Program Notes: Spring and Summer

MAY 12 & 13 SPRING AND SUMMER FRIDAY May 12, 2017 – 8:00pm SATURDAY May 13, 2017 – 8:00pm JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT

conductor Matthias Pintscher piano Kirill Gerstein

CONCERT SPONSOR:

Performance at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall

PROGRAM ANTON WEBERN BÉLA BARTÓK

Im Sommerwind Piano Concerto No. 3 Allegretto Adagio religioso - Poco più mosso - Tempo I Allegro vivace Kirill Gerstein, piano

INTERMISSION

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 38: Spring Andante un poco maestoso - Allegro molto vivace Larghetto Scherzo: Molto vivace Allegro animato e grazioso

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

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

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MATTHIAS PINTSCHER, CONDUCTOR

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ATTHIAS PINTSCHER is the Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Beginning in 2016-17 he also takes up post as Principal Conductor of the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra. He continues his partnerships with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as its Artistin-Association, and with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra as artist-in-residence.

Pintscher is also named as the first composerin-residence and artist-in-focus at Hamburg's new Elbphilharmonie concert hall which opens in autumn 2016, and will be featured in a series of portrait concerts in its inaugural season. Equally accomplished as conductor and composer, Mr.

Pintscher sees his two main spheres of activity as entirely complementary; he has created significant works for the world’s leading orchestras, and his intrinsic understanding of the score from the composer’s perspective informs his ability to communicate on the podium.

In the 2016-17 season Mr. Pintscher will guest conduct the Cleveland Orchestra, National Arts Centre Orchestra (Ottawa), Cincinnati Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Bayerische Rundfunk and Radio Symphonie Orchestre Wien, among other orchestras. In summer 2016 he led concerts at the London Proms and

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

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the Edinburgh International Festival with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. With the Ensemble Intercontemporain, he celebrates the 40th anniversary of its founding and takes the orchestra on tour to Asia. This upcoming season will also see the premiere of Mr. Pintscher's new cello concerto, which will be performed by Alisa Weilerstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as a new work commissioned by the NDR Sinfonieorchester in Hamburg. Mr. Pintscher recently made conducting debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.) and Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Pintscher began his musical training in conducting, studying with Peter Eötvös, but composing took a more prominent role in his life while he was in his early twenties. Soon after, he divided his time equally between the two disciplines of conducting and composing. Naturally noted for his interpretations of contemporary music, he developed an affinity for repertoire of the late 19th and the 20th centuries – Bruckner, the French romantic masters, Beethoven, Berlioz, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky and for the Second Viennese School – along with a rich variety of contemporary scores.

“My thinking as a conductor is informed by the process of my own writing,” notes Pintscher, “and vice versa of course.” He may justly be called the most sought-after German composer of his generation, and his music is championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, orchestras and conductors. His works are frequently performed by orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, NDR Hamburg, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia London, BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris.

A prolific composer, Mr. Pintscher's most recent orchestral composition idyll was given its world premiere in October 2014 by the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst, followed by performances by the Bayerische Rundfunk and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In summer 2015 his works Now I for solo piano and Now II for solo cello were respectively premiered at the Lucerne Festival and the Moritzburg Festival; also that summer, gemini calls – a fanfare for two trumpets – was commissioned by and premiered at the Grafenegg Festival. Mr. Pintscher was the 2012 recipient of the Roche Commission. His work, Chute d’Étoiles: Hommage à Anselm Kiefer for two trumpets and orchestra, premiered at the Luzern Festival in

August 2012 by the Cleveland Orchestra, and was subsequently performed at Severance Hall in Cleveland and at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Mr. Pintscher works regularly with leading contemporary music ensembles such as the Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble contrechamps, Avanti (Helsinki), remix (Porto) and the Scharoun Ensemble. Since 2011 he has curated the music segment of the Impuls Romantik Festival in Frankfurt. He has also served as the artistic director of the Heidleberg Atelier of the Heidelberg Spring Festival since 2007, which has now transformed into the Heidelberg Young Composer’s Academy. In September 2014 Mr. Pintscher joined the composition faculty at The Juilliard School.

Mr. Pintscher conducts throughout Europe, U.S. and Australia. Past conducting engagements have included the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Berlin, DSO-Berlin, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Paris Opera Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de France, Accademia Nazionale di Santa CeciliaOrchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI Mariinsky Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony and Sydney Symphony, among others.

