TCHAIKOVSKY 6 & BRAHMS SONGS

Friday, March 1, 2024 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, March 2, 2024 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Dashon Burton, bass-baritone

PROGRAM

DOBRINKA TABAKOVA

Thrace (United States Premiere)

JOHANNES BRAHMS/DETLEV GLANERT

Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge [Four Preludes and Serious Songs]

Dashon Burton, bass-baritone

INTERMISSION

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74, “Pathétique”

I. Adagio – Allegro non troppo

II. Allegro con grazia

III. Allegro molto vivace

IV. Finale: Adagio lamentoso

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.

Guest Artist Biographies

DASHON BURTON

Hailed as an artist “alight with the spirit of the music” (Boston Globe), Dashon Burton has established a vibrant career appearing regularly throughout the U.S. and Europe. Highlights of his 2023.24 season include multiple appearances with Michael Tilson Thomas, including a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the San Francisco Symphony, Copland’s Old American Songs with the New World Symphony, and selections from Tilson Thomas’s own Meditations on Rilke with the San Diego Symphony. Burton also performs Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Washington Bach Consort, sings Handel’s Messiah with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and performs the title role in Sweeney Todd at Vanderbilt University. With the Cleveland Orchestra, Burton participates in a semi-staged version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and he joins the Milwaukee Symphony and Ken-David Masur for three subscription weeks as their artistic partner.

Last season, Burton returned to The Cleveland Orchestra for Schubert’s Mass No. 6 with Franz Welser-Möst in Cleveland and at Carnegie Hall, to the Houston Symphony for Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Juraj Valčuha, and to the New York Philharmonic for Michael Tilson Thomas’s Rilke Songs, led by the composer. Debut appearances included Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Milwaukee Symphony led by Ken-David Masur, the world premiere of Chris Cerrone’s The Year of Silence with the Louisville Orchestra led by Teddy Abrams, and Dvořák’s Requiem with the Richmond Symphony. In summer 2023, Burton appeared at Tanglewood and Caramoor in critically acclaimed performances of Handel’s Acis and Galatea with Philharmonia Baroque. He continues his relationship with San Francisco Performances as an artist in residence with appearances at venues and educational institutions throughout the Bay Area.

A multiple award-winning singer, Burton won his second Grammy Award in March 2021 for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album with his performance featured in Dame Ethyl Smyth’s masterwork The Prison with The Experiential Orchestra (Chandos). As an original member of the groundbreaking vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, he won his first Grammy Award for their inaugural recording of all-new commissions.

His other recordings include Songs of Struggle & Redemption: We Shall Overcome (Acis); the Grammy-nominated recording of Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road (Naxos); Holocaust, 1944 by Lori Laitman (Acis); and Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. His album of spirituals garnered high praise and was singled out by The New York Times as “profoundly moving…a beautiful and lovable disc.”

Burton received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College and Conservatory and a Master of Music degree from Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. He is an assistant professor of voice at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Program notes by Elaine Schmidt

DOBRINKA TABAKOVA

Born 1980; Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Thrace

Composed: 2001

First performance: 14 October 2016; Sofia, Bulgaria

Last MSO performance: United States Premiere

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; tuba; percussion (bass drum, cowbell, tubular bells, vibraphone); harp; strings Approximate duration: 10 minutes

Born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, one of the oldest cities in the world, composer Dobrinka Tabakova has spent most of her life in Britain. Her parents, both medical physicists, moved the family to London when she was just 11 years old. At age 14, she won the Jean-Frédéric Perrenoud Prize at the 4th Vienna International Music Competition. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London before receiving her doctorate in composition from Kings College, London. In 2017, Tabakova was named the composer in residence of the BBC Concert Orchestra.

Tabakova has been praised by critics, conductors, and composers alike. American composer John Adams has described her music as “extremely original and rare.” Critics have used such phrases as “glowing tonal harmonies” and “grand sweeping gestures.” Describing her own compositional process, Tabakova has said that she really enjoys the research phase of writing a piece. When working on a commissioned piece about William Shakespeare, she read all of Shakespeare’s works as part of her research.

