Program Notes: Opening Weekend with Gil Shaham

OCTOBER 14, 15 & 16

OPENING WEEKEND WITH GIL SHAHAM

A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT FRIDAY October 14, 2016 – 8:00pm SATURDAY October 15, 2016 – 8:00pm SUNDAY October 16, 2016 – 2:00pm conductor Jahja Ling violin Gil Shaham

All performances at The Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall This concert is made possible through the generosity of Raffaella and John Belanich.

PROGRAM JOHN STAFFORD SMITH / Arr. H. W. Davis WILLIAM SCHUMAN FELIX MENDELSSOHN

"The Star-Spangled Banner" American Festival Overture

Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64

Allegro molto appassionato Andante

Allegretto non troppo - Allegro molto vivace Gil Shaham, violin

INTERMISSION JOHANNES BRAHMS

Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90

Allegro con brio Andante

Poco allegretto Allegro The approximate running time for this program, including intermission, is one hour and fifty minutes.

P12 PE RFORMA NCES MAG A Z IN E

SAN DI E GO SYM P H O N Y O R C H E ST R A 2 016 - 17 S E AS ON O CTO BER 2016

ABOUT THE ARTIST

OPENING WEEKEND WITH GIL SHAHAM - OCTOBER 14, 15 & 16

GIL SHAHAM, VIOLIN

G

IL SHAHAM is one of the foremost violinists of our time; his flawless technique combined with his inimitable warmth and generosity of spirit has solidified his renown as an American master. The Grammy® Awardwinner is sought after throughout the world for concerto appearances with leading orchestras and conductors. He regularly gives recitals and appears with ensembles on the world’s great concert stages and at the most prestigious festivals. Highlights of recent seasons include performances with the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, New World Symphony, Singapore Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, residencies with the Montreal Symphony and Carolina Performing Arts and on an extensive North American tour with The Knights, to celebrate the release of Violin Concertos of the 1930s, Vol. 2. Mr. Shaham has also toured Bach’s complete unaccompanied sonatas and partitas to London’s Wigmore Hall and key North American venues in a special multimedia collaboration with photographer/video artist David Michalek.

The violinist already has more than two dozen concerto and solo CDs to his name, including bestsellers that have ascended the charts in the U.S. and abroad. These recordings have earned multiple Grammys®, a Grand Prix du Disque, Diapason d’Or and Gramophone Editor’s Choice. His recent recordings are issued on the Canary Classics label, which he founded in 2004. They include J.S. Bach: Sonatas & Partitas for Violin; 1930s Violin Concertos (Vol. 1), recorded live with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, BBC Symphony, Staatskapelle Dresden and Sejong; Haydn Violin Concertos and Mendelssohn’s Octet with the Sejong Soloists; Sarasate: Virtuoso Violin Works with Adele Anthony, Akira Eguchi and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León; Elgar’s Violin Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and David Zinman; The Butterfly Lovers and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Singapore Symphony; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A Major with Yefim Bronfman and cellist Truls Mork; The Prokofiev Album and Mozart in Paris, both with his sister, pianist Orli Shaham; The Fauré Album with Akira Eguchi and cellist Brinton Smith; and Nigunim: Hebrew Melodies, also recorded with Orli Shaham, which features the world premiere recording of a sonata written for the violinist by Avner Dorman.

Dorman’s sonata is one of several new works

S AN DI EG O SYMPHO NY O RCHEST RA 2016- 17 SEA SO N OC TOB E R 2016

commissioned for the violinist, who has also premiered and championed pieces by composers including William Bolcom, David Bruce, Avner Dorman, Julian Milone and Bright Sheng.

Mr. Shaham was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1971. He moved with his parents to Israel, where he began violin studies with Samuel Bernstein of the Rubin Academy of Music at the age of seven, receiving annual scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. In 1981, while studying with Haim Taub in Jerusalem, he made debuts with the Jerusalem Symphony and the Israel Philharmonic. That same year he began his studies with Dorothy DeLay and Jens Ellermann at Aspen. In 1982, after taking first prize in Israel’s Claremont Competition, he became a scholarship student at Juilliard, where he worked with DeLay and Hyo Kang.

