Music

Prokofiev wrote the Flute Sonata in 1943, in wartime evacuation, in the middle of War and Peace. He said he wanted something “with classical, clear, transparent sonority” — and what came out is a sonata in D major that behaves as if the previous thirty years had not happened. No irony, no grimacing. Sviatoslav Richter and the flautist Nikolai Kharkovsky premiered it in Moscow on 7 December 1943. The following year David Oistrakh talked him into rewriting it for violin, which became the Second Violin Sonata, Op. 94bis, and that version is now played roughly ten times as often. Flautists have a legitimate grievance here. The piece is native to the flute — the long, wide-interval melody in the first movement, the way the third movement sits in the instrument’s weakest register and asks it to sing there anyway. On the violin all of that is merely beautiful. On the flute it is beautiful and slightly precarious, which is better. ...

Leonard Bernstein was born on today (August 25) in 1918. Candide opened on Broadway in 1956 and closed after two months — a famous, thorough failure that Bernstein and his collaborators kept revising for the next thirty years without ever quite fixing. The overture survived on its own. It is four and a half minutes long, it gets played by more orchestras than almost any other American concert piece, and it is a small masterclass in how to be funny in orchestral writing without ever winking at the audience. ...

Vivaldi’s Op. 10, published in Amsterdam around 1729, was the first set of concertos for transverse flute ever printed. Before that the instrument was a curiosity in the orchestra; after that it had a repertoire. Six concertos, and the second one is La notte — the night. It is a strange piece, structurally. Instead of the usual fast–slow–fast, it runs through a sequence of short movements with titles: a Largo opening, then Fantasmi — ghosts — then a second Largo, a Presto, then Il sonno, sleep, and finally an Allegro. ...

Tchaikovsky wrote the Valse-Scherzo in early 1877, a few months before the Violin Concerto, and it is his second and slighter work for violin and orchestra — six minutes, C major, no ambitions beyond charm. The printed score carries the inscription à Monsieur Joseph Kotek: Iosif Kotek, his former pupil at the Moscow Conservatory, the violinist who would sit beside him the following summer working through the concerto bar by bar, and the man Tchaikovsky wrote about in letters to his brother in language he used for nobody else. ...

Claude Debussy was born on today (August 22) in 1862! Happy birthday to the master! The Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra (L.73) was composed in 1889–90 and never performed in Debussy’s lifetime. When a Paris concert was arranged and he learned that only the first movement would be played, he pulled the parts from the stands before the rehearsal began. He would rather the piece not be heard than heard incompletely. It wasn’t premiered until 1919, a year after his death. ...

In 1874, Mussorgsky wrote a piano suite in memory of his friend Viktor Hartmann — a painter and architect who had died suddenly at thirty-nine. The suite moves through ten of Hartmann’s works like a walk through a memorial exhibition, connected by a recurring Promenade theme that is Mussorgsky himself, moving from picture to picture. A gnome. A medieval castle. Children quarreling in a Paris market. An oxcart so heavy the wheels barely turn. A witch’s hut. And finally, the great gate of Kiev — massive, monumental, the brass building until the hall shakes. ...

Yes, it’s another ballet, and we’re listening to the suite. Deal with it. The Firebird (1910) was Stravinsky’s first commission for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — and his breakthrough. He was twenty-seven. The ballet draws on Russian folklore: the Firebird, a magical creature of light, helps Prince Ivan defeat the immortal demon Kashchei by revealing the secret of his deathless soul. Stravinsky’s teacher was Rimsky-Korsakov, and it shows in the brilliant orchestration and Russian folk material woven in with care. But it already goes further than anything Rimsky-Korsakov wrote. The Infernal Dance is violent in a way that points directly toward what came next: Petrushka in 1911, then The Rite of Spring in 1913 — until he finally blew up the concert hall. ...

There is a recent documentary on Perlman that is worth watching for one reason in particular: the discussion of color and vibrato. Perlman describes vibrato not as an ornament or a habit but as a palette — different speeds and widths produce different colors, and a violinist who only has one vibrato is like a painter with one brush. A narrow, slow vibrato pulls the sound inward and dark. A wide, fast one opens it up. The choice is not decorative; it is the interpretation. ...

The CSO’s 90th summer residency at Ravinia closes with an all-Tchaikovsky evening — cannons, a soloist finding her footing, and a conductor who once applied here as a cellist.

The Cinderella story long predates Disney — Charles Perrault wrote it in 1697, the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and Rossini turned it into an opera (La Cenerentola) in 1817. Prokofiev was commissioned by the Bolshoi to compose the ballet, and worked on it between 1940 and 1944, through the war years, in something close to exile from the international career he’d built before returning to the Soviet Union. The score premiered at the Bolshoi in 1945. It’s one of the great ballet scores — genuinely romantic in the waltz themes, genuinely funny in the stepsisters (Prokofiev, like Saint-Saëns and Shostakovich, had a taste for musical caricature), and genuinely terrifying in the midnight scene, where the clock strikes twelve and the harmony collapses under Cinderella’s feet. ...