RUTH REINHARDT RETURNS
Friday, November 17, 2023 at 7:30 pm Saturday, November 18, 2023 at 7:30 pm ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL Ruth Reinhardt, conductor Andrei Ioniță, cello JONATHAN CZINER Rear-view
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Concerto No. 2 for Cello and Orchestra, Opus 126 I. Largo II. Allegretto III. Allegretto Andrei Ioniță, cello INTERMISSION
JOHANNES BRAHMS Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Opus 98 I. Allegro non troppo II. Andante moderato III. Allegro giocoso IV. Allegro energico e passionato
The 2023.24 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION. The length of this concert is approximately 2 hours. 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. MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
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Guest Artist Biographies RUTH REINHARDT German conductor Ruth Reinhardt is building a reputation for a keen musical intelligence, programmatic imagination, and elegant performances. In the 2023.24 season, Reinhardt’s plans include leading her first staged opera, a production of La Traviata for the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, directed by Ellen Lamm and featuring the young rising voices of Ida Falk Winland and Joel Annmo. She continues to build her already burgeoning reputation among symphony orchestras, making debut appearances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, and WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne. In North America, she begins the season with a debut appearance at the Nashville Symphony and also makes debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, and a postponed debut with the Grand Rapids Symphony, which was where Reinhardt found herself when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the performing arts world in March 2020. Programmatically, Reinhardt’s interests have led her toward an in-depth exploration of contemporary repertoire, leading the symphonic and orchestral world into the 21st century. Strongly centered on European composers, with significant emphasis on women composers of the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century, she brings new names and fresh faces to many orchestras for the first time. Among those whose works appear often in her programs are Grażyna Bacewicz, Kaija Saariaho, Lotta Wennäkoski, Daniel Bjarnason, Dai Fujikura, and Thomas Adès. Parallel programming can be complementary or contrasting, from the classic moderns such as Lutosławski, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Hindemith, or core composers of the symphonic canon — e.g. Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Dvořák. In recent seasons, Reinhardt has made an important series of symphonic debuts in North America with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and symphony orchestras of San Francisco, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Seattle. In Europe, her appearances have been no less impressive — the Orchestre National de France, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Tonkünstler Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSB), to name several. Reinhardt attended The Juilliard School in New York as a student in the conducting class of Alan Gilbert and James Ross, where she received her master’s degree. Prior education and training was at the Zürich University of the Arts (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste), studying violin with Rudolf Koelman and conducting with Constantin Trinks and Johannes Schlaefli. She attended master classes with, among others, Bernard Haitink, Michael Tilson Thomas, David Zinman, Paavo Järvi, Neeme Järvi, and Marin Alsop. Reinhardt was a Dudamel Fellow of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (2017-2018), conducting fellow at the Seattle Symphony (2015-2016) and Tanglewood Music Center (2015), and Taki Concordia associate conducting fellow (2015-2017). Reinhardt was born in Saarbrücken, Germany, into a family of medical doctors and studied violin and singing from an early age. She currently resides in Switzerland.
