Beloved Rachmaninoff

Mei-Ann Chen

One of the most outstanding conductors to emerge over the past decade, Taiwanese American Mei-Ann Chen has been Music Director of the Chicago Sinfonietta since 2011 and Chief Conductor of the Grosses Orchester Graz as of last year in addition to guesting with leading orchestras the world over. After studying the violin and piano and teaching herself to play the trumpet, she turned to conducting and at the age of 16 was offered a scholarship to study in the United States. She made her conducting debut on tour with the Boston Youth Orchestra in Spain but made her real breakthrough on winning the prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors in 2005 – the only woman to do so in the competition’s nearly 60-year history. She was also the first student in New England Conservatory’s history to receive Master’s degrees simultaneously in both violin and conducting, and she holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in conducting at the University of Michigan. Tonight’s concert marks her debut with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

Mackenzie Melemed

Mackenzie Melemed (b. 1995) made his Helsinki Philharmonic debut in 2018, as the soloist in the Samuel Barber concerto, having studied at the Juilliard School, New York and won the International Maj Lind Piano Competition in Helsinki in 2017. He has, he says, a very close relationship with the Rachmaninoff concerto. “I fell in love with it on the first listen. There is such a wide range of interpretations of previous and current piano legends, including Rachmaninoff’s own performance, and I am amazed at how my own conception of the work has changed.” Tonight is the first time he has played the second Rachmaninoff concerto with an orchestra – an honour for the HPO. At two international competitions in 2012, he played it with only a second piano as accompanist. Last week, Melemed played exactly the same programme in the opening concert of the Oulu Music Festival as that performed by Rachmaninoff himself at what was to be his last recital, at Carnegie Hall in 1942.

Mackenzie Melemed is a Steinway Artist.

Bohuslav Martinů: Toccata e due canzoni

Unlike his fellow countrymen Dvořák, Suk and Janáček, Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) did not draw on the music of his native Bohemia. While studying in Paris in the 1920s, he became acquainted with jazz and especially Neoclassicism. The concerto grosso, a type of composition dating from the Baroque, became his speciality. In 1941, he sought refuge in the United States, where his compositions included a three-movement concerto grosso of almost symphonic scope. He originally intended the Toccata e due canzoni (1944) as a short, light piece, but as work progressed, it grew in depth and style. The Toccata movement is a typical perpetuum mobile, dramatic and at times even chaotic. The Canzoni have no fixed form, gliding from mood to mood and spiced with polyphony. In 1946, Martinů had a major accident that cracked his skull and seriously impaired his hearing. He had to learn to walk again, and his pain may be detected in the serious tone of the second Canzone, composed after the accident.

Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto. No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) was the very personification of Slav melancholy. All his great works are in minor keys, and the mediaeval Dies irae motif was his favourite theme. His Piano Concerto No. 2 (1901) was preceded by a severe bout of depression. The premiere of his first symphony had been a fiasco; he took to his bed and the bottle and was only rescued by a period of intense hypnotism. The first work he composed after his recovery was the C-minor concerto, which he dedicated to his therapist Nikolai Dahl.

The flowing melodies, the ideas following smoothly from one to another and the seamless interplay of soloist and orchestra speak of the state of euphoria in which the concerto was written. The very chords with which it begins establish the nature of the 35-minute piece, interrupted only by the singing, dreamy slow second movement. Many of its melodies have been borrowed by the world of pop, among them Frank Sinatra’s I Think of You (1st movement) and Full Moon and Empty Arms (finale), and Eric Carmen’s All by myself (2nd movement) possibly best known for its rendering by Céline Dion.

Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70

Each of the symphonies by Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) adopts a different approach; the 8th, for example, was inspired by nature and the 9th by melodies he heard in America. When the London Philharmonic Society commissioned him to write his Symphony No. 7 (1885), he was already well known for his Slavonic Dances, so decided to seek inspiration in his Bohemian homeland. The premiere he conducted in London was a success, but the 7th has been overshadowed by some of his other symphonies, even though some claim it is one of his best. Maybe the minor key and the only faint hint of Slavonic dances were not quite what the audience expected.

The heavy tread of the first movement may call to mind another composer highly popular in London at the time, Johannes Brahms. The score of the second, a mournful orchestral song, bears a footnote “From the sad years” – Dvořák lost both his mother and oldest daughter within a short period of time. The third movement is a scherzo, a Furiant dance and a reminder of the former man- of-the-people Dvořák. Though the symphony ends on a mighty major chord, the listener may be left wondering whether it was in fact triumphant.