Program - Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 with Natasha Paremski

2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:

CLASSICS 2021/22 PROKOFIEV PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 WITH NATASHA PAREMSKI ANDREW LITTON, conductor NATASHA PAREMSKI, piano Friday, November 19, 2021 at 7:30pm Saturday, November 20, 2021 at 7:30pm Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

PROKOFIEV Classical Symphony, Op. 25 I. Allegro con brio II. Larghetto III. Gavotte: Non troppo allegro IV. Finale: Molto vivace PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 I. Andantino II. Scherzo: Vivace III. Moderato IV. Finale: Allegro tempestoso

— INTERMISSION — SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 9 in E-flat major, Op. 70 I. Allegro II. Moderato III. Presto IV. Largo V. Allegretto CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 32 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 7 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT! PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM I

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES ANDREW LITTON, conductor Andrew Litton is Music Director of the New York City Ballet. He is also Principal Guest Conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Conductor Laureate of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Laureate of Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic. Under his leadership the Bergen Philharmonic gained international recognition through extensive recording and touring, making debuts at the BBC Proms, at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and appearances at Vienna’s Musikverein, Berlin’s Philharmonie, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. For his work with the Bergen Philharmonic, Norway’s King Harald V knighted him with the Norwegian Royal Order of Merit.

Andrew was Principal Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra from 1988-1994.

During this time, he led the orchestra on their first American tour and produced 14 recordings, including the Grammy-winning Belshazzar’s Feast. As Music Director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 1994-2006, he hired over one third of the players, led the orchestra on three major European tours, appeared four times at Carnegie Hall, created a children’s television series broadcast nationally and in widespread use in school curricula, produced 28 recordings, and helped raise the orchestra’s endowment from $19 million to $100 million. He regularly guest conducts leading orchestras and opera companies around the globe and adds to his discography of over 130 recordings, which have garnered America’s Grammy Award, France’s Diapason d’Or and other honours.

In addition to conducting over 30 ballets at the New York City Ballet, Andrew returns regularly to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, and guest conducts with a wide range of international orchestras, recently including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Colorado Symphony, the Orquesta Sinfonica de Galicia, and the Royal Swedish Orchestra.

An avid opera conductor with a keen theatrical sense, Andrew has led major opera companies throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Australian Opera and Deutsche Oper Berlin. In Norway, he was key to founding the Bergen National Opera, where he led numerous critically acclaimed performances. He often conducts semi-staged opera programmes with symphony orchestras. During his 14-year tenure as Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra Sommerfest, he concluded the Festival with sold-out performances of Salomé, Der Rosenkavalier, Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, Tosca, Rigoletto, La Traviata and others.

Andrew’s work with New York City Ballet has earned praise from critics, dancers, and audiences, bringing new prominence to the Ballet’s orchestra. He began his ballet work while still a Juilliard student, performing as on-stage pianist for Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Cynthia Gregory.

An accomplished pianist, Andrew often performs as piano soloist, conducting from the keyboard, most recently Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in Singapore. An acknowledged expert on George Gershwin, he has performed and recorded Gershwin widely as both pianist and conductor, and serves as Advisor to the University of Michigan Gershwin Archives. After leading the Covent PROGRAM II

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES Garden debut of Porgy and Bess, Andrew arranged his own concert suite of the work, which is now performed around the world. In 2014 he released his first solo piano album, A Tribute to Oscar Peterson, a testimony to his passion for jazz, particularly the music of that great pianist.

Andrew’s Dallas Symphony Rachmaninov Piano Concerto recordings with Stephen Hough, widely hailed as the best since the composer’s own, won the Classical Brits/BBC Critics Award.

He also received a Grammy nomination for his recording of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd with the New York Philharmonic and Patti Lupone.

Born in New York City, Andrew graduated from the Fieldston School and earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from The Juilliard School in Piano and Conducting. He served as assistant conductor at La Scala and at the National Symphony under Rostropovich. His many honours in addition to Norway’s Order of Merit include Yale’s Sanford Medal, the Elgar Society Medal, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bournemouth.broadcast and DVD production of Rossini’s Cenerentola with the Orchestra Nazionale della RAI. From 2005 to 2015 she was the Principal Conductor and Music Director of the University Choir in Florence and remains their Honorary Conductor, receiving a special award from the Government in 2011 in recognition of her work there.

NATASHA PAREMSKI, piano With her consistently striking and dynamic performances, pianist Natasha Paremski reveals astounding virtuosity and voracious interpretive abilities.

She continues to generate excitement from all corners as she wins over audiences with her musical sensibility and powerful, flawless technique.

Natasha is a regular return guest of many major orchestras, including Minnesota Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Grant Park Festival, Winnipeg Symphony, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Elgin Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Virginia Symphony, and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with whom she has performed every year since 2008 in venues such as Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, and Cadogan Hall. She has performed with major orchestras in North America including Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Houston Symphony, NAC Orchestra in Ottawa, Nashville Symphony.

