Program Notes: Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2

CLASSICS 2023/24 BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY EUN SUN KIM, conductor INON BARNATAN, piano Friday, February 9, 2024 at 7:30pm Saturday, February 10, 2024 at 7:30pm Sunday, February 11, 2024 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

DEBUSSY

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

BEETHOVEN

Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19

I. Allegro con brio II. Adagio III. Rondo: molto allegro — INTERMISSION — SIBELIUS

Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43

I. Allegretto II. Andante; ma rubato III. Vivacissimo IV. Finale: Allegro moderato CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 50 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 19 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT! Saturday’s concert is dedicated to Dr. Harold Nelson PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES EUN SUN KIM, conductor Following “a company debut of astonishing vibrancy and assurance” (San Francisco Chronicle) in Rusalka, Korean conductor Eun Sun Kim has been named the Caroline H. Hume Music Director of San Francisco Opera.

Her presence in North America was first established with performances of Verdi’s Requiem with the Cincinnati Symphony and La traviata with Houston Grand Opera, with the latter earning her an appointment as the company’s first Principal Guest Conductor in twenty-five years.

In San Francisco Opera’s centennial season, Ms. Kim leads the world premiere of John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra, as well as productions of La traviata, Madame Butterfly, and Dialogues of the Carmelites. She also conducts SFO’s Opera Ball, Opera in the Park, The Future is Now, and 100th Anniversary concerts. She continues a series of important operatic debuts with La bohème at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and returns to Wiener Staatsoper to conduct that same work.

At the Dutch National Opera she will conduct Verdi´s Messa da Requiem with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in a scenic version.

Ms. Kim has enjoyed recent North American successes at the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Los Angeles Opera, Washington National Opera, and Houston Grand Opera, where The New York Times pronounced her “a major star…with great sensitivity and flexibility.” Her debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was quickly followed by debut engagements with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Toronto Symphony, and Seattle Symphony, and her triumphant return to Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra was hailed by the Business Courier as “impeccable…a dynamic presence, illuminating details of the score with clarity and expressive power.”

In addition to her growing North American presence, Ms. Kim is a regular guest conductor at many important European opera houses. She maintains a particularly close connection with the Staatsoper Berlin, where she has recently conducted successful productions of La traviata, Ariadne auf Naxos, Madama Butterfly, Un ballo in maschera, and Il trovatore. She has appeared consistently at opera houses across Germany, leading productions of Hänsel und Gretel at Bayerische Staatsoper, Madama Butterfly at Staatsoper Stuttgart, Rigoletto at Semperoper Dresden, and a new production of Lucia di Lammermoor at Oper Köln. She has been frequently engaged by Oper Frankfurt, where she celebrated successes with La Sonnambula, The Count of Luxembourg, La bohème, Die Csárdásfürstin, and Der Fliegende Holländer.

Ms. Kim established herself in Scandinavia with a successful debut at the Royal Swedish Opera in Madama Butterfly, returning there to conduct Il barbiere di Siviglia. Her performances of Il trovatore at Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, Carmen in Oslo, and Madama Butterfly and Der Fliegende Holländer in Bergen have been complemented by concert appearances with Gothenburg Symphony and Norwegian Radio Orchestra, as well as orchestras in Malmö, Umeå, and Aarhus.

Ms. Kim’s recent engagements have also included a new production of Die Fledermaus with English National Opera, Carmen at Opernhaus Zürich, Hänsel und Gretel, Carmen, and Die Fledermaus at Volksoper Wien, Il viaggio a Reims at Teatro Real Madrid, La traviata at Opéra de

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES Marseille, and La bohème with Oper Graz. Concert performances comprise appearances with Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre National de France, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, and Stuttgart Philharmonic, as well as orchestras in Madrid, Marseille, Munich, Lille, Nancy, Milan, Palermo, Turin, Milwaukee, Calgary, and Santiago de Compostela.

Ms. Kim studied composition and conducting in her hometown of Seoul, South Korea, before continuing her studies in Stuttgart, where she graduated with distinction. Directly after graduation, she was awarded the First Prize in the International Jesús López Cobos Opera Conducting Competition at the Teatro Real Madrid.

