CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 32 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
The Friday, January 10 concerT is sponsored by uc healTh’s ready se T co campaign
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
CLASSICS 2024/25
Saturday Program:
ANNA CLYNE Within Her Arms
MOZART Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 “Turkish”
I. Allegro aperto
II. Adagio
III. Rondo: Tempo di menuetto
— INTERMISSION —
MOZART Adagio & Fugue in C minor, K. 546
JOHN ADAMS Doctor Atomic Symphony
I. The Laboratory
II. Panic
III. Trinity
CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 40 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
CLASSICS 2024/25
Sunday Program:
MOZART Adagio & Fugue in C minor, K. 546
MOZART Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 “Turkish”
I. Allegro aperto
II. Adagio
III. Rondo: Tempo di menuetto
— INTERMISSION —
MOZART Così fan tutte: Overture, K. 588
MOZART Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425
I. Adagio – Allegro spiritoso
II. Poco adagio
III. Menuetto
IV. Presto
The music rentals for Mozart and Now are generously sponsored by the Colorado Symphony Guild.
CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 30 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 37 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT!
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor
Recognized as a masterful and dynamic presence in the conducting world, Peter Oundjian has developed a multi-faceted portfolio as a conductor, violinist, professor and artistic advisor. He has been celebrated for his musicality, an eye towards collaboration, innovative programming, leadership and training with students and an engaging personality. Strengthening his ties to Colorado, Oundjian is now Principal Conductor of the Colorado Symphony in addition to Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival, which successfully pivoted to a virtual format during the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021.
Now carrying the title Conductor Emeritus, Oundjian’s fourteen-year tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony served as a major creative force for the city of Toronto and was marked by a reimagining of the TSO’s programming, international stature, audience development, touring and a number of outstanding recordings, garnering a Grammy nomination in 2018 and a Juno award for Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works in 2019. He led the orchestra on several international tours to Europe and the USA, conducting the first performance by a North American orchestra at Reykjavik’s Harpa Hall in 2014.
From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra during which time he implemented the kind of collaborative programming that has become a staple of his directorship. Oundjian led the RSNO on several international tours, including North America, China, and a European festival tour with performances at the Bregenz Festival, the Dresden Festival as well as in Innsbruck, Bergamo, Ljubljana, and others. His final appearance with the orchestra as their Music Director was at the 2018 BBC Proms where he conducted Britten’s epic War Requiem.
Highlights of past seasons include appearances with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Iceland Symphony, the Detroit, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Dallas, Seattle, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. With the onset of world-wide concert cancellations, support for students at Yale and Juilliard became a priority. In the 2022/2023 season, Oundjian conducted the opening weekend of Atlanta Symphony, followed by return engagements with Baltimore, Indianapolis, Dallas, Colorado and Toronto symphonies, as well as a visit to New World Symphony.
Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981, and in 2013 was awarded the school’s Sanford Medal for Distinguished Service to Music. A dedicated educator, Oundjian regularly conducts the Yale, Juilliard, Curtis and New World symphony orchestras.
An outstanding violinist, Oundjian spent fourteen years as the first violinist for the renowned Tokyo String Quartet before he turned his energy towards conducting.
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
CLAUDE SIM, violin
Claude Sim enjoys a varied career as a chamber musician, orchestral leader, soloist, and multi-genre performing artist. He studied violin performance at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (BM ’99) with Greg Fulkerson, Almita Vamos, and viola with Roland Vamos. At age 21, he was appointed Associate Concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony under music director Marin Alsop. As frequent soloist with the orchestra, he has earned praise for his “lustrous tone and poise” by the Rocky Mountain News and was dubbed “Denver’s Musical Adventurer” by the Denver Post. Formerly Associate Principal Second of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Sim has served in guest capacity as Concertmaster of the Kansas City Symphony, Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, Boulder Philharmonic, as Principal Second of the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa, and first violin with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Sim has been a grand prizewinner at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and has served as guest first violin and viola on concert tours with the critically acclaimed Miró and Pacifica Quartets. He has collaborated in chamber music performance with pianists Christopher O’Riley, Jeffrey Kahane, and members of the Vermeer and Tokyo String Quartets.
As solo violinist of the tango ensemble Extasis, Sim has recorded a studio album. The quartet’s arrangements of Golden Age tango by D’Arienzo, Troilo and Pugliese through the nuevo tango of Rovira and Piazzolla serve as foundations of their wide-ranging repertoire. Extasis performance tours and community engagements have reached audiences across the United States and Europe.