He also studied at Columbia University.

Gil Shaham was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and in 2008 he received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. In 2012 he was named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by Musical America, which cited the “special kind of humanism” with which his performances are imbued. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius and lives in New York City with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their three children. n

Concert Sponsor Spotlight

JOHN AND RAFAELLA BELANICH RAFFAELLA AND JOHN BELANICH are longtime supporters of classical music and education in San Diego and are sponsoring our Opening Weekend concerts with Gil Shaham.

P E R FOR M AN C E S M AGAZ I NE P13

ABOUT THE MUSIC

OPENING WEEKEND WITH GIL SHAHAM - OCTOBER 14, 15 & 16 American Festival Overture WILLIAM SCHUMAN Born August 4, 1910, New York City Died February 15, 1992, New York City The San Diego Symphony’s season-long survey of American music gets off to the best possible start with William Schuman’s American Festival Overture. This overture was Schuman’s first great success; it brought him a popular and critical triumph, and it was the first of the series of impressive works he composed across the decade of the 1940s. Schuman’s path to this success had not been quick, nor was it easy. He had resolved to become a composer after hearing a concert by the New York Philharmonic in 1930, but he became one very slowly: he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia, studied privately and spent a summer at the Mozarteum in Salzburg before taking a job as choral conductor at Sarah Lawrence. His early attempts at composition met with little success, and what had seemed a breakthrough – Koussevitsky’s performance of his Second Symphony in February 1939 – instead turned into a disaster: critics hated it, the audience thought it the worst piece they had ever heard, and one disgruntled listener who had heard it on the radio wrote to tell the composer that “Your symphony made me lose my faith in the power of aspirin.”

The one person who did not lose faith in the struggling composer was Koussevitzky, and later that year the conductor’s faith was justified. Koussevitzky had scheduled a Festival of American Music for the fall of 1939, and over the summer Schuman – then 29 years old – retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, where he composed an overture full of energy and based in large part on its opening threenote figure. Schuman was quite specific about the origins of this figure: “The first three notes of this piece will be recognized by some listeners as the ‘call to play’ of boyhood days.

In New York City it is yelled on the syllables ‘Wee-Awk-Eee’ to get the gang together for a game or a festive occasion of some sort. This call very naturally suggested itself for a piece of music being composed for a very festive occasion.” The American Festival Overture, as Schuman called the piece, was premiered by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony on October 6, 1939, and it remains to this day one of Schuman’s most frequently performed and recorded scores.

The source of its popularity is no secret: the American Festival Overture rockets along on

P 14 PE RFORMA NCES MAG A Z IN E

an endless supply of white-hot energy. Aptly marked Allegro con spirito, the overture opens with the three-note motif, and this figure then saturates the piece: it is tossed rapidly between sections of the orchestra, varied, inverted, shouted out, whispered – in fact, the figure is almost continuously present throughout the overture’s opening section.

Its initial energy spent, the overture makes a quiet transition to the central section, a lengthy fugue announced by the violas and full of a bristling energy all its own. Schuman gives the exposition of the fugue to strings alone (the violas have a lovely counter-theme along the way), and a grand brass cadence opens the door to the concluding section, marked Un poco presto. The last minutes of the overture are a sizzling romp home on variants of the opening three-note figure. n

Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 FELIX M ENDELSS OHN Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg Died November 4, 1847, Leipzig “I would like to write you a violin concerto for next winter. One in E minor keeps running through my head, and the opening gives me no peace.” So wrote Mendelssohn to his lifelong friend, violinist Ferdinand David, in 1838, and that opening has given millions of musiclovers no peace ever since, for it is one of the most perfect violin melodies ever written.

Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto seems so polished, so effortless in its easy flow that this music feels as if it must have appeared in one sustained stroke of Mendelssohn’s pen.

Yet this concerto took seven years to write.

Normally a fast worker, Mendelssohn labored very carefully on this music, revising, polishing and consulting with David – his concertmaster at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra – at every step of its composition. He completed the score while on vacation in Soden, near Frankfurt, during the summer of 1844, and David gave the premiere in Leipzig on March 13, 1845. Mendelssohn was sick at that time and could not conduct, so his assistant, the Danish composer Niels Gade, led the first performance.

