September 23 & 25 program notes

LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Overture to Candide

(1956)

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Born August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts; died October 14, 1990 in New York, New York

PREMIERE OF WORK

October 29, 1956; Boston, Massachusetts; Leonard Bernstein, conductor

PSO PREMIERE

July 15, 1973; Temple University Music Festival; Robert Page, conductor

PSO LAST PERFORMANCE

October 9, 2018; Heinz Hall; Andrés Franco, conductor

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings

DURATION

5 minutes

Lillian Hellman conceived a theater piece based on Voltaire’s Candide as early as 1950, but it was not until 1956 that the project materialized. She originally intended the work to be a play with incidental music, which she asked Leonard Bernstein to compose, but his enthusiasm for the subject was so great that the venture swelled into a full-blown comic operetta; Tyrone Guthrie was enlisted as director and Richard Wilbur wrote most of the song lyrics. Candide was first seen in a pre-Broadway tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on October 29, 1956 (just days after Bernstein’s appointment as co-music director of the New York Philharmonic had been announced for the following season), and opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on December 1st. The Overture, largely drawn from the show, captures perfectly the wit, brilliance and slapstick tumult of the operetta.

Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, raised in South America, where her father was a mining engineer, and returned to the United States to attend Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition. After finishing her professional training, she taught at Greenwich House, a settlement house in New York, while also composing and performing as a pianist. Since 1972, Tower has been on the faculty of Bard College in Annandale-onHudson, New York, where she is now Asher Edelman Professor of Music. Tower’s many distinctions include awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville in 1990, the first woman to receive that honor. In 2019, Tower was awarded the Gold Baton, the highest honor given by the League of American Orchestras, and in 2020, she was honored with the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award by Chamber Music America and named Musical America’s Composer of the Year.

JOAN TOWER

A New Day for Cello and Orchestra

(2021)

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Born September 6, 1938 in New Rochelle, New York

PREMIERE OF WORK

July 25, 2021; Boulder, Colorado; Peter Oundjian, conductor; Alisa Weilerstein, soloist

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, pairs of woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, and strings

DURATION 24 minutes

PSO PREMIERE

These concerts mark the first Pittsburgh Symphony performance of A New Day.

Of A New Day, composed for cellist Alisa Weilerstein, Tower wrote, “I composed the music with love to Jeff, my partner of 48 years, who turned 94 in April of 2021. While writing this piece, I realized that our long time together was getting shorter, becoming more and more precious with each new day.… A New Day is in four movements: Daybreak, Working Out, Mostly Alone and Into the Night. Those titles are suggestions, open to interpretation of what the music might refer to. Following the opening movement’s lyrical beginning, the soloist nudges the orchestra onward at a brisk clip. A moment of reflection leads to the second movement and the work at hand. The third movement is like a cadenza for solitary cello — in which the orchestra’s strings occasionally make appearances. The closing movement rushes forward into the night — ending with hope for another new day.”

By 1830, when he turned 27, Hector Berlioz had won the Prix de Rome and gained a certain notoriety among the fickle Parisian public for his perplexingly original compositions. Hector Berlioz was also madly in love. The object of his amorous passion was an English actress of middling ability, one Harriet Smithson, whom the composer first saw when a touring English theatrical company performed Shakespeare in Paris in 1827. During the ensuing three years, this romance was entirely one-sided, since the young composer never met Harriet but only knew her across the footlights as Juliet and Ophelia. He sent her such frantic love letters that she never responded to any of them, fearful of encouraging a madman.

Berlioz was still nursing his unrequited love for Harriet in 1830 when his emotional state served as the germ for a composition based on this “Episode from the Life of an Artist,” as he subtitled the Symphonie Fantastique. In this work, the artist visualizes his beloved through an opium-induced trance, first in his dreams, then at a ball, in the country, at his execution and, finally, as a participant in a witches’ sabbath. She is represented by a musical theme that appears in each of the five movements, an idée fixe (a term Berlioz borrowed from the just-emerging field of psychology to denote an unhealthy obsession) that is transformed to suit its imagined musical surroundings.

Berlioz wrote of the Symphonie Fantastique, “PART I: Reveries and Passions. The young musician first recalls that uneasiness of soul he experienced before seeing her whom he loves, then recognizes the volcanic love with which she suddenly inspired him. PART II: A Ball. He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant fête. PART III: Scene in the Country. One summer evening in the country he hears two shepherds playing a ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue … but what if she were to betray him! PART IV: March to the Scaffold. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death, and led to execution. PART V: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. He sees himself at the Witches’ Sabbath, amid ghosts, magicians and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies. The beloved melody reappears, and she takes part in the diabolic orgy ... Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies Irae [the ancient ‘Day of Wrath’ chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead]. Witches’ Dance. The Witches’ Dance and the Dies Irae together.”

HECTOR BERLIOZ

Symphonie Fantastique, Opus 14

(1830)

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Born December 11, 1803 in La Côte-Saint-André, France; died March 8, 1869 in Paris

PREMIERE OF WORK

December 5, 1830; Paris, France; François Habeneck, conductor

PSO PREMIERE

December 22, 1905; Carnegie Music Hall; Emil Paur, conductor

PSO LAST PERFORMANCE

March 18, 2018; Heinz Hall; Robert Spano, conductor

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, three clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two sets of timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings

DURATION 49 minutes