Brahms' Violin Concerto Playbill by Utah Symphony

VIOLIN CONCERTO

with Augustin Hadelich

JANUARY 9, 2025 / 8:00 PM / DAINES CONCERT HALL AT THE CHASE FINE ARTS CENTER (UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY IN LOGAN, UT)

JANUARY 10, 2025 / 7:30 PM / MAURICE ABRAVANEL HALL

JANUARY 11, 2025 / 5:30 PM / MAURICE ABRAVANEL HALL

ELIM CHAN , conductor

AUGUSTIN HADELICH , violin

ELIZABETH OGONEK RACHMANINOFF

BRAHMS

Moondog (10’)

Symphonic Dances (35’)

I. Non allegro

II. Andante con moto (Tempo di valse)

III. Lento assai - Allegro vivace

INTERMISSION

Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra (38’)

I. Allegro non troppo

II. Adagio

III. Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace

AUGUSTIN HADELICH, violin

CONCERT SPONSOR

CONDUCTOR SPONSOR

FRED & LUCY MORETON

GUEST ARTIST SPONSOR

Elim Chan Conductor

Since winning the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition in 2014 as the first ever female winner, Elim Chan has built a unique career, establishing herself as one of the most sought-after conductors internationally. Her conducting embodies modern orchestral leadership through zeal and crystalline precision, all in service of the music.

Highlights of her 2024–25 season include two tours with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, returns to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and Vienna Symphony, as well as debuts with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, to mention a few. Previous debuts include Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals as well as the BBC Proms (which she opened this year), and orchestras such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, Staatskapelle Berlin, Staatskapelle Dresden, Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, and Swedish Radio Symphony.

Elim Chan was Chief Conductor of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra between 2019–2024 and Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra between 2018–2023. She began her career as Assistant Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and shortly afterwards joined the Dudamel Fellowship program at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Bernard Haitink was an important supporter and mentor at the beginning of her career.

Augustin Hadelich

Violin

Augustin Hadelich is one of the great violinists of our time. Known for his phenomenal technique, insightful and persuasive interpretations, and ravishing tone, he appears extensively on the world’s foremost concert stages. Hadelich has performed with all the major American orchestras as well as the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, and many other eminent ensembles.

Hadelich, a dual American-German citizen born in Italy to German parents, rose to fame when he won the Gold Medal at the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Further distinctions followed, including an Avery Fisher Career Grant (2009), U.K.’s Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship (2011), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter in the U. K. (2017). In 2018, he was named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by the influential magazine Musical America. Hadelich holds an Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Joel Smirnoff, and in 2021, was appointed to the violin faculty at Yale School of Music. He plays a 1744 violin by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, known as “Leduc, ex Szeryng”, on loan from the Tarisio Trust.

Moondog

Duration: 10 minutes.

THE COMPOSER – ELIZABETH OGONEK (b. 1989)

– American composer Elizabeth Ogonek was born in Minnesota but grew up in New York City. Her academic career took her to Indiana University, USC, and the Guildhall School in London. Ogonek then moved right away into the prestigious position of Mead Composerin-Residence with Chicago Symphony with fellow American Samuel Adams. She was there until 2018 and has since stormed the world with awards, commissions, and projects too many and various to list. Ogonek just joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music after holding positions at Oberlin Conservatory and Cornell University. While at Cornell, Ogonek taught a class called FutureSounds, a “creative lab where students across disciplines collaborate[d] to design multi-faceted projects around the invention of new instruments.”

THE HISTORY – In 2021, Ogonek wrote the first work of an intended orchestral triptych based on the idea of looking up at the sky. This was Cloudline, commissioned by the BBC Proms and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was a tribute to what Ogonek called “the infinite canon of cloud-inspired musings” of people like Walt Whitman and Georgia O’Keefe. Next came Starling Variations for the Boston Symphony, in which she endeavored to symbolically capture the murmuration of starling flocks. A murmuration is the coordinated flight phenomenon where large groups of birds swoop, dive, and abruptly change direction in one otherworldly mass of living mercury. Last in the trilogy is Moondog, a piece composed on a commission from San Francisco Symphony in 2022 and premiered in 2023. Again, we find ourselves gazing up to the heavens with this music, but this time at the moon and the interesting meteorological treat it occasionally offers up. A “moondog,” like its sibling the “sundog,” is part of the “halo” family of optical miracles. To create one, light interacts with the ice crystals (or “diamond dust”) in the atmosphere and results in stunning, if often quite faint, displays around the moon. These light shows can also conjure vertical pillars, false submoons, parhelic circles, and other celestial delights (look these up when you get home tonight – it’s worth it). “For Moondog,” Ogonek told San Francisco Symphony for the premiere, “I really wanted to do a vocalese [a song without words] for the orchestra” and around this central core, she employed a “halo” structure of her own with outer sections that reflect back on their source. Within that conceptual framework, Ogonek has successfully built an “orchestral atmosphere that evokes the mysteriousness of nighttime.”

THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died in September, Shackleton’s ship Endurance was discovered in Antarctica, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Kahn was removed from office by no-confidence vote, and Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.