We do not normally think of Mendelssohn as an innovator, but his Violin Concerto is as remarkable for its originality as for its endless beauty. So over-familiar has this music become that it is easy to miss its many innovations. These begin in the first instant: Mendelssohn does away with the

standard orchestral exposition and has the violin enter in the second bar with its famous theme, marked Allegro molto appassionato and played entirely on the violin’s E-string.

This soaring idea establishes the movement’s singing yet impassioned character from the very beginning. Other themes follow in turn: a transitional figure for the orchestra and the true second subject, a chorale-like tune first given out by the woodwinds.

This concerto offers wonderful violin music.

Mendelssohn played the violin himself, and he consulted with David at every point. The result is a concerto that sits gracefully under the violinist’s hand and sounds to its listeners as poised and idiomatic as it actually is. It is also easy to miss how deftly this concerto is scored: Mendelssohn writes for what is essentially the Mozart-Haydn orchestra (pairs of woodwinds, trumpets and horns, plus timpani and strings), and he is able to keep textures transparent and the soloist audible throughout. However, he can also make that orchestra ring out with a splendor that Mozart and Haydn never dreamed of. The quiet timpani strokes in the first few seconds, which subtly energize the orchestra’s swirling textures, are just one of many signs of the hand of a master. Another innovation: Mendelssohn sets the cadenza where we do not expect it, at the end of the development rather than just before the coda, and that cadenza – a terrific compilation of trills, harmonics and arpeggios – appears to have been largely the creation of David, who fashioned it from Mendelssohn’s themes. The return of the orchestra is a masterstroke: it is the orchestra that brings back the movement’s main theme as the violinist accompanies the orchestra with dancing arpeggios.

Mendelssohn hated applause between movements, and he tried to guard against it here by tying the first two movements together with a single bassoon note. (This has not always stopped audiences, however!)

The two themes of the Andante might by themselves define the term “romanticism.”

There is a sweetness about this music that could – in other hands – turn cloying, but Mendelssohn skirts that danger gracefully.

The soloist has the arching and falling opening melody, while the orchestra gives out the darker, more insistent second subject. The writing for violin in this movement, full of double-stopping and fingered octaves, is a great deal more difficult than it sounds.

Mendelssohn joins the second and third movements with an anticipatory bridge

SAN DI E GO SYM P H O N Y O R C H E ST R A 2 016 - 17 S E AS ON O CTO BER 2016

ABOUT THE MUSIC

OPENING WEEKEND WITH GIL SHAHAM - OCTOBER 14, 15 & 16 passage that subtly takes its shape from the concerto’s opening theme. Resounding fanfares from the orchestra lead directly to the soloist’s entrance on an effervescent, dancing melody so full of easy grace that we seem suddenly in the fairyland atmosphere of Mendelssohn’s own incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Several other themes appear along the way (Mendelssohn combines some of them in ingenious ways), but it is the sprightly opening melody that dominates as the music flies through the sparkling coda and concludes on the violin’s exultant three-octave leap. n

Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 JOH A N N E S BR A H M S Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg Died April 3, 1897, Vienna Brahms spent the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden, where he took a second-story apartment looking out over the Rhine. He had just turned 50, which is a bad birthday for anyone, but at this moment in his life he was feeling new energy. In January of that year he had heard a contralto. Her name was Hermine Spiess, she was 26, she had a beautiful voice, and Brahms fell in love with her. Hermine lived in Wiesbaden, so Brahms found an apartment there, and that summer – with a magnificent view of the Rhine and very much in love with a young woman – Brahms composed his Third Symphony. At 50, Brahms was a supremely accomplished composer – powerful, subtle, refined and passionate – and his mastery is evident in every measure of the Third Symphony. Of his four symphonies, the Third is the shortest, most concise and most subtle (all four movements end quietly), and it is marked by an attention to instrumental color rare in Brahms’ music.

The opening Allegro con brio is extraordinary music, even by Brahms’ standards. It is built around a three-note motto: the rising sequence F-A-flat-F. Brahms said that motto was a reflection of his personal credo “Frei aber froh” (“Free but happy.”) That rising threenote figure will saturate this movement: they are the first three notes of the symphony, and that motto will function melodically, serve as an accompaniment and bind sections together.

