2017–18 Season Week 9 Bermel Prokofiev Strauss

Home , An Alpine Symphony, Josephslegende, Leonidas Kavakos, Masuko Ushioda, Robert Soetens, Tone poems (Strauss)

2017–18 season andris nelsons music director

week 9 bermel prokofiev strauss

Season Sponsors seiji ozawa music director laureate bernard haitink conductor emeritus supporting sponsorlead sponsor supporting sponsorlead thomas adès artistic partner Better Health, Brighter Future

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Takeda is proud to support the Boston Symphony Orchestra Table of Contents | Week 9

7 bso news 1 5 on display in symphony hall 16 bso music director andris nelsons 18 the boston symphony orchestra 21 parallel paths in early 20th-century music by jean-pascal vachon 2 8 this week’s program

Notes on the Program

30 The Program in Brief… 31 Derek Bermel 37 Sergei Prokofiev 47 Richard Strauss 63 To Read and Hear More…

Guest Artist

67 Leonidas Kavakos

7 0 sponsors and donors 80 future programs 82 symphony hall exit plan 8 3 symphony hall information

the friday preview on december 1 is given by bso associate director of program publications robert kirzinger.

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115-4511 (617) 266-1492 bso.org Two Japanese legends go head-to-head. Are you #TeamKuniyoshi or #TeamKunisada?

Through December 10

Presented with support from the Patricia B. Jacoby Exhibition Fund and an anonymous funder. Left: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Nozarashi Gosuke (detail), about 1845. Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection. Right: Utagawa Kunisada, The In-demand Type (Yoku ureso) (detail), 1820s. Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper. Nellie Parney Carter Collection—Bequest of Nellie Parney Carter. andris nelsons, ray and maria stata music director bernard haitink, lacroix family fund conductor emeritus seiji ozawa, music director laureate thomas adès, deborah and philip edmundson artistic partner thomas wilkins, germeshausen youth and family concerts conductor 137th season, 2017–2018 trustees of the boston symphony orchestra, inc.

Susan W. Paine, Chair • Susan Bredhoff Cohen, Co-President • Robert J. Mayer, M.D., Co-President • George D. Behrakis, Vice-Chair • Cynthia Curme, Vice-Chair • John M. Loder, Vice-Chair • Theresa M. Stone, Treasurer

William F. Achtmeyer • David Altshuler • Gregory E. Bulger • Ronald G. Casty • Richard F. Connolly, Jr. • William Curry, M.D. • Alan J. Dworsky • Philip J. Edmundson • Thomas E. Faust, Jr. • Levi A. Garraway • Michael Gordon • Nathan Hayward, III • Brent L. Henry • Susan Hockfield • Barbara W. Hostetter • Stephen B. Kay • Edmund Kelly • Tom Kuo, ex-officio • Martin Levine, ex-officio • Joyce Linde • Nancy K. Lubin • Joshua A. Lutzker • Carmine A. Martignetti • Steven R. Perles • John Reed • Carol Reich • Arthur I. Segel • Wendy Shattuck • Caroline Taylor • Sarah Rainwater Ward, ex-officio • Roberta S. Weiner • Robert C. Winters • D. Brooks Zug life trustees

Vernon R. Alden • Harlan E. Anderson • J.P. Barger • Gabriella Beranek • Jan Brett • Peter A. Brooke • Paul Buttenwieser • John F. Cogan, Jr. • Diddy Cullinane • Mrs. Edith L. Dabney • Nelson J. Darling, Jr. • Deborah B. Davis • Nina L. Doggett • William R. Elfers • Nancy J. Fitzpatrick • Charles H. Jenkins, Jr. • Mrs. Béla T. Kalman • George Krupp • Richard P. Morse • David Mugar • Robert P. O’Block • Vincent M. O’Reilly • William J. Poorvu • Peter C. Read • Edward I. Rudman • Roger T. Servison • Richard A. Smith • Ray Stata • John Hoyt Stookey • John L. Thorndike • Stephen R. Weber • Stephen R. Weiner • Dr. Nicholas T. Zervas other officers of the corporation

Mark Volpe, Eunice and Julian Cohen Managing Director • Evelyn Barnes, Chief Financial Officer • Bart Reidy, Clerk of the Board overseers of the boston symphony orchestra, inc.

Tom Kuo, Co-Chair • Sarah Rainwater Ward, Co-Chair

Nathaniel Adams • Noubar Afeyan • James E. Aisner • Holly Ambler • Peter C. Andersen • Bob Atchinson • Lloyd Axelrod, M.D. • Liliana Bachrach • Judith W. Barr • Linda J.L. Becker • Paul Berz • William N. Booth • Mark G. Borden • Partha Bose • Karen Bressler • Thomas M. Burger • Joanne M. Burke • Bonnie Burman, Ph.D. • Richard E. Cavanagh • Miceal Chamberlain • Yumin Choi • Michele Montrone Cogan • Roberta L. Cohn • RoAnn Costin • Sally Currier • Gene D. Dahmen • Lynn A. Dale • Anna L. Davol • Michelle A. Dipp, M.D., Ph.D. • Peter Dixon • Dr. Ronald F. Dixon • Sarah E. Eustis • Beth Fentin • Peter Fiedler • Sanford Fisher • Alexandra J. Fuchs • Stephen T. Gannon • Zoher Ghogawala, M.D. • Cora H. Ginsberg • Robert R. Glauber • Todd R. Golub • Barbara Nan Grossman • Ricki Tigert Helfer • Rebecca M. Henderson • James M. Herzog, M.D. •

week 9 trustees and overseers 3

photos by Michael Blanchard and Winslow Townson

Stuart Hirshfield • Albert A. Holman, III • Lawrence S. Horn • Jill Hornor • Valerie Hyman • George Jacobstein • Stephen J. Jerome • Darlene Luccio Jordan, Esq. • Mark Jung • Karen Kaplan • Steve Kidder • John L. Klinck, Jr. • Sandra O. Moose • Kristin A. Mortimer • Cecile Higginson Murphy • John F. O’Leary • Peter Palandjian • Donald R. Peck • Wendy Philbrick • Randy Pierce • Lina S. Plantilla, M.D. • Irving H. Plotkin • Jim Pollin • William F. Pounds • Esther A. Pryor • James M. Rabb, M.D. • Ronald Rettner • Robert L. Reynolds • Robin S. Richman, M.D. • Dr. Carmichael Roberts • Graham Robinson • Patricia Romeo-Gilbert • Michael Rosenblatt, M.D. • Sean C. Rush • Malcolm S. Salter • Dan Schrager • Donald L. Shapiro • Phillip A. Sharp, Ph.D. • Carol S. Smokler • Anne-Marie Soullière • Michael B. Sporn, M.D. • Nicole Stata • Margery Steinberg, Ph.D. • Katherine Chapman Stemberg • Jean Tempel • Douglas Dockery Thomas • Mark D. Thompson • Albert Togut • Blair Trippe • Sandra A. Urie • Edward Wacks, Esq. • Linda S. Waintrup • Vita L. Weir • Dr. Christoph Westphal • June K. Wu, M.D. • Patricia Plum Wylde • Marillyn Zacharis overseers emeriti

Helaine B. Allen • Marjorie Arons-Barron • Diane M. Austin • Sandra Bakalar • Lucille M. Batal • James L. Bildner • William T. Burgin • Hon. Levin H. Campbell • Carol Feinberg Cohen • Mrs. James C. Collias • Charles L. Cooney • Ranny Cooper • Joan P. Curhan • James C. Curvey • Tamara P. Davis • Mrs. Miguel de Bragança • Paul F. Deninger • JoAnne Walton Dickinson • Phyllis Dohanian • Alan Dynner • Harriett Eckstein • Ursula Ehret-Dichter • George Elvin • Pamela D. Everhart • Judy Moss Feingold • Steven S. Fischman • John F. Fish • Myrna H. Freedman • Mrs. James Garivaltis • Dr. Arthur Gelb • Robert P. Gittens • Jordan Golding • Mark R. Goldweitz • Michael Halperson • John Hamill • Deborah M. Hauser • Carol Henderson • Mrs. Richard D. Hill • Roger Hunt • Lola Jaffe • Everett L. Jassy • Paul L. Joskow • Martin S. Kaplan • Stephen R. Karp • Mrs. Gordon F. Kingsley • Robert I. Kleinberg • David I. Kosowsky • Robert K. Kraft • Peter E. Lacaillade • Benjamin H. Lacy • Mrs. William D. Larkin • Robert J. Lepofsky • Frederick H. Lovejoy, Jr. • Diane H. Lupean • Mrs. Harry L. Marks • Jay Marks • Joseph B. Martin, M.D. • Joseph C. McNay • Dr. Martin C. Mihm, Jr. • Robert Mnookin • Paul M. Montrone • Robert J. Morrissey • Joseph Patton • John A. Perkins • Ann M. Philbin • May H. Pierce • Claudio Pincus • Irene Pollin • Dr. John Thomas Potts, Jr. • Dr. Tina Young Poussaint • Claire Pryor • Robert E. Remis • John Ex Rodgers • Susan Rothenberg • Alan W. Rottenberg • Joseph D. Roxe • Kenan Sahin • Roger A. Saunders • Lynda Anne Schubert • L. Scott Singleton • Gilda Slifka • Christopher Smallhorn • Patricia L. Tambone • Samuel Thorne • Diana Osgood Tottenham • Joseph M. Tucci • David C. Weinstein • James Westra • Mrs. Joan D. Wheeler • Margaret Williams-DeCelles • Richard Wurtman, M.D.

week 9 trustees and overseers 5 WEALTH IS MORE THAN ACCUMULATING ASSETS.

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Andris Nelsons Named 2018 Artist of the Year by “Musical America” BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons has been named Musical America’s 2018 Artist of the Year. Recognizing artistic excellence and achievement in the arts, the 57th annual Musical America Awards were announced on October 17. Maestro Nelsons and the other honor- ees will receive their awards in a special ceremony at Carnegie Hall in December, in an event also marking the publication of the 2018 Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts, which will feature Andris Nelsons on its cover and, in addition to its comprehensive industry listings, pay homage to each of the 2018 winning artists in its editorial pages. Now in its third century, Musical America is an indispensable resource for the performing arts world. The other winners for 2018 are Mason Bates (Composer of the Year), violinist Augustin Hadelich (Instrumentalist of the Year), soprano Sondra Radvanovsky (Vocalist of the Year), and Francisco J. Núñez, who founded the Young People’s Chorus of New York City in 1988 (Educator of the Year). The article paying tribute to Andris Nelsons in Musical America’s 2018 International Directory is by Brian McCreath, producer of the BSO’s broadcasts for WCRB and WGBH, and can be read online at www.musicalamerica.com/features.

BSO Broadcasts on WCRB Featuring Rebroadcasts from the 2017 Tanglewood Season BSO concerts are heard on the radio at 99.5 WCRB. Saturday-night concerts are broadcast live at 8 p.m. with host Ron Della Chiesa, and encore broadcasts are aired on Monday nights at 8 p.m. In addition, interviews with guest conductors, soloists, and BSO musicians are available online at classicalwcrb.org/bso. Following this Saturday’s program of music by Bermel, Prokofiev, and Strauss with Andris Nelsons and Leonidas Kavakos (live on December 2; encore December 11), WCRB’s December broadcasts will continue with encore presentations of concerts from this past summer: the August 6 program of Mozart and Schumann with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and conductor David Zinman (December 9); the July 14 program of Ravel, Haydn, and Mozart with Andris Nelsons and pianist Daniil Trifonov (December 16); and the August 13 program of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schubert with rising young Israeli conductor Lahav Shani and violinist Joshua Bell (Decem- ber 30). WCRB’s December 23 broadcast will feature BSO recordings led by Seiji Ozawa and Charles Munch, made originally for Philips and RCA, of seasonal music by Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Berlioz.

week 9 bso news 7

“Boston Symphony Orchestra: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon” Available at Symphony Shop and at bso.org “Boston Symphony Orchestra: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon” is a limited-edition, 57-CD boxed set of the BSO’s recorded legacy on that label, reflecting the orchestra’s spirit and character over a period spanning the years 1969 to 2017. Conductors include music directors William Steinberg, Seiji Ozawa, and Andris Nelsons, as well as Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Dutoit, Eugen Jochum, Rafael Kubelik, André Previn, Michael Tilson Thomas, and John Williams. Instru- mental soloists include, among others, Christoph Eschenbach, Gidon Kremer, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Itzhak Perlman, Mstislav Rostropovich, Gil Shaham, and Krystian Zimerman. Among the contents are six discs of recordings by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players; the first release of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 led by Andris Nelsons; and previously unreleased recordings under Seiji Ozawa of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 and the overture to Rossini’s Semiramide. A lavishly illustrated booklet includes introductory essays by former recordings producer Thomas Mowrey and BSO Director of Program Publications Marc Mandel, and the individual CD sleeves repro- duce the cover artwork of the original releases. “Boston Symphony Orchestra: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon” is available for $199.95 in the Symphony Shop and at bso.org.

latest release on bso classics!

Recorded live at Symphony Hall in November 2016

Available at the Symphony Shop and at bso.org

3 CDs $34.99

week 9 bso news 9 Friday Previews at Symphony Hall Friday Previews take place from 12:15-12:45 p.m. in Symphony Hall prior to all of the BSO’s Friday-afternoon subscription concerts throughout the season. Given by BSO Director of Program Publications Marc Mandel, Associate Director of Program Publications Robert Kirzinger, and occasional guest speakers, these informative half-hour talks incorporate recorded examples from the music to be performed. This week’s speaker on December 1 is Robert Kirzinger. The speakers for January and February will be Harlow Robinson of North- eastern University (January 12), Marc Mandel (January 19, February 23), Robert Kirzinger (January 26), and Elizabeth Seitz of The Boston Conservatory at Berklee (February 16).

individual tickets are on sale for all concerts in the bso’s 2017-2018 season. for specific information on purchasing tickets by phone, online, by mail, or in person at the symphony hall box office, please see page 83 of this program book.

