Program Notes: Mahler Symphony No. 3

MAY 5, 6 & 7 MAHLER SYMPHONY NO. 3 JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT

FRIDAY May 5, 2017 – 8:00pm SATURDAY May 6, 2017 – 8:00pm SUNDAY May 7, 2017 – 2:00pm conductor Jahja Ling mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford

Women of the San Diego Master Chorale St. Paul's Cathedral Choristers All performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall This concert is made possible, in part, through the generosity of Sam B. Ersan.

PROGRAM GUSTAV MAHLER

Symphony No. 3 in D minor Kräftig; Entschieden Tempo di menuetto: Sehr mässig Comodo; scherzando; ohne Hast Sehr langsam; misterioso Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck Langsam; ruhevoll; empfunden Tamara Mumford, mezzo-soprano Women of the San Diego Master Chorale St. Paul's Cathedral Choristers The approximate running time for this program, performed without intermission, is one hour and fifty minutes.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

T

his season mezzo-soprano TAMARA

Cavalleria rusticana, Nixon in China, The Queen

MUMFORD returns to The Metropolitan

of Spades, the complete Ring Cycle, The Magic

Opera for the new production of Kajia

Flute, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Wozzeck.

Saariaho's L'Amour de loin and appears in concert

Other recent opera engagements have included

with the New York Philharmonic, Boston

the first ever American performances of

Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony

Rossini's Aureliano in Palmira at the Caramoor

Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic and the Simón

Festival, L'Amour de loin at the Festival d'opéra

Bolívar Orchestra on tour in Europe.

de Québec, Iolante at the Dallas Opera, the

A graduate of The Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, Ms. Mumford made her debut there as Laura in Luisa Miller, and has since appeared in more than 140 performances with the company, some of which include Smeaton in the new production of Anna Bolena, and in productions of Rigoletto, TAMARA MUMFORD, MEZZO-SOPRANO

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Ariadne auf Naxos, Il Trittico, Parsifal, Idomeneo,

title role in the American premiere of Henze's Phaedra, the title role in The Rape of Lucretia and the world premiere of Daniel Schnyder's Yardbird at Opera Philadelphia. She has also sung the title role in Dido and Aeneas at the Glimmerglass Festival, Ottavia in L'incoronazione di Poppea at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival and the BBC Proms, Orsini in Lucrezia Borgia

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

MAHLER SYMPHONY NO. 3 - MAY 5, 6 & 7

at the Caramoor Festival, Isabella in L'Italiana in Algeri at the Palm Beach Opera, the title role in The Rape of Lucretia, conducted by Lorin Maazel at the Castleton Festival, the title role in Carmen at the Crested Butte Music Festival, Principessa in Suor Angelica and Ciesca in Gianni Schicchi with the Orchestra Sinfonica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano in Italy and the title role in La Cenerentola at Utah Festival Opera.

Also an active concert performer and recitalist, Ms. Mumford appeared with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in U.S. and European tours of the world premiere of John Adam's oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary. She also toured the U.S. and Europe with Maestro Dudamel and the LAPO in performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.

Other concert engagements have included appearances with the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Utah Symphony, Oregon Symphony and Milwaukee Symphony orchestras, the Netherland Radio Philharmonic and at the Hollywood Bowl and the Ravinia, Tanglewood, Grand Teton, Vail, Tucson Desert Song and La Jolla SummerFest music festivals.

She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2005 as part of the Richard Good and Friends concert series in Zankel Hall, and has since appeared there with James Levine and the Met Chamber Orchestra.

She has also made multiple appearances in the Musicians from Marlboro's summer festivals and U.S. tours. In recital she has been presented in New York by both the Marilyn Horne Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in Philadelphia by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

Ms. Mumford has appeared in The Metropolitan Opera's Met: Live in HD series broadcasts of

record the complete songs of Charles Ives.

A native of Sandy, Utah, Ms. Mumford holds a Bachelors of Music from Utah State University and has received awards from the Opera Index Competition, Palm Beach Opera Competition, Sullivan

Foundation,

Connecticut

Opera

Guild Competition, Joyce Dutka Foundation Competition and the MacAllister Awards. n

SAN DIEGO MASTER CHORALE John Russell, music director

D

eclared "The Voice of San Diego" by mayoral proclamation, the SAN DI EGO MAST ER C HORALE (SDMC) is the region’s premier choral ensemble, showcasing approximately 100 of San Diego's finest singers. Established in 1961, the SDMC is the preferred ensemble for the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Opera and other collaborating organizations, and it produces an annual series of concerts featuring the world’s greatest choral works.

Legendary choral composer Alice Parker personally presented the San Diego Master Chorale with the prestigious ASCAP/ Alice Parker Award for Innovative Choral Programming at the 2009 Chorus America Convention, in recognition of its debut performance of Daniel Kellogg's The Fiery Furnace with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra. In 2012 the San Diego Master Chorale was also chosen to perform under the direction of the celebrated Chinese composer Tan Dun in the San Diego premiere of his Water Passion According to St. Matthew, which was lauded by reviewers as “riveting” and the La Jolla Music Society SummerFest’s “finest

hour” since the annual event was launched 25 seasons ago.

The mission of the San Diego Master Chorale is “to promote and preserve the art of choral music through performance, education and diverse community outreach.” Their singers, who are all unpaid volunteers, also participate in the Chorale's community outreach programs, including on-site music workshops for groups ranging from elementary schools to senior centers. They regularly collaborate with the San Diego Youth Symphony, Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and other San Diego arts organizations. n

ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL CHORISTERS

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T. PAUL’S CAT H E DR AL C HORI ST ERS was originally founded in 1885 at the original St. Paul’s church. However, this choir did not prove to be sustainable at that time and was replaced by the choir of mixed voices a few years later. In 1963 the choir of boys and men was re-started by then-Organist and Choirmaster Larry King. Since then, the choir has flourished, and it remains the only boys’ choir in San Diego and one of only a handful in the United States. The Cathedral Choristers sing 5pm Choral Evensong on the first and third Sunday of the month, as well as Christmas Lessons and Carols, Easter Day, the St. George Festal Evensong, occasional Sunday Morning services and other concerts and outside appearances. The choir is open to enrollment for boys with unchanged voices, age seven and up. n

Anna Bolena, Das Rheingold, Gotterdämmerung, The Magic Flute, Nixon in China, Manon Lescaut and Il Trittico. Her recordings include Handel's Messiah with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Beethoven's Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony (Avie) and John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon). She was one of 16 singers invited to work with Naxos Records and Yale University in a collaborative project to

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ABOUT THE MUSIC

MAHLER SYMPHONY NO. 3 - MAY 5, 6 & 7 Symphony No. 3 in D minor GU STAV M A H L ER Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia Died May 18, 1911, Vienna In the summer of 1896 the young German conductor Bruno Walter went to visit Gustav Mahler at the composer’s summer retreat at Steinbach-am-Attersee in the Salzburg Alps. As Walter stepped off the boat, Mahler greeted him and took his bag. Around them stretched magnificent scenery: the brilliant blue lake and bright meadows, huge mountains and towering cliffs. Walter gazed around him, but Mahler quickly said: “You don’t need to look – I have composed all this already!”

The music was Mahler’s Third Symphony, completed that summer. When Mahler played it through on the piano for Walter, the young man was stunned: the massive symphony (100 minutes long) seemed to be “nature itself… transformed into sound.” Mahler would have agreed, but in his Third Symphony he had in mind a very specific sense of nature. To a friend he wrote: “It always strikes me as odd that most people, when they speak of ‘nature,’ think only of flowers, little birds and woodsy smells. No one knows the god Dionysus, the great Pan.” In his Third Symphony, Mahler sets out to encompass all of nature, from the delicate and beautiful to the wild and terrifying.

The longest symphony ever written, Mahler’s Third is in six movements: two massive outer movements (each about half an hour long) frame four shorter ones. Mahler originally had an elaborate program for the symphony.

Eventually he dropped the program, preferring to let the music stand on its own, but the program tells us a great deal about the music.

Each of the six movements had a name: 1. Pan awakes; Summer Marches In 2. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me 3. What the Animals in the Woods Tell Me 4. What the Night Tells Me 5. What the Morning Bells Tell Me 6. What Love Tells Me The sequence of six movements progresses from the lowest to the highest orders of being: from primordial nature itself to the flowers, to the animals, to man (who speaks in the fourth movement), to the angels (who speak in the fifth) and finally to God in the sixth.

Mahler said of the finale: “I could almost call the movement ‘What God tells me.’ And truly

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in the sense that God can only be understood as love. And so my work is a musical poem embracing all stages of development in a step-wise ascent. It begins with inanimate nature and ascends to the love of God.” Such a message seems Christian, but Mahler’s Third Symphony is not really Christian. To be more accurate, it is a statement of Mahler’s Pantheism, his belief in the presence of God at all levels of creation. (His original working title for the Third Symphony was “Joyful Wisdom.”)

The first movement is the wildest music Mahler ever wrote, and it has had passionate admirers as well as outraged critics. Written after the other five movements were complete, the opening is charged with energy – Mahler himself called it “Pan-ic” and meant that term in both senses: to refer to the god of fields, forests and wild animals and also to the fear generated by wildness. Remarkably, this huge movement conforms to sonata form, with a long introduction (“Pan Awakes”) and an exposition and development built on a gigantic march (“Summer Marches In”).

The symphony opens with a mighty call by eight horns; the theme is reminiscent of the finale of Brahms’ First Symphony, but the resemblance was apparently unintentional.

Throbbing lower strings and brass, punctuated by trumpet fanfares, suggest the first stirrings of primordial life; the march enters quietly but soon springs to thunderous life and slogs powerfully forward. There is something almost bizarre about this music, which is by turns jaunty, nostalgic, extroverted, wistful, violent, abrasive, noble – it swirls with life. The opening horn call returns throughout, and the movement finally drives to an overwhelming conclusion, ending with a great rush up the scale; nature has sprung to vigorous life.

Mahler asked for a long pause after this movement, and some modern orchestras – for musical reasons as well as concerns for the endurance of audience and performers – opt to take a full intermission at this point.

(For these performances Maestro Ling and the orchestra will take a significant pause, as Mahler intended, not an intermission.)

The next two movements are alike in mood and manner. The first, the “flower” movement, is a slow minuet with variations based on the oboe’s grazioso opening theme. Some of the variations dash along vigorously, but this lightly-scored music comes to a quiet close on a sustained harmonic. This movement was performed separately before the rest of the symphony, and Mahler had mixed feelings about that. He of course wanted his music

performed, but he worried that – out of context – so gentle a movement would make him seem – in his words – “the ‘sensuous’, perfumed ‘singer of nature’.”

The third movement, the “animal” movement, is the symphony’s scherzo. It is based on the song “Ablösung im Sommer” (“Relief in Summer”), which Mahler had written several years earlier; the text of that song reads in part: “Cuckoo down to his deathbed has fallen…Upon the verdant clover, clover, clover!

Cuckoo is dead! Cuckoo is dead! Yes, to his death has fallen!” The poised beginning soon gives way to several long interludes scored for posthorn, whose faraway calls sound like the distant intrusion of man on the world of animals.

The fourth and fifth movements employ voices. Mahler marks the beginning of the fourth Misterioso and uses some of the emerging-nature music from the beginning of the first movement. The fourth movement (originally titled “What the Night Tells Me”) truly is a piece of night-music, not just for its night-sounds but because it speaks nightthoughts. The alto soloist sings the “Midnight Song,” drawn from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, a brief text full of pain: mankind longs for redemption. The movement ends quietly in darkness.

The fifth opens with a blaze of bright light. The children’s choir happily echoes the morning bells – “Bimm! Bamm! Bimm! Bamm!” – and this brief movement sounds a note of hope.

Mahler would later use some of this same music in his portrait of the heavenly life in the final movement of his Fourth Symphony, but here he draws his text from the collection of folk-poetry Das Knaben Wunderhorn to make two separate points: the alto soloist sings of man’s sins, but the women’s chorus brings a glowing message: redemption is possible.

