Our 2010 Summerfest season ends at Regency Park this Saturday with a classical blockbuster of a program that I will conduct. The concert begins with music from Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. This is indeed grandiose music fit for a King. (It was written for King George II.) By a happy coincidence the next work also has a royal title: The “Emperor” Concerto, the Piano Concerto No. 5 by Beethoven. It is well known that Handel was Beethoven’s favorite composer partly because of Handel’s genius at creating larger-than life effects with the simplest musical means. Think for instance of Handel’s most famous work, the Hallejulah Chorus from the oratorio, Messiah. It packs an enormous wallop when it is excerpted at concerts but its full brilliance is revealed only in the context of the complete work. That’s because for the first 100 minutes of the oratorio Handel has held back from using the trumpets and timpani. When they are finally unleashed in this chorus, the effect is apocalyptic.

The subtitle of the “Emperor” Concerto originated with the first English publisher who with this title correctly caught the majestic tone of most of the piece. But there is more to this work than its nobility and its exterior aggression; the second movement is one of the most intimate and spiritual movements Beethoven ever wrote. In this context it functions as a kind of musical oasis. It is these kinds of contrasts that contribute to the impressive breadth of this piece. Related to this, I recently found a wonderful quote from Schiller that mentions the importance of contrast in an art work: “There must be supreme unity, but it must not detract from diversity. Without a feeling of resistance between the materials in a work it is impossible to produce the perturbations without which any poetic effect is unthinkable.” Beethoven uses his own version of this dictum in many of his works his works in order to create musical scenarios filled with epic emotional contrasts. Think for instance of the strongly contrasting first two themes of his Fifth Symphony. The first theme is an iron fist; the second is a velvet glove. The interaction between these two extremely different temperaments supplies a good deal of the intense drama of the movement. The first movement begins with a “battle royale” featuring alternating brazen outbursts from the competing teams: the piano and the orchestra. A considerable amount of electricity is created by the ever-changing moods and the sheer drama of hearing two equally matched opponents struggling to be the dominant partner.

As mentioned, the second movement takes us to another world of calm and repose. And then, for the very first time in a concerto, Beethoven composed a transition that acts as a musical bridge to the next movement. If the Adagio was a visit to the Elysian Fields, the third movement brusquely yanks us back to Earth. This piece features a galloping rhythm that supports a series of melodies that are athletic but magisterial. Near the end, the orchestra retreats from the scene (the weaker fighter vanquished ?) , leaving only the timpani to accompany the last thoughts of the pianist.

The concert will conclude with Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony. It is a popular work that I first discovered as a middle school student in the late 1960s and have been fond of ever since. I have conducted it only once before, with the Peabody Conservatory Orchestra in 1979. Saint-Saëns was one of the most remarkable of all child prodigies. He began studying the piano at the age of two-and-a-half and wrote his first composition at age three. At 11, he made his performing debut as a pianist. Through his life he developed a great deal of interest in many extra-musical fields such as archaeology, math and classical philology. He was also a talented essayist and playwright. However, it was in the field of music as a pianist, organist, conductor and composer that he was especially gifted. He said of himself that he “lived in music like a fish in water.” And he was proud of his facility as a composer, saying that he created music “as an apple tree produces apples.” This easy facility and his prodigious output have worked somewhat to dampen his reputation as a “deep” composer. Certainly we look in vain in his music to find the kind of intense soul-searching we hear in the music of his contemporaries, Schumann and Wagner. And as for his vast output, I think we tend to unfairly judge the most prolific composers that came after the time of Bach and Mozart. Whether composers leave behind 12 works (Mahler ) or 1200 (Telemann) should not be taken into account when evaluating their place in history. What matters is the quanity of works that eventually become a part of the permanent standard repertoire. And in this area, Saint-Saëns outshines many of his contemporaries that get more respect. His standards include Violin Concerto No. 3, Piano Concerti Nos. 2, 4 and 5, the Cello Concerto No. 1, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Danse Macabre, the opera Samson and Delilah, Symphony No. 3 and “The Carnival of the Animals.”