The Wendy Shattuck and This performance is supported by a gene- Sam Plimpton Concert ous gift from BSO Great Benefactors Wendy Friday, December 1, 2017 Shattuck and Samuel Plimpton. Wendy was The Wendy Shattuck and Sam Plimpton elected a BSO Overseer in 2011 and a Trustee Concert on Saturday evening celebrates in 2013. She is a member of the Education the 150th anniversary of the New England Committee and Overseers Nominating Conservatory of Music, and the many BSO Committee. orchestral players who have taught and inspired NEC students. Founded by Eben The Robert and Jane Mayer Concert Tourjée in 1867, NEC is one of America’s first conservatories, making it possible for Saturday, December 2, 2017 Americans to pursue excellence in music in The performance on Saturday evening is this country rather than in Europe. Classes supported by a generous gift from BSO Great were originally held at the old Boston Music Benefactors Robert J. Mayer, M.D., and his Hall in downtown Boston, currently the site wife Jane, who are longtime BSO patrons in of the Orpheum Theatre. The Boston Sym- Boston and at Tanglewood. Symphony sub- phony Orchestra gave its inaugural concert scribers for thirty-three consecutive years, at Boston Music Hall on October 22, 1881, they also attend many performances at under Georg Henschel. BSO concerts were Tanglewood each season. Bob was elected held in Boston Music Hall until Symphony an Overseer in 2001 and a Trustee in 2005. Hall opened on October 15, 1900. Many of He was recently elected Co-President of the the BSO’s orchestral players, past and pres- Board of Trustees. Bob currently serves as ent, graduated from NEC or have taught at co-chair of the Planned Giving Committee the conservatory. More than fifteen musi- and a member of the Buildings and Grounds cians currently in the orchestra, including and Trustees Nominating and Governance Germeshausen Youth and Family Concerts committees. He previously served as chair Conductor Thomas Wilkins, are NEC alumni, of the Overseers Nominating Committee, and nearly fifty musicians have served on the chair of the Tanglewood Annual Fund, and a NEC faculty. In addition, the late Jules Eskin, member of the Annual Funds and Leadership former principal cellist (d. 11/15/2016); Gifts committees, as well as the Tanglewood Everett (“Vic”) Firth, former principal timpa- Annual Fund Taskforce. Jane is a member of nist (d. 7/26/2015); and Joseph de Pasquale, the Audience Development Committee. The former principal violist (d. 6/22/15), were Mayers, who were chairs of the Tanglewood NEC alumni as well. Gala in 2014, have been members of the

10 benefactor committee for both Symphony Bob credits his father for encouraging his and Tanglewood galas for many years. Bob interest in music. He learned to love classical and Jane are members of the Higginson music early, and most of his fondest and Society, the Koussevitzky Society, and the clearest memories are of seeing the greats Walter Piston Society. The Mayer family has perform the best music. Bob and Jane have named two seats in Symphony Hall. In addi- shared their passion for music and Tangle- tion to supporting the Annual Funds and Gala wood with their two daughters, Erica and events, they have supported the Tanglewood Rachel, and their families. Forever Fund and the Tanglewood Music Center/Tanglewood Learning Institute Build- ing Project. Join Our Community of Music Lovers— Bob is the faculty vice-president for academ- The Friends of the BSO ic affairs at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the faculty associate dean for admissions Attending a BSO concert at Symphony Hall at Harvard Medical School, where he is the is a communal experience—thousands Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Medicine. of concertgoers join together to hear 100 Bob is a graduate of Williams College and musicians collaborate on each memorable Harvard Medical School. Jane directed the performance. Without an orchestra, there is department of social work at Beth Israel no performance, and without an audience, Deaconess Medical Center for many years it is just a rehearsal. Every single person is before serving as vice-president for resident important to ensuring another great expe- services and community relations at Cornu rience at Symphony Hall. There’s another Management Company. She currently chairs community that helps to make it all possible, the Art and Environment Program at Dana- one that you might not notice while enjoying Farber and is a board member of the Winsor a concert—the Friends of the BSO. Every $1 School, Kids4Harmony, and the Museum the BSO receives through ticket sales must of Fine Arts, Boston, where she is a Gallery be matched by an additional $1 of contribut- Instructor, serves as vice-chair of the Con- ed support to cover annual expenses. Friends servation and Collections Management of the BSO help bridge that gap, keeping the Committee, and is a member of the Learning music playing to the delight of audiences all and Community Engagement Committee. year long. In addition to joining a commu- Jane is a graduate of Boston University and nity of like-minded music lovers, becoming Columbia School of Social Work. a Friend of the BSO entitles you to benefits

2O17 2O18 SEASON

The Usual Orchestral Suspects ANNUAL FAMILY CONCERT DEC 10, 2017 3pm Nathaniel Stookey, Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead Former Boston Police Commissioner, Ed Davis, Narrator John Adams Short Ride in a Fast Machine Aaron Copland Old American Songs, set 1 Cambridge Children’s Chorus, Wendy Silverberg, Director Illustration Violinist Keila Wakao, Carson Ellis NEP 2017 Young Artist Competition Winner, performs Pablo de Sarasate’s “Zigeunerweisen” (Gypsy Airs) Op. 20 TSAI PERFORMANCE CENTER TICKETS ON SALE NEPHILHARMONIC.ORG BOSTON UNIVERSITY

week 9 bso news 11 Newton’s own enchanting holiday tradition! CELEBRATIONS Sunday, December 10 at 3 pm First Baptist Church, 848 Beacon St, Newton

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New Philharmonia Orchestra is a member of the Newton Cultural Alliance. newtonculture.org

12 that bring you closer to the music you cher- Comings and Goings... ish. Friends receive advance ticket ordering Please note that latecomers will be seated privileges, discounts at the Symphony Shop, by the patron service staff during the first and access to the BSO’s online newsletter convenient pause in the program. In addition, InTune, as well as invitations to exclusive please also note that patrons who leave the donor events such as BSO and Pops working auditorium during the performance will not rehearsals, and much more. Friends member- be allowed to reenter until the next conve- ships start at just $100. To join our commu- nientpause in the program, so as not to dis- nity of music lovers in the Friends of the BSO, turb the performers or other audience mem- contact the Friends Office at (617) 638-9276 bers while the music is in progress. We thank or [email protected], or join online at you for your cooperation in this matter. bso.org/contribute.

Those Electronic Devices… The Information Stand: Find Out What’s Happening at the BSO As the presence of smartphones, tablets, and other electronic devices used for com- Are you interested in upcoming BSO concert munication, note-taking, and photography information? Special events at Symphony has increased, there have also been continu- Hall? BSO youth activities? Stop by the ing expressions of concern from concertgoers information stand in the Brooke Corridor and musicians who find themselves distracted on the Massachusetts Avenue side of Sym- not only by the illuminated screens on these phony Hall (orchestra level), and in the devices, but also by the physical movements Cohen Wing during Pops concerts. There that accompany their use. For this reason, you will find the latest information on per- and as a courtesy both to those on stage and formances, membership, and Symphony those around you, we respectfully request Hall. The BSO Information Stand is staffed that all such electronic devices be completely before each Pops concert and during inter- turned off and kept from view while BSO per- mission. During the BSO season the stand is formances are in progress. In addition, please self-serve. also keep in mind that taking pictures of the orchestra—whether photographs or videos— is prohibited during concerts. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

week 9 bso news 13 Modern luxury and waterfront living. The perfect ensemble.

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617.657.1000 • LOVEJOYBOSTON.COM on display in symphony hall Using archival materials displayed on the orchestra and first-balcony evelsl of Symphony Hall, this season’s BSO Archives exhibit recognizes three significant anniversaries. celebrating the bernstein centennial Anticipating the 100th anniversary on August 25, 2018, next summer of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, the Archives has assembled materials documenting Bernstein’s Boston roots and his deep, lifelong connection with the BSO, Tanglewood, and the Tanglewood Music Center. • An exhibit in the Brooke Corridor focuses on Bernstein’s early connections with Boston and the BSO. • An exhibit case on the first balcony, audience-right, is devoted to the world premiere of Bernstein’s opera Trouble in Tahiti on June 12, 1952, as part of a Creative Arts Festival at Brandeis University in which many BSO members performed. • An exhibit case on the first balcony, audience-left, documents BSO performances of Bee- thoven’s Missa Solemnis at Tanglewood in 1951, 1955, and 1971 led by Leonard Bernstein in memory of his mentor, BSO conductor Serge Koussevitzky. • A display in the Cabot-Cahners Room of photographs, musical scores, and memorabilia documents the BSO premieres of works by Leonard Bernstein and BSO-commissioned works by Bernstein himself. marking the 100th anniversary of the bso’s first recordings in 1917 One hundred years ago the BSO traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to make its very first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Co. (later RCA Victor). • An exhibit near the backstage door in the Brooke Corridor focuses on the turbulent World War I era during which the BSO’s first recordings were made. • A display on the first balcony, audience-left, documents the BSO’s first recording sessions of October 2-5, 1917. marking the 60th anniversary of the boston youth symphony orchestras (byso) • In the Hatch Corridor, material on loan from the BYSO Archives documents both its own history and its ongoing partnership with the BSO.

TOP OF PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT: Leonard Bernstein and his mentor Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood, c.1946 (photo by Heinz H. Weissen- stein, Whitestone Photo) Label from one of the BSO’s first commercial recordings, the Prelude to Act III of “Lohengrin” led by Karl Muck BYSO’s founding music director, Dr. Marvin J. Rabin, with members of the orchestra, c.1960 (courtesy BYSO)

week 9 on display 15 Marco Borggreve

Andris Nelsons

In October 2017, BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons was named Musical America’s 2018 Artist of the Year. In 2017-18, his fourth season as the BSO’s Ray and Maria Stata Music Director, Andris Nelsons leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in twelve wide-ranging subscription programs at Symphony Hall, repeating three of them at New York’s Carnegie Hall in March. Also this season, in November, he and the orchestra toured Japan together for the first time, playing concerts in Nagoya, Osaka, Kawasaki, and Tokyo. In addition, in February 2018 Maestro Nelsons becomes Gewandhauska- pellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, in which capacity he will bring both orchestras together for a unique multi-dimensional alliance; under his direction, the BSO celebrates its first “Leipzig Week in Boston” that same month. In the summer of 2015, following his first season as music director, his contract with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was extended through the 2021-22 season. Following the 2015 Tanglewood season, he and the BSO undertook a twelve-concert, eight-city tour to major European capitals as well as the Lucerne, Salzburg, and Grafenegg festivals. A second European tour, to eight cities in Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg, took place in May 2016.

The fifteenth music director in the history of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons made his BSO debut at Carnegie Hall in March 2011, his Tanglewood debut in July 2012, and his BSO subscription series debut in January 2013. His first CD with the BSO—live recordings of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Sibelius’s Sym- phony No. 2—was released in November 2014 on BSO Classics. April 2017 brought the release on BSO Classics of the four Brahms symphonies with Maestro Nelsons conducting, recorded live at Symphony Hall in November 2016. In an ongoing, multi- year collaboration with Deutsche Grammophon initiated in 2014-15, he and the BSO are making live recordings of Shostakovich’s complete symphonies, the opera Lady

16 Macbeth of Mtsensk, and other works by the composer. The first release in this series (the Symphony No. 10 and the Passacaglia from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) won the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance and Gramophone Magazine’s Orchestral Award. The second release (symphonies 5, 8, and 9, plus excerpts from Shostakovich’s 1932 incidental music to Hamlet) won the 2017 Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance. Also for Deutsche Grammophon, Andris Nelsons is recording the Bruckner symphonies with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and the Beetho- ven symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic.

In 2017-18, Andris Nelsons is artist-in-residence at the Konzerthaus Dortmund and continues his regular collaboration with the Vienna Philharmonic, leading that orchestra on tour to China. He also maintains regular collaborations with the Royal Concert- gebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Sym- phony Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Maestro Nelsons has also been a regular guest at the Bayreuth Festival and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where he conducts a new David Alden production of Lohengrin this season.

Born in Riga in 1978 into a family of musicians, Andris Nelsons began his career as a trumpeter in the Latvian National Opera Orchestra before studying conducting. He was music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 2008 to 2015, principal conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Herford, Germany, from 2006 to 2009, and music director of Latvian National Opera from 2003 to 2007. Mr. Nelsons is the subject of a 2013 DVD from Orfeo, a documentary film entitled “Andris Nelsons: Genius on Fire.” Marco Borggreve

week 9 andris nelsons 17 Boston Symphony Orchestra 2017–2018

andris nelsons bernard haitink seiji ozawa thomas adès Ray and Maria Stata LaCroix Family Fund Music Director Laureate Deborah and Philip Edmundson Music Director Conductor Emeritus Artistic Partner endowed in perpetuity endowed in perpetuity thomas wilkins Germeshausen Youth and Family Concerts Conductor endowed in perpetuity

first violins Wendy Putnam* Cathy Basrak Blaise Déjardin* Robert Bradford Newman chair, Assistant Principal Oliver Aldort* Malcolm Lowe endowed in perpetuity Anne Stoneman chair, endowed Concertmaster in perpetuity Charles Munch chair, Xin Ding* basses endowed in perpetuity Wesley Collins° Glen Cherry* Lois and Harlan Anderson chair, Edwin Barker Tamara Smirnova Lisa Ji Eun Kim* endowed in perpetuity Principal Associate Concertmaster Harold D. Hodgkinson chair, Helen Horner McIntyre chair, Rebecca Gitter endowed in perpetuity endowed in perpetuity second violins Michael Zaretsky* Lawrence Wolfe Alexander Velinzon Haldan Martinson Mark Ludwig*° Assistant Principal Associate Concertmaster Principal Maria Nistazos Stata chair, Robert L. Beal, Enid L., and Rachel Fagerburg* Carl Schoenhof Family chair, endowed in perpetuity Bruce A. Beal chair, endowed endowed in perpetuity Daniel Getz* in perpetuity Benjamin Levy Julianne Lee° Leith Family chair, endowed Elita Kang Rebekah Edewards* Assistant Principal in perpetuity Assistant Concertmaster Charlotte and Irving W. Rabb Danny Kim* Edward and Bertha C. Rose chair, chair, endowed in perpetuity Dennis Roy endowed in perpetuity Leah Ferguson* Sheila Fiekowsky Joseph Hearne Yuncong Zhang Shirley and J. Richard Fennell James Orleans* John and Dorothy Wilson chair, chair, endowed in perpetuity cellos endowed in perpetuity Todd Seeber* Nicole Monahan (position vacant) Eleanor L. and Levin H. Campbell Lucia Lin David H. and Edith C. Howie Principal chair, endowed in perpetuity Dorothy Q. and David B. Arnold, chair, endowed in perpetuity Philip R. Allen chair, endowed Jr., chair, endowed in perpetuity in perpetuity John Stovall* Ronan Lefkowitz§ Ikuko Mizuno Sato Knudsen Thomas Van Dyck* Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro chair, Vyacheslav Uritsky* Acting Principal Mischa Nieland chair, endowed endowed in perpetuity Nancy Bracken* in perpetuity flutes Bo Youp Hwang Aza Raykhtsaum* Mary B. Saltonstall chair, Mihail Jojatu Elizabeth Rowe endowed in perpetuity Bonnie Bewick* Sandra and David Bakalar chair Principal Walter Piston chair, endowed Martha Babcock Jennie Shames* James Cooke* in perpetuity Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser Vernon and Marion Alden chair, chair Victor Romanul* endowed in perpetuity Clint Foreman Myra and Robert Kraft chair, Catherine French* Owen Young* Valeria Vilker Kuchment* endowed in perpetuity Kristin and Roger Servison chair Jason Horowitz* John F. Cogan, Jr., and Mary L. Cornille chair, endowed Elizabeth Ostling § Tatiana Dimitriades* Ala Jojatu* in perpetuity Associate Principal Donald C. and Ruth Brooks Marian Gray Lewis chair, Bracha Malkin* Mickey Katz* Heath chair, endowed endowed in perpetuity in perpetuity Stephen and Dorothy Weber chair, endowed in perpetuity Si-Jing Huang* violas piccolo Ronald G. and Ronni J. Casty Alexandre Lecarme* Steven Ansell chair Nancy and Richard Lubin chair Cynthia Meyers Principal Evelyn and C. Charles Marran Charles S. Dana chair, endowed Adam Esbensen* chair, endowed in perpetuity in perpetuity Richard C. and Ellen E. Paine chair, endowed in perpetuity

