Program - Beethoven Symphony No. 7

CLASSICS

2018/19

2018/19 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS:

BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 7 COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor MASON BATES, electronica/composer JOSHUA ROMAN, cello Friday, March 1, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 2, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, March 3, 2019, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall

REC

These performances are being recorded live.

We appreciate your cooperation and understanding, thank you.

MASON BATES

Auditorium for Chamber Orchestra & Laptop

MASON BATES

Cello Concerto — INTERMISSION —

BEETHOVEN

Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92

Friday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Diane S. Hill and Kevin E. Somerville Saturday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Liberty Global Sunday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Genesee Mountain Foundation Recording of compositions by Mason Bates this weekend was graciously underwritten in part by Michèle and Larry Corash LOU Fund, Vicki and David Fleishhacker, Priscilla and Keith Geeslin, Joanie and Michael Klein, and Jerome Guillen.

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES BRETT MITCHELL, conductor

PHOTO: ROGER MASTROIANNI

Hailed for presenting engaging, in-depth explorations of thoughtfully curated programs, Brett Mitchell began his tenure as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony in July 2017. Prior to this appointment, he served as the orchestra’s Music Director Designate during the 2016/17 season. He leads the orchestra in ten classical subscription weeks per season as well as a wide variety special programs featuring such guest artists as Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and Itzhak Perlman.

Mitchell is also in consistent demand as a guest conductor. Highlights of his 2018/19 season include subscription debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and return appearances with the orchestras of Cleveland, Dallas, and Indianapolis. Other upcoming and recent guest engagements include the Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, National, Oregon, and San Antonio symphonies, the Grant Park Festival Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Mitchell also regularly collaborates with the world’s leading soloists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Rudolf Buchbinder, Kirill Gerstein, James Ehnes, Augustin Hadelich, Leila Josefowicz, and Alisa Weilerstein.

From 2013 to 2017, Mitchell served on the conducting staff of The Cleveland Orchestra. He joined the orchestra as Assistant Conductor in 2013, and was promoted to Associate Conductor in 2015, becoming the first person to hold that title in over three decades and only the fifth in the orchestra’s hundred-year history. In these roles, he led the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour.

From 2007 to 2011, Mitchell led over one hundred performances as Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony. He also held Assistant Conductor posts with the Orchestre National de France, where he worked under Kurt Masur from 2006 to 2009, and the Castleton Festival, where he worked under Lorin Maazel in 2009 and 2010. In 2015, Mitchell completed a highly successful five-year appointment as Music Director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra.

As an opera conductor, Mitchell has served as music director of nearly a dozen productions, principally at his former post as Music Director of the Moores Opera Center in Houston, where he led eight productions from 2010 to 2013. His repertoire spans the core works of Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute), Verdi (Rigoletto and Falstaff), and Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress) to contemporary works by Adamo (Little Women), Aldridge (Elmer Gantry), Catán (Il Postino and Salsipuedes), and Hagen (Amelia). As a ballet conductor, Mitchell most recently led a production of The Nutcracker with the Pennsylvania Ballet in collaboration with The Cleveland Orchestra during the 2016/17 season.

In addition to his work with professional orchestras, Mitchell is also well known for his affinity for working with and mentoring young musicians aspiring to be professional orchestral players.

His tenure as Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra from 2013 to 2017

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES was highly praised, and included a four-city tour of China in June 2015, marking the orchestra’s second international tour and its first to Asia. Mitchell is regularly invited to work with the highly talented musicians at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the orchestras at this country’s highlevel training programs, such as the National Repertory Orchestra, Texas Music Festival, Sarasota Music Festival, and Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Born in Seattle in 1979, Mitchell holds degrees in conducting from the University of Texas at Austin and composition from Western Washington University, which selected him as its Young Alumnus of the Year in 2014. He also studied at the National Conducting Institute, and was selected by Kurt Masur as a recipient of the inaugural American Friends of the Mendelssohn Foundation Scholarship. Mitchell was also one of five recipients of the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellowship from 2007 to 2010.

For more information, please visit www.brettmitchellconductor.com

MASON BATES, electronica Recently named the most-performed composer of his generation, Mason Bates serves as the first composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His music enlivens imaginative narrative forms with innovative orchestral writing, the harmonies of jazz and the rhythms of techno, and it has been the first symphonic music to receive widespread acceptance for its unique integration of electronic sounds. Leading conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Leonard Slatkin have championed his diverse catalogue. He has become a visible advocate for bringing new music to new spaces, whether through institutional partnerships such as his residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, or through his club/classical project Mercury Soul, which transforms spaces ranging from commercial clubs to Frank Gehry-designed concert halls into exciting, hybrid musical events drawing over a thousand people. Mason Bates’ music’s novel realization of narrative forms has recently attracted the attention of artists in opera and film. He made his film composition debut in 2015 with the feature-length The Sea of Trees by director Gus Van Sant. He premiered an opera on the topic of Steve Jobs at Santa Fe Opera in 2017. Last season the Kennedy Center premiered Mason Bates’ new work celebrating the centennial of John F. Kennedy. The work juxtaposes the poetry of longtime JFK confidant Robert Frost with excerpts of the President’s own words. Other recent highlights include performances of Liquid Interface and Garages of the Valley by the National Symphony Orchestra, Alternative Energy with the Philadelphia Orchestra and performances by the Fort Worth Symphony of Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, which was recently recorded by Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony. For more info, go to www.masonbates.com and www.mercurysoul.org.

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

PHOTO: HAYLEY YOUNG

JOSHUA ROMAN, cello Joshua Roman has earned an international reputation for his wideranging repertoire, a commitment to communicating the essence of music in visionary ways, artistic leadership and versatility. As well as being a celebrated performer, he is recognized as an accomplished composer and curator, and was named a TED Senior Fellow in 2015. During the 2017/18 season, Roman will make his Detroit Symphony Orchestra debut, and perform his own Cello Concerto, Awakening, with the Princeton Symphony in collaboration with conductor Teddy Abrams. In Europe, Roman will perform one of his favorite 20th Century Cello Concertos, that of Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, with the Szczecin Philharmonic of Poland. Other season highlights include performances of Tornado with the JACK Quartet with San Francisco Performances, Town Hall Seattle, Interlochen and numerous presenters throughout the country. Notable events from the 2016/17 season include the premiere of Tornado, a new work composed by Joshua Roman and commissioned by the Music Academy of the West and Town Hall Seattle. The lauded premiere took place with the JACK Quartet at the Music Academy of the West in June of 2017. He also gave his debut at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, comprised of not only performances with high caliber musicians from the St. Lawrence String Quartet and other corners of the chamber music world, but a performance of his solo piece Riding Light. Orchestral highlights of the season included performances of the Mason Bates Cello Concerto with the Portland, Berkeley, Spokane, and Memphis symphonies. The concerto is dedicated to the cellist, who gave its “world-class world premiere” (Seattle Times) with the Seattle Symphony in 2014, and has since performed it with orchestras around the U.S. In November of 2016, Roman’s musical response to the tension around the U.S. Presidential election – “Let’s Take A Breath” – brought almost one million live viewers to TED’s Facebook page to hear his performance of the complete Six Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach. Before embarking on a solo career, Roman spent two seasons as principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, a position he won in 2006 at the age of 22. Since that time he has appeared as a soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Moscow State Symphony, and Mariinsky Orchestra, among many others. An active chamber musician, Roman has collaborated with Cho-Liang Lin, Assad Brothers, Christian Zacharias, Yo-Yo Ma, the JACK Quartet, the Enso String Quartet, and Talea Ensemble. His YouTube series (youtube.com/joshuaromancello), “Everyday Bach,” features Roman performing Bach’s cello suites from beautiful settings around the world. He was the only guest artist invited to play an unaccompanied solo during the YouTube Symphony Orchestra’s 2009 debut concert at Carnegie Hall, and has given a solo performance on the TED2015 main stage. Roman is grateful for the loan of an 1899 cello by Giulio Degani of Venice. www.joshuaroman.com www.opus3artists.com

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES MASON BATES (B. 1977): Auditorium Mason Bates was born on January 23, 1977 in Philadelphia. Auditorium was composed in 2016 and premiered on April 27, 2016 by the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado. The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, piano, electronics, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes. This is the first performance by the orchestra.

Mason Bates brings not only his own fresh talent to the concert hall but also the musical sensibilities of a new generation — he is equally at home composing “for Lincoln Center,” according to his web site (www.masonbates.com), as being the “electronica artist Masonic® who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York City, where he was a lounge DJ at such venues as The Frying Pan — the floating rave ship docked off the pier near West 22nd Street.”

Bates was born in Philadelphia in 1977 and started studying piano with Hope Armstrong Erb at his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. He earned degrees in both English literature and music composition in the joint program of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, where his composition teachers included John Corigliano, David Del Tredici and Samuel Adler, and received his doctorate in composition from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 as a student of Edmund Campion and Jorge Lidermann. Bates was Resident Composer with the California Symphony from 2008 to 2011, Project San Francisco Artist-in-Residence with the San Francisco Symphony in 2011-2012, and Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2012-2013; he held a residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2010 to 2015 and is the first-ever Composer-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. through the 2019-2020 season. He also teaches in the Technology and Applied Composition Program of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Bates’ rapidly accumulating portfolio of orchestral, chamber, vocal, theatrical, film (notably Gus Van Sant’s 2014 The Sea of Trees starring Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts) and electronic compositions includes commissions and performances by the major orchestras of London, Lisbon, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Toronto, Phoenix, San Francisco, Oakland, Annapolis, Los Angeles, Miami and Detroit, the Tanglewood, Aspen, Cabrillo and Spoleto USA festivals, Biava Quartet, Chanticleer and New Juilliard Ensemble. In 2010, Bates was commissioned to write Mothership for the second concert of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble composed of musicians from around the world who were selected through online auditions by Michael Tilson Thomas, the project’s director and conductor, and assembled in Sydney, Australia for rehearsals and a live concert on March 20, 2011 streamed on the internet; the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra concert had been held in New York in 2009. Among his recent works is The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, premiered by Santa Fe Opera in July 2017 and released on the Pentatone label in June 2018.

In addition to being recognized as the most-performed American composer of his generation and named “2018 Composer of the Year” by Musical America, Bates has received a Charles Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship, Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, ASCAP and BMI awards, a Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, a two-year Composer Residency with Young Concert Artists, and the 2012 Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Mason Bates is also an ardent and effective advocate for bringing new music to new spaces, “whether,” he explained, “through institutional partnerships such as the residency with the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW series, or through the project Mercury Soul, which has transformed spaces ranging from commercial clubs to Frank Gehry-designed concert halls into exciting, hybrid musical events drawing over a thousand people. Mercury Soul, a collaboration with director Anne Patterson and conductor Benjamin Schwartz, embeds sets of classical music into an evening of DJing and beautiful, surreal visuals.”

Bates was thoroughly trained in traditional classical styles and techniques during the course of his excellent education but he had never explored Baroque music in any depth until about 2015, when Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and Bates’ frequent collaborator (and inspiration), challenged him to explore a range of 18thcentury compositions he would suggest. Bates admitted discovering in that study a “love for 18th-century music” and decided to express that interest in a piece which would bridge the two musical eras, “essentially a work for two orchestras — one live, one dead.” That tribute, titled Auditorium, was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony on April 27, 2016 conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado. “Auditorium,” Bates continued, “is based on the premise that an orchestra, like a person, can be possessed. It is a Baroque ‘thriller’ that haunts the orchestra with ghostly processed recordings of a Baroque ensemble, with the electronic part comprising entirely original neo-Baroque music recorded on period instruments.” “What gave Auditorium its immediate currency,” wrote critic Steven Wynn in his review in San Francisco Classical Voice, “was the conversation Bates set up between old and new, natural and recorded sound…. [It is an] ingratiating and good-natured work.”

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MASON BATES: Cello Concerto Bates composed his Cello Concerto in 2014. It was premiered on December 11, 2014 by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla with Joshua Roman as soloist. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, alto flute, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes. This is the first performance by the orchestra.

“My Cello Concerto,” Bates explained, “began with a friendship. Josh Roman is beloved by just about everyone who meets him, and I am no exception. Immediately apparent is his unusual combination of enlightened prodigy and everyman approachability. I noticed this when we first crossed paths in New York, where we were thrown together [in 2009] at the inaugural YouTube Symphony to improvise an electro-acoustic duo at [the club] Le Poisson Rouge. That shotgun wedding left me mesmerized at his unmatched musicianship and technique, and soon I was composing a fiendishly difficult solo work for him [Carbide & Carbon] to premiere on his series at Town Hall [in Seattle]. He played it from memory. That experience proved to be a great warm-up for this Concerto.” A joint commission for the Concerto from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Columbus (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra was arranged with funding from the Johnstone Fund for New Music of Columbus, and it was composed in 2014 and PROGRAM 6

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES premiered in Seattle on December 11, 2014 by Joshua Roman and Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. (The event was a musical reunion, since Roman had served as Principal Cellist of the SSO from 2006 to 2008, the youngest principal player in that Orchestra’s history.) Bates gave the following précis of the work: “The piece begins plaintively, with Josh floating over a restless orchestra, and the lyricism only expands in the central slow movement. But by the final movement [Léger — ‘Lightly’] rhythmic energy wins the day, and at one point Josh even plays with a guitar pick. This is, after all, the same fellow who played arrangements of Led Zeppelin at Town Hall, so I had to send him out with a bang.”

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827): Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770 in Bonn and died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna. The Seventh Symphony was composed between autumn 1811 and June 1812 and premiered on December 8, 1813 in Vienna under the composer’s direction. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes. The symphony was last performed on December 2-4, 2016, with David Danzmayr on the podium.

In the autumn of 1813, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, approached Beethoven with the proposal that they organize a concert to benefit the soldiers wounded at the recent Battle of Hanau — with, perhaps, two or three repetitions of the concert to benefit themselves. Beethoven was eager to have his as-yet-unheard A major Symphony of the preceding year performed, and thought the financial reward worth the trouble, so he agreed. The concert consisted of this “Entirely New Symphony” by Beethoven, marches by Dussek and Pleyel performed on a “Mechanical Trumpeter” fabricated by Mälzel, and an orchestral arrangement of Wellington’s Victory, a piece Beethoven had concocted the previous summer for yet another of Mälzel’s musical machines, the clangorous “Panharmonicon.” The evening was such a success that Beethoven’s first biographer, Anton Schindler, reported, “All persons, however they had previously dissented from his music, now agreed to award him his laurels.”

The Seventh Symphony is a magnificent creation in which Beethoven displayed several technical innovations that were to have a profound influence on the music of the 19th century: he expanded the scope of symphonic structure through the use of more distant tonal areas; he brought an unprecedented richness and range to the orchestral palette; and he gave a new awareness of rhythm as the vitalizing force in music. It is particularly the last of these characteristics that most immediately affects the listener and to which commentators have consistently turned to explain the vibrant power of the work. Perhaps the most famous such observation about the Seventh Symphony is that of Richard Wagner, who called the work “the apotheosis of the Dance in its highest aspect ... the loftiest deed of bodily motion incorporated in an ideal world of tone.”

A slow introduction, almost a movement in itself, opens the Symphony. This initial section employs two themes: the first, majestic and unadorned, is passed down through the winds while being punctuated by long, rising scales in the strings; the second is a graceful melody for oboe.

The transition to the main part of the first movement is accomplished by the superbly controlled reiteration of a single pitch. This device both connects the introduction with the exposition and SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES also establishes the dactylic rhythm that dominates the movement. The Allegretto scored such a success at its premiere that it was immediately encored, a phenomenon virtually unprecedend for a slow movement. In form, the movement is a series of variations on the heartbeat rhythm of its opening measures. In spirit, however, it is more closely allied to the austere chaconne of the Baroque era than to the light, figural variations of Classicism.

The third movement, a study in contrasts of sonority and dynamics, is built on the formal model of the scherzo, but expanded to include a repetition of the horn-dominated Trio (Scherzo – Trio – Scherzo – Trio – Scherzo). In the sonata-form finale, Beethoven not only produced music of virtually unmatched rhythmic energy (“a triumph of Bacchic fury,” in the words of Sir Donald Tovey), but did it in such a manner as to exceed the climaxes of the earlier movements and make it the goal toward which they had all been aimed. So intoxicating is this music that some of Beethoven’s contemporaries were sure he had composed it in a drunken frenzy. An encounter with the Seventh Symphony is a heady experience. Klaus G. Roy, the late program annotator for the Cleveland Orchestra, wrote, “Many a listener has come away from a hearing of this Symphony in a state of being punch-drunk. Yet it is an intoxication without a hangover, a dopelike exhilaration without decadence.” To which the composer’s own words may be added. “I am Bacchus incarnate,” boasted Beethoven, “appointed to give humanity wine to drown its sorrow....

He who divines the secret of my music is delivered from the misery that haunts the world.” ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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