Mahler's The Titan | Program Notes

MASTERWORKS • 2014/15 MAHLER’S THE TITAN COLORADO SYMPHONY MARIN ALSOP, conductor KARINA CANELLAKIS, guest conductor SATURDAY’S CONCERT IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED TO BOB AND CYNTHIA BENSON, RAYMOND AND SUZANNE SATTER SUNDAY’S CONCERT IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED TO DALE AND MYCKI BUSSMAN

Saturday, November 1, 2014 at 7:30 pm Sunday, November 2, 2014 at 1:00 pm Boettcher Concert Hall

JOHN ADAMS

Short Ride in a Fast Machine

MOZART

Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major, K. 543 Adagio – Allegro Andante con moto Menuetto: Allegretto Allegro — INTERMISSION—

MAHLER

Symphony No. 1 in D major Langsam schleppend Kräftig bewegt Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen Stürmisch bewegt

MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES MARIN ALSOP, conductor Marin Alsop is an inspiring and powerful voice in the international music scene, a Music Director of vision and distinction who passionately believes that “music has the power to change lives”. She is recognized across the world for her innovative approach to programming and for her deep commitment to education and to the development of audiences of all ages. Her outstanding success as Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2007 has been recognised by two extensions in her tenure, now confirmed until 2021. Alsop took up the post of Music Director of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in July 2013, steering the orchestra in its artistic and creative programming, recording ventures and its education and outreach activities. She has led the orchestra on two European tours, both in 2012 and 2013, with acclaimed performances at the BBC Proms in London and at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Building an orchestra is one of Alsop’s great gifts, and she retains strong links with all of her previous orchestras — Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (Principal Conductor 2002-2008; now Conductor Emeritus) and Colorado Symphony (Music Director 1993-2005; now Music Director Laureate). Born in New York City, Marin Alsop attended Yale University and received her Master’s Degree from The Juilliard School. Her conducting career was launched when, in 1989, she was a prize-winner at the Leopold Stokowski International Conducting Competition and in the same year was the first woman to be awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize from the Tanglewood Music Centre, where she was a pupil of Leonard Bernstein.

KARINA CANELLAKIS, guest conductor Currently in her first season as Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Symphony, Karina Canellakis is rapidly gaining recognition as one of the most promising and exciting young American conductors. She recently made headlines filling in last minute for Jaap Van Zweden in two subscription concerts with the Dallas Symphony, conducting Shostakovich 8th Symphony and Mozart K.449 with soloist Emanuel Ax, receiving rave reviews. She made her Carnegie Hall conducting debut in Zankel Hall, and frequently appears as guest conductor of New York’s groundbreaking International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).

This coming season, she makes her debut with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colorado and Toledo Symphonies, and the Orchestra of St. Lukes. This past summer Canellakis was a Conducting Fellow at the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center, where she has been featured in a BSO documentary web series entitled “New Tanglewood Tales.” Canellakis was the winner of the 2013 Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, founded by Marin Alsop. She has also led performances with the Juilliard Orchestra at Lincoln Center. She was a selected conductor in the Lucerne Festival Masterclass with Bernard Haitink, and conducted the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra in Japan, as well as the Tonhalle Orchestra in Switzerland as part of international masterclasses. As a violinist, Canellakis appears as soloist with orchestras across the United States. For several years she played on a regular basis with both the Berlin Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony. She has also been on several occasions guest concertmaster of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway. An avid chamber musician, she spent many summers at the Marlboro Music Festival. Karina Canellakis holds a Bachelor’s degree in violin from the Curtis Institute of Music and a Master’s degree in orchestral conducting from The Juilliard School, where she won numerous awards. Among her most prominent mentors are Alan Gilbert, Fabio Luisi, and Sir Simon Rattle.

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES JOHN ADAMS (b. 1947) Short Ride in a Fast Machine John Adams was born February 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts and now lives in Berkeley, California. He composed this brief work in 1986 in celebration of the opening of the Great Woods Performing Arts Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony there in the work’s premiere on June 13, 1986.

The score calls for two piccolos, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, four clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

Last performed by the orchestra on September 11&12, 2009 with Jeffrey Kahane on the podium.

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 received the University of Louisville’s distinguished Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was the focus of the New York Philharmonic’s Composer Week, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America Magazine; he has been made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 1999, Nonesuch released The John Adams Earbox, a critically acclaimed ten-CD collection of his work; 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, and was also recognized by New York’s Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work titled “John Adams: An American Master,” the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted at Lincoln Center; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society” and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, which included residencies and teaching at Northwestern University; he was a 2009 recipient of the NEA Opera Award; he has been granted honorary doctorates from the 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.

For the recording of Short Ride in a Fast Machine by the San Francisco Symphony on Nonesuch Records, Michael Steinberg wrote, “This work is a joyfully exuberant piece, brilliantly scored for a large orchestra. The steady marking of a beat is typical of Adams’ music. Short Ride begins with a marking of quarters (woodblock, soon joined by the four trumpets) and eighths (clarinets), but the woodblock is fortissimo and the other instruments play forte. Adams describes the woodblock’s persistence as ‘almost sadistic’ and thinks of the rest of the orchestra as running the gauntlet through that rhythmic tunnel. About the title: ‘You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?’ It is, in any event, a wonderful opening music for a new American outdoor festival.”

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major, K. 543 Mozart was born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg and died December 5, 1791 in Vienna. He registered the E-flat Symphony in the catalog of his works on June 26, 1788. There is no irrefutable record of a performance during his lifetime, but it seems likely to have been played on at least one of the following concerts in which he participated: April 14, 1789 (Dresden); May 12, 1789 (Leipzig); October 15, 1790 (Frankfurt); or April 16, 1791 (Vienna).

The score calls for flute, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.

Jeffrey Kahane conducted the last performance of the work on October 17-19, 2008.

The city of Prague fell in love with Mozart in January 1787. The Marriage of Figaro met with a resounding success when he conducted it there on January 17th, and so great was the acclaim awarded to his Symphony in D major (K. 504) when it was heard only two days later that it has since borne the name of the Bohemian capital. He returned to Vienna in early February with a signed contract to provide Prague with a new opera for its next season. The opera was Don Giovanni, and Mozart returned to Prague on October 1st to oversee its production. Again, he triumphed and was invited to take up residence in the city. He was tempted to abandon Vienna, where his career seemed stymied and the bill-collectors harassed him incessantly, but, after six weeks away, he returned home for pressing reasons both personal and professional. Personally, his wife, Constanze, was due to deliver their fourth child in December, and she wished to be close to her family for the birth. (A girl, Theresa, was born on December 27th.) Professionally, the venerable Christoph Willibald Gluck was reported near death, and Mozart, who had been lobbying to obtain a position at the Habsburg court such as Gluck held, wanted to be at hand when the job, as seemed imminent, came open.

Mozart arrived back in Vienna on November 15th, one day after Gluck died. Three weeks later he was named Court Chamber Music Composer by Emperor Joseph II, though he was disappointed with both the salary and the duties. He was to receive only 800 florins a year, less than half the 2,000 florins that Gluck had been paid, and rather than requiring him to compose operas, a form in which he had proven his eminence and to which he longed to fully devote himself, the contract specified he would write only dances for the imperial balls. Still, the income from the court position, the generous amount he had been paid for Don Giovanni, and his fees for various free-lance jobs should have been enough to adequately support his family. However, his desire to put up a good front with elegant clothes, expensive entertaining, and even loans to needy (or conniving) musicians drained his resources.

Despite the disappointments inflicted upon him, his precarious pecuniary position, and an alarming decline in his health and that of his wife, Mozart was still working miracles in his music.

On June 26th, he finished the E-flat Symphony (K. 543), the first of the incomparable trilogy that he produced within two months during that unsettling summer of 1788. The reason he wrote the E-flat, G minor and C major (“Jupiter�) Symphonies has never come to light. It has been speculated that they might have been composed for a series of concerts he planned originally for June, but which was several times postponed for lack of subscribers and eventually cancelled completely.

A second possibility is that the symphonies were written on speculation to be published as a set. A third consideration might have been a trip that Mozart was trying to arrange to London.

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES Should the tour materialize, he reasoned, these symphonies would make a fine introduction to the British public. None of those situations came about, however, and the genesis of Mozart’s last three symphonies will probably always remain a mystery.

The E-flat Symphony opens with a large introduction of surprising emotional weight. The remainder of the movement, however, uses its sonata form as the basis of a lovely extended song rather than as an intense drama. The halcyon mood carries into the Andante, a sonatina in form (sonata without development section) and a sunbeam in spirit. The Minuet, with its sweet trio, is a vivacious dance of grace, elegance and prescient Romantic vigor. The finale combines wit and verve with suavity of style and harmonic felicity.

o GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911) Symphony No. 1 in D major Mahler was born July 7, 1860 in Kalischt, Bohemia and died May 18, 1911 in Vienna. He began composing his First Symphony in 1883 or 1884, using sketches that date from as early as 1876. He completed the first version the work in March 1888 and revised the orchestration in 1892 and 1893. Mahler, one of the greatest conductors of his time, led both the world premiere (Orchestra of the Royal Opera, Budapest, November 20, 1889) and the American premiere (New York Philharmonic, December 16, 1909).

The work is scored for four flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolo), four oboes (3rd doubling English horn), E-flat clarinet, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), seven horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two sets of timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

Last performance by the orchestra was on September 19-21, 2008, with Jeffrey Kahane conducting.

Though he did not marry until 1902, Mahler had a healthy interest in the opposite sex, and at least three love affairs touch upon the First Symphony. In 1880, he conceived a short-lived but ferocious passion for Josephine Poisl, the daughter of the postmaster in his boyhood home of Iglau, and she inspired from him three songs and a cantata after Grimm, Das klagende Lied (“Song of Lamentation”), which contributed thematic fragments to the gestation of the Symphony. The second affair, which came early in 1884, was the spark that ignited the composition of the work.

Johanne Richter possessed a numbing musical mediocrity alleviated by a pretty face, and it was because of an infatuation with this singer at the Cassel Opera, where Mahler was then conducting, that not only the First Symphony but also the Songs of the Wayfarer sprang to life. The third liaison, in 1887, came as the Symphony was nearing completion. Mahler revived and reworked an opera

by Carl Maria von Weber called Die drei Pintos (“The Three Pintos,” two being impostors of the title character) and was aided in the venture by the grandson of that composer, also named Carl.

During the almost daily contact with the Weber family necessitated by the preparation of the work, Mahler fell in love with Carl’s wife, Marion. Mahler was serious enough to propose that he and Marion run away together, but at the last minute she had a sudden change of heart and left Mahler standing, quite literally, at the train station. The emotional turbulence of all these encounters found its way into the First Symphony, especially the finale, but, looking back in 1896, Mahler put these experiences into a better perspective. “The Symphony,” he wrote, “begins where SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 7

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES the love affair [with Johanne Richter] ends; it is based on the affair that preceded the Symphony in the emotional life of the composer. But the extrinsic experience became the occasion, not the message of the work.”

The Symphony begins with an evocation of verdant springtime. The movement’s main theme, which enters softly in the cellos, is based on the second of the Songs of a Wayfarer, Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld (“I Crossed the Meadow this Morn”). The first movement is largely given over to this theme combined with the spring sounds of the introduction.

The second movement is a dressed-up version of the Austrian peasant dance known as the Ländler balanced by a gentle central trio. The third movement begins and ends with a lugubrious transformation of the European folk song known most widely by its French title, Frére Jacques.

The middle of the movement contains a melody marked “Mit Parodie” (played “col legno” by the strings, i.e., tapping with the wood rather than the hair of the bow), and a simple, tender theme based on another melody from the Wayfarer songs, Die zwei blauen Augen (“The Two Blue Eyes”).

The finale, according to Bruno Walter, conducting protégé and friend of the composer, is filled with “raging vehemence.” The stormy character of the beginning is maintained for much of the movement. Throughout, themes from earlier movements are heard again, with the hunting calls of the opening introduction given special prominence. The tempest is finally blown away by a great blast from the horns to usher in the triumphant ending of the work.

— ©2014 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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