18 photos by Winslow Townson and Michael Blanchard oboes contrabassoon bass trombone voice and chorus John Ferrillo Gregg Henegar James Markey James Burton Principal Helen Rand Thayer chair John Moors Cabot chair, BSO Choral Director and Mildred B. Remis chair, endowed in perpetuity Conductor of the Tanglewood endowed in perpetuity Festival Chorus horns Alan J. and Suzanne W. Dworsky Mark McEwen tuba chair, endowed in perpetuity James and Tina Collias chair James Sommerville Principal Mike Roylance John Oliver Keisuke Wakao Helen Sagoff Slosberg/ Principal Tanglewood Festival Chorus Assistant Principal Edna S. Kalman chair, Margaret and William C. Founder and Conductor Farla and Harvey Chet endowed in perpetuity Rousseau chair, endowed Laureate Krentzman chair, endowed in perpetuity in perpetuity Richard Sebring Associate Principal librarians Margaret Andersen Congleton timpani english horn chair, endowed in perpetuity D. Wilson Ochoa Timothy Genis Principal Robert Sheena Rachel Childers Sylvia Shippen Wells chair, Lia and William Poorvu chair, Beranek chair, endowed John P. II and Nancy S. Eustis endowed in perpetuity endowed in perpetuity in perpetuity chair, endowed in perpetuity Mark Fabulich Michael Winter percussion clarinets Elizabeth B. Storer chair, endowed in perpetuity J. William Hudgins associate William R. Hudgins Peter and Anne Brooke chair, conductor Principal Jason Snider endowed in perpetuity Ann S.M. Banks chair, Ken-David Masur Jonathan Menkis Daniel Bauch endowed in perpetuity Anna E. Finnerty chair, Jean-Noël and Mona N. Tariot Assistant Timpanist endowed in perpetuity Michael Wayne chair Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Linde chair Thomas Martin assistant Associate Principal & trumpets Kyle Brightwell E-flat clarinet Peter Andrew Lurie chair, conductor Thomas Rolfs Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. endowed in perpetuity Principal Moritz Gnann Davis chair, endowed Roger Louis Voisin chair, in perpetuity Matthew McKay endowed in perpetuity orchestra Benjamin Wright harp manager and bass clarinet director of Thomas Siders Craig Nordstrom Jessica Zhou orchestra Associate Principal Principal personnel Kathryn H. and Edward M. Nicholas and Thalia Zervas bassoons Lupean chair chair, endowed in perpetuity Lynn G. Larsen by Sophia and Bernard Gordon Richard Svoboda Michael Martin Principal Ford H. Cooper chair, endowed assistant Edward A. Taft chair, endowed in perpetuity personnel in perpetuity managers Suzanne Nelsen trombones Bruce M. Creditor John D. and Vera M. MacDonald Toby Oft chair Andrew Tremblay Principal Richard Ranti J.P. and Mary B. Barger chair, Associate Principal endowed in perpetuity stage manager Diana Osgood Tottenham/ * participating in a system Stephen Lange John Demick Hamilton Osgood chair, of rotated seating endowed in perpetuity §on sabbatical leave ˚ on leave

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Proud to be the Official Chauffeured Transportation Provider for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. CommonwealthLimo.com 800.558.5466 • 617.787.5575 Parallel Paths in Early 20th-Century Music by Jean-Pascal Vachon

Canadian-born musicologist Jean-Pascal Vachon discusses five early 20th-century works being performed by the BSO in the coming months—Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony” (November 30-December 2), Webern’s Passacaglia (January 11-13), Stravinsky’s “Firebird” (also January 11-13), Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé” (February 15-17), and Debussy’s “Jeux” (March 1-3).

All the signs were there: after ruling Western music for centuries, tonality—a harmonic system that organizes musical compositions around a central pitch—was showing signs of fatigue, the Austro-German musical tradition was no longer considered as the only valid one, traditional musical forms seemed ready to burst at the seams.... As the Paris-born American composer Edgard Varèse put it: “composers could not live much longer by tradition. The world was changing and they had to change with it.” Béla Bartók also captured the feeling shared by several of his contemporaries: “[T]he excesses of the Romanticists began to be unbearable for many. There were composers who felt: ‘this road does not lead us anywhere; there is no other solution but a complete break with the 19th century.’” Obviously, this new century needed new music.

RICHARD STRAUSS embodies the conflicts faced by a composer of the 19th century facing the world in the 20th century. While admittedly one of the forefathers of modernism—the depiction, for example, of sadistic and decadent characters in his opera Elektra was translated into harsh dissonances and vocal outbursts verging on cries that stretched tonality to its utter limits—Strauss owed his reputation to the essentially 19th-century genres of the tone poem—he composed six between 1888 and 1898—and opera, of which he composed a dozen between 1905 and the early 1940s.

A “symphony” in name only, “An Alpine Symphony,” Opus 64 (1911-15) is a tone poem made up of twenty-two continuous sections of music evoking the climb and descent of an Alpine mountain, from daybreak to dusk. Nothing is missing in this quasi- cinematographic evocation of nature, from the pasture to the glacier, from the waterfall to the storm. Completed in 1915, when the musical landscape now included Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók with jazz not too far away, this tone poem, the archetypal romantic form, seems like an anachronistic anomaly, albeit a glorious one. And Strauss knew it better than any other: An Alpine Symphony would be his last work in the genre.

Meanwhile, around the same time, Europe’s culture was dominated by two intellectual centers—Paris and Vienna. The latter, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was from a musical vantage point equidistant to the North and the South, where, to quote historian Eric Salzman: “the contrapuntal and instrumental techniques from the German mingled with the operatic and instrumental styles of Italy.” Vienna, whose musical life included Gustav Mahler at the head of the Court Opera, was enjoying a cultural and intellectual golden age, unaware that in only a few years Berlin would oust it as the Germanic musical capital. Despite the weight of conservatism intrinsic to turn-of-the

week 9 parallel paths 21

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Anton Webern (1883-1945)

century Viennese society, a new generation of composers, headed by Arnold Schoen- berg, was determined to shake things up. And while Mahler became their hero in his fight against adversity, his conception of “symphony as world” was nevertheless rejected: music didn’t have to be “expressive” of, or reduced merely to serve, a narrative, but should, rather, become self-sufficient and claim its autonomy.ANTON WEBERN, especially, adopted this stance.

Webern’s Passacaglia, Opus 1 (1908) plays a dual role in his evolution as a composer: a “passing examination” after four years of studying with Schoenberg, and the first step of a body of works characterized by musical integrity and technical fastidiousness. On the surface, the Passacaglia may seem to stand quite apart from the rest of his production. After all, Webern’s music is known for its extreme concision and concentration while the Passacaglia shows him at his most expansively romantic. Yet the individuality of the timbres, the refined sound, the care given to the structure, the scrupulous placement of each note, the use of silence—all are unmistakably “Webernian.” Composed in the aftermath of Webern’s mother’s passing, the Passacaglia, his longest continuous movement, is also his last piece for standard orchestra used in a conventional way.

Almost 800 miles to the west of Vienna, in Paris, literature and visual arts were flourishing and music was about to join them. While Gabriel Fauré, Erik Satie, laudeC Debussy, and Maurice Ravel had already contributed in making Paris a mainstay of musical modernism, a visionary Russian impresario—Sergei Diaghilev—was about to cause one of the biggest earthquakes in the history of music. Sensing the interest of the Parisian public for novelty and the spectacular following an exhibition and concert series dedicated to Russian art between 1906 and 1908, Diaghilev founded the Ballets Russes. But Diaghilev wanted more than mere ballets. With groundbreaking artistic collaborations among young choreographers, composers, designers, and dancers, Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes (who would never perform in Russia) became a not- to-be-missed attraction for Parisian art-lovers. Moreover, rather than banking on mere

week 9 early 20th-century music 23

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

exoticism à la russe, Diaghilev understood that in order to keep his company at Paris’s artistic epicenter, he had to look constantly for something new and exciting. Guided by an extraordinary flair, he didn’t hesitate to commission music scores from well-known composers who had never written a ballet before, or from lesser-known composers. This is how, on the basis of two short—but spectacular—orchestral works heard in St. Petersburg in February 1909, he requested from an unknown student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov a “long” ballet based on the Russian legend of the firebird for the opening of the 1910 season. How could twenty-seven-year-old IGOR STRAVINSKY refuse?

Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” (1909-10), not unlike Webern’s Passacaglia, is similarly both a conclusion and a beginning. Here, in a spectacular way, Stravinsky ends his appren- ticeship and makes his entrance on the international musical scene. Accustomed to the lavishness of Diaghilev’s productions, the Parisian public received its money’s worth

week 9 parallel paths 25 Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

with the lush and spectacular Firebird. And while certain aspects of Stravinsky’s music here clearly allude to Rimsky-Korsakov’s training, especially in the association of super- natural elements with chromaticism and human elements with diatonic themes, and in the traditionally tonal language as well as the adhesion to the 19th-century conceptions of melodic development, others point to the Stravinsky to come: sudden melodic shifts, the rhythmical ferocity of certain numbers, and the modernity of the orchestration. His ballets Petrushka (1912) and The Rite of Spring (1913) further developed and expanded on the embryonic ideas and concepts present in The Firebird, and contributed to make Stravinsky one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century.

Even though the two best-known French composers of the period 1900-1920, CLAUDE DEBUSSY and MAURICE RAVEL, are often referred to as examples of “impressionism” in music, they take different approaches to their musical aesthetics. While Debussy constantly looked forward, Ravel, the younger of the two, was more conservative. Admittedly, Ravel was not interested in being at the forefront of modernism and rather preferred to remain true to the purity of line, the clarity of architecture, the sense of proportion, the transparency, and grace of style found in the classical forms. Valuing economy and objectivity, Ravel was an expert craftsman—“a Swiss watch-maker” said Stravinsky—who adopted François Couperin’s dictum that “I love rather what touches me than what surprises me.” Ravel’s harmonic language and precise articulation of transitions makes his music seem more “solid” and “grounded” than Debussy’s. And his quiet legacy may be found in the importance, not so frequent among his contemporaries, given to specific timbres and their combinations.

Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé” (1909-12), composed for the Ballets Russes, displays an orchestral refinement that recalls Debussy in its handling of colors, a combination of impassioned lyricism combined with typically “Ravelian” modesty, an infinite rhythmic variety, and an extraordinary lush orchestration typical of the impressionist movement. While these characteristics can be found in other works by Ravel, nowhere do

26 they appear with such warmth and virtuosity. With its intoxicating colors and its unre- strained rhythms, the concluding Bacchanale seems like a reply to the works of Stravin- sky himself, who, incidentally, regarded Daphnis et Chloé as “not only Ravel’s best work, but one of the most beautiful products of all French music.” He was absolutely right. All of Ravel’s artistry is here, brilliantly encapsulated.

Debussy was one of music’s great innovators, attempting to incorporate and synthe- size an astonishing range of influences, from exotic scales to ideas from impressionist painting and symbolist literature, from 18th-century composers like Rameau to ragtime! While his orchestral music constantly evolved during his career, he always treated chords as individual sounds rather than parts of a functional harmonic progression. Furthermore, he vehemently rejected melodic development and despised such techniques inherited from previous centuries as variation form, classic harmonic progression, and modula- tion, and considered timbre an essential element of his musical language.

In this regard, “Jeux” (1912-13) is a manifesto of Debussy’s principles. Here, melody, which had dominated music for three centuries, steps back, making way for instrumental color, and rhythm liberates itself from the traditional shapes. The work thus becomes an organic whole, unstable and elusive; its balance no longer depends on pre-established forms within which a composition develops. French composer Jean Barraqué also said: “The structures of... Jeux are based upon the superposition and jux- taposition of independent patterns which he subjected, both in their rhythmic texture and melodic outline, to a very free process of variation. Debussy split up the orchestra into single cells and used polyphony to outline them.”

After a lukewarm reception at its premiere—two weeks before the legendary and [in]famous premiere of The Rite of Spring—the misunderstood Jeux was relegated to oblivion until the mid-1950s, when composers of the “Darmstadt generation,” Pierre Boulez at their head, reappraised the work and found in it not only an important example of musical modernism, but also a link to Anton Webern’s intricate serial works in its use of a new musical material: the tone itself. The orchestra can thus take an active and functional role, creating, as Boulez put it, “a more delicate, more austere art, freer of immediate seductions but unequaled in richness of inspiration.” That generation’s linking of Debussy and Webern produced an apt posthumous reunion of two kindred musical minds unified in their efforts to create a new musical order seeking to celebrate the human imagination, far from preconceived hierarchies and outdated forms. Their combined influence continues to resonate today.

A freelance musicologist based in Vienna, Canadian-born jean-pascal vachon writes liner notes for BIS records and gives music history courses and lectures in Europe and North America at various institutions, including Webster University (in Saint Louis and Vienna) and the Donau-Universität in Krems, Austria. Essay ©2017 Jean-Pascal Vachon.

week 9 early 20th-century music 27 andris nelsons, ray and maria stata music director bernard haitink, lacroix family fund conductor emeritus seiji ozawa, music director laureate thomas adès, deborah and philip edmundson artistic partner Boston Symphony Orchestra 137th season, 2017–2018

Thursday, November 30, 8pm Friday, December 1, 1:30pm Saturday, December 2, 8pm | the robert and jane mayer concert

andris nelsons conducting

derek bermel “elixir” (2006)

prokofiev violin concerto no. 2 in g minor, opus 63 Allegro moderato Andante assai Allegro ben marcato leonidas kavakos

{intermission} Peter Vanderwarker

28 strauss “an alpine symphony,” opus 64 Night—Sunrise—The Ascent—Entry into the Wood— Wandering by the Brook—At the Waterfall—Apparition— On Flowery Meadows—On the Alm—Through Thicket and Undergrowth on the Wrong Path—On the Glacier— Dangerous Moments—On the Summit—Vision—The Fog Rises—The Sun Gradually Becomes Obscured—Elegy— Calm Before the Storm—Thunderstorm. Descent—Sunset— Dying Away of Sound—Night

Please note that these performances of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” are being recorded for future release on compact disc. Your cooperation in keeping noise in Symphony Hall at a minimum is sincerely appreciated.

the wendy shattuck and sam plimpton concert on friday afternoon celebrates the 150th anniversary of the new england conservatory of music, and the many bso orchestral players who have taught and inspired nec students. bank of america and takeda pharmaceutical company limited are proud to sponsor the bso’s 2017-18 season.

The evening concerts will end about 10:10, the afternoon concert about 3:40. Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe performs on a Stradivarius violin, known as the “Lafont,” generously donated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra by the O’Block Family. Two members of the violin section perform on a 1754 J.B. Guadagnini violin, the “ex-Zazofsky,” and on a 1778 Nicolò Gagliano violin, both generously donated to the orchestra by Michael L. Nieland, M.D., in loving memory of Mischa Nieland, a member of the cello section from 1943 to 1988. Steinway & Sons Pianos, selected exclusively for Symphony Hall. The BSO’s Steinway & Sons pianos were purchased through a generous gift from Gabriella and Leo Beranek. The program books for the Friday series are given in loving memory of Mrs. Hugh Bancroft by her daughters, the late Mrs. A. Werk Cook and the late Mrs. William C. Cox. Special thanks to Fairmont Copley Plaza, Delta Air Lines, and Commonwealth Worldwide Executive Limousine. Broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra are heard on 99.5 WCRB. In consideration of the performers and those around you, please turn off all electronic equipment during the performance, including tablets, cellular phones, pagers, watch alarms, messaging devices of any kind, anything that emits an audible signal, and anything that glows. Thank you for your cooperation. Please note that the use of audio or video recording devices, or taking pictures of the artists—whether photographs or videos—is prohibited during concerts.

week 9 program 29 The Program in Brief...

New York City-born Derek Bermel is a sought-after, stylistically voracious composer, conductor, clarinetist, and educator, as well as a singer and multi-instrumentalist in a variety of contexts. His ties to the BSO go back more than twenty years—he was a Tanglewood Music Center Composition Fellow in 1995 and has been commissioned by both Tanglewood and the BSO itself. Elixir is an eight-minute, single-movement work premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 2006. The work features a sedate but colorful repeated phrase played by the onstage orchestra, with contrasting, quirky commentary from wind players stationed in the auditorium.

