Performance

Winter 2023

Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra

February 23, 2023

This event occurred as part of the 22/23 Hop Ensemble season. This is an archived view.

A feast of string favorites, including Barber's Adagio for Strings, Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony Op. 110a and Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.

Don't miss a pre-show talk with Director Filippo Ciabatti on Thursday at 7pm in the Baker Berry Library: East Reading Room

The main performance may be sold out, but join us for a unique opportunity to witness the ensemble refine its performance during an Open Dress Rehearsal > .

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Program

The Project

Hopkins Center for the Arts
at Dartmouth

presents

Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra
Filippo Ciabatti, director

Thursday, February 23, 8:00 pm
Rollins Chapel • Dartmouth College • 2023

Generously supported by the Roesch Family Fund in Support of Instrumental Ensembles, Friends of the Symphony Orchestra and the Benjamin Schore ‘51a Fund for Excellence in Piano Performance.

Program
Approximate duration: 90 minutes with intermission

Adagio for Strings - Samuel Barber (1910–1981)

Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a - Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
     I. Largo arr. Rudolf Barshai (1924–2010)
     II. Allegro molto
     III. Allegretto
     IV. Largo
     V. Largo

Intermission

Serenade for String Orchestra, Op. 48 - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
     I. Pezzo in forma di sonatina. Andante non troppo—Allegro moderato
     II. Valse. Moderato. Tempo di Valse
     III. Elegia. Larghetto elegiaco
     IV. Finale (Tema russo). Andante—Allegro con spirito

The Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, by Dmitri Shostakovich presented under license from G. Schirmer Inc. and Associated Music Publishers, copyright owners.

Program Notes

Samuel Barber
Adagio for Strings

Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died on January 23, 1981, in New York. He originally composed the famous Adagio for Strings as the middle movement of his String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, in 1936, transcribing it for string orchestra under the current title in 1938. The orchestration premiered on November 5 of that year in a radio broadcast from New York with Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

Possibly the most famous of all American compositions, Samuel Barber’s orchestral transcription of the Molto adagio from his B minor string quartet has, since its 1938 premiere, only solidified its reputation as a supreme heartstring-tugger. Over the intervening decades, the Adagio for Strings became the go-to musical accompaniment to periods of national grief, with performances at memorials for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and a host of appearances on programs immediately following the September 11 attacks in 2001.

For all its renown, the sheer compositional simplicity of the Adagio for Strings is at first surprising. The whole is built from a single theme, one comprising just two musical phrases. But it is this very simplicity which provides the key to the work’s emotional impact, for into those phrases Barber pours a whole world of longing.

The melody enters alone in the first violins, waiting, suspended, for a rich choral dictum from the lower strings before resuming its languishing tune. The tempo is glacial, the tone elegiac as the line wends its weary way higher by step, encountering dissonance with the accompaniment below at every turn. There’s just enough independent motion in the lower strings to evoke some archaic Renaissance polyphony, but never so much as to overshadow the lyricism of the violin’s song. A breath (at last), followed by a second languid phrase, this one spiraling down to uneasy F-major half-peace.

The theme seems to restart its first strain in altered form, now leaping and stretching into the upper register, but this turns out to be a transition and a bit of misdirection: Quietly, unnoticed, the violas have already begun their own melancholy rendition of the theme. The cello section has its turn next, leading, through a long crescendo, to the Adagio’s climactic fortissimo chords, high and searing in their passion. Another breath, then a miniscule pianissimo chorale in F major offers the piece’s only genuinely reassuring words. The theme returns again, stronger and more sure with the addition of violas at the octave below, but soon the music fades, unresolved yet acceptant.

Dmitri Shostakovich
arr. Rudolf Barshai, from String Quartet No. 8
Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a

Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg and died on August 9, 1975, in Moscow. He composed his String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110, over just three days between July 12 and July 14, 1960, dedicating it to the memory of victims of “fascism and war.” The Beethoven Quartet premiered it in Leningrad that year. In 1967, with the blessing of the composer, Soviet conductor Rudolf Barshai (1924-2010) transcribed the quartet for string orchestra. Shostakovich, signaling his approval, gave the orchestration a new title: Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a.

