19 minute read
Concert Program: Lise de la Salle Plays Schumann
Lise de la Salle Plays Schumann
Nov 4 - 6
FRI, SAT | 7:30PM & SUN | 3:00PM
PRESENTED BY
In gratitude, these performances are dedicated to: Shirley and Bill McIntyre Weekend of Concerts Sunday Dallas Symphony Orchestra League Presentation Ball
FABIO LUISI Conducts
LISE DE LA SALLE Piano
BRUCH Kol Nidrei, Adagio on Hebrew Melodies for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 47
(Approximate duration 10 minutes) Performed only on Saturday, November 5
YURI ANSHELEVICH CELLO
JULIA PERRY Study for Orchestra
(Approximate duration 7 minutes)
CLARA SCHUMANN Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 7
(Approximate duration 22 minutes)
I. Allegro maestoso II. Romanze: Andante non troppo, con grazia III. Finale: Allegro non troppo – Allegro molto
LISE DE LA SALLE PIANO
INTERMISSION
LOUISE FARRENC Symphony No. 3 in G minor, Op. 36
(Approximate duration 36 minutes)
I. Adagio – Allegro II. Adagio cantabile III. Scherzo. Vivace IV. Finale. Allegro
Fabio Luisi
Music Director
Louise W. & Edmund J. Kahn Music Directorship
GRAMMY® AWARD WINNER Fabio Luisi launched his tenure as Louise W. & Edmund J. Kahn Music Director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO) at the start of the 2020/21 season. In January 2021, the DSO and Luisi announced an extension of the Music Director’s contract through the 2028/29 season. A maestro of major international standing, the Italian conductor is also set to embark on his sixth season as Principal Conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and in September 2022 he assumed the role of Principal Conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. He previously served for six seasons as Principal Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and nine seasons as General Music Director of the Zurich Opera. In September 2022, Luisi and the Dallas Symphony released their first recording project together. Brahms’s First and Second Symphonies will be available through the DSO’s in-house DSO Live label. Fabio Luisi’s 2022/23 programs in Dallas and for the DSO’s Next Stage Digital Concert Series will feature performances of the music of beloved classical composers, a continued examination of American music, and large-scale choral and orchestral works. A world-renowned interpreter of the music of Richard Strauss, Luisi will conduct the composer’s tone poem Don Quixote for his first concert weekend, along with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Hélène Grimaud will return to the DSO for Luisi’s second series of concerts, joining him in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. He will continue the program with César Franck’s Symphony in D minor, the composer’s best-known orchestral work.
As a prelude to the fourth annual Women in Classical Music Symposium in November, Luisi will present music by three female composers – Julia Perry, Clara Schumann and Louise Farrenc. The following week, the full Dallas Symphony Chorus will make its season debut in Verdi’s monumental Requiem, featuring Adriana González (soprano), Tamara Mumford (mezzo-soprano), Piero Pretti (tenor) and Wenwei Zhang (bass) as soloists. Acclaimed violinist Nicola Benedetti will return to the DSO to join Luisi for the U.S. premiere of James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2, and Luisi will conduct Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, the cinematic “Romantic.” This will mark the first time during his tenure that Luisi has presented Bruckner. In his three final concerts of the season, Luisi mixes the familiar with the unique. Continuing his recording project of the complete Brahms symphonies, Luisi will perform both Brahms’s Third and Fourth Symphonies with the DSO. He also welcomes composer-in-residence Angélica Negrón for the world premiere of her new work, Arquitecta. Luisi closes his season with the orchestra with two works by Carl Orff, the iconic Carmina Burana and the rarely heard Catulli Carmina. Other highlights of the 2022/23 season include several concerts with the NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo) in Luisi’s first season as Principal Conductor; a new production of Verdi’s I vespri siciliani at La Scala (Milan); and the continuation, with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, of his recording series of Carl Nielsen’s symphonies for the renowned Deutsche Grammophon label. The conductor received his first GRAMMY® Award in March 2013 for his leadership of the last two operas of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, when Deutsche Grammophon’s DVD release of the full cycle, recorded live at the Met, was named Best Opera Recording of 2012. In February 2015, the Philharmonia