A passionate chamber musician, Natasha is a regular recital partner of Grammy winning cellist Zuill Bailey, with whom she has recorded a number of CDs. Their Britten album on Telarc debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Chart, remaining there for a number of weeks, in addition to being featured on The New York Times Playlist. She has been a guest of many chamber music festivals such as Jeffrey Kahane’s Green Music Center ChamberFest, the Lockenhaus, Toronto, Sitka Summer Music, and Cape Cod Chamber Music festivals to name a few.

Natasha was awarded several prestigious prizes at a very young age, including the Gilmore Young Artists prize in 2006 at the age of eighteen, the Prix Montblanc in 2007, the Orpheum Stiftung Prize in Switzerland. In September 2010, she was awarded the Classical Recording Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year. Her first recital album was released in 2011 to great SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM III

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES acclaim, topping the Billboard Classical Charts, and was re-released on the Steinway & Sons label in September 2016 featuring Islamey recorded on Steinway’s revolutionary new Spirio technology. In 2012 she recorded Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody with Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Fabien Gabel on the orchestra’s label distributed by Naxos.

She has toured extensively in Europe with such orchestras as Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Vienna’s Tonkünstler Orchester, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Orchestre de Bretagne, the Orchestre de Nancy, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Tonhalle Orchester in Zurich, Moscow Philharmonic, under the direction of conductors including Thomas Dausgaard, Peter Oundjian, Andres Orozco-Estrada, Jeffrey Kahane, James Gaffigan, JoAnn Falletta, Fabien Gabel, Rossen Milanov and Andrew Litton. In addition, she has toured with Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica in Latvia, Benelux, the United Kingdom and Austria as well as appearances with National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra in Taipei.

Natasha has given recitals at the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, Wigmore Hall, Schloss Elmau, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, Verbier Festival, Seattle’s Meany Hall, Kansas City’s Harriman Jewell Series, Santa Fe’s Lensic Theater, Ludwigshafen BASF Series, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Tokyo’s Musashino Performing Arts Center and on the Rising Stars Series of Gilmore and Ravinia Festivals.

With a strong focus on new music, Natasha’s growing repertoire reflects an artistic maturity beyond her years. In the 2010-11 season, she played the world premiere of a sonata written for her by Gabriel Kahane, which was also included in her solo album.

Natasha continues to extend her performance activity and range beyond the traditional concert hall. In December 2008, she was the featured pianist in choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s Danses Concertantes at New York’s Joyce Theater. She was featured in a major two-part film for BBC Television on the life and work of Tchaikovsky, shot on location in St. Petersburg, performing excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and other works.

In the winter of 2007, Natasha participated along with Simon Keenlyside in the filming of Twin Spirits, a project starring Sting and Trudie Styler that explores the music and writing of Robert and Clara Schumann, which was released on DVD. She has performed in the project live several times with the co-creators in New York and the U.K., directed by John Caird, the original director/adaptor of the musical Les Misérables.

Natasha began her piano studies at the age of four with Nina Malikova at Moscow’s Andreyev School of Music. She then studied at San Francisco Conservatory of Music before moving to New York to study with Pavlina Dokovska at Mannes College of Music, from which she graduated in 2007. Natasha made her professional debut at age nine with El Camino Youth Symphony in California. At the age of fifteen she debuted with Los Angeles Philharmonic and recorded two discs with Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.

Born in Moscow, Natasha moved to the United States at the age of eight becoming a U.S. citizen shortly thereafter, and is now based in New York.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953) Classical Symphony, Op. 25 (Symphony No. 1 in D major) Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Sontsovka, Russia, and died on March 5, 1953 in Moscow. He began his Classical Symphony in 1916 and completed it on September 10th of the following year. Prokofiev conducted the work at both its world premiere (Petrograd [St. Petersburg], April 21, 1918) and its first American performance (New York, December 1918). The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Duration is about 14 minutes. This piece was last performed by the Orchestra January 6, 2001 with Marin Alsop conducting.

Prokofiev’s penchant for using Classical musical idioms was instilled in him during the course of his thorough, excellent training: when he was a little tot, his mother played Beethoven sonatas to him while he sat under the piano; he studied with the greatest Russian musicians of the time — Glière, Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, Glazunov; he began composing at the Mozartian age of six. By the time he was 25, Prokofiev was composing prolifically, always brewing a variety of compositions simultaneously. The works of 1917, for example, represent widely divergent styles — The Gambler is a satirical opera; They Are Seven, a nearly atonal cantata; the Classical Symphony, a charming miniature. This last piece was a direct result of Prokofiev’s study with Alexander Tcherepnin, a good and wise teacher who allowed the young composer to forge ahead in his own manner while making sure that he had a thorough understanding of the great musical works of the past. It was in 1916 that Prokofiev first had the idea for a symphony based on the Viennese models supplied by Tcherepnin, and at that time he sketched out a few themes for it. Most of the work, however, was done the following year.

