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MASTERWORKS • 2016-2017 OPENING WEEKEND: BRAHMS PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 CONDUCTED BY ANDREW LITTON COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor JON KIMURA PARKER, piano This Weekend’s Concerts Are Gratefully Dedicated To Mary Rossick Kern And Jerome H. Kern Friday’s Concert Is Gratefully Dedicated To Col. Philip Beaver And Mrs. Kim Beaver
Friday, September 16, 2016 at 7:30pm Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 7:30pm Boettcher Concert Hall
BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83 Allegro non troppo Allegro appassionato Andante Allegretto grazioso
— INTERMISSION —
STRAUSS
Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1
MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES
JEFF WHEELER
ANDREW LITTON, conductor Andrew Litton is Music Director of the New York City Ballet, and Artistic Advisor and Principal Guest Conductor of the Colorado Symphony. He recently ended his twelve year tenure as Music Director of Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic. Under Litton’s leadership, the Bergen Philharmonic gained international recognition through extensive touring, making debuts at London’s BBC Proms, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and appearances at Vienna’s Musikverein, Berlin’s Philharmonie, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. They recorded 25 CD records for Sweden’s BIS and Britain’s Hyperion labels. In acknowledgment of Litton’s service to the cultural life of Norway, Norway’s King Harald knighted Litton with the Royal Order of Merit. Now Bergen Philharmonic Music Director Laureate and Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth Symphony, he carries on as Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest, a post he has held since 2003. He guest conducts the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies, and has a discography of almost 130 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy,™ France’s Diapason d’Or, and many other honors. Litton was Principal Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony from 1988-1994. A Music Director of the Dallas Symphony from 1994-2006, he hired over one third of the players, led the orchestra on three major European tours, appeared four times at Carnegie Hall, created a children’s television series broadcast nationally and in widespread use in school curricula, produced 28 recordings, and helped raise the orchestra’s endowment from $19 million to $100 million. He has conducted the Colorado Symphony both as Music Director and Artistic Advisor since 2012. An accomplished pianist, Litton often conducts from the keyboard and enjoys performing chamber music with his orchestra colleagues. Passionate about jazz, and long an admirer of the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, Litton recorded his first solo piano album, A Tribute to Oscar Peterson, released in 2014.
PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES
TARA McMULLEN
JON KIMURA PARKER, piano Known for his passionate artistry and engaging stage presence, pianist Jon Kimura Parker’s brilliant and versatile career has taken him from Carnegie Hall and Berlin’s Philharmonie to the Beijing Concert Hall and the Sydney Opera House. This season, Mr. Parker performs as concerto soloist with the Ann Arbor, Colorado, Sioux Falls, Pittsburgh, and National symphonies, as well as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In Canada, he will appear with the Toronto and Vancouver symphonies, and the National Arts Centre Orchestra. In October, Mr. Parker is appearing at Carnegie Hall with the Rice University Orchestra, playing Prokofiev Concerto No. 3. He continues to give recitals throughout North America and chamber music concerts with the Montrose Trio, featuring violinist Martin Beaver and cellist Clive Greensmith. A committed educator, Jon Kimura Parker is Professor of Piano at The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Mr. Parker is also Artistic Advisor of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, where he has given world premieres of new works by Peter Schickele and Jake Heggie. Jon Kimura Parker has recorded for Telarc and CBC, and on his own label. His new CD Fantasy features Fantasies of Schubert and Schumann, as well as the sensational Wizard of Oz Fantasy by William Hirtz, receiving this praise from Classical Candor: “The reading is riveting. Parker scores with another favorite recording of the year.” “Jackie” Parker studied with Edward Parker, Keiko Parker, Lee Kum-Sing, Robin Wood, Marek Jablonski, and Adele Marcus. He won the Gold Medal at the 1984 Leeds International Piano Competition. He lives in Houston with his wife, violinist Aloysia Friedmann, and their daughter Sophie. For further information, please see www.jonkimuraparker.com.
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 3
introducing...
BRETT MITCHELL, recently appointed Music Director Designate for the Colorado Symphony! Get to know the Colorado Symphony’s Music Director Designate Brett Mitchell when he appears on the podium for 5 concerts during the 2016/17 Season! See all the concerts and subscribe to this package today at the Box Office or buy now at coloradosymphony.org!