Known for his multi-genre interests, Sim’s jazz violin album Time With You presents a collection of standards from the American Songbook. Trumpeter Greg Gisbert (Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry sideman) is a featured artist on the record. Sim has performed with Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. and Odom’s jazz combo as guest soloist. He has shared the stage with Irish American fiddler Eileen Ivers, Warren Haynes (Allman Brothers Band, Gov’t Mule), rock band Guster, and with iconic Denver rock band Devotchka, both live and on the album 100 Lovers. In 2014, he performed as a duo with Grammy award-winning artist and banjo master Béla Fleck on a Colorado tour, culminating at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.
Sim’s interest in exploring original and standard jazz has led to collaborations with today’s elite string jazz artists including live radio broadcasts and a tour with German guitarist Joscho Stephan.
Claude Sim’s performing career and concurrent teaching mission focus on developing true artistic versatility while building connections across musical genres and communities. His previous teaching appointments include University of Colorado Denver and Colorado State University. From 2019-2022, he served as Assistant Professor of Violin at CU Boulder College of Music.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
WOLF GANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
Overture to Così fan tutte (“Thus Do They All”), K. 588
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, and died on December 5, 1791 in Vienna. Così fan tutte was composed in 1789-1790 and premiered on January 26, 1790 in Vienna. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Duration is about 5 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra was July 6, 2018 at the Arvada Center with Christopher Dragon conducting.
In his classic study of Mozart’s operas, Edward Dent gave this plot summary of Così fan tutte (“Thus Do They All”): “Ferrando and Guglielmo are two young Neapolitan officers engaged to be married to two young ladies, Dorabella and her sister, Fiordiligi. A cynical old bachelor, Don Alfonso by name, persuades the young men to put their mistresses’ constancy to the test. They pretend to be called away from Naples on duty, but return that same afternoon disguised as Albanian noblemen. Don Alfonso, with the help of Despina, the ladies’ maid, persuades the two sisters to receive them. The strangers make violent love to them, and after some hesitation each succeeds in winning the heart of his friend’s betrothed. The affair proceeds with such rapidity that a notary is called in that very evening to draw up a marriage contract for their signatures. Suddenly Don Alfonso announces the return of the soldiers; the Albanians vanish, and the terrified ladies are obliged to confess everything to their original lovers. Needless to say, everything ends happily.”
Needless to say, a more prim sensibility might have found this lubricious tale of questionable taste. Beethoven declared it to be simply immoral (he said the same thing about Don Giovanni); Franz Niemetschek, one of Mozart’s earliest biographers, wondered in 1808 how “that great mind could lower itself to waste its heavenly melodies on so feeble a concoction of text;” Richard Wagner vilified the libretto. Così was virtually forgotten during the 19th century, receiving little recognition until Hermann Levi revived it in Munich in 1896; it was not heard in the United States until the Met staged it in 1922. Such neglect was unjustified. Edward Dent concluded that it “is the best of all da Ponte’s librettos and the most exquisite work of art among Mozart’s operas.” Sir Donald Tovey called it “a miracle of irresponsible beauty unlike anything else in Mozart.” Sir Thomas Beecham even imputed to it significant social importance: “In Così fan tutte the dying 18th century casts a backward glance over a period outstanding in European life for grace and charm and, averting its eye from the new age suckled in a creed of iconoclasm, sings its swan song in praise of a civilization that has passed away forever.”
The wit and elegance of Così fan tutte are perfectly captured in its compact and ebullient Overture. It begins with a brief introduction in moderate tempo that incorporates a tiny oboe melody and a thematic fragment later heard in the opera. (Mozart used a similar quotation device in the overtures to Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.) The music that follows brims with chattering, conspiratorial music of infectious good humor.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
SAMUEL CARL ADAMS (B. 1985)
Chamber Concerto for Violin and Chamber Orchestra
Samuel Adams was born on December 30, 1985 in San Francisco. The Chamber Concerto was composed in 2017, and premiered on May 21, 2018 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with Karen Gomyo as soloist. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, percussion, piano and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes. This is the premiere performance of this piece by the orchestra.
Samuel Carl Adams is the son of Pulitzer, Grammy and Grawemeyer-winning composer John Adams and noted fine-art photographer Deborah O’Grady, “but they never imposed on me the idea of being an artist,” Samuel recalled. “There was a period I told my parents I wanted to do something outside of the arts, and they were always very supportive…. But I was unhappy not making music. It just didn’t feel right. I think the urge to make music supersedes any other urge in my life.”
Samuel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1985, inevitably immersed in music from childhood, and chose double bass as his instrument. He played jazz around the city while still in high school, and came to realize that playing bass offered creative as well as performance insights. “Bass players are sort of like baseball catchers,” he explained. “They are in a position to see everything and control a lot. You’re responsible for the root of everything that’s happening. My first compositions came out of collaborations with other jazz musicians.” Adams crossed the bay to study electroacoustics and composition at Stanford University while continuing to gig on bass on weekends. After graduating in 2008, he undertook two years of advanced study in composition at Yale with Martin Bresnick and Ezra Laderman, and began establishing his reputation soon thereafter with the well-received Drift and Providence, commissioned in 2011 by the San Francisco Symphony. Commissions from Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Spektral Quartet, violinists Anthony Marwood, Jennifer Koh and Karen Gomyo, pianists Emanuel Ax, Sarah Cahill, David Fung and Joyce Yang, and other noted artists and ensembles followed. From 2015 to 2018, Adams served with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as Mead Composer-in-Residence and curator for its MusicNOW series; in 2021-2022, he was Resident Composer with the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
Adams composed his Chamber Concerto for Violin and Chamber Orchestra in 2017 on a commission for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series; it was premiered on May 21, 2018 by the CSO, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with Karen Gomyo as soloist. On his website, the composer provided the following information about the work, written by fellow composer and Washington University of St. Louis faculty member Christopher Stark:
“Adams’ musical language participates in many distinct yet overlapping musical communities — jazz, classical, electronic — and defies easy categorization. A syncopated rhythmic vitality and bluesy melodic inflection reflects a composer with a significant background in jazz; a sense of patience and spaciousness reveals the influence of ambient electronic music and West Coast minimalism; the presence of Western European musical techniques points towards both the early-20th-century music of Olivier Messiaen, Anton Webern and Igor Stravinsky, as well as older pre-Romantic era influences whereby each movement’s individual sections are distinctly delineated and often recur in a balanced and classical way.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
“The middle three of the Chamber Concerto’s five movements exhibit the standard fast–slow–fast design of a traditional concerto, while the bookends — Prelude: One By One and Postlude: All Together Now — have the effect of gradually winding up and winding down. The Concerto begins with a lonely, plaintive melody in the violin that reverberates throughout the ensemble to create a striking atmospheric halo. This gives rise to increasingly acrobatic passages in the violin that culminate in an airy coda punctuated by an abrupt ‘tripped-breaker’ [snapping sound] ending.
“Lines (after J[ohannes Brahms]) surges with nimble and percussive energy that recalls the music of Adams’ father [John], as the movement’s title perhaps suggests. The spritely ‘hocketing’ (i.e., trading notes) between the instruments gives the impression of a playground game, and these kaleidoscopic and minimalist sonorities are juxtaposed throughout with buoyant harmonic sequences that fall somewhere between bebop and Baroque, perhaps pointing to other notable J’s: J.S. Bach, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett. The structural columns of this electric movement are the twice-recurring quotations of John Adams’ pioneering orchestral work Harmonielehre, which gives the effect of great fun and ironic wit but also of filtered distance and contemporary transformation. From these heights of intensity, a very beautiful and gradual unfolding takes shape that concludes with a lonely cadenza.
“The haunting and mystical Slow Movements evokes eternity in the center of this Concerto that rivals Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The long, arching, sustained melodies and gliding, dissonant tones in the violin express a deep yearning, while the ensemble creates a placid and meditative environment.
“Much like the abrupt ending of the Prelude, On/Off begins with a similar ‘tripped-breaker’ technique, analogous to an electronic gate, whereby instrumental tones are mechanically turned on and off as if from a switchboard. The result is an animated, fragmented rhythmic display that has a stippled, pointillistic quality. This highly extroverted movement features virtuosic writing for the entire ensemble, and the raucous on-the-string/off-the-string violin part climaxes with a dramatic stratospheric sustained tone that lingers into the Postlude: All Together Now.
“In the work’s final section, the soloist’s descent leads through several broadening waves that end with a brief return to the opening melody, creating the feeling of re-centering. The music abruptly ends with a brief unison, offering a reminder of Chamber Concerto’s central tenant: That We Are All in This Together, Now.”