KIRILL GERSTEIN, PIANO

Goehr, Oliver Knussen and Brad Mehldau, with additional commissions scheduled for future seasons. Mr. Gerstein was awarded First Prize at the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv; he has also received a Gilmore Young Artist Award (2002) and an Avery Fisher Career Grant (2010).

he multifaceted pianist KIRILL GERSTEIN has rapidly ascended into classical music’s highest ranks. With a masterful technique, discerning intelligence and a musical curiosity that has led him to explore repertoire spanning centuries and styles, he has proven to be one of today’s most intriguing and versatile musicians. His early training and experience in jazz has contributed an important element to his interpretive style, inspiring an energetic and expressive musical personality that distinguishes his playing.

A significant highlight of Mr. Gerstein’s 2016-17 season is the New York premiere of a new Urtext edition of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in the composer’s own 1879 version of the score with the New York Philharmonic led by Semyon Bychkov. He will also perform this version of the concerto with the Atlanta Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Grant Park Orchestra (in its U.S. premiere) and Naples Philharmonic. Mr. Gerstein’s ECHO Klassik Award-winning world premiere recording of this version of the work, paired with Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin led by James Gaffigan was released by Myrios Classics in 2015 and marked Mr. Gerstein’s first orchestral recording. Internationally, Mr. Gerstein has performed this version of the score with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms in London, as well as with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and the Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Mr. Gerstein is the sixth recipient of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award, presented every four years to an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, possesses broad and profound musicianship and charisma and who desires and can sustain a career as a major international concert artist. Since receiving the award in 2010, Mr. Gerstein has shared his prize through the commissioning of boundary-crossing works by Timo Andres, Chick Corea, Alexander

Additionally this season, Mr. Gerstein performs Busoni’s epic Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Sakari Oramo. (He returns to Boston in the 2018-19 season to play the world premiere of a BSO-commissioned piano concerto by the orchestra’s first-ever artistic partner, Thomas Adès). Other performances this season include Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in the original jazz band version and Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra

Matthias Pintscher makes his home in New York and Paris. His works are published by BärenreiterVerlag. Recordings can be found on Kairos, EMI, ECM, Teldec, Wergo and Winter & Winter. n

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

SPRING AND SUMMER - MAY 12 & 13 led by James Gaffigan, and both Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue with the St. Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson, to be recorded for future release. He also returns to the New Jersey, San Diego and Vancouver symphonies, performs recitals in Washington DC, Chicago and Seattle. He joins the Hagen Quartet for chamber music concerts at Zankel Hall in New York and at Duke University. In Europe, Mr. Gerstein performs Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3 as part of Semyon Bychkov’s Tchaikovsky festival with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and plays with the Brno Philharmonic, Deutches-SymphonieOrchester Berlin, Göttinger Symphonie Orchester, Hamburger Symphoniker, Helsinki Philharmonic and Luzerner Sinfonieorchester.

Recent engagements have included performances with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, and the Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Montreal, St. Louis, San Francisco and Toronto symphonies, among others. He has appeared at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony and at the

Aspen Music Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chicago’s Grant Park, Blossom with the Cleveland Orchestra and with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Bravo! Vail Valley Festival.

Internationally, he has played with such prominent European orchestras as the Berlin, Czech, Munich, Rotterdam and London Philharmonics. He has performed recitals in Paris, Prague, Hamburg, London’s Wigmore Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, and at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. He made his Salzburg Festival debut playing solo and two piano works with Andras Schiff and has also appeared at the Lucerne and Jerusalem Chamber Music Festivals as well as at the Proms in London.

Mr. Gerstein performs Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes on a new recording released by Myrios Classics in the U.S. in September 2016. His other solo recordings for the label include Imaginary Pictures comprising Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Carnaval released in June 2014, and a recording of works by Schumann, Liszt and Oliver Knussen, released in 2010. Both albums were chosen by The New York Times as a best recording of the year.

Born in 1979 in Voronezh, in southwestern Russia, Mr. Gerstein studied piano at a special music school for gifted children; while studying classical music, he taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents’ extensive record collection. After coming to the attention of vibraphonist Gary Burton, who was performing at a music festival in the Soviet Union, Mr. Gerstein came to the United States at 14 to study jazz piano as the youngest student ever to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music. After completing his studies in three years and following his second summer at the Boston University program at Tanglewood, Mr. Gerstein turned his focus back to classical music and moved to New York City to attend the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Solomon Mikowsky and earned both Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees by the age of 20.

