MASTERWORKS • 2014/15 NATASHA PAREMSKI PLAYS BRAHMS COLORADO SYMPHONY DOUGLAS BOYD, conductor NATASHA PAREMSKI, piano This weekend of concerts are gratefully dedicated to Colorado Symphony Guild Friday’s concert is gratefully dedicated to Fred and Connie Platt Saturday’s concert is gratefully dedicated to Dr. Christopher Ott and Mr. Jeremy Simons Sunday’s Concert is gratefully dedicated to Paul Goodspeed and Mary Poole
Friday, April 11, 2015 at 7:30 pm Saturday, April 12, 2015 at 7:30 pm Sunday, April 13, 2015 at 1:00 pm Boettcher Concert Hall
WEBERN Fünf Sätze (Five Movements) for Orchestra, Op. 5 Heftig bewegt – etwas ruhiger Sehr langsam Sehr lebhaft Sehr langsam In zarter Bewegung SCHOENBERG
Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 — INTERMISSION —
BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 Maestoso Adagio Rondo: Allegro non troppo
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MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES
JOHN BATTEN
DOUGLAS BOYD, conductor In demand world-wide, Douglas Boyd is currently Chief Conductor of the Musikkollegium Winterthur in Switzerland and Artistic Director of Garsington Opera in England and was recently appointed Music Director of l’Orchestre de chambre de Paris. In ten seasons as Music Director of the Manchester Camerata, Boyd transformed the orchestra into one of the United Kingdom’s finest. His live recordings with the Camerata have received universal critical acclaim. Like so many of Boyd’s performances, his debut with the Camerata at London’s BBC Proms concerts was praised for clarity, vibrancy and musicality. Boyd and the Camerata subsequently returned to the Proms with an acclaimed program of Haydn and MacMillan, one of the many living composers he champions. In 2009 Douglas Boyd joined The Musikkollegium Winterthur as its Principal Conductor. Each season he takes Switzerland’s oldest orchestra on tour throughout Europe and has undertaken several ambitious recording projects with them including works of Strauss, Mendelssohn and Schubert. From 2003 through 2009, Boyd was Artistic Partner of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, with whom he performed, recorded and toured regularly, including acclaimed performances at Carnegie Hall in New York and the Ojai Festival in California. Boyd has also served as Principal Guest Conductor with the City of London Sinfonia and the Colorado Symphony. This season he can be heard with the Colorado Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony and Detroit Symphony. In addition to the above, North American conducting highlights include appearances with the Baltimore, Dallas, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Toronto symphonies.
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 flawless technique. Born in Moscow, Natasha moved to the U.S. at the age of 8 and became a U.S. citizen shortly thereafter. She is now based in New York. Natasha was awarded several very prestigious artist prizes at a very young age, including the Gilmore Young Artists prize in 2006 at the age of 18, 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. Natasha began her piano studies at the age of 4 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 the 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 under Dmitry Yablonsky, the first featuring Anton Rubinstein’s Piano Concerto No. 4 coupled with Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody and the second featuring all of Chopin’s shorter works for piano and orchestra. PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES THE “SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL” It is a commonplace, of course, in history to observe that there are times in which most aspects of life seem predictably to change little—whether economic, political, social, or artistic. Inevitably, there follow those times in which nothing is predictable and significant alterations in every facet of society seem to cascade, one upon the other, and nothing remains the same thereafter. We now understand the beginning of the twentieth century to be one of those periods. All was in flux, science, art, philosophy—and most lamentably, politics and military power, as well. The cataclysm of World War I was nigh, monarchies were to disappear, and new and oppressive forms of governments arose. Intellectual life in all its forms walked, as it must, hand in hand with these events, and especially so the arts. Any visit, today, to an art museum reveals the stark changes in perception, technique, and expressive means underwent by visual artists of that time. In music, the parallel upheavals were equally fundamental and epochal. And the epicenter for that remarkable pivot was fin-de-siècle Vienna—the city of Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Wittgenstein, and a host of other seminal intellects. The legacy of titans of Western art music that lived and worked in Vienna is fundamental to music history: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. But, by the end of the century, thoughtful composers—especially in Vienna—agonized over how to move forward in musical style, but yet maintain the tradition and rigor of their formidable predecessors. The music of Wagner, especially that of Tristan und Isolde had taken traditional tonality to the brink of dissolution, and others, Gustav Mahler most importantly, extended that trend. But, the way forward was more than murky. It remained for an intense, largely self-taught, composer and teacher, and two of his immensely gifted students to explore one of the ways to the musical future. That, of course, was Arnold Schoenberg and his protégés, Anton Weber and Alban Berg. Together (often deemed confusingly as the “Second Viennese School”) they proposed and produced masterworks in a musical style that was one of the major directions in musical composition of the twentieth century. Others—notably Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, and their successors—offered other different, distinct responses to the question: “What is modern music, what does it mean, and what does it sound like?” Schoenberg began to compose early on in a musical style that attenuated the tonality of Romanticism in a dense, chromatic texture. It didn’t take long for him to jettison all pretense of traditional adherence to the idea of composing in a single tonality, with excursions to related key areas, and the psychological pleasure of returning home. Three hundred years of building, extending, and integrating amazing nuance in this technique saw much of its apotheosis in the work of Wagner, Richard Strauss (later), and Gustav Mahler. But, Schonberg saw that it had run its course. His personal musical solution, and that of his talented young students, Berg and Webern, led first to atonality, and when the limitations of that became apparent, to the 12-tone technique. Together, working in almost total collaboration, they moved quickly from late Romantic style into jettisoning the core of that style—tonality—for the bewildering world of atonality, and finally into the organization of atonality into the totally controlled texture of 12-tone composition. Their collective body of works, while certainly not the all-encompassing solution to twentieth-century modernism, nevertheless constitutes a treasure of musical masterpieces from the first half of the century. Moreover, their artistic solutions became perhaps the dominant style of composition for a time after World War II—especially for Europeans and those in the American academic school— attracting even the attention of Igor Stravinsky, who had thitherto steadfastly maintained his SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 3
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES own stylistic identity. While it must be admitted that the dissonance and frequent obscurity inherent in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern has never been to everyone’s taste, there is no denying the fundamental ethics, integrity and genius of their work. While they differed, often strikingly—in their respective styles, they all offer rewards to the listener who will spend the time to listen without preconceptions and with an open mind. Beauties and profound musical meaning lie beneath the daunting surface.
o Anton von Webern: Fünf Sätze (Five Movements) for Orchestra, Op. 5 Anton von Webern was born on December 3, 1883 in Vienna and died on September 15, 1945 in Mittersill, Austria. Fünf Sätze was composed as a string quartet in 1909 and revised for string orchestra in 1929. Duration is approximately 11 minutes. The piece was last performed by the orchestra on October 3, 5, and 6, 1985, with Gaetano Delogu conducting. Unlike his fellow Schoenbergian acolyte, Alban Berg, Anton Webern was the more cerebral, quiet, and detached. While Berg is commonly thought of as more lyrical, comfortable in the larger forms of concerto and opera, Webern pursued a style of abstraction, brevity, and an almost mathematical precision of structure. He is known for his lightly orchestrated, almost pointillist textures. Like pinpoints of sound, that “ping” from disparate points, his works are aphoristic and brief almost to an extreme. And what is almost indiscernible to most listeners is the frequent infusion in his mature style of counterpoint in all its glory: invertible, canonic, retrograde, every technique from the golden age of counterpoint, the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. And why not? For despite his avant-garde compositions, he was a trained musicologist, whose doctoral dissertation was on one of the great collections of early sixteenth-century polyphonic sacred vocal music. He simply took his interests and training way into the future. In his maturity he was a relentless exponent of the rigorous application of 12-tone—or serial—techniques, but early on, like his mentor Schoenberg and his fellow student, Berg, he quickly left tonality behind and produced works that are conveniently called atonal. This period in the artistic lives of the three didn’t last long, chiefly centering very roughly around the years 1908-1923. A cardinal virtue of tonality, especially in the late romantic period, is its inherent capacity to sustain long music structures—that’s why, for example, symphonies of the time grew longer and longer, as in Mahler. In the sense of remembering from whence you came harmonically speaking, no matter how distant you may go in tonal regions, the way home is