Program Notes: An Alpine Symphony

CLASSICS 2023/24

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY WITH PETER OUNDJIAN

PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY

PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor

BRUCE LIU, piano

Friday, May 24, 2024 at 7:30pm

Saturday, May 25, 2024 at 7:30pm

Sunday, May 26, 2024 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

GLINKA Ruslan and Lyudmila: Overture

PROKOFIEV

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26

I. Andante - Alllegro

II. Theme and Variations, Andantino

III. Allegro ma non troppo — INTERMISSION —

Saturday’S concert iS dedicated to the colorado Symphony Guild

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

R. STRAUSS

CLASSICS 2023/24

Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64

Night

Sunrise

The Ascent

Entering the Forest

Wandering near the Stream

At the Waterfall

Apparition

On Blooming Meadows

On the Alpine Pasture

Going Astray

On the Glacier

Dangerous Moments

At the Summit View

Fog Arises

The Sun Gradually Darkens

Elegy

Calm Before the Storm

Thunder and Storm

Sunset

Vanishing Sound

Night

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!

The custom Allen Digital Computer Organ is provided by Mervine Music, LLC.

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

BRUCE LIU, piano

Bruce Liu was brought to the world’s attention in 2021, when he won the First Prize at the 18th Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. Since then he has toured the world, appearing at the Théâtre des ChampsElysées in Paris, Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Vienna Konzerthaus, BOZAR Brussels, Tokyo Opera City, and Sala São Paulo. Orchestral appearances also include the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, and Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

In the 2022-23 season, Mr. Liu appeared in recital on the main stage of Carnegie Hall, and with the Montreal Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Wiener Symphoniker at the Musikverein. His festival appearances include la Roque d’Anthéron, KlavierFestival Ruhr, Rheingau, Edinburgh, Chopin and his Europe, Duszniki, and Gstaad Menuhin. Past highlights include performance with the Cleveland Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and a tour of North America with the China NCPA Orchestra.

An exclusive recording artist with Deutsche Grammophon, Mr. Liu’s first album featuring the winning performances from the Chopin Competition won a Fryderyk Award and received international acclaim including both the Critics’ choice and Editor’s choice in Gramophone Magazine, which proclaimed his debut disc as “simply as one of the most distinguished Chopin recitals of recent years”. They also included it in the list of Best classical albums of 2021, and described Mr. Liu’ playing as “evoking Shura Cherkassky and Georges Cziffra in a single breath”

Born in Paris to Chinese parents, Bruce Liu grew up in Montreal. His life has been steeped in cultural diversity, which has shaped his differences in attitude, personality and character. He draws on various sources of inspiration for his art: European refinement, Chinese long tradition, North American dynamism and openness. Following his artist path with optimism and a smile, his teachers include Richard Raymond and Dang Thai Son.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

MIKHAIL GLINKA (1804-1857)

Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla

Mikhail Glinka was born on June 1, 1804 in Smolensk, Russia, and died on February 15, 1857 in Berlin. He began his opera Russlan and Ludmilla in the late 1830s and completed it in April 1842. The premiere took place at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg on December 9, 1842. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. Duration is about 5 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece May 18-20, 2012 with Peter Oundjian conducting.

Mikhail Glinka was the father of Russian concert music. When his first opera, A Life for the Czar (also known as Ivan Susanin), appeared in 1836, it was hailed as a breakthrough in the use of native Russian folk music as the basis of a serious musical work. The opera, whose plot was based on an incident from Russian history in which the people played a vital role, was an immediate popular success and had a profound influence on such later nationalistic composers as Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Important not only in his own country, Glinka was the first Russian composer whose works received widespread attention beyond his native land. The libretto of Russlan and Ludmilla, Glinka’s second opera, is based on Pushkin’s fairy tale. Just prior to her betrothal to Russlan, Ludmilla has been spirited away from her father, the Grand Duke of Kiev, by the evil dwarf Tchernomor. Russlan perseveres through many fantastic adventures to regain his beloved and they are united in marriage in the final scene. The exuberant Overture is based on themes from the opera.

@SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26

Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Russia, and died on March 5, 1953 in Moscow. He composed the Piano Concerto No. 3 in the summer of 1921 from themes he had been collecting for ten years and played the premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on December 16, 1921; Frederick Stock conducted. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 27 minutes. Scott O'Neil was the conductor when the orchestra last performed this piece February 19-21, 2010.

