Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season January-February 2016 | Page 18

{ program notes permeates the entire work. Barely audible in the veiled tones of muted solo cello, clarinets, and horns, it suggests Russian Orthodox chant in its restrained stepwise motion. After the orchestra explodes into life, the plaintive tones of oboes and bassoons sing the principal theme: a lovely expansion of the motto, over a gently rocking violin accompaniment. Intensifying the mood of yearning for a lost paradise, the cellos enter with the bittersweet second theme, the symphony’s most memorable tune. All this material is repeated before agitated violas, baleful bassoons, and wailing oboes introduce Rachmaninoff’s greatest development section, rich in atmosphere, adventurous harmonies, and fantastic scoring. It reaches a nightmarish climax, punctuated by the return of the motto theme, harshly intoned by brass. The opening music recapitulates, but cannot recover the purity and sweetness of its earlier existence. The movement subsides with a final ominous appearance of the motto in trumpet and trombone. Embedded within the C-sharp-minor slow movement is a sardonic little scherzo. In a haunting opening, the solo horn mournfully sings the motto motif over strummed harp chords and is answered by a weeping violin solo. The violins’ poignant main theme, wistfully colored with trills, again grows out of the motto idea. The tempo accelerates to the scherzo, featuring a cheeky, crisply articulated march tune whose tone grows increasingly macabre and unhinged. Buzzing strings return to the slow-tempo music. The finale jolts us with its sudden shift to noisy bustle and from the minor mode to A major. Its mood of frantic, slightly meaningless activity culminating in a ferocious little fugue suggests Rachmaninoff’s own whirlwind schedule as globetrotting virtuoso. After the opening music recapitulates, stopped horns and muted trumpets snarl out a version of the Dies irae (Day of Judgment) chant from the medieval Catholic funeral rite. At the close, Rachmaninoff intriguingly sends a harmonic cloud over his sunny happy ending. Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright ©2016 16 O v ertur e | www. bsomusic .org Off the Cuff: Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 Music Center At Strathmore Friday, January 8, 2016 — 8:15 p.m. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall Saturday, January 9, 2016 — 7p.m. Marin Alsop, Conductor Richard Kogan, Piano Sergei Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, opus 44 Lento — Piu vivo Adagio ma non troppo — Allegro vivace Allegro Music Center At Strathmore The concert will end at approximately 9:30 p.m. Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall The concert will end at approximately 8:15 p.m. Marin Alsop For Marin Alsop’s bio., please see pg. 7. Richard Kogan Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and Artistic Director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program, Richard Kogan has gained world renown for lecture/concerts that explore the role of music in healing and the influence of psychiatric and medical illness on composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin,  Bernstein and Joplin. He delivered an address entitled “The Power of Music in Healing Mind and Body” at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi, and recently performed “The Psychiatrist at the Keyboard” in London, co-sponsored by the BBC and the Wellcome Trust.  Dr. Kogan recorded the DVD Music and the Mind: The Life and Works of Robert Schumann for Yamaha. Dr. Kogan has won numerous honors including the Concert Artists Guild Award, the Liebert Award for Applied Psychoanalysis, and the Alexander Award in Psychiatry. A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music Pre-college, Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Kogen has a private psychiatry practice in New York City.