Following his departure from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution, Sergei Prokofiev spent the following two decades first in the United States, then in France. Already in the 1920s he apparently entertained the possibility of returning to Russia and becoming a citizen of the Soviet Union; he finally moved there permanently in 1936. His Second Violin Concerto dates from 1935, when Prokofiev had one foot still in Western Europe and one in Russia. He was composing his popular ballet Romeo and Juliet at the same time; a feeling for direct, transparent musical character and sweeping melody infuses both works. The BSO gave the first U.S. performances of the Second Violin Concerto in 1937, with Jascha Heifetz as soloist and Serge Koussevitzky, a great proponent of Prokofiev’s music, conducting.

Between 1886 and 1903, Richard Strauss secured his reputation as the leading German composer of his time by writing the series of orchestral tone poems that included Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Don Quixote, and A Hero’s Life, among others. An Alpine Symphony—the last of his tone poems, and his final large-scale, purely symphonic work—followed more than a decade later, by which time he had also cemented his place as an opera composer with Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier. The germ for An Alpine Symphony can be traced to a boyhood mountain-climbing expedition during which Strauss’s group lost its way heading up a mountain and was drenched in a storm coming down.

In its continuous, fifty-minute span of twenty-two sections (each with its own title), An Alpine Symphony depicts a climb to the summit of a mountain and a hasty descent during a tremendous downpour. Two strongly contrasted sections—“Night” and “Sunrise”— set the stage. These are followed by music evoking various aspects of the climb and the Alpine scenery (e.g, a waterfall, a brook, flowery meadows, a glacier, the summit). During the quick descent, we encounter many of these same sights, but in reverse order. Another, more spiritual aspect of the score—reflecting, in Strauss’s words, “the adoration of eternal, glorious nature”—is embodied in the work’s numerous quieter, even rarified, passages, including the final moments, as night once more enshrouds the scene.

Robert Kirzinger (Bermel, Prokofiev)/Marc Mandel (Strauss)

30 Richard Bowditch

Derek Bermel “Elixir” (2006)

DEREK BERMEL was born in Manhattan, New York City, on October 14, 1967, and lives in Brooklyn. He composed “Elixir” at the request of the composer John Adams for the American Composers Orchestra, which premiered the piece on May 3, 2006, at Carnegie Hall in New York, with Steven Sloane conducting. “Elixir” was commissioned by Betty Freeman for the American Composers Orchestra, Steven Sloane, music director; Robert Beaser, artistic director; Dennis Russell Davies, conductor laureate; and co-commissioned by the Westchester Philharmonic, Paul Lustig Dunkel, music director. This is the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of “Elixir,” though the orchestra previously commissioned Bermel’s “Swing Song,” which was premiered at Tanglewood on August 1, 2009 (see below).

THE SCORE OF “ELIXIR” calls for three flutes, two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets (second doubling bass clarinet), bassoon, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones and bass trombone, tuba, percussion (three or four players: I. Chinese cymbal, sizzle cymbal, rainstick; II. deep nipple gong, mark tree, bamboo wind chimes; III. vibraphone, mark tree, bamboo wind chimes; IV. mark tree, bamboo wind chimes, rain stick), two harps, theremin, six-string fretless electric bass guitar, and strings. Two groups of winds are positioned within the auditorium: flutes, first oboe, first clarinet, and first trumpet are to audience-left, second oboe/ English horn, second clarinet/bass clarinet, first and second horns, and first trombone to audience- right. The significant part for theremin is being performed by Elizabeth Brown. The six-string bass guitar part is being played by BSO double bassist Dennis Roy.

The most striking aspect of Derek Bermel’s orchestral score Elixir is that the most active members of the orchestra aren’t on stage but are stationed in two ensembles to the left and right of the audience in the auditorium. That spatial dispersion reflects the contrasting musical character those instruments embody versus that of the onstage orchestra: active and gregarious compared with atmospheric and sedate. It also con- tributes a theatrical dimension, asking members of the audience to reset their expec- tations of what happens in the concert hall, thereby creating different kinds of spaces

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32 both sonic and, in a way, cultural: the formal division of audience/orchestra is disrupted and the music itself and the ensemble setup suggest other, familiar ways we experience music outside of the concert hall, where intentional and environmental sound interact, as at a fair or outdoors. The music of Charles Ives is a notable illustration of this idea. Although Bermel recalls that he wasn’t consciously channeling Ives while writing Elixir, he acknowledges that many of Ives’s wildest ideas have become so pervasive over the past century as to be virtually second-nature for today’s composers.

Music as a broad cultural activity is fundamental to Derek Bermel’s thinking. In addition to being a composer, he’s a world-class clarinetist and an active and enthusiastic conductor of his colleagues’ work. He has ties to several ensembles and educational programs, earning a reputation for dynamic, innovative, and thoughtful programming. As a composer and as a performer he embraces a wide range of styles, from Western classical to Balkan folk music to rock and gospel and hip-hop. As a singer-songwriter and keyboardist he fronted the pop-rock band Peace by Piece, and he regularly works with other musicians from New York’s jazz and rock communities. He incorporates, to the extent possible with the constraints of notation, the nuance and verve of performance into his scores, using complex rhythms, microtonally bent or “blue” pitches, glissandos, varieties of tone quality and articulation, and other subtle techniques, all in the service of an organic, natural result that sometimes approaches the freedom of improvisation (an activity he also pursues as a performer). He remains fascinated by the challenges of process and form as well, combining nuance and spontaneity of surface style with rigorous process and architecture.

Bermel’s academic dossier includes formal studies at Yale University and the University of Michigan; his composition teachers included William Albright, Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, and Michael Trenzer. A 1995 Composition Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center, he worked there with Henri Dutilleux. He later worked with both Dutil- leux in Paris and Andriessen in the Netherlands during the same period. With Andre Hajdu in Jerusalem he studied ethnomusicology and orchestration. Adding to the breadth of his musical thinking as well as to his performance experience, he studied the Lobi xylophone in Ghana, Thracian folk music in Bulgaria, and uillean pipes in Ireland; some of his music explicitly acknowledges these excursions, such as his Thracian Echoes for orchestra or his ensemble piece Canzonas Americanas. Bermel’s accomplishments have been recognized with the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, several ASCAP awards, and Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. He also co-founded the ensemble Music from Copland House as well as the pan-Atlantic crossover TONK Ensemble. As an educator he founded the Making Score program of the New York Youth Symphony. He was also artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Bermel’s music has been commissioned by ensembles throughout the country. As noted above, the BSO commissioned his Swing Song, which was premiered at Tangle- wood in August 2009 by Sir James Galway and an ensemble of BSO and Tanglewood

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GROGANCO.COM | 617.720.2020 20 CHARLES STREET, BOSTON, MA 02114 Music Center flutists dubbed “The Tanglewood Festival Flute Ensemble,” in a concert marking Galway’s 70th birthday. His string quartet Intonations was commissioned jointly by the Tanglewood Music Center and the 92nd Street Y, and Tanglewood also commissioned his brief fanfare In Tangle, for brass and percussion. The Chicago-based new music ensemble eighth blackbird commissioned and toured his Tied Shifts, which they performed during Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music in August 2005. Ber- mel’s big piece The Good Life for chorus and orchestra was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in October 2008. His A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace, a Kousse- vitzky Foundation commission, was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 2010. The latter was the culminating work of a three-year Music Alive residency with ASSISTING NEW the ACO. Canzonas Americanas, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was also premiered in 2010. Bermel has also written for such groups as the Boston Modern ENGLAND FAMILIES Orchestra Project, the Guarneri Quartet, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which performed his LCJO commission Migration Series featuring the composer and Wynton Marsalis. This past summer, a collaboration with WITH THE SALE OF the poet/novelist Sandra Cisneros resulted in his Mango Suite, commissioned for the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and the THEIR FINE JEWELRY Princeton Symphony. Based on Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street, the piece serves as the jumping-off point for a larger-scale theatrical collaboration with Cisneros AND PAINTINGS currently in progress. The single-movement orchestral work Elixir was one of the products of Bermel’s association with the American Composers Orchestra. The title’s suggestion of a potion SINCE 1987. resulting from an alchemical process is an apt one: on one level the piece is very much “about” how harmony becomes timbre and vice versa, couched in what is ostensibly a straightforward, song-like form. Following a quiet introductory percussion cadenza, the highly constrained harmonic scheme produces the audible consistency of the narrative, a soft, cycling, chorale-like pattern providing a template through which the combined timbres of the orchestra grow ever richer. The theremin, an early electronic instrument with a uniquely ethereal timbre, adds its distinct color to the overall orchestral sheen. About halfway through the eight-minute piece, incisive fragments of melody—birdlike, fanfare-like—superpose themselves onto the legato orchestral foundation, these inter- ruptions also growing more insistent and complex as they go. The chorale-like cycle remains a constant presence.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer/annotator robert kirzinger is Associate Director of Program Publications of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. VAN CLEEF & ARPELS Diamond , SOLD

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Client - Team One Job # - 144448 Ver. - AD01 Cyan Magenta Yellow Black Sergei Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Opus 63

SERGEI PROKOFIEV was born in Sontsovka, Ukraine, on April 23, 1891, and died in Moscow on March 5, 1953. He composed his Violin Concerto No. 2 during the summer of 1935; it received its premiere on December 1, 1935, in Madrid, with the French violinist Robert Soetens as soloist and Enrique Fernández Arbós conducting.

IN ADDITION TO THE SOLO VIOLINIST, the score of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 calls for an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, castanets), and strings.

The years between 1932 and 1936 were transitional and crucial for the nomadic Sergei Prokofiev. Although still based in Paris, where he had lived with his family since 1923, the composer—apparently homesick—made increasingly frequent and extended trips to the USSR during this period. Nearly all the music he wrote after 1932 was composed for Soviet commissions and first performed in Russia. Indeed, in their overeagerness to claim Prokofiev as “ours,” Soviet musicologists traditionally cited 1932 as the year of his “final return” to the homeland. But the composer came to the fateful decision to make Stalin’s Moscow his permanent home gradually, over the course of several years, and finally moved his family there only in the spring of 1936, on the eve of the purges that would decimate the ranks of Russia’s leading artists and intellectuals.

Oddly oblivious of the increasingly intolerant cultural climate in Moscow, Prokofiev ener- getically forged closer links with Soviet orchestras, theaters, filmmakers, conductors, and publishers. In 1933 he wrote his first film score, for the charmingLieutenant Kijé, an ironic tale of mistaken identity and Tsarist stupidity set around 1800. (Prokofiev recycled the music into a suite that soon became one of his most popular works.) Numerous other scores for Soviet films would follow in the coming years. In late 1934, he was approached by Sergei Radlov, a director affiliated with the Mariinsky Theater in Leningrad, to write his first ballet for a Soviet theater. It would become his first

week 9 program notes 37 Program page for the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances—also the first American performances—of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on December 17 and 18, 1937, with soloist Jascha Heifetz and Serge Koussevitzky conducting (BSO Archives)

38 full-length “story ballet” and one of his greatest artistic successes—Romeo and Juliet. At the same time, Prokofiev began making public statements in leading Soviet publications about the role of the Soviet composer, and what kind of music Soviet society needed. In an article for the official newspaperIzvestiia , Prokofiev outlined his aesthetic ideas: Finding the right language for our music is not easy. It should first of all be melodic, but the melody, though simple and accessible, shouldn’t become a refrain or a trivial turn of phrase. Many composers have difficulty composing melody in general—no matter what kind—and composing a melody for definitely stated goals is even more difficult. The same holds true for compositional technique and how it is set forth; it must be clear and simple, but not hackneyed. Its simplicity must not be an old- fashioned one; it must be a new simplicity.

“A new simplicity.” Actually, Prokofiev had first set forth this concept several years earlier in France but found that it was more suited to his new role as a Soviet composer. Paris valued complexity more than simplicity. Musically, Prokofiev’s “new simplicity” meant a more homophonic, transparent, and emotionally lyrical style; less dissonance; an increased emphasis on melody; a preference for programmatic and “public” genres; an avoidance of the avant-garde extremism of the 1920s; and an emulation of the ideals, subject matter, and techniques of the leading “classical” composers (particularly Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky) of 19th-century Russian music. To a surprisingly large extent, Prokofiev’s professed vision of a “new simplicity” also coincided with the tenets of Soviet Socialist Realism in music.

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week 9 program notes 39

Prokofiev in 1938 with the film director Sergei Eisenstein, with whom Prokofiev collaborated extensively after returning to the Soviet Union

In the months immediately following the appearance of his new credo in Izvestiia, Pro- kofiev composed two major works: the balletRomeo and Juliet and the Second Violin Concerto. The concerto was Prokofiev’s last non-Soviet commission, but like the ballet, it definitely reflects some of the features of the “new simplicity,” particularly the primacy of melody. Especially as compared to the First Violin Concerto (composed in 1917), the Second is more traditional in form and harmonic language, just as Romeo is considerably more conventional than Prokofiev’s early short ballets likeThe Buffoon or Le Pas d’acier (The Steel Step). In his youth, Prokofiev liked to think of himself as a debunker of polite 19th-century tradition, but both the Second Concerto and Romeo pay tribute to that world—and especially to the music of Tchaikovsky.

Prokofiev was commissioned to write the Second Violin Concerto by a group of French admirers of the violinist Robert Soetens, on the condition that Soetens have sole right to perform the work for one year. In composing it, Prokofiev (as he often did) used some themes he had already been collecting with a violin piece in mind. “Reflecting my nomadic concertizing existence,” the composer wrote in his autobiography, “the concerto was written in the most diverse countries: the main subject of the first movement in Paris, the first theme of the second movement in Voronezh, the instrumentation was completed in Baku, and the premiere took place in December of 1935 in Madrid.” Most of the work of assembly was done during the summer of 1935 in Russia, while Prokofiev was staying with his family at the country retreat of the Bolshoi Theater (working on the score of Romeo and Juliet) in the idyllic surroundings of Polenovo. This was a happy and productive time for the composer, as we can see from a letter he wrote to his old friend Vladimir Dukelsky (better known as the American Broadway and song composer Vernon Duke): I’m spending the summer at an estate that belongs to the Bolshoi Theater, near Serpukhov. It’s a marvelous little spot, a bit noisy when 3/4 of the Bolshoi Theater

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troupe comes here on vacation, but it’s actually fun, especially since I have a separate little cottage with a Bluthner and a terrace overlooking the Oka River, where it is very quiet and very conducive to good work. Lina Ivanovna and the children also came here in August; everyone made a great fuss over the boys and spoiled them to pieces. Now all the opera and ballet people have gone away, and I’m sitting over the score up to eight hours a day. Besides the ballet, I have written a Second Violin Concerto, two symphonic suites, two opuses for piano (one of them is called Pensées), and an album for children.

Prokofiev was right to observe that the Sec ond Violin Concerto is “completely different” from the equally brilliant First Violin Concerto written nearly twenty years earlier. Although both pieces have three movements, the first two of the Second Concerto— each about ten minutes in length—are relatively slow. The First Concerto has faster tempi (including a precipitous Vivacissimo) than the Second, and puts greater emphasis on velocity and flashy technical dexterity in the solo part. The Second Con certo even eschews the convention of a solo cadenza. But what is most different about the Second is its predominantly cantilena character: its melodies are some of the most beautiful, flowing, and lyrical that Prokofiev ever wrote. Nor does he cut them short, impatient with emotional display, as he did in many of his earlier compositions—including, to some extent, the First Violin Concerto. Perhaps the romantic feelings stimulated by the simultaneous composition of Romeo help to explain why.

The Second Concerto never descends to the sentimental “Glazunov-ism” Prokofiev detested, however. Its characteristically “Prokofievian” rhyth mic drive and strategically

week 9 program notes 43 placed dissonances provide a bracing contrast to the prevailing lyrical mood. Particu larly witty and original is the use of percussion—including castanets, triangle, bass drum, and snare drum—in the concluding movement. In combination with the staccato double- stops in the solo part, it creates a slightly ironic “Spanish” atmosphere that at the same time pays homage to the final movement of Tchaikov sky’s Violin Concerto. Per haps to break the lyrical spell of the opening movements, the Second Concerto comes to an abrupt end with an ascending run in eighth-notes—tumultuoso—in the solo part. (The First Concerto does precisely the opposite, ending with an ethereal return to its fragile opening theme to counterbalance the predominating speed and aggressiveness of what has come before.)

The Second Concerto achieved an immediate and lasting success with both critics and audience. Even the prickly Prokofiev was pleased, writing to his friend composer Nikolai Miaskovsky back in Moscow that the premiere in Madrid “gave me great pleasure. It seems the concerto is a success. The public reception was also excellent—the music somehow immediately reached the audience. Now I still plan to look it over again and to add a few details here and there.” The piece was published in full score by Gutheil in Europe in 1937, and in a piano-violin version in the USSR in 1938. It remains one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all modern violin concerti.

Harlow Robinson harlow robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History at Northeastern University. The author of “Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography” and “Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians,” he is a frequent annotator and lecturer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and the Aspen Music Festival.

THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA gave the first American performances of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on December 17 and 18, 1937, with Jascha Heifetz as soloist under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky. Subsequent BSO performances have featured Heifetz (with Richard Burgin conducting); Zino Francescatti, Isaac Stern, and Joseph Silverstein (all with Charles Munch); Masuko Ushioda and Itzhak Perlman (both with Erich Leinsdorf); Peter Zazofsky (Seiji Ozawa); Frank Peter Zimmermann (Yuri Temirkanov); Tamara Smirnova (Carl St. Clair); Joshua Bell (Charles Dutoit); Midori (Mariss Jansons); Kyung Wha-Chung (James DePreist); Gil Shaham (the most recent Tanglewood performance, with John Williams conducting on July 8, 2000), Lisa Batiashvili (Charles Dutoit), and Julian Rachlin (the most recent subscription performances, with Asher Fisch conducting in January 2015).

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www.naejuilliard.com/bisboston Richard Strauss “An Alpine Symphony,” Opus 64

RICHARD GEORG STRAUSS was born in Munich, Germany, on June 11, 1864, and died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, on September 8, 1949. His earliest sketches for “An Alpine Symphony” (“Eine Alpensinfonie”) date from 1911. He began the orchestration on November 1, 1914, and completed the score on February 8, 1915. Strauss himself led the first performance, on October 28, 1915, with the orchestra of the Dresden Hofkapelle at the Philharmonie in Berlin. The score is dedicated to Count Nicolaus Seebach, who was director of the Royal Opera in Dresden. THE SCORE OF “AN ALPINE SYMPHONY” calls for two flutes, two piccolos (doubling third and fourth flute), two oboes, English horn (doubling third oboe), and heckelphone (bass oboe at these performances), E-flat clarinet, two clarinets in B-flat, one in C, and bass clarinet in B-flat, three bassoons and contrabassoon (doubling fourth bassoon), four horns, four tenor tubas (doubling fifth through eighth horns), four trumpets, four trombones, two bass tubas, two harps (“doubled if possible”), organ, wind machine, thunder machine, glockenspiel, cymbals, bass drum, side drum, triangle, cowbells, tam-tam (three players), celesta, timpani (two players), and strings. Strauss asks that the flute, oboe, E-flat clarinet, and C clarinet parts be doubled from rehearsal number 94 (just before “The Fog Rises”) to the end of the score. He also recommends use of “Samuel’s Aerophon” to assist the wind players with their long sustained notes.* The organist at these performances is Dexter Kennedy.

Upon his return to Boston in September 1911 from summering in Europe, where he had spent time visiting with Richard Strauss at the composer’s home in Garmisch, Bos ton Symphony music director Max Fiedler told an interviewer: I only wish that I were going to be able to perform this winter the new symphony on which Strauss is at work. Unfortunately there is no possible chance of it. The work

* Writing for the Boston Symphony program in 1925, Philip Hale noted that “the aërophor [sic], or Tonbinde Appar[a]t, an invention of one Samuels, a court musician of Schwerin, is a sort of pump, a bellows worked by the foot of the player, and connected with the wind instrument by a length of rubber tube, so that the sound of a tone can be protracted.” Norman Del Mar, in his biography of Strauss, writes that “this alas long-extinct device seems to have supplied oxygen to the distressed player by means of a foot-pump with a tube stretching up to the mouth.”

week 9 program notes 47 Program page for the first Boston Symphony performances of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” on December 18 and 19, 1925, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting (BSO Archives)

48 will be one of large dimensions, in two movements. The first is sketched in pencil and not yet scored, while the second is still in the mind of the composer and there is no possibility of its being finished in the next six or eight months. Besides working on this, Strauss is writing a motet for 20 voices, he is composing stage music for one of Reinhardt’s stage plays and is at work on a one-act opera. He has played for me so far as he could the first movement of his symphony and I have heard enough of it to make me anxious for the day when I will see it on the rack before me in an orchestra rehearsal. He will probably call it the “Alps Symphony.” In the first movement he goes up a lofty peak and comes down again. He passes Alpine farms and pastures, huntsmen, peasants singing in the fields and finally he reaches the lofty snow-capped peak. Then, like the true Strauss that he is, he uses the same music to descend with but with everything diminished to make the descent faster than the ascent. Altogether I think it is going to be a most notable work.

Strauss was at this time concerned with the curious hybrid project that would couple a staging of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme with his own one-act opera Ariadne auf Naxos to a text by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and which would have its none too successful premiere on October 25, 1912, at the Kleines Haus of the Hoftheater, Stuttgart, in a production by Max Rein hardt—only the first stage in a rather long and complicated history of composition and performance.* It was at Reinhardt’s Kleines Deutsches Thea ter in Berlin that Oscar Wilde’s Sa lome and, shortly after, the stage version of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra had been produced; both, of course, provided the source material for Strauss’s operas. Also by this time, the first performance ofDer Rosenkavalier, again to a libretto by Hofmannsthal, on January 26, 1911, at the Court Opera in Dresden had won the heart of the public, and the second great phase of Strauss’s composing career—as a composer for the operatic stage—was well established. Behind him was the series of tone poems with which he had secured his reputation as the leading German composer— Macbeth (1886; revised 1890 and 1891), Don Juan (1889), Death and Transfiguration (1889), Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), Ein Heldenleben (1898), and, adding insult to injury, as far as his critics were concerned, after the effrontery of portraying himself as Heldenleben’s composer- hero, the Symphonia domestica (1903), in which the resources of Strauss’s huge orchestra were employed to depict a typical day in the life of the com poser’s family.

It would be another dozen years before the last of Strauss’s tone poems appeared: An Alpine Symphony would ultimately be composed while Strauss was awaiting from Hofmannsthal material for what after Ariadne would be their next major undertaking— Die Frau ohne Schatten—although the germ for his final large-scale symphonic work can

* The motet to which Fiedler refers is likely the Deutsche Motette, Opus 62, for sixteen-part unaccom- panied double chorus plus four solo voices, to a text by Friedrich Rückert and completed in 1913.

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50 Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss

be traced to a much earlier time, specifically to a boyhood mountain-climbing expedition during which his group lost the way heading up and was drenched in a storm coming down. In 1900, following the completion of Heldenleben, Strauss wrote his par- ents that he had an idea for a symphonic poem “which would begin with a sunrise in Switzerland.” But only after he had used the royalties from Salome to build his villa at Garmisch with its spectacular Alpine views in 1908, and where he and his wife Pauline* lived for the rest of their lives, did he finally begin sketching the work. On May 15, 1911, he wrote to Hofmannsthal from Garmisch, inquiring how Frau was doing, wondering what was happening with the Molière, and complaining that, while waiting, he was in the meantime “torturing [himself] with a symphony—a job that, when all’s said and done, amuses me even less than chasing cockroaches.” The other project with which Strauss was likewise busying himself as a stopgap was the ballet Josephslegende, to a scenario by Hofmann s thal, on which he worked from 1912 to 1914, and which was given its premiere at the Paris Opéra by Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet on May 14, 1914 (one year after Diaghilev’s troupe had danced the first performance of Stravinsky’sLe Sacre du printemps).

Strauss completed the score of his Alpine Symphony on February 8, 1915, dedicating it “in profound gratitude” to Count Nicolaus Seebach, director of the Royal Opera in

* Strauss fell in love with soprano Pauline de Ahna during his summer holiday in 1887. She sang Isolde when Strauss conducted Tristan with the opera company at Weimar in January 1892, and she sang the heroine of his first opera,Guntram , at its first performance under his baton and also in Weimar, in May 1894. They married on September 10 that year; the four songs of Opus 27 (Morgen, Cäcilie, Ruhe, meine Seele, and Heimliche Aufforderung) were his gift to her. Pauline plays an important part in both Ein Heldenleben and the Symphonia domestica. Im Abendrot, the last of Strauss’s posthumously published Four Last Songs, is a reflection upon their life together. She died in May 1950, less than a year after her husband.

week 9 program notes 51 Be in touch with the full spectrum of arts and culture happening right here in our community. Visit The ARTery at wbur.org/artery today. Strauss’s villa at Garmisch

Dresden, where had been given the premieres of his second opera, Feuersnot (1901), then Salome (1905), Elektra (1909), and Der Rosenkavalier. The first performance ofEine Alpen sinfonie was given by the Dresden Hofkapelle, but in Berlin, where Strauss was conductor of the Berlin Opera from 1898 to 1908, and where he also conducted concerts with the Berlin Tonkünstler Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic (it should be remembered that, like Mahler, Strauss was regarded equally as both composer and conductor). Among the guests invited to the final rehearsal were Humperdinck, Schnabel, Dohnányi, Lhévinne, Lilli Lehmann, and Max Fiedler—no longer music director of the Boston Sym phony Orchestra—and it was during rehearsals for the Alpine Symphony that the composer commented that he had at last learned how to orchestrate(!).

The premiere went largely unnoticed, but with World War I then in its second year, there were larger issues on people’s minds. Strauss was not dissatisfied; on November 10, 1915, he wrote to Hofmannsthal of his plans to visit Vienna with Pauline the following month, adding that “You must hear my Alpine Symphony on December 5: it is really good!” And years later, when he was invited to London for a festival of his music in October 1947, he wrote that, of all his orchestral works, he would most have preferred to conduct the Alpine Symphony, though in the event—owing to difficulties with the size of the orchestra—he settled for the Symphonia domestica.

General opinion has for a long time held that An Alpine Symphony represents, with respect to the quality of the tone poems, an even greater decline in Strauss’s creative powers than the Symphonia domestica before it, just as Ein Heldenleben had already suggested to certain minds something of a falling off before that. This notion, coupled with the requirement of a gargantuan orchestra, has resulted in its being only rarely performed.* But An Alpine Symphony brings to a close the entire series of purely orches-

* Del Mar suggests that Strauss’s instrumentation reflects the composer’s taking for granted the resources of the Wagnerian opera orchestra, citing the twelve offstage horns of Tristan and Tannhäuser, as well as the twelve offstage trumpets and various wind and percussion ensembles of Lohengrin.

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Developed by Massachusetts General Hospital Proudly Celebrating Over 25 Years! tral pieces begun even earlier than Macbeth with the travelogue-in-music, Aus Italien, of 1886—thus ending with a return to the same sort of geographical nature-painting he had attempted some thirty years earlier; and it benefits from and is a measure fo Strauss’s experience with the large-scale operatic orchestras of Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier, while serving at the same time as rather grand preparation for Die Frau ohne Schatten. It is a spectacular piece of musical pictorialism with numerous clearly and aptly characterized themes and ideas from a composer for whom producing this kind of music was virtually second nature.* And it has an added spiritual dimension, which the composer himself recognized: the death of his friend and contemporary Gustav Mahler (whose music Strauss championed, and in whose music nature-painting plays an extremely significant role) on May 18, 1911, affected Strauss very deeply, and in his notebook Strauss wrote that his Alpine Symphony represented “the ritual of puri- fication through one’s own strength, emancipation through work, and the adoration of eternal, glorious nature.” Following the specific and extremely subjective pictorialism of the Alpine Symphony’s mountain-climbing course from sunrise to sunset, the final two sections of the piece—“Ausklang” (not readily translatable; “the dying away of sound” gives some idea) and the return of “Night”—suggest that the composer has stepped back, is viewing the mountain, and nature, from outside himself, as it were, from some spiritual distance or remove, and the music closes with an aura of spiritual acceptance and then, finally, awe-inspired objectivity.

But to begin at the beginning—Strauss’s Alpine Symphony is in a single large movement some fifty minutes in length and divided by headings in the score into twenty-two sections. The first two of these set the scene for the Alpine climbing expedition depicted in the course of the work; the summit of the mountain is reached midway through the journey, and, following the descent through a drenching downpour, the final sections serve as a coda to the whole. Here is a sort of “trail guide”:

Strauss begins by depicting deep, mysterious Nacht (“Night”) with a dark, descending B-flat minor scale through which each added note is sustained so that all sound imuls - taneously. Trombones and bass tuba solemnly declaim the theme of the mountain, noble, imposing, majestic:

* Strauss remarked that he went about composing the Alpine Symphony “just as a cow gives milk.” According to Del Mar, the composer also “made the extravagant claim in conversation at about this time that he could, if necessary, describe a knife and fork in music.”

week 9 program notes 55 A softly undulating figure in low strings and bassoons leads to a tremendous buildup through the full orchestra (the opening of Wagner’s Rheingold cannot have been far from the composer’s mind) and night gives way to Sonnenaufgang (“Sunrise”). The theme of the sun, as heard here, is a glorious melodic outburst built, like the earlier depiction of night, on a descending scale, but now in the major mode, for full orchestra, and punctuated by cymbal crashes:

The texture is enriched by a broad countertheme energized by motion in triplets and taken up by each section of the orchestra. Another buildup, an accelerando, and a brief, dramatic pause now set us on our actual journey up the mountain with a quick marching theme (marked “very lively and energetic”):

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56 This begins the section of the score headed Der Anstieg (“The Ascent”) and serves as a sort of “main theme” for the symphonic movement to follow. This theme is developed, leading to a full E-flat major cadence and the entry of another important idea, a pointed fanfare-like motif which Strauss will use to characterize other aspects of the ascent to the peak, particularly during the more rugged moments of the climb:

Now, however, it serves to introduce the sound of a distant hunting party: twelve horns, two trumpets, and two trombones are heard from afar.

A sudden change of texture and mood brings our Eintritt in den Wald (“Entry into the Wood”), in which this broad additional theme for the brass:

and then a more relaxed version of the marching theme are heard against a background of string arpeggios. The music here is broad and expansive, serving as a sort of relaxed second-theme unit in contrast to the faster, march-like theme introduced earlier. Bird- calls are heard, the leisurely pace continues, the marching theme is given a soft, gentle rendering by the strings, and solo string quartet initiates the passage that will lead us to the next section of the score.

