The MSO Steinway was made possible through a generous gift from MICHAEL AND JEANNE SCHMITZ
The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION.
The length of this concert is approximately 2 hours. All programs are subject to change.
Guest Artist Biographies
DAVID DANZMAYR
Described by The Herald as “extremely good, concise, clear, incisive and expressive,” David Danzmayr is widely regarded as one of the most exciting European conductors of his generation.
Danzmayr is in his second season as music director of the Oregon Symphony, having started his tenure there in the orchestra’s 125th anniversary season. He also stands at the helm of the versatile ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, an innovative orchestra comprised of musicians from all over the USA. He holds the title of honorary conductor of the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom he had served as chief conductor, leading the Zagreb musicians on several European tours, with concerts in the Salzburg Festival Hall, where they performed the prestigious New Year’s concert, and the Vienna Musikverein.
Propelled into a far-reaching international career, Danzmayr has quickly become a sought-after guest conductor, having worked in America with the symphonies of Cincinnati, Minnesota, St. Louis, Seattle, Baltimore, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Detroit, Houston, North Carolina, San Diego, Colorado, Utah, Milwaukee, New Jersey, the Pacific Symphony, Chicago Civic Orchestra, and Grant Park Music Festival.
In Europe, Danzmayr has led the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Bamberger Symphoniker, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Mozarteum Orchester, Essener Philharmoniker, Hamburger Symphoniker, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Odense Symphony, Salzburg Chamber Philharmonic, Bruckner Orchester Linz, and the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Vienna and Stuttgart.
Danzmayr received his musical training at the University Mozarteum in Salzburg where, after initially studying piano, he went on to study conducting in the class of Dennis Russell Davies. He has served as assistant conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, performing in all the major Scottish concert halls and in the prestigious St Magnus Festival.
He was also strongly influenced by Pierre Boulez and Claudio Abbado in his time as conducting stipendiate of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and by Leif Segerstam during his additional studies in the conducting class of the Sibelius Academy. He subsequently gained significant experience as assistant to Neeme Järvi, Stéphane Denève, Sir Andrew Davis, and Pierre Boulez, who entrusted Danzmayr with the preparatory rehearsals for his own music.
Guest Artist Biographies
CLAIRE HUANGCI
The American pianist Claire Huangci continuously captivates audiences with her “radiant virtuosity, artistic sensitivity, keen interactive sense and subtle auditory dramaturgy” (Salzburger Nachrichten). With an irrepressible curiosity and penchant for unusual repertoire, she proves her versatility with a wide range of repertoire spanning from Bach and Scarlatti via German and Russian romanticism to Bernstein, Amy Beach, and Barber.
Huangci’s 2024-25 season is peppered with exciting projects, starting with a new collaboration on Alpha Classics. Following a highly acclaimed Mozart concerto album with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, she will release an all-American solo disc titled Made in USA.
Kicking off a string of international orchestral engagements, Huangci will return to the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra, the Porto, Iceland, Vorarlberg, Nordwestdeutsche, and Pacific symphony orchestras, and debut with the Basel, Hanover, Bremen, Bochum, and Milwaukee symphonies. In recent seasons, she has been a fixture on the concert circuit, presenting an unusual breadth of repertoire and directing various concertos from the piano in the play-direct tradition.
In solo recitals and with international orchestras, Huangci has appeared in some of the most prestigious halls, including Carnegie Hall, Suntory Hall Tokyo, Paris Philharmonie, Frankfurt Alte Oper, Dortmund Konzerthaus, Munich Prinzregententheater, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Konzerthaus, and Salzburg Festspielhaus. She is a welcome guest of renowned festivals, including the Lucerne Festival, Rheingau Musik Festival, and Klavier Festival Ruhr. Her esteemed musical partners include the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg, Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Musikkollegium Winterthur, Munich Chamber Orchestra, and Basel Chamber Orchestra, together with Carl St. Clair, Elim Chan, Michael Francis, Howard Griffiths, Pietari Inkinen, Jun Märkl, Cornelius Meister, Sir Roger Norrington, Eva Ollikainen, Alexander Shelley, and Mario Venzago.
