Prague Symphony Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Sat 8 February 2025

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Noonday Witch

Polednice (The Noon Witch) Symphonic Poem, after Karel Jaromír Erben, Opus 108 (1896)

Dvořák had first turned to the ballades of the Czech author Karel Jaromír Erben (1811-1870) in the early 1880s when he produced a full-length symphonic cantata, The Spectre’s Bride. This was premiered in Prague in 1885 and was then given a tumultuous reception when performed in Birmingham later the same year. Erben was dedicated to bringing together folklore stories from the Czech lands, publishing a volume of some 500 traditional songs, as well as longer ballades. These often were gruesome tales, perhaps reflecting the higher level of child mortality and the need for parents to come to terms with their grief. Dvořák and his wife, Anna, had suffered the loss of their first three children in the 1870s.

When he returned from America in 1895, having completed his Ninth Symphony (From the New World) and Cello Concerto, he was keen to have a period of rest from composition. He spent time reading Erben’s ballades and these provided the inspiration for a series of symphonic poems which he then composed during the early months of 1896. He completed four works: The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel and The Wild Dove. The Noon Witch, at around 14 minutes, is the shortest of these four symphonic poems.

The initial composition process was relatively quick, but he spent much more time on orchestrating the works, drawing on the experience he had developed both in his late symphonies, concertos and, perhaps most tellingly, the Slavonic Dances. Echoes of these dances permeate the ballade settings.

His younger contemporary and walking companion, Leoš Janáček, was enthusiastic about the symphonic poems; he remarked especially on the characters’ musical motifs being closely linked with Czech speech patterns. This was dear to his heart, and he developed the idea further in his own operas over the coming years. Janáček managed to persuade Dvořák to allow him to conduct the first performance of The Wild Dove when Dvořák visited Brno in May 1897. Dvořák himself conducted The Noon Witch and The Golden Spinning Wheel, with the visiting Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.

In the 1970s, Dvořák’s biographer, John Clapham, discovered letters that Dvořák wrote in which he helpfully outlined the stories of the symphonic poems, including bar numbers for the various events along the way. Here are the key points of the dramatic story, which are illustrated by the musical motifs for the four characters in The Noon Witch:

Bar 1: The mother is preparing dinner for her husband in a peaceful domestic setting.
Bar 45: Their child is fretful and noisy.
Bar 86: The mother chides the child, threatening to call the Noon Witch. The child calms down.
Bar 122: The mother returns to her work.
Bar 140: She is again distracted by the crying child.
Bar 203: She again threatens to call the Noon Witch.
Bar 221: She does so.
Bar 252: The Noon Witch appears. She is “small, brown, wild-looking, with a sheet over her head”, represented by high muted strings and a bass clarinet.
Bar 265: The Witch commands, “Give me the child!”, with increasing urgency.
Bar 312: The Witch performs a grotesque dance, while the mother refuses to give up her child.
Bar 434: A clock strikes noon. The Witch’s time is up, so she vanishes.
Bar 457: The father returns. He finds his wife unconscious, with the child suffocated and pressed to her bosom. They both discover that their child is dead.
Bar 500: End.

© Timothy Dowling

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major

1. Andante – Allegro
2. Theme and Variations: Andantino
3. Allegro, ma non troppo

Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninoff (if we include the Paganini Rhapsody), Martinů and Prokofiev: five composers who produced five piano concertos each. Like Beethoven, Prokofiev’s five concertos date from his earlier years as a piano virtuoso and Prokofiev composed his concertos within a twenty-year period from 1911 to 1931. His brief First Concerto is very much a young man’s work, overflowing with the vigour of youth and the search for pastures new. He composed the Second Concerto soon afterwards (1912-1913) and, lasting about 30 minutes, it is on a much larger scale; the format is unusual with an opening Andantino being followed by three quicker movements. The work was unfortunately destroyed in a fire shortly after its premiere and Prokofiev reconstructed the work ten years later, saying that he re-composed much of the Second Concerto.

The Third Concerto was largely composed between 1917 and 1921, but some of its thematic ideas date back to his earlier years. It has remained the most popular of his five concertos and this is not surprising given its typical mixture of Prokofiev’s searing lyricism and exciting rhythms. It is the most conventional of the five concertos, adopting the traditional ‘classical’ format of three movements, with a slow central movement flanked by the two faster movements, although the first movement alternates between Andante and Allegro tempo markings.

Prokofiev played in the premiere performance in Chicago in December 1921 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock. He then gave the European premiere in Paris the following year conducted by Serge Koussevitzky and this marked its acceptance as one of the classic concertos. The Russian pianist Samuel Feinberg then gave the Russian premiere in 1925; Prokofiev played the Concerto during his first visit to the USSR in 1927, as he began his long journey back to his homeland, culminating when he settled in Moscow in 1935.

