ORLI SHAHAM PERFORMS MOZART
NOVEMBER 1, 2024 / 10:00 AM / MAURICE ABRAVANEL HALL (FINISHING TOUCHES) NOVEMBER 1 & 2, 2024 / 7:30 PM / MAURICE ABRAVANEL HALL
DAVID ROBERTSON , conductor
ORLI SHAHAM , piano
SCHOENBERG (CLOVIS LARK, ED.)
Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38 (20’)
I. Adagio
II. Con fuoco
MOZART
Concerto No. 17 in G major for Piano and Orchestra (31’)
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Allegretto
ORLI SHAHAM, piano
INTERMISSION
BRAHMS
Serenade No. 1 in D major, Op. 11 (45’)
I. Allegro molto
II. Scherzo
III. Adagio non troppo
IV. Menuetto I - Menuetto II
V. Scherzo
VI. Rondo
CONCERT SPONSOR
FINISHING TOUCHES SPONSOR
David Robertson Conductor
David Robertson – conductor, composer, artist, thinker, and American musical visionary – occupies some of the most prominent platforms on the international music scene. A highly sought-after podium figure in the worlds of opera, orchestral music, and new music, Robertson is celebrated worldwide as a champion of contemporary composers, an ingenious and adventurous programmer, and a masterful communicator whose passionate advocacy for the art form is widely recognized. A consummate and deeply collaborative musician, Robertson is hailed for his intensely committed music making.
In the 2023–24 season to continue a deep and longstanding relationship, David Robertson returned to his home orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, to conduct works by Ligeti, including the US premiere of Mifiso la sodo, Brahms, and the New York premiere of Elena Firsova’s Piano Concerto with his longtime collaborator Yefim Bronfman. In the Fall, Robertson returned to The Philadelphia Orchestra to conduct works by Reena Esmail, Haydn, and Beethoven, and begins his second season of three as Creative Partner with Utah Symphony | Utah Opera.
GUEST ARTIST SPONSOR
THE LINDA & DON PRICE
GUEST ARTIST FUND
Orli Shaham Piano
Aconsummate musician recognized for her grace, subtlety and brilliance, Orli Shaham has established an impressive international reputation as one of today’s most gifted pianists, in demand for her prodigious skills and admired for her interpretations of both standard and modern repertoire. She has performed with most of the major orchestras in the United States and with many ensembles across five continents, given recitals on stages from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House and appeared at music festivals around the world.
Shaham is Artistic Director of the interactive children’s concert series Bach Yard, which she founded in 2010, and she is chair of the Board of Trustees of Kaufman Music Center. In addition to her musical education at The Juilliard School, she holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University and pursued a master’s degree in musicology from Columbia. She is winner of the Gilmore Young Artist Award and the Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Chamber Symphony No. 2
Duration: 20 minutes in five sections.
THE COMPOSER – ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (18741951) – Even though Schoenberg was initially disdainful of Mahler’s music, he was made a true believer by the older master’s Symphony No. 3. They soon after connected in mentorship, and Schoenberg knew he would not find a better public champion in the first decade of the 20th century. It was a period in Schoenberg’s life when his highly stylized late-Romanticism (something Mahler recognized quite well) was agitating toward transformation into a more rigidly structured, atonal Expressionism (perhaps less so). Premieres of new Schoenberg works during that time were often followed by strongly negative opinions, but Mahler never wavered in his outspoken support of the younger man’s career. No even when Schoenberg’s contemporary musical innovations moved beyond his understanding.
THE HISTORY – Schoenberg may have learned how to love Mahler’s galactic utterances, but that did not keep him from sparking a revolution against them. Whatever message the mighty 3rd Symphony had for him, or his own large-scale Romantic explorations for that matter, Schoenberg was determined to abandon excess in favor of expressive distillation. The Chamber Symphony No. 1, written while on a 1906 holiday in Bavaria, might seem like a landing place, but it was only a steppingstone, a part of the transition Schoenberg was navigating. That the pure abstraction of 12-tone music would come next is nearly impossible to perceive when listening to it. The same could be said for the Chamber Symphony No. 2, which Schoenberg also began in 1906, but the fact that he didn’t finish it until 1939 makes this observation complicated. The years between those two distant dates comprised an epoch of technical adventurism for Schoenberg, during which melody and harmony were bound to formulas rather than traditions. All the rules of tonality were abandoned in favor of the unique math he had discovered. Which is why the relatively consonant nature of the Chamber Symphony No. 2, as eventually completed in 1939, stands out. Why didn’t he make another 12-tone piece out of the material? He was known to return to traditional tonality now and then. “There is still much good music to be written in C Major,” he once said. Chamber Symphony No. 2 cannot be described so simply, but its harmonies diverge enough from Schoenberg’s work through the 20s and 30s that it requires an explanation. “The Supreme Commander had ordered me on a harder road,” he wrote in an essay much later in 1948, “But a longing to return to the older style
was always vigorous in me, and from time to time I had to yield to the urge.”
THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1939, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz had their premieres, Finnegans Wake was published, Siam changed its name to Thailand and, of course, war broke out in Europe.
THE CONNECTION – These concerts represent the first Utah Symphony performance of the Chamber Symphony No. 2 since May 2021. Thierry Fischer was on the podium. Our own principal librarian, Clovis Lark, was the editor for this edition.
Concerto No. 17 in G Major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 453
Duration: 31 minutes in three movements.
THE COMPOSER – WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) – There is no doubt that Mozart and Haydn were friends, but it not an easy matter to pinpoint their first meeting. At various moments in the 1770s and early 1780s, they might well have been introduced in Vienna, when and if they happened to be there at the same time. But we can’t say for sure. One especially promising possibility was in 1783 at a concert featuring works by both men. Again, however, no certainty exists on that. The two masters definitely knew of each other by then and, in any case, they were clearly pals by 1784. Mozart’s six “Haydn” Quartets, published in 1785, make that much obvious, and the high esteem in which they held one another is celebrated by biographers to this day.
THE HISTORY – It wasn’t only string quartets that occupied Mozart’s attention in 1784. He was also in the middle of a piano concerto binge, writing six of them before year’s end. Two were written for his highly talented student Barbara (“Babette”) Ployer, the niece of a Viennese court functionary. She apparently premiered it on a program in the summer of 1784 that also included a two-piano sonata (K. 448) which the composer performed with her. Mozart obviously thought highly of Babette’s talents and was delighted to promote her among his Viennese fans. We don’t remember her, or many of the female virtuosi of the 18th century, because music history has taught us not to. A pity, that, and a crime, since Mozart was proud enough of her accomplishments as a pianist and composer that he introduced her to the Italian opera giant Giovanni Paisiello and drew of sketch of her in one of his scores.
HISTORY
An interesting figure we do happily recall in connection to Concerto No. 17 is not a person at all, but rather a pet starling. It was not the only avian friend Mozart kept, before or after. He loved birds and some say one of his canaries was with him when he died. Presumably, he saw the Starling in a store in May of 1784 and quickly taught it to sing a theme from the just completed K. 453 concerto. Or did the bird somehow already know it as some have mysteriously written? In either case, the bird did a passable job of mimicking the music, which delighted Mozart into buying him. The composer kept the little singer for three years, calling him Star (German for Starling). When the bird died in 1787, Mozart buried him in the garden and held an elaborate funeral service for him. There was singing and the recitation of a poem that waved a fond farewell to a companion who “was still in his prime, when he ran out of time”. Think of dear Star when you hear the opening bars of the finale! Think of Babette during the rest.
THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1784, the “Empress of China”, America’s first trading vessel with China, set sail, the Marquis de Sade was sent to the Bastille in Paris and, in hopes of holding off a rebellion, Holland forbid the wearing of orange clothes.
THE CONNECTION – Concerto No. 17 has not been performed on a Utah Symphony Masterworks program since May 2010. Carlo Rizzi conducted and Jean-Louis Steuerman was soloist.
Serenade No. 1 in D Major, Op. 11
Duration: 45 minutes in six movements.
THE COMPOSER – JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
– It is well known that Brahms spent the greater part of the 1850s building his first orchestral masterpiece, and that it was not a symphony. The D Minor Piano Concerto, made largely out of material meant for other works, was his hedge against facing up to the ghost of Beethoven. The symphony genre, that fully conquered field of Beethoven’s legacy, was something Brahms did not attempt to address until 1876 at the age of 43. In addition to the professional caution he was observing in the 1850s, it was a period of intense personal experiences for Brahms, most of which revolved around his special (and complicated) relationship
with Robert and Clara Schumann. Robert, an early champion of Brahms, died in 1856. Clara remained a close to Brahms until their deaths at the end of the century.
THE HISTORY – As the friendship between Brahms and the Schumanns developed in their complex ways (he as mentor, she as mentor too but also something more), Brahms was battling the demons of his D Minor Concerto. But it was his not only attempt to wrestle a full orchestra score into being. Behind the scenes of the concerto project, Brahms wrote two other proto-symphonies that he called Serenades. Both were written in the years just after Robert Schumann died, and the dearly departed master’s fingerprints are on them. Not the music itself so much, but certainly the air of expectation that quietly surrounded them. We cannot forget that Schumann, in his oft-quoted 1853 article entitled “New Paths,” spoke of Brahms in almost messianic terms. Brahms was, for Schumann, the fulfillment of a prophecy in which a new artistic voice would appear suddenly and fully formed as if from the mind of a god to “express the ideal form and spirit of his time.” This pronouncement must have felt like an immense pressure on a young man as nervous and retiring as Brahms, and Robert’s passing must have doubled its weight and its urgency. Even without Robert’s words, the world would have come to expect a symphony from Brahms by the late 1850s. He simple wasn’t ready. Instead, he poured his attention into the Piano Concerto and the Serenades. Even though the composer himself considered calling them Symphonies at first, it’s true the Serenades are quite different from the eventual actual Symphony No. 1. Serenade No. 1 was completed first in 1858 as a nonet a la Mozart and did not until 1859 become the charming full orchestra work we know today. Brahms’ great friend and collaborator Joseph Joachim (for whom he would later write his violin concerto) conducted the premieres of both versions.
THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1859, excavation of the Suez Canal began, Charles Darwin published his shocking scientific work On the Origin of Species and Alfred Lord Tennyson released the first portion of his Arthurian epic The Idylls of the King
THE CONNECTION – Brahms’ 1st Serenade appeared on the Utah Symphony Masterworks series most recently in November 2005 under the baton of Keith Lockhart.
Vote YES for Proposition #8 on November 5!
By Leslie Peterson, VP of Development
It’s amazing what a penny on every $10 can do for a community! Thirty years ago, community leaders came together with a vision to create a fund to make Salt Lake County an even greater place to live. Today that fund is affectionately known as ZAP, the Zoo, Arts & Parks Program. If you’ve attended a free day at a museum or a zoological organization, experienced a live performance or cultural festival, or enjoyed a day at a recreational facility, an outing at a park, or a walk on a trail, you’ve seen your ZAP program at work.
In Utah, we like to say that we punch above our weight, and the achievements of the ZAP program certainly live up to that statement. The $357 Million invested since its launch in 1997 have resulted each year in four million free admissions and 8,000 jobs; supported 232 arts, cultural, and zoological non-profits; attracted 26,000 volunteers; and built hundreds of miles of trails, 70 parks, and 22 recreational centers. Whew! That’s a fantastic return on investment and great value for the average of $8-12 spent by every Salt Lake County household in a year. THANK YOU voters of Salt Lake County!
Each year Utah Symphony | Utah Opera submits a detailed and thorough application and report to Salt Lake County, which are carefully reviewed and vetted by an Advisory Board. The process keeps us accountable to the public and ourselves, and gives us an opportunity to highlight particular events that demonstrate the value of ZAP to our community. The ZAP program has a sunset provision every ten years when voters have a chance to express their approval of its renewal. 2024 is such a year.
Memorable stories we’ve highlighted in our applications include the following:
Utah Opera offers an annual Blind and Visually-Impaired Night at the Opera. This year, our Education & Community
Engagement staff received the following email from one of the 81 people who attended: “Thank you so much for putting on this event! I am fairly new to non-seeing side of things. Reaching legal blindness in the last couple of years. My world had gotten much smaller. The list of things I can do on my own, much shorter. It has been a difficult adjustment. One that continues each day. Last night I felt so welcomed, accepted and included. This event showed me that there is more awareness out there of my experience than I knew. Of the way I perceive things as a non-seeing person in a seeing person’s world. My world has been made a bit bigger and brighter again. So much love to you all!”
USUO offers Access to Music, a free annual performance of short, lively orchestral pieces and scenes from opera and operetta by Utah Symphony members and Utah Opera Resident Artists for children with special needs and their families. Audience members are invited to relax and enjoy the concert without the usual expectations of remaining seated and quiet: “We LOVE this event. I literally cannot express in words how much it means to my family and how much fun it is to come knowing that I don’t have to worry about my son making a noise.”
“Songs of Hope presented by Utah Opera’s Resident Artists on the Patient Patio at Huntsman Cancer Institute included a small, socially-distanced audience of patients, staff, and family. Our contact at HCI has shared more than once during the planning process how deeply they have missed live music performances in their lobby during the pandemic. She was thrilled that Utah Opera was their first guest performance group and reported that a special unplanned encore for an opera-loving patient was proclaimed his “best medicine of the day”!
Community leaders, mayors, and council members are able to utilize ZAP funds to make their own communities better by supporting local cultural groups and keeping parks, playgrounds, and recreational facilities well-maintained and accessible. As the VP of Development for Utah Symphony | Utah Opera, I am particularly grateful for the incredible public support my organization receives from the ZAP program. I’ve had the privilege over the many years of my career in the arts to champion the ZAP program since its inception. I hope you share my pride in being a part of a unique model that brings so much joy, creativity, and learning opportunities to residents of all ages.
Pennies can add up to big accomplishments. Simple actions can have a profound effect.
Exercise your voting privileges and make sure to cast your ballot with a YES vote for Proposition #8 on November 5.
