The Masters Program Notes

Masters Program Notes: Brahms' Second Symphony - Oct 3, 2009

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Brahm's Second Symphony
Classic Landmarks Masters
Enmax Hall, Winspear Centre

Saturday, October 3, 2009 - 8 pm
William Eddins, conductor
Julie Albers, cello

Program

Forsyth: ukuZalwa (Rebirth) (12')*

Kabalevsky: Cello Concerto No. 2 (30')*
Julie Albers, cello

Intermission

Brahms: Symphony No. 2 (40')*

*Indicates approximate performance duration

Program Notes

ukuZalwa
Malcolm Forsyth
(b. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 1936)

First performance: October 22, 1983 in Pietermaritzburg
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

Program note by the composer
This piece is in the style of a concert overture: bright, brilliant, and tuneful. It was written as the inaugural work for the newly-established Natal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1983. The title is a Zulu word meaning "Rebirth."

Several features have dictated its form. First, there is the element of bringing together the European style with the African, as a statement of the composer's hope for the future of his native land at at a time of tribulation, so that we hear an A-section in the typical melodic-harmonic manner of Europe contrasted with the beat of Zulu drums and the cross-rhythmic ostinati typical of Africa in the B-theme. These are first introduced by a fanfare which reappears twice later.

The two main elements are then projected into a series of variations in which each section of the orchestra is given its own feature solo passage, some based on the European, some on the African theme. This was the composer's way of introducing the new orchestra to its audience at the inaugural concert in the city of his birth, Pietermaritzburg.

First in the set of variations are the trombones and tuba in a boisterous romp, followed by the upper strings, then lyrical bassoons. Horns follow with a wonderful mixing of the two cultures: a new theme in the style of a Protestant hymn, but pentatonic, and with the driving cross-rhythms of the drums in the background. Then comes a flute and piccolo variation on the A-theme, followed by the cellos and basses in a romantic interlude. Oboes have an ethereal moment and then the two trumpets appear in a rapid and rhythmic passage. An incisive solo for the harp leads us to the clarinets, the last soloists, in a looping and flexible pattern, after which the return of the A-theme and a brilliant burst of drums signal the conclusion, an optimistic prediction of a fine future for both the new orchestra and the whole country.

Cello Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op.77
Dmitri Kabalevsky
(b. St. Petersburg, 1904 / d. Moscow, 1987)

First performance: January 15, 1965 in Leningrad
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

“As it is, I think it is the best of his works so far made available in the West though I realise that this may be interpreted as a pretty backhanded compliment.”
Robert Layton, Gramophone magazine, December 1969

During the Cold War, and indeed even in the first few decades following, composers who found themselves more or less at peace with the Soviet regime were regarded by the west as somehow less deserving of serious attention. Those who fell out of favour, who were charged with the serious offense of writing music which fell under the accusation of “formalism,” were seen as rebels against the Soviet authorities, and therefore as more “heroic.” But perhaps time and understanding have helped the reputations of composers such as Dmitri Kabalevsky, who seemed to prosper under the Soviet regime. His music had a natural bent toward 19th century idioms and harmonies; that, coupled with his talents for music education made his natural compositional voice one that avoided the strictures directed at many of his contemporaries, such as Shostakovich.

Kabalevsky’s First Cello Concerto (which Yo-Yo Ma performed at an ESO Gala performance in 2007) was intended as a student work – though not one necessarily easy for any performer. The Second Cello Concerto had a much more “adult” genesis. Having worked on the orchestration of Prokofiev’s Concertino, Kabalevsky was inspired to turn to the cello concerto form once more, writing this work in 1964 for cellist Daniel (also spelled Daniil) Shafran, who premiered it in 1967.

Dedicated to Shafran, the concerto is in three movements, linked by cadenzas. It opens ominously: a few plucked notes over haunting low strings. The music opens out from this, with lyricism in both cello and orchestra, though the molto sostenuto atmosphere is maintained. The second mood of the movement, Allegro molto e energico, bursts out from the cello about halfway through. The long, highly detailed cello passages test the mettle of the performer, while the mood of restless, nervous energy is a strong contrast to the preceding one of sadness. There are some wonderful instrumental flourishes here as well, particularly for the woodwinds. The opening mood is restored as the movement ends, yielding to the first cadenza, a brooding affair featuring pizzicato, bent notes, and double stops.

