Program - Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 with Emanuel Ax

2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:

CLASSICS 2021/22 CHOPIN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 WITH EMANUEL AX

This Weekend's Concerts are gratefully dedicated to Mary Rossick Kern and Jerome H. Kern

PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor EMANUEL AX, piano Friday, September 17, 2021 at 7:30pm Saturday, September 18, 2021 at 7:30pm Sunday, September 19, 2021 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

Adagio for Strings

BARBER

CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 Maestoso Larghetto

Allegro vivace — INTERMISSION —

MUSSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition arr. RAVEL Promenade Gnomus Promenade

The Old Castle Promenade Tuileries Bydło Promenade

Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle Limoges Catacombs

Cum mortuis in lingua mortua

The Hut on Fowl’s Legs

The Great Gate of Kiev CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 35 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 7 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT! PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM I

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHY PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor Recognized as a masterful and dynamic presence in the conducting world, Peter Oundjian has developed a multi-faceted portfolio as a conductor, violinist, professor and artistic advisor. He has been celebrated for his musicality, an eye towards collaboration, innovative programming, leadership and training with students and an engaging personality.

Now carrying the title of Conductor Emeritus, Oundjian’s fourteenyear tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony served as a major creative force for the city of Toronto and was marked by a reimagining of the TSO’s programming, international stature, audience development, touring and a number of outstanding recordings, garnering a Grammy nomination in 2018 and a Juno award for Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works in 2019. He led the orchestra on several international tours to Europe and the USA, conducting the first performance by a North American orchestra at Reykjavik’s Harpa Hall in 2014.

From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra during which time he implemented the kind of collaborative programming that has become a staple of his directorship. Oundjian led the RSNO on several international tours, including North America, China, and a European festival tour with performances at the Bregenz Festival, the Dresden Festival as well as in Innsbruck, Bergamo, Ljubljana, and others. His final appearance with the orchestra as their Music Director was at the 2018 BBC Proms where he conducted Britten’s epic War Requiem.

Highlights of past seasons include appearances with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Detroit, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. With the onset of world-wide concert cancellations support for students at Yale and Juilliard and the creation of a virtual summer festival in Boulder where he is Music Director of Colorado Music Festival became a priority. Winter 2021 saw the resumption of some orchestral activity with streamed events with Atlanta, Colorado, Indianapolis and Dallas symphonies.

The 2021/22 season anticipates return visits to Toronto, Kansas City, Seattle, Colorado, Detroit, Baltimore and Indianapolis.

Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981, and in 2013 was awarded the school’s Sanford Medal for Distinguished Service to Music. A dedicated educator, Oundjian conducted the Yale and Juilliard Symphony Orchestras and the New World Symphony during the 2018/19 season.

An outstanding violinist, Oundjian spent fourteen years as the first violinist for the renowned Tokyo String Quartet before he turned his energy towards conducting.

PROGRAM II

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

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHY EMANUEL AX, piano Born in modern day Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. Mr. Ax made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series, and in 1974 won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize.

Highlights of the 2019/20 season included a European summer festivals tour with the Vienna Philharmonic and long-time collaborative partner Bernard Haitink, an Asian tour with the London Symphony and Sir Simon Rattle and three concerts with regular partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma at Carnegie Hall in March 2020.

Additional recitals and orchestral appearances last spring were postponed due to Covid-19 and like many artists around the world, Mr. Ax responded to these unprecedented circumstances creatively. He hosted “The Legacy of Great Pianists,” part of the online Live with Carnegie Hall highlighting legendary pianists who have performed at Carnegie Hall. Last September, he joined cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a series of surprise pop-up concerts for essential workers in multiple venues throughout the Berkshires community. With the resumption of concert activity this summer he will appear in the reopening weekend of Tanglewood both with the Boston Symphony and in a Beethoven trio program with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma. Concerts with the Colorado, Pacific, Cincinnati and Houston symphonies as well as Minnesota, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras follow throughout the 21/22 season.

Mr. Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, his most recent being Brahms Trios with Yo-Yo Ma and Leonidas Kavakos. He has received GRAMMY® Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He has also made a series of Grammy-winning recordings with cellist Yo-Yo Ma of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. In the 2004/05 season Mr. Ax contributed to an International EMMY® AwardWinning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2013, Mr. Ax’s recording Variations received the Echo Klassik Award for Solo Recording of the Year (19th Century Music/Piano).

Mr. Ax is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Skidmore College, New England Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and Columbia University.

SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM III

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981): Adagio for Strings Samuel Barber was on born March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and died on January 23, 1981 in New York City. He composed Adagio for Strings in 1936 as the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11; he arranged it for string orchestra the following year. The Pro Arte Quartet premiered the complete Quartet in Rome in December 1936. Arturo Toscanini conducted the strings of the NBC Symphony in the first performance of the orchestral version of the Adagio on his network broadcast of November 5, 1938, a concert that also included the premiere of Barber’s Essay No. 1 for Orchestra. The score calls for strings. Duration is about 8 minutes. Courtney Lewis conducted the orchestra's last performance in November, 2016.

