Program Notes: Bach and Mahler

PROGRAM JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, BWV 1041 (Allegro) Andante Allegro assai

Jeff Thayer, violin

INTERMISSION GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 1 in D Major: Titan Langsam schleppend Kräftig bewegt Feierlich und gemessen Stürmisch bewegt EDO DE WAART

Friday, March 9 | 8PM Sunday, March 11 | 2PM

BACH AND MAHLER A Jacobs Masterworks Concert

conductor Edo de Waart violin Jeff Thayer

Performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall

The approximate running time for this program, including intermission, is one hour and forty minutes.

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PROGRAM NOTES | BACH AND MAHLER – MARCH 9 & 11

ABOUT THE ARTIST Music Director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, EDO DE WAART also holds the positions of Conductor Laureate of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, having concluded his tenure at the latter as Music Director at the end of the 2016-17 season.

In addition to his existing posts, he was previously Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and he was Chief Conductor of De Nederlandse Opera.

The 2017-18 season sees his annual appearance with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra where he conducts a programme of Bernstein and Brahms, as well as his return to the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra who he joins for a German tour in May 2018. He opens the season for the San Diego Symphony with Jean-Yves Thibaudet and returns to the Orchestra for two more weekends later in the season, and also conducts the Atlanta Symphony. Other regular guest conducting appearances include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. A renowned orchestral trainer, he has a number of projects with talented young players at the Juilliard and Colburn Schools, which follows on from his summer visit to the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.

As an opera conductor, Mr. de Waart has enjoyed success in a large and varied repertoire in many of the world’s greatest opera houses. He has conducted at Bayreuth, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Opéra Bastille, Santa Fe Opera and The Metropolitan Opera. As Music Director in Milwaukee, Antwerp and Hong Kong in an attempt bring the operatic canon to broader audiences where stage limitations prevent performances, he has often conducted semi-staged and operas in concert performances. He still continues this mission with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam matinee series.

Mr. de Waart’s extensive catalogue encompasses releases for Philips, Virgin, EMI, Telarc and RCA. Recent recordings include Henderickx Symphony No.1 and Oboe Concerto, Mahler’s Symphony No.1 and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, both with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.

Beginning his career as an Assistant Conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, Mr. de Waart then returned to Holland where he was appointed Assistant

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Conductor to Bernard Haitink at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. In 1973 he was appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

Edo de Waart has received a number of awards for his musical achievements, including becoming a Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion and an Honorary Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. n

Violinist JEFF THAYER holds the Deborah Pate and John Forrest Concertmaster Chair of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Thayer is also a founding member of the Camera Lucida chamber music ensemble, in residence at UCSD’s Conrad Prebys Music Center.

Previous positions include assistant concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, associate concertmaster of the North Carolina Symphony and concertmaster of the Canton (OH) Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Thayer was also formerly on the violin faculty of the Music Academy of the West where he also served as concertmaster for 13 years. He is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School’s Pre-College Division. His teachers include William Preucil, Donald Weilerstein, Zvi Zeitlin and Dorothy DeLay. A native of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Mr. Thayer began violin lessons with his mother at the age of three. At 14 he studied for a year at the Conservatorio Superior in Cordoba, Spain. He has appeared as soloist with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Jupiter Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, the Canton Symphony Orchestra, the Pierre Monteux School Festival Orchestra, the Spartanburg Philharmonic, the Cleveland Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra, The Music Academy of the West Festival Orchestra, the Williamsport Symphony Orchestra, the Nittany Valley Symphony Orchestra and the Conservatory Orchestra of Cordoba, among others. He attended Keshet Eilon (Israel), Ernen Musikdorf (Switzerland), Music Academy of the West, Aspen, New York String Orchestra Seminar, the Quartet Program, and as the 1992 Pennsylvania Governor Scholar, Interlochen Arts Camp. Other festivals include Interlochen, the Pierre Monteux Festival, Astoria Music Festival, the National Orchestral Institute, the National Youth Symphony, the Grand Teton Music Festival, Astoria Music Festival, Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart Festival (San Diego), Festival der Zukunft and the Tibor Varga Festival (Switzerland).

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PROGRAM NOTES | BACH AND MAHLER – MARCH 9 & 11 Mr. Thayer’s awards include the Stephen Hahn/Lillybelle Foundation Award in Violin from the Music Academy of the West, the Starling Foundation Award, the George Eastman Scholarship and the Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music.

