Program

Overture to Don Giovanni
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
     1. Allegro moderato
     2. Andante assai
     3. Allegro; ben marcato

Moni Simeonov, violin

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 “Eroica”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
     1. Allegro con brio
     2. Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
     3. Scherzo: Allegro vivace
     4. Finale: Allegro molto

Overture to Don Giovanni, K. 527
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Born: January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria
Written: 1787
Premiered: October 29, 1787, National Theater, Prague
Approximate duration: 7 minutes
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 French horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings

After the successful premiere of The Marriage of Figaro at the National Theatre in Prague, the opera house immediately commissioned another work from its composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Mozart turned to the legend of Don Juan for subject matter, inspired by the theatre of the Spanish Golden Age.  He stylized the work as a comic opera, as he was commissioned to write, but he also incorporated uniquely serious, melodramatic, and supernatural elements.  The plot follows the notorious nobleman Don Giovanni, a brazen and fearless seducer who defies all moral codes.  After killing the Commendatore, the father of one of his would-be conquests, in a duel, Don Giovanni pursues even more noblewomen with reckless abandon, even as his former lovers seek vengeance and his servant, Leporello, challenges his schemes.  The work reaches its supernatural climax when Don Giovanni is haunted and confronted by the “Stone Guest” – a stone statue of the Commendatore that comes to life and drags Don Giovanni to his fiery punishment.  

Although Mozart completed the opera with plenty of time for the cast to learn it, he did not write the overture until the last minute.  According to legend, he partied away the night before the opera’s premiere.  In fact, his wife had to keep him awake the rest of the night to ensure the overture was written at all, before delivering the scores to the copyists early the next morning.  

From its first measures, the overture foreshadows Don Giovanni’s fate, using the same musical themes that appear when the Commandetore’s statue carries him down to hell.  After the slow introduction, the rest of the overture sparkles with lively themes unique to the overture that embody a pleasure-seeking lifestyle.  This overture leads directly into the beginning of the opera, but Mozart later wrote a “concert ending” so the it may be performed as a standalone piece.

To watch a video of Mozart’s Don Giovanni overture in the theater where the opera had its premiere, click here.

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63
Sergei Prokofiev

Born: April 23, 1891, Sontsivka, Ukraine
Died: March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia
Composed: 1935
Premiered: December 1, 1935, Teatro Monumental, Madrid, Spain, with violinist Robert Soetens, the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, and conductor Enrique Fernández Arbós
Approximate duration: 26 minutes
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 French horns, 2 trumpets, percussion (bass drum, castanets, snare drum, suspended cymbal, triangle), strings

Sergei Prokofiev grew up in a remote Ukrainian village.  Tchaikovsky was his earliest musical inspiration.  He played arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s music on the piano throughout his youth and musical education. In fact, Prokofiev eventually became a “compositional grandson” of Tchaikovsky, as his  primary teacher studied under the Russian composer himself.   Although Prokofiev still revered Tchaikovsky when he enrolled in the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1905, the encroaching Russian Revolution in 1917 pushed him away from  traditional norms of refinement, beauty, and Romantic melodic and harmonic styles, and towards a dissonant and sarcastic musical language.  After the revolution, he left Russia and settled in the US, Germany, and Paris.  By the 1920s, his compositional style evolved into what he called a "new simplicity," focusing on clear and Romantic melodies and classical textures and forms.  Prokofiev found this approach more sincere than the "contrivances and complexities" of 1920s modern music.  Although his orchestration tended to be lighter than Tchaikovsky’s, he exercised his love for the Russian master through lush melodies and compositions for ballet, opera, and some film.

When the Great Depression affected the US and Europe in the 1930s, the homesick Prokofiev struggled to stage operas and ballets, so he returned to his homeland in 1936.  He thought he would adapt easily to life in the Soviet Union, writing,  “I care nothing for politics—I’m a composer first and last.  Any government that lets me write my music in peace, publishes everything I composed before the ink is dry, and performs every note that comes from my pen is all right with me.  In Europe, we all have to fish for performances, cajole conductors and theatre directors; in Russia they come to me. I can hardly keep up with the demand…”  

