Fresh Air & Beethoven’s Eroica

Friday, November 11, 2022 at 11:15 am

Saturday, November 12, 2022 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Baiba Skride, violin

Program

JEAN SIBELIUS / Night Ride and Sunrise, Opus 55

SEBASTIAN CURRIER / Aether, for violin and orchestra / Baiba Skride, violin

INTERMISSION

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN / Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Opus 55, “Eroica” / I. Allegro con brio • II. Marcia funebre: Adagio assai • III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace • IV. Finale: Allegro molto

The 2022.23 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND.

The length of this concert is approximately 2 hours.

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra can be heard on Telarc, Koss Classics, Pro Arte, AVIE, and Vox/Turnabout recordings. MSO Classics recordings (digital only) available on iTunes and at mso.org. MSO Binaural recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.

Guest Artist Biographies

Baiba Skride

Baiba Skride’s natural approach to music‐making has endeared her to many of today’s most important conductors and orchestras worldwide. She performs regularly with orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouworkest, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Orchestre de Paris, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and NHK Symphony Orchestra.

Highlights of the 2022.23 season include Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2, which she will perform and record on the Deutsche Grammophon label with Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the UK premiere of Victoria Borisova‐Ollas’s violin concerto A Portrait of a Lady by Swan Lake with Cristian Măcelaru and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Gubaidulina’s “Offertorium” with the NHK Symphony Orchestra. She appears for the first time with the Karajan‐Akademie der Berliner Philharmoniker and Brucknerorchester Linz. In addition, she returns to the Iceland Symphony Orchestra to give the Iceland premiere of Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto with Harriet Krijgh (cello) and Elsbeth Moser (bajan), to the Dresdner Philharmonie with Dima Slobodeniouk, and other orchestras such as Taipei Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Skride is an internationally sought‐after chamber musician and commits to the long‐established duo with her sister Lauma Skride. She is one of the founding members of the Skride Quartet. In 2022.23, the Skride Quartet returns to Copenhagen, Riga, and the U.S. She also performs in trio with Lauma Skride and Harriet Krijgh as well as in various chamber music projects.

Skride’s latest album Violin Unlimited was released in May 2022. Her prolific discography includes all Mozart concertos with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and Bartók with the WDR Sinfonieorchester, both with Eivind Aadland, as well as an American disc featuring Bernstein, Korngold, and Rózsa, and the debut recording of the Skride Quartet, all under the Orfeo label.

Skride was born into a musical Latvian family in Riga and continued her studies from 1995 at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre. In 2001, she won the first prize of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. She plays the Yfrah Neaman Stradivarius kindly on loan by the Neaman family through the Beare’s International Violin Society.

Program notes by J. Mark Baker

Tension, energy, and triumph abound in Beethoven’s history-changing “Eroica” Symphony. In contrast, Sebastian Currier’s delicate and mesmerizing Aether evokes “the air the gods breathe.” Sibelius’s evocative tone poem Night Ride and Sunrise opens the program. Welcome, Baiba Skride!

Jean Sibelius

JEAN SIBELIUS

Born 8 December 1865; Hämeenlinna, Finland • Died 20 September 1957; Jarvenpää, Finland

Night Ride and Sunrise, Opus 55

Composed: 1908 • First performance: 23 January 1909; St. Petersburg, Russia • Last MSO performance: MSO premiere • Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tambourine, triangle); strings • Approximate duration: 16 minutes

Jean Sibelius was born into a Swedish-speaking family in a hamlet in south central Finland. The man who would become the most famous Finn in history did not begin to speak the Finnish language until age eight and acquired complete proficiency in the language only as a young man. His official first name was Johan; as an adolescent, he adopted the gallicized “Jean.” And though he was prolific in many genres – tone poems, choral music and songs, chamber music, solo piano works – his stature rests chiefly on his accomplishment as a composer of symphonies.

Sibelius was in his early 40s when he composed Night Ride and Sunrise [Öinen ratsastus ja auringonnousu]. Chronologically, it comes between Symphonies No. 3 and No. 4. The work was completed in 1908, the same year Sibelius developed a serious illness and underwent several operations, both in Helsinki and Berlin, for suspected cancer of the throat. For a few years, he was forced to give up alcohol and cigars. Musicologist Robert Layton suggests that “…the bleak possibilities which the illness opened up may well have served to contribute to the austerity, concentration, and depth of the works which followed in its wake.”

This picturesque tone poem presents itself in three discernable parts. The first is a protracted galloping section in which woodwind and brass solos emerge amid the relentless rhythm of the strings. The middle portion is vintage Sibelius: a hymn-like melody in the strings, surrounded by a kaleidoscope of orchestral colorings. Slowly, the Northern sun begins to rise, as its first exquisite rays emerge in the horns.

Across the years, Sibelius gave various accounts of the inspiration for this music. He told his friend Karl Ekman that his first visit to the Colosseum in Rome in 1901 had prompted it. In his later years, he related to his secretary Santeri Levas a sleigh ride from Helsinki to Kerava, “around the turn of the century,” during which he experienced an extraordinary sunrise. Whatever the case, it is indeed a breath of fresh Nordic air.

Sebastian Currier

SEBASTIAN CURRIER

Born 16 March 1959; Huntingdon, Pennsylvania

Aether, for violin and orchestra

Composed: 2018 • First performance: 2 May 2019; Boston, Massachusetts • Last MSO performance: MSO premiere • Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes (2nd doubling on English horn); 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; percussion (anvil, bass drum, brake drum, cymbal, glockenspiel, hi-hat, high cymbal, high woodblock, low cymbal, snare drum, tambourine, triangle, vibraphone); harp; piano; celeste; strings • Approximate duration: 25 minutes

Educated at the Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music and the recipient of many prestigious awards, Sebastian Currier has garnered the attention of musicians across the globe. His catalogue includes compositions for solo instruments, voice, chorus and orchestra, and pieces for ensembles, both large and small. His numerous commissions include works for the Berlin Philharmonic and, for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, Time Machines and Aftersong. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia universities.

Aether, a co-commission of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, was composed for and dedicated to Baiba Skride, who gave its premiere with Andris Nelson and the BSO. Set in four continuous movements, it is a violin concerto in all but name. The composer has offered the following illuminating comments:

For much of the 18th and 19th centuries “aether” was thought to be an invisible substance that pervaded all of universe between celestial bodies. It was the medium through which light waves were thought to travel. The word itself looks back to Greek mythology. It means “pure, fresh air” and was thought to be the air of the upper atmosphere, the air the gods breathed.

With Einstein’s theory of relativity, the concept became outmoded, but it still lingers as a term referring to something remote, mysterious, invisible, and out of reach. Conceptually, Aether, starts with a rather standard multimovement structure of a symphony or a concerto, but in the finished work this form is deconstructed and reconfigured.

There are four primary movements. The first is a sort of Nachtmusik [night music] where instruments from the orchestra play phrases that the violin imitates. In the second movement there’s a continual struggle between lyrical impulses and aggressive outbursts. The third movement is a sustained, lyrical slow movement where the violin soars above the orchestra. The fourth is an energetic, virtuosic finale.

But that’s not actually how the piece unfolds. As the piece begins, we hear very, very quiet, distant, mysterious chords in the strings, with the winds making ephemeral air sounds. It’s vague and atmospheric. It’s the medium in which the four movements are contained; it’s the “aether” that surrounds the firmer, more concrete structures of the four movements. It begins the piece, ends it, and occurs between all the four movements. The movements don’t really conclude but just trail off into oblivion or, as in the fourth movement, are interrupted unexpectedly. They float within this medium of aether. The violin is noticeably absent from these ethereal sections, except the last. Here the violin steps off the solid structure created by the movements and floats into the aether, gradually disappearing into nothingness.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Baptized 17 December 1770; Bonn, Germany • Died 26 March 1827; Vienna, Austria

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Opus 55, “Eroica”

Composed: 1804 • First performance: 7 April 1805; Vienna • Last MSO performance: June 2016; Carlos Kalmar, conductor • Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 3 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings • Approximate duration: 47 minutes

Beethoven spent the summer of 1802 in the village of Heiligenstadt (now part of larger Vienna). It was a musically prolific time for him, but the 31-year-old master was already aware that his hearing was beginning to deteriorate. In October, as he prepared to return to central Vienna, he carefully wrote a document to his two brothers describing his depression, but declaring he had now rejected the idea of suicide. This “Heiligenstadt Testament” is a heartbreaking testimony to the despair that frequently overtook him during this period in his life.

From that low ebb of despondency, Beethoven effected a speedy recovery through hard work, churning out his oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives in early 1803. Fidelio, his only opera, was written in 1804-05. Between them came the Eroica (“Heroic”) Symphony, an opus Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman has called “a watershed work, one that marks a turning point in the history of modern music.” Kerman goes on to explain that Beethoven was concerned not only with the musical and technical aspects of composition, but also with conveying his own spiritual journey and growth process. This “symphonic ideal,” states Kerman, “Beethoven perfected at a stroke with his Third Symphony and further celebrated with his Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth. The forcefulness, expanded range, and evident radical intent of these works sets them apart from symphonies in the 18th-century tradition.”

It is well known that Beethoven took Napoleon as his inspiration for the Symphony No. 3 and later was angered and disillusioned when the revolutionary hero turned despot and had himself crowned emperor. The “Bonaparte” Symphony then became the “Sinfonia Eroica.” From our 21stcentury vantage point, it is easy to declare Beethoven the true hero here.

The Third Symphony as a whole – and its first two movements in particular – was on a larger scale than any instrumental work the master had yet written; it was many years before he wrote another of such dimensions. Following two strong E-flat major chords, the cellos quietly sing the waltz-like melody that will provide Beethoven with much of the musical material for this movement. Typically, Classical-era symphonies have a central development section shorter than the opening exposition. Beethoven turns this around completely, expanding on his material at great length, taking the listener in unexpected directions. A weighty and protracted funeral march in C minor makes up the second movement. Musicologists have suggested that Beethoven was here influenced by French composers of the revolutionary era, as well as by the operas of Luigi Cherubini (Beethoven’s favorite living composer) and Etienne Mehul. All is not gloomy in this movement, however: Listen for a lyrical interlude in C major that soon turns triumphant. And there’s even a brief fugal section.

The scherzo’s softly scampering staccato strings and jaunty woodwind melodies disperse all funereal thoughts. The bold trio – with fanfares played by three horns – stands in marked contrast. The scurrying then returns, and a short, intriguing coda ends the movement. The ingenious Finale is a set of variations based on a theme Beethoven had used in his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus and in the 15 Variations, Opus 35 (“Eroica Variations”) for piano. The styles range from solemn to humorous and make use of both the major and minor modes. Listen for everything from imitative counterpoint to a swaying dance, from warlike passages to an ample hymn tune. In the splendid coda, jubilant salvos from the three horns bring this history-changing work to its “heroic” conclusion.