Joel Thompson
An Act of Resistance
Joel Thompson (b. 1988) is an American composer, conductor, pianist, and educator. From 2015-17 he taught music at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal High School in Atlanta and later was Director of Choral Studies at Andrew College. His musical training includes two degrees from Emory University; since then he has been working on a doctorate in music at Yale University.
Thompson’s works—orchestral, choral, opera—have been performed widely. He is the current composer-in-residence at the Houston Grand Opera, and his choral works have been performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the Cleveland Chamber Choir, among many other groups. He is perhaps best known for his 2015 composition “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which sets the final words of seven black American men who were killed by police or authority figures. This powerful work won the American Prize for Choral Composition.
Tonight’s work, “An Act of Resistance,” continues the composer’s exploration of the arts as advocacy—for justice, for fairness, for healing. The composer notes that “the piece is essentially a battle between selfishness and empathy”; he has said elsewhere that it is a commentary on the “divisiveness and turmoil in our world and our deficiency in empathy.”
The work begins with an agitated, often discordant, section that grows to an explosive climax. The mood changes radically, the musical lines become tonal and melodic, the atmosphere pacific. But this section too succumbs to internal tension as it reaches its noisy climax. What follows, however, is quite unexpected. The violas and basses maintain a single hushed tone for the remainder of the composition, while the other members of the orchestra are encouraged to stand and sing. Thompson has provided four different singing options—all beginning on concert C—and with the simple text, “love.”
“An Act of Resistance” won the 2017 Hermitage Prize.
Felix Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Along with Mozart and Camille Saint Saëns, Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47) was one of the great musical prodigies in western music. He has become one of the most celebrated figures of Romantic music, and he infused traditional (Classical) forms with refined feeling and elegant sensitivity.
Born into a wealthy and very cultured Berlin family, Mendelssohn received the highest quality musical training as well as a superior academic education. At the age of nine he was taken to meet Goethe and developed a great friendship with the aging poet. A gifted conductor as well as composer, Mendelssohn resurrected interest in the music of J. S. Bach with his performance of St. Matthew Passion in 1829. His musical output—much of it written when he was a teenager—includes symphonies, two piano concertos, tonight’s violin concerto, much well-known chamber music, and the oratorio Elijah.
In his short lifetime, he became famous throughout Europe, but it was the audiences of the British Isles that most appreciated the composer and his music. He had a particular passion for the countryside of Scotland and befriended Sir Walter Scott while hiking there. Later he became the favorite composer of Queen Victoria, visiting the palace no fewer than 10 times in his lifetime. The British loved Elijah, and Mendelssohn’s cachet with the listening audiences of Britain equaled that of George Frideric Handel.
Mendelssohn began the Violin Concerto in E Minor in 1838. Unlike his typical fast-paced compositional style, he spent six years on this his last major work; its premiere came in 1845. It quickly became a standard work in virtuoso repertoire. The concerto shows Mendelssohn at his best: lovely lyrical melodies soar, retreat, then reappear; the soloist neither overshadows nor kowtows to the orchestra; the final movement, a scherzo, creates one of the composer’s most notable moods—delicate and light, elegant and optimistic.
The concerto departs from Classical form in a number of ways despite its traditional three movements (fast-slow-fast). Mendelssohn introduces the solo violin almost immediately in the concerto. This was something new, since earlier concertos typically opened with extended orchestral introductions. Rather than allow the soloist to come up with a cadenza, a virtuosic commentary on major themes of the first movement, Mendelssohn himself writes out the entire cadenza for the soloist. In addition, Mendelssohn links the three movements, providing no time for audiences to applaud in between movements and thereby disrupt the mood of the performance (this was a pet peeve of the composer).
Though perhaps lacking the intense drama of subsequent concertos—from Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and others—this work continues to be one of the most requested and respected of violin concertos.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1906; he died in Moscow in 1975. The exceedingly talented youth entered Petrograd Conservatory at 13; by age 19 he had graduated with honors, and in that same year performances of his first symphony—everywhere a resounding success—catapulted the composer to world fame. In the course of his career, he wrote 14 more symphonies, operas, ballets, concertos for piano, sonatas, and much chamber music. At the time of his death, he was the undisputed voice of Russian music (especially since Prokofiev had died in 1953, a bad year too for Stalin as it turned out).
