Yo-Yo Ma Plays Dvořák Playbill

SPECIAL EVENT

YO-YO MA PLAYS DVOŘÁK DECEMBER 11, 2024 / 7:30 PM / MAURICE ABRAVANEL HALL ERIC JACOBSEN, conductor YO-YO MA, cello

ANNA CLYNE

Masquerade (5’)

HINDEMITH

Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber (21’)

DVOŘÁK

I.

Allegro

II.

Turandot: Scherzo

III.

Andantino

IV.

March

Concerto in B minor for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 104 (40’) I.

Allegro

II.

Adagio ma non troppo

III.

Finale: Allegro moderato

YO-YO MA, cello

PRESENTING SPONSOR

KEM & CAROLYN GARDNER

CONCERT SPONSOR

ORCHESTRA SPONSOR

PO & BEATRICE CHANG & THE CHANG FAMILY

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ARTISTS’ PROFILES — YO-YO MA PLAYS DVOŘÁK

Eric Jacobsen Conductor

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lready well-established as one of classical music’s most exciting and innovative young conductors, Eric Jacobsen combines fresh interpretations of the traditional canon with cutting-edge collaborations across musical genres. Hailed by The New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” Jacobsen, as both a conductor and a cellist, has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative programming.

He has been Music Director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra since 2021 and is entering his tenth season as Music Director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra.

A frequent guest conductor, Jacobsen has established continuing relationships with the Colorado Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Oregon Bach Festival, and the Dresden Musikfestspiele. Upcoming engagements also include concerts with Classical Tahoe and Grant Park Music Festival, and special performances with Yo-Yo Ma and the Atlanta Symphony.

Jacobsen brings joy, storytelling, and a touch of humor to what he describes as “musical conversations” that delight audiences around the world, including those who do not traditionally attend classical music concerts. Jacobsen is married to GrammyWinner singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan and together they have a daughter.

Yo-Yo Ma Cello

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o-Yo Ma’s multi-faceted career is testament to his belief in culture’s power to generate trust and understanding. Whether performing new or familiar works for cello, bringing communities together to explore culture’s role in society, or engaging unexpected musical forms, Yo-Yo strives to foster connections that stimulate the imagination and reinforce our humanity.

Most recently, Yo-Yo began Our Common Nature, a cultural journey to celebrate the ways that nature can reunite us in pursuit of a shared future. Our Common Nature follows the Bach Project, a 36-community, six-continent tour of J. S. Bach’s cello suites paired with local cultural programming. Both endeavors reflect Yo-Yo’s lifelong commitment to stretching the boundaries of genre and tradition to understand how music helps us to imagine and build a stronger society.

Photo Credit: Jason Bell

Yo-Yo Ma was born in 1955 to Chinese parents living in Paris, where he began studying the cello with his father at age four. When he was seven, he moved with his family to New York City, where he continued his cello studies before pursuing a liberal arts education.

Yo-Yo has recorded more than 120 albums, is the winner of 19 Grammy Awards, and has performed for nine American presidents, most recently on the occasion of President Biden’s inauguration. He has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of the Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Birgit Nilsson Prize. He has been a UN Messenger of Peace since 2006, and was recognized as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

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HISTORY OF THE MUSIC — YO-YO MA PLAYS DVOŘÁK

Masquerade Duration: 5 minutes.

THE COMPOSER – ANNA CLYNE (b. 1980) – London-born composer Anna Clyne began composing at the tender age of 7 but didn’t receive any formal training until she was 20.

It was an early start and then kind of a late one. But her path, once identified, accelerated her from the University of Edinburgh to the Manhattan School of Music and eventually into just about every important concert hall in the world.

Clyne is among the most performed living composers now and her frequent collaborations with dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, and electronic music specialists provides her with ample opportunity to explore what she refers to as the “physicality of sound.” She continues to receive commissions from the industry’s most prestigious organizations but always leaves time to mentor the next generation of music makers.

THE HISTORY – High among Clyne’s list of high-profile commissions, was the opportunity to write for the Last Night of the Proms in 2013. Masquerade was the thrilling concert opener she dedicated that year to “the Prommers”.

In her words, the piece “draws inspiration from the original mid-18th century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens. As is true today, these concerts were a place where people from all walks of life mingled to enjoy a wide array of music. Other forms of entertainment ranged from the sedate to the salacious with acrobatics, exotic street entertainers, dancers, fireworks and masquerades.

I am fascinated by the historic and sociological courtship between music and dance. Combined with costumes, masked guises and elaborate settings, masquerades created an exciting, yet controlled, sense of occasion and celebration. It is this that I wish to evoke in Masquerade.

The work derives its material from two melodies. For the main theme, I imagined a chorus welcoming the audience and inviting them into their imaginary world. The second theme, Juice of Barley, is an old English country dance melody and drinking song, which first appeared in John Playford’s 1695 edition of The English Dancing Master.”

Clyne’s mention of The English Dancing Master in the context of her imaginary courtly ball is fun to explore further. Published for nearly eighty years in the 17th and 18th centuries, The Dancing Master was a periodical compendium of country dance tutorials, complete with written-out tunes and specific numbered (and gendered) steps. The Juice of Barley page from the 1695 booklet genially suggests that the starting position for the dance

should be “Longways for as many as will.” Playford’s guide must have been very useful for curating spontaneous group activities during a masquerade like the one Clyne has created for us in sound.

THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings occurred, India launched a Mars Orbiter, a powerful meteor explosion near Chelyabinsk in Russia injured 1500 people, and Lance Armstrong finally admitted to doping in all seven of his Tour de France victories.

THE CONNECTION – Though other Anna Clyne works have been played here in recent years, these concerts represent the Utah Symphony premiere of Masquerade.

Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber Duration: 21 minutes in four movements.

THE COMPOSER – PAUL HINDEMITH (1895-1963) – It’s a story so common it almost loses meaning through its repetition. Almost. Paul Hindemith left Germany in 1940 to get away from the Nazis and settled in America. He would not reside again in Europe until 1953. Hindemith’s pre-departure relationship with the Nazi Party had already necessitated a move to Switzerland in 1938, where he was able to at least nurture both “decent music and a pure conscience.” Once he established himself in America a short time later, the composer still did not feel he had reached a political and artistic promised land. Hindemith called it a place of “limited impossibilities,” but his teaching post at Yale and the welcoming concert experiences he had did bring him much satisfaction.

THE HISTORY – The seeds of the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber were sown in 1940, coincident with Hindemith’s move to the United States. Ballet master Léonide Massine approached him about a choreographed collaboration based on the music of Weber and Hindemith was initially very interested. The two had already worked together on Nobilissima visione in 1938 so there was every reason to believe each man knew what he was getting from the other. But the new project never really got off the ground.

Massine wanted the music to sound like actual Weber,

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HISTORY OF THE MUSIC — YO-YO MA PLAYS DVOŘÁK not a translation of him into modern language. And Hindemith just couldn’t get on board with what Massine was planning for the production. The proposed sets based on art by Salvador Dalí were especially bothersome to the composer. With the dance project scuttled, the music was set aside until 1943, when Hindemith turned it into the four-movement orchestral showstopper we know and love today. Symphonic Metamorphosis takes its Weber themes very seriously, treating them with reverence even when they are obscured by contemporary flourishes and the composer’s playful wit. Everything Hindemith borrowed from Weber came from piano music he played with this wife. Movements 1 and 4 are based on themes from the Op. 60 piano duets. Movement 2 was inspired by a 4-hands reduction of the incidental music Weber wrote for Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandot (yes, this is the same drama that Puccini memorialized in 1926). Movement 3 took its material from another set of piano duos, the Six Pieces, Op. 10a. Symphonic Metamorphosis was an immediate hit in American concert halls and may still be Hindemith’s most popular work. Interestingly, the piece did eventually become a ballet when George Balanchine choreographed it for the New York City Ballet in 1952.

THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1943, the Pentagon was completed, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising occurred in occupied Poland, a new volcano (Parícutin) emerged and erupted from a cornfield in Mexico, and Ayn Rand published The Fountainhead.

THE CONNECTION – Symphonic Metamorphosis is not frequently programmed by Utah Symphony. The last concerts to feature it were in October 2014. Ignat Solzhenitsyn was on the podium.

Concerto for Cello in B Minor, Op. 104 Duration: 40 minutes in three movements.

THE COMPOSER – ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904) – In 1891, Dvořák received a telegram from Jeannette Thurber, President of the National Conservatory of Music in America.

She was offering him a job. At first, the composer wasn’t sure he wanted to be the Director of the Conservatory’s branch in New York. But his wife helped to convince him and the family set sail in 1892. America was a country already enamored of his music and the Conservatory leaders were intensely interested in his nationalistic voice

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as an artist. In a country without its own established musical identity, his example could be instructive to American composers as they developed an identity for their burgeoning culture. Dvořák’s great gift to his hosts was a symphony, perhaps the most important one he ever wrote.

THE HISTORY – Much like this most famous symphony, No. 9 “From the New World”, Dvořák’s last instrumental concerto was an American work. It was written during his time in New York but differs from the “New World” Symphony and the “American” Quartet by how little of his bespoke “Americana” it contains. In fact, there is none.

This, in the opinion of writers at the Dvořák American Heritage Association seemed “to signal the impending return to his homeland with references to a song from his earlier works.” We will return to that song in a moment.

Dvořák had been previously unconvinced by the cello as a concerto instrument, but he heard performances of Victor Herbert’s 2nd Concerto while in the States and changed his mind completely. From that experience Dvořák took the confidence not only to write a Cello Concerto of his own in 1895, but to do so with a full orchestral accompaniment – a previously outrageous notion to him. It worked, and it greatly impressed an equally cello-skeptical Brahms. The piece was dedicated to Dvořák’s countryman Hanz Wihan.

Wihan made several suggestions for alterations, some of which Dvořák accepted, but Wihan’s idea of a cadenza at the end of the finale was plainly rejected by the composer.

For scheduling reasons, Wihan did not perform the 1896 London premiere, but his fingerprints remain on the score.

There is another bit of inspirational DNA in the music that Dvořák would certainly have preferred not to include. It was mentioned earlier. The shocking death during this time of his beloved sister-in-law Josefina Kaunic necessitated a melodic memorial so, in her honor, Dvořák revised the coda to incorporate a specific song. It was called “Leave Me Alone,” her favorite from his Four Songs, Op. 82. With lyrics like “Leave me the deep peace that these words bestow…”

Dvořák’s deep sadness over her passing was, we hope, given some measure of release.

THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1895, Cuba began an attempt to throw off Spanish rule, the First Sino-Japanese War ended, H.G. Wells published The Time Machine, and Oscar Wilde staged The Importance of Being Earnest.

THE CONNECTION – Dvořák’s Cello Concerto is programmed often by the Utah Symphony. It was presented most recently in September 2017. Harriet Krijgh was soloist under Thierry Fischer.