Zurich launched its Philharmonia Records label with three Luisi recordings: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a double album surveying Wagner’s Preludes and Interludes, and a DVD of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Subsequent releases have included a survey of Rachmaninov’s Four Piano Concertos and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with soloist Lise de la Salle, and a rare recording of the original version of Bruckner’s monumental Symphony No. 8. Luisi’s extensive discography also includes rare Verdi operas (Jérusalem, Alzira and Aroldo), Salieri’s La locandiera, Bellini’s I puritani and I Capuleti e i Montecchi with Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča for Deutsche Grammophon, and the symphonic repertoire of Honegger, Respighi and Liszt. He has recorded all the symphonies and the oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln by neglected Austrian composer Franz Schmidt, several works by Richard Strauss for Sony Classical, and an award-winning account of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Staatskapelle Dresden. Born in Genoa in 1959, Luisi began piano studies at the age of four and received his diploma from the Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini in 1978. He later studied conducting with Milan Horvat at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Graz. Named both Cavaliere della Repubblica Italiana and Commendatore della Stella d’Italia for his role in promoting Italian culture abroad, in 2014 he was awarded the Grifo d’Oro, the highest honor given by the city of Genoa, for his contributions to the city’s cultural legacy. Off the podium, Luisi is an accomplished composer whose Saint Bonaventure Mass received its world premiere at St. Bonaventure University, followed by its New York City premiere in the MetLiveArts series, with the Buffalo Philharmonic and Chorus. As reported by the New York Times, CBS Sunday Morning and elsewhere, he is also a passionate maker of perfumes, which he produces in a one-person operation, flparfums.com.
Lise de la Salle
Piano
Last DSO Performance | March 8 - 11, 2018
THROUGH HER ACCLAIMED international concert appearances and her award-winning Naïve recordings, Lise de la Salle has established a reputation as one of today’s most exciting young artists and as a musician of uncommon sensibility and maturity.
Born in Cherbourg, France, Ms. de la Salle was surrounded by music from her earliest childhood. She began studying the piano at the age of four and gave her first concert at nine in a live broadcast on Radio-France. At thirteen, she made her concerto debut with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Avignon, and her
Paris recital debut at the Louvre before going on tour with the
Orchestre National d’Ile de France. Ms. de la Salle first came to international attention in 2005, at the age of 16, with a Bach/Liszt recording that Gramophone
Magazine selected as “Recording of the Month.” Ms. de la Salle, who records for the Naïve label, was then similarly recognized in 2008 for her recording of the first concertos of Liszt, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. The Spring 2021 season saw the release of her most recent recording When Do We Dance? on Naïve, which presents an odyssey of dance inspired works from around the globe that span a century.
Lise de la Salle has played with many of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors. She made her London Symphony
Orchestra debut with Fabio Luisi and in 2016 returned to the orchestra with Antonio Pappano. Luisi, who invited her to become the first Artist-in-Residence of the Zurich Opera in 2014, has also frequently featured Ms. de la Salle with the Vienna Symphony.
In recent seasons, Ms. de la Salle has appeared with leading symphonic ensembles in London, Paris, Munich, Tokyo,
Baltimore, Detroit, Dallas, and Atlanta, among others, with such esteemed conductors as Osmo Vanska, James Conlon, Karina
Canellakis, and Lionel Bringuier.
Ms. de la Salle also takes pleasure in educational outreach and conducts master classes in many of the cities in which she performs.
Lise de la Salle Plays Schumann
Program Notes by René Spencer Saller
JULIA PERRY (1924–1979) Study for Orchestra
Even after suffering a debilitating stroke in 1971, Julia Perry persisted in composing, building up a substantial body of work, in numerous genres. Her catalogue contains more than a dozen symphonies and at least three operas, all of high quality. But if you don’t recognize her name, please know that this has nothing to do with her talent, which was formidable, and everything to do with her status, or lack thereof, as a Black woman in the mid-20th-century United States. Until recently, Perry, like the two other female composers presented in this concert, has been woefully neglected on concert programs. During her own lifetime, racism and sexism challenged but never deterred her; if anything, she worked harder to chart her own path. Her revelatory compositions deserve—and reward—our attention. Perry, the fourth of five sisters, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to a schoolteacher mother and a physician father, who once played piano well enough to accompany the celebrated lyric tenor Roland Hayes in concert. The family moved to Akron, Ohio, when Perry was 10. She earned a scholarship to Westminster Choir College, in Princeton, New Jersey, where she studied voice, piano, and composition, and then Juilliard, which led to her first Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1948 Perry earned her master’s degree and presented her secular cantata Chicago, a setting of a 1914 Carl Sandburg poem. She went on to study with the influential teacher Luigi Dallapiccolla, at Tanglewood and, in Fontainebleau, outside of Paris, with the legendary Mlle. Nadia Boulanger, who taught everyone from Aaron Copland to Astor Piazzolla. In 1952 Perry won the Boulanger Grand Prix for her Viola Sonata. She also won a second Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed her to study with Dallapiccolla again in Italy. The premiere of her Study for Orchestra was a high point of her second stint in Italy. With the vocal composition Stabat mater, Study for Orchestra would become one of her mostperformed works and one of the few pieces from her catalogue to be recorded during her lifetime. During the summers of 1956 and ‘57, she studied conducting in Siena and directed a series of concerts in Europe for the Information Service of the U.S. State Department.
Program Notes
Perry wrote her final five symphonies while contending with serious health conditions and a long hospitalization. These include her Symphony No. 11 (“Space Symphony”), Symphony No. 12 (“Simple Symphony”), and the Marching Band Symphony. She also wrote an opera about the Salem witch trials, Symplegades. Her last known composition was Bicentennial Reflections, from 1977, a concise meditation on the theme of American freedom for tenor, electric bass, and chamber ensemble. On April 24, 1979, in Akron, Ohio, Perry experienced catastrophic heart failure and died at age 55.
A Closer Listen
Perry wrote Study for Orchestra in 1952, during her second Italian sabbatical. Sometimes called by its earlier name, Short Piece for Orchestra, the seven-or-so-minute orchestral work is distinctively American, a bewitching concoction of the European neoclassical tradition that Perry soaked up in the conservatories and the richly syncopated African American musical vernacular, the bonded-by-blood spirituals, gospel hymns, and jazz ballads that anchored her like family. In 1964, a dozen years after its premiere, the New York Philharmonic performed and recorded Perry’s Study for Orchestra during a European tour. Vividly scored, the piece contrasts a hypnotic Lento passage with aggressive outer sections.
CLARA SCHUMANN (NÉE WIECK) (1819–1896) Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7
FIRST PERFORMANCE: November 9, 1835 – Leipzig; Clara Schumann, piano; Felix Mendelssohn, conductor
THIS IS A DSO PREMIERE
On January 13, 1833, the 13-year-old German piano prodigy Clara Wieck wrote in her diary that she had begun to compose her first piano concerto. All she had composed so far was a single movement, which she called a “concert rondo.” It would eventually serve as the final movement of her Piano Concerto in A minor. “[Robert] Schumann
Program Notes
will orchestrate it now so that I can play it at my concert,” she noted, referring to her father’s piano pupil and boarder—and her own future husband. Clara had been an international sensation before hitting puberty, and Robert, despite being nine years older, was still struggling to make a name for himself as a composer and critic. More than anyone, even more than he believed in himself, Clara believed in Robert’s genius. Even though he wouldn’t kiss her until her 16th birthday party, and he was sporadically involved with other women, he had fallen for her, and the feeling was mutual. (As she wrote in a letter to him, “When you gave me that kiss, I thought I would faint.”) Unfortunately, her controlling (and, at least by contemporary standards, abusive) father opposed the match and even filed a lawsuit to prevent it. After a long and rocky courtship, conducted mostly by secret correspondence, Clara and Robert eventually prevailed in court. They married on September 12, 1840, the day before she turned 21: she called it “the most beautiful and the most important” day of her life. Over the next 16 years, until Robert’s premature death in 1856, she barely had time to practice on the family’s only piano, much less compose. She gave birth to eight children, seven of whom survived infancy; supported her increasingly delusional husband creatively, emotionally, and financially; supervised the servants and balanced the household budget; and, despite Robert’s pathetic objections, maintained a busy performance schedule. After Robert died in a sanitarium, in 1856, Clara composed very little. As a touring concert pianist, she devoted much of her life to promoting her late husband’s music and ensuring his place in the canon. By the mid-19th century, concert culture no longer demanded that virtuoso performers also write or improvise their own material, as had been the case during her adolescence, when she wrote her Piano Concerto in A minor primarily for her own performance. Without the weight of expectation, she felt less motivated to compose. Instead, she resolved to serve as Robert’s loyal champion and a (probably) platonic muse to their younger friend and frequent houseguest, Johannes Brahms.
Program Notes
Perhaps relevantly, before her father obtained sole custody of her after divorcing her pianist mother, before he transformed the child into a world-famous prodigy, she reportedly spent the first four years of her life deaf and mute.
The A minor Concerto
At age 15, Schumann, then Wieck, posed for a portrait with one hand resting on the keyboard, the sheet music for her own Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, within reach: a sweet-faced, sad-eyed girl whose public image was carefully constructed by her Svengali father. She wrote her sole Piano Concerto between the ages of 13 and 15; she debuted it publicly on November 11, 1835, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, under the baton of her friend and admirer Felix Mendelssohn. This premiere took place a couple of months or so after her fateful 16th birthday party. In those days, piano prodigies were expected to demonstrate mastery of harmony and counterpoint by performing their own compositions or improvisations at recitals. As Anna Beer explains in her essential Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music: “Because Clara Wieck was a child prodigy on the piano, she became a child-prodigy composer for the piano.” Robert’s growing attention fortified her ego while weakening her father’s hold. When she was only 12, he praised her as a composer, treating her as his creative equal: “Have you been composing a lot?” he asked in his first surviving letter to her, dated January 11, 1832: “And if so, what? Sometimes I hear music in my dreams—what a composer you are!” She began dedicating compositions to him, including her sublime Romance variée for piano, Op. 3 (1831–33). Disappointingly, Robert commissioned and published a somewhat tepidto-critical review of her Piano Concerto for the journal he edited at the time. His future fiancée was incensed not only because he didn’t review it himself but also because he must have approved this unsympathetic review of a concerto that he had helped orchestrate. Defending herself, she reminded him that her audiences, which spanned the continent, insisted on hearing immediate encores of her original material: “Of the many pieces I played, my concerto was received the
Program Notes
best.... Do you think I am so unaware that I don’t know the faults of the concerto?” [But] there is no better feeling than having satisfied an entire audience.”
A sharp but well-deserved dig: as they both were all too aware, Robert wasn’t nearly as adept as his teenage fiancée when it came to satisfying audiences. Proving the point, she took the concerto on tour for the next few years, presenting it some seven times across the continent, including at one recital in Vienna, when audiences demanded two encores of the finale. Ignorant critics made backhanded compliments and sexist assumptions. As one anonymous reviewer quoted by Beer opined: “If the name of the female composer were not on the title one would never think it were written by a woman.” Another critic attributed the composer’s bold harmonic choices to a woman’s “moody” nature, adding that innovation often promotes deviance in “the daughters of Eve.”
A Closer Listen
Despite the composer’s youth, the Piano Concerto in A minor is both accomplished and daring. Her through-composed melodies, unusual key changes, and risky modulations exude a Chopinesque perfume, never mind that Wieck began writing it before Chopin’s piano concertos were widely known. On the other hand, it’s likely that Clara, a precocious connoisseur who made her professional debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus at age 11, had heard Chopin’s music performed during her extensive European concert tours. There are no true pauses between movements: in what would become a Romantic convention, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, each movement flows into the next, linked by carefully considered segues. Cast in A minor, the opening Allegro maestoso announces itself with a grand tutti before interjecting a contrasting idea, a plangent wind refrain. The piano tosses out some resolute scales before the orchestra returns. After a dramatic cascade of downward arpeggios, the soloist plunges upward and launches into the first solo cadenza, a delicately voluptuous, polonaise-like tune that soon sweet-talks the strings into humming along. Overall, the movement is punctuated by dynamic shifts and climactic crescendos and decrescendos.
Program Notes
Preceded by another segue, also labeled Romanze, the central Romanze, in the distant key of A-flat Major, eases into a rapturous stretto piano interlude, a dreamy, druggy waltz. Call it a rhapsody in deep violet, call it what you will, but it blossoms into a twilit colloquy with the cello, one of the most indelible duets in the repertoire. And even if she is biting Chopin’s steez (debatable), who cares? Who can fuss about influence while marinating in bliss? Does it matter that Chopin himself admired Clara’s music?
For the Allegro non troppo finale, which is almost as long as the first two movements combined, Schumann returns to the home key of A minor, decorating the majestic polonaise idea with ornately virtuosic filigree. At once fierce and tender, the finale represents the soloist’s— originally the composer’s—spotlight moment. It is the only one of the three movements that was originally orchestrated by Robert, although Clara likely revised it in the years afterwards, after numerous live performances. The orchestra offers support and occasional friction, alternating full-throated tutti sections with subtle, chamber-like accompaniment that sets off the sparkling piano pyrotechnics.
FIRST PERFORMANCE: 1849 – Paris
THIS IS A DSO PREMIERE
Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, in Paris, Louise Farrenc was the daughter and sister of prominent sculptors. She grew up in a creative, mildly bohemian environment and thrived, starting piano lessons as a young girl, under Cecile Soria, a pupil of Muzio Clementi. Soon she was learning from such luminaries as Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. She became a touring piano virtuosa a good decade before Clara Schumann debuted at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. In 1819, at age 15, she studied composition privately with Anton Reicha, an associate of Beethoven’s and an esteemed faculty member at the Paris Conservatoire. Whether the young woman ever took classes with Reicha at the Conservatoire remains unknown, but it seems unlikely, since
Program Notes
the composition coursework was limited to men at the time. Female students could not enroll, at least officially, in any composition class at the Conservatoire until 1870.
In 1821 Dumont married Aristide Farrenc, a flutist and music publisher 10 years her senior. It proved a good match for her, giving her the freedom to pursue the kind of music career that was usually off limits to women of her social class. The couple also co-founded a leading publishing house, Editions Farrenc. In 1826 the Farrencs welcomed a daughter, Victorine, who, like her mother, enjoyed a successful career as a concert pianist. In 1842 Farrenc was named a tenured professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, a prestigious position that she would hold for the next 30 years. Underpaid for the first decade of her employment, she demanded and received a salary equal to that of her male colleagues after her 1849 nonet for strings and winds wowed critics and audiences alike. Twice, in 1861 and 1869, she won the Prix Chartier of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. She was praised by the likes of Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann.
Along with chamber music and works for solo piano, Farrenc wrote three symphonies. She completed her Symphony No. 3 in G minor, Op. 36, in 1847, and debuted it two years later, at the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, on the same program as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Farrenc stopped composing in 1859, after her 33-year-old daughter, Victorine, succumbed to a long illness. Despite her grief, she stayed busy, continuing to teach at the Conservatoire until 1873 while also researching French Baroque keyboard music for the 23-volume scholarly series that she was compiling and editing with Aristide.
A Closer Listen
The first movement, a dramatic, richly textured Allegro, opens with a solitary oboe, which spins out a theme that the strings caress and adapt before conjuring up a ferocious coda. In the slow movement, a solo clarinet croons over velvety strings, low brass, and muted timpani. The effervescent scherzo amps up the contrast, and a satisfying woodwindcentered trio ensues before the final emphatic chords of the finale, a contrapuntal delight.