Samuel Barber was among those many talented American musicians who lived, studied and worked in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, not only polishing their professional skills but also proving to the world that their country had come of artistic age. Barber spent much time overseas after 1928, thanks to such emoluments as the American Prix de Rome and the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship. In Rome, he wrote a Symphony in One Movement, which was premiered there in 1936 and given its first American performance in Cleveland by Artur Rodzinski early the next year. Rodzinski also played the Symphony at the Salzburg Festival in 1937, making it the first American work to be heard at that prestigious event. The chief conductor of the Salzburg Festival at that time was Arturo Toscanini, who was to begin his tenure with the NBC Symphony in New York later that year. Toscanini asked Rodzinski if he could suggest an American composer whose work he might program during the coming season, and Rodzinski advised that his Italian colleague investigate the music of the 27-year-old Samuel Barber. By October, Barber had completed and submitted to Toscanini the Essay No. 1 for Orchestra and an arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement from the String Quartet (Op. 11, in B minor) he had written in Rome in 1936 — the Adagio for Strings. No reply came from Toscanini, however. The scores were returned without comment in the spring, and Barber started to cast about for other conductors who might perform them.

The following summer Barber traveled to Lake Maggiore with Gian Carlo Menotti, where Menotti was to meet Toscanini. Barber, however, refused his friend’s invitation to go along for the visit to Toscanini’s home. “Illness,” Menotti told the conductor. “Oh,” replied Toscanini, “he’s perfectly well; he’s just angry with me, but he has no reason to be — I’m going to do both of his pieces.” True to his word, Toscanini performed the Essay No. 1 and the Adagio for Strings on his November 5, 1938 broadcast with the NBC Symphony, though he did not ask to see the scores again until the day before the rehearsal — he had already memorized them. The Adagio was an instant success. It was the only American work that Toscanini took on his tour of South America.

Sibelius praised it. The audience at its 1945 Russian premiere, in Kiev, would not leave the hall until Stokowski encored it. It was the music broadcast from New York and London following

PROGRAM IV

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

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES the announcement of the death of President Roosevelt. The Adagio for Strings, with its plaintive melody, rich modalism, austere texture and mood of reflective introspection, is among Samuel Barber’s greatest legacies, a 20th-century masterwork.

 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810-1849): Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 Frédéric Chopin was born on February 22, 1810 in Zelazowa-Wola (near Warsaw), Poland, and died on October 17, 1849 in Paris. He composed his F minor Concerto in 1829, and introduced it on his concert of March 17, 1830 at the National Theater in Warsaw, the event that marked his formal debut as pianist and composer. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, two horns, two trumpets, bass trombone, timpani and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes. The orchestra last performed the Concerto in February, 2020, conducted by Jun Markl with Fabio Bidini playing piano.

Frédéric Chopin was nineteen and in love when he wrote this Concerto in 1829. The Concerto he handled with maturity and assurance — the love affair, he did not. When Chopin finished his studies at the Warsaw Conservatory that summer, he was already an accomplished pianist and composer. As a graduation present, his father sent him to Vienna, where he gave two successful concerts and found a publisher for his Variations for Piano and Orchestra on Mozart’s La ci darem la mano (Op. 2). It was sometime during those summer months that he began the F minor Concerto. Though he enjoyed his visit to the imperial city, his thoughts were often back in Warsaw, centered on a comely young singer, one Constantia Gladowska. In his biography of the composer, Casimir Wierzynski passed on some information about this apparently delightful lady: “She had been studying voice at the Conservatory for four years and was considered one of the school’s best pupils. She was also said to be one of the prettiest. Her regular, full face, framed in blond hair, was an epitome of youth, health and vigor, and her beauty was conspicuous in the Conservatory chorus, for all that it boasted a number of beautiful women. The young lady, conscious of her charms, was distinguished by ambition and diligence in her studies. She dreamed of becoming an opera singer....” Constantia was certainly a worthy object for Chopin’s affections, though she had no way to know of his interest — it took him a full year to utter a word to her.

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PROGRAM V

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Chopin first saw Constantia when she sang at a Conservatory concert on April 21, 1829. For the first time in his life, he fell in love. He followed Constantia to her performances, and caught glimpses of her when she appeared at the theater or in church, but never approached her. He kept his churning passion secret even from his friends. She was on his mind constantly, and the emotional rush of young love played a seminal role in the creation of his two piano concertos.

On October 6th, Chopin, recently returned from Vienna, composed a waltz (Op. 70, No. 3) with the image of Constantia vivid in his mind. That evening, he was no longer able to contain his feelings, and wrote to his friend Titus Woyciechowski, “I have — perhaps to my own misfortune — already found my ideal, whom I worship faithfully and sincerely. Six months have elapsed, and I haven’t yet exchanged a syllable with her of whom I dream every night — she who was in my mind when I composed the Adagio of my Concerto.” Chopin’s love manifested itself in giddily immature ways. He raved about Constantia’s virtues to his friends. He invited one Mrs. Beyer to dinner simply because her given name was the same as that of his beloved. He reported “tingling with pleasure” whenever he saw a handkerchief embroidered with her name. He broke off one of his letters abruptly with the syllable “Con — ,” explaining, “No, I cannot complete her name, my hand is too unworthy.”