He continued his studies in Madrid with Dmitri Bashkirov and in Budapest with Ferenc Rados. An American citizen since 2003, Mr. Gerstein now divides his time between the United States and Germany. n

ABOUT THE MUSIC Im Sommerwind A N TO N WE BE R N Born December 3, 1883, Vienna Died September 15, 1945, Mittersill For several generations the Webern family had a summer estate, called Preglhof, in a mountain valley near Klagenfurt at the east end of the Wörthersee in southern Austria. Anton Webern spent his summers there as a child and delighted in climbing through the mountains that surrounded the estate. In the summer of 1904, after two years at the University of Vienna, the 20-year-old composer returned to Preglhof and set to work on an ambitious new piece. He had already written songs, piano pieces and chamber music, but that summer he composed a work for large orchestra, inspired by his pleasure in the sunny valleys and mountains of Carinthia. The work was specifically modeled on the lengthy poem Im Sommerwind (“In the Summer Wind”)

by Bruno Wille. Wille (1860-1928), a social

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philosopher and poet, believed so deeply in the spiritual power of nature that he fled the city to make his home on an isolated lake outside Berlin.

His Im Sommerwind tells of the experience of a summer day in the country, of bright sunlight and warm winds, and finally of the pleasure and peace the day brings.

Webern used Wille’s poem as the framework for his orchestral work, a tone-poem somewhat in the manner of Richard Strauss but more concerned with expressing states of feeling than depicting specific actions. Webern was precise in his subtitle Idyll for Large Orchestra. An idyll is an ancient form of poetry that celebrates pastoral life, and Webern does indeed write for very large orchestra. Im Sommerwind, in fact, requires one of the largest orchestras Webern ever used, including six horns and two harps, though (curiously) it has no trombones or tuba, and it makes very delicate use of percussion.

Im Sommerwind is a terrific evocation of a warm summer day in the countryside. It begins very

quietly (the marking is triple piano) as Webern slowly unfolds a great D Major chord from the muted strings. The music itself is built on a series of short motifs, usually just a few measures each, that evolve continuously across the 12-minute span of this music; principal among these are the rising, surging figure first heard in the violins and a dancing idea for solo oboe that Webern marks lustig (“gay, delighted”). Gradually the summer wind begins to blow, and the music eases ahead and becomes more animated. Those who think of Webern as the supremely cerebral and detached manipulator of tone-rows and complex canons should look at his performance markings in this score: the musicians are repeatedly instructed to make their playing as tender as possible, very soft and tender, with tender expression, and very peaceful and solemn. Twice this music rises to great climaxes that subside quickly – Webern’s winds blow firmly but never tempestuously. He deploys his forces with precision: sometimes he uses only a handful of solo instruments, but he

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is also willing to unleash the full resources of his “large orchestra” to create an opulent sonority that can sound very much like Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (still seven years in the future).

Im Sommerwind concludes peacefully as Webern returns to the same D Major chord that opened this music and instructs the players to let their sound fade into inaudibility.

Webern finished the draft of this music early in August 1904 and had the orchestration complete six weeks later, on September 16. The young composer could not have known, as he completed this score, that seven days earlier and just a few miles to the west – at his sunny summer residence on the Wörthersee – Gustav Mahler had completed the draft of his Sixth Symphony.

That fall, Webern would return to Vienna and begin studying with Arnold Schoenberg, and his subsequent music would take quite a different direction. He remained proud of Im Sommerwind, however, and showed the manuscript to his own students as an example of his early work.

But Webern never heard this music. The first performance did not take place until May 25, 1962 – 17 years after the composer’s death – when it was performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra at the first International Webern Festival in Seattle. n

Piano Concerto No. 3 B É L A BA RTÓ K Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary Died September 26, 1945, New York City At the beginning of 1945, things were finally beginning to look up for Béla Bartók. After five years of unhappy exile in the United States, Bartók could look forward to the end of the war in Europe and to the possibility of returning to Hungary. After three years of dismal health, he was beginning to regain his strength. And while Bartók had been unable to compose at all during his first years in this country, he now found critical and popular acclaim with the premieres of his Concerto for Orchestra and Sonata for Solo Violin in the fall of 1944. Though the Bartóks had lived in near-poverty in the United States, the growing success of his music now brought a measure of financial security: to a friend, Bartók wrote that “we are assured of a modest living for the next three years.”

Making this success even sweeter was a new interest in his music. His publisher commissioned a string quartet, William Primrose asked for a

viola concerto, there were requests for a piano concerto and for a two-piano concerto, and Bartók discovered that – after years of neglect – he suddenly had too much work: “Well, this is a nice thing…the only obstacle is that I don’t know where and when I could write this huge mass of scores!”

Bartók began work as the new year progressed.

He made sketches for the quartet and began to plan the concerto for Primrose. But he also began a new work that had not been commissioned.

Though he had turned down the commission for a piano concerto, he now began to compose one, and he wrote with a very specific purpose: he was writing it for his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory Bartók. Because despite all the apparent good news, Bartók was worried about his health and about his wife, should anything happen to him. In February, he wrote to his son Peter, serving in the U.S. Navy in Panama: “I should like to write a piano concerto for Mother. This plan has long been hanging in the air. If she could play it in three or four places then it would bring in about as much money as the one commission I refused.” Bartók saw this concerto, which would be his third for piano, as a bequest to his wife: if anything should happen to him, it would be a source of income for her.

Bartók worked on the two concertos across the summer of 1945. He made a complete sketch of the viola concerto for Primrose, but gave more immediate attention to the piano concerto for his wife, doing most of the work in the quiet cottage at Saranac Lake in upstate New York where he had written the Concerto for Orchestra two years earlier. Bartók completed the draft of the piano concerto and began its orchestration, but in September his health took a sudden turn for the worse. The Bartóks returned to New York City, where the composer – desperately weak – struggled to complete the orchestration. His son Peter, discharged from the navy, drew the bar lines for him, and Bartók had orchestrated the concerto to within seventeen measures of the end when, September 21, he had to be taken to the hospital. He died of leukemia five days later.

Working from Bartók’s sketches, his friend Tibor Serly completed the orchestration of the final measures after his death.

Even before he left Europe, Bartók had recognized a new direction in his music. In an interview with a Belgian newspaper in 1938, he said that he felt that he was now striving for a “genial simplicity” in his music, and many have felt that that effort finds its clearest statement in his Third Piano Concerto.

Bartók’s first two piano concertos, composed in

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1926 and 1931, had demanded a furious virtuosity from both soloist and orchestra, but the Third goes to the other extreme, and the unusual vocabulary that critics have employed to talk about this concerto suggests its unique character.

It has been described as “lucid,” “ethereal,” “transparent,” “airy” and “carefree,” while others have heard in it a “serenity,” “clarity,” “radiance” and “weightlessness”; a recurrent description is “Mozartean.”

Certainly Mozart would have understood the crystalline form of this concerto. In fact, Bartók’s final piano concerto begins just as Mozart’s final piano concerto had begun a century-and-a-half earlier: with the quiet rustling of second violins, over which a simple opening idea is announced in octaves. Yet Bartók’s first statement of that theme is a key to this concerto: the piano part is a single line for each hand set two octaves apart, and the writing for piano throughout this concerto will be marked by its clarity and simplicity. Gone are the brutal tone clusters of his First Concerto and the blazing virtuosity of the Second. In their place, Bartók – perhaps with his wife’s specific talents in mind – creates a more delicate part for the soloist: graceful, lyric, transparent (significantly, this concerto has no cadenza). The second subject – playful and trilling – is also announced by the soloist, and a brief development leads to a magical recapitulation and quiet close as the movement winks out on fragments of its opening theme.

Bartók marked the second movement Andante religioso, the only time he ever used that marking.

Bartók had no interest in dogmatic religion (his funeral took place at a Unitarian church in New York City), and he intended that that marking should indicate a general atmosphere. This central movement has inevitably (and accurately) been compared to the central movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, which Beethoven subtitled “Hymn of Thanksgiving in Praise of the Godhead, from a Convalescent.” Like Beethoven, Bartók had just come out of a crisis in his own health and looked ahead hopefully. He adopts the form of Beethoven’s great movement: chorale-like writing alternates with more animated episodes.

Beethoven marked his episodes “Feeling New Strength,” but in his central section Bartók heads in entirely new directions. Over trilling strings, winds, piano and xylophone take us into one of Bartók’s “nature-movements”: the themes here are based on bird-calls Bartók noted down while on vacation in Asheville, North Carolina. Two decades earlier, he had written such a movement in his Out of Doors suite for solo piano, a work he

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SPRING AND SUMMER - MAY 12 & 13 had dedicated to his wife. Now, at the end of his life and in another work dedicated to Ditta, he creates the same sort of natural world, energized by chirps and cries of birds. (Here, more than in churches, is where Bartók found religion.) The return of the opening chorale is set against some graceful polyphonic writing for the piano, and the music rises to an animated climax before trailing off to its quiet close.

