JOSEFOWICZ & BOLÉRO

JOSEFOWICZ & BOLÉRO

Friday, October 20, 2023 at 11:15 am

Saturday, October 21, 2023 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Matthias Pintscher, conductor

Leila Josefowicz, violin

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune [Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun]

MATTHIAS PINTSCHER

Assonanza

IN TERMISSION

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Leila Josefowicz, violin

“Ibéria,” No. 2 from Images pour orchestre

I. Par les rues et par les chemins [Through Streets and Lanes]

II. Les parfums de la nuit [The Fragrances of the Night]

III. Le matin d’un jour de fête [Morning of a Feast-Day]

MAURICE RAVEL

Boléro

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 50 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

MATTHIAS PINTSCHER

Matthias Pintscher is the newly appointed music director of the Kansas City Symphony, effective from the 2024.25 season. He has just concluded a successful decade-long tenure as the music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the iconic Parisian contemporary ensemble founded by Pierre Boulez and winner of the 2022 Polar Prize. During his stewardship, Pintscher led this most adventurous institution in the creation of dozens of world premieres by cutting edge composers from all over the world and took the ensemble on tours around the globe – to Asia and North America, and throughout Europe to all the major festivals and concert halls.

The 2023.24 season will be Pintscher’s fourth year as creative partner at the Cincinnati Symphony, where he will conduct a new work by inti figgis-vizueta, as well as an immersive video-concert of Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles. He will also tour with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie where he is artist in residence. As guest conductor, he returns to the RAI Milano Musica, Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, NDR Hamburg, Indianapolis Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Barcelona Symphony, Lahti Symphony, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, La Scala, and Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble. Pintscher has conducted several opera productions for the Berliner Staatsoper, Wiener Staatsoper, and the Théatre du Châtelet in Paris. He returns to the Berliner Staatsoper in 2024 for Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee.

Pintscher is also well known as a composer, and his works appear frequently on the programs of major symphony orchestras throughout the world. In August 2021, he was the focus of the Suntory Hall Summer Festival – a weeklong celebration of his works with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra as well as a residency by the EIC with symphonic and chamber music performances. His third violin concerto, Assonanza, written for Leila Josefowicz, was premiered in January 2022 with the Cincinnati Symphony.

Guest Artist Biographies

LEILA JOSEFOWICZ

Leila Josefowicz’s passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin is reflected in her diverse programs and enthusiasm for performing new works. A favorite of living composers, Josefowicz has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Luca Francesconi, John Adams, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all written specially for her.

Artist-in-residence of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra for the 2023.24 season, Josefowicz will perform Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto with Daniel Bjarnason and Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with Eva Ollikainen, as well as present a solo recital at Harpa Hall. Elsewhere, Josefowicz’s season includes engagements with Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Musikkollegium Winterthur, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Lahti, Milwaukee, Taipei, and Antwerp symphony orchestras. Josefowicz also presents the world premiere of Jüri Reinvere’s Concerto for Violin and Harp alongside Trina Struble and The Cleveland Orchestra, and tours Germany and Austria with Junge Deutsche Philharmonie with concerts Berlin, Vienna, and Dresden.

Josefowicz enjoyed a close working relationship with the late Oliver Knussen, performing various concerti, including his violin concerto, together over 30 times. Other premieres have included Matthias Pintscher’s Assonanza with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, John Adam’s Scheherazade.2 with the New York Philharmonic, Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Steven Mackey’s Beautiful Passing with the BBC Philharmonic.

Together with John Novacek, with whom she has enjoyed a close collaboration since 1985, Josefowicz has performed recitals at world-renowned venues such as New York’s Zankel Hall and Park Avenue Armory, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center and Library of Congress, and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Reykjavik, Trento, Bilbao, and Chicago. This season, their collaboration continues with recitals in California, appearing at Festival Mozaic, UC Santa Barbara, San Francisco Performances, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Colburn Celebrity Recital series. Josefowicz has released several recordings, notably for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips/ Universal, and Warner Classics and was featured on Touch Press’s acclaimed iPad app, The Orchestra. Her latest recording, released in 2019, features Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Violin Concerto with Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu. She has previously received nominations for Grammy Awards for her recordings of Scheherazade.2 with the St. Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto with Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.

In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, joining prominent scientists, writers, and musicians who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.

Program notes by Elaine Schmidt

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Born 22 August 1862; Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Died 25 March 1918; Paris, France

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, L. 86 [Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun]

First performance: 22 December 1894; Paris, France

Last MSO performance: 26 February 2017; Edo de Waart, conductor

Instrumentation: 3 flutes; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; crotales; 2 harps; strings

Approximate duration: 10 minutes

Although the world thinks of Claude Debussy as one of the great Impressionist composers, he wanted nothing to do with that term. It came, in part, from the French artists, painters such as Claude Monet, who were more interested in capturing subtle variations in the play of light on the subjects they were painting — impressions of those sujects — than on making smooth brush strokes and perfect likenesses of their subjects. “Impressionist” was applied to Debussy’s work in a mocking review of his piece, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise). But today, the term is applied to French composers of Debussy’s era who employed slowly shifting harmonies and unique textures and timbres created by unusual pairings of instruments — two qualities you will hear quite clearly in his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), the symphonic poem that opens today’s concert.

Debussy’s inspiration for this piece was a poem by the same name, written by French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé, whose Tuesday evening soirées Debussy began attending at age 25. Other guests at these soirées were a rather heady crowd, including Monet, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and the writer Marcel Proust, among others. Debussy was a great fan of Mallarmé, and particularly of the epic 1876 poem for which he named this piece nearly 20 years later.

Mallarmé’s poem was a dreamy telling of the story of a faun (a mythical creature that is half man and half goat) who takes a nap in a forest, awakens, and struggles to remember the pleasant dream he had about two lovely nymphs. He is eventually lulled back to sleep by the warmth of the day and completes his dream. Mallarmé’s poem is highly sensual, yet also quite intellectual and still very ambiguous, if you can imagine that combination.

Debussy created a musical illustration of the poem, which begins with a famously free, dreamy flute solo. He said of the piece that he sought to evoke “the successive scenes in which the longings and desires of the faun pass in the heat of the afternoon.”

MATTHIAS PINTSCHER

Born 29 January 1971; Marl, Germany

Assonanza

First performance: 28 January 2022; Cincinnati, United States

Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere

Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); oboe (doubling on English horn); 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; bassoon; contrabassoon; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; trombone; percussion (bass drum, bongo drum, crotales, glockenspiel, guiro, log drum, marimba, metal wind chimes, sandpaper blocks, side drum, spring coil, suspended cymbals, tam tam, tubular bells, tuned gongs, vibraphone, waterphone); strings

Approximate duration: 28 minutes

In March 2023, German-born conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher was announced as the fifth music director of the Kansas City Symphony, with a five-year, initial term beginning with the 2024.25 season. The announcement grabbed the attention of the music world, in great part because he was offered the job after spending just a few days with the orchestra as a guest conductor — he first stepped in front of the orchestra on a Wednesday this past March and was offered the job on the following Monday.

But Pintscher wears two hats as a musician, the other as a well-respected, sought-after composer, who also teaches composition at Juilliard. When violinist Leila Josefowicz, with whom Pintscher had worked for a decade, asked Pintscher to write a violin concerto for her, he declined. He has said in interviews that he admires her and her ability to do everything entirely “in the moment,” making a fresh take on the same piece several concerts in a row, but he felt that after writing two violin concertos in a ten-year period, he simply didn’t have enough material left in him to write a third. He was also getting calls from orchestras requesting a third concerto, but he was declining those requests as well.

Then COVID-19 hit and shut down the world. Josefowicz called Pintscher and proposed that since he was sitting at home like everyone else, he could maybe write her a solo piece, which he was delighted to do, calling the project “a lifesaver.” Josefowicz live-streamed the premiere of the piece, entitled La Linea Evocative, calling Pintscher afterward and asking if he thought he now had enough material to write a concerto.

“She tricked me,” he said in an interview for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, but then acknowledged that she was right. He explained that the piece is a “resonance chamber around the soloist,” so that the orchestra “forms an acoustical space that she walks through, sending out signals, colors, timbres, and gestures.” He explained that the piece gives her a great deal of spontaneity within certain parameters, which suits her in-the-moment style of playing quite well.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Born 22 August 1862; Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Died 25 March 1918; Paris, France

“Ibéria,” No. 2 from Images pour orchestre

First performance: 20 February 1910; Paris, France

Last MSO performance: 6 October 2012; Olari Elts, conductor

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubling on 2nd piccolo); piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 3 clarinets; 3 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (castanets, chimes, snare drum, tambourine, xylophone); 2 harps; celeste; strings

Approximate duration: 20 minutes

Claude Debussy wrote the first set of Images, a collection of three piano pieces, between 1901 and 1905. In it he used music to depict places or ideas outside the world of music, which is a textbook definition of what we call program music, or programmatic music. He wrote the second book in 1907 and told his publisher that he was writing another Images series, this time for two pianos. He worked on the third set of Images from 1905 through 1912, changing his mind about the instrumentation along the way and turning them into pieces for orchestra (Images pour orchestre).

Debussy was an extremely visual person. His writings give us an idea of how important visual art and scenic beauty were in music. He wrote, “I like pictures almost as much as music,” and believed that music “can centralize variations of color and light within a single picture — a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is,” and defined music as being “made up of colors and rhythms.” That mindset, combined with the vividly descriptive titles of the pieces within the Images series, help to create very evocative music for listeners.

Each of the three sets of the Images series is referred to as a triptych — a term borrowed from the art world, where it refers to works of art in three panels, often hinged together. With his Images pour orchestre, Debussy gave us a triptych within a triptych by way of the three pieces included the second movement, which he titled “Ibéria” for the southern-European region of the same name, calling the set Images oubliée (Forgotten Images).

Listen to what Debussy called “the colors and rhythms” of Images pour orchestre with your imagination as much as with your ears and see where it takes you.

MAURICE RAVEL

Born 7 March 1875; Ciboure, France

Died 28 December 1937; Paris, France

Boléro

Composed: 1928

First performance: 22 November 1928; Paris, France

Last MSO performance: 6 October 2019; Jun Märkl, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on 2nd piccolo); piccolo; 2 oboes (2nd doubling on oboe d’amore); English horn; 2 clarinets (2nd doubling on E-flat clarinet); bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 4 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tam tam); harp; celeste; sopranino saxophone; soprano saxophone; tenor saxophone; strings

Approximate duration: 13 minutes

Like his colleague and countryman Claude Debussy, French composer Maurice Ravel was often referred to during his career as an Impressionist composer. Ravel and Debussy, along with other “Impressionist” composers, rejected the designation. The term “Impressionist” came from the world of visual art and was a convenient crossover term for composers who were rejecting what they saw as the excesses of the Late Romantic composers in favor or slowly shifting harmonies and instrumental timbres blended to create unique “colors” of sound and shimmering effects.

Written in 1928, Boléro was one the last works Ravel completed. He wrote it to fulfill a commission from Russian dancer and actress Ida Rubenstein. She wanted an orchestration of six piano pieces by Isaac Albéniz, but the pieces had already been arranged by another composer, which put them under copyright restrictions. Ravel decided to orchestrate one of his own works instead, but then changed his mind and decided to write a new piece and to base it on the Spanish dance form known as the boléro.

Ravel was vacationing in southwestern France when he played a simple theme on the piano and asked a friend if he thought it had “an insistent quality.” Ravel explained that he was going to try and repeat the theme several times, without developing it in any way, but to gradually increasing the number of players as the piece progressed.

A much-publicized flap between Ravel and conductor Arturo Toscanini over the conductor’s tempo in a performance of Boléro, along with some very successful early performances and recordings of the piece, propelled it into popular culture. It was used in the 1934 motion picture Boléro, and in the 1979 romantic comedy 10, and was heard during the 1984 Olympics thanks to skaters Torvill and Dean. It was heard again at the torch-lighting ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Ironically, Ravel saw Boléro as the least important piece he had written.