Born in Rochester, New York, Huangci displayed an early penchant for piano and was invited to the White House in 1999. She studied with Gary Graffman and Eleanor Sokoloff at the Curtis Institute of Music before moving to Hanover for further studies with Arie Vardi. She rose to international prominence with top prizes at several major competitions, including the European and U.S. Chopin competitions, ARD Music Competition, Geza Anda Competition, and Grand Prix of the Paris Play Direct Academy. Since then, she has led a number of orchestras in various concerto repertoire. Huangci is a proud ambassador of the Henle Publishing House and artistic director of the Erbach Kammerkonzerte series.
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First performance: 23 December 1806 (version for violin); Franz Clement, conductor and violin; Theater an der Wien; Unknown (version for piano); First publication in August 1808
Ubiquitously popular among both violinists and audiences today, Beethoven’s violin concerto languished in obscurity for decades following its premiere. Written at a white-hot pace on a commission from violin virtuoso Franz Clement, then concertmaster and conductor at the Theater an der Wien, Beethoven completed the score in just a few short months in 1806. It was an incredibly fertile time for Beethoven’s imaginative faculties; indeed, he seemed to have no want of inspiration, as it was in October of the same year that his third symphony, the “Eroica,” was published, and he had already been hard at work on the Razumovsky quartets, the fourth piano concerto, and the fourth symphony.
That the violin concerto remained a relatively anonymous thing is somewhat unsurprising given its debut: Beethoven delivered the manuscript in the eleventh hour, leaving Clement to sightread at the premiere, and if first-hand accounts are to be believed, Clement even inserted one of his own compositions, played on a single string (and with the violin upside-down), between movements. It isn’t hard to imagine this sort of antic, in the context of an under-rehearsed performance, contributing to the impression that it might not have been worthy of posterity. It wasn’t until the young Hungarian prodigy Joseph Joachim championed the concerto with the London Philharmonic Society in 1844 under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn that it earned its rightful place in history as one of the finest monuments of the genre.
It is not the same vehicle for virtuoso showmanship one would expect from the likes of Brahms, Sibelius, or Tchaikovsky, but rather a deeply expressive and sensitively crafted musical statement of the loftiest lyrical quality. Like the “Eroica,” itself a herald of the Romantic period, the concerto is made up of expansive, forward-looking music that reads like an epic novel, luxuriating in its extended harmonic rhythms, finely ornamented melodies, and highly refined thematic material. An account that remains to us of Clement’s playing in Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung as “indescribably delicate, neat and elegant,” with “an extremely delightful tenderness and cleanness” suggests that the concerto was tailor-made for him, and Beethoven clearly drew from the French lineage of fiddle-playing typified by the works of Kreutzer, Rode, and Viotti.
The version presented in this weekend’s performances, however, is a rare delicacy for listeners otherwise familiar with the piece. Shortly after its troublous premiere, Italian-British composer and keyboard virtuoso Muzio Clementi requested a new arrangement of the concerto for piano and orchestra, and with some convincing, Beethoven acquiesced, completing it within the following year. Sensing that the music itself was faultless, he left its instrumentation and structure intact, augmenting the soloist’s line with a harmonic framework in the middle and lower register of the piano. Marked by impeccably balanced dynamic contrasts, subtle orchestration, and an abundance of memorable tunes, the result is a charming, almost Mozartian “sixth” piano concerto that embodies the same radiance and depth of emotion as its progenitor.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born 3 February 1809; Hamburg, Germany
Died 4 November 1847; Leipzig, Germany
Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 56, “Scottish”
Composed: July 1829 – 20 January 1842
First performance: 3 March 1842; Feliz Mendelssohn, conductor; Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Last MSO performance: 4 March 2017; Edo de Waart, conductor
There are those individuals throughout history whose lives, however brief, seem to contain entire generations of experience. Ignaz Moscheles, one of Europe’s greatest pianistic talents, hinted at the emergence of such a figure in his diary on 22 November 1824: “This afternoon, from two to three o’clock, I gave Felix Mendelssohn his first lesson, without losing sight for a single moment of the fact that I was sitting next to a master, not a pupil.” At 15, Mendelssohn had already composed 13 string symphonies, published two piano quartets, and premiered his first complete symphony a week prior. Three years earlier, the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had remarked to Carl Friedrich Zelter, who was teaching Felix composition, that “what your pupil already accomplishes bears the same relation to the [young] Mozart … that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.” It is difficult to think of the boy as being anything other than destined for greatness.