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Adagio and Fugue in C minor for Strings, K. 546
The Adagio and Fugue in C minor for Strings was composed in 1783 and 1786. Duration is about 9 minutes. This is the premiere performance of this piece by the orchestra.
In 1782, one year after he had bolted from Salzburg to take up life as a free-lance composer and pianist in Vienna, Mozart developed a new, gleaming admiration for the music of Bach, Handel and other masters of the early 18th century. He had been exposed to the works of such Italian Baroque composers as Leo, Caldara, Durante and Alessandro Scarlatti in Salzburg, where their scores were used for performance and for study, but his interest in Bach grew from his association in Vienna with Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the Court Librarian and musical amateur who had developed a taste for the contrapuntal glories of German music while serving as ambassador to the Prussian court at Berlin. Van Swieten, who is also remembered as the librettist for Haydn’s oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, produced a weekly series of concerts in Vienna devoted to “ancient music,” and hired the best available musicians, including Mozart, to perform and arrange the compositions for these events. (Among other projects for van Swieten, Mozart scored Handel’s Messiah for classical orchestra.) Mozart, perhaps history’s greatest adept at absorbing musical styles, learned much about the fine workings of Baroque counterpoint from his close involvement with the works of Bach and Handel.
Among the immediate musical results of Mozart’s interest in Bach’s imitative procedures were the C minor Mass (K. 427), a suite for piano (K. 399), the A minor Sonata for Violin and Piano (K. 402) and several sketches for keyboard fugues; none of these works was completed. The climax of this development in Mozart’s style was reached with the powerful Fugue in C minor for Two Pianos (K. 426), written in December 1783. Mozart may have modeled his subject for this densely packed fugue on the motive Handel employed for the chorus “And with his stripes we are healed” from Messiah or perhaps on one that Haydn used in the fugal finale of his F minor Quartet, Op. 20, No. 5 of 1772. Mozart utilized it once again for the “Kyrie” of his Requiem. In 1788, he returned to his keyboard fugue, scoring it for string orchestra and prefacing it with an austere Adagio in the style of the French overture (K. 546).
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425, “Linz”
The “Linz” Symphony was composed between October 30 and November 3, 1783, and first heard at a private concert there the day after it was completed. The score calls for oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra was July 24, 2014 at the Arvada Center with Gary Lewis conducting.
On August 4, 1782 in Vienna, Mozart married Constanze Weber — without the blessing of his father. Papa Leopold thought that the humble, uneducated girl was not worthy of his brilliantly talented son, and made no secret of his opposition to the union. In an attempt to heal the family rift, the new Herr and Frau Mozart went to Salzburg the following summer for an extended stay. The visit changed little: Leopold spent the rest of his years telling his son what a poor choice of a wife he had made. Wolfgang tried to put a good face on the situation, but he was bitterly disappointed at the results of the Salzburg sojourn. He left the town of his birth on October 27, 1783, and never returned.
The Mozarts journeyed back to Vienna by way of Linz, where they found a warm welcome. “When we arrived at the gates of Linz,” Mozart reported to his father on October 31st, “a servant was waiting there to conduct us to the palace of old Count Thun [father-in-law of one of Mozart’s Viennese pupils], where we are still living. I can’t tell you how they overwhelm us with kindness in this house. On Thursday, November 4th, I am going to give a concert in the theater, and since I haven’t a single symphony with me, I am up to my ears writing a new one which must be finished by then.” That new Symphony, the “Linz,” was completed on time, in the astonishing space of just five days.
The Symphony begins with an introduction in slow tempo whose chromatic inflections and strong emotions presage the opening of the Don Giovanni Overture, composed four years later. The tempo quickens for the presentation of the main theme, an energetic melody with martial overtones. The complementary theme is played sweetly by the woodwinds. The development treats the second theme and a mock-fanfare motive derived from the principal theme. The thematic materials from the exposition are restated in the recapitulation. In the Andante, Mozart created precisely the necessary pathos to balance the exuberant expression of the outer movements. The third movement is a cheerful Minuet, whose trio, with its gentle, swaying rhythmic motion, is reminiscent of the Austrian national dance, the Ländler. The finale is a quicksilver affair, filled with dashing vitality and irresistible joie de vivre.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
ANNA CLYNE (B. 1980)
Within Her Arms for String Orchestra
Anna Clyne was born on March 9, 1980 in London. Within Her Arms was composed in 2008-2009 and premiered on April 7, 2009 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Duration is about 14 minutes. This is the premiere performance of this piece by the orchestra.