Photo: Roger Mastroianni
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897): Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83 Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833, in Hamburg and died on April 3, 1897, in Vienna. He composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 between late spring 1878 and July 1881. Brahms was soloist at the premiere on November 9, 1881, at the Redoutensaal in Budapest; Alexander Erkel conducted the Orchestra of the National Theater. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 46 minutes. Last performance by the Colorado Symphony was on September 28, 29, and 30, 2012, with André Watts as the soloist and Gilbert Varga on the podium. In April 1878, Brahms journeyed to Goethe’s “land where the lemon trees bloom” with two friends, the Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth and the composer Carl Goldmark. Though he found the music of Italy ghastly (he complained of hearing one opera that consisted wholly of final cadences), he loved the cathedrals, the sculptures, the artworks, and, especially, the countryside. Spring was just turning into summer during his visit, and he wrote to his dear friend Clara Schumann, “You can have no conception of how beautiful it is here.” Still under the spell of the beneficent Italian climate, Brahms sketched themes for his Second Piano Concerto on his return to Austria on the eve of his 45th birthday. Other matters pressed, however, and the Concerto was put aside. Three years later, during the spring of 1881, Brahms returned to Italy and he was inspired by this return visit to resume composition on the Concerto. The score was completed by July. Whether or not the halcyon influence of Italy can be detected in the wondrous music of the B-flat Concerto is for each listener to decide. This work is certainly much more mellow than the stormy First Concerto, introduced over twenty years earlier, but whether that quality is the result of Brahms’ trips to the sunny south, a decade of imbibing Viennese Gemütlichkeit, or simply of greater maturity remains a matter for speculation. The Concerto opens with a sylvan horn call answered by sweeping arpeggios from the piano. These initial gestures are introductory to the sonata form proper, which begins with the robust entry of the full orchestra. A number of themes are presented in the exposition; most are lyrical, but one is vigorously rhythmic. The development uses all of the thematic material, with one section welded almost seamlessly to the next, a characteristic of all Brahms’ greatest works. The recapitulation is ushered in by the solo horn, here given a richer orchestral accompaniment than on its earlier appearance. It is rare for a concerto to have more than three movements. The second movement, a scherzo, was added by Brahms to expand the structure of this Concerto to a symphonic four movements. The composer’s biographer Max Kalbeck thought that the movement had originally been intended for the Violin Concerto but that Brahms, on the advice of Joseph Joachim, for whom the piece was written, had eliminated it from that work. In key and mood, it differs from the other movements of the Second Concerto to provide a welcome contrast in the composition’s overall architecture. The third movement is a touching nocturne based on the song of the solo cello heard immediately at the beginning. (Brahms later fitted this same melody with words as the song Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer [“My Sleep Grows Ever More Peaceful”].) An agitated central section gives way to long, magical phrases for the clarinets that lead to a return of the solo cello’s lovely theme. The finale fuses rondo and sonata elements in a style strongly reminiscent of Hungarian Gypsy music. The jaunty rondo theme, presented without introduction, is carefully and thoroughly SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES examined before two lyrical motives are presented. As a study in the way in which small musical fragments may be woven into an exquisite whole, this rousing movement is unexcelled.
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949): Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra), Op. 30 Richard Strauss was born on June 11, 1864, in Munich and died on September 8, 1949, in GarmischPartenkirchen, Germany. He composed Also sprach Zarathustra between February 4 and August 24, 1896, while serving as principal conductor of the Royal Bavarian Opera in Munich. He led the premiere in Frankfurt on November 27, 1896, with the Orchestra of the Museum Concerts. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), piccolo, three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two bass tubas, timpani, percussion, organ, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes. The piece was last performed by the orchestra on September 23 & 24, 2011, with Yan Pascal Tortelier conducting. Back in the days when Richard Strauss was considered The World’s Greatest Composer, two popular literary sports grew up around his works. The first was played by those critics who could fire off pot-shots at this amazing new music from behind the safety of their journalistic mastheads. To many of that outspoken clan, Strauss’ tone poems were “musical obscenity,” “utterly unlovable,” “a blood-curdling nightmare,” “monstrosity,” or “unhealthy.” In Nicolas Slonimsky’s amazing anthology of critical gaffs, the Lexicon of Musical Invective, only Schoenberg and Wagner won larger chapters. This game was played with particular ardor by the Americans, who may have been displaying some vestiges of that old Puritanical belief, “Anything this voluptuous and sensuous must be sinful.” Those critics were wrong (a not uncommon phenomenon), and Strauss’ thrilling orchestral works continue to enjoy an especially prominent place in the concert repertory and in the affections of listeners. The second musico-literary game involved devising plots or stories or programs to fit Strauss’ music. Strauss was always chary with verbal information about the “meaning” of his tone poems, and, since he did not discourage others from having a go at it, a whole barrage of possible “explanations” greeted each new work. Also sprach Zarathustra, deriving in some manner, at least, from the universal vision of Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem (left incomplete at his removal to a mental hospital in 1889), was an especially inviting target for these hurlers of literary tracts. The composer approved almost all of the efforts that came along (they were, after all, good publicity, and Strauss—and his very large income—thrived on publicity), so the latterday reader is left with a bundle of often contradictory evidence. The truth of the matter seems to be that Strauss’ music and Nietzsche’s poem actually share little more than a title and a few pretentious ideas. Virtually every attempt to equate a section of the tone poem with a specific passage from the poem has been unconvincing. Some of the music even goes against the meaning of the text. The Of the Inhabitants of the Unseen World section deals in Nietzsche’s work with his belief in the folly of religion. Strauss’ comparable music, originally titled Of the Divine, which includes a quotation of a Credo from the old Gregorian liturgy, is marked “with devotion,” and exhibits a prayerful mood. Strauss’ Dance-Song is not some Beethovenian vision of Valhallian gods hymning the beauties of life, but merely a lilting Viennese waltz. The sensuality of Strauss’ interpretation of Joys and Passions has nothing to do with the self-abnegation professed by the poet in his book. In sum, Strauss’ work exists as a work of music and not as a piece of philosophy. PROGRAM 6 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES The key to understanding Also sprach Zarathustra was given by Strauss himself in a letter to his friend Otto Florscheim at the time of the work’s Berlin premiere. “I did not intend to write philosophical music or to portray in music Nietzsche’s great work,” he wrote. “I meant to convey by means of music an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of its development, religious and scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman. The whole symphonic poem is intended as my homage to Nietzsche’s genius, which found its greatest exemplification in his book Thus spake Zarathustra.” These duties are, in themselves, more than enough to ask of any piece of music. To go further and “attempt to reveal [in sound] a specific philosophical system or detailed philosophical teaching,” wrote George R. Marek, “must end in failure.” Against this background, it seems probable that Nietzsche’s book was little more than the source of generating in Strauss what he called “a poetical idea,” a literary hook upon which to hang a piece of music. In his exhaustive biography of the composer, Norman Del Mar brought out the most important point in this entire matter: “Ultimately it is the sheer quality of the musical material and its organization which counts, while the greater or lesser degree to which it succeeds in the misty philosophizing which conjured it into being is wholly immaterial.” Though its philosophical intentions are correctly questioned, there has never been any doubt about the expressive powers of this music. (It was the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra that inspired the young Béla Bartók to devote his life to composition.) The sections of Strauss’ tone poem mirror several strong emotional states, as indicated by the following program note that appeared at the work’s premiere, conducted by the composer in Frankfurt on November 27, 1896. “First movement: Sunrise, Man feels the power of God. Andante religioso. But still man longs. He plunges into passion (second movement) and finds no peace. He turns toward science, and tries in vain to solve life’s problems in a fugue (third movement). Then agreeable dance tunes sound and he becomes an individual, and his soul soars upward while the world sinks far below him.” There is a progression inherent in the work, a sort of a-religious Pilgrim’s Progress, toward some transcendent state. One German writer, Rudolf Kloiber, viewed Also sprach Zarathustra as “a colorfully formed music-drama without words.... Strauss chose from the poem the speeches of Zarathustra to create a kind of scenario for the content and form of the work.” There are three overtly programmatic elements that unify the work. The first is heard immediately at the outset. It is the theme of Nature, the unison call by four trumpets based on the most fundamental acoustical pitches in the musical spectrum: C–G–C (inextricably wedged in the public consciousness by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). The second is a sinister theme, perhaps depicting Fate, introduced by the trombones in the section Of Joys and Passions. The third is the conflict between the C tonality—representing Nature—and that of B, the latter standing for Man’s aspirations. The unsettled struggle between these two (the technical term is bi-tonality) is most clearly discerned at the very end of the work, but it occurs many times throughout the piece. Of the Strauss tone poems, Lawrence Gilman wrote, “[He] taught his generation a new approach to making instrumental music articulate and significant. He showed them how to deal with it in two seemingly contradictory ways: how to expand and how to concentrate it. He applied to it an immensely widened range of human experience. He seemed to touch life with generous daring, and at every side—at its loveliest and noblest, at its most disordered, pitiable, and grotesque. He had learned how to convey experience still drenched in its essential colors, pungent with its veritable odors, rich with all its implications.” ©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 7
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