Program Notes: Beethoven Emperor

CLASSICS 2022/23

BEETHOVEN’S EMPEROR CONCERTO

TEDDY ABRAMS, conductor STEWART GOODYEAR, piano

Friday, February 24, 2023 at 7:30pm

Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 7:30pm

Sunday, February 26, 2023 at 1:00pm

Boettcher Concert Hall

PERKINSON Worship: A Concert Overture

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, “Emperor”

I. Allegro

II. Adagio un poco mosso

III. Rondo: Allegro

— INTERMISSION —

PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100

I. Andante

II. Allegro marcato

III. Adagio

IV. Allegro giocoso

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 50 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION

FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 7 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT!

Friday’s concert is dedicated to dr david H. Wagner

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

TEDDY ABRAMS, conductor

Named Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year, Teddy Abrams is the widely acclaimed Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra. In his ninth season as Music Director, Teddy launches the Orchestra’s groundbreaking Creators Corps–a fully-funded residency for three composers–and the Orchestra goes on tour across Kentucky in a first-of-its-kind multiyear funding commitment from the Kentucky State Legislature.

Abrams’s rap-opera, The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, premiered in 2017, celebrating Louisville’s hometown hero with an all-star cast that included Rhiannon Giddens and Jubilant Sykes, as well as Jecorey “1200” Arthur, with whom he started the Louisville Orchestra Rap School. Abrams’s work with the Louisville Orchestra has been profiled on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, PBS’ Articulate, and the PBS NewsHour.

Highlights of the 2022-2023 season include guest conducting engagements with the Cincinnati, Kansas City, Utah, Colorado, and Pacific Symphonies, a return to conduct the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, and his debut with the Tiroler Symphonieorchester Innsbruck.

Abrams has been Music Director and Conductor of the Britt Festival Orchestra since 2013, where, in addition to an annual three-week festival of concerts, he has taken the orchestra across the region in the creation of new work—including Michael Gordon’s Natural History, which was premiered on the edge of Crater Lake National Park in partnership with the National Parks Service, and was the subject of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature; and Pulitzer Prize-winning-composer Caroline Shaw’s Brush, an experiential work written to be performed in Summer 2021on the Jacksonville Woodlands Trail system.

Abrams recently collaborated with Jim James, vocalist and guitarist for My Morning Jacket, on the song cycle The Order of Nature, which they premiered with the Louisville Orchestra in 2018 and recorded on Decca Gold. They performed the work with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in 2019.In addition to The Order of Nature, Teddy and the Louisville Orchestra recorded All In in 2017 with vocalist Storm Large. Most recently, he released Space Variations, a collection of three new compositions for Universal Music Group’s 2022 World Sleep Day

As a guest conductor, Abrams has worked with such distinguished ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Chicago, San Francisco, National, Houston, Pacific, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Vancouver, Colorado, Utah, and Phoenix Symphonies; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and the Sarasota and Florida Orchestras. Internationally, he has worked with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, and the Malaysian Philharmonic. He served as Assistant Conductor of the Detroit Symphony from 2012-2014. From 2008 to 2011, Abrams was the Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of the New World Symphony.

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

STEWART GOODYEAR, piano

Proclaimed “a phenomenon” by the Los Angeles Times and “one of the best pianists of his generation” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stewart Goodyear is an accomplished concert pianist, improviser and composer. Mr. Goodyear has performed with, and has been commissioned by, many of the major orchestras and chamber music organizations around the world.

Mr. Goodyear’s discography includes the complete sonatas and piano concertos of Beethoven, as well as concertos by Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Rachmaninov, an album of Ravel piano works, and an album, entitled “For Glenn Gould”, which combines repertoire from Mr. Gould’s US and Montreal debuts. His Rachmaninov recording received a Juno nomination for Best Classical Album for Soloist and Large Ensemble Accompaniment. Mr. Goodyear’s recording of his own transcription of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker (Complete Ballet)”, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best classical music recordings of 2015. His discography is released on the Marquis Classics, Orchid Classics, Steinway and Sons, and the Bright Shiny Things labels.

Highlights of the 2021-22 season included his Boston debut at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, return engagements at the 92nd Street Y (recital), Chamber Music Society of Detroit, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Vancouver and Indianapolis Symphonies, and his debut with the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, DC). This summer, he will be performing at the Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and return to the Seattle Chamber Music Festival where his Octet for winds and strings will have its world premiere.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR PERKINSON (1932-2004)

Worship: A Concert Overture

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born on June 14, 1932 in New York City, and died on March 9, 2004 in Chicago. Worship was composed in 2001. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 6 minutes. This is the Colorado Symphony premiere performance of this piece.