Anna Clyne was born in London in 1980, studied music from early in life (she recalls lessons “on a piano with randomly missing keys”), began composing at age eleven (a fully notated piece for flute and piano), and received her undergraduate training at Edinburgh University and a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music; her teachers include Julia Wolfe, Marina Adamia and Marjan Mozetich. Clyne’s career has been on a meteoric trajectory since she completed her education — performances and commissions by leading ensembles and soloists around the world; selection as a participant in a master class with Pierre Boulez in New York City; director of the New York Youth Symphony’s award-winning program for young composers “Making Score” from 2008 to 2010; Composer-in-Residence with both the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and Trondheim Symphony Orchestra (Norway) in 2022–2023, after which she began a residency with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra for the following season.
As an educator, Clyne taught at the Mannes/The New School in New York City and served as Mentor Composer for the Orchestra of St Luke’s Inaugural DeGaetano Composer Institute since its founding in 2019. Her dedication to education and collaboration is especially evidenced by her extended residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2010-2015), when she not only composed six works for the ensemble — including the Grammy-nominated double-violin concerto Prince of Clouds — but also conducted workshops with the Chicago Public Schools and incarcerated youth at the city’s Juvenile Detention Center, joined with Yo-Yo Ma and musicians of the Civic Orchestra, CSO and Chorus to help realize the work of young poets, musicians and composers at such events as the Humanities Festival and Youth in Music Festival, and worked with art therapist Caroline Edasis to develop an innovative collaboration between the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Learning Institute and residents in the memory care unit of the Mather Pavilion Residential Nursing Home. She has also led seminars and master classes at universities and institutions in America and Europe.
Anna Clyne’s rapidly accumulating collection of honors includes eight consecutive ASCAP Plus Awards, Hindemith Prize, Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Clutterbuck Award from the University of Edinburgh, as well as awards from Meet the Composer, American Music Center, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation and International Artist Sponsorship; she also received a grant from Opera America to develop a work titled Eva, about the German-born American post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse (19361970).
Clyne’s family was not particularly musical, but they supported her early interest in music and got a well-used home piano for her when she was seven. Her mother, a nurse and midwife, was then taking care of a woman whose husband taught piano, and she arranged with him to give lessons to her precocious daughter, who almost simultaneously began making her own music with a little piano piece she called The Sea. Soon after attending her mother’s funeral, in 2008, Clyne was intrigued by an old violin with an ornate scroll carved in the shape of a gargoyle that she saw in an Oxford shop and bought it for a few pounds. That instrument, the grief over
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her mother’s death, the subtle voice-weaving of the Elizabethan composers of her national heritage, and the deep poignancy of such works as Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings led her to compose Within Her Arms for strings soon thereafter on a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered the work on April 7, 2009 under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Clyne wrote that Within Her Arms is “music for my mother, with all my love,” and headed it with a poem by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh:
Earth will keep you tight within her arms dear one —
So that tomorrow you will be transformed into flowers — This flower smiling quietly in this morning field —
This morning you will weep no more dear one — For we have gone through too deep a night.
This morning, yes, this morning, I kneel down on the green grass — And I notice your presence.
Flowers, that speak to me in silence.
@WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219, “Turkish”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, and died December 5, 1791 in Vienna. He wrote the D major Violin Concerto in December 1775 in Salzburg for his own use as concertmaster of the Salzburg Court Orchestra. The work’s premiere date is uncertain, but it was probably performed soon after it was completed on December 20th. The score calls for two oboes, two horns and strings. Duration is about 31 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra was July 15, 2022 at the Arvada Center with Christopher Dragon conducting and Claude Sim on violin.
Mozart’s five authentic Violin Concertos were all products of a single year — 1775. At nineteen he was already a veteran of five years’ experience as concertmaster of the archiepiscopal court in Salzburg, for which his duties included not only playing, but also composing, acting as co-conductor with the keyboard player (modern orchestral conducting was not to originate for at least two more decades), and soloing in concertos. It was for this last function that Mozart wrote these concertos. He was, of course, a quick study at everything he did, and each of these works builds on the knowledge gained from its predecessors. It was with the last three (K. 216, 218, 219) that something more than simple experience emerged, however, because it was with these compositions that Mozart indisputably entered the era of his musical maturity. These are his earliest pieces now regularly heard in the concert hall, and the last one, No. 5 in A major, is the greatest of the set.
