OJAI FESTIVAL OVERTURE
Peter Maxwell Davies

Composer and conductor Peter Maxwell Davies often bases his works on preexisting music, either English medieval and Renaissance themes or folk melodies. In the 1960s he was known as an enfant terrible, shocking the musical establishment, especially with his Eight Songs for a Mad King of 1969, which satirizes Handel’s Messiah. Since 1970, Davies has resided in the Orkney Islands, off the northern coast of Scotland, gleaning much of his musical material from the islands’ indigenous music. One of his most popular works is the witty An Orkney Wedding.

Davies served for ten years as Conductor/Composer of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London and is the Composer Laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He regularly guest-conducts both in Europe and in the United States. Davies was knighted in 1987.

The Ojai Music Festival in the Ojai Valley north of Los Angeles was started in 1947, establishing a concept whereby each year the Festival engages a different music director who determines the themes, programs and soloists for that year's Festival – thus ensuring a certain cherished eccentricity.
Davies composed the Ojai Festival Overture in 1991. Its scurrying main theme is interrupted later on with a counter-rhythm and a lyrical second theme. The Overture is reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide and particularly of Samuel Barber’s Overture for Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy, The School for Scandal.

VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR, Op.77  
Johannes Brahms                                                                                                                               

One of the marks of great artists is accurate self-assessment, to know their strengths and limitations. Like Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, Brahms sought the collaboration of a leading violinist when he composed a concerto for the violin, an instrument with which he was not intimately familiar. Brahms’s long-time friend Joseph Joachim, a Hungarian violinist, composer and educator who for over half a century was the world’s dominant violin virtuoso was intimately involved in the concerto’s formation. Needless to say, Brahms dedicated it to him. Joachim gave the premiere on New Year’s Day, 1879.

The initial reception of the Concerto was respectful but cool. Its technical demands deterred many violinists, who dubbed it “Concerto against the Violin and Orchestra.” It is, like the other Brahms concerti, a true partnership between soloist and orchestra; virtuosity for its own sake is totally absent. Although in numerous places Joachim attempted to have Brahms make it easier for the soloist, the manuscript of the violin part in the State Library in Berlin, full of Joachim’s suggestions, shows that, in this respect at least, the violinist seldom prevailed.

The sunny mood of the concerto is close to that of the D Major symphony, written shortly before. The opening movement is necessarily long for the development of each of the themes Brahms employs. While many composers choose to concentrate on developing a single theme, Brahms decided to expand on all of them. The orchestral first exposition introduces the main theme   and two secondary themes.   Immediately afterwards, the soloist takes off on a flight of cadenza-like passagework that gradually leads into the formal second exposition propelled by little hints of the main theme in the orchestra. A classicist in form, Brahms writes a new secondary theme for the soloist. Joachim wrote a large cadenza for this movement, which is still a favorite with soloists and audiences, although many violinists have written their own.

Brahms’s original plan was for a concerto in four movements, including a scherzo. But he discarded the scherzo and the original slow movement because their style did not fit with the rest of the work. The slow movement we have today opens with the solo oboe playing one of the most delicate and beautiful melodies in the literature. The violin – entering a full two minutes into the movement – then embellishes this melody with arabesques (florid ornamentation of a theme), continuing to maintain a special relationship with the oboe throughout. The middle of the movement becomes more intense and dramatic, but Brahms never loses sight of the theme.

The fiery rondo-finale exploits the melodies and rhythms played by itinerant Gypsy musicians in the cafés of central Europe. It is one of the few places where Joachim’s intervention attenuated the difficulties for the violinist. He managed to get Brahms to moderate the movement’s tempo by adding “ma non troppo” (but not too much) to the tempo indication Vivace. Brahms employs a secondary refrain, as well as the initial rondo theme. The episode turns into a fiery, accelerated coda with cadenza-like passagework for the soloist.

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770 - 1827

SYMPHONY No.7 IN A MAJOR, Op.92
Ludwig van Beethoven

"My kingdom is the air. Just like the wind, tones whirl around and so often eddy in my soul. For my instrumental music I need an orchestra of about sixty good musicians. I am convinced that only such a number can bring out the quickly changing gradations in performance" - thus said Beethoven around the time of the first performance of his Seventh Symphony.

He got his wish. The premiere, on December 8, 1813, was a gala benefit concert to aid the wounded of the latest battles against Napoleon. Also on the program was Wellington's Victory (the "Battle Symphony") and numerous smaller works. Beethoven–although nearly completely deaf–conducted, and a collection of the most important musical celebrities were in the orchestra: Louis Spohr, Domenico Dragonetti and Ignaz Schuppanzigh played in the strings; Giacomo Meyerbeer and Johann Nepomuck Hummel played the timpani; Ignaz Moscheles played the cymbals, and even old Antonio Salieri was there, directing the percussion section.*

Each movement of the Symphony is dominated by persistent rhythmic motive which – especially in the second movement – is equal in importance the melodic content of the themes. Richard Wagner described the Seventh Symphony as "the apotheosis of dance in its loftiest aspects." The story goes that he once attempted to demonstrate this dance to the accompaniment of Liszt's piano playing.

The lengthy slow introduction, featuring some of the repertory’s loveliest oboe solos, belies the mood of the symphony to follow.   The lively 6/8 rhythm actually consists of a single complex theme held together by an underlying dotted rhythm in the accompaniment. and The pulse extends for the entire movement and is only occasionally interrupted by a special musical articulation.

The theme of second movement is minimal, a 4/4 ostinato consisting primarily of repeated pitches over which Beethoven adds counter-melodies and increases the orchestration to build emotional tension. and A contrasting second section of the movement breaks out into a series of new melodies in the relative major key but retaining the pulse. Beethoven’s innovative use of the rhythmic pulse in this movement influenced the Romantic composers that followed, serving as a model for Schubert in his great C Major Symphony.

The scherzo, in 3/4, is defined by driving quarter notes, dynamic contrasts and shifting rhythms. The trio, with its legato wind melody, provides the expected contrast, breaking away from the rhythmic pulse of the scherzo.

Musicologist Sir Donald Tovey described the finale as “A triumph of Bacchic fury.” The rondo theme, with its emphatic timpani part, resembles a stomping peasant dance–admittedly refined for the occasion. But this movement is built on variety and contrast, as each episode contrasts sharply with the rondo theme by setting up its own defining rhythms. &
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* Louis Spohr (1784-1859) was one of Paris’s most noted opera composers. Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846) was a virtuoso double bass player and composer. Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829) was a famous Italian guitar virtuoso and composer. Ignaz Schuppanzigh (1776-1830) was an Austrian violinist, who headed a string quartet for whom Beethoven wrote the three Op.59 quartets. Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1776-1837) was a composer and pianist remembered mostly for his clarinet compositions. Pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) was a famous interpreter and editor of Beethoven’s music. And former court composer to the Hapsburg emperors, composer Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) is familiar to music lovers for the fictional account of his rivalry with Mozart in the film Amadeus.