After yet another half year of such maudlin goings-on, Chopin finally met — actually talked with — Constantia in April 1830. She was pleasant to him, and they became friends, but he was never convinced that she fully returned his love. She took part in his farewell concert in Warsaw on October 11th, and he kept up a correspondence with her for a while through an intermediary. (He felt it improper to write directly to a young woman without her parents’ permission.) Her marriage to a Warsaw merchant in 1832 caused him intense but impermanent grief, which soon evaporated in the glittering social whirl of Paris, his new home.

In the opening movement of the Second Concerto, most of the orchestra’s participation is confined to the introduction, in which are presented the main theme (a rather dolorous tune with dotted rhythms played immediately by violins) and the second theme, a brighter strain given by woodwinds led by the oboe. The piano enters and, with the exception of the orchestral interludes surrounding the development section and the concluding coda, dominates the remainder of the movement. A description of the second movement’s form — three-part (A–B–A) with wide-ranging harmonic excursions in the center section — is too clinical to convey the moonlit poetry and quiet intensity of this beautiful music. The theme of the finale was inspired by the mazurka, the Polish national dance that also served Chopin as the basis for more than fifty stylized compositions for solo piano. The movement’s structure comprises a series of episodes rounded off by the return of the main theme and a cheerful coda.

 PROGRAM VI

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

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839-1881): Pictures at an Exhibition Transcribed for Orchestra by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Modest Mussorgsky was born on March 21, 1839 in Karevo, Pskov District, Russia, and died on March 28, 1881 in St. Petersburg. He composed his Pictures at an Exhibition as a suite for solo piano in June 1874. The most familiar transcription for orchestra was done by Maurice Ravel early in 1923 on commission from the conductor Sergei Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky premiered that version at his concert in Paris on May 3, 1923. Ravel’s transcription is scored for piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, E-flat alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, two harps and strings.

Duration is about 35 minutes. Brett Mitchell conducted the orchestra's last performance of Pictures at an Exhibition in March, 2019.

In the years around 1850, with the spirit of nationalism sweeping through Europe, several young Russian artists banded together to rid their native art of foreign influences in order to establish a distinctive character for their works. At the front of this movement was a group of composers known as “The Five,” whose members included Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, César Cui and Mily Balakirev. Among the allies that The Five found in other fields was the artist and architect Victor Hartmann, with whom Mussorgsky became close personal friends. Hartmann’s premature death at 39 stunned the composer and the entire Russian artistic community. The noted critic Vladimir Stassov organized a memorial exhibit of Hartmann’s work in February 1874, and it was under the inspiration of that showing of his late friend’s works that Mussorgsky conceived his Pictures at an Exhibition for piano. Maurice Ravel made his masterful orchestration of the score for Sergei Koussevitzky’s Paris concerts in 1923.

Promenade. According to Stassov, this recurring section depicts Mussorgsky “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly, and, at times sadly, thinking of his friend.” The Gnome.

Hartmann’s drawing is for a fantastic wooden nutcracker representing a gnome who gives off savage shrieks while he waddles about. Promenade — The Old Castle. A troubadour sings a doleful lament before a foreboding, ruined ancient fortress. Promenade — Tuileries. Hartmann’s picture shows a corner of the famous Parisian garden filled with nursemaids and their youthful charges. Bydlo. Hartmann’s painting depicts a rugged wagon drawn by oxen. The peasant driver sings a plaintive melody (solo tuba) heard first from afar, then close-by, before the cart passes away into the distance. Promenade — Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells. Hartmann’s costume design for the 1871 fantasy ballet Trilby shows dancers enclosed in enormous egg shells.

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle was inspired by a pair of pictures depicting two residents of the Warsaw ghetto, one rich and pompous (a weighty unison for strings and winds), the other poor and complaining (muted trumpet). Mussorgsky based both themes on incantations

SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES he had heard on visits to Jewish synagogues. The Marketplace at Limoges. A lively sketch of a bustling market. Catacombs, Roman Tombs. Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua. Hartmann’s drawing shows him being led by a guide with a lantern through cavernous underground tombs.

The movement’s second section, titled “With the Dead in a Dead Language,” is a mysterious transformation of the Promenade theme. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs. Hartmann’s sketch is a design for an elaborate clock suggested by Baba Yaga, the fearsome witch of Russian folklore who flies through the air. Mussorgsky’s music suggests a wild, midnight ride. The Great Gate of Kiev was inspired by Hartmann’s plan for a gateway for the city of Kiev in the massive old Russian style crowned with a cupola in the shape of a Slavic warrior’s helmet. The majestic music suggests both the imposing bulk of the edifice (never built, incidentally) and a brilliant procession passing through its arches.

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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