CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 50 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
Friday’s concert is sponsored by UcHealtH’s ready set co cHallenge
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
ROBERT SPANO, conductor
Robert Spano, conductor, pianist, composer, and teacher, is known worldwide for the intensity of his artistry and distinctive communicative abilities, creating a sense of inclusion and warmth among musicians and audiences that is unique among American orchestras. After twenty seasons as Music Director, he continues his association with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as Music Director Laureate. An avid mentor to rising artists, he is responsible for nurturing the careers of numerous celebrated composers, conductors, and performers. As Music Director of the Aspen Music Festival and School since 2011, he oversees the programming of more than 300 events and educational programs for 630 students and young performers. Principal Guest Conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra since 2019, Spano began his tenure as Music Director in August 2022, and will continue there through the 2027-2028 season. He is the tenth Music Director in the orchestra’s history, which was founded in 1912. In January 2024, Spano was appointed Principal Conductor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra & Music School. In February 2024, Spano was appointed Music Director of the Washington National Opera, beginning in the 2025–2026 season, for a three-year term; he is currently the WNO’s Music Director Designate.
During the 2023-2024 season, Spano leads the Fort Worth Symphony symphonic and chamber music programs, as well as a gala concert with Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfry, in addition to overseeing the orchestra and music staff and shaping the artistic direction of the orchestra and driving its continued growth. Additional engagements this season include the Atlanta and New Jersey Symphonies, Denver, Naples, and Rhode Island Philharmonics, multiple weeks at Curtis and Rice University, and a recital in Napa with Kelley O’Connor.
Spano made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2019, leading the US premiere of Marnie by American composer Nico Muhly. Recent concert highlights have included several world premiere performances, including Voy a Dormir by Bryce Dessner at Carnegie Hall with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor; George Tsontakis’s Violin Concerto No. 3 with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
With a discography of critically-acclaimed recordings for Telarc, Deutsche Grammophon, and ASO Media, Robert Spano has garnered four Grammy™ Awards and eight nominations with the Atlanta Symphony. Spano is on faculty at Oberlin Conservatory and has received honorary doctorates from Bowling Green State University, the Curtis Institute of Music, Emory University, and Oberlin. Maestro Spano is a recipient of the Georgia Governor’s Award For The Arts And Humanities and is one of two classical musicians inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
SIR STEPHEN HOUGH, piano
Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career of a concert pianist with those of a composer and writer. In recognition of his contribution to cultural life, he became the first classical performer to be given a MacArthur Fellowship, and was awarded a Knighthood for Services to Music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2022.
In a career spanning over 40 years, Stephen Hough has played regularly with most of the world’s leading orchestras, including televised and filmed appearances with the Berlin, London, China, Seoul and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Concertgebouw, Budapest Festival and the NHK Symphony Orchestras. He has been a regular guest of recital series and festivals including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, London’s Royal Festival Hall, Salzburg, Verbier, La Roque-d’Anthéron, Aspen, Tanglewood, Aldeburgh and Edinburgh.
He begins his 2024/25 concert season with his 30th appearance at the BBC Proms, performing at Last Night of the Proms to a live audience of 6,000 and televised audience of 3.5 million. Over the course of the following 12 months Hough performs over 80 concerts on four continents, opening Philharmonia Orchestra’s season at the Royal Festival Hall, performing a solo recital at Barbican Centre and giving the world premiere of his Willa Cather-inspired Piano Quintet at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. Following the 2023 world premiere of his own Piano Concerto (The World of Yesterday), named after Stefan Zweig’s memoir, Hough brings the work to Adelaide, Bournemouth, Oregon, Singapore and Vermont Symphony Orchestras.
Hough’s discography of 70 recordings has garnered awards including the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, several Grammy nominations, and eight Gramophone Awards including Record of the Year and the Gold Disc. For Hyperion he has recorded the complete piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky as well as celebrated solo recordings of the Final Piano Pieces of Brahms, Chopin’s complete nocturnes, waltzes, ballades and scherzi, as well as recitals of Schumann, Schubert, Franck, Debussy and Mompou. Upcoming releases include a Liszt Album, a recital of encores, including arrangements made for Lang Lang’s Disney project, and Hough’s own Piano Concerto.
As a composer, Hough’s Fanfare Toccata was commissioned for the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and performed by all 30 competitors. His 2021 String Quartet No.1 Les Six Rencontres, was written for and recorded by the Takács Quartet for Hyperion Records. Hough’s body of songs, choral and instrumental works have been commissioned by Musée du Louvre, National Gallery of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, the Wigmore Hall, the Genesis Foundation, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, BBC Sounds, and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. His music is published by Josef Weinberger Ltd.