The second movement opens with a jaunty solo for alto saxophone, flashy and completely unexpected. The cello responds, and the pace is bracing, the orchestral colours rich. There are quiet moments, particularly when the cello is given some taxing music to play, but the energy never flags, until a sudden halt ushers in the second cadenza, which restores a mood of haunting stillness, amid emotional bursts. This cadenza is shorter, and the third movement begins with - sadness again - but also great beauty. Slowly, the cello raises the temperature, leading to a brief fanfare in the horns, then ebbs back into the beautiful, lyrical opening (with a lovely oboe solo). Again, the cello picks up the pace, this time for good. The cello plays a searing ostinato as the orchestra grows in strength, leading to another passage of more animated lyricism. As the movement ends, the quiet returns, and the concerto ebbs away, in a mist of mystery and muted colours.

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op.73
Johannes Brahms
(b. Hamburg, 1833 / d. Vienna, 1897)

First performance: December 30, 1877 in Vienna
Last ESO performance: January 2001

“…an unqualified success…with nothing of the contemporary tendency to emphasize novelty. This time Brahms has managed to suppress his imposing, but dangerous, art of hiding his ideas in a polyphonic web or exposing them to contrapuntal frustration.”
from Eduard Hanslick’s review of the premiere of Brahms’ Second Symphony

At last! It had taken Johannes Brahms the better part of two decades to finally bring a symphony before the public. Faced with the extraordinary pressure of producing a symphony worthy of the musical successor to Beethoven – as the music world had regarded him - Brahms had laboured and second-guessed the long, tortuous road that had finally yielded his First Symphony in 1876. But with that finally behind him, Brahms wrote a second symphony with surprising ease, and in only months, not years.

Composed during an idyllic summer in 1877 spent at the village of Pörtschach, near Lake Worth in the Austrian Alps, the Second Symphony is widely considered Brahms’ most serene, his most contented. But there is a grey undercurrent amid the serenity, one borne of a mature and seasoned composer who, that same summer, had written a motet titled, “Wherefore is the light given to them that toil?”.

All four movements of the D Major Symphony are in major keys, yet as often as not, tonality is suggested more than dwelled upon. There is much harmonic and rhythmic interplay and subtlety at work throughout the symphony, which begins with an almost hymn-like theme in the trombones before the mood turns more rich and romantic. A theme which comes to dominate the movement first occurs about two and a half minutes in – listen for what almost sounds like the opening of Brahms’ famous Lullaby. Moods contrast greatly throughout this movement, often by using fragments of the two main themes subjected to cross rhythms and unsettled harmonies. There are some moments of intense passion, but the movement itself ends almost playfully, with pizzicato (plucked) strings leading to a demure ending.

The second movement is the longest slow movement in any Brahms symphony, and opens with much the same mood as the first does. The development section offers a strong contrast in both mood and tempo, and moves through many keys. An emotional climax ebbs away as quickly as it arrives, ending the movement on a hush. The third movement’s main song is a tripping Ländler (the rustic precursor to the Viennese waltz), contrasted with a skittish, scurrying theme in 2/4 – the string writing has the feel of Mendelssohn’s gossamer string sound. These two main subjects alternate, or are combined in ingenious ways by Brahms in this good-naturedly off-kilter movement.

With the opening measures of the finale, we know momentous things are imminent. But at first, the buoyant outbursts from the orchestra sound almost as if the happiness is contrived. A clarinet begins a new song, which is followed in the strings by one reminiscent of the third movement’s Ländler. Fragments of these melodies come and go, but there is a forward momentum to the music; the brass dominates the proceedings as the coda begins, and at last, the joy is as irrepressible as it is unbounded, leading to one of the most ebullient endings of any Brahms work.

Program Notes © 2008 D.T. Baker

Program notes © 2009 by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and its respective annotators. All Rights Reserved. Program notes may not be printed in their entirety without the written consent of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra; excerpts may be quoted if due acknowledgment is given to the author and to the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. For reprint permission, contact D.T. Baker, Music Resource, by email, dave.baker@winspearcentre.com.

These notes appear in galley files prepared for Signature magazine, official publication of the ESO, and may contain typographical or other errors, or may differ from the final print version. Programs and artists subject to change without notice.

