AT A GLANCE

Variety and Variation

In one sense, variation is just variety with a constant, and this program has plenty of both. “Developing variation” was one aspect of Brahms’ craft that Schoenberg greatly admired, and the Brahms piano quartet that he orchestrated here in Los Angeles is a classic locus of that technique, brilliantly applied. In linking all three movements of his Violin Concerto and shifting the position—and effect—of the cadenza, Mendelssohn created something like “developing structure,” or meta-variation, which was highly influential. The recombination of thematic elements in Olga Neuwirth’s rowdy Masaot/Clocks without Hands drives a sort of contextual variation, and its Eastern European nods make a framing connection with Brahms’ “gypsy” finale. —John Henken

MASAOT / CLOCKS WITHOUT HANDS

Olga Neuwirth (b. 1968)

Composed: 2014

Orchestration: 3 flutes (1st=piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets (1st=E-flat clarinet, 3rd=bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, percussion (tubular bells, 3 gongs, 10 cymbals, 3 tom-toms, 3 suspended cymbals, 6 cowbells, 2 woodblocks, 2 toy ratchets, 3 metronomes, metal guiro with metal brush, Japanese bells, glockenspiel, small snare drum, large drum, 2 triangles, jingle bundle, temple bells, tam-tam, vibraphone), celesta, and strings

First LA Phil performance.

In 2010, the Vienna Philharmonic asked Olga Neuwirth to write an orchestral work for the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s death. Since she had to finish two operas by the end of 2011, she had to decline. When the commission was postponed until 2015, she decided that she did not want to drop the idea she had had while reflecting on Mahler in 2010.

Neuwirth made the multiethnic origins of her refugee grandfather the inspirational source of this orchestral work. It’s a musical river journey. And the Danube, the massive waterway on which her grandfather grew up, is the quiet protagonist. It connects Neuwirth’s diverse and abruptly changing acoustic landscapes with the tableaux of citations into one musical tale. Along this waterway, the plot develops, so to speak, through her grandfather’s different cultures like a series of musical postcards. Masaot/ Clocks combines fragments of melodies from very different places and experiences from her grandfather’s life.

It opens with a tutti chord in triple forte that thrusts the iridescent initial sounds of the strings upon us. Soon the first snippets from her grandfather’s Eastern European Jewish song heritage can be heard—a poetic reflection on the search for identity and fading memories. They are the strands of tradition on a journey (in Hebrew masa’ot also means history and story, figuratively as well) through a broad, not merely musical, multiple homeland (Mehrheimat).

The composition evolves within a kind of grid in which song fragments resound and are recombined. Simultaneously, there is a “musical object,” based on metronome beats, that makes time not only audible but palpable. Just like with a revolving carousel, these metronome beats appear and disappear. Through this ticking of the metronome, through time’s externally regulated pulsation, time itself becomes a subjective, timeless realm of the subconscious. Ultimately, time appears to dissolve into … clocks without hands.

Neuwirth’s grandfather was born in a seaside town with a turbulent history, but grew up in the Danube River Basin, on the border between Croatia and Hungary. The many different (musical) stories are carried to sea by a river; in her case, the Danube. Neuwirth wanted to look back at the world of Kakania from the perspective of her present life. In the search for identity and origin—because for her, Heimat (homeland, native country) is something nebulous. In Masaot/Clocks without Hands, she responds to the idea of someone having several homelands, namely, by composing music that is both native and foreign—with familiar and unfamiliar sounds beyond any form of nostalgia. —Adapted from program notes by Olga

Neuwirth

VIOLIN CONCERTO IN E MINOR, OP. 64 Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Composed: 1844

Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings, and solo violin

First LA Phil performance: January 2, 1920, Walter Henry Rothwell conducting, with Sylvain Noack, soloist

Mendelssohn participated as early as the age of nine in musical performances in his family’s Berlin home and wrote a charming concerto for violin and string orchestra in his 13th year. That work, in D minor, was not written for his own performance, but rather for his—only slightly older—teacher, Eduard Rietz, later to become a founder of the Berlin Philharmonic Society and concertmaster for Mendelssohn’s epochal 1829 revival of the Bach St. Matthew Passion

If the D-minor Concerto is the handiwork of a precocious youth, betraying its indebtedness to earlier models, the present work, the Concerto in E minor, is not only the creation of a mature master, but also sui generis: brimming with lyric inspiration and structural inventiveness. It was written for another violinist friend of the composer, Ferdinand David, whom Mendelssohn had appointed his concertmaster when he became conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835.

“I would like to write a concerto for you,” Mendelssohn wrote to David in 1838, “one with an E-minor theme that keeps running through my head, preventing me from thinking about anything else.” The work was begun shortly thereafter, but completion was delayed by other projects and by Mendelssohn’s frequent bouts of ill health. He never abandoned the score for long, however, and at intervals showed sketches to David, soliciting practical advice from its eventual dedicatee every step of the way.

The composer was particularly interested in David’s opinion regarding the cadenza: not only whether it would be too difficult to play, but also whether its unusual positioning would prove detrimental to the whole. The cadenza, as it turns out, is the work’s pivotal episode and one of the composer’s great inspirations—one that would separate it from past concertos and set a course for composers of the future.

In earlier concertos, the cadenza constituted an often unwelcome break in continuity at the end of the first movement, the orchestra banished to allow the soloist opportunity for—more often than not, mindless—solo display. In his two earlier major concertos, for piano, Mendelssohn omitted cadenzas altogether, solving the problem by avoiding it.

Here, instead of placing the cadenza at the end of the first movement, Mendelssohn introduces it just beyond midpoint, allowing it to serve an integral function, growing out of the development and enriching everything to come in a score that is seamless, literally and figuratively: the three movements are not only played without a break, but might be regarded as variations on a single, evolving thought. —Herbert

Glass

PIANO QUARTET IN G MINOR, OP. 25

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), orch. Arnold Schoenberg

Composed: 1861; 1937

Orchestration: 3 flutes (3rd= piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd = English horn), E-flat clarinet, 2 clarinets (2nd = bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd = contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, tambourine, triangle, and xylophone), and strings

First LA Phil performance: May 7, 1938, Otto Klemperer conducting

In a series of lectures from 1947 entitled “Brahms the Progressive,” Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) relates an instance of Brahms dealing with one of his fans. “Contemporaries found various ways to annoy him,” writes Schoenberg of Brahms. “A musician or a music lover might intend to display his own great understanding, good judgment of music, and acquaintance with ‘some’ of Brahms’ music. Hence, he dared say, he had observed that Brahms’ First Piano Sonata was very similar to Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. No wonder that Brahms, in his straightforward manner, spoke out: ‘Every jackass notices that!’ ”

You don’t have to know about either composer or his works to understand why Brahms might sour at such a comment. He spent much of his life having his place in the history of German music found for him by others. His First Symphony was called “Beethoven’s Tenth.”

To Wagner’s detractors, Brahms represented everything that was good about German music and to Wagner’s fans, everything that was bad about it. It’s easy to point out the commonalities between Brahms and the generations that preceded him; finding what makes him a unique, progressive force in German music takes a bit more effort, and that was the point of Schoenberg’s lectures, and, in a sense, of his orchestration of one of Brahms’ chamber masterpieces.

Brahms’ Quartet had its premiere in Hamburg in 1861; Schoenberg orchestrated the work in 1937, and it was premiered in 1938 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of then-Music Director Otto Klemperer at one of the orchestra’s Saturday Evening Concerts. Schoenberg explained the rationale behind his orchestration in a letter to Alfred Frankenstein, the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, almost a year after the premiere:

1. I like the piece

2. It is seldom played

3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.

Schoenberg liked the piece as a great example of “developing variation,” a Brahms innovation he discussed in his talks on “Brahms the Progressive.” The idea is really quite simple: Brahms would subject his thematic material to variations and transformations as soon as he introduced them, rather than waiting until the development section of a sonata-form movement. This allowed him to create larger structures from these constantly developing materials.

An example comes right at the opening of the first movement. Brahms introduces a four-note motive that becomes the basis of the entire movement, undergoing numerous transformations throughout. The secondmovement intermezzo is the type of movement Brahms would fine-tune over the course of his career as a replacement for the traditional scherzo; it moves at a relaxed pace and exudes a warm elegance. The Andante con moto is a slow movement entirely typical of Brahms, radiant and serene. Schoenberg’s orchestral setting opens with a solo violin, a texture favored by Brahms in some of the slow movements of his symphonies. In fact, all three movements, aside from some cymbal crashes during the climactic pages of the first, could have been orchestrated by Brahms, although Schoenberg does favor some instrumental contributions that would have been a stretch in 1861. The finale, a “gypsy rondo,” is exhilarating and fiery, permeated by rhythm and given a suitably exciting treatment by Schoenberg, who really lets loose with a percussion section that, until now, he has held in check. When Klemperer premiered the score, he thought the orchestration a great success. He declared:

“You can’t even hear the original quartet, so beautiful is the arrangement.” —John

Mangum

Matthias Pintscher

The 2022/23 season is Matthias Pintscher’s final season as Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain (EIC), the world’s foremost contemporary music ensemble, founded in 1980 by Pierre Boulez. In his decadelong artistic leadership of the EIC, Pintscher continued and expanded the cultivation of new works by emerging composers of the 21st century, alongside performances of iconic works by the pillars of the avant-garde of the 20th century.