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
As an author, Hough’s memoir Enough: Scenes from Childhood, was published by Faber & Faber in Spring 2023. It follows his 2019 collection of essays Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More which received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and was named one of the Financial Times’ Books of the Year. His novel The Final Retreat was published in 2018 (Sylph Editions). He has also written for The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and the Evening Standard.
A resident of London, Hough is an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple, an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, an Honorary Fellow of Cambridge University’s Girton College, and holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester. He is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School in New York.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Suite from Mother Goose
Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France, and died on December 28, 1937 in Paris. Mother Goose was originally composed in 1908 and 1910 as a suite of five pieces for piano four-hands and first heard publicly on April 20, 1910 at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, performed by the child pianists Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony. In 1911, Ravel orchestrated and expanded this piano suite into a ballet, which was premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Arts on January 28, 1912; Gabriel Grovlez conducted. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, two horns, timpani, percussion, “Jeu de timbres” (keyed glockenspiel), celesta, harp and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes. The piece was last performed in full by the orchestra on November 16-18, 1990, with James DePriest conducting.
“I would settle down on his lap, and tirelessly he would begin, ‘Once upon a time ...’ It was Beauty and the Beast and The Ugly Empress of the Pagodas, and, above all, the adventures of a little mouse he invented for me.” So Mimi Godebski reminisced in later years about the visits of Maurice Ravel to her family’s home during her childhood. Ravel, a contented bachelor, enjoyed these visits to the Godebskis, and took special delight in playing with the young children — cutting out paper dolls, telling stories, romping around on all fours. Young Mimi and her brother Jean were in the first stages of piano tutelage in 1908, and Ravel decided to encourage their studies by composing some little pieces for them portraying Sleeping Beauty, Hop o’ My Thumb, Empress of the Pagodas and Beauty and the Beast. To these he added an evocation of The Fairy Garden as a postlude. In 1911, he made a ravishing orchestral transcription of the original five pieces, added to them a prelude, an opening scene and connecting interludes, and produced a ballet with a scenario based on Sleeping Beauty for the Théâtre des Arts in Paris.
The Mother Goose Suite comprises the five orchestrated movements of Ravel’s original piano version. The tiny Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty, only twenty measures long, depicts the Good Fairy, who watches over the Princess during her somnolence. Hop o’ My Thumb treats the old legend taken from Perrault’s anthology of 1697. “A boy believed,” Ravel noted of the
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tale, “that he could easily find his path by means of the bread crumbs which he had scattered wherever he passed; but he was very much surprised when he could not find a single crumb: the birds had come and eaten everything up.” Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas portrays a young girl cursed with ugliness by a wicked fairy. The tale, however, has a happy ending in which the Empress’ beauty is restored. In the Conversations of Beauty and the Beast, the high woodwinds sing the delicate words of the Beauty, while the Beast is portrayed by the lumbering contrabassoon. At first the two converse, politely taking turns in the dialogue, but after their betrothal, both melodies are entwined, and finally the Beast’s theme is transfigured into a floating wisp in the most ethereal reaches of the solo violin’s range. The rapt, introspective splendor of the closing Fairy Garden is Ravel’s masterful summation of the beauty, mystery and wonder that pervade Mother Goose
EDVARD GRIEG (1843-1907)
Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16
Edvard Grieg was born on June 15, 1843 in Bergen, Norway, and died there on September 4, 1907. He began his Piano Concerto during the summer of 1868 and completed it the following spring. Edmund Neupert was the soloist in the premiere, on April 3, 1869 in Copenhagen. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. Duration is about 30 minutes. The piece was last performed by the orchestra March 25-27, 2022, with Peter Oundjian conducting and Jan Lisiecki on piano.
Edvard Grieg completed his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1863. Rather than heading directly home to Norway, however, he settled in Copenhagen to study privately with Niels Gade, at that time Denmark’s most prominent musician and generally regarded as the founder of the Scandinavian school of composition. Back in Norway, Grieg’s creative work was concentrated on the large forms advocated by his Leipzig teachers and by Gade. By 1867, he had produced the Piano Sonata, the first two Violin and Piano Sonatas, a Symphony (long unpublished and made available only as recently as 1981) and the concert overture In Autumn. He also carried on his work to promote native music, and gave an unprecedented concert exclusively of Norwegian compositions in 1866. Grieg arranged to have the summer of 1868 free of duties, and he returned to Denmark for an extended vacation at a secluded retreat at Sölleröd, where he began his Piano Concerto. He thoroughly enjoyed that summer, sleeping late, taking long walks, eating well, and tipping a glass in the evenings with friends at the local inn. The sylvan setting spurred his creative energies, and the new Concerto was largely completed by the time he returned to Norway in the fall.
