All Beethoven
Ronald Feldman, Music Director
Victor Rosenbaum, piano
BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36
BEETHOVEN
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37
Victor Rosenbaum, piano
Concerts will be presented without intermission.
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About the Soloist
+ Victor Rosenbaum, piano
Internationally known pianist and teacher, Victor Rosenbaum, has been a mainstay of Boston’s musical community for more than five decades, since Gunther Schuller, newly appointed President of New England Conservatory, hired him to teach piano, theory, and chamber music in 1967. Of his very first recital as an NEC faculty member, the Boston Globe wrote: Rosenbaum “makes up for all the drudgery the habitual concert-goer has to endure in the hope of finding the real, right thing”. His critical praise continues to this day. Describing his most recent CD, “Brahms: The Last Piano Pieces” (Bridge), which was released in fall 2020, Glyn Pursglove of MusicWeb International said: “Rosenbaum’s account of these pieces seems to me impeccable. The whole disc is magisterial; a mature pianist bringing deep thought and empathy to a series of mature pieces which stand revealed, as clearly as I have heard, as masterpieces. This will be the disc I turn to when I next want to hear any of these remarkable pieces.”
Rosenbaum has concertized widely as soloist and chamber musician in the United States, Europe, Israel, Brazil, Russia, and Asia (including 25 annual trips to Japan) in such prestigious halls as Alice Tully Hall in New York and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. A committed chamber music performer, he has collaborated with such artists as Leonard Rose, Paul Katz, Laurence Lesser, Arnold Steinhardt, Robert Mann, Joseph Silverstein, James Buswell, Malcolm Lowe, Walter Trampler, and the Brentano, Borromeo, and Cleveland String Quartets, and was a member of two trios: The Wheaton Trio and The Figaro Trio. Festival appearances have included Tanglewood, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Kfar Blum and Tel Hai (in Israel), Yellow Barn, Kneisel Hall (Blue Hill), Musicorda, Masters de Pontlevoy (France), the Heifetz Institute, the International Keyboard Institute and Festival in New York, the International Music Seminar in Vienna, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Festival at Walnut Hill School, the Puerto Rico International Piano Festival, The Art of the Piano Festival in Cincinnati, the Atlantic Music Festival, and the Eastern Music Festival, where he headed the piano department for five years. In 2021, he was invited to join the faculty of the prestigious PianoTexas Festival. Rosenbaum is also a contributor to the online site “Musicale” (WeAreMusicale.com).
Concert appearances have brought him to Chicago, Minneapolis, Tokyo, Beijing, St. Petersburg (Russia), Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and New York, among others. In addition to his absorption in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in particular Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms), Rosenbaum has performed and given premieres of works by many 20th and 21st Century composers, including John Harbison, John Heiss, Peter Westergaard, Norman Dinerstein, Arlene Zallman, Donald Harris, Daniel Pinkham, Miriam Gideon, Stephen Albert, and many others. A musician of diverse talents, Rosenbaum is also a composer and has frequently conducted in the Boston area and beyond.
Rosenbaum, who studied with Elizabeth Brock and Martin Marks while growing up in Indianapolis, and went on to study with Rosina Lhevinne at the Aspen Festival and Leonard Shure in New York (while earning degrees at Brandeis University and Princeton), has become a renowned teacher himself. During his long tenure on the faculty of New England Conservatory, he chaired its piano department for more than a decade, and was also Chair of Chamber Music. Much of his time is now devoted to teaching the young through the NEC Preparatory Division. On the faculty of Mannes School of Music in New York from 2004-2017, he has also been Visiting Professor of Piano at the Eastman School of Music, a guest teacher at Juilliard, and presents lectures, workshops, and master classes for teachers’ groups and schools both in the US and abroad, including London’s Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, and Guildhall School, the conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow, Beijing Central Conservatory, Shanghai Conservatory, the Toho School in Tokyo, Tokyo Ondai, most major schools in Taiwan, and other institutions such as the Menuhin School near London, and the Jerusalem Music Center. Rosenbaum’s students have established teaching and performing careers in the US and abroad, and have won top prizes in such competitions as the Young Concerts Artists, Charles Wadsworth International Competition, New Orleans International Competition, Casagrande International Piano Competition, Gina Bachauer Competition, and the New York International Competition, among others. Rosenbaum’s sixteen years as Director and President of the Longy School of Music (1985-2001) transformed the school into a full-fledged degree granting conservatory as well as a thriving community music school.
