Music Director and Principal Symphonic Conductor Rossen Milanov leads the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra in a performance of John Luther Adams’ “Become River” Tuesday in the Amphitheater.
Each of us, Rossen Milanov feels, should prioritize feeding the ravenous creativity inside, in ways singular to our needs. At 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater, the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will provide a buffet of individuality with works from young — and young-at-the-time — composers.
The evening’s program includes “Entr’acte,” by the youngest-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Caroline Shaw, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1, Op. 10.
Throughout his career, Milanov has championed Shostakovich’s work, and said that the prodigy’s “First Symphony is quite a unique work, because he wrote it when he was barely 19 years old.”
Perhaps one of the most enduring graduation projects of all time, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 was written as a requirement to obtain his music degree from the Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) Conservatory.
For CSO trumpet player Leslie Linn, the soloistic features of the third trumpet hold a “heavier and darker” tone than the other two trumpet parts, as the third part was written for a slightly bigger trumpet pitched in F; in Symphony No. 1, “there’s just lots of little fun, unusual things to play,” he said.
A teenager at the time of the work’s composition, Shostakovich was beginning to ponder life and death, evident in the First Symphony’s “thoughtful, introspective quality,” Linn said. The closure has a typical Shostakovich dramatic flare, he added, with a bold finish.
This was a “revolutionary work,” Milanov said, in a time when the last major symphony in the Western Europe canon had been written about 13 years before. An “enigmatic” piece, Milanov said, each movement has a different inspiration.
The first resembles a marionette theater, in that Shostakovich was “playing with different masks.” The second movement is more “traditional,” Milanov said, incorporating piano — on which the composer was proficient. The third and fourth movements have no interruption between the two; the third, Milanov said, is in a traditionally inspired Russian style with “perfect intervals moving in the same direction while the fourth is a “beautiful and profound” slow movement.
The piece embodies “a whirlwind of ideas and energy until the music suddenly stops and there is a moment of quite dramatic interruption,” Milanov said. “Timpani plays a kind of a condenser for about 30 seconds that really sends the movement into a more reflective stage and sense of suspense. Perhaps it is not as innocent as all this comedy that has been in front of us; it is something that has a deeper meaning.”
After his father’s death, Shostakovich worked to support his family as an accompanist at a silent movie theater, capitalizing on his improvisational skills. He largely considered it a trite, escapist affair, and is frequently quoted as believing “real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward” — his later “Leningrad” was particularly seen as symbol of resistance against totalitarianism.
Born in what is now St. Petersburg, Shostakovich wasn’t even 10 years old at the outset of the Russian Revolution. Membership in the Communist Party was required in the Soviet Union, but Shostakovich was never seriously affiliated. While wildly popular, he fell in and out of favor with the authorities over the years.
“He somehow managed to walk between the raindrops and survive, but at an enormous expense,” Milanov said. “He always felt the obligation to write for the people that were suffering, and sometimes he would do it in very disguised form, using certain coded messages or different way of creating this dual meaning — one that could be read as optimistic by the party officials while the other could be read with a different meaning from the people that would understand what he was writing.”
Before tonight’s Shostakovich comes Shaw’s “Entr’acte.” The contemporary classical music composer completed her Ph.D. in composition at Princeton, where Milanov is the music director of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. He believes the audience “is going to be quite surprised by the variety of new sounds” elicited in “Entr’acte,” composed for string quartet and later adapted for string orchestra.
“It’s a work sort of inspired by the tradition of what happened to be a dance that was part of the Baroque suite called the Menuet (of Haydn’s Op. 77, No. 2) that became an important part of the symphonic cycle during the classical period,” Milanov said.
Shaw herself felt that some music — like Haydn’s Menuet — “takes you to the other side of the looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition,” she wrote in her program notes for “Entr’acte.”
As in Shostakovich’s work, Shaw’s “discovery and amazement” shines through the composition, Milanov said.
“People approach music … inventing their own unique voice,” Milanov said. “What was happening 100 years ago for Shostakovich is happening every day now; just names are different and the creators are different. Creativity is such an important part of who we are as people — it never really stops. The question is, how many people pay attention to it?”