Redemption comes in the long final movement, which follows without pause, and Mahler’s markings are crucial: “Slow; peaceful; with feeling.” This is one of the greatest of Mahler’s slow movements, ranking with those of the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. But unlike those late Adagios, so full of wrenching pain and longing, the finale of the Third is rapt, suffused with a glowing spirituality. This truly is music that might be called, in Mahler’s words, “What God Tells Me.” It is built on two broad theme groups, both first announced by the strings. The music rises to a climax and falls back, then – beginning quietly – it moves with mounting fervor to a genuinely triumphant

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ABOUT THE MUSIC

MAHLER SYMPHONY NO. 3 - MAY 5, 6 & 7 climax, thundered out with the full resources of a huge orchestra.

Mahler’s Third Symphony has had its detractors. Some have found its intentions presumptuous, its manner gargantuan, the whole effort insane. But if the attempt to encompass all creation in 100 minutes of music is not absolutely successful – and how could it be? – this symphony is still a magnificent leap. And for many listeners, this sprawling score is one of the wonders of the symphonic literature, full of passionately beautiful music.

When Leonard Bernstein in 1969 completed his tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic and had to decide the program for his farewell concerts, he chose one piece of music: Mahler’s Third Symphony. n PROGRAM NOTES BY ERIC BROMBERGER

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist Mahler's sometimes overwhelming, always beautiful Third Symphony has been played only once before by the San Diego Symphony, also under the direction of Jahja Ling.

This was during the 2007-08 season.

Our music director felt very strongly about wanting (needing?) to conduct it again with this Orchestra, these musicians, before concluding his music directorship.

THANK YOU TO OUR DOCENTS! The San Diego Symphony wishes to thank ADVOCATES FOR CLASSICAL MUSIC (AFCM) for their support of the Symphony’s education programs!

AFCM is an all-volunteer, non-profit organization established in 1996 to help build future classical-music audiences in the greater San Diego area. They serve the community in a variety of ways. Prior to San Diego Symphony Young People’s Concerts and Classics 4 Kids concerts, 40 dedicated docents visit elementary school classrooms in pairs, speaking to 10,000 students per year. They supply the teachers with lesson materials to assist with student preparation and also provide a limited amount of funding for student tickets and busing to the concerts.

This year, some members of AFCM volunteered their time at the Symphony’s first Sensory Friendly concerts, developed especially for children on the autism spectrum. Along with their work with young people, AFCM members visit senior facilities to present entertaining and educational music programs. For more information, visit www.advocatesforclassicalmusic.org.

CURRENT ACTIVE DOCENTS: Ron and Nowell Bierman Pat Brown Diane Burlison Kathy Chambery Jeannette and Hal Coons Alicia Cook Alan Des Roches Connie Eitzen Ellie Elphick Cathy Funke Marty Hambright

Sonya Harris Ana Maria Hidalgo Mary Link-Hobbib Joyce and Dario Iacuelli Mona Kelley Evie Kosower Don Kowal Kathleen Kramer Linda Lenhard Linda Lungren April MacKinnon

Janice McKinnis Dianne Park Doris Payne Rosalba Ponce Franz Roehmann Nancy Sandweiss Fran Selder Susan Shuchter Aveline von Ehrenberg

In addition, a number of people are currently Docents in Training: Marie Del Re, Nancy Gatschet, Marilyn Hickey, Anya Lefler, Lesi Mei and Susan Tully.

Congratulations and Thank You to W. Gregory Berton! performing, including a term on the Board of Directors. Greg honored the Symphony and its legacy during the Centennial Campaign by creating a significant Charitable Trust. The Berton Family Young People’s Concerts were renamed recognition of this gift and the service of Greg and his whole family.

W.

GREGORY BERTON became a member of the bass section of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in 1982. He has also generously served in various capacities beyond

Greg has been active in all aspects of musical life, from teaching at local colleges to opera, ballet, chamber orchestra, recording, etc. He enjoys his family and likes to spend as much time as possible with them. He is also a great cook and enjoys entertaining, reading, playing jazz with his son Kieran and working with his daughter

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Eleanor on his farm property in Oregon. He believes strongly in the volunteer spirit and will continue to support a number of civic and arts organizations.

According to Principal Bass Jeremy Kurtz-Harris, “Greg has not only been committed to actual music making, but has also been fully invested in the organization and the people who make it. He has brought both his musical sense and his business sense to many of the orchestra committees on which he served throughout the years, and has constantly been a caring and genuine colleague.” We wish Greg Berton a long, healthy and productive retirement!

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