In addition to his Brahms disc, Rosenbaum’s recordings on the Bridge and Fleur de Son labels include a Mozart CD, three Schubert discs, one of which was described as “a poignant record of human experience”, and two recordings of Beethoven which the American Record Guide named as among the top classical recordings of 2005 and 2020.
The Jerusalem Post wrote of Rosenbaum: “His obvious consciousness of everything he was doing....resulted in rich and subtle nuances of dynamics and shadings and in organically shaped, well-rounded phrases; while there was refreshing spontaneity and genuine temperament....the reign of intellect never faltered.”
The New York Times put it succinctly after his performance at Alice Tully Hall: Rosenbaum “could not have been better.” And a headline in the Boston Globe summed up the appeal of Rosenbaum’s playing: “Fervor and Gentleness Combined”.
Mr. Rosenbaum can be reached at vrosenbaum@aol.com
Program Notes
+ BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36
The Second Symphony was composed during the summer and fall of 1802; its first performance took place on an all Beethoven concert given at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on April 5, 1803 (the program also included the First Symphony, as well as the premieres of the Piano Concerto No. 3 and the oratorio “Christ on the Mount of Olives”). The symphony is scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes.
During the summer of 1802 Beethoven left Vienna for several months to live in the nearby suburb of Heiligenstadt, located in the low mountains to the northwest of Vienna. Heiligenstadt would be but one in a lengthy list of temporary residences of the peripatetic Beethoven, were it not for one incident that took place there not long before he returned to the city.
Having gone to Heiligenstadt in the first place on the advice of his doctor, who suggested that the rural quiet of the village might improve his hearing, which had already begun to concern him deeply, Beethoven fell into a deep, suicidal despair and on October 6, 1802, gave vent to his emotions by writing—in a document now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament—a lengthy farewell that combined elements of self justification (trying to explain his apparently misanthropic nature) with rhetorical moralisms on the importance of virtue (which, he says, prevented him from taking his own life) and passionate outbursts expressing his unhappiness. After writing this document, Beethoven sealed it up in his papers, where it was discovered after his death, a full quarter of a century later, and went on with the business of living and composing.
In any case, the musical works sketched and completed at Heiligenstadt that summer—including the Opus 30 violin sonatas, the Opus 31 piano sonatas, and the Second Symphony—seem entirely to have avoided contamination from the mental world of the Heiligenstadt Testament. The symphony, while vigorous and energetic in the unmistakable early Beethoven manner, is nonetheless smiling throughout, filled with such musical wit as befits a composer who once studied, however briefly, with Haydn. At the same time, the Second Symphony is a step forward on the path of The Nine, conquering wider territory than the First.
Following the slow introduction (which is already three times the length of that for the First Symphony), Beethoven presents thematic material that is little more than an arpeggiation of the tonic chord, animated by a rapid turn figure in the tune itself and an answering “fiery flash of the fiddles” (as Grove puts it). At the very outset of the Allegro everything sounds straightforwardly formalistic, but the dovetailing of phrases soon keeps us from predicting the next event. When the full orchestra takes up the theme, fortissimo, what started out as a simple D major arpeggio rushes up as far as a strongly accented C natural, the first emphatic out of key note; it has consequences later on. The violins begin inserting a measured trill, which appears in every movement as a particular fingerprint of this symphony. The second theme is also straightforwardly simple, a marchlike arpeggiation of the dominant key presented first on clarinets and bassoons. At the end of the recapitulation all is prepared for a short coda, with a few perfunctory reiterations of the tonic D major triad, when the woodwinds suddenly insist on inserting a C natural—the intrusive note from early in the movement—into the tonic chord. This generates a much more extended coda, which takes on some of the elements of a new development section, something that was to be even more marked in the Third Symphony to come.
The slow movement is one of the most leisurely Beethoven ever wrote (“indolent” is the word that most analysts have used to describe it). It is a full scale slow movement sonata form, complete with development and a good deal of internal repetition. But for all its length, the Larghetto never loses momentum, and it remains deliciously pastoral throughout, with just momentary twinges of pain.