Prokoviev wasn’t exactly correct, however.  In 1936 and onward, the Soviet government actively suppressed artistic dissent and had strict, patriotic requirements for composers: “The main attention of the Soviet composer must be directed towards the victorious progressive principles of reality towards all that is heroic, bright and beautiful.  This distinguishes the spiritual world of Soviet man and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and strength.  Socialist Realism demands an implacable struggle against folk-negating modernistic directions that are typical of the decay of contemporary bourgeois art, against subservience and servility towards modern bourgeois culture.”  For the most part, Prokofiev managed to avoid censure, but in 1948, he was denounced by the government, along with Shostakovich and Khachaturian, for “western decadence.”  However, Prokofiev literally ended his life free from the eyes of Soviet nationalist critics–he died within the same hour as Joseph Stalin, so his death went largely unnoticed.    

Prokofiev’s second violin concerto was the last piece he wrote before returning home, composed while he was on tour with French violinist Robert Soetens.  He recalled, “The main theme of the first movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the second movement in Voronezh, the orchestration was finished in Baku and the premier was given in Madrid.”  This concerto features some of the most beautiful melodies Prokofiev ever wrote.  It begins with the violin alone, playing a mournful folk-like melody in its lowest register, before the orchestra captivates listeners with rapid, unexpected changes in key and meter.  The contrasting second theme is in major key.  The second movement begins with gentle pizzicato (plucked) string accompaniment as the solo violin sings a simple melody that grows lush, expansive, and Romantic.  This movement recalls his Romeo and Juliet ballet, which Prokofiev was composing at the same time, featuring many variations of the opening melody and frequent exchanges between soloist and orchestra.  The energetic, dancelike finale is structured as a rondo, with a recurring theme interspersed with unique and contrasting episodes.  Prokofiev uses a surprising amount of percussion in this movement, including liberal use of castanets, perhaps celebrating the work’s premiere in Madrid.  He explores further dissonance in this movement, as well as frequent heavy accents, and marks the ending as "tumultuous," before the orchestra rushes wildly to the conclusion.

To watch a video of Prokofiev’s second violin concerto, click here.

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 “Eroica”
Ludwig van Beethoven

Born: (Baptized) December 17, 1770, Bonn
Died: March 26, 1827, Vienna
Written: 1802-1804
Premiered: private premiere at the palace of one of Beethoven’s patrons, Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, in August 1804; official premiere: April 7, 1805, Theater an der Wien
Approximate duration: 47 minutes
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 French horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings

Music donated by Diane Lewis

In the early 1800s, Ludwig van Beethoven confronted personal challenges and encroaching hearing loss with a new level of awareness and openness.  In 1801, he first began to tell his close friends.  The next summer, he moved to the Viennese suburb of Heiligenstadt, where, in early fall 1802, he wrote his illuminating Heiligenstadt Testament: 

“O you men who think or say that I am hostile, peevish, or misanthropic, how greatly you wrong me.  You do not know the secret cause that makes me seem so to you.  From childhood on, my heart and soul were full of tender feelings of goodwill, and I was always inclined to accomplish great deeds.  But just think, for six years now I have had an incurable condition, made worse by incompetent doctors, from year to year deceived with hopes of getting better, finally forced to face the prospect of a lasting infirmity (whose cure will perhaps take years or even be impossible).”  

Beethoven could not bear the indignity of asking people to "speak louder, shout, for I am deaf," and felt he must retreat from society.  He even contemplated suicide, confessing, "A little more and I would have ended my life.  Only my art held me back.  It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me."

Beethoven’s hearing loss and growing self-awareness dramatically shifted his approach to his own music and composition.  In 1802, he wrote, “I am not satisfied with my works up to the present time.  From today I mean to take a new road.”  One of the first and most striking examples of this new approach was his third symphony, the "Eroica," dating from 1803.  It was the first of his symphonies for which he suggested a programmatic theme.  Although Beethoven originally planned to dedicate the symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he had long admired, he became disillusioned when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1804.  Ferdinand Ries, a student and early biographer, related the scene: "I was the first to bring him the news that Bonaparte had proclaimed himself emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition!' Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page by the top, tore it in two, and threw it on the floor. The first page was rewritten and only then did the Symphony receive the title, ‘ Sinfonia Eroica,’ Composed to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man.”  

