JON NAKAMATSU PIANO

from 2022-2023 Masterworks III

by ASO - Annapolis Symphony Orchestra

JOSÉ-LUIS NOVO

Now in his third decade of touring worldwide, American pianist Jon Nakamatsu continues to draw critical and public acclaim for his intensity, elegance, and electrifying solo, concerto, and chamber music performances. Catapulted to international attention in 1997 as the Gold Medalist of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition—the only American to achieve this distinction since 1981—Mr. Nakamatsu subsequently developed a multi-faceted career that encompasses recording, education, arts administration, and public speaking in addition to his vast concert schedule.

In the 2022-23 season Jon Nakamatsu will perform extensively in the U.S. both with orchestra and in recital, with the Schumann Quartet (Schumann Piano Quintet), Stanford Woodwind Quintet, Jon Manasse, and Jennifer Frautschi. Mr. Nakamatsu’s orchestral engagements include those with the Wichita Falls Symphony, Santa Rosa Symphony, Lansing Symphony, Williamsburg Symphony, and others. His solo recitals include performances in San Francisco, San Jose, and Ashland, and other U.S. cities.

Mr. Nakamatsu has been guest soloist with over 150 orchestras worldwide, including those of Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Florence, Los Angeles, Milan, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Vancouver. He has worked with such esteemed conductors as Marin Alsop, Sergiu Comissiona, James Conlon, Philippe Entremont, Hans Graf, Marek Janowski, Raymond Leppard, Gerard Schwarz, Stanisław Skrowaczewski, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Osmo Vänskä.

As a recitalist, Mr. Nakamatsu has appeared in New York City’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Musée d’Orsay and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and in major centers such as Boston, Chicago, Houston, London, Milan, Munich, Prague, Singapore, Warsaw, and Zurich. In Beijing he has been heard at the Theater of the Forbidden City, the Great Hall of the People, China Conservatory, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts. His numerous summer engagements included appearances at the Aspen, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Caramoor, Vail, Wolftrap, Colorado, Brevard, Britt, Colorado College, Evian, Interlochen, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Santa Fe, and Sun Valley festivals.

With clarinetist Jon Manasse, Mr. Nakamatsu tours as a member of the Manasse/Nakamatsu Duo. A frequent chamber musician, Mr. Nakamatsu has collaborated repeatedly with ensembles such as the Emerson, Escher, Jupiter, Miró, Modigliani, Prazak, St. Lawrence, Tokyo, and Ying string quartets, the Imani Winds, and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet with whom he made multiple tours beginning in 2000.

A former high school teacher of German with no formal conservatory training, Mr. Nakamatsu studied privately with Marina Derryberry and Karl Ulrich Schnabel. Mr. Nakamatsu holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University in German Studies and secondary education. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife Kathy and young son Gavin.

Program Notes

amidst isolation, to celebrate life and the sacrifice of heroes."

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, composer and flutist Valerie Coleman is a graduate of the Mannes School of Music and Boston University. She is currently on the faculty of the Mannes School teaching flute. In 1996, while still a student, she became one of the founding members of the Imani Wind Quintet.

Seven O'Clock Shout

Valerie Coleman, b. 1970

Valerie Coleman composed Seven O'Clock Shout in 2020 on commission from the Philadelphia Orchestra. Written in honor of the frontline workers in the Covid-19 pandemic, it received a virtual premiere which emphasized the human isolation caused by the pandemic.

Coleman writes: "Seven O'Clock Shout is an anthem inspired by the tireless frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the heartwarming ritual of evening serenades that brings people together

Piano Concerto No.5 in E-flat major, Op.73, “Emperor”

Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770-1827

In his greatest works, Ludwig van Beethoven was both an innovator and an individualist who attempted to put his personal stamp on everything from harmony and musical structure to advances in piano construction. While retaining the three-movement form of the concerto, he expanded the internal structure of the individual movements, especially in the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos. The dramatic use of the piano in the opening phrases of these concertos was tried only once before – by Mozart in his Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 271 – and did not occur again in any major piano concerto until the B-flat major Concerto of Brahms. The thunderous opening of the Fifth Concerto was without precedent, as was Beethoven's refusal to allow the performer to improvise a cadenza.

Beethoven composed the Concerto in Vienna during the summer of 1809, under conditions hardly conducive to creativity. Following a day of heavy bombardment, Vienna surrendered to the French army under Napoleon, and those citizens who could afford to flee did so, including Beethoven's patron and friend the Archduke Rudolph. Prices and taxes skyrocketed, food was scarce, parks were closed to the public and Beethoven remained in the city, alone and lonely. In spite of the hardships during those trying months, he managed to compose some of his greatest works: The Piano Sonata Op. 81a (“Les adieux”), the Quartet in E-flat, Op. 74 (the “Harp”) and the “Emperor”

Concerto (the title bestowed on it by one of the publishers, without Beethoven's approval.)

The Concerto was premiered in Leipzig in 1811 to an enthusiastic reception. It was the only one of Beethoven's piano concertos without the composer himself at the keyboard, since by that time his hearing had deteriorated too far for him to perform in public, especially with an orchestra. Two months later, however, the first performance in Vienna was a total failure, primarily because the Concerto was on the program of a Charity Society performance featuring three living tableaux on Biblical subjects – hardly a suitable milieu.

The Concerto opens with a powerful orchestral chord, followed by a sweeping cadenza-like flourish by the piano solo. Only after two more orchestral chords interrupted by the piano outbursts, does the orchestra introduce the principal theme. The movement is stormy and driving with some of the same harmonic ambiguity as in the first movement of the Fourth Concerto. At the point where traditionally, one would have expected a cadenza, the pianist’s score bore Beethoven’s directive: “Do not play a cadenza!” The music that follows, however, has all the characteristics of a cadenza as if the composer wanted to be sure that his ideas, not the performer’s, would prevail.

The hymn-like lyrical second movement opens with the muted violins introducing the theme, followed by a pianissimo aria by the piano. There follow two variations, the first by the piano, the second by the orchestra. Then follows one of Beethoven’s most mysterious musical moments, the hushed transition leading without pause into the exuberant Rondo. Beethoven builds up immense tension by subtle changes in key and tempo with hints of the rondo refrain to come, until the Finale bursts out in its jubilant mood.

Overture to Los Esclavos Felices

Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga , 1806-1826

In the roster of prematurelylost musicians, Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga must occupy a dubious place of honor, dying of tuberculosis 10 days short of his 20th birthday. He left behind few surviving works, including three string quartets, the Symphony in D, and the overture and a few fragments of an opera, Los Esclavos Felices (The Happy Slaves), composed and staged at age 14 in Bilbao.

Arriaga, a Basque, was born in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao to a well-to-do family who encouraged his musical talent. He wrote his first composition at age 11 and with the aid of Luigi Cherubini was accepted to the Paris Conservatory in 1821. By 1824 he was a teaching fellow in harmony and counterpoint, assisting his own teacher. It was in the same year that he published his three quartets.

After his death, Arriaga was frequently referred to as “The Spanish Mozart.” But in the 1950s he became a symbol of Basque nationalism and was often referred to as “The Basque Mozart.” From the meager evidence we have, it appears that Arriaga was well on his way to branching out from 18th-century classicism. Had he lived, he most likely would have embraced the tenets of Romanticism, and we would be regarding his Symphony as “transitional” or by some other term that would have cast it in the shadow of later, greater creations.

The Overture has a Rossini flavor, opening with a pastoral scene, building up to a crescendo leading to the coda. But in his stay in Paris, Arriaga learned something from the surprises in the symphonies of Haydn, popular in Paris at the time. As the coda comes to an end and you expect the closing cadence, there is a short pause and the coda grows a 10-bar mini-coda to the close.

1906-1975

Dmitri Shostakovich came from a music-loving family. Upon starting piano at age nine, he immediately displayed a level of innate talent, including perfect pitch, advanced sight-reading, and, most important, a nearly “photographic” musical memory. At 13 he entered the Leningrad Conservatory, unsure whether he wanted to become a pianist or a composer. However, conditions were so dire in the struggling new Soviet regime that the slight, nearsighted prodigy suffered from anemia and malnutrition, despite special food rations for talented students.

Shostakovich’s outstanding composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg encouraged him and contributed to his meteoric rise to fame. It was for the graduation project for Steinberg’s composition class in December 1925 that Shostakovich composed his First Symphony. He had been working on it for a year and a half, but his efforts were continually interrupted when the death of his father and economic necessity forced him to earn money by accompanying silent films on the piano. Although the Symphony was technically a student work, it flew in the face of both the Russian academic tradition and the style established by the last generation of Russian masters, the “Mighty Five.”

The premiere in May 1926 by the Leningrad Philharmonic created a sensation; the scherzo had to be encored. Conductor Bruno Walter shortly thereafter conducted the work in Berlin, and two years later Leopold Stokowski programmed it with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

With its combination of musical irony and intense pathos, the First Symphony foreshadows many of the composer’s subsequent works. Shostakovich himself called the music of the first two movements

“Symphonie-grotesque,” poking fun at academic tradition. Later in his career, the “grotesque” elements would come to represent the repressive forces of Soviet politics, particularly the figure of Joseph Stalin. Even if his “hidden” musical symbolism was not recognized, his musical acerbity and dissonant harmony periodically got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. With the third movement, Lento, however, the mood turns somber, and in the last movement – threatening and tragic.

The question remains as to what it was about Shostakovich’s world at age 19 that contributed to the creation of such a personally prescient piece. Spurious reports of the ten-year-old Dmitri witnessing the brutal slaying of a child by a policeman at a workers’ demonstration made their way into the composer’s “official” biography. Yet, even if such a single incident cannot be verified, the boy certainly was witness – if even indirectly – to the human carnage of the early years of the Revolution, where lists of “Enemies of the People” who had been executed were plastered on billboards throughout Petrograd (later Leningrad). The melancholy oboe theme and trumpet fanfare in the third movement and, in the fourth, the mournful introduction with its snare drum “gunshots,” the solo violin and woodwind laments, the trumpet calls, and the funereal timpani tattoo bear musical witness to a life of menace and deprivation.

On the other hand, the composer, who later in life described in detail his extra-musical symbolism and coded language, never spoke of any political significance for his First

Symphony. Perhaps the dismal finale merely reflected the young composer’s state of mind at the moment. He wrote in a letter:

“I am in a terrible mood. I cannot find a room in Moscow. I cannot find work...The horrid town of Moscow doesn’t want to nurture me in its cradle. Its teeming masses make a terrible impression on me... but nevertheless, I want to go there with all my soul. So there. Sometimes I just want to shout. To cry out in terror. Doubts and problems, all this darkness suffocate me. From sheer misery, I’ve started to compose the Finale of the Symphony – it’s turning out pretty gloomy…”

Whatever the extra-musical meaning embedded in the Symphony, it is clear that even at this early stage, Shostakovich’s musical language of despair was already well formed.

Program notes by:

Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn

Wordpros@mindspring.com www.wordprosmusic.com

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JON NAKAMATSU PIANO

Next Article

JOSÉ-LUIS NOVO

Program Notes

Seven O'Clock Shout

Overture to Los Esclavos Felices

Ensuring a Legacy of Musical Excellence for Future Generations

Musician Sponsors

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR & CONDUCTOR

Flute

Individual Support

And More

+ Multiyear Pledges

More articles from this publication:

JOSÉ-LUIS NOVO

IN MEMORY

FRIENDS OF THE ANNAPOLIS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

This article is from:

2022-2023 Masterworks III