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born in 1932 into a musical family in New York City — his mother was a professional pianist, organist and director of a local theater — and he seemed destined to musical prominence by his very name, given in honor of the London-born composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), the son of a white English woman and a physician from Sierra Leone, who became a cultural hero to American audiences. (New York orchestral players described him as the “black Mahler” on his visit to that city in 1910.) Perkinson early demonstrated musical gifts, and he was admitted to New York’s prestigious High School of Music and Art in 1945; his mentor there, Hugh Ross, once introduced him to Igor Stravinsky. Perkinson began composing while still a teenager, and he received the LaGuardia Prize from the school for his choral work And Behold upon his graduation in 1949. He entered New York University as an education major in 1949, but transferred to the Manhattan School of Music two years later to study composition with Charles Mills and Vittorio Giannini and conducting with Jonel Perlea; he received his baccalaureate in 1953 and his master’s degree the following year.

The life-long influence of jazz on Perkinson’s musical personality was nurtured at Manhattan by his classmates Julius Watkins, Herbie Mann, Donald Byrd and Max Roach — in 1964-1965 he played piano in the Max Roach Quartet and at various times served as arranger and music director for such eminent popular artists as Marvin Gaye, Lou Rawls, Barbara McNair, Melvin Van Peebles and Harry Belafonte. Perkinson took further advanced training in conducting at the Berkshire Music Center (1954), Netherlands Radio Union in Hilversum (1960-1963), Mozarteum in Salzburg (1960) and privately with Dimitri Mitropoulos, Lovro von Matačić, Franco Ferrara and Dean Dixon, and in composition with Earl Kim at Princeton University (1959-1962). He went on to teach at Brooklyn College and Indiana University, hold conducting positions with the Dessoff Choirs and Brooklyn Community Symphony Orchestra, serve as music director for Jerome Robbins’ American Theater Lab, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, and co-found the Symphony of the New World, the first integrated symphony orchestra in the United States, and serve as both its Associate Conductor (1965-1970) and Music Director (1972-1973). In 1998, Perkinson was appointed Artistic Director of the Performance Program at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. At the time of his death, in 2004, Perkinson was also serving as Composer-in-Residence for the Ritz Chamber Players of Jacksonville, Florida.

Perkinson’s Worship: A Concert Overture is a well-crafted, two-part orchestral fantasia based on the Doxology, one of Christianity’s best-loved hymns — Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. The familiar hymn tune is not heard complete and intact anywhere in the piece, though its phrasing and melodic leadings are embedded in the texture throughout, just a handful of notes at first in the moderately paced opening section, but becoming more evident in the faster music that follows, notably in a powerful statement by the low brass shortly before the end.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, “Emperor”

Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770 in Bonn, and died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna. The “Emperor” Concerto was composed in 1809, and premiered on November 11, 1811 in Leipzig, conducted by Johann Philipp Schulz with Friedrich Schneider as soloist. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Duration is about 38 minutes. The Orchestra last performed this piece March 16-18, 2018 with conductor Andrew Litton and pianist Zhang Zou.

The year 1809 was a difficult one for Vienna and for Beethoven. In May, Napoleon invaded the city with enough firepower to send the residents scurrying and Beethoven into the basement of his brother’s house. The bombardment was close enough that he covered his sensitive ears with pillows to protect them from the concussion of the blasts. On July 29th, he wrote to the publisher Breitkopf und Härtel, “We have passed through a great deal of misery. I tell you that since May 4th, I have brought into the world little that is connected; only here and there a fragment. The whole course of events has affected me body and soul.... What a disturbing, wild life around me; nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of all sorts.” He bellowed his frustration at a French officer he chanced to meet: “If I were a general and knew as much about strategy as I do about counterpoint, I’d give you fellows something to think about.” Austria’s finances were in shambles, and the annual stipend Beethoven had been promised by several noblemen who supported his work was considerably reduced in value, placing him in a precarious pecuniary predicament. As a sturdy tree can root in flinty soil, however, a great musical work grew from these unpromising circumstances — by the end of that very year, 1809, Beethoven had completed his “Emperor” Concerto.

The sobriquet “Emperor” attached itself to the E-flat Concerto very early, though it was not of Beethoven’s doing. If anything, he would have objected to the name. “Emperor” equaled “Napoleon” for Beethoven, as for most Europeans of the time, and anyone familiar with the story of the “Eroica” Symphony will remember how that particular ruler had tumbled from the great composer’s esteem. “This man will trample the rights of men underfoot and become a greater tyrant than any other,” he rumbled to his young friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries. The Concerto’s name may have been tacked on by an early publisher or pianist because of the grand character of the work, or it may have originated with the purported exclamation during the premiere by a French officer at one particularly noble passage, “C’est l’Empereur!” The most likely explanation, however, was given by Anton Schindler, long-time friend and early biographer of Beethoven. The Viennese premiere, it seems, took place at a celebration of the Emperor’s birthday.