Beethoven uses the term “scherzo” here for the first time in a symphony; the corresponding movement of the First Symphony had been called a “menuetto,” though it had passed far beyond the graceful character of that courtly dance. The third movement of the Second Symphony, though, is a hearty joke (which is what the word “scherzo” means), with whirlwind alternations of dialogue, tossing back and forth the basic three note motive between the instruments, then suddenly bending one pitch to lead off to distant keys, only to return home with equal celerity. In the Trio, the strings roar in mock gruffness on the chord of F sharp major, only to be reminded (by a fortissimo A from the woodwinds) that F sharp is not the home key here, but simply the third of D, to which the chastened strings immediately return.
The finale is a wonderfully confident achievement, fusing Haydn’s wit with Beethoven’s newly won breadth and grandeur. The rondo style of the principal theme—a pick up tossed off in the upper instruments to be answered with a sullen growl lower down—forecasts wit, especially when Beethoven uses that little pick up to mislead the ear. But the real breadth appears at the end, when a quiet, lyrical idea that has passed almost unnoticed as the transition between first and second themes now takes on an unexpectedly potent force and generates an enormous coda with a whole new developmental section, in which the measured tremolo of the strings, heard here and there throughout the symphony, returns with a fortissimo shake on the same C natural that had upset the course of the home tonic back in the first movement. From here on, the reaffirmation of that firm tonic is the main order of business, to bring the chain of events to a close.
The size of the last movement and the extended coda clearly unsettled the critic for the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (“Newspaper for the elegant world”), who wrote after the first performance: “Beethoven’s Second Symphony is a crass monster, a hideously writhing wounded dragon that refuses to expire, and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.” One wonders what he thought of Beethoven’s ensuing works.
Basil Lam has noted acutely, apropos of this symphony, “In view of such music as this, let us not lapse into the still received opinion that Beethoven, after writing two promising symphonies, began to brood on Napoleon and found himself great with the Eroica.” Beethoven’s sense of proportion—which allows him to achieve the greatest effects with the simplest and most abstract materials—is already fully in operation with the Second Symphony. And, while the ways of genius are wondrous strange and no one lacking the advantage of hindsight could predict the extraordinary growth that was to come in the Third Symphony, it is not only unfair to patronize Beethoven’s Second as an “early work,” as “complacently formal,” it would be downright foolish.
© Steven Ledbetter
+ BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. Sketches for this concerto appear as early as 1796 or 1797, though the principal work of composition came in the summer of 1800. It may have been revised at the end of 1802 for the first performance, which took place in Vienna on April 5, 1803, with the composer as soloist. Some time after completing the concerto—but before 1809—Beethoven wrote a cadenza, possibly for the Archduke Rudolph; most modern soloists play that cadenza. In addition to solo piano, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 34 minutes.
One morning during the summer of 1799 Beethoven was walking through the Augarten* with Johann Baptist Cramer, one of the most brilliant pianists of his day and one of the few whom Beethoven found worthy of praise. Cramer was on a continental tour from his hometown of London and had stopped in Vienna to look up Haydn, whose favorite he had been during Haydn’s London visits a few years earlier. At this time, he made the acquaintance of Beethoven. As the two men were strolling in the Augarten early one morning, they heard a performance of Mozart’s C-minor piano concerto, K.491. Beethoven suddenly stopped and drew Cramer’s attention to a simple but beautiful theme introduced near the end of the concerto and exclaimed, “Cramer, Cramer! We shall never be able to do anything like that!” Opinions may (and do) differ as to exactly what passage affected Beethoven so strongly, but there is no doubt that Mozart’s C-minor concerto was one of his favorite works, and echoes of that enthusiasm are clearly to be found in his own C-minor concerto, which was already in the works—at least in some preliminary way—at the time of the reported incident.
It is misleading to think of the concerto as “Opus 37,” a number applied when the work was published four years after composition; rather it should be linked with the other compositions of 1799 1800: the six Opus 18 string quartets, the Septet, Opus 20, and the First Symphony, Opus 21. Still, even though it is an early work, the Third Piano Concerto shows a significant advance over its two predecessors.
For some reason Beethoven withheld performance of the concerto for three years. When the performance finally took place, it was part of a lengthy concert that Beethoven himself produced to introduce several of his newest works (this concerto, the Second Symphony, and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives); he also inserted the First Symphony, already becoming a favorite in Vienna, to attract the audiences. The performance was to take place on April 5, 1803, in the Theater an der Wien, where Beethoven himself lodged gratis while working on his opera Fidelio, which was ultimately produced there. The last rehearsal for the concert, on the day of the performance, was a marathon affair running without pause from 8 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., when everyone broke for a lunch provided by Prince Lichnowsky, after which the oratorio was given still another run through.