He led a remarkably long life — from 1835 (eight years after the death of Beethoven ) to 1921 (the year of some of Schoenberg’s finest pieces written in the 12-tone serial style). He was a musical conservative who lived long enough to see the first performances of such revolutionary works as Debussy’s Peleas et Melisande (which he depised ) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. (Legend has it that he walked out of the premiere during the opening bars because of Stravinsky’s “illogical” use of the bassoon.)

In his mature years a more innovative compositional style w as created by his study and admiration of the tone poems of Franz Liszt. Saint-Saëns was impressed by the organic nature of these one-movement works that either tell a story or reveal a facet of human nature. Liszt was also an admirer of Saint-Saëns’s music and was once heard to say, “When I am composing I often ask the question ‘Would Saint- Saëns like this?’” What did Liszt mean by this? Perhaps this innately spontaneous and romantic rhapsodist was impressed by the orderliness and concision of Saint Saëns’s best music. Liszt conducted several of Saint-Saëns’s works (including the world premiere of Samson and Delilah) but his main contribution was to nudge the French composer toward being less conservative in his musical forms and more unrestrained in the emotional content of his music.

Saint-Saëns’s first two numbered symphonies are small scale works that reveal the influence of Mozart and Mendelssohn. Twenty-seven years elapsed before the birth of the Third Symphony. It is as if he were slowly gearing up for a symphonic magnum opus that would test his abilities and set the world on fire. In fact, he said about this piece, “ I gave everything to it that I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again.” An accurate prediction; though he lived 35 more years, this was his last symphony and last piece that became part of the standard repertoire. It is revealing that the Third Symphony, the summation of his compositional career, is dedicated to Liszt.

I have always been fascinated by those works that composers write when they are consciously trying to live up to their potential or even outdo themselves. Examples of that would include Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony and Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony , both of which are deeply personal works that reveal the hidden “dark night of the soul” of both composers. Works that are somewhat less revealing of the composer’s psyche but instead are more intent on stretching the boundaries of the symphonic form would include Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Saint -Saëns’s Third Symphony. Just as Beethoven added instruments to the Fifth that had never been used in a symphony before (piccolo and trombones) the French master here adds to the symphonic palette for the first time the bass clarinet, the contrabassoon, the piano played by two players and the pipe organ. This dramatic use of this last instrument has the given the symphony its subtitle. This subtitle often misleads people who do not know the work into assuming the piece is a kind of organ concerto. Though its sonority does supply some of the most spectacular moments in the piece it is mainly a secondary player in the musical dialogue. (Berlioz once said, “Since the orchestra is the Emperor and the organ is the Pope, it is unwise to engineer a contest between the two.” )

The Third Symphony is in the traditional four movements but with transitions that connect the first two and the last two movements. The principal key of the work is C, but it begins enigmatically in the farthest key from C — D flat. The tempo of this short introduction is slow, the mood is ominous. Soon we are plunged into an Allegro that begins with murmuring sounds possibly influenced by a passage near the very beginning of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. This Allegro section is stormy with contrasting tender moments that give us a temporary respite from the prevailing agitated atmosphere. This leads directly to the Adagio and the quiet, subtle first entrance of the organ. The mood is seraphic and “religioso.” After a short pause we hear a brisk scherzo that features the brilliance of the sound of piano played by four hands bounding quickly all over the keyboard. Here, as everywhere in this symphony , one is astonished by Saint-Saëns’s melodic gifts and his virtuosic handling of the orchestra. And there’s no doubt that the brash extroversion of this movement is even more striking coming after the heavenly serenity of the slow movement. A contemplative interlude leads to the finale, which begins with an unforgettable wake-up call from the organ. The remainder of the movement alternates between austere fugal material and radiant lyrical melodies. This all leads to one of the most uplifting endings in French symphonic music. Finding the perfect ending for a large-scale work is one of the most difficult tasks a composer has to conquer. An ending that is too short and not rhetorical enough can lead to a feeling of irresolution. Its opposite, an overly extended coda that is long on bombast and short on eloquence, can be equally unconvincing. It is to Saint-Saëns’s credit that this massive work of tremendous contrasts ends with a logical and organic summation comprised of heart-felt music that no one can remain unmoved by. As the composers colleague Gounod said on first hearing this work, “Behold the French Beethoven!”