JUPITER & SERENADE

from JUPITER & SERENADE

by Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

JUPITER & SERENADE

Friday, June 9, 2023 at 11:15 am

Saturday, June 10, 2023 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, June 11, 2023 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Edo de Waart, conductor

Matthew Annin, horn

PROGRAM

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Serenade No. 2 in A major, Opus 16

I. Allegro moderato

II. Scherzo: Vivace

III. Adagio non troppo

IV. Quasi menuetto

V. Rondo: Allegro

INTERMISSION

RICHARD STRAUSS

Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major for Horn and Orchestra, Opus 11

I. Allegro

II. Andante

III. Allegro

Matthew Annin, horn

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, “Jupiter”

I. Allegro vivace

II. Andante cantabile

III. Allegretto

IV. Molto allegro

This weekend’s concerts are dedicated to the memory of PEG AND HARRY BRADLEY

by JULIA AND DAVID UIHLEIN.

The 2022.23 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND.

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. recordings. MSO Classics recordings (digital only) available on iTunes and at mso.org. MSO Binaural recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.

Guest Artist Biographies

MATTHEW ANNIN

Matthew Annin has held the position of principal horn of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra since 2011. He also regularly performs with the Grand Teton Music Festival. Before joining the Milwaukee Symphony, Annin was a member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, as well as the Peninsula Music Festival. He has also performed with the San Francisco Symphony, the Saint Louis Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Chautauqua Symphony, Chicago’s Music of the Baroque, the Grant Park Orchestra, and the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. Annin has enjoyed presenting masterclasses at UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, and Lawrence University in Wisconsin. As a soloist, he has appeared on several occasions with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Edo de Waart, Francesco Lecce-Chong, and KenDavid Masur, and also as guest soloist with the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra. Annin performs exclusively on Kortesmaki horns, instruments artfully crafted by Michigan horn maker Karl Hill.

Program notes by Elaine Schmidt

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Born 7 May 1833; Hamburg, Germany

Died 3 April 1897; Vienna, Austria

Serenade No. 2 in A major, Opus 16

Composed: 1859

First performance: 10 February 1860; Hamburg, Germany

Last MSO performance: February 1997; Neal Gittleman, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; violas; cellos; contrabasses

Approximate duration: 29 minutes

Composer Johannes Brahms saw himself as the musical successor to Beethoven, particularly in the symphonic tradition. It was not the proximity of Brahms’s birth (1833) to Beethoven’s death (1827) that engendered these feelings, nor was it a matter of Brahms taking an inflated view of himself. When Brahms was still in his early 20s, he played some of his music for composer and music critic Robert Schumann, who famously wrote that Brahms was, “the heir to Beethoven,” launching the young man into the limelight and terrifying him with that expectation.

The notion of being Beethoven’s musical successor was rather daunting to Brahms for many years — for perfectly understandable reasons. Beethoven had completely redefined the idea of symphonic form and composition as a craft over the course of his nine symphonies. Imagine being asked to pick up where Beethoven had left off with his Symphony No. 9. The idea was so overwhelming to Brahms that he wrote in a letter to a conductor who was a friend his, “I shall never write a symphony! You can’t have any idea what it is like to hear such a great giant marching behind you!” He was already 40 years old when he wrote that letter.

Brahms began writing a symphony in 1854, but gave up on the idea and turned the piece into a sonata for two pianos before scrapping that idea in favor of turning it into a piano concerto. The concerto received a decidedly negative reaction at its premiere, which featured Brahms as the soloist. The following year, he began musical sketches for another symphony, one that would take him about 20 years to complete — 20 years of agonizing over whether he was up to the task. But the 20 years it took Brahms to complete his Symphony No. 1 were not filled with procrastination. Among the many pieces he wrote during this time were his serenades for orchestra, opus numbers 11 and 16. He was employed as a court musician in Detmold at the time, where he had access to an orchestra.

The first of the two serenades sounds a bit bland, in the context of what we know Brahms would go on to compose, but the second is much more in keeping with the orchestral colors and artful phrase structures of Brahms’s later orchestral writing. Brahms omitted violins from the orchestra for this piece, giving it a dark, warm, almost throaty sound and a rather moody feel at times.

Brahms sent the completed second serenade to Robert Schumann’s widow, the piano virtuoso and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, with whom he shared a devoted, complex relationship. She loved it, which gave him the confidence to put it before the public.