As conductor, Pintscher enjoys and maintains relationships with several of the world’s most distinguished orchestras, among them the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO), the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He is also Creative Partner for the Cincinnati Symphony. As guest conductor in Europe, he makes debut appearances this season with the Wiener Symphoniker and Gürzenich Orchester of Cologne and returns to the Royal Concertgebouw, BRSO, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony, and Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble. In North America, he will make prominent debuts with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kansas City Symphony, in addition to regular visits to the Cincinnati Symphony and repeat guest engagements with the Detroit Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New World Symphony. Pintscher has also conducted several opera productions for the Berliner Staatsoper (Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee, Wagner’s Lohengrin), Wiener Staatsoper (Olga Neuwirth’s

Orlando), and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. He returns to the Berliner Staatsoper in 2023 for Die Fliegende Holländer.

Pintscher is well known as a composer, and his works appear frequently on the programs of major symphony orchestras throughout the world. In August 2021, he was the focus of the Suntory Hall Summer Festival—a weeklong celebration of his works with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra as well as a residency by the EIC with symphonic and chamber music performances. His third violin concerto, Assonanza, written for Leila Josefowicz, premiered in January 2022 with the Cincinnati Symphony. Another 2021/22 world premiere was neharot, a co-commission of Suntory Hall, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Staatskapelle Dresden, where he was named Capell-Compositeur. In the 2016/17 season, he was the inaugural composer-in-residence of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and from 2014 to 2017, he was artist-in-residence at the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.

Ray Chen

Ray Chen is a violinist who redefines what it is to be a classical musician in the 21st century. With a media presence that enhances and inspires the classical audience, reaching out to millions through his unprecedented online following, Ray Chen conveys his remarkable musicianship to a global audience that is reflected in his engagements with the foremost orchestras and concert halls around the world.

Initially coming to attention via the Yehudi Menuhin (2008) and Queen Elizabeth (2009) competitions, of which he was First Prize winner, Ray has built a profile in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. as well as his native Australia, both live and on disc. Signed in 2017 to Decca Classics, he recorded the first album of this partnership with the London Philharmonic in the summer of that year, as a followup to his three previous critically acclaimed albums on Sony, the first of which (Virtuoso) received an ECHO Klassik Award. Ray has been described as “one to watch” by The Strad and Gramophone magazines, and his profile has grown to encompass his being featured in the Forbes list of 30 most influential Asians under 30, appearing in the online TV series Mozart in the Jungle, a multiyear partnership with Giorgio Armani (who designed the cover of the Mozart album he recorded with Christoph Eschenbach), and performing at major media events such as France’s Bastille Day (for an audience of 800,000), the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm (telecast across Europe), and the BBC Proms. camimusic.com/ray-chen

He has appeared with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, Munich Philharmonic, Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra Nazionale della Santa Cecilia, and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and his recent and upcoming debuts include the SWR Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, Berlin Radio Symphony, and Bavarian Radio Chamber Orchestra. He works with conductors such as Riccardo Chailly, Vladimir Jurowski, Sakari Oramo, Manfred Honeck, Daniele Gatti, Kirill Petrenko, Krzysztof Urbański, Juraj Valčuha, and many others. From 2012 to 2015, he was artist-in-residence at the Dortmund Konzerthaus.

His presence on social media makes Ray Chen a pioneer in an artist’s interaction with his audience, utilizing the new opportunities of modern technology. His appearances and interactions with music students and musicians are instantly disseminated to a new public in a contemporary and relatable way. He is the first musician to be invited to write a lifestyle blog for the largest Italian publishing house, RCS Rizzoli (Corriere della Sera, Gazzetta dello Sport, Max). He has been featured in Vogue magazine and is currently releasing his own design of violin cases for the industry manufacturer GEWA. His commitment to music education is paramount and inspires the younger generation of music students with his series of self-produced videos combining comedy and music. Through his online promotions, his appearances regularly sell out and draw an entirely new demographic to the concert hall.

Born in Taiwan and raised in Australia, at age 15 Ray was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Aaron Rosand and was supported by Young Concert Artists. He plays the 1715 “Joachim” Stradivarius violin on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation. This instrument was once owned by the famed Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907).