Mr. Thayer was a laureate of the Wieniawski Violin Competition (2001) as well as winner of various competitions, including the Tuesday Musical Club Scholarship Auditions in Akron, OH (2000), the Cleveland Institute of Music Concerto Competition (1999), the Fort Collins Symphony Young Artist Competition (1999), the American String Teacher’s Association Competition in Pennsylvania and Delaware (1997), the Gladys Comstock Summer Scholarship Competition (1993), the Ithaca College Solo Competition and the Phyllis Triolo Competition (1992).

Through a generous gift to the SDSO from Joan and Irwin Jacobs and the Jacobs' Family Trust, Jeff Thayer performs on the 1708 "Bagshawe" Stradivarius. n

voice on material derived directly from the orchestral exposition, and throughout the movement soloist and orchestra exchange and mutually extend this material.

The Andante belongs almost entirely to the solo violin: here the orchestra is limited to a bare ostinato accompaniment. But if the accompaniment is simple, the violin’s arching cantilena is ornate, unfolding in long, lyric lines high above the orchestra.

This movement is the expressive center of the concerto, and – despite the C Major tonality – its tone is dark and intense.

Bach aims for brilliance in the final movement: his marking is Allego assai – “Very fast” – and its 9/8 meter and dancing energy give it some resemblance to the gigue. After a spirited orchestral introduction, the solo violin comes sailing into the orchestral texture. Bach’s evolution of the opening material is remarkable: as the orchestra hurtles brusquely along far below it, the violin seems to fly high, transforming this simple material into music of grace and beauty before rejoining the orchestra. n

ABOUT THE MUSIC Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, BWV 1041 JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig Bach spent the years 1717 to 1723 as kapellmeister in the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The Cöthen court, located about thirty miles north of Leipzig, was strictly Calvinist and would not tolerate in its church services the organ music and cantatas Bach had written for the more liberal Weimar, where he had spent the previous nine years. But Prince Leopold himself was extremely enthusiastic about music – he played clavier, violin and viola da gamba, and he was delighted to have Bach in his employment. So enthusiastic about music was Prince Leopold that he maintained a 17-piece orchestra, which he was happy to put at the composer’s disposal. Bach – who once said that music exists for two purposes: the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul – spent six years refreshing his soul at Cöthen. From these years came the great part of his secular instrumental music, including the Brandenburg Concertos, the violin concertos, the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, several of the orchestral suites and Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

The Concerto in A Minor, one of Bach’s three surviving violin concertos, was probably composed about 1720. The opening movement is animated (though the movement lacks a tempo marking, it is clearly some form of Allegro): the upward leap of a fourth at the beginning recurs throughout, giving the movement its rhythmic energy and forward impulse. Against vigorous orchestral accompaniment, the solo violin enters in a more lyric

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Symphony No. 1 in D Major: Titan GUSTAV MAHLER Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia Died May 18, 1911, Vienna Mahler’s First Symphony is one of the most impressive first symphonies ever written, and it gave its young creator a great deal of trouble. He began it late in 1884, when he was only 24, and completed a first version in March 1888. But when it was first performed – to a mystified audience in Budapest on November 20, 1889 – it had a form far different from the one we know today. Mahler would not even call it a symphony.

For that first performance he called it Symphonic Poem, and it was in two huge parts that seemed to tell a story: the opening three-movement section was called “Days of Youth,” while the concluding two movements made up what Mahler called the “Human Comedy.” But as Mahler revised the symphony for later performances, he began to let slip quite different hints about the “meaning” of this music. At one point he called it the Titan, borrowing the title of Jean Paul’s novel about a wild young hero who feels lost in this world. Some further sense of its content comes from the fact that the symphony borrows several themes from Mahler’s just-completed Songs of a Wayfarer, which are about his recovery from an ill-fated love affair. But finally Mahler, who had a love-hate relation with verbal explanations of his music (denouncing them one moment, releasing new ones the next), abandoned any mention of a program. When he ultimately published this symphony in 1899, he had cut it to only four movements, greatly expanded the orchestration and suppressed all mention of the Titan or of any other extra-musical associations. Now it was simply his Symphony No. 1.

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PROGRAM NOTES | BACH AND MAHLER – MARCH 9 & 11 And what a first symphony it is! The stunning beginning – Mahler asks that it be “like a nature-sound” – is intended to evoke a quiet summer morning, and he captures that hazy, shimmering stillness with a near-silent A six octaves deep. The effect is magical, as if we are suddenly inside some vast, softly-humming machine. Soon we hear twittering birds and morning fanfares from distant military barracks. The call of the cuckoo is outlined by the interval of a falling fourth, and that figure will recur throughout the symphony, giving shape to many of its themes.

