Yale Philharmonia, April 5, 2024

José García-León, Dean

Yale Philharmonia

Peter Oundjian, Principal Conductor

Samuel Hollister, Conductor

Brian Isaacs, viola

Friday, April 5, 2024 | 7:30 p.m.

Woolsey Hall

Program

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

1756–1791

Bohuslav Martinů

1890–1959

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

1840–1893

Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, “Haffner”

I. Allegro con spirito

II. Andante

III. Menuetto

IV. Presto

Samuel Hollister, conductor

Rhapsody-Concerto for viola & orchestra, H. 337

I. Moderato

II. Molto adagio

Brian Isaacs, viola

intermission

Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”

I. Adagio – Allegro non troppo

II. Allegro con grazia

III. Allegro molto vivace

IV. Finale. Adagio lamentoso

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

Artist Profiles

Toronto-born conductor Peter Oundjian has been an instrumental figure in the rebirth of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra since his appointment as Music Director in 2004. In addition to conducting the orchestra in dynamic performances that have achieved significant artistic acclaim, he has been greatly involved in a variety of new initiatives that have strengthened the ensemble’s presence in the community and attracted a young and diverse audience. Now Conductor Emeritus in Toronto, Oundjian also serves as Principal Conductor of the Colorado Symphony and Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival. Past conducting posts include Principal Guest Conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor at the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York, and Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

Oundjian was the first violinist of the renowned Tokyo String Quartet, a position he held for fourteen years. Since 1981, he has been on the Yale School of Music faculty. He was awarded the School’s Samuel Simons Sanford Medal for distinguished service to music in 2013 and named Principal Conductor of the Yale Philharmonia in 2015. He is Professor (adjunct) of Music and Orchestral Conducting at the School of Music.

Conductor, pianist, harpsichordist, composer, and theorist Samuel Hollister is a doctoral candidate in conducting at the Yale School of Music and is the music director of the Civic Orchestra of New Haven. He served on the faculty of the University of Rhode Island in 2022–2023 as director of orchestral activities. He has served as assistant to conductors including Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, and Peter Oundjian at orchestras such as the St. Louis Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, and the Colorado Music Festival. Hollister earned his master’s degree from Peabody and his bachelor’s degree (in music and mathematics) from Yale.

In 2018, Hollister founded Aurora Collaborative, a Rhode Island nonprofit community music organization blending music with art and writing. He was named a conducting fellow, pianist, and harpsichordist at Opera Saratoga in 2022 and at the Eastern Music Festival in 2019 and 2021. Hollister has conducted, played, and studied around the world, including in South Africa, Spain, Mexico, Hungary, Austria, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Canada, and has appeared in master classes with teachers including Yo-Yo Ma, Jeffrey Kahane, Awadagin Pratt, Gemma New, Dalia Stasevska, Larry Rachleff, Rune Bergmann, Jonathon Heyward, and Benjamin Zander.

Peter Oundjian, principal conductor

Samuel Hollister, conductor

Artist Profiles, cont.

American violist Brian Isaacs is passionate about developing meaningful musical experiences for both performers and audience members alike. He is based in Berlin as a member of both the class of Tabea Zimmermann (Konzertexamen, Frankfurt HfMDK) and the KarajanAkademie der Berliner Philharmoniker (mentored by Sebastian Krunnies).

Isaacs has received awards and prizes from the Verbier Festival Academy, Yale University, Frank Huntington Beebe Fund, and international competitions including Grunewald, Nedbal, and Rubinstein. He has advanced to the semifinals of competitions such as ARD, Primrose, and Prague Spring. He has worked in masterclasses with violists

Misha Amory, Yuri Bashmet, Noemie Bialobroda, Ettore Causa, Nobuko Imai, Lawrence Power, Antoine Tamestit, Steven Tenenbom, Lars Anders Tomter, and Tabea Zimmermann.

An avid chamber musician, Isaacs has participated in numerous festivals and concerts in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Recent festival appearances include Four Seasons, Gstaad String Academy, NUME, Taos, Thy, Verbier Festival Academy, and Viridian Strings.

