PROGRAM LEONARD BERNSTEIN Overture to Candide FRANCIS POULENC Concerto for Two Pianos in D minor Allegro ma non troppo Larghetto Finale: Allegro molto
Christina and Michelle Naughton, duo piano
INTERMISSION NAUGHTON SISTERS
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Friday, May 25 | 8PM Saturday, May 26 | 8PM Sunday, May 27 | 2PM
SEASON FINALE WITH EDO DE WAART
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 Allegro non troppo Adagio non troppo Allegretto grazioso (Quasi andantino) Allegro con spirito
A Jacobs Masterworks Concert
conductor Edo de Waart piano Christina and Michelle Naughton
All performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall
This concert is made possible, in part, through the generosity of Terry Atkinson and Kathy Taylor
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The approximate running time for this program, including intermission, is one hour and forty minutes. S AN DIEG O SYM P H O N Y O RC H ES T RA 2 0 1 7-1 8 S E A S ON M AY 20 1 8
PROGRAM NOTES | SEASON FINALE WITH EDO DE WAART – MAY 25, 26, 27
ABOUT THE ARTISTS 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
Concert Sponsor Spotlight
TERRY ATKINSON AND KATHY TAYLOR
KATHY and TERRY have been attending the Symphony’s summer performances since 2010. They are avid supporters of arts and educational institutions in San Diego.
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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 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 CHRISTINA AND MICHELLE NAUGHTON have been hailed by the San Francisco Examiner for their “stellar musicianship, technical mastery and awe-inspiring artistry.” The Naughtons made their European debut at Herkulesaal in Munich, where the Süddeutsche Zeitung proclaimed them “an outstanding piano duo.” They made their Asian debut with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, where the Sing Tao Daily said of their performance, “Joining two hearts and four hands at two grand pianos, the Naughton sisters created an electrifying and moving musical performance.” An appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra led the Philadelphia Inquirer to characterize their playing as “paired to perfection,” while the Saarbrücker Zeitung exclaimed, “this double star could soon prove to be a supernova.” They have captivated audiences throughout the globe with the unity created by their mystical musical communication, as featured by the Wall Street Journal in their own words: “There are times I forget we are two people playing together.” The Naughtons opened their 2017-18 season with recital appearances at the La Jolla Music Society and the Ravinia Festival. Additional engagements include the duo’s Lincoln Center debut as well as appearances at the Gilmore Festival, Rockefeller Evening Concerts, Purdue Convocations, Portland
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PROGRAM NOTES | SEASON FINALE WITH EDO DE WAART – MAY 25, 26, 27 Piano International, Society of the Four Arts, Sharon Lynn Wilson Center, Virginia Arts Festival and the National Gallery. Orchestral season highlights include performances with the Detroit, St. Louis, San Diego, Midland and Puerto Rico Symphonies. The duo will also be seen in recital and orchestral engagements throughout New Zealand, Brazil, Belgium and Spain. The Naughtons opened their 2016-17 season with their debut at The Royal Concertgebouw playing Mozart’s Double Piano Concerto with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. Other season highlights included performances across the United States with the Milwaukee, Madison and San Antonio Symphonies in addition to recital engagements at the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the Grand Tetons Festival, the Gardner Museum, Big Arts in Sanibel Island and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. The duo was seen in recital and orchestral engagements throughout Germany, Spain and Portugal including an appearance at the Ruhr Piano Festival. In February of 2016 the Naughtons released their debut record on the Warner Classics label titled Visions, featuring the music of Messiaen, Bach and Adams. The album received much critical acclaim, with The Washington Post hailing them as one of the “greatest piano duos of our time."
Series, Chamber Music San Francisco Series, Louisville’s Speed Museum Series and the Kingston Chamber Music Festival. European recital highlights for the Naughtons include the Parc Du Chateau de Florans at France’s La Roque d’Antheron Festival, the Sociedad de Conciertos de Valencia in Spain, Zürich’s Tonhalle and Prague’s Strings of Autumn Festival, among others. Recital engagements in Asia and South America have included appearances at the Beijing Forbidden City Concert Hall, Shenzhen Concert Hall, Wuhan Qintai Concert Hall in China, Pallacio de las Bellas Artes, Biblioteca de Luis Angel and Sala Sao Paulo in Brazil. The Naughtons recorded their first album in the Sendesaal in Bremen Germany; the album was released worldwide in Fall 2012 by label ORFEO and has been praised by Der Spiegel Magazine for “stand[ing] out with unique harmony, and sing[ing] out with stylistic confidence,” and described by ClassicsToday as a “Dynamic Duo Debut.” Their performances have been broadcast on American Public Media’s Performance Today, Sirius XM Satellite Radio, New York’s WQXR, Chicago’s WFMT, Philadelphia’s WHYY, Boston’s WQED, Atlanta’s WABE, Hong Kong’s RTHK, Latvia’s Latvijas Radio 3, Netherland’s Radio 4 Concerthuis, Germany’s Bayerischen Rudfunks, NordwestRadioBremen, WDR and NDR Radio.
Previous orchestral engagements include appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Houston, Milwaukee, New Jersey, North Carolina, Nashville, Virginia, Hawaii, Maryland, Toledo, Delaware, El Paso, Napa Valley, Wichita, Tulsa, Gulf Coast and Madison Symphonies; the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Cleveland’s Red Orchestra, Chicago’s Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra and Erie Philharmonic; as well as with ensembles such as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Royal Flemish Philharmonic in Belgium, Solistes Europeens Luxembourg, Hamburg Chorus, Kiel Philharmonic and Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock. Past and future seasons feature collaborations under the batons of conductors such as Stephane Deneve, Edo de Waart, Charles Dutoit, JoAnn Falletta, Giancarlo Guerrero, Emanuel Krivine, Cristian Măcelaru, Andres Orozco-Estrada, and Leonard Slatkin.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey to parents of European and Chinese descent; Christina and Michelle Naughton are graduates of Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music, where they were each awarded the Festorazzi Prize. They are Steinway Artists and currently reside in New York City. n
Christina and Michelle’s recitals have included venues in America such as The Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, New York City’s Naumburg Orchestral Concert Series at the Historic Naumberg Bandshell (Central Park) and Le Poisson Rouge, the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Wharton Center, Houston’s Cullen Theater, South Orange Performing Arts Center, the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Ramsey Hall in Athens and Rockefeller University; as well as on series such as the Fortas Chamber Music Festival, Detroit Chamber Music Series, Harriman Jewell Series, Steinway Society-The Bay Area, Artist Series of Sarasota, UAB Piano
Voltaire’s novel Candide, a savage attack on the statement by Leibniz that “All is for the best in this best possible of all worlds,” was published in 1759. Two centuries later, this tale of the catastrophic adventures of Candide, his tutor Pangloss, and his lover Cunegonde in a world that is emphatically not the best possible was transformed into an operetta by Leonard Bernstein and a team of distinguished collaborators, including Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur and Bernstein himself. The initial run in 1956 was not a complete success, and Candide went through numerous revisions in the three decades after the first production.
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ABOUT THE MUSIC Overture to Candide LEONARD BERNSTEIN Born August 25, 1918, Lawrence, MA Died October 14, 1990, New York City
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PROGRAM NOTES | SEASON FINALE WITH EDO DE WAART – MAY 25, 26, 27 One part of Candide that has enjoyed complete success is its overture. Bernstein’s four-minute curtain-raiser has become one of the most widely-played overtures of the twentieth century, and from the brassy fanfare that opens it to the swirl of energy that ends it this music is full of the bright spirits and memorable tunes that mark Bernstein’s best music. Bernstein draws several of its themes from songs in Candide itself, including “Oh Happy We” and “Glitter and Be Gay,” and the overture is full of wry humor, featuring excursions into wrong keys and the surprise ending, still one of the best jokes in all music. n
Concerto for Two Pianos in D minor FRANCIS POULENC Born January 7, 1899, Paris Died January 30, 1963, Paris Poulenc wrote his Concerto for Two Pianos in the summer of 1932, when he was 33 years old, and he was one of the soloists at the premiere in Venice on September 5 of that year. Concertos for two pianos are comparatively rare. It is difficult to use two such formidable instruments with orchestra, and Poulenc wisely chose to write charming and agreeable music for this combination instead of trying to create a virtuoso display concerto for two pianists simultaneously. It has proven one of his most popular works. Among the most striking features of the Concerto for Two Pianos is its multiplicity of styles, all deftly held together with Poulenc’s breezy and effortless skill. One hears – by turns – tunes from Parisian dance halls, a slow movement in homage to Mozart, sonorities inspired by Balinese gamelan ensembles, and many other styles. Throughout, Poulenc keeps textures light and clear. He is setting out consciously to charm audiences, and in this he succeeds admirably. Poulenc’s marking at the beginning of the Allegro ma non troppo – très brilliant – is the key to this sparkling movement: the soloists trade passages, Poulenc incorporates “popular” tunes, and the music is colored by a large percussion battery that includes castanets. The coda brings a surprise: the movement’s breathless rush comes to a sudden stop, and the two pianos take the movement to its close with quiet music inspired by the Balinese gamelan, a sound that had captured the imagination of Debussy a generation earlier. The music sounds vaguely exotic (Poulenc marks it “mysterious and clear”), its unusual sound produced in part by harmonics from the lower strings and cymbals struck with sponge-headed sticks. Poulenc was frank about the inspiration for the second movement: “In the Larghetto of this concerto, I allowed myself, for the first theme, to return to Mozart, for I cherish the melodic line and I prefer Mozart to all other musicians.” The opening theme, played by the first piano, could easily come from the slow movement of a
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late Mozart piano concerto. The movement’s center section offers more animated music, but the two pianos – which often play unaccompanied here – bring the movement to a quiet close on a return of the opening material. The finale, very fast and rondo-like in structure, recalls material from the first movement, including some of the dance-hall tunes. Poulenc once again invokes gamelan music in the coda, and this rushes the concerto to its brusque cadence. n
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg Died April 3, 1897, Vienna Brahms was haunted by the example of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. “You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us,” Brahms remarked to the conductor Hermann Levi, and he worked on his own First Symphony for nearly 20 years before he was ready to take it before audiences. The premiere in November 1876 was a success, and Brahms himself conducted the new work throughout Europe during the winter concert season. With the stress of that tour behind him, he spent the summer of 1877 in the tiny town of Pörtschach on the Wörthersee in southern Austria, and there he began another symphony. This one went quickly. To Clara Schumann he wrote, “So many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to tread on them.” Brahms’ First Symphony may have taken two decades, but his Second was done in four months, and its premiere in Vienna on December 30, 1877, under Hans Richter was a triumph. While the Second Symphony is quite different from the turbulent First, this music is not all pastoral sunlight. The first two movements in particular are marked by a seriousness of purpose and a breadth of expression. Brahms’ friend Theodor Billroth spoke of only one side of the Second Symphony when he said: “It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine and cool green shadows. How beautiful it must be at Pörtschach!” For all the sunshine in this symphony, the first two movements explore some of those shadows in depth. The hand of a master is everywhere evident in the Second Symphony, particularly in Brahms’ ingenious use of the simple three-note sequence (D-C#-D) heard in the cellos and basses in the first measure. This figure recurs hundreds of times throughout the Second Symphony, giving the music unusual thematic and expressive unity. The constant repetition of so simple a figure might become monotonous or obsessive in the hands of a lesser composer, and it is a mark of Brahms’ skill that he uses this figure in so many ways. It gives shape to his themes, serves as both harmonic underpinning and blazing motor-rhythm, is by turns
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PROGRAM NOTES | SEASON FINALE WITH EDO DE WAART – MAY 25, 26, 27 whispered softly and shouted at full-blast. Once aware of this figure, a listener can only marvel at Brahms’ fertile use of what seems such unpromising material. The Allegro non troppo opens with this figure, and a rich array of themes quickly follows: a horn call, a flowing violin melody (derived from the opening three-note motto), a surging song for lower strings (Brahms characteristically sets the cellos above the violas here) and a dramatic idea built on the violins’ octave leaps. This wealth of thematic material develops over a very long span (the only longer movement in a Brahms symphony is the massive finale of the First), and – crowned by a wonderful solo for French horn – the movement comes to a relaxed close. The expressive Adagio non troppo opens with the cellos’ somber melody; while this is in B Major, so dark is Brahms’ treatment that the movement almost seems to be in a minor key. The center section, with its floating, halting melody for woodwinds, brings relief, but the tone remains serious throughout this movement, which comes to a quiet conclusion only after an eruption in its closing moments. After two such powerful movements, the final two bring welcome release. The charming third movement comes as a complete
Performance History
by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist The overture to Bernstein's hybrid piece, Candide, part opera and part musical comedy, has become a very popular piece for symphony orchestras. Jahja Lang has used it to open concerts on several occasions beginning in the season 2013. He took the piece on tour to China after playing it with the Symphony in Carnegie Hall. The delightful two-piano concerto by Poulenc has been played at these concerts on four occasions, beginning in the summer of 1959 when the duo-piano team of Josette and Yvette Roman were the soloists and Earl Bernard Murray conducted. The most recent performance was conducted by David Atherton in the season 1984-85, when the brothers Anthony and Joseph Paratore soloed. Although Fabien Sevitzky conducted the third and fourth movements of Brahms' glorious Second Symphony with the orchestra in the summer of 1951, when the orchestra had just recently re-organized after the war, the first complete performance here was conducted by Robert Shaw two years later. It has been programmed 16 times since then by this orchestra, and was played most recently under the direction of Jahja Ling in the 2014-15 season. One special performance before then was conducted by Ling's conducting teacher from Yale, Otto-Werner Mueller, invited by his former pupil as a guest conductor. n
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surprise. Instead of the mighty scherzo one expects, Brahms offers an almost playful movement in rondo form. The oboe’s opening melody (Brahms marks it grazioso: “graceful”) leads to two contrasting sections, both introduced by strings and both marked Presto. Brahms’ rhythms and accents here are imaginative and complex: phrases are tossed easily between instrumental families and complicated rhythms are made to mesh smoothly as one section gives way to the next. This movement so charmed the audience at the symphony’s premiere that it had to be repeated. The Allegro con spirito opens quietly and quickly – so quickly that one may not recognize that its first three notes are exactly the same three notes that began the symphony. In sonata-form, the finale features a broad second subject that swings along easily in the violins. Full of energy and explosive outbursts, this movement drives to a mighty conclusion. We do not usually think of Brahms as a composer much concerned with orchestral color, but the writing for brass in the closing measures of this symphony is thrilling, no matter how often one has heard it. n -Program notes by Eric Bromberger
CONGRATULATIONS AND THANK YOU TO
RICHARD GORDON Trombonist RICHARD GORDON, who has served as a Staff Opera Musician with the San Diego Symphony since the Orchestra began performing with the San Diego Opera in 2006, is retiring at the end of this month. Richard, known for his rich sense of humor and his ability to fix any car or other household mechanism, has performed at one time or another with almost every music organization in San Diego over the course of his playing career; for many years he was the “1st call” for anything trombone-related in town. As George Johnston, a retired member of the San Diego Symphony trombone section, recalls, “Richard absolutely knocked me out in 1971, when I first heard him play…it was a quite difficult passage from Respighi, and I’ve never heard it played better.” Johnston, who performed beside Richard on many occasions over the decades, says he “never met anyone who did not like Richard, and no one ever regretted hiring him.” On one occasion, Richard himself said, “Anyone who knows the personalities that end up matching with certain instruments, knows that every trombone player is truly unique. We play hard, both on stage and off.” We could not have said it better ourselves, Richard! The San Diego Symphony wishes you a peaceful, music-filled retirement.
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