logical, directed and forceful in tonality. Lacking this musical compass, atonal works are necessarily shorter, even brief, to avoid the concomitant sensation of wandering on and on until the music just stops, undirected. Webern composed his Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5 in 1909, at the height of his atonal period, and dedicated it to the memory of his revered mother. He later revised the work in 1929, recasting it for string orchestra. It is a complete example of Webern’s approach to composition. The five movements average no more than about two minutes in length and display the composer’s gift for instrumental tone color, using for example, the wood of the bow, harmonics, playing near the instrument’s bridge, and pizzicato. These sounds are now familiar PROGRAM 4 SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES from Bartók, and, of course, went on to become common coin. Webern, true to his roots in the “first Viennese School,” employed traditional musical forms—although remarkably compressed and almost unperceivable. Extremes of register, disjunct melodic intervals, and frequent changes of mood complete the picture. The five movements are in a typical classical order of tempo and character: outer movements with motion, slow interior ones, and a kind of scherzo in the middle. Forget the dissonance, the aphoristic brevity, and the abstractions. Atonality is not the point amidst the many charms of these little gems. They are perfect examples of what Stravinsky characterized as Webern’s “dazzling diamonds.”
o Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874, and died in Los Angeles on July 13, 1951. Verklärte Nacht was composed in 1899. It is scored for strings. The duration is approximately 32 minutes. The last performance of the piece was on November 7-9, 1997, with Markand Thacker leading the orchestra. While he was the leader of the musical revolution centered in Vienna in the early twentieth century, whose precepts led to completely new foundations for the composition of music, Arnold Schoenberg certainly possessed nothing of the personal aura of a revolutionary. Born into a poor family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and almost completely self-taught as a composer, he struggled most of his life to provide for his family as a teacher of music theory and composition. He was a quiet, intellectual, and somewhat dogmatic man, and certainly realized that, for all of his wide reputation and approval by eminent musicians, he could never hope to earn a living from compositions, alone. Audience and critics’ reactions to his challenging musical style saw to that. He limped along from one teaching engagement to another. The advent of the Third Reich put paid to his time in Vienna, and he had the perspicacity to move his family out very early on. In the late 1930s they ended up in southern California, where he taught first at the University of Southern California, and then at UCLA. Poor health dogged him for most of his life, and he retired on a very small pension, dying in 1951 in Los Angeles. His youth and the period of his musical apprenticeship was thoroughly grounded in the chromatic harmony of Wagner and the structural integrity of Brahms—he adored them both. So, naturally, his early efforts in musical composition were absolutely an outgrowth of the late Romantic traditions of conventional Germanic art. Nevertheless, his innate sophistication led him to extend, push, and challenge these precepts. So, his early style is somewhat of a bridge between the lush conventions of late romantic music, and the stark upheavals of the next century. The first work that brought him recognition is, of course, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed for string sextet and later arranged by him for string orchestra. The work, inspired by a poem by the controversial poet, Richard Dehmel, lies in one continuous movement, although there are five somewhat subtle, but perceptible, sections that correspond to the poem’s five stanzas. The dense weft of melodic lines, in a harmonic scheme that pushes the limits of tonality, creates a dark Teutonic mood so characteristic of fin-de-siècle Vienna. And certainly, the work is a perfect complement to the poem, which like so much of the SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES art and literature of the times, pretty much challenged the good, conservative folk of Vienna. The art of Egon Schiele may come to mind in this context. The poem concerns a troubled couple walking in the gloom and dark, the woman confessing her pregnancy by another man, her shame at her transgression, and her fear of thereby destroying her relationship with her true love. The last stanza turns upbeat as her lover declares, no matter, the child will be ours. The sexual content was controversial enough, but coupled with the music’s advanced harmonic idiom, it was sufficient to hinder the acceptance of what is clearly Schoenberg’s first masterpiece. Soon enough, though, this little symphonic poem for chamber orchestra gained its rightful place as not only an invaluable marker along the road to musical modernity, but also as a testament to the intrinsic genius of the composer’s intellect and musicality.
o Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany. He died on July 3, 1897, in Vienna. The Piano Concerto No. 1 was composed in 1854-1858; its duration is approximately 42 minutes. The concerto is scored for winds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. The concerto was last performed with Marin Alsop conducting and Christopher O’Riley as the soloist on March 9-11, 2007. Brahms wrote two piano concertos, separated by the passage of some twenty-two years. This first one is the product of his relative youth, having been completed in 1859, when he was twenty-five. A youthful work it is not, however. Brahms had labored over it for most of the decade of the 1850s, and during that time it underwent several substantial transformations. Originally, Brahms had conceived of the work as a sonata for two pianos—he was a fine pianist, and that medium naturally fell easily to him. But, as he worked, he came to understand that the imposing nature of his ideas suggested the full powers of the symphony orchestra. Ultimately, his difficulties in turning it into the form of a symphony, not to speak of his incomplete mastery of the skill of orchestration, led him finally to cast the work in the form of a piano concerto. During that process, the last two movements were discarded, and new replacements were crafted. During the last half of the nineteenth century Brahms was, of course, the standard bearer for those who believed that the future of music lay in continuing the disciplined, classically oriented musical style of Beethoven. They held that the traditional forms of sonata, concerto, and symphony had not nearly exhausted their viability, and that music should continue to speak in an integrated language that referred to it, alone, and certainly not to extra-musical ideas. The music of those of the opposite view, Liszt, Wagner, et al, while respecting the music of the past, saw no future in continuing that tradition. Today, most of those who compose, perform, and listen to art music see no contradiction in valuing both aesthetics. With that as background, Brahms’ first concerto honors those traditions of the past in its form and the nature of its musical ideas and their manipulation, but it is not conventional in any sense. This powerful work betrays its own genesis in the pronounced importance given PROGRAM 6 SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES to the orchestra—in fact; critics of the time (and some of today) snidely called it a symphony with “piano obbligato.” But, of course, that matters not; great works of art take their own way. The massive first movement (inspired by the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) starts conventionally, for the times, with a long exposition by the orchestra alone, before the entrance of the piano. While the part of the piano is quite difficult, and demands a virtuoso, it cannot be characterized as based in empty virtuosic bombast like so many other nineteencentury concertos. The demands of the part simply grow out of Brahms’ musical style and the task of the piano in the ample orchestral context. Many have posited a connection between the suicide attempt by Robert Schumann and the tone of this movement—but that is not clear. What is clear, however, is that Brahms, himself, characterized the remarkable beauty of the Adagio second movement as a “gentle portrait” of his beloved Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife. He wrote in the score under the opening melody, “Benedictus, qui venit, in nomine Domini!” Not surprisingly, the third movement is clearly based upon the like movement of Beethoven’s third piano concerto. It—typically—is a rondo, that is, a fast, spirited movement with an easily recognized theme that returns several times, with contrasting ideas interspersed. Early performances of this masterpiece were not successful—in Leipzig the audience was not receptive and hissed the work with great enthusiasm. One critic averred that it offered nothing but “waste” and “barren dreariness.” Brahms was not deterred, however. He wrote to his friend, Joachim, “In spite of all this, the concerto will please someday . . . “ And so it has. — Wm. E. Runyan ©William E. Runyan
Correction: The program notes for the recent Masterworks presentation of The American Festival Part II, March 13-15, should have been credited to William E. Runyan.
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