Program Notes: Vivaldi's The Four Seasons

CLASSICS 2022/23

VIVALDI’S THE FOUR SEASONS

ARAM DEMIRJIAN, conductor PAUL HUANG, violin

Friday, October 14, 2022 at 7:30pm

Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 7:30pm

Sunday, October 16, 2022 at 1:00pm

Boettcher Concert Hall

JESSIE MONTGOMERY Strum

VIVALDI

TCHAIKOVSKY

The Four Seasons, Op. 8

I. Spring II. Summer III. Autumn IV. Winter — INTERMISSION —

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36

I. Andante sostenuto II. Andantino in modo di canzona III. Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato IV. Finale: Allegro con fuoco

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 49 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!

Friday’s concert is dedicated to ed and Laurie Bock saturday’s concert is dedicated to JenniFer HegLin and randaLL carter sunday’s concert is dedicated to LiBBy Bortz and andra, LuLu, and greta zeppeLin

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

ARAM DEMIRJIAN, conductor

Recipient of The Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award from The Solti Foundation U.S., conductor Aram Demirjian is widely acclaimed for his transformative work as Music Director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra (KSO).

Aram has led the KSO to new artistic heights and national recognition for its achievements, including being selected in 2020 as one of four orchestras to be featured at SHIFT: A Festival of American Orchestras, presented by the Kennedy Center and Washington Performing Arts. His visionary programming emphasizes crossdisciplinary collaboration and initiatives that excite audiences and broaden the idea of what one can expect to see on the symphonic stage, with an emphasis on music by American composers, living composers, and composers from groups underrepresented on the symphonic stage. Aram and the KSO regularly perform as part of the internationally renowned Big Ears Festival, most recently in a performance with jazz saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings. In April 2022, Aram, the KSO, and Tessa Lark premiered Michael Schachter’s Violin Concerto: Cycle of Life, jointly commissioned by the KSO and Knoxville Museum of Art. The project, inspired by glass artist Richard Jolley’s work, was profiled by the PBS show Craft in America.

In demand as a guest conductor, Aram has appeared in recent seasons with the Philadelphia, Sarasota, Oregon Bach Festival, and Breckenridge Music Festival orchestras; the Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New England Conservatory, North Carolina, Omaha, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, Santa Rosa, St. Louis, and Tucson symphonies; and the Louisiana and Orlando philharmonics. Internationally, he has conducted the Orquesta Sinfónico de Minería, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, and Orchéstre Métropolitain de Montréal.

Aram’s 2022-23 season features exciting debuts with the Nashville Symphony at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center for Handel’s Messiah; the Colorado Symphony conducting Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Paul Huang; and Symphony San Jose conducting Price’s Symphony No. 1 and Grieg’s Piano Concerto with Jon Nakamatsu. In Knoxville, he conducts an exciting range of repertoire, including the Southeast premiere of Jonathan Leshnoff’s Piano Concerto (a KSO co-commission), the KSO’s first-ever performance of Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, Mozart’s Requiem, and music by a range of composers of our time including Anna Clyne, TJ Cole, Viet Cuong, Caroline Shaw, and Tan Dun.

Throughout his career, Aram has worked with internationally renowned conductors Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Stéphane Denève, Alan Gilbert, Bernard Haitink, Manfred Honeck, Louis Langrée, Fabio Luisi, Kurt Masur, and Antonio Pappano, and collaborated with artists including Julia Bullock, Augustin Hadelich, Stefan Jackiw, Yo-Yo Ma, Nicholas Phan, Jason Vieaux, and Joyce Yang.

American born and of Armenian descent, Aram holds a joint Bachelor of Arts in Music and Government from Harvard University, and a Master of Music in Orchestral Conducting from New England Conservatory.

For more information, please visit https://www.aramdemirjian.com/.