Now we have a large development-like section which encompasses several phases of the climb: Wanderung neben dem Bache (“Wandering by the Brook”) is marked by an increase in fluid passagework. The energy level increases still further, and cascading figures in the winds and strings tell us that we areAm Wasserfall (“At the Waterfall”), one of the most vividly specific moments of Strauss’s nature-painting in this score. A segment marked Erscheinung (“Apparition”)—depicting, according to Del Mar, “the Fairy of the Alps appearing beneath the rainbow formed by the spray of the cascading water”—brings yet another broad theme, richly romantic, destined for a later important reappearance, and here given to horns and violas:

This brings us to the next section, Auf blumige Wiesen (“On Flowery Meadows”): the march theme is heard softly in the cellos, the higher strings provide a soft backdrop, and isolated points of color (winds, harps, and pizzicato violas) dot the landscape. The

week 9 program notes 57 pace quickens, and we have reached the expansive landscape Auf der Alm (“On the Alm”), the Alpine pastureland, where cowbells, bird song, sheep, and shepherds piping distract us from the climb that still remains, lulling us to relaxation.

A shrill cry from the woodwinds and yet another broad, airy theme begun by the horns

propel us on our way. But now the going gets rough, and the shifting character of the music brings us Durch Dickicht und Gestrupp auf Irrwegen (“Through Thicket and

2017-18

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String Quintet No. 1 in B-flat, K.174 Mozart String Quintet No. 3 in C, K.515 Brookline Sunday Afternoons String Quintet No. 2 in G, at 3:00 Brahms Opus 111 in beautiful St. Paul’s Church Jan 7 | Mar 11 | Apr 22 Peter Zazofsky, Bayla Keyes – violins, Beth Guterman Chu, Jonathan Chu – violas, Jonathan Miller – cello You ™ Please note Hamilton Hall is a Registered National Historic Landmark and is not handicap accessible to the performance hall on the second floor. Are Hear BostonArtistsEnsemble.org

58 Under growth on the Wrong Path”). A sudden sounding of the mountain theme on trumpets and trombones, and the climbers are Auf dem Gletscher (“On the Glacier”), where the course of their progress through the Gefahrvolle Augenblicke (“Dangerous Moments”) that follow is charted by appearances of the original marching theme and the pointed fanfare-like climbing theme introduced at the outset of the ascent.

Suddenly we are Auf dem Gipfel (“On the Summit”), the centerpiece of the score: the atmosphere is one of wonder and tense anticipation, as trombones proclaim the Zarathustra -like peak motif and then the solo oboe stammers a hesitant tune. There is a large buildup based on a succession of themes—the peak motif just introduced, the theme of the mountain from the beginning, and the broad horn tune from the “Apparition” section of the score—and a great climax for full orchestra, punctuated by the fanfare-like climbing theme, brings the recapitulation of the sun theme, gloriously proclaimed in C major. This initiates another development-like section labelled Vision, based largely on the peak theme and the “Apparition” theme and characterized by shifting tonalities, with appearances of the sun theme and mountain theme preparing the way for the next, transitional part of the score.

There is a misty thinning of the orchestral texture as “The Fog Rises” (Nebel steigen auf), and we hear soft fragments of the sun theme as “The Sun Gradually Becomes Obscured” (Die Sonne verdüstert sich allmählich). This atmosphere of mounting ten- sion continues through a brief section marked Elegie (“Elegy”), and suddenly the “Calm Before the Storm” (Stille vor dem Sturm) sets in: a rumble of timpani and bass drum, and the stammered woodwind tune heard earlier, perfectly capture the rarified pre- storm atmosphere. There are isolated raindrops, ever-increasing gusts of wind, flashes of lightning, thunder, and suggestions of darkness (by allusion to the night theme). Then the full fury of the storm is unleashed.

This part of the score, Gewitter und Sturm, Abstieg (“Thunderstorm, Descent”), marks the last phase of the mountain-climbing expedition, and in it Strauss couples the climbers’ descent through the tempest with the recurrence of many of the ideas heard earlier—in reverse order, and at a very quick pace, as the mountaineers hurriedly retrace their steps. Easily recognizable are reappearances of the marching theme (now heard, appropriately enough for the descent, with its contours inverted), the pointed fanfare- like motif, the waterfall music, the “Apparition” theme, and the woodland theme. The storm subsides—there is a final gust of wind followed by some isolated raindrops—the noble theme of the mountain is proclaimed once more by the brass, and the organ, which has been assuming increasing prominence, enters to introduce a ceremonial phrase proclaimed by brass and harps. It is “Sunset” (Sonnenuntergang), and spacious treatment is given to developments of the sun theme, heard in strings and winds in long-held note values with soaring embellishments in the violins.

Chorale-like phrases on solo organ, again taking the sun theme as point of departure, usher in the next-to-last section of the score, labeled Ausklang (“Dying Away of Sound”). In a passage parallel to the earlier “Vision” section, but in tones much softer and more

week 9 program notes 59 Boston ChamBer musiC soCiety

Debussy Centennial Highlighting the music of Debussy (1862–1918) with performances of his string quartet and three sonatas

Sun. 1/7 • 3 PM | Sanders Theatre Sun. 2/18 • 3 PM | Sanders Theatre Dohnányi Serenade in C for String Trio, Op. 10 Beethoven Serenade in D for Flute, Violin & Viola Debussy String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 Walton Piano Quartet in D minor Dvořák String Sextet in A major, Op. 48 Debussy Sonata for Flute, Viola & Harp, L. 137 with violist Kim Kashkashian with flutist Paula Robison & harpist Jessica Zhou 617.349.0086 • www.bostonchambermusic.org

60 relaxed, and marked to be played “in gentle ecstasy,” winds and brass develop the yearn- ing “Apparition” theme. The strings return to bring yet another development of the marching theme, heard both in its original form and in inversion. The final pages fo this section are marked by a sudden reappearance of the shrill woodwind theme and further soft appearances of the marching theme, the violins rising higher and higher un til the E-flat tonality of this section suddenly gives way to B-flat minor and the returnf o Nacht (“Night”). The descending scale that opened the symphony is heard once more, the brass proclaim the mountain theme one last time, and a haunting, very slow variant of the marching theme is given out by the violins, ending with a final, dying glissando ot the last note. We leave the mountain as we encountered it, shrouded in mystery and darkness.

Marc Mandel marc mandel is Director of Program Publications of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

the first american performance of “An Alpine Symphony” was given by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski on April 28, 1916. By the end of that year, it had also been played by the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Minneapolis Symphony.

THE FIRST BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCES of “An Alpine Symphony” were given on December 18 and 19, 1925, by Serge Koussevitzky, who also led further performances the following month in Boston, New York City, and Brooklyn. Koussevitzky led “An Alpine Symphony” again with the BSO in March 1930, after which the orchestra did not play it again until October 1982, when André Previn conducted, subsequent performances being given by Edo de Waart (at Tanglewood in July 1987), Seiji Ozawa (first in December 1991, then again in January 1996 followed by performances that February as part of a North American tour, plus a Tanglewood performance that same year), Marek Janowski (December 2002), Christof Perick (the BSO's most recent Tanglewood performance, on August 10, 2003), and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (the most recent subscription performances, in January 2008). More recently, Andris Nelsons led the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in "An Alpine Symphony" this past summer, on August 20, 2017, to conclude the TMCO's annual Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert.

week 9 program notes 61 K8B<K@D<KF ;I<8D n`k_9fjkfeËjfecp)+&. ZcXjj`ZXcdlj`ZjkXk`fe To Read and Hear More...

The most useful and current source of information on Derek Bermel and his work is the composer’s website, derekbermel.com, which includes news, work-list, discography, biography, photos, and other information. His music is published by Peermusic Clas- sical. A wide-ranging 2013 interview with Bermel by Frank Oteri for New Music USA’s NewMusicBox website reveals more of the composer’s personality and preoccupations (nmbx.newmusicusa.org/derek-bermel-context-is-key/). Bermel’s music has been recorded extensively. Elixir was recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Gil Rose for the CD “Voices,” which also includes his Dust Dances, Thracian Echoes, and Voices for solo clarinet and orchestra, featuring Bermel as soloist (BMOP/ sound). Albums of his chamber music include “Soul Garden,” featuring performances by such artists as cellist Fred Sherry and the Borromeo String Quartet (CRI/New World), and “Canzonas Americanas,” a disc of ensemble works performed by Alarm Will Sound (Cantaloupe). Bermel also appears as a clarinetist on recordings of music by Sebastian Currier, John Musto, and many others.

Robert Kirzinger

The important modern study of Prokofiev is Harlow Robinson’sSergei Prokofiev: A Biog- raphy, originally published in 1987, reprinted in 2002 with a new foreword and afterword by the author (Northeastern University paperback). Robinson’s book avoids the biased attitudes of earlier writers whose viewpoints were colored by the “Russian”-vs.-“Western” perspectives typical of their time, as reflected in such older volumes as Israel Nestyev’s Prokofiev (Stanford University Press, translated from the Russian by Florence Jonas) and Victor Seroff’s Sergei Prokofiev: A Soviet Tragedy (Taplinger). Robinson has also produced Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev, newly translating and editing a volume of previously unpublished Prokofiev correspondence (Northeastern University). Sergey Prokofiev by Daniel Jaffé is in the well-illustrated series “20th-Century Composers” (Phaidon paperback). Michael Steinberg’s program note compilation The Concerto–A Listener’s Guide includes Prokofiev’s two violin concertos and his Second and Third piano concertos (Oxford University paperback). Robert Layton discusses Prokofiev’s concertos in his chapter on “Russia after 1917” in A Guide to the Concerto, which Layton also edited (Oxford paperback). Other useful books include Boris Schwarz’s Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, Enlarged Edition, 1917-1981 (Indiana University Press) and Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer’s Memoir, an autobiographical account covering the first seven- teen years of Prokofiev’s life, through his days at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (Doubleday).

week 9 read and hear more 63 Go beyond headlines like this one.

Don’t settle for what’s on the surface. Expand your point of view.

wgbhnews.org The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the young Itzhak Perlman recorded both of Proko- fiev’s violin concertos with Erich Leinsdorf conducting, No. 1 in 1964, No. 2 in 1966 (originally RCA, but now available on Sony in the low-priced, six-disc Leinsdorf/BSO compilation box “Erich Leinsdorf conducts Prokofiev,” also including symphonies 2, 3, 5, and 6, the five piano concertos with soloist John Browning, and other works). TheBSO also recorded Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 twice with Jascha Heifetz, in 1937 under Serge Koussevitzky and in 1959 under Charles Munch (also RCA). Other noteworthy violinist-conductor pairings for the two concertos include Joshua Bell with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony (Decca), Vadim Gluzman with Neeme Järvi with the Estonian National Symphony (Bis), Cho-Liang Lin with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony), Perlman with Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony (EMI), Gil Shaham with André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon), and Maxim Vengerov with Mstislav Rostropovich and the London Symphony Orchestra (Warner Classics). Perlman also recorded Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Erato).

The biggest biography of Richard Strauss is still Norman Del Mar’s three-volume Richard Strauss, which gives equal space to the composer’s life and music (Cornell University paperback); “An Alpine Symphony” receives detailed consideration in Volume II. More recent books on the composer include Tim Ashley’s Richard Strauss in the well-illustrated series “20th-Century Composers” (Phaidon paperback); The life of Richard Strauss by Bryan Gilliam, in the series “Musical lives” (Cambridge paperback); Raymond Holden’s Richard Strauss: A Musical Life, which examines the composer’s life through detailed consideration of his work as a conductor (Yale University Press), and Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge University Press) by Michael Kennedy, who also wrote Richard Strauss in the “Master Musicians” series (Oxford paperback).

This week’s BSO performances of An Alpine Symphony are being recorded for future release on compact disc. Andris Nelsons previously recorded the piece with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Orfeo). Other currently available recordings include Herbert Blomstedt’s with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Decca), Bernard Haitink’s with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live), Herbert von Karajan’s with the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon), Rudolf Kempe’s with the Staatska- pelle Dresden (Warner Classics or Brilliant Classics; originally EMI), Seiji Ozawa’s with the Vienna Philharmonic (Decca), Christian Thielemann’s also with the Vienna Phil- harmonic (Deutsche Grammophon), and Antoni Wit’s with the Staatskapelle Weimar (Naxos). Of historic interest is Strauss’s own recording, from 1941 with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (CD reissues on EMI, Preiser, and Dutton).

Marc Mandel

week 9 read and hear more 65

Guest Artist

Leonidas Kavakos

Recognized for his virtuosity and musicianship, Leonidas Kavakos appears with the world’s great orchestras and conductors and is an exclusive artist with Decca Classics. The three important mentors in his life have been Stelios Kafantaris, Josef Gingold, and Ferenc Rados. By age twenty-one Mr. Kavakos had already won three major competitions: the 1985 Sibelius Competition and the 1988 Paganini and Naumburg competitions, successes that led to his making the first recording of the original version of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, which earned a 1991 Gramophone Award. He was the winner of the 2017 Léonie Sonning Music Prize, Denmark’s highest musical honor. Previous winners include Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Dietrich Fischer- Dieskau, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Alfred Brendel, Daniel Baren- boim, and Sir Simon Rattle. In the 2017-18 season, Mr. Kavakos is artist-in-residence at both Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and Vienna’s Musikverein. He tours Europe with the Filharmonica della Scala under Chailly and Europe and Asia with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under Blomstedt. He is soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and, with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, gives the European premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Nyx: Fractured Dreams (Violin Concerto No. 4). Recital highlights include a European tour with Yuja Wang, a North American tour with Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, and recitals in Asia and Europe with regular chamber music partner Enrico Pace. In his burgeoning career as a conductor, Mr. Kavakos has led the London Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony,

week 9 guest artist 67

Houston Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Gürzenich Orchester, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Filarmonica Teatro La Fenice, and Budapest Festival orchestras. In the 2017-18 season he conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and Vienna Symphony. Mr. Kavakos’s first Decca Classics release, the complete Beethoven violin sonatas with Enrico Pace, earned him the ECHO Klassik award for Instrumentalist of the Year. Subsequent Decca releases include the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Gewand- haus Orchestra under Chailly, the Brahms violin sonatas with Yuja Wang, and “Virtuoso.” Named Gramophone magazine’s Artist of the Year 2014, he recently joined Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax on a Sony Classical disc of Brahms trios. His earlier discography encompasses recordings for BIS and ECM; for Sony Classical he recorded Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (winner, ECHO Klassik for Best Concerto Recording) and Mozart’s violin concertos as conductor and soloist with Camerata Salzburg. Born into a musical family in Athens, where he still resides, Leonidas Kavakos curates an annual violin and chamber music master class there, attracting violinists and ensembles from all over the world and reflecting his deep commitment to the handing on of musical knowledge and traditions. Part of this tradition is the art of violin and bow-making, which Mr. Kavakos regards as a great mystery and, to this day, an undisclosed secret. He plays the “Willemotte” Stradivarius violin of 1734 and owns modern violins made by F. Leonhard, S.P. Greiner, E. Haahti, and D. Bagué. Visit leonidaskavakos.com and facebook.com/leonidas.kavakos.violin for further information. Leonidas Kavakos made his Boston Symphony debut in March 2007 with Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 and his Tanglewood debut in August 2014 with Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 2. His most recent BSO appearances were as soloist and conductor for a subscription program of Bartók, Haydn, and Mussorgsky in November 2014, and a Tan- glewood performance of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in August 2015, at which time he also collaborated with Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma in an Ozawa Hall performance of the three Brahms piano trios.

For rates and information on advertising in the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood program books, please contact

Eric Lange |Lange Media Sales |781-642-0400 |[email protected]

week 9 guest artist 69 The Great Benefactors

In the building of his new symphony for Boston, the BSO’s founder and first benefactor, Henry Lee Higginson, knew that ticket revenues could never fully cover the costs of running a great orchestra. From 1881 to 1918 Higginson covered the orchestra’s annual deficits with personal contributions that exceeded $1 million. The Boston Symphony Orchestra now honors each of the following generous donors whose cumulative giving to the BSO is $1 million or more with the designation of Great Benefactor. For more information, please contact Bart Reidy, Director of Development, at 617-638-9469 or [email protected].

ten million and above

Julian Cohen ‡ • Fidelity Investments • Linde Family Foundation • Maria and Ray Stata • Anonymous

seven and one half million

Bank of America • Mr. and Mrs. George D. Behrakis • John F. Cogan, Jr. and Mary L. Cornille • Cynthia and Oliver Curme/The Lost & Foundation, Inc. • EMC Corporation

five million

Alli and Bill Achtmeyer • Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser • Alan J. and Suzanne W. Dworsky • Fairmont Copley Plaza • Germeshausen Foundation • Sally ‡ and Michael Gordon • Barbara and Amos Hostetter • Ted and Debbie Kelly • Commonwealth of Massachusetts • NEC Corporation • Megan and Robert O’Block • UBS • Stephen and Dorothy Weber

two and one half million

Mary and J.P. Barger • Gabriella and Leo ‡ Beranek • Roberta and George ‡ Berry • Bloomberg • Peter and Anne ‡ Brooke • Eleanor L. and Levin H. Campbell • Chiles Foundation • Mara E. Dole ‡ •

Eaton Vance Corporation • Jane and Jack Fitzpatrick ‡ • Susan Morse Hilles ‡ • Charlie and Dorothy Jenkins/The Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation • Stephen B. Kay and Lisbeth L. Tarlow/The Aquidneck Foundation • The Kresge Foundation • Lizbeth and George Krupp • Liberty Mutual Foundation, Inc. • Kate and Al ‡ Merck • Cecile Higginson Murphy • National Endowment for the Arts • Mrs. Mischa Nieland ‡ and Dr. Michael L. Nieland • William and Lia Poorvu • John S. and Cynthia Reed • Carol and Joe Reich • Kristin and Roger Servison • Miriam Shaw Fund • State Street Corporation and State Street Foundation • Thomas G. Stemberg ‡ • Miriam and Sidney Stoneman ‡ • Elizabeth B. Storer ‡ • Caroline and James Taylor • Samantha and John Williams • Anonymous (3)

70 one million

Helaine B. Allen • American Airlines • Lois ‡ and Harlan Anderson • Mariann Berg (Hundahl) Appley • Arbella Insurance Foundation and Arbella Insurance Group • Dorothy and David B. ‡ Arnold, Jr. • AT&T • Caroline Dwight Bain ‡ • William I. Bernell ‡ • BNY Mellon • The Boston Foundation • Lorraine D. and Alan S. ‡ Bressler • Jan Brett and Joseph Hearne • Gregory E. Bulger Foundation/Gregory Bulger and Richard Dix • Ronald G. and Ronni J. ‡ Casty • Commonwealth Worldwide Chauffeured Transportation • Mr. and Mrs. William H. Congleton ‡ • William F. Connell ‡ and Family • Dick and Ann Marie Connolly • Country Curtains • Diddy and John Cullinane •

Edith L. and Lewis S. ‡ Dabney • Elisabeth K. and Stanton W. Davis ‡ • Mary Deland R. de Beaumont ‡ • Delta Air Lines • Bob and Happy Doran • Hermine Drezner and Jan Winkler • Alan and Lisa Dynner and Akiko ‡ Dynner • Deborah and Philip Edmundson • William and Deborah Elfers • Elizabeth B. Ely ‡ • Nancy S. and John P. Eustis II ‡ • Shirley and Richard ‡ Fennell • Anna E. Finnerty ‡ • John and Cyndy Fish • Fromm Music Foundation • The Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation • Marie L. Gillet ‡ • Sophia and Bernard Gordon • Mrs. Donald C. Heath ‡ • Francis Lee Higginson ‡ • Major Henry Lee Higginson ‡ • John Hitchcock ‡ • Edith C. Howie ‡ • John Hancock Financial • Muriel E. and Richard L. Kaye ‡ •

Nancy D. and George H. ‡ Kidder • Kingsbury Road Charitable Foundation • Audrey Noreen Koller ‡ • Farla and Harvey Chet Krentzman ‡ • Barbara and Bill Leith ‡ • Elizabeth W. and John M. Loder • Nancy and Richard Lubin • Vera M. and John D. MacDonald ‡ • Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation • Carmine A. and Beth V. Martignetti • Jane B. and Robert J. Mayer, M.D. • The McGrath Family • The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation • Henrietta N. Meyer ‡ • Mr. and Mrs. Nathan R. Miller ‡ • Mr. and Mrs. Paul M. Montrone • Richard P. and Claire W. Morse Foundation • William Inglis Morse Trust • Mary S. Newman ‡ • Mr. ‡ and Mrs. Norio Ohga • P&G Gillette • The Claudia and Steven Perles Family Foundation • Polly and Dan ‡ Pierce • Mary G. and Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. ‡ • Susan and Dan ‡ Rothenberg • Carole and Edward I. Rudman • Richard Saltonstall Charitable Foundation • Wilhemina C. (Hannaford) Sandwen ‡ • Hannah H. ‡ and Dr. Raymond Schneider • Carl Schoenhof Family • Ruth ‡ and Carl J. Shapiro • Wendy Shattuck and Samuel Plimpton • Marian Skinner ‡ • Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation/Richard A. and Susan F. ‡ Smith • Sony Corporation of America • Dr. Nathan B. and Anne P. Talbot ‡ • Diana O. Tottenham • The Wallace Foundation • Edwin S. Webster Foundation • Roberta and Stephen R. Weiner • The Helen F. Whitaker Fund • Robert and Roberta Winters • Helen and Josef Zimbler ‡ • Brooks and Linda Zug • Anonymous (12)

‡ Deceased week 9 the great benefactors 71 “First Republic takes extraordinary care of us and provides fl awless service.”

HELGI TOMASSON, Artistic Director & Principal Choreographer, San Francisco Ballet MARLENE TOMASSON, Former Dancer, Wife and Mother

(855) 886-4824 | fi rstrepublic.com | New York Stock Exchange symbol: FRC MEMBER FDIC AND EQUAL HOUSING LENDER

BostonSymphony 2017-18 Tomasson ND2017.indd 1 10/19/17 3:34 PM Administration

Mark Volpe, Eunice and Julian Cohen Managing Director, endowed in perpetuity Evelyn Barnes, Chief Financial Officer Anthony Fogg, William I. Bernell Artistic Administrator and Director of Tanglewood Marion Gardner-Saxe, Director of Human Resources Ellen Highstein, Edward H. Linde Tanglewood Music Center Director, endowed by Alan S. Bressler and Edward I. Rudman Bernadette M. Horgan, Director of Public Relations Lynn G. Larsen, Orchestra Manager and Director of Orchestra Personnel Thomas D. May, Senior Financial Advisor Kim Noltemy, Chief Operating and Communications Officer Bart Reidy, Director of Development Ray F. Wellbaum, Advisor to the Managing Director administrative staff/artistic

Bridget P. Carr, Director of Archives and Digital Collections • Jennifer Dilzell, Chorus Manager • Sarah Donovan, Associate Archivist for Digital Assets • Julie Giattina Moerschel, Executive Assistant to the Managing Director • Vincenzo Natale, Chauffeur/Valet • Sarah Radcliffe-Marrs, Manager of Artists Services • Eric Valliere, Assistant Artistic Administrator administrative staff/production Christopher W. Ruigomez, Director of Concert Operations and Assistant Director of Tanglewood Brandon Cardwell, Video Engineer • Kristie Chan, Orchestra Management Assistant • Tuaha Khan, Assistant Stage Manager • Jake Moerschel, Technical Director • Leah Monder, Operations Manager • John Morin, Stage Technician • Mark C. Rawson, Stage Technician • Emily W. Siders, Concert Operations Administrator • Nick Squire, Recording Engineer boston pops

Dennis Alves, Director of Artistic Planning • Richard MacDonald, Executive Producer and Operations Director • Pamela J. Picard, Executive Producer and Event Director, July 4 Fireworks Spectacular, and Broadcast and Media Director Wei Jing Saw, Assistant Manager of Artistic Administration • Amanda Severin, Manager of Artistic Planning and Services business office

Sarah J. Harrington, Director of Planning and Budgeting • Mia Schultz, Director of Investment Operations and Compliance James Daley, Accounting Manager • Karen Guy, Accounts Payable Supervisor • Jared Hettrick, Budget and Finance Reporting Assistant • Erik Johnson, Interim Director of Planning and Budgeting • Evan Mehler, Budget Manager • Robin Moxley, Payroll Supervisor • Kwan Pak, Payroll Specialist • Nia Patterson, Staff Accountant • Mario Rossi, Senior Accountant • Lucy Song, Accounts Payable Assistant • Teresa Wang, Staff Accountant • Maggie Zhong, Senior Endowment Accountant

week 9 administration 73 OUR NEW BOSTON SHOWROOM IS NOW OPEN.

Steinway and other pianos of distinction park plaza, boston natick mall, natick msteinert.com

We are pleased to welcome customers to our elegantly appointed new showroom in the Park Plaza building in Boston. You are invited to view our selection of Steinway, Boston, Essex and Roland pianos in a comfortable new setting. Or visit our showroom at the Natick Mall. development

Nina Jung Gasparrini, Director of Board, Donor, and Volunteer Engagement • Susan Grosel, Director of Annual Funds and Donor Relations • Ryan Losey, Director of Foundation and Government Relations • Jill Ng, Director of Planned Giving and Senior Major Gifts Officer • Richard Subrizio, Director of Development Communications • Mary E. Thomson, Director of Corporate Initiatives • Jennifer Roosa Williams, Director of Development Research and Information Systems Kyla Ainsworth, Donor Acknowledgment and Research Coordinator • Kaitlyn Arsenault, Graphic Designer • Erin Asbury, Manager of Volunteer Services • Stephanie Baker, Assistant Director, Campaign Planning and Administration • Lydia Buchanan, Assistant Manager, Development Communications • Diane Cataudella, Associate Director, Donor Relations • Caitlin Charnley, Donor Ticketing Associate • Allison Cooley, Major Gifts Officer • Emily Diaz, Assistant Manager, Gift Processing • Elizabeth Estey, Major Gifts Coordinator • Emily Fritz-Endres, Senior Executive Assistant, Development and Board Relations • Barbara Hanson, Senior Leadership Gifts Officer • Laura Hill, Friends Program Coordinator • James Jackson, Assistant Director, Telephone Outreach • Laine Kyllonen, Assistant Manager, Donor Relations • Andrew Leeson, Manager, Direct Fundraising and Friends Program • Anne McGuire, Manager, Corporate Initiatives and Development Research • Kara O’Keefe, Leadership Gifts Officer • Suzanne Page, Major Gifts Officer • Mark Paskind, Assistant Manager of Planned Giving • Kathleen Pendleton, Assistant Manager, Development Events and Volunteer Services • Johanna Pittman, Grant Writer • Maggie Rascoe, Annual Funds Coordinator • Emily Reynolds, Assistant Director, Development Information Systems • Francis Rogers, Major Gifts Officer • Laura Sancken, Assistant Director of Board Engagement • Alexandria Sieja, Assistant Director, Development Events • Yong-Hee Silver, Senior Major Gifts Officer • Szeman Tse, Assistant Director, Development Research education and community engagement Zakiya Thomas, Helaine B. Allen Executive Officer for Education, Community Engagement, and Inclusion Claire Carr, Associate Director of Education and Community Engagement • Elizabeth Mullins, Manager of Education and Community Engagement • Sarah Saenz, Assistant Manager of Education and Community Engagement facilities Robert Barnes, Director of Facilities symphony hall operations Peter J. Rossi, Symphony Hall Facilities Manager Charles F. Cassell, Jr., Facilities Compliance and Training Coordinator • Alana Forbes, Facilities Coordinator • Shawn Wilder, Mailroom Clerk maintenance services Jim Boudreau, Lead Electrician • Samuel Darragh, Painter • Thomas Davenport, Carpenter • Michael Frazier, Carpenter • Steven Harper, HVAC Technician • Adam Twiss, Electrician environmental services Landel Milton, Lead Custodian • Desmond Boland, Custodian • Julien Buckmire, Custodian/Set-up Coordinator • Claudia Ramirez Calmo, Custodian • Garfield Cunningham,Custodian • Errol Smart, Custodian • Gaho Boniface Wahi, Custodian tanglewood operations Robert Lahart, Director of Tanglewood Facilities Bruce Peeples, Grounds Supervisor • Peter Socha, Tanglewood Facilities Manager • Fallyn Davis, Tanglewood Facilities Coordinator • Stephen Curley, Crew • Richard Drumm, Mechanic • Maurice Garofoli, Electrician • Bruce Huber, Assistant Carpenter/Roofer human resources

Heather Mullin, Human Resources Manager • Susan Olson, Human Resources Recruiter • Kathleen Sambuco, Associate Director of Human Resources

week 9 administration 75 EXPERIENCE THE Difference

We believe we’re a little different from other independent schools. We are a student- centered community where you can be you. Through rigorous academics, strong leadership opportunities, competitive athletics, and inspiring arts programs, we are focused on helping students become the best versions of themselves.

Explore our campus, meet our community, and experience the difference of Worcester Academy. Visit worcesteracademy.org or call 508-459-5841.

BEETHOVEN HANDEL MESSIAH BACH MASS SYMPHONY NO. 9 Dec 1 + 2 + 3 IN B MINOR Oct 6 + 8 Mar 23 + 25 BACH CHRISTMAS MOZART + Dec 14 + 17 PURCELL BEETHOVEN THE FAIRY QUEEN Oct 27 + 29 MOZART + HAYDN Apr 6 + 8 Jan 26 + 28 AMADEUS LIVE HANDEL HERCULES Nov 10 + 11 + 12 BACH BRANDENBURG May 4 + 6 CONCERTOS Complete film with soundtrack Feb 16 + 18 performed live by the H+H Orchestra and Chorus.

