Program Notes
Like most professional cellists, Roman has played
the standards, especially the Dvorak Cello Concerto,
and treats all the works he performs as having
been “new’’ music at one point. But the difference
between a Dvorak and a Bates is only one guy can
answer the phone and chat it up.
“If I have a question about the (Bates) Concerto, I
can just text or call him,’’ Roman said. “You get to
know the composer and ask him things and get a
sense of his personality and how he’s connected to
the music. With Dvorak, it’s all guesswork because
he’s not around. I can’t play a passage for him and
ask what he thinks.’’
For Roman, this accessibility to living composers
also deepens his respect for those of the past: “I feel
very lucky to be working with today’s composers,
and it makes me feel much more connected to
Beethoven and Brahms and Dvorak.’’
Bates and Roman are close friends, and when
the composer first heard the young cellist play,
he was taken aback by an unusual combination
of “enlightened prodigy and everyman
approachability … unmatched musicianship and
technique,’’ according to the composer’s own
program notes. He was a natural to represent and
interpret the Concerto around the world.
“I love the fact that my debut with TFO is doing
the work of a close friend,’’ Roman said. “These
performances are really an expression of that
friendship.’’
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
SYMPHONY NO. 9 IN C MAJOR
Duration: ca. 50 minutes
Imagine, if you will indulge in whimsy for a moment,
what glories of music would fill our concert halls
had Mozart not died at such a young age. The same
for Mendelssohn, Bizet and Gershwin, who passed
much too soon, leaving us to ponder masterpieces
that might have been.
Schubert seemed almost prescient about his short
life, judging from the sheer output of compositions
– nearly 1,500 – in his 31 years. This enormous
cache includes 600 songs; 40 liturgical pieces; 20
piano sonatas; 15 string quartets; nine symphonies;
and music for the stage.
To say Schubert could write a tune is an
understatement. He spun music like silk on a
loom, organically melodic, melancholy and
introspective. It may have seemed bizarre to his
friends that such angelic sounds could come from
a shy, often sick, diminutive man, whom they called
THE FLORIDA OR 58 CHESTRA | 2018-2019
“little mushroom.’’ Few of Schubert’s works were
published or widely known in his lifetime, and
he did little to promote himself. Only one public
concert devoted to his music was known to be
staged while he was alive.
In fact, he never lived to hear the sound of his finest
large-scale creation, the Symphony No. 9, aptly
known as the Great. You and everyone else sitting
here tonight might not have heard it either, if not
for the good luck of composer Robert Schumann,
who happened to come across the score in a pile of
papers a decade after Schubert’s death. Knowing
its significance, Schumann shared it with Felix
Mendelssohn, who in 1840 gave the world premiere
with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
This is a long symphony, clocking in at about 50
minutes, depending on a conductor’s approach
to tempo. But its “heavenly length,’’ as Schumann
said about the slow movement, along with the
rhythmic energy of the surrounding sections,
make length irrelevant. “It transports us into a
world,’’ Schumann said, “where we cannot recall
ever having been before.’’ Its grand structure and
innovative orchestration left Haydn and Mozart
behind and helped pave the way – with a little
help from Beethoven – for the new, grander age of
romanticism.
The symphony opens with a stentorian horn call
that heralds a pensive introduction on which the
entire work is built – one of the mightiest sonata
movements in all of music. Schubert develops
and redevelops his ideas through “choirs of
instruments’’ and concludes with a glorious coda
that sets up the slow movement in A minor, where
lyricism creeps alongside an undertow of tension.
Notice how the plaintive tune sung by the woeful
oboe keeps getting interrupted by outbursts from
the full orchestra.
In the third movement, Schubert discards the
traditional minuet with a Beethoven-like scherzo
so bold and incisive it seems cut from marble. The
finale summarizes the tonal complexities of and key
schemes of the opening movement and charges
forward with relentless energy. This section is so
full of technical pitfalls that some befuddled 19thcentury
orchestras had to stop playing. Schubert
brings all the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic bits
and pieces from the preceding movements to an
exhilarating close in the radiant key of C major.
Program notes by Kurt Loft, a freelance writer and
former music critic for The Tampa Tribune.