PHOTO: DAVID BICKLEY

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

PAUL HUANG, violin

Recipient of the prestigious 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, violinist Paul Huang is considered to be one of the most distinctive artists of his generation. The Washington Post remarked that Mr. Huang “possesses a big, luscious tone, spot-on intonation and a technique that makes the most punishing string phrases feel as natural as breathing,” and further proclaimed him as “an artist with the goods for a significant career” following his recital debut at the Kennedy Center.

Mr. Huang’s recent highlights have included acclaim debut at Bravo! Vail Music Festival stepping in for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter in the Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.4 with Chamber Orchestra Vienna-Berlin, Detroit Symphony with Leonard Slatkin, Houston Symphony with Andres OrozcoEstrada, Baltimore Symphony and Seoul Philharmonic with Markus Stenz, and recital debuts at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and Aspen Music Festival. In Fall 2021, Paul also became the first classical violinist to perform his own arrangement of the National Anthem for the opening game of the NFL at the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina to an audience of 75,000.

During the 2022-23 season, Mr. Huang opens the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan season with Jun Markl (also embarks on a US tour at the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall) and makes his debut with the Hiroshima Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic with Lahav Shani, and Dallas Symphony Orchestra with Fabio Luisi. Other highlights will include engagements with the Buffalo and Fort Wayne Philharmonics, and Colorado, San Diego, and Pensacola Symphonies.

2022-23 season recital and chamber music performances will include Mr. Huang’s return to both the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Camerata Pacifica, his recital debut at Alice Tully Hall with pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, and appearances at the Washington Performing Arts, Wolf Trap, the Rockefeller University, the Society of Four Arts in Palm Beach, Cleveland Chamber Music Society, and Chamber Music San Francisco. In January 2023, Mr. Huang will launch the first edition of “Paul Huang & Friends” International Chamber Music Festival in Taipei, Taiwan in association with the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan.

Winner of the 2011 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Mr. Huang made critically acclaimed recital debuts in New York at Lincoln Center and in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center. Other honors include First Prize at the 2009 Tibor Varga International Violin Competition Sion-Valais in Switzerland, the 2009 Chi-Mei Cultural Foundation Arts Award for Taiwan’s Most Promising Young Artists, the 2013 Salon de Virtuosi Career Grant, and the 2014 Classical Recording Foundation Young Artist Award.

Born in Taiwan, Mr. Huang began violin lessons at the age of seven. He is a recipient of the inaugural Kovner Fellowship at The Juilliard School, where he earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees under Hyo Kang and I-Hao Lee. He plays on the legendary 1742 “ex-Wieniawski” Guarneri del Gesù on extended loan through the Stradivari Society of Chicago and is on the faculty of Taipei National University of the Arts. He resides in New York.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

JESSIE MONTGOMERY (born in 1981)

Strum for String Orchestra

Jessie Montgomery was born December 8, 1981 in New York City. She composed Strum for string quintet in 2006 and revised it for string ensemble in 2012. The original version was premiered in April 2006 by the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players; the revised version was first performed on February 5, 2012 at the Sphinx Competition in Detroit. The score calls for strings. Duration is about 8 minutes. This is the Colorado Symphony's premiere performance.

Violinist, composer and music educator Jessie Montgomery, who began a three-year term as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in July 2021, started studying violin at age four at the Third Street Music School Settlement in her native New York City. She was composing by age eleven, and while still in high school twice received the Composer’s Apprentice Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Montgomery went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in violin performance at Juilliard and a master’s from New York University in film scoring and multimedia; she also studied composition with Derek Bermel and Steven Burke and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. In 2020, she was appointed to the faculty of the Mannes School of Music in New York. As a composer, Montgomery has created works for concert, theater and film (one of which was in collaboration with her father, Ed Montgomery, also a composer and an independent film producer), and held residencies with the Deer Valley Music Festival, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and Sphinx Virtuosi. Among her rapidly accumulating distinctions are the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. Jessie Montgomery is currently working on a commission for Project 19, the New York Philharmonic’s multi-year celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year, which granted women the right to vote. The Philharmonic began premiering these new compositions by 19 women composers in February 2020. In September 2021, Montgomery was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera along with two other Black composers — Valerie Coleman and Joel Thompson — to develop new works in collaboration with the Lincoln Center Theater.