Masters Program Notes: September 18 & 19, 2009 - The Red Violin

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:00:00 GMT

The Red Violin
Friday, September 18, 2009 - 7:30 pm
Saturday, September 19, 2009 - 8:00 pm
Enmax Hall, Winspear Centre

William Eddins, conductor
Martin Riseley, violin
Sara Davis Buechner, piano
George Gao, erhu

Program

Lavallée: O Canada (arr. Gilliland) (1')*

Shore: Fanfare for Organ, Brass & Percussion (8)*
Jeremy Spurgeon, organ

Tan Dun: Crouching Tiger Concerto (32)*
George Gao, erhu

Intermission

Corigliano: Red Violin Chaconne (17)*
Martin Riseley, violin

Gershwin: Second Rhapsody for Piano & Orchestra (15)*
Sara Davis Buechner, piano

*Indicates approximate performance duration

Program Notes

Fanfare for Organ, Brass and Percussion
Howard Shore
(b. Toronto, 1946)

First performance: September 27, 2008 on the Wanamaker Organ at Macy’s Department Store, Philadelphia
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

The new Fanfare by Shore came out of protracted, intense study of the organ's possibilities: Though Shore is said to have intended an hour's visit to Macy's to hear what he was writing for, he stayed for at least four. The 10-minute piece seemed out to explore as many possibilities as possible, with brass writing encompassing suggestions of Wagner's Die Meistersinger as well as John Williams' Star Wars.
David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 2008

Program Note by Ray Biswanger, Executive Director of the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, Inc.
In 2008, Macy’s commissioned this fanfare in honour of its 150th anniversary, at a performance featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra and organist Peter Richard Conte in the historic John Wanamaker Philadelphia store. Macy's was cognizant of the rich musical heritage of the Wanamaker Organ, the world's largest pipe organ, and of the legacy of the Wanamaker Grand Court as a setting for important new music. Howard Shore is perhaps best known for his acclaimed scores for the The Lord of the Rings movie cycle and other feature films, including several for the films of fellow Canadian David Cronenberg. In this tone poem, an unruly opening theme from the organ is offset by fanfares from the brass choir. Soon, organ and brass join forces and dance in an ever-widening gyre.

Crouching Tiger Concerto for Erhu and Orchestra
Tan Dun
(b. Si Mao, Hunan Province, 1957)

First performance: September 30, 2000 in London
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

The six-movement Crouching Tiger Concerto is an inviting amalgam of Chinese and Western timbres and gestures … The cello music is often dramatic and hard-driven as well…Chinese percussion instruments augment the Western orchestra, and among the work's most intriguing moments were cadenzas for percussion, and bawu and dizi flutes.
Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

Program Note by Peggy Monastra
The individual bodies of work of Tan Dun and Ang Lee have focused on the meeting of the cultures of East and West, and the fascinating hybrid that results — something no longer wholly eastern or western. Like Tan Dun's Orchestral Theater series, many of Ang Lee’s earlier films focus on that which is born of the cross-fertilization of cultures, traditions and generations. In developing the musical scores to accompany his films, Lee has sought out innovative composers who are adept at creating a contemporary sound in the blending of eastern and western musical traditions. It thus seems a natural progression that Tan Dun's and Ang Lee's work should come together, and not only in the format of music accompanying images — but also a work in which images accompany music.

The Crouching Tiger Concerto, written originally for cello and chamber orchestra but later adapted for the erhu as solo instrument, is a concert work based on Tan's Oscar-winning score for Lee's Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — a film which joins the quintessential Asian genre of martial arts cinema with the drama of a western romance with a deep metaphorical message.

The concerto is in six movements with cadenzas connecting the orchestral movements. The work is highly reflective of Tan Dun's current interest in the historical cultures of the Silk Road. Woven into the film score and concerto are instruments, their performing techniques and articulations, and melodies native to the cultures which intermingled along the Silk Road in China's Xinjiang province. Of particular interest is the erhu melody in the third cadenza, which is a folk song from this region. Instruments heard in the concerto which are indigenous to these Silk Road cultures are the tar (a North African frame drum) and the bawu (a bamboo, copper-reed flute which came into China from Southeast Asia). The rawap (a high-pitched, plucked string instrument native to the Uygar culture of the Taklimakan area) is prominent in the film score and represented in the concerto in melodies and articulations transcribed to the cello and the orchestra. Additional instruments from Silk Road cultures can be heard throughout in the gestures and timbres that Tan crafted into the scoring of this Western orchestra.

The Crouching Tiger Concerto was written for and inspired by Yo-Yo Ma. The work received its world premiere at London's Barbican Centre Festival: Fire Cross Water, of which Tan Dun was artistic director.