Shostakovich’s personal and musical life was greatly shaped by the Soviet era in which he lived. In 1928 Joseph Stalin imposed his first Five-Year Plan, and the central authority thereafter clamped down on political as well as cultural life of Soviet citizens. Artists were censured if their work did not meet the often-ill-informed proclivities of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; many were disappeared if their works were deemed alien to official public taste.
After a 1936 performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (where Stalin, the “Great Leader,” himself was in attendance), Shostakovich too was found to be an enemy of the state—or at least of state-authorized taste. The ironically-titled state newspaper, Pravda (i.e. “truth”), carried a scathing review entitled “Chaos Instead of Music,” finding the opera too avant-garde and glaringly absent the predetermined bromidic references to the benefits of proletarian life. In order to rehabilitate himself and his music, Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1937. It is a conservative (though scarcely conventional) work—harmonically as well as formally—and it was enthusiastically received. This effort saved the composer’s life. He was all of 36 years old.
Some of Shostakovich’s best music was written in the following decade. But his suffering at the hands of the authorities did not stop. He was violently criticized at the Soviet Composers’ Congress in 1948 (the stultifying effects of state standards of taste extended to Party sycophants as well as Party officials) and renewed his acquaintance with scorn and isolation. Shostakovich even went so far as to join the Communist Party in 1960, a move that the composer described as “an obituary for myself.” Interestingly, the deeply moving and deeply troubling String Quartet No. 8 was written that same year. The score indicates that the work is dedicated to “the victims of fascism and war.”
Shostakovich spent his last years in continual ill-health, often in hospitals. Despite the grim tenor of much of his music, Shostakovich was reputed to be very gregarious: music need not reflect the personality of its creator. Shostakovich had early learned the necessity of developing a strong sense of irony, which often expresses itself in his musical compositions.
First performed in 1937, the Fifth Symphony is a massive work, almost 50 minutes in length. Shostakovich himself noted that he had taken “a turn towards greater accessibility, towards greater simplicity.” You could argue that this greatly complex work exemplifies simplicity, but its abstract form (i.e. the symphony) argued for its place in accepted Russian—and classical European—musical tradition. Shostakovich referred to the work as a “lyrical-heroic symphony.” Given the composer’s history of stinging interaction with typically mindless cultural authorities, you could easily imagine that phrase to be sardonic.
The symphony begins with a bold musical statement of the main theme, with dotted rhythms and big intervallic leaps. That dramatic gesture gives way eventually to a shimmering, sustained string melody. The movement begins tonally, in D minor; after a tremendous climax with all forces on stage engaged, the movement ends quietly with the sweet tinkle of the celesta as it plays a major scale that trails off at the end.
The second movement, a scherzo, displays the composer’s jocular—ironic, you might say—side. It is a noisy lop-sided triple-time dance, a great contrast to the slowly-accumulated gravity of the preceding movement and the emotional intensity of the movement that follows.
For the Largo, Shostakovich divides the violins into three parts (normally two) and the violas and cellos into two (normally one), so intent is he upon developing a dense, lush string sound. The brass do not contribute to the movement, and percussion (particularly the xylophone at the breath-taking climax) is used to intensify what is happening elsewhere in the orchestra. Reviewers have found the Largo to be “an exquisite confession of grief and suffering,” whose roots you might likely surmise. Like the first movement, it ends quietly and questioningly with the receding sounds of celesta.
Of the fourth movement much has been written. Is it a satirical portrait of the Great Leader? Does it represent the apotheosis of the state (i.e. Soviet) hero (think: Richard Strauss’ “A Hero’s Life”)? In its final, prolonged, and triumphal insistence on D-major tonality, is it intentionally reminiscent of an upbeat Mahler? Whatever the comparison, the movement—and the symphony—brought forth ecstatic applause from the Soviet audience at its premiere, and enjoys great success today.