THE CONNECTION – These concerts represent the Utah Symphony premiere of Elizabeth Ogonek’s Moondog

Symphonic Dances, op. 45

Duration: 35 minutes in three movements.

THE COMPOSER – SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (18731943) – Like so many of his artistic cohort in the eventful moments of 1939, Rachmaninoff decided that Europe was no place to be. He had seen it all before and knew well the sound made by distant drums of war. And at his age (he had recently fallen and was forced to miss the ballet based on his Paganini Variations), the prospect of another global conflagration was more than he was prepared to endure. He was living in Switzerland at the time but traveling regularly for concerts in the U.S. and England. His decision to flee more permanently to America was fateful. It meant he would never again see his beloved Swiss villa, let alone his long-lost Russian homeland.

THE HISTORY – In the latter years of his compositional life, Rachmaninoff favored a leaner and more focused orchestral language. The luxuriant textures that fueled his rise to prominence became rare and in their place was a more concise, less emotional presentation of ideas. Rachmaninoff’s somber seriousness as a person was often at odds with his early Romantic opulence as a composer, so the turn towards directness in his December years is perhaps an understandable eventuality. In his last completed work, Rachmaninoff found reason to blend a bit of the old with the new. The Symphonic Dances of 1940 actually date in part back to 1915 and a ballet project that Rachmaninoff had proposed to Mikhail Fokine. Nothing came of it, so the material in those sketches remained on the shelf for twenty-five years before finding a new home in the score of Symphonic Dances. The work was dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra and, though not an overwhelming success at the premiere, Symphonic Dances is regularly and quite reasonably held up as Rachmaninoff’s finest masterpiece. The spare angularity of his late style was reminiscent of

his countrymen Stravinsky and Prokofiev, but the lushness of his harmonic language and the occasional, well-placed “big” melody (in honor of his own younger self) are elements that still brook no comparison. No composer before or since has ever truly matched them. Present also of course was the Dies Irae chant that shadowed Rachmaninoff throughout his life and figured prominently in his final three large-scale works. “Last” works often enjoy reflective prominence in a composer’s history, either as an invitation to consider what might have come next or as an intentional conclusion to the thesis of their lives. The music itself, so often incomplete, does not always oblige the latter. But with Symphonic Dances, no stretch is needed to see it as a capstone to a brilliant career.

THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1940, the film version of The Grapes of Wrath premiered, Peter Fraser became Prime Minister of New Zealand, the improbable Dunkirk evacuation took place, and the Lascaux cave paintings were discovered.

THE CONNECTION – Symphonic Dances was recorded by Utah Symphony in 2004 and last performed live in 2022. Thierry Fischer was on the podium.

Concerto in D Major for Violin, Op. 77

Duration: 38 minutes in three movements.

THE COMPOSER – JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) –

In the middle years of the 1870s, Brahms was forced to contend with something his dogged humility must have been averse to – fame. He had been living in Vienna for years at that point. It was an impossible place in which to hide had he really wanted to, but it was also a city whose hard-won praise an artist could really trust. Brahms’ first two symphonies, finally written after decades of doubt, were actively in the world and confirming him as both Beethoven’s successor and a conservative foil to Wagner’s progressive excesses. This success gave Brahms the courage to stare down another of his persistent ghosts, this one of his own design. It was time to write another concerto.

THE HISTORY – Not since 1859 and the disastrous launch of his 1st Piano Concerto had Brahms given serious thought to composing another, for any instrument. It was a friendship, a long and devoted one, that eventually brought him back around. Brahms and violin virtuoso Josef Joachim had been friends since 1853 and the latter had been a great help during the construction and trials of the piano concerto. Joachim must have been thrilled then when Brahms told him in 1878 that he had a few nascent “passages” to share. Joachim fully expected a highly collaborative process to ensue, much like the one they established back in 1857 and 1858, and he got one. Whenever they could not meet in person, letters and manuscript morsels flew back and forth between the two comrades. It wasn’t always enjoyable. Brahms was often resistant and occasionally dismissive of Joachim’s expert corrections, but both men wanted the piece to be special, worthy of another orbit around Beethoven’s star. Joachim was enthusiastic about the possibility of New Year’s Day premiere in 1879, but Brahms felt unready to meet so ambitious a deadline. He did, in the end, but that Leipzig performance felt a little thrown together, and the friends would have to wait for the Vienna concerts two weeks later to enjoy a rapturous response. The symphonic nature of the work would continue to fuel its detractors, Pablo Sarasate most notable among them, and the concerto did not always make a big splash in its travels after Vienna. This is hard to fathom, given the work’s current standing (with Beethoven and Mendelssohn) as one of the three unbreakable pillars of 19th century violin mastery. Posterity often makes better arguments than audiences, it seems, and Brahms’ stern masterpiece would have to wait.

THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1877, Oglala Lakota leader Crazy Horse was killed by a soldier while in confinement in Nebraska, the first Championships at Wimbledon were held, and the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos were discovered.

THE CONNECTION – Brahms’ Violin Concerto is a popular work on Utah Symphony Masterworks seasons. The most recent performance was in 2021 under the baton of Jahja Ling with Hilary Hahn as soloist.