The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra
John Corigliano
(b. New York, 1938)

First performance: November 26, 1997 in San Francisco
Last ESO performance: Enbridge Symphony Under the Sky 2000

John Corigliano is film scoring's answer to Terrence Malick and the late Stanley Kubrick, the kind of genius who comes along every 20 years or so to amaze us with brilliance. Corigliano's bravura score is nothing short of a masterpiece, a concert work in sound-track form. No instrument can resonate emotion like the violin, and Corigliano uses this one for all of its tragic potential.
Daniel Schweiger, Venice Magazine

Program Note by the composer
The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra draws upon music I composed for the film of the same name. The film spans three centuries in the life of a magnificent but haunted violin in its travels through space and time. A story this episodic needed to be tied together with a single musical idea. For this purpose I used the Baroque device of a chaconne: a repeated pattern of chords upon which the music is built. Against the chaconne chords I juxtaposed Anna's theme, a lyrical yet intense melody representing the violin builder's doomed wife. From these elements I wove a series of virtuosic etudes for the solo violin, which followed the instrument from country to country, century to century.

I composed these elements before the actual filming, because the actors needed to imitate actual performance of the music. Then, while the film itself was shot, I made - from Anna's theme, the chaconne, and the etudes - this concert work. While I scored the film just for the soloist and string orchestra (to emphasize the "stringness" of the picture), I composed this seventeen-minute concert work for violin and full orchestra.

As The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra begins, diaphanous ascending string lines unveil the chaconne chords, voiced in incantatory dotted rhythms, in low winds and brass. Then solo violin and orchestra utter, and expand on, Anna's theme. Virtuosic etudes quicken the pace, lead to a rushing climax; these yield to a stratospherically high, gravely slow melody, which remembers, against slowly shifting string sonorities, Anna's romantic theme. The string chords grow louder and stronger, with winds and brass: then the soloist reclaims, in determined accents this time, the diaphanous string line that opened the score. The orchestra halts to launch the soloist's cadenza, impetuous and songful by turns: then the chaconne, in strings chords rendered brittle by sharp attacks with the wood of the bow, gradually climax in a grand tutti restatement of the incantatory opening and a whirlwind coda for all.

Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra
George Gershwin
(b. Brooklyn, NY, 1898 / d. Hollywood, 1937)

First performance: January 29, 1932 in New York
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

Program Note by Sara Davis Buechner
George Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra originated as musical material for the 1931 Hollywood film Delicious, starring Janet Gaynor as a young Scottish immigrant in Manhattan. In the movie sequence, her arrival at Gotham’s door is accompanied by a pastiche of the sounds of the city, including construction workers building in directions both low (subway) and high (skyscraper). Indeed, Gershwin’s first impulse was to call his newest piano concerto Rhapsody in Rivets, and the opening gesture of the work calls for the pianist to pile-drive repeated notes into the bass octaves. “I wrote it mainly because I wanted to write a serious composition and found the opportunity in California to do it,” wrote Gershwin. “Nearly everybody comes back from California with a Western tan and a pocketful of moving picture money. I decided to come back with both those things, and a serious composition -- if the climate would let me.”

The piece remains one of the lesser-known in the Gershwin oeuvre although it is widely admired by musicians. Less flashy and tuneful than its rhapsodic predecessor, the work nevertheless displays a dazzling command of orchestration and motivic development, and demonstrates clearly the advanced compositional skills that Gershwin was rapidly acquiring en route to his final masterpiece, the opera Porgy and Bess.

There is evidence that Gershwin intended to create a solo piano version of his Second Rhapsody (as he had with the Rhapsody in Blue), but this project did not come to fruition. I have always had a great fondness for the piece and wanted to perform it more often, so I created and recorded my own solo version of it in 1988 along Gershwin’s lines. In any guise it’s a work deserving of much more performance, so it’s a special treat to play it at these concerts with the Edmonton Symphony.

Program Notes © by the respective authors noted above

Masters Program Notes: A Dramatic Conclusion

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: A Dramatic Conclusion

Masters Program Notes: From the New World, May 30 & 31

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: From the New World, May 30 & 31

Masters Program Notes: A Space Odyssey - May 8 & 9, 2009

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: A Space Odyssey - May 8 & 9, 2009

Masters Program Notes: Carmina Burana - April 4 & 5, 2009

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: Carmina Burana - April 4 & 5, 2009

Masters Program Notes: Music that Changed the World, Mar 7 & 8, 2009

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: Music that Changed the World, Mar 7 & 8, 2009

Masters Program Notes: Bach & Beethoven, Feb 20 & 21, 2009

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: Bach & Beethoven, Feb 20 & 21, 2009

Masters Program Notes: Keyboard Masterpieces, Jan 31 & Feb 1, 2009

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: Keyboard Masterpieces, Jan 31 & Feb 1, 2009

Masters Program Notes: Bursts of Creativity, January 9 & 10, 2009.

philip.paschke@winspearcentre.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Masters Program Notes: Bursts of Creativity, January 9 & 10, 2009.