SHOSTAKOVICH WITH HANS GRAF AND NIKOLAY DIDENKO SYMPHONY AND SONG 31 MAR 2022 ESPLANADE CONCERT HALL
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SH O S TA KOV I CH WI TH H ANS GR A F AND NIKOLAY DI DEN K O SYMPH O N Y A N D S O N G 31 Mar 2022 Esplanade Concert Hall Singapore Symphony Orchestra Hans Graf Chief Conductor Nikolay Didenko bass*
S HO ST AK O V I CH Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti,
44 mins
Op. 145a* SSO PREMIERE Intermission
20 mins
Scherzo in F-sharp minor, Op. 1 SSO PREMIERE Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10
5 mins 28 mins
Concert Duration: 2 hrs (with 20 mins intermission)
SINGAPORE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Since its founding in 1979, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) has been Singapore’s flagship orchestra, touching lives through classical music and providing the heartbeat of the cultural scene in the cosmopolitan city-state. In addition to its subscription series concerts, the orchestra is well-loved for its outdoor and community appearances, and its significant role educating the young people of Singapore. The SSO has also earned an international reputation for its orchestral virtuosity, having garnered sterling reviews for its overseas tours and many successful recordings. In 2021, the SSO clinched third place in the prestigious Orchestra of the Year Award by Gramophone. The SSO makes its performing home at the 1,800-seat state-of-the-art Esplanade Concert Hall. More intimate works, as well as outreach and community performances take place at the 673-seat Victoria Concert Hall, the home of the SSO. The orchestra performs over 60 concerts a year, and its versatile repertoire spans all-time favourites and orchestral masterpieces to exciting cutting-edge premieres. Bridging the musical traditions of East and West, Singaporean and Asian musicians and composers are regularly showcased in the concert season. This has been a core of the SSO’s programming philosophy from the very beginning under Choo Hoey, who was Music Director from 1979 to 1996.
Under the Music Directorship of Lan Shui from 1997 to 2019, the SSO has performed in Europe, Asia and the United States. In May 2016 the SSO was invited to perform at the Dresden Music Festival and the Prague Spring International Music Festival. This successful five-city tour of Germany and Prague also included the SSO’s second performance at the Berlin Philharmonie. In 2014 the SSO’s debut at the 120th BBC Proms in London received critical acclaim in the major UK newspapers The Guardian and The Telegraph. The SSO has also performed in China on multiple occasions. In 2020, the SSO appointed renowned Austrian conductor Hans Graf as its Chief Conductor. In a time greatly disrupted by COVID-19, the SSO continued to keep music alive and lift spirits up through a multitude of digital concerts and videos, which crossed a million views in six months. The SSO has released more than 50 recordings in its 40-year history, with more than 30 on the BIS label. The most recent critically acclaimed albums include a Rachmaninoff box set (2021), Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier and Other Works” (2020), and three Debussy discs “La Mer”, “Jeux” and “Nocturnes”. The orchestra has also released albums of contemporary works linked to East Asia, including works by Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Bright Sheng, Alexander Tcherepnin, and others. The SSO has also collaborated with such great artists as Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Neeme Järvi, Gustavo Dudamel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Diana Damrau, Martha Argerich, Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, Janine Jansen, Leonidas Kavakos and Gil Shaham.
H ANS G RAF Chief Conductor The SSO is part of the Singapore Symphony Group, which also manages the Singapore Symphony Choruses, the Singapore National Youth Orchestra, and the VCHpresents chamber music series, the Singapore International Piano Festival and the biennial National Piano & Violin Competition. The mission of the Group is to create memorable shared experiences with music. Through the SSO and its affiliated performing groups, we spread the love for music, nurture talent and enrich our diverse communities.
© BRYAN VAN DER BEEK
SH O STAK O V IC H W ITH H ANS G R AF AND NIK OL AY DIDENKO | 3 1 MAR 2 0 2 2
HA N S G RAF Chief Conductor
Hans Graf is a frequent guest with major orchestras around the world including with the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, the Seoul, Hong Kong and Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestras. Hans Graf’s discography includes all symphonies of Mozart and Schubert, the complete orchestral works by Henri Dutilleux and the world premiere recording of Zemlinsky’s opera Es war einmal. His recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck with the Houston Symphony won the ECHO Klassik 2017 award and the Grammy 2018 for Best Opera Recording.
The Austrian conductor Hans Graf is the Chief Conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra from the 2020/21 concert season. He held the role of Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra 2001–2013, making him the longest-serving Music Director in the orchestra’s 100 year history. Prior to this, he was Music Director of the Calgary Philharmonic and of the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine. He has also held the post of Music Director at the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg and the Basque National Orchestra.
Hans Graf has been made Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur by the French Government (2002) and was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour of the Republic of Austria (2007). He is also Professor Emeritus for Orchestral Conducting at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg. 4
S H O S T A KO V I C H W ITH H ANS G R AF AND NIK OL AY DIDENK O | 31 M A R 2022
N I K O L AY D I D E N KO bass Russian bass Nikolay Didenko graduated from the Moscow Academy of Choral Art in singing and conducting. He was previously a soloist of the ‘New Opera’ in Moscow and a member of the Houston Grand Opera Studio. His operatic roles include Don Geronio in Il Turco in Italia with the Royal Danish Opera, Shostakovich’s Rayok at the Liceu Barcelona, Cappelio in I Capuleti e I Montecchi with Opera North (UK tour), Ramfis in Aida and Oroveso in Norma at the Teatro Comunale, La Sonnambula at the Bolshoi Theatre, Der fliegende Holländer at Malmö Opera, Pistola in Falstaff at the Bilbao Opera, and many others. He continues to perform across the world with many significant companies including the Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, Metropolitan Opera and Bilbao Opera. He recently sung Don Pasquale at the Bolshoi Theatre and Shostakovich’s Songs and Dances of Death at the Beethoven Festival in Warsaw. On the concert platform he has sung in Verdi’s Requiem at the Beethoven Festival, with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg under Alexander Shelley, and most recently with Orchestre National d'Île de France under Enrique Mazzola.
Recent highlights included his debut at Dallas Opera as King Dodon in The Golden Cockerel, Daland in Der fliegende Holländer at the Malmö Opera, and Sakdo at the Bolshoi. Next, he performs in Iolanta under Kirill Petrenko with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Nikolay features on the Grammy awardwinning disc Penderecki Conducts Penderecki, for Best Choral Performance (2017), as well as a ‘Medtner Songs’ album with Iain Burnside, released on Delphian in 2018.
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T HE ORC HE S T R A HANS GRAF Chief Conductor ANDREW LITTON Principal Guest Conductor CHOO HOEY Conductor Emeritus LAN SHUI Conductor Laureate EUDENICE PALARUAN Choral Director WONG LAI FOON Choirmaster
FIRS T VI OL I N (Position vacant) Concertmaster, GK Goh Chair Markus Tomasi^ Concertmaster Kong Zhao Hui1 Associate Concertmaster Chan Yoong-Han2 Fixed Chair Cao Can* Chen Da Wei Duan Yu Ling Foo Say Ming Jin Li Kong Xianlong Cindy Lee Karen Tan William Tan Wei Zhe Ye Lin* Zhang Si Jing*
SEC O N D V IOL IN Michael Loh Associate Principal Nikolai Koval* Hai-Won Kwok Lim Shue Churn^ Chikako Sasaki* Margit Saur Shao Tao Tao Edward Tan^ Wu Man Yun* Xu Jueyi* Yeo Teow Meng Yew Shan^ Yin Shu Zhan* Zhao Tian* VIO L A Manchin Zhang Principal Guan Qi Associate Principal Gu Bing Jie* Fixed Chair Marietta Ku Luo Biao Julia Park Shui Bing Janice Tsai Dandan Wang Yang Shi Li Yeo Jan Wea^ C EL L O Ng Pei-Sian Principal, The HEAD Foundation Chair Yu Jing Associate Principal Guo Hao Fixed Chair Chan Wei Shing Jamshid Saydikarimov Song Woon Teng Wang Yan Wu Dai Dai Zhao Yu Er D O U B LE BAS S Yang Zheng Yi Associate Principal Karen Yeo Fixed Chair Olga Alexandrova Ma Li Ming^ Jacek Mirucki Guennadi Mouzyka Wang Xu
FLUTE
TR U M P ET
Jin Ta Principal Evgueni Brokmiller Associate Principal Roberto Alvarez Miao Shanshan
Jon Paul Dante Principal David Smith Associate Principal Lau Wen Rong
PICCOLO Roberto Alvarez Assistant Principal OBOE Rachel Walker Principal Pan Yun Associate Principal Carolyn Hollier Elaine Yeo COR ANGL AI S Elaine Yeo Associate Principal CLARINET Ma Yue Principal Li Xin Associate Principal Liu Yoko Tang Xiao Ping BAS S CL AR I NE T Tang Xiao Ping Assistant Principal BAS S OON Liu Chang Associate Principal Christoph Wichert Zhao Ying Xue
TR O M B O N E Allen Meek Principal Damian Patti Associate Principal Samuel Armstrong B A SS T R O MBONE Wang Wei Assistant Principal TU B A Tomoki Natsume Principal TIM P A N I Christian Schiøler Principal P ER CU SSIO N Jonathan Fox Principal Mark Suter Associate Principal Mario Choo Derek Koh^ Lee Yu Ru^ Lim Meng Keh Nicholas Loh^ Michael Tan Pei Jie^ H A RP Gulnara Mashurova Principal
CONTRAB AS S OON Zhao Ying Xue Assistant Principal HORN Gao Jian Associate Principal Jamie Hersch Associate Principal Marc-Antoine Robillard Associate Principal Bryan Chong^ Hoang Van Hoc Alexander Oon^ * With deep appreciation to the Rin Collection for their generous loan of string instruments. ^ Guest musician 1 Kong Zhao Hui performs on a J.B. Guadagnini of Milan, c. 1750, donated by the National Arts Council, Singapore, with the support of Far East Organization and Lee Foundation. 2 Chan Yoong-Han performs on a David Tecchler, Fecit Roma An. D. 1700, courtesy of Mr G K Goh. Musicians listed alphabetically by family name rotate their seats on a per programme basis.
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SH O STAK O V IC H W ITH H ANS G R AF AND NIK OL AY DIDENKO | 3 1 MAR 2 0 2 2
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Op. 145a (1974) SSO PREMIERE I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI
Truth Morning Love Separation Anger Dante To the exile Creativity Night Death Immortality
These eleven settings of poems in a Russian translation have a patchy history. Shostakovich was inspired to start work on this piece after reading an Avram Efros translation of some Michelangelo poems, but he did not like the translations themselves and seriously considered commissioning another poet to produce better Russian translations. This sprawling song cycle eventually went ahead with Efros’s translations anyway, and Shostakovich was pleased enough with it to tell his son Maxim that he thought it might as well count as a 16th Symphony. This is not a facetious comparison: coming in at over 40 minutes, it requires great concentration from the soloist, intoning these austere texts over a pared-down orchestral texture. The striking opening fanfare, with only two trumpets, gives way to the glorious D major of the second song, but there are precious few moments as unequivocal as that. The light orchestration allows the intimacy and terror of Shostakovich’s music to come through in turns. The brass torrents announcing “Anger”
Autograph score of Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti
16
are very scherzo-like, and it is possible to hear in the progression of the music Shostakovich’s favoured slow-fast-slow-finale movement scheme, as in the First Violin Concerto.
old. “Fate might have sent me to sleep early / but I am not dead”... Surtitles in English will be projected on stage during the concert, with permission from James M. Saslow, and operated by Mani Shridar.
But even though the texts force frequent mood changes, the overriding emotion is one of pure melancholy and resignation. Parallels may be drawn to Michelangelo’s poetry: the master of grand architecture and immensely detailed sculpture and painting turned to short poetic forms late in his life; Shostakovich had no more grand symphonic statements to make. In his final year, these eleven songs were his effort at speaking truth to power, a power that had trampled all over him nearly forty years prior with the disastrous review to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He might have seen his own fate in Michelangelo’s words, had he known the Italian text. “Qui vuol mie sorte c’anzi tempo i’ dorma / né son già morto”, wrote the Italian master in 1544. A whole 420 years later, Shostakovich’s delirious final song translates this, making reference to a piano piece he had written when he was nine years
Instrumentation 2 flutes (1 doubling on piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons (1 doubling on contrabassoon) 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba timpani, glockenspiel, xylophone, snare drum, chimes, tam-tam, vibraphone, triangle, wood block, whip, bass drum harp, piano, celesta, strings World Premiere 23 Dec 1974, Leningrad (voice-piano version) 17
S H O S T A KO V I C H W ITH H ANS G R AF AND NIK OL AY DIDENK O | 31 M A R 2022
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512
SH O STAK O V IC H W ITH H ANS G R AF AND NIK OL AY DIDENKO | 3 1 MAR 2 0 2 2
Scherzo in F-sharp minor, Op. 1 (1919) SSO PREMIERE The beginning of Shostakovich’s composing career took a different course from a lot of his contemporaries. Unlike countless other composers who turned out “Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 1”, this pianist-composer chose to give pride of place to a five-minute work for orchestra, written in the grand style familiar from the Mighty Handful’s nationalistic take on European Romanticism. It is mostly remarkable for being so different in style from the vast majority of his output that gets regularly performed these days, being steadfastly unironic and full of very studious effects, including the orchestra heaviness that he would eventually turn to to fill out huge symphonic moments.
of Shostakovich’s ability to write in weirdly disparate styles, but this 1919 effort is very much still Shostakovich as a romantic, eight years before his appearance at the first Warsaw Chopin Competition, still feeling his way through the artistic avenues available to him before he would eventually break away and forge his own paths.
The opening could come from a Tchaikovsky ballet and the chirpy flutes sound like something from The Nutcracker; the music shows no trace of the horrors of the Great War, despite its march-like gait. Shostakovich demonstrates incredible command of orchestration for a 13-year-old, and the melodic and harmonic invention are rich and full of confidence. A “blind tasting” of this piece might result in a guess of Glazunov as the composer, with clear balletic influences and a sweetness of character largely due to the lack of strong dissonance at any point in the work and the turn towards the luminosity of F-sharp major near the end.
Instrumentation 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons
In fact, the “grandfather” of this piece is Rimsky-Korsakov himself, and that compositional style ran through the Petrograd Conservatory, where Shostakovich was a pupil. Another scherzo from five years later, Op. 7, would be a concertante work (with solo piano) that demonstrated more
4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle strings World Premiere Unknown 18
I II III IV
Allegretto – Allegro non troppo Allegro Lento Allegro molto – Lento
Shostakovich was a very different composer by the time he graduated from Petrograd in 1925. The opening trumpet and bassoon duet, followed by clarinet over pizzicato strings, signalled a different direction of growth, one that resulted in the great 20thcentury symphonist we know and love today. Shostakovich pulled together many influences for his first major work, but the most far-reaching one was including a piano as a nod to his work as a silent film pianist. Much of the music in the first movement sounds like vaudeville, with which he would have been familiar from playing in the theatres.
passages betray a real sense of unease and foreboding. The effects of Shostakovich’s exposure to the music of the Second Viennese School are obvious, especially when considering how much Shostakovich loved Pierrot Lunaire and Wozzeck. With this symphony he decidedly stepped into modernity, and the sensational reception at its premiere would change his life forever, catapulting him to national attention. Programme notes by Thomas Ang
Grotesqueries of various sorts are to be found in the music, including widely-swinging moods, such as the comic waltz in the middle of the first movement. The second movement’s false start on the low strings also throws this humour into the spotlight, and the frantic scherzo foreshadows both his work in film scoring and the wild First Piano Concerto of eight years later. This passes into the grand crescendo that forms the entirety of the third movement, and moves via drum roll into the sombre opening of the finale, interrupted by the violent whirlwind of the first fast section.
Instrumentation 3 flutes (2 doubling on piccolos), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons 4 horns, 2 trumpets, alto trumpet, 3 trombones, tuba timpani, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, tam-tam, triangle piano, strings
These contrasts became a hallmark of mature Shostakovich, as well as the very adept use of dissonance. Throughout the final movement, nothing ever settles into a comfortable pace, and even the calmer
World Premiere 12 May 1926, Leningrad First performed by SSO 27 Feb 1980 19
S H O S T A KO V I C H W ITH H ANS G R AF AND NIK OL AY DIDENK O | 31 M A R 2022
Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10 (1925)
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SE A SO N PAT RONS
The mission of the Singapore Symphony Group is to create memorable shared experiences with music. Through the SSO and its affiliated performing groups, we spread the love for music, nurture talent and enrich our diverse communities. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra is a charity and not-for-profit organisation. You can support us by donating at www.sso.org.sg/donate.