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Guest Artist Biographies ANDREI IONIȚĂ The Gold Medal-winner at the 2015 XV International Tchaikovsky Competition, Andrei Ioniță is one of the most admired cellists of his generation, called “one of the most exciting cellists to have emerged for a decade” by The Times of London. A versatile musician focused on giving gripping, deeply felt performances, Ioniță has been recognized for his passionate musicianship and technical finesse. His debut album on Orchid Classics combined a Brett Dean world premiere with Bach and Kodály, prompting Gramophone to declare him “a cellist of superb skill, musical imagination, and a commitment to music of our time.” Ioniță made his U.S. debut in 2017 with recitals in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and gave his New York debut recital in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. Previous season highlights include performances with the Münchner Philharmoniker, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, BBC Philharmonic, Danish National Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He has worked with famous conductors including Herbert Blomstedt, Cristian Măcelaru, Sylvain Cambreling, Kent Nagano, Omer Meir Wellber, John Storgårds, Joana Mallwitz, and Ruth Reinhardt. He has given recitals at Konzerthaus Berlin, Elbphilharmonie, Zürich Tonhalle, LAC Lugano, and L’Auditori in Barcelona, as well as at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, SchleswigHolstein, Verbier, and Martha Argerich Festivals. Ioniță’s exceptional talent makes him a versatile and sought-after performer of chamber music. In his concerts, he joins forces with Martha Argerich, Christian Tetzlaff, Sergei Babayan, and Steven Isserlis, among others. Highlights of Ioniță’s 2023.24 season include performances with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich under the baton of Paavo Järvi, the Mexico Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ludwig Carrasco, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Ruth Reinhardt, the Opéra national de Lorraine conducted by Marta Gardolińska, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Newbury Festival conducted by Jonathan Bloxham. Also in the 2023.24 season, Ioniță will serve as artist-in-residence of the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra in Bucharest in Timișoara, Europe’s 2023 cultural capital. Prior to winning the Tchaikovsky Competition, Ioniță won First Prize at the Khachaturian International Competition in June 2013, and he won Second Prize and the Special Prize for his interpretation of a commissioned composition at the International ARD Music Competition. In 2014, he received Second Prize at the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann in Berlin. He was a BBC new generation artist from 2016-18 and was the Symphoniker Hamburg’s artist-in-residence for the 2019.20 season. Born in Bucharest, Romania in 1994, Ioniță first became a student of Ani-Marie Paladi and later of Professor Jens Peter Maintz at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin. A scholarship recipient of the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben, Ioniță performs on a cello made by Giovanni Battista Rogeri from Brescia in 1671, generously on loan from the foundation.
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Program notes by Elaine Schmidt JONATHAN CZINER
Born 1991; Armonk, New York, United States
Rear-view
Composed: 2022 First performance: 25 February 2023; Palos Heights, Illinois, United States Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 2 trombones; bass trombone; tuba; percussion (bell tree, brake drum, chimes, crotales, marimba, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, vibraphone, vibraslap); harp; strings Approximate duration: 10 minutes If you have driven a car in the last 40-or-so years, you have undoubtedly seen the words “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” etched on one or more of your car’s mirrors. So has American composer Jonathan Cziner. He explains on his website that his 2022 composition Rear-view is based on this perplexing sentence commonly found on the rear-view mirror of one’s car. The words are a warning that the convex shape of the mirror, which provides a wider view than that of a flat mirror, distorts the reflected image and could cause the driver to misinterpret the distance to whatever is presented in the image on the mirror. Cziner, who holds a Bachelor of Music degree from New York University and Master of Music and Doctor of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Justin Dello Joio, presents listeners with three musical objects in Rear-view: a chord progression, a melody, and an accompaniment. Within the piece, Cziner manipulates the three musical objects, turning them around, playing them backwards, and giving listeners a closer “look” at them. At the end of the piece, he explains, “They appear simultaneously in a rousing conclusion.” But for Cziner, who was the composer-in-residence of the Illinois Philharmonic for their 20222023 season and created three new works for the ensemble — including his first symphony, entitled Celestial Symphony — and who currently heads the composition program of the Charles Ives Music Festival, writing Rear-view was more than an experiment or exercise in the various ways to manipulate musical ideas. He has explained that the piece holds a deeper meaning for him, saying, “On a more personal level, this same idea is reflected in my memories of old road trips, which conjure feelings of fondness but also nostalgia. Each road trip is filled with a series of memories that morph over time and together form the entirety of a grand adventure.”