INON BARNATAN, piano “One of the most admired pianists of his generation” (The New York Times), Inon Barnatan has received universal acclaim for his “uncommon sensitivity” (The New Yorker), “impeccable musicality and phrasing” (Le Figaro), and his stature as “a true poet of the keyboard: refined, searching, unfailingly communicative” (The Evening Standard).

As a soloist, Barnatan is a regular performer with many of the world’s foremost orchestras and conductors, and he was the inaugural Artist-inAssociation of the New York Philharmonic. Equally at home as a curator and chamber musician, Barnatan is Music Director of La Jolla Music Society Summerfest in California, one of leading music festivals in the country, and he regularly collaborates with world-class partners such as Renée Fleming and Alisa Weilerstein. His passion for contemporary music has resulted in commissions and performances of many living composers, including premieres of new works by Thomas Adès, Andrew Norman and Matthias Pintscher, among others.

Barnatan’s 2022-23 season highlights include concerto performances in the U.S. with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and others, and internationally with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Auckland Philharmonia, and Philharmonie Zuidnederland.

Barnatan will give solo recitals in London, Kansas City, Aspen and Santa Fe, and play chamber music at festivals through the USA. Barnatan will also tour North America with Les Violons du Roy, performing concertos by CPE Bach and Shostakovich.

A recent addition to Barnatan’s acclaimed discography is a two-volume set of Beethoven’s complete piano concertos, recorded with Alan Gilbert and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields on Pentatone. In its review, BBC Music Magazine wrote “The central strength of this first installment of Inon Barnatan’s piano concertos cycle is that, time and again, it puts you in touch with that feeling of ongoing wonderment.”

Born in Tel Aviv in 1979, Inon Barnatan started playing the piano at the age of three, when his parents discovered his perfect pitch, and made his orchestral debut at eleven. He studied with some of the 20th century’s most illustrious pianists and teachers, including Professor Victor Derevianko, Christopher Elton and Maria Curcio, and the late Leon Fleisher was also an influential teacher and mentor. For more information, visit www.inonbarnatan.com.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un faune” (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”) Claude Debussy was born on August 22, 1862 in St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, and died on March 25, 1918 in Paris. He began his Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” in 1892 and completed the work in the summer of 1894. Gustave Doret conducted the premiere at a concert of the Société Nationale at the Salle d’Harcourt in Paris on December 22, 1894. The score calls for three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, antique cymbals and strings.

Duration is about 10 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece February 2-4, 2018, with Brett Mitchell conducting.

Stéphane Mallarmé was one of those artists in fin-de-siècle Paris who perceived strong relationships among music, literature and the other arts. A number of his poems, including L’Après-midi d’un faune, were not only inspired, he said, by music, but even aspired to its elevated, abstract state. The young composer Claude Debussy had similar feelings about the interaction of poetry and music, and he and Mallarmé became close friends, despite the twenty years difference in their ages. When Mallarmé completed his L’Après-midi d’un faune in 1876 after several years of writing and revising, he envisioned that it would be used as the basis for a theatrical production. Debussy was intrigued at this suggestion, and set about planning to provide music to a choreographic version that would be devised in consultation with Mallarmé, but he completed only the scenario’s first portion, perhaps realizing, as had others, that the poet’s misty symbolism and equivocal language were not innately suited to the theater.

Mallarmé’s poem is deliberately ambiguous in its sensuous, symbolist language; its purpose is as much to suggest a halcyon, dream-like mood as to tell a story. Robert Lawrence described its slight plot, as realized by Debussy, in his Victor Books of Ballets: “Exotically spotted, a satyr is taking his rest on the top of a hillock. As he fondles a bunch of grapes, he sees a group of nymphs passing on the plain below. He wants to join them, but when he approaches, they flee. Only one of them, attracted by the faun, returns timidly. But the nymph changes her mind and runs away. For a moment he gazes after her. Then, snatching a scarf she has dropped in her flight, the faun climbs his hillock and resumes his drowsy position, astride the scarf.” As the inherent eroticism of the plot suggests, the Debussy/Mallarmé faun is no Bambi-like creature, but rather a mythological half-man, half-beast with cloven hooves, horns, tail and furry coat, a being which walks upright and whose chief characteristic is its highly developed libido.

Mallarmé’s poem is filled with the ambiguities symbolized by the faun: is this a man or a beast? is his love physical or fantasy? reality or dream? The delicate subtlety of the poem finds a perfect tonal equivalent in Debussy’s music.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827) Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19 Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770 in Bonn, and died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna. He began his B-flat Concerto in 1794 and completed it early the following year. The composer was soloist in its premiere, on March 29, 1795 in Vienna’s Burgtheater. The score calls for flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons and horns, and strings. Duration is about 28 minutes. The last time the orchestra played this piece was June 1-3, 2007. Jeffrey Kahane conducted and performed on piano .

In November 1792, the 22-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven, full of talent and promise, arrived in Vienna. So undeniable was the genius he had already demonstrated in a sizeable amount of piano music, numerous chamber works, cantatas on the death of Emperor Joseph II and the accession of Leopold II, and the score for a ballet that the Elector of Bonn, his hometown, underwrote the trip to the Habsburg Imperial city, then the musical capital of Europe, to help further the young musician’s career (and the Elector’s prestige). Despite the Elector’s patronage, however, Beethoven’s professional ambitions consumed any thoughts of returning to the provincial city of his birth, and, when his alcoholic father died in December, he severed for good his ties with Bonn in favor of the stimulating artistic atmosphere of Vienna.

The occasion of Beethoven’s first Viennese public appearance was a pair of concerts — “A Grand Musical Academy, with more than 150 participants,” trumpeted the program in Italian and German — on March 29, 1795 at the Burgtheater whose proceeds were to benefit the Widows’ Fund of the Artists’ Society. It is likely that Antonio Salieri, Beethoven’s teacher at the time, had a hand in arranging the affair, since the music of one Antonio Cordellieri, another of his pupils, shared the bill. Beethoven chose for the occasion a piano concerto in B-flat major he had been working on for several months, but which was still incomplete only days before the concert.

In his reminiscences of the composer, Franz Wegeler recalled, “Not until the afternoon of the second day before the concert did he write the rondo, and then while suffering from a pretty severe colic which frequently afflicted him. I relieved him with simple remedies so far as I could.

In the anteroom sat copyists to whom he handed sheet after sheet as soon as they were finished being written.” The work was completed just in time for the performance. It proved to be a fine success (“he gained the unanimous applause of the audience,” reported the Wiener Zeitung), and did much to further Beethoven’s dual reputation as performer and composer. For a concert in Prague three years later, the Concerto was extensively revised, and it is this version that is known today. The original one has vanished.

Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto is a product of the Classical age, not just in date but also in technique, expression and attitude. Still to come were the heaven-storming sublimities of his later works, but he could no more know what form those still-to-be-written works would take than tell the future in any other way. A traditional device — one greatly favored by Mozart — is used to open the Concerto: a forceful fanfare motive immediately balanced by a suave lyrical phrase. These two melodic fragments are spun out at length to produce the orchestral introduction. The piano joins in for a brief transition to the re-presentation of the principal thematic motives, applying brilliant decorative filigree as the movement unfolds. The sweet second theme is sung by the orchestra alone, but the soloist quickly resumes playing to supply commentary on this new melody. An orchestral interlude leads to the development section, based largely on transformations of the principal theme’s lyrical motive. The recapitulation SOUNDINGS 2 0 2 3/ 24

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES proceeds apace, and includes an extended cadenza. (Beethoven composed cadenzas for his first four concertos between 1804 and 1809.) A brief orchestral thought ends the movement.

The touching second movement is less an exercise in rigorous, abstract form than a lengthy song of rich texture and operatic sentiment. The inventive piano figurations surrounding the melody are ample reminder that Beethoven was one of the finest keyboard improvisers of his day, a master of embellishment and piano style.

The finale is a rondo based on a bounding theme announced immediately by the soloist.

Even at that early stage in Beethoven’s career, it is amazing how he was able to extend and manipulate this simple, folk-like tune with seemingly limitless creativity. Though his music was soon to explore unprecedented areas of expression and technique, this Concerto stands at the end of an era, paying its debt to the composer’s great forebears and announcing in conventional terms the arrival of a musician who was soon to change forever the art of music.

@ JEAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957) Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43 Jean Sibelius was born on December 8, 1865 in Hämeenlinna, Finland, and died on September 20, 1957 in Järveenpää, Finland. He began his Second Symphony in Rapallo, Italy in spring 1901 and completed it early the following year in Finland. The composer conducted the work’s premiere, in Helsinki on March 8, 1902. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Duration is about 43 minutes. Bramwell Tovey was the conductor when the orchestra last performed this piece on October 4-6, 2013.

At the turn of the 20th century, Finland was experiencing a surge of nationalistic pride that called for independence and recognition after eight centuries of domination by Sweden and Russia. Jean Sibelius became imbued with the country’s spirit, lore and language, and several of his early works — En Saga, Kullervo, Karelia, Finlandia — earned him a hero’s reputation among his countrymen. Sibelius became an emblem of his homeland in 1900 when conductor Robert Kajanus and the Helsinki Philharmonic featured his music on a European tour whose purpose was less artistic recognition than a bid for international sympathy for Finnish political autonomy.

The young composer went along on the tour, which proved to be a success for the orchestra and its conductor, for Finland, and especially for Sibelius, whose works it brought before an international audience.

A year later Sibelius was again traveling. Through a financial subscription raised by Axel Carpelan, he was able to spend the early months of 1901 in Italy away from the rigors of the Scandinavian winter. So inspired was he by the culture, history and beauty of the sunny south (as had been Goethe and Brahms) that he envisioned a work based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

However, a second symphony to follow the First of 1899 was gestating, and the Dante work was eventually abandoned. Sibelius was well launched on the new Second Symphony by the time he left for home. He made two important stops before returning to Finland. The first was at Prague, PROGRAM VI

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES where he met Dvořák and was impressed with the famous musician’s humility and friendliness.

The second stop was at the June Music Festival in Heidelberg, where the enthusiastic reception given to his compositions enhanced the budding European reputation that he had achieved during the Helsinki Philharmonic tour of the preceding year. Still flush with the success of his 1901 tour when he arrived home, he decided he was secure enough financially (thanks in large part to an annual stipend initiated in 1897 by the Finnish government) to leave his teaching job and devote himself full-time to composition. Though it was to be almost two decades before Finland became independent of Russia as a result of the First World War, Sibelius had come into his creative maturity by the time of the Second Symphony. So successful was the work’s premiere on March 8, 1902 that it had to be repeated at three successive concerts in a short time to satisfy the clamor for further performances.

The Second Symphony opens with an introduction in which the strings present a chordal motive that courses through and unifies much of the first movement. A bright, folk-like strain for the woodwinds and a hymnal response from the horns constitute the opening theme. The second theme exhibits one of Sibelius’ most characteristic constructions — a long-held note that intensifies to a quick rhythmic flourish. This theme and a complementary one of angular leaps and unsettled tonality close the exposition and figure prominently in the ensuing development.

A stentorian brass chorale closes this section and leads to the recapitulation, a compressed restatement of the earlier themes.

The second movement, though closely related to sonatina form (sonata without development), is best heard as a series of dramatic paragraphs whose strengths lie not just in their individual qualities but also in their powerful juxtapositions. The opening statement is given by bassoons in hollow octaves above a bleak accompaniment of timpani with cellos and basses in pizzicato notes. The upper strings and then full orchestra take over the solemn plaint, but soon inject a new, sharply rhythmic idea of their own that calls forth a halting climax from the brass choir. After a silence, the strings intone a mournful motive which soon engenders another climax. A soft timpani roll begins the series of themes again, but in expanded presentations with fuller orchestration and greater emotional impact.

The third movement is a three-part form whose lyrical, unhurried central trio, built on a repeated note theme, provides a strong contrast to the mercurial surrounding scherzo. The slow music of the trio returns as a bridge to the sonata-form closing movement, which has a grand sweep and uplifting spirituality that make it one of the last unadulterated flowerings of the great Romantic tradition. ©2023 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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