Cellos announce the true first theme, which begins with the drop of a fourth. When Mahler earlier used this same theme in his Wayfarer cycle, it set the disappointed lover’s embarking on his lonely journey: “I went this morning through the fields, dew still hung upon the grass.” A noble chorus of horns, ringing out from a forest full of busy cuckoos, forms the second subject, and the brief development – by turns lyric and dramatic – leads to a mighty restatement of the Wayfarer theme and an exciting close.

of the funeral march.” Mahler’s original title for this movement was “From Inferno to Paradise,” and while one should not lean too heavily on a program the composer ultimately disavowed, Mahler himself did choose these words, and this description does reflect the progress of the finale, which moves from the seething tumult of its beginning to the triumph of the close. Longest by far of the movements, the finale is based on two main themes: a fierce, striving figure in the winds near the beginning and a gorgeous, long-lined melody for violins shortly afterwards. The development pitches between extremes of mood as it drives to what seems a climax but is in fact a false conclusion. The music seems lost, directionless, and now Mahler makes a wonderful decision: back comes the dreamy, slow music from the symphony’s very beginning. Slowly this gathers energy, and what had been gentle at the beginning now returns in glory, shouted out by seven horns as the symphony smashes home triumphantly in D Major, racing to the two whipcracks that bring it to a thrilling conclusion.

Mahler marks the second movement Kraftig bewegt ("Moving powerfully"); his original subtitle for this movement was “Under Full Sail.” This movement is a scherzo in ABA form, and Mahler bases it on the ländler, the rustic Austrian waltz. Winds and then violins stamp out the opening ländler, full of hard edges and stomping accents, and this drives to a powerful cadence. Out of the silence, the sound of a solo horn rivets our attention – and nicely changes the mood. The central section is another ländler, but this one sings beautifully, its flowing melodies made all the more sensual by graceful slides from the violins. The movement concludes with a return of the opening material.

What are we to make of Mahler’s many conflicting signals as to what this symphony is “about”? Is it about youth and the “human comedy”? Is it autobiogr aphical, the tale of his own recovery from an unhappy love affair? Late in his brief life, Mahler even suggested another reading. When he conducted his First Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in 1909, Mahler wrote to his disciple Bruno Walter that he was “quite satisfied with this youthful sketch,” telling him that when he conducted the symphony, “A burning and painful sensation is crystallized. What a world this is that casts up such reflections of sounds and figures!

Things like the Funeral March and the bursting of the storm which follows it seem to me a flaming indictment of the Creator.”

The third movement opens what, in Mahler’s original scheme, was the second part of the symphony. Deliberately grotesque, this music was inspired by a woodcut picturing the funeral of a hunter, whose body is borne through the woods by forest animals – deer, foxes, rabbits, shrews, birds – who celebrate his death with mock pageantry. Over the timpani’s quiet tread (once again, the interval of a fourth), solo double-bass plays a lugubrious little tune that is treated as a round; the ear soon recognizes this as a minor-key variation of the children’s song “Frere Jacques.” The first episode lurches along sleazily over an “oom-pah” rhythm; Mahler indicates that he wants this played “with parody,” and the music echoes the klezmer street bands of Eastern Europe.

But a further episode brings soft relief: muted violins offer another quotation from the Wayfarer songs, this time a theme that had set the words “By the wayside stands a linden tree, and there at last I’ve found some peace.” In the song cycle, these words marked the disappointed lover’s escape from his pain and his return to life. The march returns, and the timpani taps this movement to its nearly-silent close.

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Finally we have to throw up our hands in the face of so much contradictory information. Perhaps it is best just to settle back and listen to Mahler’s First Symphony for itself – and the mighty symphonic journey that it is. n -Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Performance History

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist The Bach Violin Concerto in A minor was first played here by William Henry, the San Diego Symphony's then-concertmaster, in the 1983-84 season, when David Atherton conducted. Jaime Laredo played and conducted it here in the season of 1994-95, when it was last given here.

Mahler's First Symphony was introduced to San Diego Symphony audiences when Earl Bernard Murray conducted it in the 1966-67 season. It was the first time any work by Mahler had been performed at these concerts. Its seventh, most recent performance with the San Diego Symphony was conducted by Jahja Ling in the 2004-05 season in his seasonopening debut as music director. n

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