Program Notes

Augusta Holmès
(1847–1903)
Irlande
Duration: ca. 13 minutes

What to listen for:
Holmès captures in music the struggle for an independent Ireland along with the hope of its people.

The Irish suffered more than potato famines in their historic struggles, including land confiscations and discriminatory laws by the invading British dating back 900 years. Artists have captured Ireland’s defeats and triumphs in countless books and paintings, notably Ernie O’Malley and Seán Keating. Augusta Holmès − a French composer of Irish descent − should be included among those who have portrayed their distant homeland through art.

Completed in 1882, Holmès’ symphonic poem Irlande is a deeply felt work of patriotism that pays tribute to the beauty and sacrifice of Ireland under English rule. Its pastoral scenes rub elbows with a funeral march, and its triumphant finale suggests her political commitment to the independence of all small nations forced to defend themselves against more powerful aggressors.

It begins with a long, somber clarinet solo, suggesting a rain-drenched Irish countryside, followed by a sprightly folk festival. The music then embraces a slow tempo, the funeral march led by cellos and basses and then an English horn solo that reflects suffering. A grand, Wagner-inspired climax for full orchestra spins a spirited march to suggest future of hope and resilience.

TFO Music Director Michael Francis knows a thing or two about Holmès: In 2024 he made a recording of her symphonic poems with the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz orchestra on the CPO label.

“Irlande is an example of the plight of the Irish, but there’s also a general sense of optimism with lots of humorous bits throughout the music,’’ he said. “Her music deserves to be heard more often.’’

Antonín Dvořák
(1841-1904)
Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 53
Duration: ca. 31 minutes

What to listen for:
Dvořák ends the work with a favorite dance, the Czech furiant.

For many listeners, the music of Dvořák feels homegrown, as if he planted the notes in rich soil and later harvested them in the harmony of his scores. Stylistically, Dvorak’s music often feels like it belongs somewhere between Germany and Russia, a blend of the earthiness of Brahms and the emotionalism of Tchaikovsky. But given Dvořák’s love of Bohemian folksong, his music is his alone; even more than his fellow Czech composers, Janacek and Smetana, he was the pivotal figure in creating an indigenous voice for his homeland.

Dvořák certainly was beloved in Bohemia long before his fame reached across the globe in 1893 with the premiere of his Symphony No. 9, From the New World, which was given its first performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall to great acclaim. But a piece popular long before his final symphony was the Violin Concerto, a muscular but amiable work that has slowly, and unjustifiably, slipped to the edges of today’s repertoire. More live performances and recordings are helping it move back toward the center.

“It’s one of the most beautiful of romantic concertos,’’ said TFO Music Director Michael Francis. “It really demands more play that it gets in concert halls.’’
Joseph Joachim, the famed Hungarian violinist to whom Dvořák dedicated the work, didn’t help things in the years prior to the 1883 premiere. He demanded revisions and disagreed with the work’s structure. Eager to please, the composer complied – up to a point. His patience with Joachim’s repeated requests for alterations wore thin and he finished the score in situ, offering the first performance to the Prague virtuoso František Ondříček. Oddly enough, Joachim remained the concerto’s dedicatee, although he never performed it in public.

Cast in three movements – allegro, adagio, allegro – the concerto resonates with a folk-like quality, the harmonies lush and rhapsodic. The composer broke from traditional sonata form by connecting the first two sections without a break, so the bold opening fuses directly into a tender slow movement. The finale features a favorite Czech dance of Dvořák – the furiant – which wraps things up, well, furiously.

Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98
Duration: ca. 40 minutes

What to listen for:
Brahms ends the works with a Bach-inspired passacaglia, featuring no less than 30 variations that build to a monumental climax.

Brahms was, and still is, a paradox. He lived with one foot planted in the past and the other in the present, a towering figure whose symphonies, concertos and chamber music influenced many figures in the century that followed, notably Arnold Schoenberg.

Among the last great composers of the late-Germanic tradition, he was a romantic classicist, a classical romantic, neo-Baroque adherent and Renaissance polyphonist all in one, notes Jan Swafford in his 1997 biography on the composer: “Such a synthesis should not have worked, but he made it work.’’

Written in the alpine town of Murzzuschlag, the Fourth Symphony is the composer’s most concentrated expression in a large form. Austere and monumental, Brahms laid out his ideas on a scale of considerable complexity, and the two outer movements could easily survive as one-movement tone poems on their own. It opens as if the music had begun long ago, and the audience had simply walked in during its progression. A series of descending notes seem to drop from an imaginary precipice.

The symphony develops from this initial theme, and in the second movement Brahms achieves a mood of profound melancholy. The scherzo is the only one in his four symphonies that can be described as boisterous, and its energetic rhythms inspired the rock group Yes to record its own version, called “Cans and Brahms,” on the 1972 album Fragile.

The finale is unique in the symphonic canon. Marked “with great energy and passion,’’ it employs a passacaglia− a ground bass over which upper voices weave − based on Bach’s Cantata No. 150. A set of 30 variations follows but any learned device is hidden: The contrapuntal scheme is subdued to the point of being almost invisible to the average listener. It would be the last piece of his own that Brahms heard in public performance, and like his final days of illness, it does not resolve into light.

“In the coda of the Fourth Symphony there is no transformation but rather a sustain tragic intensity that reels into the final E-minor chords,’’ Swafford writes. “For the only time in his symphonies or in any large work before him, Brahms does not turn to a major (key) at the end of a minor-key piece. He allows the darkness to stand, giving tragedy the last word.’’

Kurt Loft is a journalist and music critic who has written for various newspapers, magazines and arts groups for more than 40 years. A member of the Music Critics Association of North America, he lives in St. Petersburg.