RICHARD STRAUSS

Born 11 June 1864; Munich, Germany

Died 8 September 1949; Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany

Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major for Horn and Orchestra, Opus 11

Composed: 1882-83

First performance: 4 March 1885; Meiningen, Germany

Last MSO performance: May 1996; Marin Alsop, conductor; William Barnewitz, horn

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings

Approximate duration: 16 minutes

When the great German composer Richard Strauss penned his Concerto No. 1 for horn and orchestra, he was not yet the towering musical figure that he would become. In fact, he was just 18 and had recently entered university to study philosophy. So how, you might ask, did a teenaged philosophy student come to write a concerto that would still be a staple in the horn repertoire, and one of the best-known pieces of that repertoire, more than a century later? He did it, in part, by following a bit of advice that fiction writers often offer today: write what you know.

Although Strauss, who had begun composing at age six, was not a virtuoso horn player, his father, Franz, was one of the preeminent horn virtuosi in Europe. The Strauss household had been filled with the sounds of the elder Strauss warming up and practicing throughout Richard’s life. Not only did he understand the range and capabilities of the instrument by the time he wrote this concerto, but he also understood its possibilities. Add to that the fact that even at 18, Strauss was a wonderful melodist, and you begin to see how the enduring concerto came to be. In addition to growing up with phenomenal horn playing in his ears and possessing musical inclinations at a young age, Strauss grew up in a household of great means. His mother, whose maiden name was Pschorr, was the heiress to some of the Hacker-Pschorr brewing fortune. As a result, Strauss received music lessons and exposure to musical performances from an early age. Throughout this piece, one hears an unmistakable, youthful exuberance. For instance, Strauss offers listeners exactly one orchestral chord before launching the solo horn into a ringing, unaccompanied fanfare, which is then revisited and reworked throughout the piece. Additionally, he built the concerto of three linked movements that flow so gracefully into a whole that it can take listeners a few beats to realize that they’ve been ushered into a new movement.

Strauss would come to be seen as a musical successor to Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner and would define the tone poem genre with his Till Eulenspiegel, Don Juan, and An Alpine Symphony. He would also create operas that remain an essential part of today’s opera repertoire. But in this early concerto, listeners can hear influences of Felix Mendelssohn, as well as reminders of the music of Mozart, whom Strauss viewed with great reverence. In fact, Strauss commented numerous times that Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony, which also appears on this evening’s program, was one of his favorite pieces of music.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Born 27 January 1756; Salzburg, Austria

Died 5 December 1791; Vienna, Austria

Symphony No. 41, K. 551, “Jupiter”

Composed: 1788

First performance: Unknown

Last MSO performance: April 2016; Courtney Lewis, conductor

Instrumentation: flute; 2 oboes; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings

Approximate duration: 31 minutes

The world remembers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as an astonishing child prodigy, who toured Europe as a young boy, performing with his older sister, Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart. Although he matured into a brilliant musician whose music is still heard with awe today, he never received the sort of praise or adulation as an adult that he had as a child. He traveled Europe as a young man, searching for work, but found none. He worked for a time in his hometown of Salzburg, Austria, but found it a stifling cultural backwater after his travels. He eventually moved to Vienna, where he was certain he could make a fine living as a freelance musician. That did not work out at all as he planned.

Although he created musical masterpieces in Vienna, including his opera The Magic Flute, his Requiem, and his Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter” — his longest and by far most intense symphony — along with many others, he struggled to support his wife and their six children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. Although we know a great deal about the creation of much of his music, his last three symphonies, No. 39, No. 40, and No. 41, “Jupiter,” present questions historians have not yet been able to answer.

Mozart wrote the three symphonies, each built of four movements in the late-Classical style, in just six to nine weeks, depending on which historical account you read. During that same time, he was moving his family to a new apartment, grieving the loss of his infant daughter, writing several other pieces, and scrambling to stave off financial disaster. One question about the symphonies haunts historians: why did Mozart, on the brink of financial disaster, write three such consuming works without any promise of payment for them?

History does not tell us with certainty if Mozart heard any of the three symphonies in the three years between their completion and his death. Some historians think he may have heard one of them, and some will say it was likely No. 40. We also don’t know who dubbed Mozart’s final symphony “Jupiter.” His younger surviving son, Franz Xavier Wolfgang Mozart, believed it was Johann Peter Salomon, who wrote an early biography of Mozart, while many historians believe it was British music publisher Johann Baptist Cramer.

What we do know is that these symphonies are still hailed as works of great genius. We also know that Richard Strauss, whose Horn Concerto No. 1 appears on this evening’s program, was an ardent fan of Mozart and often said that Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter,” was among his favorite pieces of music. Even today, more than 230 years after it was written, “Jupiter,” comes across the footlights as an inventive, expressive, contrast-filled, and completely engrossing work of musical genius.