The Concerto’s first movement opens with a bold summons by the soloist. The main theme is given by the woodwinds and taken over almost immediately by the piano. A transition, filled with skipping rhythms, leads to the second theme, a tender cello melody wrapped in the warm harmonies of the trombones. An episodic development section, launched by the full orchestra playing the movement’s opening motive, is largely based on the main theme in dialogue.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
The recapitulation returns the earlier themes, after which the piano displays a tightly woven cadenza. The stern introductory measures are recalled to close the movement.
Famed conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow called Grieg “the Chopin of the North,” and that appellation is nowhere more justified than in the nocturnal second movement. A song filled with sentiment and nostalgia is played by the strings and rounded off by touching phrases in the solo horn. The soloist weaves elaborate musical filigree above the simple accompaniment before the lovely song returns in an enriched setting. The finale follows almost without pause. Themes constructed in the rhythms of a popular Norwegian dance, the halling, dominate the outer sections of the movement. The movement’s central portion presents a wonderful melodic inspiration, introduced by the solo flute, that derives from the dreamy atmosphere of the preceding movement. The dance rhythms return and gather increasing momentum. A grandiloquent restatement by the full orchestra of the theme of the movement’s central section brings this evergreen work to a stirring close.
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, and died on November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg. He wrote the short score of his Fifth Symphony between late May and July 4, 1888, completed the orchestration on August 27th, and conducted the orchestra of the Russian Musical Society in St. Petersburg in the premiere, on November 17, 1888. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Duration is about 44 minutes. The piece was last performed by the orchestra January 21-23, 2022, with Peter Oundjian conducting.
Tchaikovsky, like most creative artists, sometimes had episodes of self-doubt. More than once, his opinion of a work fluctuated between the extremes of satisfaction and denigration. The unjustly neglected Manfred Symphony of 1885, for example, left his pen as “the best I have ever written,” but the work failed to make a good impression at its premiere and Tchaikovsky’s estimation of it tumbled. The lack of success of Manfred was particularly painful, because he had not produced a major orchestral work since the Violin Concerto of 1878, and the score’s failure left him with the gnawing worry that he might be “written out.” The three years after Manfred were devoid of creative work. It was not until May 1888 that Tchaikovsky again took up the challenge of the blank page, collecting “little by little, material for a symphony,” he wrote to his brother Modeste. Tchaikovsky worked doggedly on the new symphony, ignoring illness, the premature encroachment of old age (he was only 48, but suffered from continual exhaustion and loss of vision), and his doubts about himself. He pressed on, and when the orchestration of the Fifth Symphony was completed, at the end of August, he said, “I have not blundered; it has turned out well.”
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Tchaikovsky never gave any indication that the Symphony No. 5, unlike the Fourth Symphony, had a program, though he may have had one in mind. In their biography of the composer, Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson reckoned Tchaikovsky’s view of fate as the motivating force in the Symphony No. 5, though they distinguished its interpretation from that in the Fourth Symphony. “In the Fourth Symphony,” the Hansons wrote, “the Fate theme is earthy and militant, as if the composer visualizes the implacable enemy in the form, say, of a Greek god. In the Fifth, the majestic Fate theme has been elevated far above earth, and man is seen, not as fighting a force that thinks on its own terms, of revenge, hate, or spite, but a wholly spiritual power which subjects him to checks and agonies for the betterment of his soul.”
The structure of the Fifth Symphony reflects this process of “betterment.” It progresses from minor to major, from darkness to light, from melancholy to joy — or at least to acceptance and stoic resignation. The Symphony’s four movements are linked together through the use of a recurring “Fate” motto theme, given immediately at the beginning by unison clarinets as the brooding introduction to the first movement. The sonata form proper starts with a melancholy melody intoned by bassoon and clarinet over a stark string accompaniment. Several themes are presented to round out the exposition: a romantic tune, filled with emotional swells, for the strings; an aggressive strain given as a dialogue between winds and strings; and a languorous, sighing string melody. All of the materials from the exposition are used in the development. The solo bassoon ushers in the recapitulation, and the themes from the exposition are heard again, though with appropriate changes of key and instrumentation.
At the head of the manuscript of the second movement Tchaikovsky is said to have written, “Oh, how I love … if you love me…,” and, indeed, this wonderful music calls to mind an operatic love scene. (Tchaikovsky, it should be remembered, was a master of the musical stage who composed more operas than he did symphonies.) Twice, the imperious Fate motto intrudes upon the starlit mood of this romanza.
If the second movement derives from opera, the third grows from ballet. A flowing waltz melody (inspired by a street song Tchaikovsky had heard in Italy a decade earlier) dominates much of the movement. The central trio section exhibits a scurrying figure in the strings. Quietly and briefly, the Fate motto returns in the movement’s closing pages.
The finale begins with a long introduction based on the Fate theme cast in a heroic rather than a sinister or melancholy mood. A vigorous exposition, a concentrated development and an intense recapitulation follow. The long coda uses the motto theme in its major-key, victory-won setting.