The Concerto opens with broad chords for orchestra answered by piano before the main theme is announced by the violins. The following orchestral tutti embraces a rich variety of secondary themes leading to a repeat of all the material by the piano accompanied by the orchestra. A development ensues with “the fury of a hail-storm,” wrote Sir Donald Tovey. Following a recapitulation of the themes and the sounding of a proper chord on which to launch a cadenza, Beethoven wrote into the piano part, “Do not play a cadenza, but begin immediately what follows.” At this point, he supplied a tiny, written-out solo passage that begins the coda. This being the first of his concertos that Beethoven himself would not play, he wanted to have more control over the

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

finished product, so he prescribed exactly what the soloist was to do. With this novel device, he initiated the practice of completely writing out all solo passages that was to become the standard method used by most later composers in their concertos.

The second movement begins with a chorale for strings. Sir George Grove dubbed this movement a sequence of “quasi-variations,” with the piano providing a coruscating filigree above the orchestral accompaniment. This Adagio leads directly into the finale, a vast rondo with sonata elements. The bounding ascent of the main theme is heard first from the soloist and then from the orchestra. Developmental episodes separate the returns of the theme. The closing pages include the magical sound of drum-taps accompanying the shimmering piano chords and scales, and a final brief romp to the finish.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100

Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Russia, and died on March 5, 1953 in Moscow. The Fifth Symphony was composed in 1944 and premiered on January 12, 1945 in Moscow, conducted by the composer. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, harp and strings. Duration is about 46 minutes. The last performance of this piece by the Orchestra was November 17-19, 2017, conducted by Andrew Litton.

“In the Fifth Symphony I wanted to sing the praises of the free and happy man — his strength, his generosity and the purity of his soul. I cannot say I chose this theme; it was born in me and had to express itself.” The “man” that Prokofiev invoked in this description of the philosophy embodied in this great Symphony could well have been the composer himself. The work was written in the summer of 1944, one of the happiest times he knew. His home life following marriage to his second wife four years earlier was contented and fulfilling; he was the most famous and oftenperformed of all Soviet composers; and Russia was winning World War II. In fact, the success of the premiere of this work was buoyed by the announcement immediately before the concert that the Russian army had just scored a resounding victory on the River Vistula. The composer’s mind was reflected in the fluency and emotional depth of his music.

Prokofiev never hinted that there was a program underlying the Fifth Symphony except to say that “it is a symphony about the spirit of man.” During the difficult years of the war, Soviet music, according to Boris Schwartz, “was meant to console and uplift, to encourage and exhort; nothing else mattered.” Though some, like Martin Bookspan, find “ominous threats of brutal warfare” lurking beneath the surface of Prokofiev’s music, there is really nothing here to match such symphonies born of the violence of war as Shostakovich’s Seventh and Vaughan Williams’ Fourth. Rather it is a work that reflects the composer’s philosophy after he returned to Russia in the 1930s from many years of living in western Europe and America. In his 1946 autobiographical sketch, he wrote, “It is the duty of the composer, like the poet, the sculptor or the painter, to serve his fellow men, to beautify human life and point the way to a radiant future. Such is the immutable code of art as I see it.”

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

The Symphony’s opening movement is a large sonata form in moderate tempo that begins without introduction. The wide-ranging main theme is presented simply by flute and bassoon before being taken up by the strings; flute and oboe sing the lyrical second theme. Two brief motives close the exposition. One, characterized by its dotted rhythms, arrives on the crest of the movement’s first climax; the other is an angular, skittish fragment tossed off by high woodwinds, violins and cellos. The development gives prominence in its first portion to the opening theme and the skittish motive from the end of the exposition; it later focuses on the second theme and the arch-shaped complementary melody. The recapitulation is heralded by the stentorian sounds of the brass choir announcing the main theme.

The second-movement scherzo is one of those pieces Prokofiev would have classified as “motoric”: an incessant two-note rhythmic motive drives the music through its entire first section. The movement’s central section is framed by a bold, strutting phrase from the woodwinds adorned with the piquant “wrong notes” that spice so much of Prokofiev’s quick music.

The brooding third movement is in a large three-part design. The outer sections are supported by the deliberate rhythmic tread of the low instruments used as underpinning for a plaintive melody initiated by the clarinets. A sweeping theme begun by the tuba serves as the basis for the middle section.

The finale opens with a short introduction comprising two gestures based on the main theme of the first movement: a short woodwind phrase answered by the strings and a chorale for cellos. The main body of the movement is a sonata-rondo structure propelled by an insistent rhythmic motive. The movement accumulates a large amount of thematic material as it progresses, though it is the solo clarinet playing the main theme which begins each of the important structural sections of the form. A furious, energetic coda ignites several of the movement’s themes into a grand closing blaze of orchestral color.

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda