Program - Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6

Steinway Piano Sponsor:

CLASSICS

2018/19

TCHAIKOVSKY SYMPHONY NO. 6

2018/19 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS:

COLORADO SYMPHONY PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor STEPHEN HOUGH, piano Friday, March 15, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 16, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, March 17, 2019, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall

JOAN TOWER Made in America SAINT-SAËNS Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, Op. 103, “Egyptian” Allegro animato Andante Molto allegro — INTERMISSION —

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique” Adagio — Allegro non troppo Allegro con grazia Allegro molto vivace Finale: Adagio lamentoso

Saturday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Raymond and Suzanne Satter PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES PHOTO: SIAN RICHARDS KOPIE

PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor A dynamic presence in the conducting world, Peter Oundjian is renowned for his probing musicality, collaborative spirit, and engaging personality.

The 2018/19 season includes debuts with the Indianapolis and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras, and return engagements with the St. Louis, Baltimore, Atlanta, Utah, Colorado, and New World Symphonies as well as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. In January 2019 he transitioned from Artistic Advisor to Music Director for the Colorado Music Festival, commencing a five year tenure. 2017/18 marked Oundjian’s fourteenth and final season as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO). His appointment in 2004 reinvigorated the orchestra with recordings, tours, and acclaimed innovative programming, as well as extensive audience growth, significantly strengthening the ensemble’s presence in the world. In 2014, he led the TSO on a tour of Europe, which included a sold-out performance at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the first performance of a North American orchestra at Reykjavík’s Harpa Hall. In the 2016/17 season, Oundjian led the TSO on a major tour of Israel and Europe.

From 2012 to 2018, Oundjian was Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO). Under his baton, the orchestra toured China, the USA, and across Europe. Together they recorded extensively for Sony and Chandos, and presented Britten’s monumental War Requiem at the 2018 BBC Proms. Few conductors bring such musicianship and engagement to the world’s great podiums—from Berlin, Amsterdam, and Tel Aviv, to New York, Chicago, and Sydney. He has also appeared at some of the great annual gatherings of music and musiclovers: from the BBC Proms and the Prague Spring Festival, to the Edinburgh Festival and The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Mozart Festival, where he was Artistic Director from 2003 to 2005.

Oundjian was Principal Guest Conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2010 and Artistic Director of the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York from 1997 to 2007. Since 1981, he has been a visiting professor at the Yale School of Music, and earned the university’s Sanford Medal for distinguished service to music in 2013.

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES PHOTO: SIM CANETTY-CLARKE

STEPHEN HOUGH, piano One of the most distinctive artists of his generation, Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of composer and writer. Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Hough was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2014 New Year’s Honors. Since taking first prize at the 1983 Naumburg Competition in New York, Hough has performed with the world’s major orchestras and given recitals at the most prestigious concert halls. He is a regular guest at festivals such as Salzburg, Aspen, Blossom, Tanglewood, Edinburgh, La Roqued’Anthéron and BBC Proms, where he has made more than twenty-five appearances. Hough’s extensive discography of over 60 CDs has garnered international awards including the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, several Grammy nominations, and eight Gramophone Awards including Record of the Year and the Gold Disc. Recent releases include solo piano works by Debussy, Hough’s ‘Dream Album’, and a live recording of Schumann and Dvořák’s piano concertos with Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, all for Hyperion Records. His award-winning iPad app The Liszt Sonata was released by Touch Press in 2013. As a composer Hough has been commissioned by Wigmore Hall, Musée du Louvre, London’s National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, the Genesis Foundation, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, Indianapolis Symphony, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, Orquesta Sinfónica de Euskadi and the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. His music is published by Josef Weinberger Ltd. Stephen Hough’s first novel, The Final Retreat, was published by Sylph Editions in March 2018, and he has written for The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, and the Evening Standard. He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, a Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music, holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music, and is on the faculty of The Juilliard School in New York.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES JOAN TOWER (B. 1938): Made in America Joan Tower was born on September 6, 1938 in New Rochelle, New York. Made in America was composed in 2005 and premiered on October 2, 2005 in Glens Falls, New York, conducted by Charles Peltz. The score calls for two flutes (both doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, and strings. Duration is about 15 minutes.

This is the first performance of the work by the orchestra.

Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938 and went to South America with her family when she was nine. Her father was a mining engineer whose assignments necessitated frequent family moves to Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, but he always found a piano and a teacher to nurture his daughter’s musical interests. Tower returned to the United States to attend Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition.

After finishing her professional training, she taught at Greenwich House, a settlement house in New York, while also composing and performing as a pianist. Since 1972, Tower has taught at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where she is now Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She is also active in working with performing groups and students in residencies throughout the country, and has served as Co-Artistic Director of the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Tower’s many distinctions include awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Massachusetts State Arts Council, as well as the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville in 1990, the first woman ever to receive that honor. She has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, named a recipient of the Delaware Symphony’s Alfred I. DuPont Award for Distinguished American Composers, and inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. In January 2005, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall featured a retrospective concert of her work. Joan Tower is the first composer chosen for the ambitious “Made in America” commissioning program, a collaboration of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer made possible by Ford Motor Company Fund, through which her composition Made in America was performed during the 2005-2006 season by smaller-budget orchestras in every state in the union; the Naxos recording of the work

by Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony received three Grammy Awards in 2008, including Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Tower wrote of Made in America, “When I was nine, my family moved to South America (La Paz, Bolivia), where we stayed for nine years. I had to learn a new language, a new culture and how to live at 13,000 feet! It was a lively culture with many saints’ days celebrated through music and dance, but the large Inca population in Bolivia was generally poor and there was little chance of moving up in class or work position.

“When I returned to the United States, I was proud to have free choices, upward mobility and the chance to try to become who I wanted to be. I also enjoyed the basic luxuries of an American citizen that we so often take for granted: hot running water, blankets for cold winters, floors that are not made of dirt, and easy modes of transportation, among many other things. So when I started composing this piece, the song America the Beautiful kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme of the work. The beauty of the song is undeniable and I loved working with it as a musical idea. One can never take for granted, however, the strength of a musical idea — as Beethoven (one of my strongest influences) knew so well. This theme is PROGRAM 4

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, interjecting, unsettling it, but America the Beautiful keeps resurfacing in different guises (some small and tender, others big and magnanimous), as if to say, ‘I’m still here, ever changing, but holding my own.’ A musical struggle is heard throughout the work. Perhaps it was my unconscious reacting to the challenge of how we keep American beautiful.”

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CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921): Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, Op. 103, “Egyptian” Camille Saint-Saëns was born on October 9, 1835 in Paris and died on December 16, 1921 in Algiers.

The Piano Concerto No. 5 was composed during the winter of 1896 and premiered on June 2, 1896 in Paris with the composer as soloist. The score calls for two flues, piccolo, plus pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, gong, and strings. Duration is about 28 minutes. The concerto was last performed on January 25-27, 2013, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist and Justin Brown on the podium.

At the age of two, Camille Saint-Saëns climbed up onto the piano bench and spent a large part of the rest of his life there. At four-and-a-half, he played the piano part of a Beethoven violin sonata, and prodigiously made his formal debut in 1846, at the tender age of ten. As a teenager, he became organist at the Church of Saint-Merry in Paris; five years later, he moved to the prestigious post at the Church of the Madeleine. His artistry (and later his compositions) gained the respect of Liszt, who performed and conducted several of Saint-Saëns’ important scores in Germany. (Liszt oversaw the premiere of Samson et Dalila, in Weimar in 1877.) Berlioz said of him that “he is an absolutely shattering master-pianist.” He impressed even the redoubtable Wagner by playing Tristan und Isolde from memory at the piano. Saint-Saëns was so constantly in demand throughout his life as a pianist in his own and other composers’ works, especially those of Mozart and Beethoven, that he religiously practiced for two hours each morning, an activity he continued, literally, until the day he died.

To perform, of course, meant to tour, and travel became one of Saint-Saëns’ chief pastimes.

He went to the corners of the earth, from Singapore to San Francisco, but he tried to spend his winters in the baking sun and relative anonymity of Algiers, away from the drab Parisian weather.

His fondness for north Africa carried him on at least two occasions to Egypt, each visit inspiring from him a work for piano and orchestra: Africa, of 1891, was based on native songs; the Fifth Piano Concerto (“Egyptian”) was composed at Luxor in 1896. The composer was the soloist in the premiere of the Concerto on June 2, 1896 in Paris at a concert celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his debut as a pianist.

The F major Piano Concerto, despite its pictorial and atmospheric effects, exhibits the formal clarity and emotional restraint that characterize Saint-Saëns’ music. In its form, harmony, orchestration and texture, the “Egyptian” Concerto is indebted to the Classical models of Mozart, a composer whom Saint-Saëns revered. The opening movement follows traditional sonataconcerto structure, with a chordal main theme and a dance-like subordinate melody. “The second movement,” Saint-Saëns wrote, “takes us on a journey to the East and even, in one section, to the Far East. The G major passage is a Nubian love song which I heard sung by the boatmen on the SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Nile as I went down the river in a dahabieh.” The finale is a breathtaking tour-de-force of keyboard technique, proof that Saint-Saëns had lost none of his piano facility during the half-century of his performing career. Arthur Hervey, one of the composer’s early biographers, interpreted the incessant rhythmic motion of the finale as Saint-Saëns’ attempt “to describe his experiences on the sea voyage” home from Egypt. “A note of realism,” Hervey continues, “is introduced by the sound of the propeller, while the serenity of the voyage is interrupted by a short storm.” Storms, propellers and voyages there well may be, but the real point of this music is its dazzling display for the soloist in one of Saint-Saëns’ great exercises in virtuosity.

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PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893): Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique” Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk and died on November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg. He composed the Sixth Symphony between February 16 and August 24, 1893 and conducted its premiere in St. Petersburg on October 28, 1893 with the Orchestra of the Imperial Russian Music Society. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes. Gilbert Varga conducted the last performance by the orchestra on September 28-30, 2012.

Tchaikovsky died in 1893, at the age of only 53. His death was long attributed to the accidental drinking of a glass of unboiled water during a cholera outbreak, but that theory has been questioned in recent years with the alternate explanation that he was forced to take his own life because of a homosexual liaison with the underage son of a noble family. Though the manner of Tchaikovsky’s death is incidental to the place of his Sixth Symphony in music history, the fact of it is not.

Tchaikovsky conducted his B minor Symphony for the first time only a week before his death.

It was given a cool reception by musicians and public, and his frustration was multiplied when discussion of the work was avoided by the guests at a dinner party following the concert on October 28, 1893. Three days later, however, his mood seemed brighter and he told a friend that he was not yet ready to be snatched off by death, “that snubbed-nose horror. I feel that I shall live a long time.” He was wrong. He died on November 6th. Memorial concerts were planned, including one in St. Petersburg on November 18th, twelve days after his death, when Eduard Napravnik conducted the Sixth Symphony. It was a resounding success and was wafted by the winds of sorrow across the musical world, becoming — and remaining — one of the most popular of all symphonies, the quintessential expression of tragedy in music.

The music of the “Pathétique” is a distillation of the strong residual strain of melancholy in Tchaikovsky’s personality rather than a mirror of his daily feelings and thoughts. Though he admitted there was a program for the Symphony, he refused to reveal it. “Let him guess it who can,” he told his nephew Vladimir Davidov. A cryptic note discovered years later among his sketches suggests that the first movement was “all impulsive passion; the second, love; the third, disappointments; the fourth, death — the result of collapse.” It is not clear, however, whether this précis applied to the finished version of the work or was merely a preliminary, perhaps never PROGRAM 6

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES even realized, plan. That Tchaikovsky at one point considered naming the work “Tragic” gives sufficient indication of its prevailing emotional content.

The title “Pathétique” was suggested to Tchaikovsky by his elder brother, Modeste. In his biography of Peter, Modeste recalled that they were sitting around a tea table one evening after the premiere, and the composer was unable to settle on an appropriate designation for the work before sending it to the publisher. The sobriquet “Pathétique” popped into Modeste’s mind, and Tchaikovsky pounced on it immediately: “Splendid, Modi, bravo. ‘Pathétique’ it shall be.” That title has always been applied to the Symphony, though the original Russian word carries a meaning closer to “passionate” or “emotional” than to the English “pathetic.”

The “Pathétique” Symphony opens with a slow introduction dominated by the sepulchral intonation of the bassoon, whose melody, in a faster tempo, becomes the first theme of the exposition; the tension subsides for the yearning second theme. The tempestuous development begins with a mighty blast from the full orchestra. The recapitulation is more condensed, vibrantly scored and emotionally intense than the exposition. Tchaikovsky referred to the second movement as a scherzo, though its 5/4 meter gives it more the feeling of a waltz with a limp. The third movement is a boisterous march. A profound emptiness pervades the closing movement, which maintains its slow tempo and mood of despair throughout. ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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