He was only 20 years old when he made his way to England for the first time, where he would find fame as the most popular composer of the Victorian era. His concerts in April 1829 with the London Philharmonic Society, conducting performances of his first symphony and serving as soloist for the London premiere of Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto, were highly favored, and after making his mark in Britain’s cultural capital, he spent the summer walking through Scotland, which would provide the seed of inspiration for his third symphony. A letter to his family in July, which included a musical incipit of the nascent work’s first theme, described his visit to the dilapidated ruins of Holyrood Chapel in Edinburgh, offering a glimpse of the landscapes that were stoking his imagination.
But unlike his overture The Hebrides, inspired by the archipelago off Scotland’s West coast and devised in its entirety by the end of 1830, Mendelssohn dithered in completing the “Scottish.” By October, he was already in Italy, quite removed from the misty and otherwise contemplative moods that had occupied him in the summer. His travels had even yielded an entirely different symphony — his fourth, aptly nicknamed the “Italian” — by 1833, after having spent months basking in the climate of that colorful peninsula. It took nearly a decade for him to return to that first youthful voyage out, but the third symphony was finally finished in January 1842. Concerts in London a few months later were so successful that Queen Victoria herself allowed Mendelssohn to dedicate the piece to her.
As are all of Mendelssohn’s mature compositions, the “Scottish” is characterized by its clarity of form, contrapuntal integrity, and thoroughly vocal melodies. His craftsman-like ingenuity is in full force, and perceptive listeners might notice that the chorale sounded by the winds and low strings at the beginning of the first movement — those mournful measures he first jotted down in Edinburgh — provides the motivic basis which permeates and unites the entire symphony. Despite the frequently dour, turbulent character of the music, Mendelssohn’s graceful renderings of the simplest ideas make obvious the rationale for his adoration by English audiences. By the time of his death only five years after the third’s premiere, Mendelssohn had composed reams of exquisite music, contributed to the revival of interest in Johann Sebastian Bach, and established his reputation as a pianist, conductor, and composer of the highest stature, cementing his place in the canon for all time.
2024.25 SEASON
KEN-DAVID MASUR
Music Director
Polly and Bill Van Dyke
Music Director Chair
EDO DE WAART
Music Director Laureate
BYRON STRIPLING
Principal Pops Conductor
Stein Family Foundation Principal Pops
Conductor Chair
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, Thora M. Vervoren First Associate Concertmaster Chair
Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster
Alexander Ayers
Autumn Chodorowski
Yuka Kadota
Sheena Lan**
Elliot Lee**
Dylana Leung
Kyung Ah Oh
Lijia Phang
Yuanhui Fiona Zheng
SECOND VIOLINS
Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair
Ji-Yeon Lee, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)*
Hyewon Kim, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Glenn Asch
Lisa Johnson Fuller
Clay Hancock
Paul Hauer
Janis Sakai**
Mary Terranova
VIOLAS
Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair
Samantha Rodriguez, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Elizabeth Breslin
Georgi Dimitrov
Alejandro Duque
Nathan Hackett
Erin H. Pipal
CELLOS
Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair
Shinae Ra, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus
Madeleine Kabat
Peter Szczepanek
Peter J. Thomas
Adrien Zitoun
BASSES
Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair
Andrew Raciti, Acting Principal
Nash Tomey, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Brittany Conrad
Omar Haffar**
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