Beethoven’s contemporaries struggled to appreciate and understand "Eroica."  To Beethoven’s audience, it was shockingly modern, with unprecedented length, thick orchestration, technical challenges, and an uncompromising stance.  Someone at the premiere yelled, “I’ll pay another kreuzer if the thing will only stop.”  Critics noted its “undesirable originality,” with “too much that is glaring and bizarre,” and thought the piece “lost itself in lawlessness.”  An early review said, “one could soon reach the point where one would derive no pleasure from it… but rather would leave the concert hall with an unpleasant feeling of fatigue from having been crushed by a mass of unconnected and overloaded ideas and a continuous tumult from all the instruments.”  Unbeknownst to his critics, however, “Eroica” marked not just a turning point in Beethoven’s compositional output, but a shift in all music.  By expressing personal feelings and ideals with new, challenging textures and musical colors, Beethoven ushered in the beginning of the Romantic movement in music.  Composers had no choice but to contend with the new reality that Beethoven introduced in this symphony.

From its first measures, “Eroica” innovates–the two striking tonic chords that open the symphony sound more like an ending than a beginning.  The first movement occupies a far bigger musical scale than any that had been written before it.  Its middle development section alone is longer than the first movement of many classical symphonies.  Beethoven fills this movement with melodic, metric, and harmonic surprises, before concluding with the solid chords from the opening.  The second movement, a funeral march, is one of the most influential pieces of music Beethoven ever composed.  Many subsequent composers wrote marches into their symphonies, often funereal in character, following Beethoven’s example.  The violins present the somber theme over a drum-like bass part.  The tone brightens at moments in the movement, notably in sections in major keys, and a powerful fugal section based on the march theme emerges at the climax of the movement.  

Beethoven replaced the traditional light-hearted “minuet” with an energetic scherzo, changing the symphony’s tone, but not its intensity.  The movement explores metric ambiguities and features the French horns in the middle trio section.  The finale starts with a mad dash in the seemingly “wrong” key.  This leads to a deceptively simple and unadorned baseline that seems ridiculously out of place.  Eventually a theme emerges.  Beethoven’s audience would have recognized it as a dance tune he had already used in three previous pieces, including his ballet music for The Creatures of Prometheus.  Perhaps Prometheus, the defiant yet heroic mythical figure, served as the symphony’s dedicatee, the “Great Man” that Napoleon failed to be.   Although listeners might have wondered why Beethoven recycled such a simple tune as the basis of the final movement of this massive symphony, Beethoven’s theme evolves as he innovates on his own composition, with variations ranging from playful to peaceful, lamenting to assertive, joyful to heroic.

To watch a video of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, click here.

A native of Bulgaria, Moni Simeonov began playing the violin at age 5, and ten years later, came to the United States on a full scholarship to the Idyllwild Arts Academy. He performs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Opera, Ensemble San Francisco, and until recently, was the Concertmaster for the Sacramento Philharmonic. He has also served as a guest concertmaster with Reno Philharmonic, Louisiana Philharmonic, and the Pacific Symphony. His doctoral studies included minor fields in Viola Performance, Schenkerian Analysis, Japanese Language, as well as an emphasis on the interpretation of the Balkan folk music.

On tour and in Los Angeles, Mr. Simeonov dedicates considerable time and energy to community engagement work and to musical activities and presentations for young people. Moni has performed and coached alongside Midori for her Orchestra Residencies Program American and International tours. Until 2014, he served as a director for the program. Outreach activities have taken him to places as diverse as homeless shelters in Peru and at-risk centers in Tennessee, to Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon, and hospitals for the terminally ill in Sri Lanka.

Moni’s summer teaching includes engagements with the Interlochen Summer Festival, the Singapore Violin Festival, and the Atlantic Music Festival. Moni is also the founder of Bulgaria’s first chamber music academy – “Quartet Intensive” in Sofia.

Moni has concertized and taught around the United States, South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. His recordings have been archived by PBS, NPR, KUSC, Bulgarian National Radio and TV, as well as Japanese Broadcasting Company NHK.

Moni received his BM and PC from the Eastman School of Music under Zvi Zeitlin, his MM and AD from Yale University with Ani Kavafian, and his GC and DMA from USC’s Thornton School of Music, where he studied with Midori.

Moni served as Adjunct Instructor at USC’s Thornton School of Music until 2014. That year, he was appointed Director of String Studies and Violin Professor with the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University, Long Beach. Moni is also the creator of zenviolin.com.

To watch the pre-concert video, click here.