In a 1962 interview, Madame Lina Llubera Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife, recalled her husband’s working method at the time he wrote the C major Piano Concerto: “Prokofiev toiled at his music. His capacity for work was phenomenal. He would sit down to work in the morning ‘with a clear head,’ as he said, either at the piano or at his writing desk. He usually composed his major works in the summer, in the mountains or at the seaside, away from the turmoil of city life. Always he sought places where the rhythm of work was not interrupted, where he could rest and take long walks. So it was with the Third Piano Concerto, which he completed during the summer of 1921 while staying at St. Brévin-les-Pins, a small village on the Atlantic coast of Brittany in France.”

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

The composition of the Concerto No. 3 was not a sudden inspiration for Prokofiev. The plan for a large virtuoso work to follow the first two piano concertos emerged in 1911, but he made little progress on it except for one passage he eventually placed at the end of the first movement. By 1913, he recalled in his memoirs, “I had composed a theme for variations, which I kept for a long time for subsequent use. In 1916-1917, I had tried several times to return to the Third Concerto. I wrote a beginning for it (two themes) and two variations on the theme for the second movement.” At that time, he was also working on what he called a “white” quartet (i.e., in a diatonic style, playable on the white keys of the piano) but abandoned it because he thought the result would be monotonous. He shuttled two themes from this aborted quartet into the Concerto. “Thus,” he continued in his autobiography, “when I began [in 1921] working on the Third Concerto, I already had the entire thematic material with the exception of the subordinate theme of the first movement and the third theme of the finale.”

Prokofiev provided the following description of the score: “The first movement opens quietly with a short introduction. The theme is announced by an unaccompanied clarinet and is continued by the violins for a few bars. Soon the tempo changes to Allegro, and the strings lead to the statement of the principal subject by the piano. Discussion of this theme is carried on in a lively manner, both the piano and the orchestra having a good deal to say on the matter. A passage in chords for the piano alone leads to the more expressive second subject, which is heard in the oboe with a pizzicato accompaniment. The second movement consists of a theme with five variations. The finale begins with a staccato theme for bassoons and pizzicato strings, which is interrupted by the blustering entry of the piano. The orchestra holds its own with the opening theme, however, and there is a good deal of argument, with frequent differences of opinion as regards key. Eventually the piano takes up the first theme and develops it to a climax. With a reduction of tone and a slackening of tempo, an alternative theme is introduced in the woodwinds. The piano replies with a theme that is more in keeping with the caustic humor of the work. This material is developed, and there is a brilliant coda.”

@RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)

Eine Alpensinfonie (“An Alpine Symphony”), Op. 64

Richard Strauss was born on June 11, 1864 in Munich, and died on September 8, 1949 in GarmischPartenkirchen. An Alpine Symphony was composed in 1911 and 1914-1915, and premiered on October 28, 1915 in Berlin, conducted by the composer. The score calls for quadruple woodwinds plus two piccolos, English horn, Heckelphone (baritone oboe), piccolo clarinet, bass clarinet and contrabassoon; four horns, four trumpets, four trombones, four tenor tubas and two bass tubas; two timpanists; percussion; two harps, organ and celesta; strings; and an off-stage contingent of twelve horns, two trumpets and two trombones. Duration is about 50 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece April 12-14, 2001 with Marin Alsop conducting.

Strauss was born and raised in Bavaria, lived in the region for most of his life, and ultimately settled in the lovely twin-towns of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, tucked beneath the northern face

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

of the massive Zugspitze. As a teenager, he once went on an Alpine climb with a local group of hikers. The party lost its way during the ascent, and was overtaken and drenched to the skin by storms on the way down. Strauss wrote to his friend Ludwig Thuille (a composer and later professor of composition at the Munich Conservatory) that he had found the experience so exhilarating that he was inspired to improvise some musical impressions of the climb at the piano: “Naturally it conjured up a lot of nonsense and giant Wagnerian tone-painting.” It was not until 1900, more than two decades later, that Strauss again broached the subject of his mountain music. Soon after finishing Ein Heldenleben, he wrote to his parents that he was considering a tone poem “that would begin with a sunrise in Switzerland. Otherwise so far only the idea (love-tragedy of an artist) and a few themes exist.” It was just at that time, however, that his creative energy shifted from the concert hall to the opera stage, and, except for his 1904 paean to life among the pots and pans, the Symphonia Domestica, all of his compositions for the next dozen years were operas.