The Third Concerto was positively received at its British premiere when Prokofiev played it with the London Symphony Orchestra under Albert Coates in April 1922; the unnamed critic wrote at the time:

“His concerto is of absorbing interest all through. The pianoforte part is practically continuous, and is a real orchestral part, not concertante; the interesting thing about it is that the orchestral tone-qualities are used with great adroitness to emphasize and give zest to the tone-qualities of the piano, seldom to contrast with it….

“We must honestly confess we never understood Mr. Prokofiev’s music, until he played it himself. As he plays it, the orchestra is like a vast resonator applied to the piano; and, without wishing to whittle down any credit due to Mr. Coates, it certainly seemed as if no orchestra could have a moment’s doubt what to be at, with these trenchant rhythms and fiery passages being hurled at them.”

The composer/conductor André Previn recognized the strength of Prokofiev’s Third Concerto describing it as “the most popular of the Post-Romantic piano concertos. And this for very good reasons: it is very dynamic, it is very Russian, and it is very difficult.”

It is a work that demands to be performed by a virtuoso: it is not a studied, contemplative work but rushes ever forward, ever faster, exploding with colour and rhythmic excitement. There are moments of calm, but never long enough to allow the listener to wallow.

The very opening is deceptive, as the two clarinets suggesting a languorous state of reverie with its backward-glancing folk-like melody. Busy strings quickly wake us from our stupor and the soloist bursts onto the scene to join the fray.

The heart of the work comes with the central movement and its limpid theme and five variations. Prokofiev wrote in his autobiographical memoirs:

‘In 1913 I had composed a theme for variations which I kept for a long time for subsequent use. In 1916-17 I had tried several times to return to the Third Concerto, I wrote a beginning for it (two themes) and two variations on the theme of the second movement.

This E minor theme is Prokofiev personified and could have morphed straight from his Classical Symphony (1917) or his later Ballet, Romeo and Juliet (1935), sounding both classical and modern at the same time. With its gentle sighing motif, we can perhaps hear a hint of Barbarina searching for her lost pin at the start of the last act of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. This is the most conventional movement of the Third Concerto, the main theme being repeated to conclude the movement with chordal decoration provided by the solo pianist.

The following rondo-like finale builds inexorably in excitement and rhythmic energy towards its barnstorming climax; the orchestra combines with the percussive power of the piano as the work heads to its breathless conclusion. This is a concerto for the fearless.

Prokofiev brought the various threads of the Third Concerto together whilst living in Brittany in 1921. Prokofiev renewed his contact with his fellow exile, the poet Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942) who was also in Brittany at the same time. Prokofiev had set some of Balmont’s poems to music a decade earlier and he was happy to support Balmont now that he had fallen on harder times. However, they were to fall out later as Prokofiev related:

‘Soon afterwards Balmont turned his pen against his “suffering homeland” (as he called it) and we parted ways.’ Balmont died in exile in France in 1942, whilst Prokofiev returned home to Russia in 1935.

Before the parting of the ways, Balmont paid tribute to Prokofiev with a sonnet in praise of the Third Concerto which neatly sums up both the excitement of the percussive piano writing, its tender lyricism and backward glances towards older dance forms:

Exultant leaping flame of crimson flower
A keyboard of words plays with sparkling fires
That suddenly dart out with flaming tongues
A river leaping forth of molten ore.
The moments dance a waltz, ages gavotte,
Suddenly a wild bull, ensnared by foes,
Has burst his chains and stands with threatening horns
But tender sounds again call from afar
And children fashion castles from small shells,
An open balcony, subtle and fair.
Then, gushing fierce, a flood dispels it all.
Prokofiev! Music and youth in bloom,
In you the orchestra craves bright summer
And mighty Scythian strikes the sun’s great drum.

Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942)

Translated by David Nice, as printed in his study Prokofiev – From Russia to the West 1891-1935. David Nice adds that he has ‘rendered a Shakespearean sonnet metre but not the rhyme of the original’.

Sonnet quoted in article by ‘Mstislav’, Sergei Prokofiev Archive, Goldsmiths College, University of London

© Timothy Dowling

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Symphony No. 5 in D minor

1. Moderato
2. Allegretto
3. Largo
4. Allegro non troppo

The ultimate political symphony – a matter of life or death…
Until recent years the Fifth Symphony usually appeared with the subtitle ‘A Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism’, with the assumption that these words were penned by the composer himself. It was only made clear in later years that these words were actually written by a reviewer following the first performance of the Symphony in Moscow in 1938. However, Shostakovich appears to have been happy to allow the words to be affixed, although his inner feelings about the subtitle were undoubtedly ambivalent, to say the least.
Shostakovich had burst onto the musical landscape of Soviet Russia with his youthful First Symphony, composed as a graduation exercise in 1925 when he was a 19-year-old student. His next two symphonies, The First of May and To October respectively, commemorated the events of 1917, and both concluded with celebratory settings of revolutionary texts.
Shostakovich scored a major critical success with the 1934 premiere of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He then embarked on the composition of his Fourth Symphony in 1935, basking in the triumph of his opera and enjoying the artistic experimentation that marked the early years of the Soviet Union.

In August 1934 the Union of Soviet Writers conference discussed the role of literature in the USSR. Later in the same year Sergei Prokofiev (who was just about to return to the Soviet Union) pondered the role of music in the USSR in the wake of the emerging doctrine of Socialist Realism:

‘The question as to what kind of music should be written at the present time is one of great concern to many Soviet composers. I have given considerable thought to the problem in the past two years and I believe that the correct solution would be the following.
‘What is needed above all is great music, i.e., music that would correspond both in form and in content to the grandeur of the epoch. Such music would be a stimulus to our own musical development, and abroad too it would reveal our true selves. The danger of becoming provincial is unfortunately a very real one for modern Soviet composers.
‘At the same time in turning his attention to serious, significant music, the composer must bear in mind that in the Soviet Union music is addressed to millions of people who formerly had little or no contact with music. It is this new mass audience that the modern Soviet composer must strive to reach.
‘I believe the type of music needed is what one might call “light-serious” or “serious” light music.” It is by no means easy to find the right idiom for such music. It should be primarily melodious, and the melody should be clear and simple without however becoming repetitive or trivial. Many composers find it difficult enough to compose any sort of melody, let alone a melody having some definite function to perform. The same applies to the technique, the form – it too must be clear and simple, but not stereotyped. It is not the old simplicity that is needed but a new kind of simplicity. And this can be achieved only after the composer has mastered the art of composing serious, significant music, thereby acquiring the technique of expressing himself in simple, yet original terms.’ (Izvestia, 16th November 1934)

The doctrine of ‘Socialist Realism’ as applied to music remained relatively open until matters were ‘clarified’ by the dramatic Pravda article on 28th January 1936 ‘Chaos instead of Music’, when Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was savagely condemned, in an article allegedly penned by Stalin himself. To ensure that the message was unequivocal the article was followed up a couple of weeks later with a similar condemnation of Shostakovich’s score for The Limpid Stream.
Surprisingly, Shostakovich’s initial reaction was to continue with the composition of his Fourth Symphony and he still had hopes that this would be premiered in Leningrad at the end of the same year, 1936. We do not know at what point in the score of his Fourth Symphony Shostakovich had reached when the Pravda article appeared; it is possible that he may well have had the whole Symphony in mind when he started work in 1935, but one cannot help wondering if the stark, bleak coda was composed in response to the savage criticism. Surely this is the most frightening conclusion of any symphony in the repertoire and it portrays the full horror of Stalin’s Terror, at its height in 1936. During this time Shostakovich lived with a suitcase packed as he expected at any time to be taken away to the prison camps strewn across Russia.

The Fourth Symphony was rehearsed in late 1936 with the planned premiere set for 30th December with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the Austrian-born conductor Fritz Stiedry, who had recently premiered Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings with the composer as soloist. Various reasons have been given for withdrawing the Symphony shortly before the planned premiere: Shostakovich reportedly said that he wanted to re-write the Finale; there were also suggestions that the conductor and orchestra were struggling with the work. Undoubtedly, there was pressure from the local authorities who must have grown increasingly uneasy about what they were hearing during the rehearsals.
Whilst there was pressure for cancellation, it was probably very wise in retrospect that the Fourth was not performed, as it would probably have been his last symphony. If Stalin had not liked Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, whatever would he have made of the cacophonous Fourth Symphony and in particular its unforgivingly dark ending?
And so in 1937 Shostakovich embarked on his Fifth Symphony. And please note that he called his new symphony his ‘Fifth’ and merely put the Fourth Symphony aside with the plan that it would be performed at a later date, not knowing that it would wait another quarter of a century, receiving its belated Moscow premiere in December 1961 during the Khrushchev artistic thaw. Shostakovich did not make any revisions to the score that he completed in 1936.

Shostakovich knew that he now had to produce a symphony that would comply with the doctrines of ‘Socialist Realism’ as applied to music.
The conductor Fritz Steidry left Leningrad after the cancelation of the Fourth Symphony and the young Yevgeny Mravinsky was asked to take charge of the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. His nervousness at the task is well captured in his personal account of this time, starting with his hope that the composer would be able to advise him regarding the work in question:

‘However, my first meeting with Shostakovich shattered my hopes. However many questions I put to him, I didn’t succeed in eliciting anything from him. In the future I encountered this reticence in regard to his other compositions. This made every meagre comment all the more valuable. In truth, the character of our perception of music differed greatly. I do not like to search for subjective, literary, and concrete images in music which is not by nature programmatic, whereas Shostakovich very often explained his intentions with very specific images and associations. But one way or another, any remark on his own compositions that you can wrest from a composer is always of enormous value to a performer.
‘Initially I could get no information about the tempo indications in the Fifth Symphony. I then had to recourse to cunning. During our work together I sat at the piano and deliberately took incorrect tempi. Dmitri Dmitriyevich got angry and stopped me, and showed me the required tempo. Soon he caught on to my tactic and started to give me some hints himself.
‘The tempi were soon fixed with metronome markings and transferred into the score. They were reproduced in the printed edition. But now, when I check them with recordings of performances, I realize that in many cases the metronome indications in the Fifth Symphony have proved to be incorrect, and the long life of this symphony has in itself brought about essential changes to the tempi that we marked down at the time.’

These reflections on tempi markings suggest that flexibility regarding such matters remains valid and we will see later how varied this might be in practice.

There can be no doubt that Shostakovich reflected very deeply on what might constitute a Soviet symphony and was strongly aware of his need to comply with the main strictures of ‘Socialist Realism’ as applied to music. Shostakovich wrote himself about his Fifth Symphony:

‘My latest work may be called a lyrical-heroic symphony. Its basic ideas are the sufferings of man, and optimism. I wanted to convey optimism asserting itself as a world outlook through a series of tragic conflicts in a great inner, mental struggle.
‘During a discussion at the Leningrad section of the Composers’ Union, some of my colleagues called my Fifth Symphony an autobiographical work. On the whole, I consider this a fair appraisal. In my opinion, there are biographical elements in any work of art. Every work should bear the stamp of a living person, its author, and it is a poor and tedious work whose creator is invisible.’ (Literaturnaya Gazeta, 12th January 1938)

Later in the same year he wrote about his initial struggles when working with the conductor Mravinsky in preparation for the first performance and his account does tie in with Mravinsky’s reflections quoted earlier. Shostakovich appreciated the conductor’s almost pedantic approach in the end, saying ‘thanks to his extreme thoroughness, Yevgeny Mravinsky presented my Fifth Symphony precisely as I wanted. I am very grateful to him for this.’

Shostakovich remained highly anxious right up until the first performance of the Fifth in Leningrad on 21st November 1937 and a second performance at a special meeting of Communist Party activists. Fortunately for Shostakovich the Symphony was a great public success in Leningrad with over 45 minutes of loud applause at the end and critics were similarly positive in their response. And so, this meant successful rehabilitation for the composer.
Thus the story remained the same for the next 40 years, as witnessed by the Hugh Ottoway’s BBC Music Guide to the Shostakovich Symphonies published in 1978. Views about the Fifth Symphony changed dramatically with the publication of Solomon Volkov’s Testimony in 1979. The authenticity of these alleged memoirs has long been contested and there is no doubt that the methodology for much of Volkov’s work is dubious. However, people who were close to Shostakovich, including his great friend the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, have vouched for the truth behind many of the views expressed.

According to Solomon Volkov’s Testimony Shostakovich reportedly said:
‘I discovered to my astonishment that the man who considers himself its greatest interpreter [Mravinsky] does not understand my music. He says that I wanted to write exultant finales for my Fifth and Seventh Symphonies but I couldn’t manage it. It never occurred to this man that I never thought about any exultant finales, for what exultation could there be? I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in [Mussorgsky’s] Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.’

Since then further hidden codes within the Fifth have been uncovered. David Rabinovich in his biography Shostakovich, Composer, pointed out the relevance of Shostakovich’s only other serious composition of 1937, the Four Pushkin Romances, Opus 46. The first song, Rebirth, is quoted directly in the central quiet passage of the Fifth’s Finale, with the lilting accompaniment in high strings referring to the final quatrain:
Thus delusions fall off
My tormented soul
And it reveals to me visions
Of my former pure days.
This perhaps suggests the composer’s hope that one day the true message of the Fifth would be appreciated and show that Shostakovich had not betrayed his basic ideals.
The musicologist Gerard McBurney also pointed out in a talk on BBC Radio 3 in January 1993 that the march theme in the Finale is derived from the quatrain:
A barbarian painter with his somnolent brush
Blackens the genius’ painting,
Slapping over it senselessly
His own lawless picture.

Following Stalin’s savage Pravda condemnation, we do not need to think too hard about the identity of the ‘barbarian painter’ who besmirched his work.
More recently Stephen Johnson spoke on Radio 3’s Discovering Music about his realization that the duet between flute and horn over gently pulsing strings in the closing stages of the first movement echoes the Habanera from Act One of Bizet’s Carmen. This is when Carmen sings of love as a rebellious bird who will not be tamed. Shostakovich may have been thinking about an unrequited love affair at the time or he may be referring to the final victory of love over oppression.
Undoubtedly, more codes in the Fifth will be revealed in the coming years but it is hard to think that we will ever fully understand all the cryptic references in his music which increased with the passage of time, culminating with his enigmatic Fifteenth Symphony in 1971.

From its earliest years, however, the Fifth was admired purely as a musical masterpiece and, whilst we might be horrified by the condemnation that Shostakovich experienced in 1936, there is no doubt that this did result in a thorough personal reflection on the future direction of the Symphony in Shostakovich’s oeuvre.
It is difficult to think how he might have progressed following the Fourth Symphony without this period of enforced reflection and we can be reasonably sure that the subsequent ‘simplification’ of his musical language helped ensure his enduring popularity.
We can marvel at the purely musical mastery in the Fifth, how tender musical themes presented at the start of the first movement are transformed into brutal marches in the central development. His use of the orchestra remains distinctive, the brutality of the central section emphasized by the use of low braying horns, playing well out of their comfort zone.

Shostakovich’s admiration for Mahler is strikingly evident throughout the Fifth, and no more so than in the second movement with its echoes of similar dances that are such a distinctive part of the Mahlerian sound-world.

Any suggestions of irony or ambivalent emotions are completely absent when we reach the third movement Largo, the heart of the Fifth, its tragic lament in the key of F sharp minor. It is fully understandable why many present at the work’s premiere in November 1937 wept openly when hearing this music. Shostakovich showed himself to be truly in tune with the feelings of the people who had all been affected by anxiety, fear and loss during the Great Terror.

The coarse interruption of the Finale completely shatters the mood of the preceding Largo, but prepares the way well for the conclusion of this dramatic Symphony; it starts with excitement and brutal energy, before giving way to the central reflective section that culminates in the aforementioned Pushkin quotation.
And so to the ending. Volkov has already quoted Shostakovich allegedly referring to the forced celebration at the coronation scene in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. But there is a Russian tradition of ambivalent endings and most markedly so with Tchaikovsky: Tchaikovsky’s explanation (in a letter to Nadezhda von Meck) of his Fourth Symphony’s finale is strangely apt for Shostakovich:
‘The fourth movement. If within yourself you find no reasons for joy, look at others. Go among the people. Observe how they can enjoy themselves. Surrendering themselves wholeheartedly to joyful feelings. A picture of festive merriment of the people… O, how they are enjoying themselves, how happy they are that all their feelings are simple and direct!… Rejoice in others’ rejoicing. To live is still possible.’
(letter to Nadezhda von Meck, 1877, as quoted in David Brown’s Tchaikovsky, Volume II: The Crisis Years)
And one cannot help hearing that the Finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth sounds similarly forced in tone, Tchaikovsky himself expressing his dissatisfaction with it on several occasions afterwards because of its questionable authenticity.

Shostakovich’s Fifth culminates with a combination of woodwind and strings playing the dominant note A no less than 252 times. After 1979, the interpretation of these repeated notes has changed dramatically. Rostropovich slowed down markedly with subsequent performances: his 2002 recording of the Finale with the LSO taking 2½ minutes longer than Mravinsky’s 1975 performance, the extra time largely as a result of Rostropovich’s interpretation of these final bars. This reflects his view that ‘the strident repeated notes at the end of the symphony are like the stabbing strokes of a spear thrust into the wounds of a tormented man’.
Alternatively, we might also hear echoes of the closing bars of Mahler’s Third Symphony with the same slow thumping out of the tonic-dominant D and A on timpani taking us to the conclusion. Perhaps this too reflects Shostakovich’s hope for the ultimate victory of love, with its memories of Mahler’s depiction of ‘What Love Tells Me’.
It will always be very difficult to separate this great Symphony from its political associations, but its triumph of personal survival in challenging circumstances will surely continue to resonate.

© Timothy Dowling