Colorado Symphony 2016/17 Season Presenting Sponsor:
MASTERWORKS • 2016-2017 SHOSTAKOVICH PERFORMED BY SILVER AINOMÄE COLORADO SYMPHONY PETER OUNDJIAN, CONDUCTOR SILVER AINOMÄE, CELLO This Weekend’s Concerts are Gratefully Dedicated to Liberty Global, Inc.
Friday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Young and Carolyn Cho Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Jennifer Heglin and David and Susan Seitz
Friday, November 18, 2016, at 7:30pm Saturday, November 19, 2016, at 7:30pm Sunday, November 20, 2016, at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
KODÁLY
Dances of Galánta
S HOSTAKOVICH Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107 Allegretto Moderato Cadenza Allegro con moto — INTERMISSION —
BARTÓK Concerto for Orchestra Introduzione: Andante non troppo – Allegro vivace Giuocco delle coppie: Allegretto scherzando Elegia: Andante non troppo Intermezzo interrotto: Allegretto Finale: Pesante - Presto
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1
MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor A dynamic presence in the conducting world, Toronto-born conductor Peter Oundjian is renowned for his probing musicality, collaborative spirit, and engaging personality. Oundjian’s appointment as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) in 2004 reinvigorated the Orchestra with numerous recordings, tours, and acclaimed innovative programming as well as extensive audience growth. In August 2014, he led the TSO on a tour of Europe, which included a sold-out performance at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the first performance of a North American orchestra at Reykjavik’s Harpa Hall. Oundjian was appointed Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) in 2012. Under his baton, the orchestra has enjoyed several successful tours including one to China, and has continued its relationship with Chandos Records. Few conductors bring such musicianship and engagement to the world’s great podiums—from Berlin, Amsterdam, and Tel Aviv, to New York, Chicago, and Sydney. He has also appeared at some of the great annual gatherings of music and music-lovers: from the BBC Proms and the Prague Spring Festival, to the Edinburgh Festival and The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Mozart Festival, where he was Artistic Director from 2003 to 2005. Oundjian was Principal Guest Conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2010 and Artistic Director of the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York between 1997 and 2007. Since 1981, he has been a visiting professor at the Yale School of Music, and was awarded the university’s Sanford Medal for distinguished service to music in 2013.
WILLIE PETERSEN
SILVER AINOMÄE, cello Silver Ainomäe was born in Tallinn, Estonia. At the age of six he began to play the cello and piano. In 1990, Ainomäe’s family migrated from Estonia to Finland. At the age of twelve, he was accepted to the Sibelius-Academy in Helsinki, where his teachers were Hannu Kiiski and Arto Noras. Studies at the Sibelius-Academy concluded with Master’s Degree in 2005 after which he continued developing his skills in London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Razumovsky Academy under the guidance of professor Oleg Kogan. Silver participated in his first international competition when he was eight years old. Since then he has been competing regularly, winning multiple prizes and awards at competitions including Isang Yun, Lutoslawski, and Paulo competitions. Silver has performed in more than 30 countries—hundreds of concerts with various chamber music ensembles and world class orchestras. His soloist debut was in 2000 with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, and since then he has performed concertos with Finnish Radio Orchestra, Zürich Chamber Orchestra, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Tapiola Sinfonietta and Colorado Symphony, conducted by Paavo Järvi, Andrew Litton, Marin Alsop and others. Previously Principal Cellist of the Colorado Symphony, Silver was appointed Associate Principal Cellist of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2016. He has appeared as guest principal with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. As an active chamber musician and educator, Silver has performed and taught at the biggest festivals in Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, Greece, Germany, and UK. PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975): Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107 Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg and died August 9, 1975, in Moscow. He wrote his First Cello Concerto in 1959 for Mstislav Rostropovich, who was the soloist in the work’s premiere with the Leningrad State Philharmonic Orchestra on October 4, 1959; Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted. The score calls for pairs of flutes (second doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets and bassoons (second doubling contrabassoon), horn, timpani, celesta, and strings. Duration is about 30 minutes. The concerto was last performed on April 9-11, 2010, with Ralph Kirshbaum as the soloist and Douglas Boyd conducting the orchestra. By the mid-1950s, Dmitri Shostakovich had developed a musical language of enormous subtlety, sophistication, and range, able to encompass such pieces of “Socialist Realism” as the Second Piano Concerto, Festive Overture, and Symphonies No. 11, “The Year 1905” and No. 12, “Lenin”, as well as the profound outpourings of the First Violin Concerto, Tenth Symphony, and late string quartets. The First Cello Concerto, written for Mstislav Rostropovich during the summer of 1959, straddles both of Shostakovich’s expressive worlds, a quality exemplified by two anecdotes told by the great cellist himself: “Shostakovich gave me the manuscript of the First Cello Concerto on August 2, 1959. On August 6, I played it for him from memory, three times. After the first time he was so excited, and of course we drank a little bit of vodka. The second time I played it not so perfect, and afterwards we drank even more vodka. The third time I think I played the Saint-Saëns Concerto, but he still accompanied his Concerto. We were enormously happy....” “Shostakovich suffered for his whole country, for his persecuted colleagues, for the thousands of people who were hungry. After I played the Cello Concerto for him at his dacha in Leningrad, he accompanied me to the railway station to catch the overnight train to Moscow. In the big waiting room we found many people sleeping on the floor. I saw his face, and the great suffering in it brought tears to my eyes. I cried, not from seeing the poor people but from what I saw in the face of Shostakovich....” The ability of Shostakovich’s music, like the man himself, to display the widest possible range of moods in succession, or even simultaneously, is one of his most masterful achievements. (The same may be said of Mahler, whose music was an enormous influence on Shostakovich.) The opening movement of the First Cello Concerto may be heard as almost Classical in the clarity of its form and the conservatism of its harmony and themes, yet there is a sinister undercurrent coursing through this music, a bleakness of spirit not entirely masked by its ceaseless activity. The following Moderato grows from sad melodies of folkish character, piquantly harmonized, which are gathered into a huge welling-up of emotion before subsiding to close the movement. The extended solo cadenza that follows without pause is an entire movement in itself. (Shostakovich had used a similar formal technique in the Violin Concerto No. 1 of 1948.) Thematically, it springs from the preceding slow movement, and reaches an almost Bachian depth of feeling. The cadenza leads directly to the finale, one of Shostakovich’s most witty and sardonic musical essays. With disarming ease, the main theme of the first movement is recalled in the closing section of the finale to round out the Concerto’s form. “It is difficult to think of any PROGRAM 4 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES modern concerto,” wrote Alan Frank, “which pursues its objectives in so purposeful a manner with little or no exploration of by-ways.” In addition to its purely musical value, Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto deserves a significant footnote in Russia’s modern artistic history. The piece was written for Rostropovich, about whom the composer said in his purported memoirs, Testimony, “In general, Rostropovich is a real Russian; he knows everything and he can do everything. Anything at all. I’m not even talking about music here, I mean that Rostropovich can do almost any manual or physical work, and he understands technology.” Shostakovich and Rostropovich were close friends during the composer’s later years, and they lived as neighbors for some time in the Composers’ House in Moscow. Rostropovich gave the Concerto both its world premiere (Leningrad; October 4, 1959) and its first American performance (Philadelphia; November 6, 1959), and was the inspiration for Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2 of 1966. In 1974, Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, defected to live and work in the West; four years later they were stripped of their Russian citizenship and became “non-persons” in their native land. In 1979, Dmitri and Ludmilla Sollertinsky published their Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, which was essentially the Soviet rebuttal to the scathing criticism leveled in Testimony, issued several months earlier. Though Rostropovich was one of Shostakovich’s best friends and most important artistic motivators, his name is not even mentioned in the Sollertinskys’ Pages, and the fine First Cello Concerto is dismissed in the book with a mere, passing half-sentence.
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945): Concerto for Orchestra Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, and died on September 26, 1945, in New York City. He composed his Concerto for Orchestra between August 15th and October 8, 1943, at Saranac Lake, New York. Sergei Koussevitzky conducted the first performance, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on December 1, 1944. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet0, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings. Duration of the work is approximately 35 minutes. The orchestra last performed the piece on January 6 & 7, 2012, with Larry Rachleff on the podium. Béla Bartók came to America in October 1940, sick of body and afflicted of spirit. He had been frail all of his life, and the leukemia that was to cause his death five years later had already begun to erode his health. Adding to the trial of his medical condition was the war raging in Europe, a painful source of torment to Bartók’s ardent Hungarian patriotism. Upon leaving his homeland, he not only relinquished the native country so dear to him, but also forfeited the secure financial and professional positions he had earned in Budapest. Compromise in the face of Hitler’s brutal inhumanity, however, was never a possibility for a man of Bartók’s adamantine convictions. “He who stays on when he could leave may be said to acquiesce tacitly in everything that is happening here,” he wrote on the eve of his departure. “This journey [to America] is like plunging into the unknown from what is known, but unbearable.” Filled with apprehension, he made the difficult overland trip to Lisbon, then sailed on to New York. Sad to say, Bartók’s misgivings were justified. His financial support from Hungary was, of course, cut off, and money worries aggravated his delicate physical condition. He held a modest post as a folk music researcher at Columbia University for a number of months, but that ended when funding from a grant ran out. His health declined enough to make public appearances impossible after 1943. His chief disappointment, however, was the almost total neglect of his compositions by the musical community. At the end of 1942 he lamented, “The quasi boycott of my works by the leading orchestras continues; no performances either of old works or new ones. It is a shame — not for me, of course.” It is to the credit of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) that the organization provided money for the hospital care that enabled Bartók to continue composing to the very end of his life. It was at that nadir in his fortunes that the commission for the Concerto for Orchestra was presented to Bartók. Phillip Ramey related the circumstances: “By early 1943, things had gotten so bad that two old friends of Bartók, [violinist] Joseph Szigeti and [conductor] Fritz Reiner, suggested to Sergei Koussevitzky [music director of the Boston Symphony] that he commission an orchestral work in memory of his wife, Natalie. Koussevitzky agreed and, one spring day, while Bartók was in a New York hospital undergoing tests, he appeared unexpectedly and startled the composer by offering him a commission for $1,000 on behalf of the Koussevitzky Foundation. Bartók, as fastidious as ever, would initially only accept half of that amount because he feared that his precarious health might prevent him from fulfilling Koussevitzky’s request.” PROGRAM 6 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES The commission and an ASCAP-sponsored stay at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake in upstate New York fortified Bartók’s strength enough so that he could work on this new orchestral piece “practically night and day,” as he wrote to Szigeti. Upon its premiere, the Concerto for Orchestra was an instant success. It was accepted immediately into the standard repertory and led to a surge of interest in Bartók’s other works. He died less than a year after this work, the last he completed for orchestra, was first heard, not realizing that he would soon be acclaimed as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. “The title of this symphony-like work is explained by its tendency to treat single instruments or instrument groups in a ‘concertant’ or soloistic manner,” wrote the composer to clarify the appellation of the score. Concerning the overall structure of the Concerto’s five movements, he noted, “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.” The first and last movements, Bartók continued, “are in more or less regular sonata form,” while “the second consists of a chain of independent short sections by wind instruments introduced in five pairs (bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and muted trumpets). A kind of ‘trio’ — a short chorale for brass instruments and snare drum — follows, after which the five sections are recapitulated in a more elaborate instrumentation.... The form of the fourth movement — ‘Interrupted Intermezzo’ — could be rendered by the symbols ‘A B A — interruption — B A.’” The interruption to which Bartók referred is a parody of the German march theme from the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad,” which was in turn a mocking phrase based on a song from Lehár’s The Merry Widow. The Concerto for Orchestra is one of the masterworks of 20th-century music, perhaps “the best orchestral piece of the last twenty-five years,” as Koussevitzky told its composer. It is a brilliant work, both as a technical and musical accomplishment, and it is a glowing testimony to the unquenchable spirit and rugged courage of one of the greatest musical creators of the modern age.
©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 7
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