Der Rosenkavalier was premiered with great success at Dresden on January 26, 1911, and Strauss was eager to follow it quickly with other stage works. However, his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was a meticulous and thoughtful writer who found it impossible to produce a new book on such short notice. Since Strauss was not one to take potential inactivity sitting down (he called the Oboe Concerto and the Duet-Concertino, composed when he was in his eighties, “wrist exercises ... to prevent my right wrist from going to sleep prematurely”), he sketched out a fifty-minute Alpine Symphony early in 1911, “though,” he confessed, “it gives me less pleasure than shaking maybugs off trees.” Despite such initial reluctance, however, much of the new work was sketched during the spring and early summer before he turned to the composition of incidental music for Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which five years later grew into the iridescent opera Ariadne auf Naxos. Strauss occasionally tinkered with the Symphony during the following years, but he did no serious further work on it until November 1914, when Hofmannsthal was (again) keeping him waiting for the final act of Die Frau ohne Schatten. The polishing and orchestration of Eine Alpensinfonie took exactly 100 days; the work was completed on February 8, 1915. Except for the Japanische Festmusik of 1940, a political potboiler celebrating the 2,600th anniversary of the Japanese Empire, it was to be his last composition for large orchestra.

Though this work is labeled as a “symphony” — and many learned commentators have tried to squeeze its single musical span into Classical sonata-allegro or Lisztian four-movements-inone — Eine Alpensinfonie is unabashedly a tone poem, the most explicit example of the genre Strauss ever created. The score bears no fewer than 22 graphic phrases attached to its various sections, representing Alpine vistas, the phenomena of nature, and the progress of the climber. It is a piece almost entirely concerned with external depiction rather than with the expression of the intense states of personal emotion that marked Death and Transfiguration, Don Juan, Also Sprach Zarathustra and other of his earlier orchestral works. For this, Strauss was (and continues to be) criticized, though the consummate craftsmanship of the work’s scoring and the manner in which he achieved his pictorial goal are beyond reproach.

Eine Alpensinfonie is concerned with a period of 24 hours upon the mountain. The work opens with the shimmering stillness of Night, depicted by a descending scale evolving from a unison B-flat; every note of the scale is sustained to create a luminous curtain of harmony. The trombones and tuba present the theme of the mountain, a simple, craggy motive built

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

around the most fundamental notes of the harmonic series. (Strauss received some criticism at the work’s premiere for the diatonic simplicity of its themes. He said that their plainness was intentional and natural: “I wanted to compose for once as a cow gives milk.”) The orchestra stirs, and mounts an enormous crescendo while the brasses give out fanfares built from the mountain theme to prepare for Sunrise, a climactic moment ingeniously derived from the descending scale of Night.

The Ascent commences with an energetic, wide-ranging theme that rises through the strings into the body of the orchestra. A blast of hunters’ horns in the distance marks the Entry into the Forest. A lugubrious theme in the horns and trombones suggests dense foliage, from which float the songs of birds. The ascent resumes, and the climber finds himself Wandering by the Brook, which, upstream, leads to a Waterfall. The music suggests a striking panorama. In the mist above the whirlpool appears an Apparition, perhaps the Fairy of the Alps that, according to legend, has inhabited those mountains since ancient times. It was the spirit that haunted Lord Byron’s Manfred and served as the catalyst for the scherzo of the fine symphony inspired from Tchaikovsky by Byron’s poem.

Climbing above the waterfall, the traveler comes first to Flowery Meadows and then to The Mountain Pasture, where he is greeted with the sounds of cowbells and the yodels of the herdsmen. The horn gives forth a lovely bit of pastoral lyricism before the climber goes Through Thicket and Undergrowth by the Wrong Way, only to emerge On the Glacier, depicted by a fanfarelike theme of short-long rhythms. Crossing the ice, the traveler has some Dangerous Moments before he arrives On the Summit. The magnificent sight has almost taken his breath away (a halting, tentative theme in the oboe), but its grandeur soon floods over him and he experiences a Vision. The sun has passed its zenith for the day, however, and Mists Arise (rustlings and long scales in the strings). Quickly, The Sun Gradually Becomes Obscured. There is a brief Elegy (a long, unison melody in the strings), which is interrupted by the Calm Before the Storm. The traveler contends with violent Thunder and Storm during his Descent. The storm breaks in time to reveal the day’s Sunset, and Eine Alpensinfonie closes with an introspective Epilogue and the return of Night.

©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda