11 minute read
DE WAART CONDUCTS ELGAR
Friday, November 10, 2023 at 11:15 am
Saturday, November 11, 2023 at 7:30 pm
ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL
Edo de Waart, conductor
Joyce Yang, piano
Program
JOHN ADAMS
The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43 Joyce Yang, piano
INTERMISSION
EDWARD ELGAR
Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 36, “Enigma Variations”
Theme (Andante)
I. “ C.A.E.” (L’istesso tempo)
II. “H.D.S.-P.” (Allegro)
III. “R.B.T.” (Allegretto)
IV. “W.M.B.” (Allegro di molto)
V. “R.P.A.” (Moderato)
VI. “Ysobel” (Andantino)
VII. “Troyte” (Presto)
VIII. “W.N.” (Allegretto)
IX. “Nimrod” (Adagio)
X. “Dorabella” (Intermezzo: Allegretto)
XI. “G.R.S” (Allegro di molto)
XII. “B.G.N.” (Andante)
XIII. “***” (Romanza: Moderato)
XIV. “E.D.U.” (Finale: Allegro)
The MSO Steinway Piano was made possible through a generous gift from MICHAEL AND JEANNE SCHMITZ. The 2023.24 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION
The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra can be heard on Telarc, Koss Classics, Pro Arte, AVIE, and Vox/Turnabout recordings. MSO Classics recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.
Guest Artist Biographies
JOYCE YANG
Blessed with “poetic and sensitive pianism” (The Washington Post) and a “wondrous sense of color” (San Francisco Classical Voice), Grammynominated pianist Joyce Yang captivates audiences with her virtuosity, lyricism, and interpretive sensitivity.
She first came to international attention in 2005 when she won the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, the youngest contestant at 19 years old. In 2006, Yang made her celebrated New York Philharmonic debut alongside Lorin Maazel at Avery Fisher Hall along with the orchestra’s tour of Asia, making a triumphant return to her hometown of Seoul, South Korea.
In the last decade, Yang has blossomed into an “astonishing artist” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), showcasing her colorful musical personality in solo recitals and collaborations with the world’s top orchestras and chamber musicians. She received the 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant and earned her first Grammy nomination for her recording of Franck, Kurtág, Previn, and Schumann with violinist Augustin Hadelich.
In the last decade, Yang has blossomed into an “astonishing artist” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), showcasing her colorful musical personality in solo recitals and collaborations with the world’s top orchestras and chamber musicians. She received the 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant and earned her first Grammy nomination for her recording of Franck, Kurtág, Previn, and Schumann with violinist Augustin Hadelich.
Other notable orchestral engagements have included Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and the BBC Philharmonic. She was also featured in a five-year Rachmaninoff concerto cycle with Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, to which she brought “an enormous palette of colors and tremendous emotional depth” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).
As an avid chamber musician, Yang has collaborated with the Takács Quartet for Dvořák — part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series — and with members of the Emerson String Quartet for Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Yang has fostered an enduring partnership with the Alexander String Quartet and together released three celebrated recordings under Foghorn Classics.
In recent years, Yang has focused on promoting creative ways to introduce classical music to new audiences. She served as the guest artistic director for Laguna Beach Music Festival in California, curating concerts that explore the “art-inspires-art” concept — highlighting the relationship between music and dance while simultaneously curating outreach activities to young students. Yang’s collaboration with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet on Half/Cut/Split was a marriage between music and dance to illuminate the ingenuity of Schumann’s musical language.
Yang began the 2023.24 season as artist-in-residence for Grant Park Music Festival and as guest artist with the Aspen Music Festival among others, followed by performances with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. This season, Yang continues to present her wide range of repertoire in over 30 cities, playing 10 different piano concerti, solo recitals, and chamber music.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Yang received her first piano lesson from her aunt at the age of four. She quickly took to the instrument, which she received as a birthday present. Over the next few years, she won several national piano competitions in her native country. By the age of 10, she had entered the School of Music at the Korea National University of Arts, and went on to make a number of concerto and recital appearances in Seoul and Daejeon. In 1997, Yang moved to the United States to begin studies at the pre-college division of The Juilliard School with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky. She graduated from Juilliard with special honors as the recipient of the school’s 2010 Arthur Rubinstein Prize, and in 2011 she won its 30th annual William A. Petschek Piano Recital Award. She is a Steinway artist.
Program notes by Elaine Schmidt
JOHN ADAMS
The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra
Composed: 1985
First performance: 31 January 1986; Lukas Foss, conductor, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
Last MSO performance: 26 September 2015; Edo de Waart, conductor
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (1st doubling on 2nd piccolo, 2nd doubling on 1st piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets (2nd doubling on bass clarinet); 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum with pedal, claves, crotales, cymbals, glockenspiel, high hat, sandpaper blocks, snare drum, tambourine, triangle, vibraphone, wood block, xylophone); harp; piano; strings
Approximate duration: 12 minutes
The MSO has a long history with John Adams’ The Chairman Dances — literally its entire history. The piece was commissioned for the MSO with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the orchestra gave the world premiere of it in 1986. Although Adams wrote The Chairman Dances (the word “dances” is a verb in the title) as he was about to begin work on his opera Nixon in China, it is not simply an excerpt from the opera. Adams explains in a post about The Chairman Dances that it was “kind of a warmup for embarking on the creation of the full opera.”
According to Adams’ writings about the piece, The Chairman Dances is a “foxtrot for orchestra.” He explains, “The music is not part of the opera (which is both stylistically and instrumentally quite different from it), but rather a separate response — a purely musical one — to the irresistible image of a youthful Mao Tse-Tung dancing the foxtrot with his mistress Chiang Ch’ing, former B-movie queen and the future Madame Mao, [who was] the mind and spirit behind the Cultural Revolution and the strident, unrehabilitated member of the Gang of Four.” He notes in the piece’s score, “I started somewhat hazily working on the music, not knowing if it had the right tone, and pretty soon I realized it wouldn’t work at all for the opera — it was a parody of what I imagined Chinese movie music of the ‘30s sounded like.”
Adams has also written, “The music takes full cognizance of her [Madame Mao’s] past as a movie actress. Themes, sometimes slinky and sentimental, at other times bravura and bounding, ride above a bustling fabric of energized motives. Some of these themes make a dreamy appearance in Act III of the actual opera . . . as both the Nixons and the Maos reminisce over their distant pasts.”
The piece opens with the insistent, rhythmic, angular sound of musical minimalism, giving way to more flowing, sinewy sounds and hints of jazz, before returning to the sounds and energy of the opening section.
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43
Composed: 3 July – 18 August 1934
First performance: 7 November 1934; Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Last MSO performance: 24 February 2019; Dima Slobodeniouk, conductor; Simon Trpčeski, piano
Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, triangle); harp; strings
Approximate duration: 22 minutes
The life of Russian composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff reads like a sweeping novel. Born in Russia into a musical family, he studied at the Moscow Conservatory and launched a promising career. But the dreadful premiere of his Symphony No. 1 — a perfect storm of things going awry — sent him into a four-year depression, which he worked through with the help of a therapist. Rachmaninoff lived with the genetic disorder known as Marfan syndrome, which has many physical manifestations, including extraordinarily large hands.
Violinist Niccolò Paganini also suffered from Marfan syndrome, as did Abraham Lincoln and Julius Caesar. Rachmaninoff traveled the world to perform but made his home in Russia until the 1917 Russian Revolution, after which he and his family fled with what they could carry in small suitcases, arriving in the U.S. in mid-November 1918.
Making his home in the U.S. for the last 24 years of his life, Rachmaninoff toured extensively but composed little, saying of his departure from Russia, “I left behind my desire to compose: leaving my country, I lost myself also.”
Among the few pieces Rachmaninoff wrote after leaving Russia is his brilliant Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, written at his summer home in Switzerland. Based on the 24th caprice of Paganini’s virtuosic 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, which itself was a set of variations on a theme, Rachmaninoff wrote 24 virtuosic variations to be played with orchestra and without pause. He grouped the variations into a concerto-like form that opens with an introduction and 15 generally fast variations, followed by three generally slow variations, and then six generally fast variations, creating the impression of three movements for the listener. Unlike a traditional theme-and-variations format, he introduces the theme after the first variation, not before it. Rachmaninoff included the “Dies irae” chant from the Latin Mass for the Dead in variations 7, 10, 22, and 24. His unabashedly expressive Variation 18 is frequently performed outside the larger work.
Rachmaninoff, considered the finest pianist of his day, played the piece’s 1934 world premiere in Baltimore with the Philadelphia Orchestra, under conductor Leopold Stowkowski.
EDWARD ELGAR
Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 36, “Enigma Variations”
Composed: October 1898 – February 1899
First performance: 19 June 1899; London, England
Last MSO performance: 5 November 2016; David Danzmayr, conductor
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, triangle); strings
Approximate duration: 29 minutes
The fact that British violinist and composer Sir Edward Elgar is such a familiar and respected name in the 21st century is a bit of a wonder, given the fact that aside from violin lessons in his youth, he had no formal training and certainly no training in composition. Yet here we are, nearly 90 years after his death, settling in to listen to the piece that first brought this self-taught composer to the attention of the world: his “Enigma Variations.”
We would probably not know Elgar’s name today had he not come home one evening feeling a bit blue. After dinner and a cigar, he sat down at the piano and began noodling at the keyboard, letting his mind wander, and not really paying attention to what he was playing. His wife heard the noodling and commented that it was a good tune. Unaware that he had been playing a tune, Elgar had to noodle a bit more to get back to it. When his wife heard the tune again and asked what it was, Elgar said, “Nothing, but something might be made of it.” That “something” turned out to be the “Enigma Variations.”
Not certain what he would do with the tune his wife had enjoyed, Elgar began playing with it, using it as the basis for musical sketches of people he knew well. He labeled each sketch with the initials of the person it depicted. C.A.E. refers to his wife, Caroline Alice Elgar. The E.D.U. section is a reference to himself, using the nickname “Edu” that his wife had given him. Enigmatic as the initials may seem, they are not the enigma Elgar included in the piece. He wrote, “The Enigma I will not explain — its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture.” He went on to say that another theme runs “through and over” the variations but is never actually played. Intrigued? You’re in good company. Musicologists have been stewing about what that theme might be ever since the piece’s 1899 premiere.
