Blossom Music Festival 2015

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THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTR A

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BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL P R E S E N T E D

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saturday August 1

KENT/BLOSSOM SIDE-BY-SIDE Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra The Cleveland Orchestra Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra Brett Mitchell, conductor James Ehnes, violin

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BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL

Saturday evening, August 1, 2015, at 7:00 p.m.

K E N T / B LO S SO M C H A M B E R ORC H EST R A AND

T H E C L E V E L A N D ORC H EST R A conducted by B R E T T M I T C H E L L

Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra igor stravinsky (1882-1971)

Danses Concertantes 1.

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Marche: Introduction Pas d’action: Con moto Thème varié Pas de deux Marche: Conclusion

sergei prokofiev (1891-1953)

Classical Symphony, Opus 25 (Symphony No. 1) 1.

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Allegro Larghetto Gavotta: Non troppo allegro Finale: Molto vivace

INTER MISSION

The Cleveland Orchestra antonín dvorák (1841-1904)

The Noon Witch, Opus 108

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Concert Program: August 1

2015 Blossom Festival

samuel barber (1910-1981)

Violin Concerto, Opus 14 1. Allegro 2. Andante 3. Presto in moto perpetuo JAMES EHNES, violin

INTER MISSION

The Cleveland Orchestra and Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra performing side-by side béla bartók (1881-1945)

Concerto for Orchestra 1. Introduzione: Andante non troppo — Allegro vivace 2. Giuoco delle coppie: Allegro scherzando 3. Elegia: Andante non troppo 4. Intermezzo interrotto: Allegretto 5. Finale: Pesante — Presto

James Ehnes’s appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra is made possible by a gift to the Orchestra’s Guest Artist Fund from Mr. and Mrs. William C. Zekan.

This concert is dedicated to Paul and Suzanne Westlake, in recognition of their extraordinary generosity in support of The Cleveland Orchestra’s 2014-15 Annual Fund.

With this concert, The Cleveland Orchestra gratefully honors

The Sisler McFawn Foundation for its generous support.

Media Partners: Northeast Ohio Media Group and WKSU 89.7

The 2015 Blossom Music Festival is presented by The J.M. Smucker Company.

The Cleveland Orchestra

Concert Program: August 1

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An Evening . . . with Kent/Blossom Music Festival and The Cleveland Orchestra Kent/Blossom Music Festival is a five-week summer institute for professional music training operated

by Kent State University in cooperation with The Cleveland Orchestra and Blossom Music Center.

Each summer since 1968, musicians of The Cleveland Orchestra and other faculty members have gathered to mentor a select group of students in chamber music, orchestral repertoire, and private lessons. Tonight’s concert continues this long and valued partnership of The Cleveland Orchestra and Kent/Blossom Music Festival.

To open this evening’s concert, the Kent/Blossom Music Festival Chamber Orchestra performs two works conducted by Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor Brett Mitchell. Following the first intermission, The Cleveland Orchestra and Mitchell present three works spanning the half century from 1896 to 1945, including Samuel Barber’s melodic Violin Concerto with guest soloist James Ehnes. In the concert finale, Kent/Blossom students join their Cleveland Orchestra counterparts side-by-side in performing Béla Bartók’s thrillingly conceived Concerto for Orchestra.

K E N T / B L O S S O M M U S I C F E S T I VA L 2 0 1 5

CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

VIOLIN Ella Loman Lilian Chou Man Man Chui Cheng Gu Yi Miao Huang Clara Lee Zoë Merrill Arman Nasrinpay U Tong Ng Yee Ling Elaine Ng Mingyuan Song Natalie Yeo

VIOLA Mei-Chun Chen Kathleen Crabtree Juan Du Yu Fung Lam Courtney O’Keefe Hanna Pederson CELLO Daniel Blumhard Seohee Choi Hongli Diao David Dietz Aaron Hauser Henry Stubbs DOUBLE BASS Christopher Glavac Scott Haigh

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FLUTE Perry Emerson Matthew Watkins OBOE Mitchell Kuhn Justine Myers Mary Riddell CLARINET Charles Daole-Wellman Hayden Forsythe Natalie Young BASSOON Mackenzie Brauns Vincent Disantis Christopher Pawlowski

Kent/Blossom Music Festival

HORN Josiah Bullach Carly Charles Katherine Seybold TRUMPET Larry Herman Erik Sundet TROMBONE David Mitchell TIMPANI Bill Sallak For further information about the Kent/Blossom Music Festival, see pages 64-65 of the 2015 Blossom Festival Book, or visit WWW. KENT. EDU /BLOSSOM

2015 Blossom Festival

Kent/Blossom Chamber Orchestra

Danses concertantes (for chamber orchestra) composed 1940-42

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IGOR

STRAVINSKY born June 17, 1882 Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg died April 6, 1971 New York

Blossom Music Festival

I G O R S T R AV I N S K Y first gained international fame by composing big and bold ballet scores, including The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. Amid the tumult and innovation of turn-of-thecentury Paris, they caused outrage, scandal, and admiration for their daring newness and tough, angular rhythms.

Stravinsky, however, was soon headed in a different direction entirely, into his own neo-classical period. In fact, he was constantly moving from one group of ideas to the next, re-inventing himself and his music throughout a long career — from modernist to neo-classical, from pagan dramas to religious epic, from orchestral to choral, from celebrated dance to plain entertainment, large orchestra to chamber music.

Long a fan of the “moving pictures” (and oddly enamored of some of its more popular forms, including spaghetti Westerns), Stravinsky also hoped, in the 1930s, that he could someday make the “real money” that film composers were paid in Hollywood.

In fact, one of Stravinsky’s biggest and most popular hits was as a composer to Disney’s original Fantasia movie, which came out in 1940 soon after he settled to live Southern California as a refugee from what became World War II. (His disagreement with Walt Disney, over the small payment he was given for the film rights to The Rite of Spring, continued for decades forward.) When Stravinsky arrived in Los Angeles in 1939, California was still — perhaps always will be — wrestling with its unique cultural mix of feast and famine, between artistic sophistication and the fakery of Hollywoodveneered sets, between endless sunshine and never-ending drink and excess . . . the land of opportunity and of ruined dreams.

Stravinsky’s fame brought him immediate access to a whole colony of dispossessed European writers, composers, and artists, some of whom were making “the good money” in films.

He was approached by one of his new friends, the composer Werner Janssen. Janssen had earlier served as music director of the New York Philharmonic, but had found happiness in the contradictions of Hollywood, where he was a film composer of the first rank — in part because of his ability to excel within the assembly-line procedures then used for scoring a film.

Janssen had his own orchestra in Los Angeles, with which he gave regular public concerts of serious music (in addition to making money through recordings), and asked Stravinsky for About the Music

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a new score to be premiered with the composer on the podium.

Stravinsky’s friend, the choreographer George Balanchine, was also in Los Angeles doing filmwork for movies, and Balanchine asked for a new piece as well. Stravinsky, sometimes practical and pragmatic, wrote one piece for the two purposes. Balanchine staged it in 1944, two years after the orchestral premiere in 1942.

Danses concertantes is relatively brief, with twenty minutes of music arranged into five movements for chamber orchestra. It is filled with solo passages for many of the instruments, including angular moments of tonal disagreement, coupled with a straight-forward design blended with the kind of rhythmical tricks one might well expect from Stravinsky. The opening and closing marches serve as bookends, with a lovely miniature “theme and variations” section placed in the middle, between two evocative dances.

At a Glance This piece runs about 20 minutes in performance. Stravinsky scored it for a small orchestra of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, and strings.

—Eric Sellen © 2015

Classical Symphony in D major, Opus 25 composed 1916-17

W I T H H I S F I R S T Piano Concerto and the Scythian Suite, the

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Sergei

PROKOFIEV born April 27, 1891 Sontsovka, Ukraine died March 5, 1953 Moscow

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young Prokofiev established a reputation, in the 1910s, as the enfant terrible of Russian music, shocking critics and audiences with his highly unconventional harmonies and wild rhythms. His early works seemed to be all about defying authority. He rebelled against his teachers at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but his music also reflected the more general intellectual unrest of the war years that led to the 1917 revolutions (the overthrow of the Czar in February and the Bolshevik coup in October). Yet in one of his first works written after the revolution broke out, Prokofiev went out of his way to appear non-revolutionary: he spent much of the summer of 1917 working on a “Classical Symphony,” ostensibly conceived within the harmonic and structural world of Haydn’s symphonies. In his autobiography, Prokofiev wrote: “It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time.

That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony: in the first place because that was simpler, and secondly, for the fun of it, to ‘tease the geese,’ and in the About the Music

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secret hope that I would prove to be right if the symphony really did turn out to be a piece of classical music.”

The first ideas for the symphony date from 1916 — the third-movement “Gavotta” was written that year, and the first and second movements were sketched. The bulk of the work was completed during the summer of 1917, in a country house where Prokofiev was sheltered from the turmoil of that difficult summer. The composer had left his piano in the city, having decided for the first time to write without one. “I believed that the orchestra would sound more natural,” he wrote later, and in fact, he achieved a bright and delicate orchestral sound that his earlier works didn’t have.

At 15 minutes’ duration, the “Classical” is the shortest of Prokofiev’s seven symphonies. The themes are all kept brief and developments are sparse, with the emphasis on shorter, wellrounded and separated units. The very simplicity of the writing sometimes becomes the source of musical humor, and the orchestration also adds more than a few comic touches, as in the third movement where, after the middle section, the gavotte theme returns in sharply reduced scoring, causing the theme to vanish into thin air. A more serious tone is introduced in the second-movement Larghetto, which anticipates the lyricism of Prokofiev’s Soviet-period works from the 1930s. But the work ends on a cheerful note, with a sparkling finale that is hard to listen to without at least a smile.

—Peter Laki © 2015

At a Glance This symphony runs about 15 minutes in performance. Prokofiev scored it for an orchestra of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Copyright © Musical Arts Association

BANDWAGON GIFT SHOP Music is in the air! Take advantage of the moment and browse our large selection of musical gifts and Cleveland Orchestra signature items. Open before each Blossom Festival concert, at intermissions, and for post-concert purchases, too! We have a selection of new summertime merchandise — and a special bargain table every night. Plus CDs and DVDs of artists and music being presented this summer. Stop in, and take the music home!

Blossom Music Festival

About the Music

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The Cleveland Orchestra

The Noon Witch, Opus 108 composed 1896

A L T H O U G H D V O Ř Á K was well into middle age before his

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Antonín

DVOŘÁK born September 8, 1841 Nelahozeves, Bohemia died May 1, 1904 Prague

At a Glance This symphonic poem runs not quite 15 minutes in performance. Dvořák scored it for an orchestra of 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, triangle, bells), and strings.

gifts as a composer were widely recognized, he soon thereafter emerged as one of Central Europe’s greatest composers — and was frequently mentioned as a worthy successor to Brahms as the leading proponent of Germanic symphonic traditions.

Even so, his Czech upbringing brought him a direct connection with the waves of nationalism cresting across mid-19th-century Europe. And Dvořák deftly applied the notion of homeland to his musical creations, borrowing freely from Czech music traditions while working within mainstream classical forms.

Many of his well-known works clearly reflect the musical rhythms and phrasings of his homeland. His great String Quartet in F major — written in 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, where the composer spent a relaxing summer at a Czech immigrant community — bounces with Czech rhythms, belying its nickname as the “American” Quartet. Even his most famous work, the “New World” Symphony of 1893 (composed in New York and orchestrated in Spillville), was written as a kind of classical music postcard, mixing together homesick feelings for his native land with new “American” musical ideas painted in a traditional classical format.

Following his return to Europe, in 1895, and just prior to his final years devoted to composing operas, Dvořák created four short symphonic poems involving Czech subjects. Among these is The Noonday Witch. These were inspired by a collection of verse poems called Kytice, written by Karel Jaromír Erben. Many are in the style of the Brothers Grimm and other older European tales with a macabre feeling, and gruesomely sharp-edged supernatural elements. The Noonday Witch portrays an overworked and exasperated mother threatening her curious and active young son (crying oboe and flute) with a visit by a Witch if he doesn’t settle down and behave. To her surprise, the Witch (portrayed by solo clarinet) suddenly appears — in the mother’s mind or reality? — and she rushes about trying to save her son from the Witch’s grasp. With the stroke of the twelve chimes of the family’s clock, her husband returns home for his noon meal, only to discover his wife lying fainted on the floor, having smothered their son to death in efforts to protect him. Father and mother are horrified, with the invisible witch cackling in the distance.

—Eric Sellen © 2015

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About the Music

2015 Blossom Festival

The Cleveland Orchestra

Violin Concerto, Opus 14 composed 1939

B A R B E R WA S T W E N T Y- N I N E years old when he completed

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Samuel

BARBER born March 9, 1910 West Chester, Pennsylvania died January 23, 1981 New York City

The Cleveland Orchestra

his Violin Concerto, a year after Toscanini’s performances of the First Essay and Adagio for Strings had catapulted the young composer to fame. It was his first major commission, coming from Samuel Fels, a soap manufacturer and trustee at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Barber’s alma mater. (Barber’s biographer Barbara Heyman writes that the composer later referred to the work in private correspondence as his “concerto del sapone,” or “soap concerto.”)

Fels intended the concerto for his adopted son, Iso Briselli, a former child prodigy and a student of the celebrated violinist Carl Flesch. Fels offered Barber $1000, half to be paid in advance and the other half upon completion of the concerto. But things didn’t quite work out between composer and violinist.

Briselli raised objections to the last movement of the concerto and asked Barber to make some major changes — which Barber declined to do. As a result, Briselli never played the work that was written for him.

In order to defend against charges that the concerto was unplayable, a young student at Curtis, Herbert Baumel, was asked to help. Based on a 1984 interview with Baumel, Heyman gives the following account of what happened: “One afternoon during the autumn of 1939, while Baumel was sitting in the commons room of the Curtis Institute of Music, [pianist] Ralph Berkowitz walked into the room and handed him a pencil manuscript of a violin part without telling him the name of the composer. He was told only that he had two hours in which to learn the music, that the ‘piece should be played very fast,’ and to return ‘dressed up’ and ready to play before a few people. The private performance took place in the studio of Josef Hofmann, where the tension and solemnity of the occasion, as recalled by Baumel, suggested that much was at stake for Barber besides the financial aspects of the commission. . . . Ralph Berkowitz accompanied Baumel, who produced dazzling evidence that the concerto was indeed playable at any tempo. There were ‘bravos’ and the ritualistic tea and cookies. The verdict was that Barber was to be paid the full commission and Briselli had to relinquish his right to the first performance of the work. The trial was based on a performance of the incomplete third movement through rehearsal no. 6, ending abruptly at measure 94.”

About the Music

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At a Glance Barber composed his Violin Concerto in 1939. It was premiered on February 7, 1941, in Philadelphia, with Albert Spalding as soloist and Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. (Although this was the official premiere, Herbert Baumel had earlier played it with the Curtis Orchestra under Fritz Reiner, and he had also stood in for Spalding at rehearsals with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.)

Barber revised the concerto in 1949.

This concerto runs about 25 minutes in performance.

Barber scored it for 2 flutes (second doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano, strings, and solo violin.

The Cleveland Orchestra first performed Barber’s Violin Concerto in April 1942 under the direction of Artur Rodzinski; Albert Spalding played the solo part. The most recent performance by the Orchestra was given at the 2010 Blossom Festival with conductor Pablo HerasCasado and violinist Gil Shaham.

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If the finale was presented incomplete during Baumel’s demonstration, then no one present could truly get an idea of the concerto’s difficulties, for part of the challenge lies in keeping the momentum going for the entire length of the movement.

The need for technical virtuosity so dominates the last movement that some critics have seen little else in it. In fact, many musicians and commentators have repeatedly stated that the finale is the weakest of the concerto’s three movements. On closer look, however, the Presto turns out to be the most harmonically adventurous of the concerto’s movements.

W I T H O U T S O M U C H A S a single measure of introduction, the

solo violin begins the first movement with a tender melody, played over a gentle orchestral accompaniment. The atmosphere is idyllic, like a sunny summer afternoon in a beautiful garden.

The first melody has repeatedly been called “Mozartian” in its purity and perfect equilibrium, but even Mozart didn’t eschew conflict and contrast as much as did Barber. Then the clarinet introduces a second melody (somewhat faster-moving than the first, but equally lyrical). A playful and animated but brief violin passage completes the collection of themes: the three form a happy family whose bliss nothing and no one can perturb. It is interesting that the characteristic clarinet theme is taken over by the soloist only at the very end; this effect is saved for the movement’s ethereal coda.

The idyll continues in the second-movement Andante.

The solo oboe presents a long (and longing) melody, repeated by the cellos. The solo violin enters with more agitated material, leading to a cadenza, after which the violin takes over the opening melody. A brief fortissimo section flares up, before the movement ends on a calm and peaceful chord.

The first two movements were written in the summer of 1939, in Sils Maria in the beautiful Engadin Valley of Switzerland.

Barber expected to finish the third movement in Europe as well, but, as Heyman writes, “his plans were interrupted . . . when at the end of August all Americans were warned to leave Europe because of the impending invasion of Poland by the Nazis.”

Barber sailed home on September 2, the day after the German invasion, and finished the concerto in the Poconos.

It would certainly be wrong to infer any direct links between these circumstances and the concerto’s third movement; in any event, Barber had from the outset planned a finale with “ample opportunity to display the artist’s technical powers.” But the finale About the Music

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movement definitely disrupts the idyll of the first two movements.

Despite the steady motion in triplets that represents no small part of the violinist’s challenge, there are more surprises here than ever before. For one thing, after two largely diatonic movements (concentrating on the seven notes of the major or minor scale), the language in the third is chromatic (making use of all 12 pitches in the tonal system). For another, there are some unexpected changes in the meter that throw off the seemingly simple patterns established at the beginning. Furthermore, Barber made the orchestration spicier by adding the snare drum, by ingeniously combining pizzicato (plucked) and arco (bow) string techniques, and through a more pointillistic use of the woodwind instruments. There is a powerful climax near the end, after which Barber cranks up the tempo even more, replacing triplets with sixteenth-notes for the frantic last 17 measures of the concerto.

—Peter Laki © 2015 Copyright © Musical Arts Association

Side-by- Side Performance

Concerto for Orchestra composed 1943-44

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Béla

BARTÓK born March 25, 1881 Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary died September 26, 1945 New York Blossom Music Festival

LI K E M O S T O F U S , Béla Bartók’s life was a mixture of good and bad fortune, adversity, rejection, acceptance, and success. Perhaps he had more than his fair share of setbacks and detractors, but he squarely played the cards that life and circumstances dealt him. And his music, which some people find difficult and others relish joyfully, has come to be considered among the most exciting and enduring from the 20th century’s many edge-cutting musical pioneers. His Concerto for Orchestra, dating from the final years of his life, is an unquestioned masterpiece — full of tunes, bursting with excitement and suspense, and a splendid showpiece for the talents of any symphony orchestra (or even for two ensembles sitting side-by-side).

Bartók was born in Hungary, in a town now in Ukraine but which then belonged to the large Austro-Hungarian Empire of Central Europe. He inherited musical talent from both parents, although his father died when Béla was still a boy. He took his first piano lessons from his mother, who kept moving her young family (there were two boys, Béla and his younger brother, Ersébet) from town to town as varying means of support changed.

Béla’s abilities as a pianist soon overtook his mother’s, so About the Music

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At a Glance Bartók wrote his Concerto for Orchestra in 1943, on commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation. It was first performed on December 1, 1944, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky’s direction at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

This work runs about 40 minutes in performance.

Bartók scored it for 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (third doubling english horn), 3 clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (side drum, bass drum, tamtam, cymbals, triangle), 2 harps, and strings.

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was introduced to The Cleveland Orchestra’s repertoire at concerts in January 1946 by George Szell, then a guest conductor.

The Orchestra’s most recent performances were led by Peter Eötvös in April 2008, at Severance Hall.

The Cleveland Orchestra recorded Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra in 1965 with George Szell and in 1988 with Christoph von Dohnányi.

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that, when money afforded it, he studied with several other teachers, intent on a keyboard career. He eventually moved to Budapest to complete his education, and was then appointed to a position on the piano faculty of the Budapest Conservatory. With this, he had a steady income, and was able to spend more time composing and pursuing his interest in Hungarian and Eastern European folk music.

Bartók’s research and cataloging of folksongs and melodies — and his many trips into the countryside to discover “new” folk music — became a central influence on his own work as a composer. His music often features powerful, irregular folk rhythms, melodies based on folk-music scales (rather than traditional classical keys), and writing that mixes together unusual combinations of notes and instruments. Bartók’s style softened somewhat as he aged, and the extreme dissonance and clashing harmonies that caused controversy for his earliest successes evolved into a core musical language that is both original and still very modern. Yet it is also clearly in the classical tradition — and he wrote in many traditional forms, including string quartets, sonatas, rhapsodies, concertos, and operas.

Bartók and his wife immigrated to the United States in 1940, after years of unhappiness in Hungary over Nazi Germany’s step-by-step subjugation of Central Europe. With his mother’s death in 1939, the composer finally felt willing to leave his native land. He had been to the United States on several previous occasions, performing as conductor and piano soloist in a number of his works, but his musical reception here had been decidedly mixed. So that he arrived in New York knowing few friends and having just a partial list of musical acquaintances.

He was able to continue his folk-music research, bringing in a meager income by working on a large project cataloging SerboCroatian folk tunes at Columbia University.

But Bartók’s health was increasingly problematic, and he often found himself inexplicably exhausted. At times he was hospitalized, where a diagnosis was not immediately forthcoming (he was eventually found to have leukemia). He was frequently unable to work, and with few new performances of any of his works, the Bartóks’ finances became increasingly precarious.

Into this situation in 1943 walked — quite literally, into Bartók’s hospital room — the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitsky, with a commission for a brand-new orchestral work, including a down payment of half About the Music

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the money! The idea for the commission was really from two of Bartók’s friends, but Koussevitsky was careful not to mention this. How, exactly, any of them expected the enfeebled composer to gather himself together to write new music is unclear.

But having a task to fulfill sometimes focuses one’s energies, and in little more than three months Bartók had completed his Concerto for Orchestra, which one early critic applauded as “a virtuoso piece for a virtuoso orchestra.”

For his new work, Bartók chose to continue the pattern of many of his previous works, which had featured prominent solo parts. The commission, however, was for an orchestral work only, so he chose to spotlight different soloists throughout the piece by writing virtuoso moments for the principal players of many of the Boston Symphony’s instrument sections, or for entire sections at once.

THE MUSIC

The Concerto for Orchestra is in five movements, beginning and ending with a large-scale movement and with a central, mournful elegy.

The long opening movement introduces several musical themes that reappear later. It begins quietly and then journeys through a wide range of dynamics and instrumentations, continually highlighting a variety of musical sounds, pleasing melodies, and raucous ideas, before dashing toward a glorious — and then sudden — finish.

The second movement, “Game of Pairs,” works through a changing series of pairs of wind instruments — bassoons, oboes, clarinets, and then flutes — each with their own tune, and each paired against their mate at a different harmonic interval. A chorale for brass pauses this procession, which then continues with a third bassoon and then with the oboes and clarinets arguing together as a quartet. Eventually all the solo instruments arrange themselves together for a “family photo” moment in sound.

The third movement is an Elegy, at first quiet and sad, but increasingly anguished and agitated in its emotional despair.

Echoes from the opening movement bring a sense of time and depth to this mournful thrashing. At one moment, Bartók builds upon a musical phrasing from his opera Bluebeard’s Castle, in which the heroine, Judith, discovers the truth within a “Lake of Tears,” filled with the unhappiness of those who have ventured Blossom Music Festival

About the Music

For his new work, Bartók chose to continue the pattern of many of his previous works, which had featured prominent solo parts. The commission, however, was for an orchestral work only, so he chose to spotlight different soloists throughout the piece by writing virtuoso moments for the principal players, or for entire sections at once.

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before her. But the intent of the elegy is clear even without understanding this musical reference.

The fourth movement is titled “Interrupted Intermezzo” and begins as a mostly tender meeting between a pair of lovers, represented by woodwinds (initially by a solo oboe) and by the violas as a section (accompanied in their ardent love song by harp). Suddenly, something goes awry, and some belches from the rest of the orchestra interrupt the reverie. Bartók suggested to a student that this was “like a group of drunken villagers who come upon and interrupt the lover’s serenade.” But, whatever the interruption’s cause, the mood settles again for more quiet cooing.

The expansive fifth movement is a large tour de force for the orchestra and its many players. The movement’s central structure involves the creation of a fugue surrounded by a whirling and fiery dance. Some introspective moments, when the action almost seems to have moved offstage somewhere, lend variety and also provide moments of rest (for some of the players) as the piece winds itself to a successful finish.

—Eric Sellen © 2015

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About the Music

Blossom Music Festival

James Ehnes Acclaimed for his virtuosity and musicianship, Canadian violinist James Ehnes has performed in over thirty countries on five continents. He made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in July 2006.

Born in Brandon, Manitoba, in 1976, James Ehnes began violin studies at age 4, and at 9 became a protégé of Francis Chaplin. He later studied with Sally Thomas at the Meadowmount School of Music and, from 1993 to 1997, at the Juilliard School, where he received the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music upon his graduation. Mr. Ehnes won the Grand Prize in Strings at the Canadian Music Competition in 1987 and in 1988, First Prize in Strings at the Canadian Music Festival. At age 13, he made his major orchestral debut as a soloist with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

James Ehnes’s honors include the first-ever Ivan Galamian Memorial Award, the Canada Council for the Arts’s Virginia Parker Prize, and a 2005 Avery Fisher Career Grant. In 2007, he became the youngest person elected as a Fellow to the Royal

The Cleveland Orchestra

Soloist

Society of Canada. The Governor General of Canada appointed Mr. Ehnes a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010, and in 2013 he was named an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music.

In recent seasons, James Ehnes has performed with the orchestras of Chicago, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Toronto, participated in a three-week residency in Melbourne, and also appeared in Berlin, Brussels, Leipzig, London, Moscow, Paris, Prague, and Tel Aviv. An avid chamber musician, he tours with his string ensemble, the Ehnes Quartet, and serves as the artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

Mr. Ehnes’s discography of more than thirty recordings features music ranging from Johann S. Bach to John Adams. His recent projects include albums of works by Bartók, Britten, Khachaturian, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Tchaikovsky.

His recordings have been honored with many prizes, including a Grammy, a Gramophone, and seven Juno Awards.

James Ehnes plays the “Marsick” Stradivarius of 1715. He currently lives in Bradenton, Florida, with his wife and family. For more information, visit www. jamesehnes.com.

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Brett Mitchell

Assistant Conductor Elizabeth Ring and William Gwinn Mather Endowed Chair The Cleveland Orchestra

Brett Mitchell is completing his second season as a member of the conducting staff of The Cleveland Orchestra and as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra. His contract has recently been extended through the 2016-17 season; his title becomes associate conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra in September 2015. As assistant conductor, Mr. Mitchell serves as cover conductor for Severance Hall and Blossom Music Festival subscription concerts, and provides assistance to music director Franz Welser-Möst — in his first season, he stepped in on several occasions to lead concerts of The Cleveland Orchestra for ailing colleagues, at Severance Hall and Blossom.

In addition to his responsibilities with The Cleveland Orchestra, Brett Mitchell has just completed his fifth and final season as music director of Michigan’s Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra.

In recent seasons, Mr. Mitchell has led the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, as well as the orchestras of Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, Oregon, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Rochester, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Washington D.C.’s National Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Northwest Mahler Festi-

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val Orchestra. He has also acted as musical assistant and cover conductor with the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra. Recent return engagements include appearances with the National Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Houston Symphony, and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.

Mr. Mitchell served as assistant conductor of the Houston Symphony (200711), where he concurrently held a League of American Orchestras American Conducting Fellowship. Since that time, he has returned to lead the Houston Symphony regularly as a guest conductor. He was also an assistant conductor to Kurt Masur at the Orchestre National de France (200609) and served as director of orchestras at Northern Illinois University (2005-07). He was associate conductor of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble (2002-06), where he led many subscription programs, six world premieres, and several recording projects.

Mr. Mitchell has also served as music director of nearly a dozen opera productions, principally as music director at the Moores Opera Center in Houston (2010-13), where he led eight productions.

A native of Seattle, Brett Mitchell holds a doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also music director of the University Orchestra. He earned a bachelor of music degree in composition from Western Washington University. Mr. Mitchell also participated in the National Conducting Institute in Washington D.C., and has studied with Lorin Maazel and Kurt Masur.

Conductor

2015 Blossom Festival