After the brass blazes out the motto to open the symphony, the main theme – marked passionate – comes crashing downward in the violins like a mighty wave. It is characteristic of this symphony that the three-note motto

has been instantly transformed into the bass-line beneath this powerful theme, and over the next few moments the motto will be woven into the texture of the music countless times. The second theme, sung by solo clarinet and quickly taken up by the violas, dances gracefully in the unusual meter 9/4, but surprisingly the development is quite short. A noble horn call (derived from the opening motto) leads to an extended – and very agitated – recapitulation before the movement closes on a quiet restatement of the opening theme.

The two middle movements are also unusual: the Third Symphony has no true slow movement, nor is there a scherzo. Instead, Brahms offers two moderately-paced central movements, both littered with his constant reminder to performers: dolce, espressivo. The Andante (in sonata form) opens with a graceful tune announced by clarinets and bassoon, and – curiously – those two instruments also have the slightly-sprung second theme. The luminous closing moments of this gentle movement are particularly beautiful. The cellos’ C minor melody at the start of the Poco Allegretto, with its subtle shadings and gypsy turns, is one of the most haunting themes Brahms ever wrote. A slightly rustic middle section, full of off-the-beat accents, gives way to the return of the opening theme, but now – in a magical touch – Brahms assigns it to the solo horn, which soars above shimmering string accompaniment.

The finale opens ominously in F minor, but this quickly gives way to the heroic main theme in C Major for cellos and horns. A powerful development – with secondary material derived from the second movement – leads

to a conclusion full of even more original touches. The music turns quiet, and – very subtly – Brahms begins to bring back themes from earlier movements: the three-note motto from the first movement, the second theme from the Andante and finally – at the very end – the opening theme of the first movement. That theme had been heroic at the very beginning of the symphony, but now it returns in dignified calm. Its quiet concluding descent has been compared by one critic to the fall of autumn leaves, and this very concise symphony ends not in thunder but on a restrained wind chord.

The premiere of the Third Symphony in Vienna on December 2, 1883, was the occasion of one of the major collisions between the Wagner and Brahms factions in that city. The followers of Wagner (the composer had died earlier that year) tried to hiss each movement of the symphony, but they were drowned out by the cheers of Brahms’ supporters. The young Hugo Wolf, a passionate Wagnerian and a sworn enemy of the “classical” Brahms, wrote a searing review of the symphony, calling it “Disgustingly stale and prosy. Fundamentally false and perverse. A single cymbal-stroke of a work by Liszt expresses more intellect and emotion than all three symphonies of Brahms and his serenades taken together.”

Brahms’ lifelong friend Clara Schumann, however, had quite a different view. She wrote the composer: “What a harmonious mood pervades the whole! All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart, each one a jewel. From start to finish one is wrapped about with the mysterious charm of the woods and forests.”

-Program notes by Eric Bromberger

PERFORMANCE HISTORY Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist

Y

oav Talmi introduced William Schuman's American Festival Overture to San Diego Symphony audiences during the 1993-94 season, and Jahja Ling also conducted it during the 2006-07 season. The lovely Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor has always been (justifiably) one of the most popular and crowd-pleasing violin concertos.

The orchestra's first music director, Buren Schryock, programmed it here during the 1917 season with Helen Babson as soloist. In 1936, then-music director Nino Marcelli led it with Enzo Pascarelli as soloist. The post-Second World War, reorganized orchestra was led by Fabien Sevitzky when Robert Gerle re-introduced it to these concerts. Since then, it has been programmed 16 times here, most recently when Jahja Ling conducted it with Viviane Hagner as soloist, during the 2012-13 season.

Brahms' Third Symphony is being heard for the sixth time at these concerts. Introduced here under the baton of Zoltan Rozsnyai during the 1967-68 season, it was last played by the San Diego Symphony Orchestra when Jahja Ling led it during the 2012-13 season. n

S AN DI EG O SYMPHO NY O RCHEST RA 2016- 17 SEA SO N OC TOB E R 2016

P E R FOR M AN C E S M AGAZ I NE P15