The opening movement of the Violin Concerto No. 5 is in conventional concerto form but has some curious structural experiments more associated with the music of Haydn than with that of Mozart. After the initial presentation of the thematic material by the orchestra, the soloist is introduced with the surprising device of a brief, stately Adagio. When the Allegro tempo
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resumes, the soloist plays not the main theme already announced by the ensemble, but a new lyrical melody for which the original main theme becomes the accompaniment. More new material fills the remainder of the exposition. The development is invested with passages of dark harmonic color that cast expressive shadows across the movement’s generally sunny landscape. The recapitulation calls for restrained, elegant virtuosity from the soloist. The second movement is a graceful song in sonatina form (sonata without development section). The finale is a rondo in the style of a minuet whose themes are in the style of Hungarian folk music, known, vaguely, as “Turkish” in the 18th century.
@J OHN ADAMS (B. 1947)
Doctor Atomic Symphony
John Adams was born on February 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He composed the opera Doctor Atomic in 2004-2005. It was premiered on October 1, 2005 by the San Francisco Opera. In 2007, Adams arranged the Doctor Atomic Symphony from the opera and led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in its premiere at London’s Royal Albert Hall on August 21, 2007. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp and strings. Duration is about 25 minutes. This is the premiere performance of this piece by the orchestra.
John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career: a recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he won five Grammy Awards between 1989 and 2004; he received the University of Louisville’s prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America magazine; he was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and since 2009 he has been Creative Chair with the LA Philharmonic; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society,” and in 2019 became the first American composer to receive the Erasmus Prize “for notable contributions to European culture, society and social science”; he has been granted honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music (London), Juilliard School, and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities, honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and the California Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts; in June 2023, the Library of Congress announced that it was acquiring Adams’ manuscripts and papers for its Music Division, which also holds the papers of Leonard
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Bernstein, Aaron Copland, George and Ira Gershwin, Martha Graham, Charles Mingus, Neil Simon and other distinguished American artists.
The vexing relationship between technology and the human spirit has been played out nowhere in more powerful and stark terms than in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II at a secret, isolated facility in Los Alamos, thirty miles northwest of Santa Fe, under the direction of a brilliant, obsessive and intellectually unsettled theoretical physicist from Berkeley, J. Robert Oppenheimer. After three years of intensive work by some of the world’s foremost scientists, a plutonium-based nuclear weapon was successfully tested in the desert near Alamogordo in southern New Mexico at dawn on July 16, 1945. On August 6th, an atomic bomb was detonated above the city of Hiroshima; nine days later Japan’s surrender ended World War II.
John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered on October 1, 2005, is concerned with the personal and moral issues confronted by Oppenheimer and his colleagues during the final days before the crucial test at Alamogordo. The libretto was created by Adams’ long-time collaborator Peter Sellars, director of the premiere, who drew on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics and declassified government documents, as well as the Bhagavad Gita and verses by Baudelaire and John Donne that were fundamental to Oppenheimer’s thinking. (Extensive background on the opera is available at Adams’ web site: http://www.earbox.com.)
In 2007, Adams drew the Doctor Atomic Symphony from the score of the opera and led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in its premiere at London’s Royal Albert Hall on August 21, 2007; David Robertson conducted the work’s first American performance with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra on February 7, 2008. The Doctor Atomic Symphony is in three continuous movements that distill the opera’s dramatic essence into purely instrumental terms. The Laboratory, adapted from the opera’s prelude, evokes a devastated post-nuclear landscape with its hammered timpani notes, blaring brass chords and howling strings; the fragmented melodic phrases that close the movement’s brief span offer little expressive relief. The second movement — Panic — derives from the tense music that accompanies the final preparations for the test at Alamogordo: the fierce electrical storm that almost delays the experiment and raises apprehension that the bomb, already armed, might explode accidentally if hit by lightning; the boorish cajoling of General Leslie Groves, Army commander of the project (impersonated by the solo trombone); and a recognition of the native Tewa people of northern New Mexico with a suggestion of their traditional “corn dance.” The finale is based on Oppenheimer’s deeply reflective aria Batter My Heart (played in the Symphony by solo trumpet), whose text was taken from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 14 (ca. 1610): Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. Adams viewed Batter My Heart as “a poem of almost unbearable self-awareness, an agonistic struggle between good and evil, darkness and light.” Donne’s verse not only summarized Oppenheimer’s own ambivalence over the fundamental morality of his project but also suggested to him the name for its culminating test site: Trinity.