The Classical Symphony is in the four movements customary in Haydn’s works, though at only fifteen minutes it hardly runs to half their typical length. The dapper first movement is a miniature sonata design that follows the traditional form but adds some quirks that would have given old Haydn himself a chuckle — the recapitulation, for example, begins in the “wrong” key (but soon rights itself ), and occasionally a beat is left out, as though the music had stubbed its toe. The sleek main theme is followed by the enormous leaps, flashing grace notes and sparse texture of the second subject. A graceful, ethereal melody floating high in the violins is used to open and close the Larghetto, with the pizzicato gentle middle section reaching a brilliant tutti before quickly subsiding. The third movement, a Gavotte, comes not from the Viennese symphony but rather from the tradition of French Baroque ballet. The finale is the most brilliant movement of the Symphony and calls for remarkable feats of agility and precise ensemble from the performers.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES SERGEI PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 Prokofiev composed his G minor Piano Concerto during the winter of 1912-1913, and was soloist in the premiere on September 5, 1913 at Pavlovsk, a summer resort near St. Petersburg; A.P. Aslanov conducted. The original score was lost during the upheavals of the 1917 Revolution, and Prokofiev reconstructed it, “with improvements,” in 1923. That revised version was premiered in Paris on May 8, 1924, with Prokofiev again at the keyboard and Koussevitzky conducting. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 31 minutes. The Orchestra last performed this piece November 6-8, 2015 with Denis Kozhukhin playing piano and Andrew Litton conducting.

Politics was not the only revolution brewing in Russia in the 1910s. A brash, arrogant student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory was helping to forge a new musical language, with a special assault concentrated on that most hallowed of Romantic instruments, the piano.

Prokofiev’s iconoclastic views of modern music engendered his piano style, one that broke from the Romantic, lyrical, virtuoso manner of Chopin and Liszt to create a new sound for a new age. Harold Schonberg, in his book on The Great Pianists, wrote of Prokofiev’s pianism: “Young Sergei Prokofiev, the pianist of steel, came raging out of Russia, playing his own music and startling the world with his vigor, his exuberance, his wild rhythm, his disdain for the trappings of romanticism. Gone were romantic color, wide-spaced arpeggios, inner voices, pretty melodies. Prokofiev at the piano attacked the music with a controlled fury, blasting out savage and complicated rhythms, giving or asking no mercy. He decided that the piano was a percussive instrument, and there’s no use trying to disguise the fact that it had hammers.... The anti-romantic age was under way.”

Prokofiev’s steely piano style was the perfect match for his athletic compositions and his strutting personality. The polite audience of gentry at the summertime premiere of the Second Piano Concerto in 1913 in the fashionable resort of Pavlosk, near St. Petersburg, was “puzzled” by the “mercilessly dissonant combinations,” according to one reviewer. The listeners, disdaining the decorum that they were convinced the young composer had already shattered, greeted the work with a sonorous round of hisses and catcalls. Prokofiev responded with his own characteristic rejoinder: he sat down and thundered through one of his noisiest solo works as an encore. It was not long, however, before his playing and his music gained a wide audience, the fascination and innate musicality of his style sweeping away all initial reservations.

The Second Piano Concerto is a work “full of splinters,” as Prokofiev wrote to Igor Stravinsky.

Through its handling of rhythm, melody and harmony, it achieves a quality of galvanic dynamism unknown in the music of the preceding century. The soloist presents the principal theme of the opening movement; a saucy melody in quicker tempo provides contrast. The formal development and recapitulation of the principal theme are combined into an enormous solo cadenza before the orchestra is recalled to provide a coda. The quiet ending section mirrors the opening measures, bringing the movement round full circle. Prokofiev cited the brief but brilliant Scherzo as an example of his “motoric” style, and this movement, is, indeed, a display of perpetual motion. The soloist, in a mighty exhibition of technique and endurance, plays

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES continuously in octaves without a single beat of rest or one long note throughout the entire movement. The slower third movement is in Prokofiev’s best nose-thumbing, wrong-note idiom. The opening and closing sections of this movement make much use of a chugging bass ostinato, with the middle section given over to music of a more gentle character. The finale is a dazzling showcase for the soloist. The lightning-flash opening section returns to finish the movement, but in between are themes of contrasting character in which the soloist frequently charges forth alone, the orchestra sitting silently amid the pianistic fireworks. The Orchestra last performed this piece January 29-31, 1987 with conductor Phillippe Entremont.