It is a wonder that any of the performers could manage the actual concert, which began at 6 p.m. and proved to be so long that some of the shorter pieces planned for the program were dropped. Still, audiences were accustomed to sitting through three or four hours of musical performances in those days, yet they can scarcely have been expected to hear three large new compositions in a completely fresh and receptive frame of mind. The fact that Beethoven made up the program entirely of his own works—and then charged elevated prices for tickets—clearly indicates that he expected the power of his name to work at the box office, and so it seems to have befallen, since he cleared 1800 florins on the event.
Ignaz Seyfried, the Kapellmeister of the Theater an der Wien, had a special reason to remember the evening clearly:
"In the playing of the concerto movements [Beethoven] asked me to turn the pages for him; but heaven help me! that was easier said than done. I saw almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most on one page or the other a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all of the solo part from memory, since, as was often the case, he had not had time to put it all down on paper. He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages and my scarcely concealed anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly and he laughed heartily at the jovial supper which we ate afterwards."
Seyfried’s explanation for the empty pages in the solo part—that Beethoven had not had time to write it out—seems unlikely. To be sure, the composer was working on the music for the concert almost up to the last minute. At 5 a.m. on the morning of the dress rehearsal and concert Beethoven’s young piano pupil and assistant Ferdinand Ries was summoned to the composer and found him in bed copying out trombone parts, apparently an afterthought for the oratorio. But the concerto had been finished three years earlier (doubtless with details touched up in the interim), and if Beethoven had wanted to write out the solo part, he could surely have found the time in that long period between composition and performance. It is much more likely that the composer’s failure to write out the solo part reflected his desire—for the moment, at any rate—to keep the concerto entirely to himself. Beethoven was still making his living in part as a piano virtuoso, and the pianist composer’s stock in trade was a supply of piano concertos that he and he alone could perform. Even if another musician somehow got hold of the orchestral parts, he would not be able to play the concerto without the one person who knew the solo part—the composer!
Obviously the solo part would have to be written out in full before publication of the work, and Beethoven in any case prepared the C-minor concerto for Ferdinand Ries, who gave the second performance in an Augarten concert on July 19, 1804. Even then he did not, according to Ries, put the solo part in the score; he simply wrote it out on separate sheets of paper. It is also clear from Ries’s recollections that Beethoven had not yet written the cadenza:
"I had asked Beethoven to write a cadenza for me, but he refused and told me to write one myself and he would correct it. Beethoven was satisfied with my composition and made few changes; but there was an extremely brilliant and difficult passage in it, which, though he liked it, seemed to him too venturesome, wherefore he told me to write another in its place. A week before the concert he wanted to hear the cadenza again. I played it and floundered in the passage; he again, this time a little ill naturedly, told me to change it. I did so, but the new passage did not satisfy me; I therefore studied the other, and zealously, but was not quite sure of it. When the cadenza was reached in the public concert Beethoven quietly sat down. I could not persuade myself to choose the easier one. When I boldly began the more difficult one, Beethoven violently jerked in his chair; but the cadenza went through all right and Beethoven was so delighted that he shouted “Bravo!” loudly. This electrified the entire audience and at once gave me a standing among the artists. Afterward, while expressing his satisfaction he added: “But all the same you are willful! If you had made a slip in the passage I would never have given you another lesson.”
Critical response to the concerto at its first performance ranged from lukewarm to cold; in fact, the only thing that really pleased the audience, it seems, was the familiar First Symphony; even the delightful Second, receiving its first performance, put off the critic of the Zeitung für die Elegante Welt with what he perceived to be too much “striving for the new and surprising.” And in the concerto Beethoven’s playing was apparently not up to his best standards. Perhaps he was tired from the strenuous day’s rehearsal. Still, the concerto quickly established itself in the public favor. When Ries played the second performance, the prestigious Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitschrift declared it to be “indisputably one of Beethoven’s most beautiful compositions.”
Beethoven refused to write a cadenza for Ries, he eventually did compose one, probably for another of his students who may not have been competent to do so himself.
Although Beethoven knew and admired the Mozart concertos, he had not yet learned one important trick of Mozart’s: that of withholding some tune for the soloist. Invariably Mozart left something out of the orchestral exposition so that it could first be presented by the piano in the solo exposition, thereby helping to characterize the pianist as an individual personality against the orchestra. But in the C-minor concerto, Beethoven lays out all of the thematic material at once in the longest and fullest orchestral statement that he ever wrote for a concerto. The main theme is typically Beethovenian in its pregnant simplicity, outlining a triad of C minor in the first measure, marching down the scale in the second, and closing off the first phrase with a rhythmic “knocking” motive that was surely invented with the timpani in mine (although Beethoven does not explicitly reveal that fact yet). Much of the “action” of the first movement involves the gradually increasing predominance of the “knocking” motive until it appears in one of the most strikingly poetic passages Beethoven had yet conceived but that’s anticipating.
As the orchestral statement proceeds, Beethoven modulates rather early to the secondary key of E flat (something else Mozart wouldn’t have done he would let the soloist engineer the appearance of the new key) and introduces the secondary theme. But then, as if suddenly recognizing his faux pas, he returns to the tonic major, C, and passes on to the closing thoughts, once again in C minor. The orchestra’s definite close on the tonic threatens stasis, but the soloist enters with forthright scales that run directly into the principal theme, whereupon the real forward momentum begins.
The piano exposition restates all the major ideas that the orchestra has already presented but makes the modulation to the new key definitive with an extended closing idea based on the rhythm of the “knocking” motive, which begins to grow in prominence. It completely dominates the development section, which twines other thematic ideas over the recurring staccato commentary of that rhythm. The recapitulation does not emphasize the knocking beyond what is minimally necessary for the restatement; Beethoven is preparing to spring one of his most wonderful ideas, the success of which requires him to build on the other themes for the movement. Even in the cadenza, which Beethoven composed some years after the rest of the concerto, he retains his long range plan by basing it on all the important thematic ideas except the knocking rhythm. The reason appears as the cadenza ends. Beethoven (following the example of Mozart’s C minor concerto) allows the piano to play through to the end of the movement, rather than simply stopping with the chord that marks the reentry of the orchestra, as happens in most classical concertos. But it is what the soloist plays that marks the great expressive advance in this score: wonderfully hushed arabesques against a pianissimo statement of the original knocking motive at last in the timpani, the instrument for which it was surely designed from the very start. Here for the first time in Beethoven’s concerto output he produces one of those magical “after the cadenza” moments of otherwordly effect, moments for which listeners to his later concertos wait with eager anticipation.
The Largo seems to come from an entirely different expressive world, being in the unusually bright key of E major. It is a simple song form in its outline but lavish in its ornamental detail. In his last two piano concertos, Beethoven links the slow movement and the final rondo directly. He has not quite done that here, though he invents a clever way of explaining the return from the distant E major to the home C minor: the last chord of the slow movement ends with the first violins playing a G sharp as the top note of their chord, which also includes a B natural; Beethoven reinterprets the G sharp as A flat (part of the scale of his home key) and invents a rondo theme that seems to grow right out of the closing chord of the slow movement. Nor does he forget that relationship once he is safely embarked on the rondo; one of the most charming surprises in the last movement is a solo passage in which the pianist takes over an A flat from the orchestra and, while repeating it in an “oom pah” pattern, reinterprets it again as a G sharp to recall momentarily the key of the slow movement before the strings return with hints that it is high time to end such stunts and return to the main theme and the main key. But Beethoven has not yet run out of surprises; when we are ready for the coda to ring down the curtain, the pianist takes the lead in turning to the major for a brilliant ending with an unexpected 6/8 transformation of the material.
*In the Leopoldstadt suburb of Vienna, on an island located between the Danube proper and a semicircular man made arm called the Danube Canal, there is a stretch of open meadowland that was once part of the Imperial hunting preserve. Emperor Joseph II opened it to the public as a garden in 1775, and for nearly half a century, the “meadow garden” (“Augarten” in German) featured, in addition to the usual alfresco pleasures, a rich musical life centered in a concert hall with restaurant built there by the early 1780s. The concerts were held outdoors on summer days, usually on Thursday mornings at the extraordinary hour of half past seven. Mozart played there in at least one series of concerts, and Beethoven introduced his Kreutzer Sonata there; moreover his first five symphonies and first three piano concertos all came to be regularly featured at the Augarten concerts. (Although the Augarten ceased to function as an important concert location by 1830, there remains even today at least one musical connection: the Vienna Choir Boys are housed on the grounds, where they can presumably soak up lingering resonances of Mozart and Beethoven.)
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