Isaacs regularly participates in performances of the Berlin Philharmonic as a member of the two-year Karajan Academy program. He has performed under conductors such as Kirill Petrenko, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, Daniele

Gatti, Alan Gilbert, Daniel Harding, Riccardo Minasi, Andris Nelsons, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

A native New Yorker and graduate of Yale University (’22BA ’23MM), Isaacs studied with Ettore Causa. He plays a viola made in 2011 by Douglas Cox in Brattleboro, VT, on generous loan from the Virtu Foundation.

Brian Isaacs, viola

Program Notes

Symphony No. 35 in D major, “Haffner” mozart

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

The version of Mozart we know from the play and film Amadeus, while fictionalized, is probably not far off from the Mozart who wrote this symphony. He composed it in a frenzy during an incredibly busy time, at the insistence of his father Leopold. He was preparing for the premiere of his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the first German singspiel that Emperor Joseph II sought out as an alternative to the Italian operas and famously, for those familiar with the film, containing “too many notes.” On top of that, he was occupied with his coming wedding. In short, when Leopold offered a work to the patriarch of most prominent family of Salzburg (you guessed it, last name Haffner) in commemoration of his daughter’s wedding, Wolfgang probably rolled his eyes and did his best. He produced not a symphony but a more substantive Serenade of six movements. That’s an important distinction, in that serenades were often meant as something between background music, dance music, and “sitdown” music, but in essence were almost always meant for a party. Some of Mozart’s most beloved and brilliant music is in his serenades, though, and here is no exception. His adaptation of the work into a symphony for Viennese audiences was not only economical, but yielded one of his most enduringly popular orchestral works. He shaved off a dance movement and a march introduction, and included flutes and clarinets in the winds alongside horns, oboes, bassoons, trumpets, and timpani. In short, he compressed and amplified. From the

very first sounds from the entire orchestra: the jubilant upward propulsion of an octave and the steady descent to the ground, the symphony is filled with fireworks. The boldness, ambition, and invention carry through all the way to the end, as in the brief yet energetic finale that begins with a whispering spark before an outright explosion. We’re lucky he had time for this.

Rhapsody-Concerto for viola & orchestra

Martin ů

Patrick Campbell Jankowski

Composers crafting music inspired (or commissioned) by a specific performer has been effectively embedded in the job description for centuries. Haydn’s many early string trios included his employer Prince Nikolaus’s viol-like baryton, Mozart’s horn concertos were written for his friend and drinking companion. Here, Martinů may well have agreed to the commission out of pure inspiration. Jascha Veissi was an American violist of international renown, and it’s said that his seventeenth-century instrument sounded so much like a human voice to the composer that it fascinated him. Veissi was at one time a principal with the San Francisco Symphony, and a renowned chamber musician and soloist by the time he commissioned this work in 1951. Martinů wrote its two movements in New York, and it premiered with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1953. Lyrical throughout and nostalgic in tone, the composer references not only Czech folk idioms but often his own music and life experiences. Its key of B-flat, relatively rare in orchestral music, was perhaps Martinů’s favorite and fits his unique sense of harmony, which hovers

Program Notes, cont.

between “classical” tradition and something more modal and evocative of Central European folk music. Antonín Dvo ř ák, another Czech composer of note, likewise shared an affinity with the music he encountered in America, and there’s something familiar to us in Martinů’s musical language as well. The surprising inclusion of the snare drum at the close is itself a nod to familiarity and memory: it recalls the toy drum the composer played as a child while wandering his hometown.

Symphony No. 6 in B minor, “Pathétique”

Tchaikovsky

Philip Ficsor

Tchaikovsky’s life was riddled with profound self-doubt and inner turmoil. He once commented on his Sixth Symphony, then still in its early stages of composition, that it “would be no worse than the earlier ones” (all of which, incidentally, had met with great popular success). He confided to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck: “Am I really used up and capable only of repeating myself and imitating my earlier manner? Yesterday I looked through the Fourth Symphony. What a difference, how much loftier and better!” He funneled these feelings into his music, sometimes even writing extramusical descriptions in his manuscripts. In sketches for this symphony he writes: “First part — all impetuosity, assurance, thirst for activity. Second part love; third disenchantment; fourth ends with dying away.” He originally entitled the work Program Symphony, keeping the precise program a secret. It was, in his words, to “be an enigma for everybody.” From the

outset, Tchaikovsky knew that the form of his symphony would be new and different. Tchaikovsky’s brother suggested the title “Pathétique” on the morning after the first performance.

