RACHMANINOFF PROGRAM NOTES cont.: A quicker interlude functions as a token scherzo. This interlude spills into a splash of cadenza, and for just five notes a pair of flutes eases the music back into softly swaying arpeggios. Rachmaninoff again makes a bridge into the finale, beginning with distant, rather conspiratorial march music, then working his way around to the piano’s assertive entrance. The march music is now determined and vigorous, and Rachmaninoff finds for contrast the most famous of his big tunes. It all moves to a rattling bring-down-the-house conclusion. – program notes by Michael Steinberg SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN E MINOR, OP. 64 – Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky COMPOSED: 1888 WORLD PREMIERE: November 17, 1888 in Saint Petersburg, Russia by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic conducted by Tchaikovsky INSTRUMENTATION: 3 flutes with 3rd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets (doubled), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings THE BACKSTORY: Tchaikovsky approached his Fifth Symphony from a position of extreme self-doubt, nearly always his posture vis-à-vis his incipient creations. In May 1888, he confessed in a letter to his brother, Modest, that he feared his imagination had dried up, that he had nothing more to express in music. Still, there was a glimmer of hope: “I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony.” Tchaikovsky was spending the summer of 1888 at a vacation residence he had built on a forested hillside at Frolovskoe, not a long trip from his home base in Moscow. The idyllic locale proved conducive to inspiration and apparently played a major role in helping him conquer his demons long enough to complete this symphony, which he did in four months. Tchaikovsky made a habit of keeping his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, informed about his compositions through detailed letters, and thanks to this ongoing correspondence we have a good deal of information about how the Fifth Symphony progressed during that summer. Tchaikovsky had met Mme. von Meck a dozen years earlier. In fact he hadn’t exactly “met” her, since an eccentric stipulation of her philanthropy was that they should avoid personal contact. Tchaikovsky’s labor on the symphony was already well along when he broached the subject with Mme. von Meck, in a letter on June 22: “I shall work my hardest. I am exceedingly anxious to prove to myself, as to others, that I am not played out as a composer. Have I told you that I intend to write a symphony? The beginning was difficult, but now inspiration seems to have come. We shall see. . . .” His correspondence on the subject brims with allusions to the emotional background to this piece, which involved resignation to fate, the designs of providence, murmurs of doubt, and similarly dark thoughts. Critics blasted the symphony at its premiere, due in part to the composer’s limited skill on the podium; and yet the audience was enthusiastic. Tchaikovsky, true to type, decided the critics must be right. In December he wrote to von Meck, Having played my Symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some over-exaggerated color, some insincerity of fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to me that the applause and ovations referred not to this but to other works of mine, and that the Symphony itself will never please the public. Samuel Barber Leonard Bernstein
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