Jessie Montgomery wrote, “Strum is the culmination of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally composed for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th Annual Sphinx Competition. Originally conceived for a quintet of two violins, viola and two cellos, the voicing is often spread over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive sound. Within Strum, I utilized ‘texture motives,’ layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinatos [repeating figures] to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a ‘texture motive’ and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, Strum has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)

The Four Seasons for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 8, Nos. 1-4 Antonio Vivaldi was born March 4, 1678 in Venice and died July 28, 1741 in Vienna. The Four Seasons was composed around 1720. The score calls for strings and harpsichord. Duration is about 37 minutes. The Orchestra last performed this piece September 11-13, 2020 at Red Rocks, with conductor Christopher Dragon and violinists Yumi Hwang-Williams, Claude Sim, Yi Zhao, and Dmitri Pogrelov.

The Gazette d’Amsterdam of December 14, 1725 announced the issuance by the local publisher Michele Carlo Le Cène of a collection of twelve concertos for solo violin and orchestra by Antonio Vivaldi — Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione, or “The Contest between Harmony and Invention,” Op. 8. The works were printed with a flowery dedication typical of the time to the Bohemian Count Wenzel von Morzin, a distant cousin of Haydn’s patron before he came into the employ of the Esterházy family in 1761. On the title page, Vivaldi described himself as the “maestro in Italy” to the Count, though there is no record of his having held a formal position with him. Vivaldi probably met Morzin when he worked in Mantua from 1718 to 1720 for the Habsburg governor of that city, Prince Philipp of Hessen-Darmstadt, and apparently provided the Bohemian Count with an occasional composition on demand. (A bassoon concerto, RV 496, is headed with Morzin’s name.) Vivaldi claimed that Morzin had been enjoying the concertos of the 1725 Op. 8 set “for some years,” implying earlier composition dates and a certain circulation of this music in manuscript copies, and hoped that their appearance in print would please his patron.

Though specifically programmatic (critic Lawrence Gilman went so far as to call The Four Seasons “symphonic poems” and harbingers of Romanticism), the fast, outer movements of these works use the ritornello form usually found in Baroque concertos. The opening ritornello theme (Italian for “return”), depicting the general emotional mood of each fast movement, recurs to separate its various descriptive episodes, so that the music fulfills both the demands of creating a logical, abstract form and evoking vivid images from Nature. The slow, middle movements are lyrical, almost aria-like, in style. Though Vivaldi frequently utilized in these pieces the standard concertino, or solo group, of two violins and cello found in the 18th-century concerto grosso, The Four Seasons is truly a work for solo violin and orchestra, and much of the music’s charm comes from the contrasting and interweaving of soloist and orchestra.

The first four concertos of Op. 8, those depicting the seasons of the year, seem to have especially excited Morzin’s admiration, so Vivaldi made specific the programmatic implications of the works by heading each of them with a sonnet:

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

Spring

The spring has come, joyfully, The birds welcome it with merry song, And the streams flow forth with sweet murmurs.

Now the sky is draped in black, Thunder and lightning announce a storm. When the storm has passed, the little birds Return to their harmonious songs.

And in the lovely meadow full of flowers, To the gentle rustling of leaves and branches, The goatherd sleeps, his faithful dog at his side.

To the rustic bagpipe’s merry sound, Nymphs and shepherds dance under the lovely sky

When spring appears in all its brilliance.

Summer

In the heat of the blazing summer sun, Man and beast languish; the pine tree is scorched.

The cuckoo raises his voice. Soon the turtledove and goldfinch join in the song.

A gentle breeze blows, But then the north wind whips, And the shepherd weeps

As above him the dreaded storm gathers.

His weary limbs are roused from rest

By his fear of the lightning and fierce thunder And by the angry swarms of flies and hornets.

Alas, his fears are borne out.

Thunder and lightning dominate the sky, Bending down the tops of trees and flattening the grain.

Autumn

The peasant celebrates with dance and song The joy of a fine harvest; And filled with Bacchus’ liquor He ends his fun in sleep.

Everyone is made to leave dancing and singing.

The air is gentle and pleasing, And the season invites everyone To enjoy a delightful sleep.

At dawn the hunters set out With horns, guns and dogs. The hunted animal flees, Terrified and exhausted by the noise Of guns and dogs. Wounded, it tries feebly to escape, But is caught and dies.

Winter

Freezing and shivering in the icy darkness, In the severe gusts of a terrible wind, Running and stamping one’s feet constantly, So chilled that one’s teeth chatter.

Spending quiet and happy days by the fire While outside the rain pours everywhere.

Walking on the ice with slow steps, Walking carefully for fear of falling, Then stepping out boldly, and falling down. Going out once again onto the ice, and running boldly

Until the ice cracks and breaks, Hearing the Scirocco, The North Wind, and all the winds battling. This is winter, but such joy it brings.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, Russia and died November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg. He composed the Fourth Symphony between April 1877 and January 7, 1878. Nikolai Rubinstein, Director of the Moscow Conservatory, conducted the premiere, in Moscow on February 22, 1878. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 44 minutes. The Orchestra last performed this piece October 4-6, 2019, conducted by Brett Mitchell.

The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most crucial and turbulent time of Tchaikovsky’s life — 1877, when he met two women who forced him into a period of intense introspection. The first was the sensitive, music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck, who became not only the financial backer who allowed him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory to devote himself entirely to composition. Though they never met, her place in Tchaikovsky’s life was enormous and beneficial.

The second woman to enter Tchaikovsky’s life in 1877 was Antonina Miliukov, an unnoticed student in one of his large lecture classes at the Conservatory who had worked herself into a passion over her professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no special attention, and he had quite forgotten her when he received an ardent love letter professing her flaming and unquenchable desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky (age 37), who should have burned the thing, answered the letter of the 28-year-old Antonina in a polite, cool fashion, but did not include an outright rejection of her advances. He had been considering marriage for almost a year in the hope that it would give him both the stable home life that he had not enjoyed in the twenty years since his mother died, as well as to help dispel the all-too-true rumors of his homosexuality. He believed he might achieve both these goals with Antonina. What a welter of emotions must have gripped his heart when, just a few weeks later, he proposed marriage to her! Inevitably, the marriage crumbled within days of the wedding amid Tchaikovsky’s searing self-deprecation.

It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the Fourth Symphony, finishing the first three movements before Antonina began her siege. The finale was completed by the time he proposed. Because of this chronology, the program of the Symphony was not a direct result of his marital disaster. All that — the July wedding, the mere eighteen days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations — postdated the actual composition of the Symphony by a few months. What Tchaikovsky found in his relationship with this woman (who by 1877 already showed signs of approaching the door of the mental ward in which, still legally married to him, she died in 1917) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable workings of Fate in human destiny.

After the premiere, Tchaikovsky wrote of the emotional content of the Fourth Symphony: “The introduction [blaring brasses heard immediately in a motto theme that recurs throughout the work] is the kernel of the whole Symphony. This is Fate, which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain [the melancholy, syncopated shadow-waltz of the main theme, heard in the strings]. Would it not

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

be better to turn away from reality and lull one’s self in dreams? [The second theme is begun by the clarinet.] But no — these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. [A brass fanfare begins the development.] The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has already been and gone! It is sad, yet sweet, to lose one’s self in the past. In the third movement are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly intoxicated. Military music is heard in the distance. As to the finale, if you find no pleasure in yourself, go to the people. The picture of a folk holiday. [The finale employs the folk song A Birch Stood in the Meadow.] Rejoice in the happiness of others — and you can still live.”

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda