S U M M E R
H O M E
O F
THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTR A
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BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL P R E S E N T E D
BY
saturday August 15
TCHAIKOVSKY’S VIOLIN CONCERTO & SIBELIUS’S FIFTH SYMPHONY The Cleveland Orchestra James Feddeck, conductor Simone Lamsma, violin
Music begins where the possibilities of language end. —Jean Sibelius
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Introducing the Concert
Blossom Music Festival
2O15
BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL
Saturday evening, August 15, 2015, at 8:00 p.m.
THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTRA JA M E S F E D D E C K , conductor
CARL MARIA VON WEBER
Overture to Euryanthe
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35
(1786-1826)
(1840-1893)
1. Allegro moderato 2. Canzonetta: Andante 3. Finale: Allegro vivacissimo SIMONE LAMSMA, violin
INT ER MISSION JEAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957)
Symphony No. 5 in E-at major, Opus 82 1. Tempo molto moderato — Allegro moderato — Presto 2. Andante mosso, quasi allegretto 3. Allegro molto — Misterioso — Un pochettino largamente
Simone Lamsma’s appearance with The Cleveland Orchestra is made possible by a gift to the Orchestra’s Guest Artist Fund from The Hershey Foundation. This concert is dedicated to R. Thomas and Meg Harris Stanton and to Richard and Nancy Sneed in recognition of their extraordinary generosity in support of The Cleveland Orchestra’s 2014-15 Annual Fund. Media Partner: Northeast Ohio Media Group
The 2015 Blossom Music Festival is presented by The J.M. Smucker Company. The Cleveland Orchestra
Concert Program: August 15
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Overture to Euryanthe composed 1823
B E C A U S E O F the “von” in his name, Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst
by
Carl Maria von
WEBER
born November 18, 1786 Eutin, Holstein (now part of Germany) died June 5, 1826 London
At a Glance Weber wrote his opera Euryanthe in 1822-23. The opera was premiered on October 25, 1823, in Vienna. This overture runs not quite 10 minutes in performance. Weber scored it for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.
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von Weber always wanted to believe he was descended from nobility. His father, a composer himself of some note, had adopted the “von” on no authority whatsoever. Despite their lack of a noble lineage, the family’s musical background was strong. Frau von Weber was a singer and actress; two of Carl’s elder halfbrothers had studied with Joseph Haydn. Yet it was Carl who would achieve the family’s greatest fame. He was only twenty-six when, in 1813, he was named director of the opera in Prague, a position that included not only conducting but also scheduling rehearsals and supervising the wardrobe. There, he would begin two new chapters in his life. He met and married the soprano Caroline Brandt, and became the champion of German Romantic opera, a style distinct from the Italian operas then personified by Rossini. Not only was German Romantic opera sung in German. It was also based in German legend and literature, and borrowed the powerful, emotional spirit of German symphonic works by Beethoven and others. There in Prague, and later in Dresden, Berlin, and Vienna, Weber came to represent German opera, wearing that crown at a time when the future sovereign of the form, Richard Wagner, was still just a child. Euryanthe, Weber’s second to last stage work, was written at the request of Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater, which requested something similar to his immensely popular Der Freischütz (“The Freeshooter,” or “The Marksman”). Weber, however, wanted to try something new — a grand opera, rather than the folk-flavored operetta-like piece that Freischütz had been. Given his proven sense of theater, he might have succeeded, had he not ended up working with Helmina von Chézy as his librettist, for even the most electrifying score could not give wings to the Dresdenbased poet’s feeble text and an absurd storyline. Euryanthe premiered October 25, 1823, but only lasted twenty performances. The score nonetheless features some strong writing on Weber’s part, and the overture in particular, with its exemplary impulses in the new German Romantic style, remains a popular piece in the concert hall. —Betsy Schwarm © 2015
About the Music
Blossom Music Festival
Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35 composed 1878
T H E R E I S C E R TA I N LY no shortage of great masterpieces that
by
Pyotr Ilyich
TCHAIKOVSKY born May 7, 1840 near Votkinsk, Russia died November 6, 1893 St. Petersburg
The Cleveland Orchestra
met with negative criticism at their premiere, but few have fared worse than Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. This may sound surprising, since this work — now one of the most popular of all concertos — has none of the revolutionary spirit of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle, or Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, to name just three works that generated heated controversies around the time of their premieres. Yet, at the time of its premiere, there were some distinct ways in which the Tchaikovsky concerto clashed with the expectations of people who had very strong opinions about what a violin concerto ought to be like. The great violinist and teacher Leopold Auer, for whom Tchaikovsky had written the concerto, rejected it. And the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, a friend of Brahms and a fierce opponent of Wagner, uttered the immortal phrase after the 1881 premiere that the concerto “stank to the ear.” The harshness and vulgarity of these opinions could not help but exacerbate Tchaikovsky’s depressive tendencies, which were never far from the surface. The composer never forgot Hanslick’s caustic remarks. Why this unusually strong resistance to a work that did not attempt to challenge the existing world order but wanted “simply” to be what it was: a brilliant and beautiful violin concerto? In Hanslick’s case, the answer may lie in the critic’s inability to accept symphonic music that was not Germanic in spirit. The first great violin concerto to come from Russia, Tchaikovsky’s work certainly struck a chord that was disconcertingly foreign in Vienna. (It is ironic that Hanslick thought of Tchaikovsky as a Russian barbarian, while in Russia, the composer was considered a “Westernizer” whose music was not as truly Russian as that exemplified by the work of the group of composers known as the “Mighty Five.”) As for Auer, the novel technical demands of the piece may have seemed to him insurmountable. To his credit, he soon enough took a second look and changed his mind. Once it was introduced by others, he became a great advocate of the concerto, and taught it to many of his star students, whose list included Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, and Efrem Zimbalist. Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto in the spring of About the Music
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At a Glance Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto in the spring of 1878 at Clarens, Switzerland. After a private hearing (with violin and piano) in April of that year, he wrote a new middle movement. (He later used the discarded movement as the opening section of his Souvenir d’un lieu cher [“Memory of a Beloved Place”] for violin and piano). The Violin Concerto was first performed on December 4, 1881, by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Hans Richter, with Adolf Brodsky as the soloist. This concerto runs about 35 minutes in performance. Tchaikovsky scored it for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings, plus the solo violin. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto has been a staple of The Cleveland Orchestra’s repertoire almost since the ensemble’s founding in 1918. Many of the greatest violinists from the past century have played it here — including Efrem Zimbalist, Zino Francescatti, Nathan Milstein, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, David Oistrakh, Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Viktoria Mullova, Midori, and Joshua Bell.
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1878. In order to recover from the recent trauma of his ill-fated and short-lived marriage to Antonina Milyukova, Tchaikovsky retreated to the Swiss village of Clarens, on the shores of Lake Geneva, accompanied by his brother Modest and a 22-yearold violinist named Yosif Kotek, who assisted him in matters of violin technique. The composition progressed so effortlessly that the whole concerto was written in only three weeks, with an extra week taken up by the orchestration. During this time, Tchaikovsky wrote not only the three concerto movements that we know, but a fourth one as well. The initial second movement, “Méditation,” was rejected at an early runthrough and replaced with the present “Canzonetta,” written in a single day. Due to Auer’s initial unfavorable reaction, no violinist accepted the work for performance for three years, until the young Adolf Brodsky, a Russian-born virtuoso living in Vienna, chose it for his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic. One of the things that makes this concerto so great is surely the ease with which Tchaikovsky moves from one mood to the next. Lyrical and dramatic, robustly folk-like and tenderly sentimental moments follow one another without the slightest incongruity, just as a variety of elements had in the First Piano Concerto, written three years earlier. Another remarkable feature is the combination of virtuosity with emotional depth. Although the technical difficulties of the solo part are tremendous, every note also expresses something that goes far beyond virtuosic fireworks. All in all, it is one of the greatest violin concertos ever written, and no critic after Hanslick has ever challenged its status again or smelled anything unpleasant in the work! —Peter Laki © 2015
Copyright © Musical Arts Association
About the Music
The Cleveland Orchestra
Simone Lamsma Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma is acclaimed for her technical artistry and heartfelt musicianship. She made her Cleveland Orchestra debut in May 2014. Simone Lamsma has appeared with many leading orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic. Recent and upcoming engagements include performances with the orchestras of Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Oregon, St. Paul, San Francisco, and Utah, as well as with ensembles across the Netherlands, including the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Other guest engagements have included appearances with the BBC Symphony, Bournemouth Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Copenhagen Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Orchestre National de France, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Spanish Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra. In addition, she has toured
Blossom Festival 2015
Guest Soloist
China with the Hong Kong Philharmonic and conductor Jaap van Zweden, with whom she collaborates often, and has played with the São Paulo Symphony and the Seoul Philharmonic. As an active recitalist and chamber musician, Ms. Lamsma has performed throughout Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and for the Dvořák Prague Festival and the Sala Cecilia Series in Rio de Janeiro — often with Robert Kulek and Valentina Lisitsa as recital partners. Her chamber music appearances include Amsterdam’s IJ-salon with Emanuel Ax and members of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Verbier Festival, and Chicago’s Winter Chamber Music Festival with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2010, Ms. Lamsma received the national Dutch VSCD Classical Music Prize and, the following year, was made an associate of the Royal Academy of Music. Also in 2011, she performed at the Queen’s Day Concert telecast nationally on Dutch television. Simone Lamsma began studying the violin at age five and moved to the United Kingdom at age eleven to work at the Yehudi Menuhin School with Hu Kun. She continued her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying with Hu Kun and Maurice Hasson, and graduating with first class honors. Ms. Lamsma plays the “Mlynarski” Stradivarius (1718), on generous loan to her by an anonymous benefactor. For more information, please visit www.simonelamsma.com.
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Symphony No. 5 in E-at major, Opus 82 composed 1912-15, revised 1916-19
W E T E N D T O T H I N K O F Sibelius primarily as a symphonist,
by
Jean
SIBELIUS born December 8, 1865 Hämeenlinna, Finland died September 20, 1957 Järvenpää, Finland
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yet he did not embark on his first symphony until he was well into his thirties. At the time, much like Richard Strauss, who was only a year older, Sibelius had dabbled unsuccessfully in opera, but was best known for his tone poems. While Strauss was soon to move definitively towards opera, Sibelius built a solid achievement in writing his seven symphonies, the last dating from 1924. The mythical Eighth, so keenly anticipated and so lavishly discussed, never appeared, even though Sibelius lived a full thirty years after apparently retiring from composition. (We could equally ponder a comparison of Sibelius with Beethoven, who also waited until he was thirty before producing the first of his immortal Nine Symphonies.) Comparing Sibelius to Beethoven was, in fact, a recurrent element of early 20th-century music criticism. Indeed, the English critic Cecil Gray roundly declared Sibelius to be “the greatest master of the symphony since the death of Beethoven.” Every symphonist in the last two hundred years has had to run that gauntlet, but Sibelius was, in his own mind, at first thinking not so much of Beethoven as of Borodin, Tchaikovsky, and Bruckner, whose works impressed him deeply. Sibelius’s First Symphony appeared in 1899 and with it — as well as from Finlandia and the Lemminkäinen Suite — came international renown. He was invited to conduct his music in Stockholm, Paris, Heidelberg, and Berlin. In Leipzig, Sibelius acquired a publisher, and he met Dvořák in Prague. His fame and worth thus lauded abroad, he was awarded a Finnish state pension for life and was able to resign his teaching post at Helsinki University. There were to be dark times ahead, when poor health, money problems, and anxiety about his standing in contemporary music dogged him, but for the first few years of the new century Sibelius was riding high. The Second Symphony appeared in 1902, the Third in 1907, the Fourth in 1911. In 1914, he visited the United States, where he received an honorary degree at Yale and conducted The Oceanides at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut. He was delighted by everything and would have returned for later concerts if World War I had not intervened. During the American visit, Sibelius’s thoughts turned to his next symphony, the Fifth, and he finished it in time for his About the Music
Blossom Music Festival
50th birthday, December 8, 1915, the occasion for a celebratory concert at Helsinki University, where he conducted its first performance. The symphony gave him more trouble than usual, however, for he revised it the following year (and performed it again exactly a year after the first concert) — and then revised and premiered it a third time in 1919, after the war’s end (when Finland’s independence from Russia had finally been secured, with fighting between the White nationalists and the Red pro-Russian forces). The Fifth has always been one of the most admired of all Sibelius’s symphonies, revealing his style in strong positive colors, free of at least much of the mystification that clouds certain of his other works. (Of course, it is this very mystification that provides the real essence of Sibelius for some listeners.) The most important of the revisions that the symphony underwent illustrates one of the central features of Sibelius’s style. He had always had a knack for relating different tempos to one another and for the smooth handling of the accelerations and decelerations his music naturally seems to generate. (This was to culminate in the one-movement Seventh Symphony, which incorporates music of all different tempos in a seamless exposition.) In the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius originally planned a first movement of moderate tempo, to be followed by a swift scherzo in 3/4 time. In his revisions, these two movements were merged, so that as the opening movement proceeds, we gradually become aware of a quickening of pace. Almost unnoticed, after extensive exploration of the opening material, the music takes on the animated character of a scherzo, fluttering away like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Thus, the Fifth Symphony that we know today has three movements, not four, although the range and variety of music is wide. There are rootless murmurings in the strings, fragmented calls in the winds, seemingly random entries of the timpani, and a great solidity in the brass transformed in the finale into a glorious hymn to the Nordic gods. The central movement is a peaceful interlude, as charming as anything by . . . Felix Mendelssohn, perhaps — although even here the music can more than once find itself hastening forward in a break-out of energy before falling back to its previous state of calm. This middle movement is notable for its constant pairing of wind instruments in thirds (playing parallel lines constantly spaced a third apart on the melodic scale), a feature The Cleveland Orchestra
About the Music
We tend to think of Sibelius primarily as a symphonist, yet he did not embark on his rst symphony until he was well into his thirties. Evenso, he built a solid achievement in his seven symphonies, the last dating from 1924.
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that recurs in the finale when the brass intone the great swinging theme that drives it forward. Thus, in the last movement, the horns and trumpets are frequently paired in thirds, yet here their melody is not genteel and stepwise, it strides across wide intervals — inviting comparison with the giants that have inhabited the great Scandinavian forests since time immemorial. —Hugh Macdonald © 2015
At a Glance premiere was given by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra on October 21, 1921. This symphony runs about 30 minutes in performance. Sibelius scored it for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings. The Cleveland Orchestra first presented Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony in November 1929, at a pair of concerts in Masonic Audi-
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA ARCHIVES
Sibelius wrote most of his Fifth Symphony in 1915 (he had started mentioning it in his diaries as early as 1912) and conducted its first performance in Helsingfors (Helsinki) on his fiftieth birthday, December 8, 1915. He revised the piece in 1916 and again in 1919. The revised version was premiered on November 24, 1919, again with the composer conducting. The score was published in 1921. The United States
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torium, under music director Nikolai Sokoloff. The symphony was last presented by the Orchestra in May 2014 at Severance Hall, under Osmo Vänskä’s direction. Vänskä also conducted the symphony’s last appearance at Blossom, in August 2000. The Cleveland Orchestra recorded this symphony in 1941 under Artur Rodzinski.
MAY 1965 On tour with The Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell and members of the Orchestra visited Sibelius’s home in Finland. Here, Szell is shown talking with Sibelius’s son-inlaw, the conductor Jussi Jalas (far left), and James Mays, Information Officer with the United States Embassy in Helsinki. Orchestra Executive Director Beverly Barksdale is in the background.
About the Music
2015 Blossom Festival
The Cleveland Orchestra
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James Feddeck American conductor James Feddeck has been called “a tremendous find. . . . Musicians of this calibre are like gold dust” by England’s The Herald. His career continues to grow rapidly, impressing orchestras and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the past two seasons, Mr. Feddeck has made a number of significant North American and European debuts, including with the Los Angeles Chamber and NAC Orchestras and the symphonies of Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Milwaukee, Minnesota, San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver, as well as with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Deutsche Oper Berlin (in a collaboration with Béjart Ballet), and the Tampere Philharmonic and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. Additional recent and upcoming engagements include performances with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Flanders, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He has also led return engagements with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra,
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Residentie Orkest at The Hague, and with England’s Hallé orchestra. Winner of the Prestigious Solti Conducting Award in 2013, James Feddeck served for four seasons (2009-13) as assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, where he led concerts at Severance Hall and Blossom, in the community, and on tour — and stepped in for an indisposed Franz Welser-Möst in a fully-staged production of Don Giovanni and in performances of Carmina Burana, to critical acclaim. He also served as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra during his tenure, leading that ensemble on its first international tour, to Europe in 2012. He most recently led The Cleveland Orchestra this past spring in the season’s “At Home” neighborhood residency community concert in Broadway Slavic Village, and last conducted at Blossom in July 2013. Prior to his time in Cleveland, he studied with David Zinman at the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he received the Aspen Conducting Prize in 2008. In addition to his conducting, James Feddeck is an accomplished organist and has performed recitals throughout Europe and North America. He studied oboe, piano, organ, and conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and in 2010 was recognized by Oberlin as the first recipient of the school’s new Outstanding Young Alumni Award.
Guest Conductor
2015 Blossom Festival