HANDELANDHAYDN.ORG 617.266.3605

76 information technology Timothy James, Director of Information Technology James Beaulieu, IT Services Lead • Andrew Cordero, IT Asset Manager • Ana Costagliola, Senior Database Analyst • Isa Cuba, Infrastructure Engineer • Stella Easland, Telephone Systems Coordinator • Michael Finlan, Telephone Systems Manager • Karol Krajewski, Senior Infrastructure Systems Architect • Brian Van Sickle, User Support Specialist public relations

Samuel Brewer, Senior Publicist • Taryn Lott, Assistant Director of Public Relations publications Marc Mandel, Director of Program Publications Robert Kirzinger, Associate Director of Program Publications—Editorial • Eleanor Hayes McGourty, Assistant Director of Program Publications—Production and Advertising sales, subscription, and marketing

Helen N.H. Brady, Director of Group Sales • Alyson Bristol, Director of Corporate Partnerships • Roberta Kennedy, Buyer for Symphony Hall and Tanglewood • Sarah L. Manoog, Senior Director of Marketing and Branding • Michael Miller, Director of Ticketing Amy Aldrich, Associate Director of Subscriptions and Patron Services • Amanda Beaudoin, Senior Graphic Designer • Gretchen Borzi, Director of Marketing Programs • Hester C.G. Breen, Corporate Partnerships Coordinator • Lenore Camassar, Associate Manager, SymphonyCharge • Megan Cokely, Group Sales Manager • Susan Coombs, SymphonyCharge Coordinator • Jonathan Doyle, Graphic Designer • Leslie Wu Foley, Associate Director of Audience Development • Paul Ginocchio, Manager, Symphony Shop and Tanglewood Glass House • Neal Goldman, Subscriptions Representative • Mary Ludwig, Manager, Corporate Sponsor Relations • Tammy Lynch, Front of House Director • Ronnie McKinley, Ticket Exchange Coordinator • Michael Moore, Manager of Digital Marketing and Analytics • Laurence E. Oberwager, Director of Tanglewood Business Partners • Meaghan O’Rourke, Digital Media Manager • Greg Ragnio, Subscriptions Representative • Ellen Rogoz, Marketing Manager • Daniel Sagastume, SymphonyCharge Representative • Laura Schneider, Internet Marketing Manager and Front End Lead • Robert Sistare, Senior Subscriptions Representative • Richard Sizensky, Access Coordinator • Kevin Toler, Art Director • Himanshu Vakil, Associate Director of Internet and Security Technologies • Claudia Veitch, Director, BSO Business Partners • Thomas Vigna, Group Sales and Marketing Associate • David Chandler Winn, Tessitura Liaison and Associate Director of Tanglewood Ticketing box office Jason Lyon, Symphony Hall Box Office Manager • Nicholas Vincent, Assistant Manager Kelsey Devlin, Box Office Administrator • Evan Xenakis, Box Office Representative event services James Gribaudo, Function Manager • Kyle Ronayne, Director of Event Administration • John Stanton, Venue and Events Manager tanglewood music center

Karen Leopardi, Associate Director for Faculty and Guest Artists • Michael Nock, Associate Director for Student Affairs • Bridget Sawyer-Revels, Manager of Administration • Gary Wallen, Associate Director for Production and Scheduling

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*May temporarily relieve common mild snoring in otherwise healthy adults. Partner Snore™ technology is available with Split King and FlexTop® King mattresses on FlexFit™ adjustable bases. †2-Year Limited Warranty on SleepIQ® technology. Warranties available at sleepnumber.com. ‡Results from a 2015 Sleep Number survey of 1,797 customers asked about their likelihood to recommend Sleep Number to a friend, family member, or colleague. SLEEP NUMBER, SELECT COMFORT, SLEEPIQ and the Double Arrow Design are registered trademarks and IT is a trademark of Select Comfort Corporation. ©2017 Select Comfort Corporation. Boston Symphony Association of Volunteers executive committee Chair, Martin Levine Chair-Elect, Gerald L. Dreher Vice-Chair, Boston, Suzanne Baum Vice-Chair, Tanglewood, Bob Braun Secretary, Beverly Pieper Co-Chairs, Boston Trish Lavoie • Cathy Mazza • George Mellman Co-Chairs, Tanglewood Nancy Finn • Gabriel Kosakoff • Susan Price Liaisons, Tanglewood Glass Houses, Adele Cukor • Ushers, Carolyn Ivory boston project leads 2017-18

Café Flowers, Virginia Grant, Stephanie Henry, and Kevin Montague • Chamber Music Series, Rita Richmond • Computer and Office Support, Helen Adelman • Flower Decorating, Stephanie Henry and Wendy Laurich • Guide’s Guide, Audley H. Fuller and Renee Voltmann • Instrument Playground, Elizabeth Michalak • Mailings, Steve Butera • Membership Table/Hall Greeters, Connie Hill • Newsletter, Cassandra Gordon • Volunteer Applications, Carol Beck • Symphony Shop, Karen Brown • Tour Guides, Greg Chetel

week 9 administration 79 Next Program…

Thursday, January 4, 8pm Friday, January 5, 8pm (“Casual Friday” concert, with introductory comments by a BSO member and no intermission) Saturday, January 6, 8pm Tuesday, January 9, 8pm

françois-xavier roth conducting

méhul overture to “the amazons, or the founding of thebes” (January 4, 6, and 9 only)

mozart piano concerto no. 21 in c, k.467 [Allegro maestoso] Andante Allegro vivace assai benjamin grosvenor

{intermission}

beethoven symphony no. 5 in c minor, opus 67 Allegro con brio Andante con moto Allegro— Allegro

Two cornerstones of the repertoire anchor this program, the first of two to be led by French conductor François-Xavier Roth. The young English pianist Benjamin Grosvenor makes his BSO debut as soloist in one of Mozart’s most familiar concertos, No. 21 in C, an elegant, good-natured work written and premiered in Vienna in spring 1785, with a slow movement made famous much more recently through its use in the filmElvira Madigan. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is the concerto’s polar opposite in mood, a stormy struggle against destiny, with a well-earned victory at the close, never failing to provide a dynamic and thrilling experience in concert. Opening the program is a rarity: the overture to the 1811 opera The Amazons by the highly successful and prolific opera composer Étienne-Nicolas Méhul, a contemporary of Mozart and Beethoven. Although The Amazons was hobbled by a weak libretto, the overture deftly contrasts dramatic, portentous music with lyrical and triumphant passages.

Single tickets for all Boston Symphony concerts throughout the season are available online at bso.org via a secure credit card order; by calling Symphony Charge at (617) 266-1200 or toll-free at (888) 266-1200; or at the Symphony Hall box office, Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Saturdays from 4-8:30 p.m. when there is a concert). Please note that there is a $6.50 handling fee for each ticket ordered by phone or online.

80 Coming Concerts… friday previews and pre-rehearsal talks: The BSO offers half-hour talks prior to all of the BSO’s Friday-afternoon subscription concerts and Thursday-morning Open Rehearsals. Free to all ticket holders, the Friday Previews take place from 12:15-12:45 p.m. and the Open Rehearsal Talks from 9:30-10 a.m. in Symphony Hall.

Thursday ‘C’ January 4, 8-9:55 Sunday, January 21, 3pm Friday Evening January 5, 8-9:15 Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory (Casual Friday, with introductory comments BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS by a BSO member and no intermission) with THOMAS ADÈS, piano Saturday ‘A’ January 6, 8-9:55 Tuesday ‘B’ January 9, 8-9:55 BEETHOVEN Quintet in E-flat for piano and winds, Op. 16 FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH, conductor SCHUBERT Notturno in E-flat for piano, BENJAMIN GROSVENOR, piano violin, and cello, D.897 MÉHUL Overture to The Amazons, LIGETI Six Bagatelles, for wind quintet or The Founding of Thebes JANÁCˇEK Concertino for piano, two (Jan 4, 6, and 9 only) violins, viola, clarinet, horn, MOZART Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, and bassoon K.467 BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 5 Thursday ‘B’ January 25, 8-10:25 Friday ‘B’ January 26, 1:30-3:55 Thursday ‘D’ January 11, 8-9:55 Saturday ‘B’ January 27, 8-10:25 Friday ‘B’ January 12, 1:30-3:25 THOMAS ADÈS, conductor Saturday ‘A’ January 13, 8-9:55 AUGUSTIN HADELICH, violin FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH, conductor BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 8 PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD, piano LIGETI Violin Concerto, with cadenza WEBERN Passacaglia, Op. 1 by Thomas Adès BARTÓK Piano Concerto No. 1 ADÈS Suite from Powder Her Face STRAVINSKY The Firebird (complete) STRAVINSKY Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss

Thursday ‘A’ January 18, 8-9:45 Friday ‘A’ January 19, 1:30-3:15 Thursday ‘C’ February 1, 8-10 Saturday ‘B’ January 20, 8-9:45 Friday Evening February 2, 8-10 Saturday ‘A’ February 3, 8-10 ANDRIS NELSONS, conductor SUSAN GRAHAM, mezzo-soprano ANDRIS NELSONS, conductor WOMEN OF THE TANGLEWOOD FESTIVAL KRISTINE OPOLAIS, soprano CHORUS, JAMES BURTON, conductor SIR BRYN TERFEL, bass-baritone BSO CHILDREN’S CHOIR MOZART Serenade No. 10 in B-flat for MAHLER Symphony No. 3 winds, K.361, Gran Partita SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 14 for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra

The BSO’s 2017-18 season is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which receives support from the State of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Programs and artists subject to change.

week 9 coming concerts 81 Symphony Hall Exit Plan

82 Symphony Hall Information

For Symphony Hall concert and ticket information, call (617) 266-1492. For Boston Symphony concert program information, call “C-O-N-C-E-R-T” (266-2378). The Boston Symphony Orchestra performs ten months a year, in Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood. For information about any of the orchestra’s activities, please call Symphony Hall, visit bso.org, or write to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. The BSO’s web site (bso.org) provides information on all of the orchestra’s activities at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood, and is updated regularly. In addition, tickets for BSO concerts can be purchased online through a secure credit card transaction. The Eunice S. and Julian Cohen Wing, adjacent to Symphony Hall on Huntington Avenue, may be entered by the Symphony Hall West Entrance on Huntington Avenue. In the event of a building emergency, patrons will be notified by an announcement from the stage. Should the building need to be evacuated, please exit via the nearest door (see map on opposite page), or according to instructions. For Symphony Hall rental information, call (617) 638-9241, or write the Director of Event Administration, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA 02115. The Box Office is open from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, or until a half-hour past starting time on performance evenings. On Saturdays, the box office is open from 4 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. when there is a concert, but is otherwise closed. For an early Saturday or Sunday performance, the box office is generally open two hours before concert time. To purchase BSO Tickets: American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Diners Club, Discover, a personal check, and cash are accepted at the box office. To charge tickets instantly on a major credit card, call “SymphonyCharge” at (617) 266-1200, from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday (12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturday). Outside the 617 area code, phone 1-888-266-1200. As noted above, tickets can also be purchased online. There is a handling fee of $6.50 for each ticket ordered by phone or online. Group Sales: Groups may take advantage of advance ticket sales. For BSO concerts at Symphony Hall, groups of twenty-five or more may reserve tickets by telephone and take advantage of ticket discounts and flexible payment options. To place an order, or for more information, call Group Sales at (617) 638-9345 or (800) 933-4255, or e-mail [email protected]. For patrons with disabilities, elevator access to Symphony Hall is available at both the Massachusetts Avenue and Cohen Wing entrances. An access service center, large print programs, and accessible restrooms are available inside the Cohen Wing. For more information, call the Access Services Administrator line at (617) 638-9431 or TDD/TTY (617) 638-9289. In consideration of our patrons and artists, children age four or younger will not be admitted to Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. Please note that no food or beverage (except water) is permitted in the Symphony Hall auditorium. Patrons who bring bags to Symphony Hall are subject to mandatory inspections before entering the building. Those arriving late or returning to their seats will be seated by the patron service staff only during a convenient pause in the program. Those who need to leave before the end of the concert are asked to do so between program pieces in order not to disturb other patrons.

Each ticket purchased from the Boston Symphony Orchestra constitutes a license from the BSO to the pur- chaser. The purchase price of a ticket is printed on its face. No ticket may be transferred or resold for any price above its face value. By accepting a ticket, you are agreeing to the terms of this license. If these terms are not acceptable, please promptly contact the Box Office at (617) 266-1200 or [email protected] in order to arrange for the return of the ticket(s).

week 9 symphony hall information 83 Ticket Resale: If you are unable to attend a Boston Symphony concert for which you hold a subscription ticket, you may make your ticket available for resale by calling (617) 266-1492 during business hours, or (617) 638-9426 up to one hour before the concert. This helps bring needed revenue to the orchestra and makes your seat available to someone who wants to attend the concert. A mailed receipt will acknowledge your tax-deductible contribution. Rush Seats: There are a limited number of Rush Seats available for Boston Symphony subscription concerts on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and on Friday afternoons. The low price of these seats is assured through the Morse Rush Seat Fund. Rush Tickets are sold at $10 each, one to a customer, at the Symphony Hall box office on Fridays as of 10 a.m. for afternoon concerts, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays as of 5 p.m. for evening concerts. Please note that there are no Rush Tickets available for Friday and Saturday evenings. Please note that smoking is not permitted anywhere in Symphony Hall. Camera and recording equipment may not be brought into Symphony Hall during concerts. Lost and found is located at the security desk at the stage door to Symphony Hall on St. Stephen Street. First aid facilities for both men and women are available. On-call physicians attending concerts should leave their names and seat locations at the Cohen Wing entrance on Huntington Avenue. Parking: The Prudential Center Garage and Copley Place Parking on Huntington Avenue offer discounted parking to any BSO patron with a ticket stub for evening performances. Limited street parking is available. As a special benefit, guaranteed pre-paid parking near Symphony Hall is available to subscribers who attend evening concerts. For more information, call the Subscription Office at (617) 266-7575. Elevators are located outside the O’Block/Kay and Cabot-Cahners rooms on the Massachusetts Avenue side of Symphony Hall, and in the Cohen Wing. Ladies’ rooms are located on both main corridors of the orchestra level, as well as at both ends of the first balcony, audience-left, and in the Cohen Wing. Men’s rooms are located on the orchestra level, audience-right, outside the O’Block/Kay Room near the elevator; on the first-balcony level, also audience-right near the elevator, outside the Cabot-Cahners Room; and in the Cohen Wing. Coatrooms are located on the orchestra and first-balcony levels, audience-left, outside the O’Block/Kay and Cabot-Cahners rooms, and in the Cohen Wing. Please note that the BSO is not responsible for personal apparel or other property of patrons. Lounges and Bar Service: There are two lounges in Symphony Hall. The O’Block/Kay Room on the orchestra level and the Cabot-Cahners Room on the first-balcony level serve drinks starting one hour before each performance. For the Friday-afternoon concerts, both rooms open at noon, with sandwiches available until concert time. Drink coupons may be purchased in advance online or through SymphonyCharge for all performances. Boston Symphony Broadcasts: Saturday-evening concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra are broadcast live in the Boston area by 99.5 WCRB Classical Radio Boston. BSO Friends: The Friends are donors who contribute $100 or more to the Boston Symphony Orchestra Annual Funds. For information, please call the Friends of the BSO Office at (617) 638-9276 or e-mail [email protected]. If you are already a Friend and you have changed your address, please inform us by sending your new and old addresses to Friends of the BSO, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA 02115. Including your patron number will assure a quick and accurate change of address in our files. BSO Business Partners: The BSO Business Partners program makes it possible for businesses to participate in the life of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Benefits include corporate recognition in the BSO program book, access to the Beranek Room reception lounge, two-for-one ticket pricing, and advance ticket ordering. For further information, please call the BSO Business Partners Office at (617) 638-9275 or e-mail [email protected]. The Symphony Shop is located in the Cohen Wing at the West Entrance on Huntington Avenue and is open Thurs day and Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m., and for all Symphony Hall performances through intermission. The Symphony Shop features exclusive BSO merchandise, including calendars, coffee mugs, an expanded line of BSO apparel and recordings, and unique gift items. The Shop also carries children’s books and musical-motif gift items. A selection of Symphony Shop merchandise is also available online at bso.org and, during concert hours, outside the Cabot-Cahners Room. All proceeds benefit the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For further information and telephone orders, please call (617) 638-9383, or purchase online at bso.org.

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