Program - Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto No. 5

Colorado Symphony 2017/18 Season Presenting Sponsor:

CLASSICS • 2017/18 BEETHOVEN’S “EMPEROR” CONCERTO NO. 5 COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor ZHANG ZUO, piano This Weekend's Concerts are Gratefully Dedicated to AMG National Trust Bank Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Donna and Ted Connolly

Friday, March 16, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 17, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, March 18, 2018, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, "Emperor" Allegro Adagio un poco mosso Rondo: Allegro

— INTERMISSION — SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, “The Year 1905” The Palace Square: Adagio The 9th of January: Allegro In Memoriam: Adagio The Tocsin: Allegro non troppo - Allegro

SOUNDINGS

2 0 1 7/ 1 8

PROGRAM 1

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

JEFF WHEELER

ANDREW LITTON, conductor Andrew Litton currently serves as Principal Guest Conductor of the Colorado Symphony, Artistic Advisor of Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Director of the New York City Ballet, Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest, and Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth Symphony. He was also Music Director of the Dallas Symphony from 1994-2006. He guest conducts the world’s leading orchestras and has a discography of over 120 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy®, France’s Diapason d’Or, and many British and other honours. Litton has also conducted many of the world’s finest opera companies, such as the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the Australian Opera. In 2011, in recognition of his work with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, King Harald V conferred the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit on Andrew Litton. Under him the orchestra has made appearances at the BBC Proms, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Musikverein, Berlin’s Philharmonie, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. Besides his Grammy®-winning Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with Bryn Terfel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, he also recorded the complete symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, a Dallas Mahler cycle, and many Gershwin recordings, as both conductor and pianist. For Hyperion Andrew Litton’s recordings include piano concertos by Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Grieg with Stephen Hough;

by Shostakovich, Shchedrin, and Brahms with Marc-André Hamelin; and by Alnæs and Sinding with Piers Lane; Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto and Symphony-Concerto with Alban Gerhardt; Viola Concertos by Bartók and Rózsa with Lawrence Power; the complete symphonies by Charles Ives and orchestral works by Joseph Schwantner. Andrew Litton received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard in piano and conducting. He is an accomplished pianist, and often conducts from the keyboard and enjoys performing chamber music with his orchestra colleagues. For further information, please visit www.andrewlitton.com.

PROGRAM 2

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES ZHANG ZUO, piano “Zhang Zuo is the one of the most outstanding and passionate pianistic talents I have come across” – Paavo Järvi An imaginative and electrifying performer, Zhang Zuo (“Zee Zee”) is unique among the young generation of pianists. Described as “full of enthusiasm and glamour, radiating the vigor of youth” (Chinese Gramophone), her interpretations and creative maturity has been met with critical acclaim. The 2017/18 season sees Zee Zee’s debut with the San Francisco Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Sinfonieorchester Basel, and Estonian National Symphony. She appears with the Colorado, Pasadena, Tuscon, and Jacksonville symphony orchestras. A passionate chamber musician, she will also perform with the Z.E.N. Trio at Hong Kong’s Premiere Performances and Liverpool’s St. George’s Hall as well as performances with the Shenzhen Symphony and Hangzhou Philharmonic. Zee Zee began her musical training in Germany at the age of five. Upon returning to her native China, she became one of the most sought after young artists in the nation, collaborating with the leading Chinese orchestras, with whom she retains a close link. Having completed her piano studies with Dan Zhao Yi at the Shenzhen Arts School, Zee Zee was invited to continue her artistic development under the mentorship of Nelita True at the Eastman School of Music and Yoheved Kaplinsky and Robert McDonald at The Juilliard School, where she won the coveted Petschek Piano Award.

Zee Zee was awarded first prizes at China’s 1st International Piano Concerto Competition, the Gina Bachauer International Artists Piano Competition and the Krainev International Piano Competition. She was also a prizewinner at the 2013 Queen Elizabeth Competition. She has studied at the Peabody Institute with Leon Fleisher, and continues to receive guidance from Alfred Brendel.

