Opposites Attract

ILLIN OIS S Y M PH O N Y O RC H E S T R A

Opposites Attract Naomi Woo, Conductor | Joyce Yang, Piano F R I D A Y

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UIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER SPRINGFIELD

Concert Comments at 6:30 pm (in concert hall) Kaija Saariaho

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Edvard Grieg Piano Concerto I. Allegro molto moderato II. Adagio III. Allegro moderato molto e marcato

Joyce Yang, Piano Intermission

Lili Boulanger

D’un Soir Triste (Of a Sad Evening)*

Paul Hindemith

Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes

by Carl Maria von Weber I. Allegro II. Turandot: Scherzo - Moderato III. Andantino IV. Marsch

*Provided by the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestra Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia

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ISU CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS NORMAL

Concert Comments at 6:30 pm (in concert hall)

Lumière et Pesanteur (Light and Matter)

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Debra & Daniel Brownstone, M.D. CONCERT SPONSOR S

Ken & Laura Berk GUEST ARTIST SPONSORS

Louise F. & Laurin A Wollan Endowed Fund F. Lucille Foster Dr. Patricia & Mr. Randall Rushing Barbara & Charles Schweighauser Carolyn & Duane Yockey MUSIC SPONSORS

Steve & Ruth Ann Friedberg

Joyce Yang

Blessed with “poetic and sensitive pianism” (Washington Post) and a “wondrous sense of color” (San Francisco Classical Voice), Grammy-nominated pianist Joyce Yang captivates audiences with her virtuosity, lyricism and interpretive sensitivity.

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She first came to international attention in 2005, when she won the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The youngest contestant at 19-years old, she took home two additional awards: Best Performance of Chamber Music (with the Takàcs Quartet), and Best Performance of a New Work. She received an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2010, and her first Grammy nomination in 2017 (Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance), for her recording of Franck, Kurtág, Previn & Schumann with violinist Augustin Hadelich.

In the last decade, Yang has blossomed into an “astonishing artist” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), showcasing her colorful musical personality in solo recitals and collaborations with the world’s top orchestras and chamber musicians through more than 1,000 debuts and re-engagements. She has performed with the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic and BBC Philharmonic, among many others.

She has appeared in recital at New York’s Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Museum, Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and Zurich’s Tonhalle.

She graduated from Juilliard with special honor as the recipient of the school’s 2010 Arthur Rubinstein Prize. She is a Steinway artist.

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Opposites Attract

Program Notes | By Erik Rohde © Artistic Director/Conductor, Winona Symphony Orchestra | Director of Orchestral Activities, University of Northern Iowa

Lumière et Pesanteur (Light and Matter) KAIJA SAARIAHO b. Helsinki, Finland, 14 October, 1952 d. Paris, France, 2 June, 2023 Premiered in 2009. (Approx. 6 minutes)

Kaija Saariaho was one of the most important Finnish composers of the last fifty years, with commissions, premieres, and performances around the globe every year.

She studied at the Sibelius Academy and attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses for composers. Her music first was guided towards strict serialism, a structure she found stifling. She later discovered the French spectralists, and her music shifted dramatically, focusing on the sound-spectrum of individual notes produced by different instruments, and composing in light of combining instruments based on those analyses and often incorporating electronics into her music.

She spent a considerable amount of her career researching at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/ Music (IRCAM) in Paris. In 2016, she became the second female composer in the history of the Metropolitan Opera to have an opera performed by that company (the first being in 1903). She died just last year after being diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2021.

The present work, Lumière et Pesanteur (Light and Matter) was written in 2009, for Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. The composer writes: Lumière et pesanteur is a gift for Esa-Pekka Salonen, inspired by his performance of my La Passion de Simone in Los Angeles, January 2009. This piece is an arrangement based on the eight station of the Passion, which I know that he especially likes.

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The oratorio “La Passion de Simone,” explores the life and writings of the Jewish French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil. “Lumière” has eight sections, or “stations”, like a passion ritual. The mostly slow, pensive music churns and breathes with hazy and mystical harmonies that linger, swell and overlap. Sudden bursts will take off, sometimes inciting a fluttering tremolo or gnashing percussion volley. But an overall cosmic feeling pervades. Moment to moment, the music is filled with haunting variations of texture and color.

Piano Concerto EDVARD GRIEG b. Bergen, Norway, 15 June, 1843 d. Bergen, 4 September, 1907 Premiered on April 3, 1869, in Copenhagen at the Royal Theater with Edmund Neupert, pianist and Holger Simon Paulli, conductor. (Approx. 30 minutes)

It has one of the most famous beginnings in the piano concerto repertoire – huge chords crashing down the piano to launch the work that itself launched Norway’s most famous composer’s career. Written when he was only 25, Grieg’s Piano Concerto remains a concert favorite, and set the composer off on a trajectory as the national voice of Norway.

Grieg was born into a musical family and first took piano lessons from his mother starting at the age of six. By the age of 15, Grieg had met the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull (a family friend), who encouraged Grieg’s parents to send him to study at the Leipzig Conservatory, which he did.

There he studied piano and some composition, and, while he chafed under the discipline of the conservatory course of study, his time there was very influential. One notable meeting was when he heard Clara Schumann play her husband’s piano concerto, a major highlight of his life as a student. The two pieces bear some similarities, so it must have had an impact on the young composer.

Grieg’s own piano concerto was written while on holiday in Søllerød, Denmark, in 1868. He had been married the previous year, and after his studies in Leipzig and a threeyear period spent in Copenhagen, was living in Norway for good. He thoroughly became a voice and drew his inspiration from his native country. As he considered his compositional style, he wrote: “Composers with the stature of a Bach or Beethoven have erected grand churches and temples. I have always wished to build villages: places where people can feel happy and comfortable . . . the music of my own country has been my model.” So much of his music is inspired by the folk music of his own country, including such a serious work as his first piano concerto.

Grieg was unfortunately not able to attend the premiere of his concerto, due to prior obligations with the orchestra in Oslo. He was thankful for news from his friend who was the soloist that several eminent music critics had “applauded with all their might,”, and that Anton Rubenstein, the famous pianist, composer, and founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory had been there and was “astounded to have heard a composition of such genius.”.

The piece is full of Norwegian-inspired melodies and dances.

From the first movement, which contains wisps of Norwegian fiddling figuration, to the second, a lyric folk-song, to the dancelike finale, his native musical roots come to the fore in a brilliant technical display by pianist and orchestra alike.

D’un Soir Triste (Of A Sad Evening) LILI BOULANGER b. Paris, France, 21 August, 1893 d. Mézy-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, 15 March, 1918 Composed primarily in the spring of 1917, and finished by January, 1918.

(Approx. 12 minutes)

Lili Boulanger was born in Paris into a highly musical family: her father was a successful composer and taught at the Paris Conservatory, she had a professional cellist and singer for grandparents, and her older sister, Nadia, would go on to become perhaps the most influential composition teacher of the 20th Century, teaching essentially every prominent Amer-

ican composer who could afford the journey to Paris, not to mention composers from all over Europe and as far as South America. Lili was the first woman ever to win the prestigious composition prize the Prix de Rome. She was active and successful as a composer during her lifetime, which unfortunately was cut short by frequent illness that brought her life to an end at the early age of 24. After her death, her sister Nadia passionately promoted the works of her sister, ensuring her legacy would live on long after her short life.

“D’un Soir Triste,” or “Of a Sad Evening,” was written by Lili Boulanger in 1918, shortly before her death. Her sister Nadia put the piece away until shortly before her own death in 1979. It was the companion piece to “D’un Matin de Printemps,” or “Of a Spring Morning.” These two works are among the last music Boulanger would write, but “D’un Soir Triste” would not have seen the light of day but for the painstaking work of JoAnn Falletta and the Woman’s Philharmonic Orchestra (WPO), who carefully worked through the manuscript in the 1980s to perform the work and create a workable edition of the music. Falletta recounts: “The handwriting was almost illegible. She was so sick, and her penmanship was really weak. It was her goodbye to the world. She knew she was going to have a short life.”

Working from photocopies of Lili Boulanger’s original parts, Falletta and the musicians of the WPO “struggled to figure out what the notes were,” she said. “We never felt we were completely sure.” But “it was a labor of love for the orchestra to do it,” she said, and only in the specialized environment of the Women’s Philharmonic could it have happened; a full-time orchestra would never devote the necessary rehearsal time to piece it together.

The Women’s Philharmonic disbanded in 2003, but this work lives on through a now-published edition. The work is dark and dense, portraying a sense of foreboding as the composer considered her end. There is moving, lush dissonance, cross-rhythms, and rich orchestral color in the 11-minute work, a work that serves both as her own elegy and a lament for those lives lost in the first world war. ilsymphony.org

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Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber PAUL HINDEMITH b. Hanau, near Frankfurt, 16 November, 1895 d. Frankfurt, West Germany, 28 December, 1963 Premiered on January 20, 1944, in New York City, by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński. (Approx. 21 minutes)

20th Century composer Paul Hindemith was a musician of many hats. In addition to composing, he was a violist, a teacher, a music theorist, and a conductor. A German by birth, he worked primarily in Germany until the rise of the Nazi Regime caused his music to be censored. He moved to America, eventually becoming an American citizen, and taught for many years at Yale. He ultimately moved back to Europe, composing until his death at the age of 68.

Undoubtedly the most popular of his compositions, Symphonic Metamorphosis is an interesting work in that it is based on incidental music written by Carl Maria von Weber for a play based on the Turandot legend. In March of 1940, Hindemith was asked to arrange music of Weber for a ballet, and created a piano arrangement that would form the basis of movements 1 and 3 of the orchestral piece. Hindemith was inspired by Weber’s music, and so decided to compose Symphonic Metamorphosis, completing the additional two movements in June of 1943.

Hindemith wrote the work with the virtuosity of American symphony orchestras in mind, and produced a true orchestral showpiece. Every movement demands and shows off technical prowess in different ways, culminating in the grand and thrilling March at the end of the work.

When it was premiered in New York in 1944, the New York Times described the piece as “a novelty ... [which] was one of the most entertaining scores that he has thus far given us, a real jeu d’esprit by a great master of his medium in a singularly happy mood.”

What is amazing about this work is that, if you hear Weber’s original music, it is clear that Hindemith’s “metamorphosis” of the music really does not stray far from the original source, and yet the music sounds undeniably like Hindemith. In fact, the piano arrangements he first made are almost exactly copied into the orchestral score in the first and third movements. Yet upon these layers Hindemith cloaks the Weber in orchestral color that could only be his own, transforming the late classical music of Weber into a true showpiece of the contemporary American virtuoso orchestra.

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