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DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Born 25 September 1906; Saint Petersburg, Russia Died 9 August 1975; Moscow, Russia
Concerto No. 2 for Cello and Orchestra, Opus 126
Composed: 1966 First performance: 25 September 1966; Moscow, Russia Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere Instrumentation: flute; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 3 bassoons (3rd doubling on contrabassoon); 2 horns; timpani; percussion (bass drum, slapstick, snare drum, tambourine, tom-tom, xylophone); 2 harp; strings Approximate duration: 33 minutes Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote two cello concertos over the course of a compositional career that included everything from 14 symphonies to numerous film scores, operas, string quartets, piano pieces, and so on. In addition to the wonder of the staggering number of pieces he wrote is the wonder of the fact that he did all of it while alternately being hailed by his government as something akin to a national treasure and being denounced, censured, and forced to undergo rehabilitation for somehow causing offense. Shostakovich wrote his first cello concerto in 1959, creating a brash, boisterous, and virtuosic piece that at one point mocked a song that had been one of Stalin’s favorites. He wrote his second concerto for the instrument in 1966 while in Crimea. Unlike the first concerto, which was a showcase for the abilities of the cellist, the second concerto is highly symphonic in nature. Shostakovich wrote about the concerto in a letter to a friend, saying, “It seems to me that the Second Concerto could have been called the Fourteenth Symphony with a solo cello part.” The concerto is a dialogue between cello and orchestra. It is a brooding, moody piece that opens with a slow, mournful cello solo, establishing the tempo and character of the first movement. The second movement, at a faster allegretto tempo, quotes a song Shostakovich heard a pretzel vendor singing on a street in Odessa to attract buyers, “Bubliki, kupitye, bubliki” (Pretzels, buy my pretzels), working to a frenzy before giving way, without pause, to the final movement. The movement draws on a parody of music from Mahler’s first symphony and repeats the pretzel-vendor’s song before fading to insistent, unsettling, clock-like ticking from the percussion. Shostakovich wrote both of his cello concertos for the great Mstislav Rostropovich, who turned up in the composer’s Moscow Conservatory composition class in 1943. When the composer heard his young student play the cello, he declared that Rostropovich was “of such significance” that his name would come to “represent an entire era of cello playing.” He was not wrong.
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JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born 17 May 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died 3 April 1897; Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Opus 98
Composed: 1884 – 1885 First performance: 25 October 1885; Meiningen, Germany Last MSO performance: 7 May 2016; Edo de Waart, conductor Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; timpani; percussion (triangle); strings Approximate duration: 39 minutes It took German-born composer Johannes Brahms somewhere between 14 and 22 years to write his Symphony No. 1, haunted as he was by comparisons of himself to the great, innovative symphonist Ludwig van Beethoven. With his first symphony out of the way, completed in 1876, Brahms completed his second in 1877, his third in 1883, and his monumental fourth in 1885. When he played excerpts of his fourth in a two-piano arrangement for some of his musician friends, they simply didn’t understand it. One of them, music critic Eduard Hanslick, made the comment after hearing it that he felt as though he “had been given a beating by two very intelligent people” — not exactly a rave review. But after the symphony’s 25 October 1885 premiere, even Brahms’s progressive critics had to admit that he had created something entirely new with this symphony. Written in the key of E minor, the symphony contains a good deal of decidedly tragic writing. Whether that owes to the tragedies of Sophocles that he was reading during the two summers he worked on the piece, or to an expression of his lifelong melancholic tendencies, the piece still makes a powerful emotional impact on listeners today. With the piece’s fourth movement, Brahms, who was a music historian — or musicologist, before that was a common field of study — turned to the past. Dismissed by many of his day’s progressive composers, including Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, as a stodgy conservative, Brahms particularly revered the music of J.S. Bach, somewhat ironically so, as he was already known as one of the “three Bs of classical music: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” In the symphony’s fourth movement, he turned to Bach’s Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin in D minor, particularly the piece’s Chaconne. By Brahms’s time, the dance roots of the Chaconne were all but forgotten, but the notion of a bass line that was repeated over and over remained. Brahms used that idea as the foundation for the symphony’s final movement, creating a universe of colors, harmonies, vivid emotions, and gorgeous melodic lines above it, sweeping the audience along to the symphony’s deeply expressive final bars.
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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*
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, John and Judith Simonitsch Tuba Chair TIMPANI Dean Borghesani, Principal Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal PERCUSSION Robert Klieger, Principal Chris Riggs PIANO Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair PERSONNEL MANAGER Françoise Moquin, Director of Orchestra Personnel 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
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
* Leave of Absence 2023.24 Season ** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2023.24 Season
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