SOUNDINGS

2 0 1 7/ 1 8

PROGRAM 3

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827): Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, “Emperor” Ludwig van Beethoven was born December 16, 1770 in Bonn and died March 26, 1827 in Vienna.

The Piano Concerto No. 5 was composed in 1809 and premiered in Leipzig on November 11, 1811, with Friedrich Schneider as soloist and Johann Philipp Christian Schulz conducting. The score calls for woodwinds, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes. The concerto was last performed on December 5-7, 2014, with Jeffrey Kahane at the piano and Jun Märkl conducting.

The year 1809 was a difficult one for Vienna and for Beethoven. In May, Napoleon invaded the city with enough firepower to send the residents scurrying and Beethoven into the basement of his brother’s house. The bombardment was close enough that he covered his sensitive ears with pillows to protect them from the concussion of the blasts. On July 29th, he wrote to the publisher Breitkopf und Härtel, “We have passed through a great deal of misery.

I tell you that since May 4th, I have brought into the world little that is connected; only here and there a fragment. The whole course of events has affected me body and soul…. What a disturbing, wild life around me; nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of all sorts.” He bellowed his frustration at a French officer he chanced to meet: “If I were a general and knew as much about strategy as I do about counterpoint, I’d give you fellows something to think about.”

Austria’s finances were in shambles, and the annual stipend Beethoven had been promised by several noblemen who supported his work was considerably reduced in value, placing him in a precarious pecuniary predicament. As a sturdy tree can root in flinty soil, however, a great musical work grew from these unpromising circumstances — by the end of that year, 1809, Beethoven had completed his “Emperor” Concerto.

When conditions finally allowed the Concerto to be performed in Leipzig some two years later, it was hailed by the press as “without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, most effective but also one of the most difficult of all concertos.” (The soloist was Friedrich Schneider, a prominent organist and pianist in Leipzig who was enlisted by the local publisher Breitkopf und Härtel to bring this Concerto by the firm’s most prominent composer to performance.) The Viennese premiere on February 12, 1812, with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny at the keyboard, fared considerably less well. It was given as part of a benefit party sponsored by the augustly titled “Society of Noble Ladies for Charity for Fostering the Good and Useful.” Beethoven’s Concerto was only one unit in a passing parade of sopranos, tenors and pianists who dispensed a stream of the most fashionable musical bon-bons for the delectation of the Noble Ladies.

Beethoven’s majestic work was out of place among these trifles, and a reviewer for one periodical sniffed, “Beethoven, full of proud self-confidence, refused to write for the crowd. He can be understood and appreciated only by the connoisseurs, and one cannot reckon on their being in the majority at such affairs.” It was not the musical bill that really robbed the attention of the audience from the Concerto, however. It was the re-creation, through living tableaux — in costume and in detail — of paintings by Raphael, Poussin and Troyes. The Ladies loved that. It was encored. Beethoven left.

The sobriquet “Emperor” attached itself to the E-flat Concerto very early, though it was not of Beethoven’s doing. If anything, he would have objected to the name. “Emperor” equaled

PROGRAM 4

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES “Napoleon” for Beethoven, as for most Europeans of the time, and anyone familiar with the story of the “Eroica” Symphony will remember how that particular ruler had tumbled from the great composer’s esteem. “This man will trample the rights of men underfoot and become a greater tyrant than any other,” he rumbled to his young friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries. The Concerto’s name may have been tacked on by an early publisher or pianist because of the grand character of the work; or it may have originated with the purported exclamation during the premiere by a French officer at one particularly noble passage, “C’est l’Empereur!” The most likely explanation, however, and one ignored with a unanimity rare among musical scholars, is given by Anton Schindler, long-time friend and early biographer of Beethoven. The Viennese premiere, it seems, took place at a celebration of the Emperor’s birthday. Since the party sponsored by the Noble Ladies was part of the festivities ordered by the French conquerors, what could be more natural than to call this new Concerto introduced at that gathering the “Emperor”?

The “Emperor” is the largest in scale of all Beethoven’s concertos. It is also the last one, though he did considerable work on a sixth piano concerto in 1815 but never completed it. The Fifth Concerto is written in a virtuosic style that looks forward to the grand pianism of Liszt in its full chordal textures and wide dynamic range. Such prescience of piano technique is remarkable when it is realized that the modern, steel-frame concert grand was not perfected until 1825, and in this work, written sixteen years earlier, Beethoven envisioned possibilities offered only by this later, improved instrument.

The Concerto opens with broad chords for orchestra answered by piano before the main theme is announced by the violins. The following orchestral tutti embraces a rich variety of secondary themes leading to a repeat of all the material by the piano accompanied by the orchestra. A development ensues with “the fury of a hail-storm,” wrote the eminent English music scholar Sir Donald Tovey. Following a recapitulation of the themes and the sounding of a proper chord on which to launch a cadenza, Beethoven wrote into the piano part, “Do not play a cadenza, but begin immediately what follows.” At this point, he supplied a tiny, written-out solo passage that begins the coda. This being the first of his concertos that Beethoven himself would not play, he wanted to have more control over the finished product, and so he prescribed exactly what the soloist was to do. With this novel device, he initiated the practice of completely writing out all solo passages that was to become the standard method used by most later composers in their concertos.

The second movement begins with a chorale for strings. Sir George Grove dubbed this movement a sequence of “quasi-variations,” with the piano providing a coruscating filigree above the orchestral accompaniment. This Adagio leads directly into the finale, a vast rondo with sonata elements. The bounding ascent of the main theme is heard first from the soloist and then from the orchestra. Developmental episodes separate the returns of the theme. The closing pages include the magical sound of drum-taps accompanying the shimmering piano chords and scales, and a final brief romp to the finish.



SOUNDINGS

2 0 1 7/ 1 8

PROGRAM 5

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975): Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, “The Year 1905” Dmitri Shostakovich was born September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg and died August 9, 1975 in Moscow. The Symphony No. 11 was composed in 1957 and premiered on October 30, 1957 in Moscow, conducted by Nathan Rakhlin. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes, (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings. Duration is about 70 minutes. Peter Oundjian conducted the last performance of the symphony on May 18-20, 2012.

“I went with the demonstrators to the Winter Palace, and the spectacle of the savage violence meted out to our unarmed working people that day imprinted itself forever on my memory. January 9, 1905 was sunny and frosty. From every corner of St. Petersburg, the city’s poor wound their way in endless files toward the Tsar’s palace. The lines of demonstrators crisscrossed the old city like the threads of a spider web. The people crowded close to the palace and waited, an hour, then another hour. Would the Tsar come out and accept the workers’ petition?

But the Tsar did not appear. The entreaties of the unarmed people were answered by a bugle call…. Again we waited, tense and with a vague foreboding. Another signal. The troops stirred slightly. Yet the crowd was still smiling, shifting from foot to foot from the cold and the frost.

There was a third signal, and then an unusual booming sound. What’s that? They’re shooting?

‘It’s nothing,’ said a voice, ‘those are just blanks.’ Yet people were falling nearby — women, children…. The people could not believe what was happening. But the Tsar’s mounted police were galloping to the attack — to attack the people!”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), who was to become a leading figure in the Russian Revolution as the organizer of the country’s women workers, its Commissar for Social Welfare, and the Soviet ambassador to Mexico and Sweden, left this horrifying account of “Bloody Sunday” — January 9, 1905 — when a peaceful protest by the workers of St. Petersburg tried to present a petition to Tsar Nicolas II, Russia’s “Little Father,” for relief of their no-longer-tolerable oppression. The workers, carrying religious icons and singing hymns, were met by the imperial troops with stunning violence in the vast square outside the Winter Palace (which today houses the Hermitage Museum), and 1,200 died. Revolution in Russia was born that day, and it erupted a dozen years later with a force that changed the course of history.

Dmitri Shostakovich first considered writing a work to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in 1955, but it was apparently an event with striking similarities to the catastrophe of 1905 that finally sparked the composition of his Symphony No. 11 — the brutal suppression of the October 1956 uprising in Budapest by Soviet tanks and machine guns. In Testimony, Solomon Volkov’s controversial edition of Shostakovich’s purported memoirs, the composer is quoted as saying, “The people think and act similarly in many things.

I wanted to show this recurrence in the Eleventh Symphony. I wrote it in 1957 and it deals with contemporary themes even though it’s called ‘The Year 1905.’ It’s about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over.” The work was premiered in Moscow on October 30, 1957 as part of the fortieth anniversary observances of the 1917 Revolution, and earned for Shostakovich a Lenin Prize in April 1958 and an invitation to chair the jury of the

PROGRAM 6

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES prestigious Tchaikovsky Piano Competition that same month (which was won by Van Cliburn in a triumph that echoed around the world).

The Eleventh Symphony, matched in its scale in Shostakovich’s output only by the Fourth and Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphonies, distills the emotional import of the tragedy of 1905 into four epic movements through which are woven traditional folk melodies as well as a quotation from the composer’s own work. The icy pre-dawn in St. Petersburg’s huge Palace Square is suggested by ominous, slow-moving chords in hollow harmonies. The quiet taps on the timpani and the distant fanfares might be either a call for the workers to gather or a premonition of the tragedy to come. The flutes present an ironically sweet harmonization of the 19th-century prison song Listen, which is taken up as the movement’s main thematic material: Autumn’s black night — and in that gloom, An awful vision: prison. As the hours drag by, In the night’s long silence, Hear, like a sigh, the cry, Echoed slowly, sadly … Listen. The Convict, another Russian melody suggesting the oppression of the people (The night is dark so mark each minute, Though high walls hide the stars), is intoned solemnly by the cellos and basses. The movement ends with a return of the glacial chords and the unsettling fanfares.

The 9th of January evokes the massacre. The thematic substance of the movement derives from the folksong O Thou, Our Tsar, Our Little Father, which is given in a furious, triple-time, accompanimental version by the low strings before being presented in its original form by clarinets and bassoons. A chorale-like setting for brass of Bare Your Heads from Shostakovich’s Ten Poems for Chorus on Texts by Revolutionary Poets of 1951 bridges to a melancholy transformation of Our Tsar that is redolent of a Tchaikovsky waltz, perhaps a sad reflection on the imperial world that was beginning to crack on that frozen January morning. The music then builds with overwhelming force as the Cossacks menace the crowd. A momentary lull is provided by an echo of the glacial chords from the first movement before the Cossacks’ full fury is unleashed by a hammered imitative passage whose theme is derived from the quiet timpani strokes heard at the Symphony’s outset. The glacial chords come again, now quivering with trills of disbelief and horror, as do the fanfares, tinged with dissonance, and a dying attempt to revive Listen.

The third movement, In Memoriam, is a requiem not just for those who died but also for the failed hope that a new life could be wrested from the old regime. Another folksong, You Fell As Victims, is given by the violas as a lament over the trudging, dirge-like foundation in the pizzicato cellos and basses.

In his study The New Shostakovich (1990), Ian MacDonald posits that the title of the finale — Nabat: “The Tocsin” or “The Alarm” — was borrowed from a 19th-century journal edited by Narodnik Piotr Tkachev, who advocated that no action, however apparently immoral, was forbidden to the true revolutionary. The powerful, marching music (based on the protest anthem Rage, Tyrants) that occupies most of the closing movement suggests the revolutionary fever that spread inexorably among the Russian masses following “Bloody Sunday.” After a shattering climax, a long English horn incantation of Bare Your Heads leads to the Symphony’s culmination, which overlays the triple-meter transformation of O Thou, Our Tsar, Our Little Father from the second movement with a final stentorian proclamation of Bare Your Heads. ©2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

SOUNDINGS

2 0 1 7/ 1 8

PROGRAM 7

REMIX YOUR SYMPHONY EXPERIENCE Remix members attend happy hours around town, Colorado Symphony concerts, and exclusive events to support the Symphony.

NEW EVENTS AND SOCIAL HOURS — all year long! Check

HAPPY HOURS

RemixColorado

PRIVATE LECTURES AND PARTIES

BEHIND-THE-SCENES EVENTS

COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG/REMIX