In composing this work as well as in others, Tchaikovsky encountered difficulties. At one point he wrote, “Today I sat over two pages—and it still didn’t come out as I wanted it.” In the end, however, he treasured this work. “I emphatically consider it the best and in particular the most sincere of all my things. I love it as I’ve never loved one of my other musical offspring.”

Whether he succeeded in the public’s eyes was a different matter. The general reaction to this symphony was mixed. The audience seems to have been perplexed by its somewhat unconventional form and by the rumor of a “secret” program. There are few clues to what the program might be. A musical clue is a brief quotation from the Orthodox Requiem, placed in the brass in the first movement. Another clue might lie in Tchaikovsky’s refusal to set a poem by Apuktin entitled “Requiem” because, in Tchaikovsky’s words, “the general mood of [Apuktin’s Requiem] pervades to a significant extent my last symphony, particularly the last movement.”

The first performance of the Symphony No. 6 took place on October 28, 1893. Tchaikovsky died a little over a week later, evidently committing suicide, the specifics of which are unclear to this day.

Yale Philharmonia Roster

Peter Oundjian, principal conductor

violin i

Emma Meinrenken

Miray Ito

Ria Honda

Jeongmin An

Benjamin Kremer

Dorson Chang

Matthew Cone

Emma Carleton

Megan Lin

Andy OuYang

Chaewon Kim

Stella Lee

violin ii

Oliver Leitner

Laurel Gagnon

Albert Gang

Josh Liu

Mercedes Cheung

Xingzhou Rong

Evan Johanson

Caroline Durham

Jimin Kim

Amy Oh

viola

Katie Liu

Julian Seney

Wanxinyi Huang

Jack Kessler

Abby Smith

Wilhelm Magner

Andy Park

Cassia Drake

cello

Amanda Chi

Emily Mantone

Ben Lanners

William Suh

Robin Park

Jakyoung Huh

Charles Zandieh

Jenny Bahk

double bass

Julide San

Esther Kwon

Yuki Nagase

Patrick Curtis

Nicole Wiedenmann

Min Kyung Cho

flute

Michael Huerta 3

Sophia Jean 2

Collin Stavinoha 1

piccolo

Collin Stavinoha

oboe

Jini Baik

Alec Chai

Mickenna Keller 1

Amy Kim 3

Will Stevens

Maren Tonini 2

clarinet

Nickolas Hamblin 2

Nikki Pet 1

Tianyi Shen 3

bass clarinet

Nikki Pet bassoon

Anjali Pillai

Kennedy Plains

Tucker Van Gundy 1 2

Lucas Zeiter 3

horn

Gretchen Berendt

Torrin Hallett

Franco Augusto Ortiz 3

Oved Rico 1

Braydon Ross 2

William Sands

Corey Schmidt

Amber Wang trumpet

Grace O’Connell

Will Rich 2

Jacob Rose 1

Karlee Wood 3

trombone

Timothy Jay Maines II 3

Yuki Mori

Jackson Murphy

tuba

Alex Friedman

timpani

Makana Medeiros 1

Mingyu Son 3

Han Xia 2

percussion

Chad Beebe 3

Han Xia

general manager

Jeffrey M. Mistri

assistant conductors

Samuel Hollister

Stefano Boccacci

office assistant

Lucas Zeiter

stage crew

Makana Medeiros

Amber Wang

Lucas Zeiter

Jackson Murphy

Chad Beebe

Evan Johanson

Connor Higley

Oved Rico

Will Rich

Nickolas Hamblin

Jude Morris

Eric Evans

Josh Liu library

Darius Farhoumand

Nicole Wiedenmann

Maren Tonini

Abby Smith

Eric Evans

Josh Liu

¹ Principal on Mozart

² Principal on Martinů

3 Principal on Tchaikovsky

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