Elim Chan and Seong-Jin Cho: Gubaidulina, Prokofiev and Lutosławski

About the Work

Fairytale Poem began as music for the radio. In 1971 Sofia Gubaidulina wrote the score for a children’s radio programme based on “The Little Piece of Chalk”, a story by the Czech writer Miloš Macourek. She later said that she liked the tale so much, and found it so symbolic of an artist’s fate, that she came to have a very personal relationship with the piece. It has had a second life in the concert hall as a short work for orchestra.

The story, as the composer retold it, goes like this. A little piece of chalk, the kind used for writing on a blackboard, dreams of drawing marvellous castles, beautiful gardens with pavilions, and the sea. Instead it is made to write dull words, numbers and geometric figures, day after day. The children in the classroom grow bigger; the chalk grows smaller. It begins to despair of ever drawing the sun or the sea. At last it is too small to be of use and is thrown away. It finds itself in complete darkness and believes it has died. But the darkness is only the inside of a boy’s pocket. The boy takes the chalk out into the daylight and starts to draw on the pavement: castles, gardens with pavilions, the sea and the sun. The chalk is so happy that it does not notice it is wearing away to nothing as it draws.

Gubaidulina, whose early music had been censured by the Soviet cultural authorities, heard in it a story about an artist. The orchestra’s introduction to the concert calls the piece a humorous fairy tale, and it is that too: light on its feet, brief and full of character.

What to Listen For

You can follow the tale without a text. Listen for how the music is built from small, distinct instrumental voices that come forward one at a time, more like characters in a story than themes in a symphony.

One writer on the piece points to a jazzy fugue for plucked strings, begun by the double bass, among the adventures along the way, and to the ending, where after a last bloom of orchestral colour the music dissolves into silence. That close matches the end of the story, in which the chalk disappears into its own drawing.

About the Work

Prokofiev was a student at the St Petersburg Conservatory, with a reputation as its enfant terrible, when he wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1912 and 1913. While he was working on it, in April 1913, his close friend and fellow student Maximilian Schmidthof killed himself, having sent Prokofiev a farewell letter. The concerto is dedicated to his memory.

Prokofiev played the solo part himself at the first performance, on 5 September 1913 at Pavlovsk, a resort town outside St Petersburg. The accounts agree that the audience was divided and loud about it. A newspaper critic described listeners murmuring, leaving their seats and hissing, while a smaller party of progressives declared the piece a work of genius. Prokofiev noted the mixture of applause and boos in his diary and professed himself pleased that the music had provoked such strong feelings.

What that audience heard is lost. The orchestral score, which had not been published, was destroyed in a fire after the Russian Revolution. In 1923, with a Third Concerto already to his name, Prokofiev reconstructed the work. He remarked that it was so completely rewritten that it might almost be counted as his Fourth. He introduced the new version in Paris on 8 May 1924, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting.

Compared with the short, sharp First Concerto, the Second is darker and built on a much grander scale, in four movements instead of the usual three. It is also harder. It is regarded as one of the most technically formidable concertos in the repertoire.

What to Listen For

Andantino. Allegretto. The concerto opens quietly. After a couple of bars from the orchestra the piano begins a long, melancholy theme in G minor, like the start of a tale. The centre of gravity comes later: an enormous cadenza for the soloist alone, which takes up much of the second half of the movement and carries it to its climax.

Scherzo: Vivace. Two and a half minutes of perpetual motion. The pianist’s two hands race along in unison without a single rest, while the orchestra chases after them.

Intermezzo: Allegro moderato. Where a slow movement might be expected, Prokofiev writes a heavy-footed, grotesque march. One annotator compares its tread to the lumbering of some immense prehistoric beast.

Finale: Allegro tempestoso. The marking says it: a storm of leaping chords and octaves across the whole keyboard. A quieter, contrasting episode brings a brief respite before the pursuit resumes and drives to the end.

About the Work

In 1950 Witold Rowicki, director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, an orchestra then re-establishing itself after the war, asked Witold Lutosławski for a piece with which the orchestra could show what it could do. Lutosławski took four years over it. The Concerto for Orchestra was finished in 1954, is dedicated to Rowicki, and was first performed under him in Warsaw on 26 November of that year.

The times shaped the piece. From 1949 Polish composers were under official pressure to write music founded on folk material, and more experimental paths were closed. Lutosławski, though, had been working with Polish folk tunes for years, largely in what he called functional music: pieces for radio, theatre and schools, by which he earned his living. In an interview he recalled that this work had given him a style of his own, simple folk melodies combined with non-tonal counterpoint and colourful harmonies, and that one day he decided the style could serve for something more serious.

So the Concerto is full of folk melodies, taken from the nineteenth-century collections of the ethnographer Oskar Kolberg, but it does not sound like an arrangement of them. The tunes are raw material. Lutosławski gives them new harmonies, sets counterpoints against them and pours them into forms borrowed from the Baroque: an intrada, a passacaglia, a toccata, a chorale. As one programme note puts it, the music was national enough to be politically unassailable and yet modern and personal enough to go beyond what was officially wanted.

The title invites comparison with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra of a decade earlier, and the two share the idea of treating sections of the orchestra as soloists. The piece lasts just under half an hour and calls for a large orchestra with piano, celesta and two harps.

What to Listen For

Intrada. The movement opens over a steady, ominous drumbeat. Above it the low strings introduce a folk-like tune, which passes from section to section while the texture thickens. Having built upwards to a climax, the music then reverses its course and ends in a calm coda.

Capriccio notturno ed Arioso. An airy, virtuoso scherzo for strings and woodwind: night music of great lightness. In the middle the brass break in with a broad, dramatic theme, the Arioso. The scherzo then returns and fades out in low rumblings.

Passacaglia, Toccata e Corale. The finale is the longest movement and the weightiest. It begins with a brooding theme in the double basses that is repeated over and over while variations accumulate above it. A lively toccata follows, built on the same theme. At its centre a solemn chorale appears, and when the chorale returns at the end it crowns the whole work, before a final dash for the full orchestra.