The finale follows without pause. Bartók did not give this movement a tempo marking, and so others provided the marking Allegro vivace. It is a rondo-finale, with the fundamental theme – in the short metric unit 3/8 – announced immediately by the piano. The uneven accents of this theme will animate this movement, which is broken by two extended episodes, both fugal in character and both introduced by solo timpani.

Though the character of the writing for piano in this concerto is usually restrained, here it grows more extroverted, and this finale demands some powerful playing.

At the very end of his life, Bartók worked desperately to complete the orchestration of this concerto. His strength may have given out 17 measures from the end, but his sketches were quite clear, and his friend Tibor Serly used them to orchestrate the concerto’s rush upward across three octaves to the blazing close. n

Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 38: Spring R O BE RT S C H U MA NN Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau Died July 29, 1856, Endenich “My greatest wish is for him to compose for orchestra–that’s his field. May I succeed in leading him to it.” – Journal entry of Clara Schumann Robert Schumann married Clara Wieck in 1840, and that became the famous “year of song”: in a sudden outpouring of happy emotion he composed over 130 songs that year. But early in 1841 Clara got her wish. Schumann sketched a complete symphony in the space of just three days (January 23-26) and had the orchestration done a month later; Felix Mendelssohn led the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in the first performance on March 31, 1841.

Schumann was delighted with his new creation.

To Louis Spohr he wrote: “It was inspired, if I may say so, by the spirit of spring which seems

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to possess us all anew every year, regardless of our age. The music is not intended to describe or picture anything specific, but I am convinced that spring shaped the form it has taken.” The symphony actually had a much more specific inspiration: Schumann was so struck by the poem “Spring Ballads” by the now forgotten German poet Adolph Böttger that he took the rhythm of the symphony’s opening fanfare directly from the stresses of the poem’s opening lines. Trumpets and horns sound the first call: O wende, wende deinen Lauf,

(O turn, o turn aside thy course,)

and the full orchestra shouts out the next line:

then riding along on an endless supply of energy.

Just before the recapitulation, Schumann brings matters to a pause: the horns offer a call from deep within the woods and the solo flute takes wing with a brief cadenza before the energetic rush to the close.

Schumann had originally given each of the four movements a name – Spring’s Beginning, Evening, Happy Playmates and Spring at its Height – but withdrew them before the premiere. The symphony hardly needs them. Written from the depths of a cold Leipzig winter, this music blazes in every measure with a sense of new life and the warmth of spring. n PROGRAM NOTES BY ERIC BROMBERGER

–Im Tale bluht der Fruhling auf!

(For the valley blooms with spring)

That rhythm will shape much of the opening movement: the introduction gradually accelerates into the Allegro molto vivace, where the spirited main theme is simply a speeded-up version of the fanfare. To a conductor preparing to lead the symphony, Schumann wrote: “I should like the very first trumpet entrance to sound as if it came from on high, like a summons to awakening. Further on in the introduction, I should like the music to suggest the world’s turning green, perhaps with a butterfly hovering in the air, and then, in the Allegro, to show how everything to do with spring is coming to life.” The composer admitted, however, that these ideas “came into my mind only after I had completed the piece.” A halting woodwind tune forms the second subject, and the movement develops in sonata-form, though with some original touches: the opening fanfare makes several splendid reappearances, and in the coda Schumann introduces an entirely new theme, a glowing chorale for strings.

The second and third movements are joined.

Violins have the singing main subject of the Larghetto, and this moves from section to section, changing colors and growing richly embellished as it goes. Near the close, trombones offer a somber transitional passage that – radically transformed – suddenly leaps ahead to become the main theme of the Scherzo. Clouds seem to gather here as Schumann moves to stern D minor, but only for a moment: he varies normal procedure by providing two trio sections, both at a quicker pace than the main scherzo, and they pierce the gloom with sunlight. The finale returns to the jubilant manner of the first movement, opening with another propulsive fanfare and

WHY THIS PROGRAM?

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist

Anton Webern's dreamy idyll, Im Sommerwind, has been played only once before by the San Diego Symphony, under the direction of Jahja Ling during the 2012-13 season.

Leonard Pennario was the piano soloist when Earl Bernard Murray introduced the brilliant Third Piano Concerto by Béla Bartók to San Diego Symphony audiences in the 1961-62 season. It has been repeated at these concerts two more times, but not since Misha Dichter played it under Donald Johanos' direction during the 1971-72 season.

Robert Schumann's Spring Symphony was initially played by the San Diego Symphony when Yoav Talmi programmed it in the 1991-92 season. Very surprisingly, as tunefully bright and popular with audiences as it has always been, it has not been programmed since that first performance here.

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