2023.24 SEASON

KEN-DAVID MASUR

Music Director

Polly and Bill Van Dyke

Music Director Chair

EDO DE WAART

Music Director Laureate

RYAN TANI

Assistant Conductor

CHERYL FRAZES HILL

Chorus Director

Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair

TIMOTHY J. BENSON

Assistant Chorus Director

FIRST VIOLINS

Jinwoo Lee, Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair

Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster

Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster

Alexander Ayers

Yuka Kadota

Elliot Lee**

Ji-Yeon Lee**

Dylana Leung

Allison Lovera

Lijia Phang

Yuanhui Fiona Zheng

SECOND VIOLINS

Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair

Timothy Klabunde, Assistant Principal

John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)

Glenn Asch

Lisa Johnson Fuller

Paul Hauer

Hyewon Kim

Alejandra Switala**

Mary Terranova

VIOLAS

Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Principal Viola Chair

Georgi Dimitrov, Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri

Viola Chair

Samantha Rodriguez, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)*

Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)

Elizabeth Breslin

Nathan Hackett

Erin H. Pipal

Helen Reich

CELLOS

Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair

Nicholas Mariscal, Assistant Principal *

Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus

Madeleine Kabat

Shinae Ra

Peter Szczepanek

Peter J. Thomas

Adrien Zitoun

BASSES

Jon McCullough-Benner, Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair *

Andrew Raciti, Associate Principal

Nash Tomey, Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)

Brittany Conrad

Teddy Gabrieledes **

Peter Hatch *

Paris Myers

HARP

Julia Coronelli, Principal, Walter Schroeder Harp Chair

FLUTES

Sonora Slocum, Principal, Margaret and Roy Butter Flute Chair

Heather Zinninger, Assistant Principal

Jennifer Bouton Schaub

PICCOLO

Jennifer Bouton Schaub

OBOES

Katherine Young Steele, Principal, Milwaukee Symphony League Oboe Chair

Kevin Pearl, Assistant Principal

Margaret Butler

ENGLISH HORN

Margaret Butler, Philip and Beatrice Blank English Horn Chair in memoriam to John Martin

CLARINETS

Todd Levy, Principal, Franklyn Esenberg Clarinet Chair

Benjamin Adler, Assistant Principal, Donald and Ruth P. Taylor Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair *

Taylor Eiffert*

Madison Freed**

E-FLAT CLARINET

Benjamin Adler *

BASS CLARINET

Taylor Eiffert*

Madison Freed **

BASSOONS

Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Bassoon Chair

Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal

Beth W. Giacobassi

CONTRABASSOON

Beth W. Giacobassi

HORNS

Matthew Annin, Principal, Krause Family French Horn Chair

Krystof Pipal, Associate Principal

Dietrich Hemann, Andy Nunemaker French Horn Chair

Darcy Hamlin

Kelsey Williams**

TRUMPETS

Matthew Ernst, Principal, Walter L. Robb Family Trumpet Chair

David Cohen, Associate Principal, Martin J. Krebs Associate Principal Trumpet Chair

Alan Campbell, Fred Fuller Trumpet Chair

TROMBONES

Megumi Kanda, Principal, Marjorie Tiefenthaler Trombone Chair

Kirk Ferguson, Assistant Principal

BASS TROMBONE

John Thevenet, Richard M. Kimball Bass Trombone Chair

TUBA

Robyn Black, Principal

TIMPANI

Dean Borghesani, Principal

Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal

PERCUSSION

Robert Klieger, Principal

Chris Riggs

PIANO

Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair

PERSONNEL MANAGERS

Françoise Moquin, Director of Orchestra Personnel

Constance Aguocha, Assistant Personnel Manager

LIBRARIANS

Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, Anonymous Donor, Principal Librarian Chair

Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist

PRODUCTION

Tristan Wallace, Technical Manager & Live Audio Supervisor

Paolo Scarabel, Stage Technician & Deck Supervisor

* Leave of Absence 2023.24 Season

** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2023.24 Season