Thrace, the word Tabakova chose as the title of the piece we will hear this evening, is the name of the geographical and historical region in which Tabakova’s hometown of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, is located, as well as an ancient people who once inhabited the area. The city contains many Roman and ancient Thracian structures and evidence of habitation dating back to the 6th millennium BCE. Thrace is also the name of a sorceress and heroine in Greek mythology.

Tabakova’s Thrace has been performed at the Barbican in London. This weekend’s MSO performances of the piece are its United States premiere.

DETLEV GLANERT

Born 6 September 1960; Hamburg, Germany

Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge [Four Preludes and Serious Songs] for bass-baritone and orchestra

Composed: 2005

First performance: 25 June 2005; Prenzlau, Germany

Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere

Instrumentation: 3 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; bass trombone; timpani; harp; strings

Approximate duration: 25 minutes

When Johannes Brahms wrote his Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), he knew that his dear Clara Schumann had very little time left to live. He had also lost several close friends and, although he likely didn’t know it yet, he was very close to the end of his own life. Although he used texts from the Luther Bible, he insisted that the four songs were “serious” rather than “sacred.” He gathered friends on 7 May 1896, his 63rd birthday, and showed them the completed manuscript. Less than two weeks later, he received word that Clara had died of a stroke. The manuscript for the songs was the last one he submitted to his publisher. He did not live to see another birthday.

The heartbreaking beauty of Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge seems like something that should never be altered or fiddled with. While German composer Detlev Glanert’s Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge (Four Preludes and Serious Songs) sounds like an alteration, it really is not. Glanert has created a prelude for the set of songs, as well as interludes that fit between them, and he has orchestrated them. In the words of MSO Music Director Ken-David Masur, “The interludes give the listener a little time to absorb and contemplate what they have just heard.” Several critics have voiced opinions on the pieces as well, including Erica Jeal of The Guardian, who wrote, “Glanert not only orchestrates Brahms’s songs but expands on them, adding an introduction and linking interludes. In the hands of a more egotistical composer this would be disastrous, but Glanert shows both affection and respect.”

Colin Anderson, writing for The Classical Source, stated, “Glanert has fashioned, with respect and imagination, something considerably more than ‘four songs orchestrated.’ . . . Glanert’s orchestration of, and additions to, Brahms’s wonderfully eloquent and soul-searching song settings is both focused to Brahms’s intentions and sensibility yet looks beyond that in distinct yet related styles.”

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

Born 7 May 1840; Votkinsk, Russia

Died 6 November 1893; Saint Petersburg, Russia

Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74, “Pathétique”

Composed: February – August 1893

First performance: 28 October 1893; Saint Petersburg, Russia

Last MSO performance: 27 January 2019; Joshua Weilerstein, conductor

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubles on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; bass trombone; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam); strings

Approximate duration: 46 minutes

Since the word French word pathétique, by which we refer to Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, sounds too much like “pathetic” for the comfort of English speakers, it’s worth explaining that Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest suggested the word pateticheskaia (meaning “filled with pathos”) for the piece, with the composer in agreement. Tchaikovsky sent a note to his publisher, asking that the word not be included on the title page. The publisher ignored that request, translated the word into French, and included it on the title page as “pathétique,” which means “solemn” or “emotive.”

That word, whether in Russian, French, or English, has certainly been weighted by the events following the piece’s premiere. Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of the “Pathétique” in October of 1893, just nine days before his death. He made some alterations to the score in the days that followed the premiere performance. Those changes were incorporated into the score that was used 21 days after the premiere at a memorial concert for Tchaikovsky.

Tchaikovsky’s death has long been attributed to a case of cholera resulting from his drinking unboiled water at a restaurant. In the 1980s, in Britain, an academic posited that he might have drunk cholera-infected water deliberately, or even poisoned himself. The current view of Tchaikovsky’s death is that we do not know and probably will never know how he died.

The premiere performance of the symphony was received rather tentatively, thanks in part to the heavy spirit of the piece and such unusual features as the 5/4 time signature appearing in the second movement, the big finish of the third movement, and the trailing-off-to-silence ending of the final movement. But at the memorial concert three weeks after the premiere, the piece brought the proverbial house down.