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Brahms, Elgar and Tchaikovsky

Maestro Rozhdestvensky is unable to conduct these performances. We're very fortunate that BSO Assistant Conductor Julian Kuerti has agreed to take over these performances on short notice.

Performance Dates:
   Thursday, November 20, 2008 8:00 PM
   Friday, November 21, 2008 1:30 PM
   Saturday, November 22, 2008 8:00 PM
   Tuesday, November 25, 2008 8:00 PM

Program:     

	BRAHMS (orch. RUBBRA) Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel
	ELGAR Cello Concerto
	TCHAIKOVSKY Manfred Symphony

Download the full Program Notes

WGBH's Brian Bell on Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony.

Audio

Audio Concert Preview by Richard Dyer, narrated by Ron Della Chiesa.

About the Music

Tchaikovsky's vivid, tuneful 1885 Manfred Symphony is based on Lord Byron's 1817 verse-play about a man who wanders the Alps obsessed by life's unanswerable questions. The work was completed between Tchaikovsky's fourth and fifth symphonies and is the only one not numbered. Instead, the title reflects the programmatic flair and scope of a multi-movement tone poem, with its tormented hero, haunted by memories, encountering an Alpine castle, a witch in a rainbow, and a subterranean hall of malevolence. Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Mme. von Meck: "The composition of the Manfred symphony, a work highly tragic in character, is so difficult and complicated that at times I myself become a Manfred." Prior to the performances, Maestro Rozhdestvensky will speak briefly to the audience about this unusual work.

Brahms' Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, written in 1861 and dedicated to his "beloved friend," Clara Schumann, is considered one of the greatest sets of variations in the piano repertoire, noted for its imagination, variety, and scope. In 1938, British composer Edmund Rubbra created a richly textured orchestration of the work.

Sir Edward Elgar wrote his dramatic, bittersweet Cello Concerto in 1919, just months after the end of World War I, and many have noted in its elegiac opening theme a lament for all the lives lost. His last important work, Elgar set the concerto in an unusual four movements instead of three, and often uses the cello rhapsodically, as in the passionate opening recitative. The great music writer Donald Francis Tovey called it "a fairy-tale, full, like all of Elgar's larger works, of meditative and intimate passages."