Following the death of Stalin in 1953 and Khrushchev’s victorious struggle for Communist Party leadership, the Soviet Union entered an era marked by somewhat lessened censorship and repression of its citizens and relaxation of its antagonism towards the capitalist states. Outwardly, the Khrushchev Thaw seemed to grant a newfound degree of artistic freedom to Shostakovich and the Soviet musical community, still reeling from the denunciations and purges of the Terror years. The first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, of which Shostakovich was president, recognized musicians from both sides of the Iron Curtain. In turn, the state allowed Shostakovich a series of westward excursions, including his first visit to England in 1958 and his second to the United States the following year. Nearly all of his previously censored compositions were finally performed, and he found himself showered with governmental praise and accolades.

But below the surface, the liberalization of Shostakovich’s relationship with the Party was weighed down by increasing encouragement to adhere to its authority. His acceptance of numerous official posts snuffed out the possibility of real independence, a fact musically reflected in the absence of any 1953-1958 work that is not cheerfully straightforward or overtly nationalistic. Furthermore, his personal life during this period was fraught with misfortune, with his wife dying unexpectedly in 1954, his mother dying the following year, and his marriage to Margarita Kaynova ending in divorce in 1959. Adding injury to insult, Shostakovich’s physical condition drastically declined over this decade. Already suffering frequent attacks of diphtheria, angina and lung inflammation, he began showing symptoms of polio in 1958, and soon lost much of his piano-playing ability in his right hand. In 1960, presumably as part of a complicated quid pro quo with the state, Shostakovich finally joined the Communist Party. From then until his death, in word and deed he was an impeccable Party loyalist.

Whether any of these personal and political concerns are echoed in the music of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, composed in 1960, has been the subject of long debate. In the late 1970s, the wake of the composer’s passing saw the publication of a number of dubiously accurate revisionist biographies, each claiming to decode hidden messages of protest in his works. The Eighth Quartet, they argued, had little to do with the “victims of fascism and war” memorialized by the dedication on its title page, but rather contained musical clues to Shostakovich’s purported double life as a dissident. A close colleague, Lev Lebedinsky, claimed that the composer viewed his own acquiescence to Party membership as a failure tantamount to moral death, that it drove him to the brink of suicide, and that the quartet was written as his final farewell.

The veracity of such claims is doubtful at best. Only this much is certain: In the Eighth Quartet we find Shostakovich’s most autobiographical music, written with the composer’s own mortality in mind. Shortly after completing the quartet, Shostakovich wrote in a letter, “When I die, it’s hardly likely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write it myself. One could write on the frontispiece, ‘Dedicated to the author of this quartet.’ The main theme is the monogram D, Es, C, H—that is, my initials.” Musical quotations from his previous works emerge throughout its five movements, including references to his First, Eighth and Tenth Symphonies, Piano Trio, First Cello Concerto, and his early opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Each self-quotation gains a new emotional intensity in the quartet: themes that were merely sad in their original work become inconsolably mournful; formerly hot-tempered tunes here are downright furious.

True, the harrowing isolation so acutely expressed by the quartet’s most mournful passages is somewhat subdued in Barshai’s string orchestra transcription. Prudently placed solos for the principals restore much of that original loneliness, though, with heart-stopping passages for the violin in the Largos and, in the fourth movement, for the cello (high in its range and weeping a breathless song from Lady Macbeth).

But it’s in the fast, fortissimo music that the real power of Barshai’s orchestration is revealed. With full symphonic string forces, the ferocity and violence of the Allegro molto increases a hundredfold, while the sinister tune-up in the second strain of the Allegretto waltz gains a new level of malevolence. If the effect of listening to the Eighth Quartet is detached, as if viewing the anguished plight of a solitary protagonist from a distance, the experience of the Chamber Symphony is more psychological and visceral: a whole inner world of turmoil and grief.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Serenade for String Orchestra, Op. 48

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk (Vyatka Governorate, Russian Empire), and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He composed his Serenade for String Orchestra in 1880. The Russian Musical Society premiered the work in public on October 30 of the following year in St. Petersburg with Eduard Eduard Nápravník conducting.

In September of 1880, having just completed his Second Piano Concerto and the Capriccio Italien for orchestra, Tchaikovsky wrote to his longtime patron-cum-pen pal Nadezhda von Meck, excitedly describing the designs of his next major work. The trouble, he said, was that he wasn’t sure yet whether it would end up as a symphony or a string quartet. It turned out to be equal parts of each: a four-movement work of symphonic scale with the texture of a quintet, calling for none of the woodwinds, brass and percussion whose slick employment in his symphonies had earned his reputation as a master of orchestral color. Their absence in this Serenade for String Orchestra bothered him not a whit, as he wrote to his publisher upon its completion in October of that year, “I love this Serenade terribly, and fervently hope that it might soon see the light of day.”

With timbral diversions set aside, Tchaikovsky could indulge his Neoclassical penchant. The Serenade sings a loving pastiche of 18th-century Europe in theme and form, unified by a cohesive network of simple scale-motives and culminating in a perfectly Classical sonata finale.

The opening Pezzo in forma di sonatina commences with a stately Andante introduction that exalts the first four pitches of the descending C major scale; a diminuendo and a pause lead into the prim-but-gracious opening gesture (a rising and falling second) of the Allegro moderato primary theme. An easy (almost perfunctory) transformation into C minor acts in lieu of a transition here, and the secondary material, a light-footed G-major sprite of a tune, invites itself inside without delay. There’s no time to waste, and certainly not on a pompous codetta, as we breeze straight into an unpretentious mini-development that efficiently reworks both themes simultaneously. The recapitulation is equally swift, but the return of the noble Andante material from the introduction provides a reminder that some grander architecture still stretches overhead.

Briefest and most lighthearted is the second movement’s Viennese waltz, its first strain a sweetly ascending scale, its second an unabashedly Italianate tune in parallel thirds—the Capriccio composed the same year comes immediately to mind. Next arrives the famous Elegia, which transmutes that same scalar material into a deeply wistful valedictory. Especially moving is the plaintive coda, with its sighing gestures in the violins over a dour cello-double bass pedal, evaporating into the faintest hopeful D-major shimmer.

The connection to the finale’s introduction is nearly seamless, as it opens with another high unison D, but now the sense of expectation is palpable. A guileless little Andante theme (“On the Green Meadow,” a folksong Tchaikovsky picked up from Konstantin Villebois’s collection) enters hesitantly, losing only a little of its shyness as it’s taken up by the cellos and double basses. After a deep breath, the primary Allegro con spirito tune takes off with a spritely hop down the C major scale (another Russian folksong, “Under the Green Apple Tree”). The secondary theme is a soaring song for the cellos, leading dutifully towards the formal passages that were so breezily elided in the opening movement: a downright Mozartean codetta and a genuine development section. Here the impulse of the scale-motif can’t be contained, as only the rhythm of the cello song appears, its pitches now rearranged into an orderly ladder. The recapitulation sees the “Green Apple Tree” burst into an exuberant and unstoppable perpetuum mobile. After a nod to the stately Andante from the Serenade’s introduction it accelerates, irrepressible, to the finish.

About the Artists

The recipient of the 2020 American Prize in Conducting (college/university division), Filippo Ciabatti, a native of Florence, Italy, is the Director of Orchestral and Choral Programs at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, and the Artistic Director of the Upper Valley Baroque Ensemble. Additionally, in 2022, he will serve as Interim Music Director of Opera Company Middlebury.

As guest conductor, Mr. Ciabatti has appeared with numerous opera companies and orchestras in Europe and North and South America, including Opera North (New Hampshire), Lyric Theatre at Illinois, Aurora Festival Orchestra (Sweden), Vermont Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Toscana dei Conservatori (Italy), Park ICM Orchestra (Missouri), Universidad Central Orchestra (Colombia), and the Concord Orchestra (Massachusetts). In 2020, he served as cover conductor for the Music Director of the Portland Symphony Orchestra (Maine). At the Hopkins Center, he conducted members of the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra in a collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company.

As a conductor, Mr. Ciabatti has collaborated with artists including Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster David Kim, baritone Nathan Gunn, cellist Gabriel Cabezas, pianist Sally Pinkas, flutist Luciano Tristaino, and mandolinist Carlo Aonzo. An advocate for contemporary music and collaborations between musical genres, he premiered a secular oratorio composed by renowned jazz composer Taylor Ho Bynum and commissioned a cello concerto by composer Noah Luna, aired during the NPR show From the Top. In 2018, he led a Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra tour to Italy, performing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in prominent venues and festivals, in collaboration with the Orchestra Toscana dei Conservatori.

In 2018, he was invited to be a Conducting Fellow at the Aurora Music Festival (Sweden), under the direction of Jukka-Pekka Saraste. During the festival, he conducted Hannah Kendall’s 2017 composition, The Spark Catchers, in the Konserthuset Stockholm.

As a collaborative pianist and vocal coach, Mr. Ciabatti is on the faculty of Camerata de’ Bardi, the Young Artists Program of Teatro Grattacielo in New York City, and the summer opera programs “Opera Viva!” in Verona (Italy) and “Scuola Italia per Giovani Cantanti Lirici” in Sant’Angelo in Vado (Italy). In 2021-2022, he served as Music Director of the Young Artists Program of Opera Middlebury. He has played for masterclasses of Renée Fleming, Nathan Gunn, Isabel Leonard, William Matteuzzi and Donald George. In Italy, he worked as vocal coach for the Cherubini Conservatory, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Florence
Opera Academy.

Mr. Ciabatti holds advanced degrees in piano, choral conducting and orchestral conducting from Italy and the United States.

Marcia Cassidy is a long-time member of the faculty of Dartmouth College. She came to Dartmouth in 1987 as a member of the Franciscan String Quartet. The quartet concertized extensively in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Japan to critical acclaim and was honored with many awards including first prize in the 1986 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Ms. Cassidy currently teaches violin and viola students and directs and coaches in the chamber music program. As the assistant to the Dartmouth Symphony, Ms. Cassidy participates in and advises all aspects of running the orchestra and enjoys playing alongside her students. In addition to her Dartmouth commitments, Ms. Cassidy is an active orchestral and chamber musician, playing with groups such as the Vermont Symphony, Opera North, Juno Orchestra, and period performance chamber ensembles, Musicians of the Old Post Road and Upper Valley Baroque.

Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra

Filippo Ciabatti, director
Marcia Cassidy, assistant conductor
Leslie Sonder, librarian

Violin I
Teddy Glover ’25, concertmaster
Jessica Jiang ’25
Sophia Chang Stauffer ’22, G
Annie Mills ’26
Kathy Andrew
Melanie Dexter
Mina Lavcheva
David Horak
Ira Morris
Jesse MacDonald

Violin II
Ida Claude ’22
Joshua Piesner ’26
Helena Seo ’25
Marcia Cassidy F
Leah Zelnick
Greg Diehl
Jessica Amidon
Ben Lively

Viola
Jehan Diaz ’22, TH
Mac Waters G
Leslie Sonder F
Ana Ruesink
Carrol Lee
Noralee Walker
Lysander Jaffe
Rebecca Hallowell

Cello
Hannah Kim ’23
Ava Rosenbaum ’26
Tyler Grubelich ’26
Jack Ryan ’23
Ethan Hodess ’25
Liam Tassiello ’26
Hannah Spindler ’23
Aidan Lee ’25

Bass
David Vargas ’23
Nicholas Browne F
Alex Ponasik ’26
Paul Horak TH ’94

F = Dartmouth faculty
G = Graduate student
TH = Thayer
Italics = Guest musician

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