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DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975) Symphony No. 9, Op. 70 Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, and died on August 9, 1975 in Moscow. He composed his Ninth Symphony during six weeks of the summer of 1945 at the Rest Home for Soviet composers near Ivanova, a village some 150 miles northeast of Moscow. Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted the Symphony’s premiere on November 3, 1945 as part of the opening performance of the Leningrad Philharmonic’s 25th season. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 27 minutes.

A transcendent paean to peace; a celebration of victory; an affirmation of goodness and right — such was the role the Ninth Symphony of Shostakovich was supposed to fill. He began the piece in 1945 at the country retreat house for Soviet composers near Ivanova during the interval between the end of hostilities in Europe and the Allied victory in Asia, and it was everywhere conceded that the piece would be the third of the trio of “War Symphonies” that began in 1941 with the Symphony No. 7, which depicted the barbarous Nazi siege of Leningrad, and continued with the evocation of the bitter suffering and destruction of the massive conflict in the Eighth Symphony of 1943. “They wanted a fanfare from me, an ode; they wanted me to write a majestic Ninth Symphony,” recalled Shostakovich in his purported memoirs, Testimony.

By “they” Shostakovich meant Stalin, and what “they” got was a surprise — a compact orchestral essay brimming with sardonic wit that many took as an insult to the Soviet hierarchy just when it was trying to rebuild spirits and cities (and solidify its own political power) in the months immediately after the war. “Stalin was incensed,” said the composer of the dictator.

In Testimony, Shostakovich revealed his difficulty in writing a heroic, apotheosizing symphony in 1945: “I doubt that Stalin ever questioned his own genius or greatness. But when the war against Hitler was won, Stalin went off the deep end. He was like the frog puffing himself up to the size of the ox, with the difference that everyone around him already considered Stalin to be an ox, and gave him an ox’s due. Everyone praised Stalin, and now I was supposed to join in this unholy affair. There was an appropriate excuse. We had ended the war victoriously; no matter what the cost, the important thing was that we had won, the empire had expanded. And they demanded that Shostakovich use quadruple winds, choir and soloists to hail the leader. All

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES the more because Stalin found the number auspicious: the Ninth Symphony … [but] I couldn’t write an apotheosis to Stalin, I simply couldn’t.” Shostakovich saw the Ninth Symphony as one of the main causes of the condemnation of his music in 1948, after which he did not release a single important work until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

The Ninth Symphony, like all of Shostakovich’s great works, seems to be more than merely the sum of its musical parts. He would have agreed with Gustav Mahler, whose symphonies were so influential on his orchestral compositions, that “what is most important in music is not to be found in the notes.” Wrote Hugh Ottaway, “Surely the Ninth is the least programmatic of Shostakovich’s symphonies and represents a deliberate turning-away from the big issues, an attempt to relax into a simple enjoyment of musical sound — rather as Prokofiev had done in his ‘Classical’ Symphony — but with the experiences embodied in the Eighth as the inescapable background.... There is little here to suggest ‘peace of mind,’ but much that is colored by an underlying tension, only partially concealed by the gay and witty inventiveness.” The referential framework of the Symphony is almost certainly one of irony, or even of bitterness, so that the brilliant, chuckling surface of the music masks, perhaps, anger or sadness or derision or some burning frustration for which there is no name. “There is a relentless movement, as if the comedy provided a distraction for events working at a deeper level whose shape is never clearly defined,” assessed Robert Layton. “This deeper side of the work emerges in the slow movement, a tender, reflective piece tinged with pathos.”

The Ninth Symphony is in five movements, the last three played without pause. The opening Allegro is a pedantically correct sonata form, a cheeky godchild of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony. The violins give out the tripping main theme. A blast from the solo trombone ushers in the second theme, a sardonic little tune piped by the piccolo. The exposition is marked to be repeated. After both themes are treated to a bit of manipulation in the development section, and the main theme returns in its original form, comes one of the funniest moments in the symphonic repertory. The trombone, overly anxious to play its solo again, keeps butting into the main theme with its two-note call. The muted trumpets give a strident cry of derision before, finally, the aggressive trombone coaxes the solo violin to play the second theme again before the movement comes to a swaggering close.

The second movement is a somber valse triste largely entrusted to the woodwinds supported by coldly solemn parallel harmonies in the strings. Following is a crackling scherzo that leads without pause to the sepulchral Largo, in which powerful, solemn statements by the trombones and tuba are answered by plaintive recitatives in the bassoon’s highest register. Hardly the stuff of high comedy, this brief movement casts a strong shadow across the entire work, as though some seething inner emotion that here breaks out could turn all the surrounding music to bitter irony. How then to hear the whirling finale? As a denial of the dark omens of the fourth movement? As the unbridled merriment of a happy soul? As some sort of gallows humor? As an abstract, meaningless pattern of tones? There is no answer, only the response of the individual listener. “What is most important in music is not to be found in the notes.” ©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

PROGRAM VIII C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G