SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT

January 29 and 31, 2016

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68: Pastorale Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arrival in the Country Scene by the Brook Merry Gathering of the Countryfolk Thunderstorm Shepherd's Song, Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm

INTERMISSION

JOHANNES BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 Maestoso Adagio Rondo: Allegro non troppo Horacio Gutiérrez, piano

Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68: Pastorale LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 17, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna

After making sketches for several years, Beethoven composed his Symphony No. 6 during the summer of 1808, and it was first performed at the Theater an der Wien on December 22 of that year. The Sixth is unique among Beethoven’s symphonies because it appears to be program music. Beethoven himself gave it the nickname Pastorale and further headed each movement with a descriptive title that seems to tell a “story”: the arrival in the country, impressions beside a brook, a peasants’ dance that is interrupted by a thunderstorm, and a concluding hymn of thanksgiving once the storm has passed. Some have claimed that romantic music begins with the Pastorale Symphony – they see it as a precursor of such examples of musical painting as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Mendelssohn’s fairyland scenes and Liszt’s tone poems – while others have tried to stage this music, complete with characters, costumes and scenery. Beethoven would have been astonished. He had no use for program music or musical portraiture, which he considered cheap trickery. His Sixth Symphony is in classical symphonic forms throughout; even its “extra” movement, the famous thunderstorm, can be understood as a brief transition between the scherzo and the rondo-finale. And while this symphony refers to something outside the music itself, Beethoven wanted it understood as “an expression of feelings rather than painting.” The Sixth may lack the stark drama and tension of such predecessors as the Eroica or the Fifth, but it depends on the same use of sonata form for its musical argument, and finally it aims for the same feeling of transcendence those earlier works achieved, even if – as Joseph Kerman has wryly noted – all that is being transcended here is the weather. Beethoven liked to get out of Vienna during the stifling summer months and would take rooms in a rural village, where he could combine composing with long walks through the fields and woods. A journal entry from 1815, seven years after the Pastorale, suggests his feelings about these walks: “The Almighty in the woods! I am happy, blessed in the forests.” This symphony seems similarly blessed. Its first movement (“Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arrival in the Country”) is built on two completely relaxed themes. These do not offer the contrast that lies at the heart of sonata form, but instead create two complementary “cheerful feelings.” One of the other unusual features of this movement is Beethoven’s use of the second measure of the opening theme in so many ways: as theme, as accompaniment, as motor rhythm. This simple falling figure saturates the movement, and over its ostinato-like repetitions Beethoven works some wonderful harmonic progressions, all aimed at preserving this movement’s sense of calm. The second movement – “Scene by the Brook” – is also in a sonata form built on two themes. The title “Scene” may imply dramatic action, but there is none here. Over murmuring lower strings, with their suggestion of bubbling water, the two themes sing gracefully. The movement concludes with three brief bird calls, which Beethoven names specifically in the score: nightingale (flute), quail (oboe) and cuckoo (clarinet). Despite the composer’s protests to the contrary, the third and fourth movements do offer pictorial representations in sound. The scherzo (“Merry Gathering of the Countryfolk”) is a portrait of a rural festival; its vigorous trio echoes the heavy stamping of a peasant dance. Beethoven offers a da capo repeat of both scherzo and trio, yet just as the scherzo is about to resume it suddenly veers off in a new direction. Tremulous strings and distant murmurings lead to the wonderful storm, which remains – nearly two centuries after its composition – the best musical depiction ever of a thunderstorm, with great crashes of thunder in the timpani and lightning flashing downward in the violins. (One desperately literal-minded early critic complained that this was the only storm he had ever heard of where the thunder came before the lightning!) Gradually the storm moves off, and the music proceeds directly into the last movement, where solo clarinet and horn outline the tentative call of a shepherd’s pipe in the aftermath of the storm. Beethoven then magically transforms this call into his serene main theme, given out by the violins. If ever there has been music that deserved to be called radiant, it is this singing theme, which unfolds like a rainbow spread across the still-glistening heavens. The finale is a moderately-paced rondo (Beethoven’s marking is Allegretto). Along the way appear secondary themes that once again complement rather than conflict with the mood of the rondo theme, and at the end a muted French horn sings this noble melody one last time. The petulant young Debussy, an enemy of all things German, once sneered that one could learn more about nature from watching the sun rise than from listening to the Pastorale Symphony. This is strange criticism from the man who would go on to write La mer, which sets out to do exactly the same thing as the Pastorale: to evoke the emotions generated by nature rather than trying to depict that same nature literally. Beethoven did not set out to teach or to show his audience anything. Rather, he wrote a symphony in classical form, which he wanted understood as music: “It is left to the listener to discover the situations for himself…Anyone with a notion of country life can imagine the composer’s intentions without the help of titles or headings.”

Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 JOHANNES BRAHMS Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg Died April 3, 1897, Vienna

Robert Schumann met Brahms when the latter was still just a rosy-cheeked boy of 20 but immediately recognized his talent and became his enthusiastic champion. In a review that must have seemed overpowering to the young man, Schumann proclaimed Brahms “a young eagle” and said: “When he holds his magic wand over the massed resources of chorus and orchestra, we shall be granted marvelous insights into spiritual secrets.” And almost immediately came disaster: Schumann went into steep mental decline, attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine and died two years later in a mental asylum. It was natural for the young composer to try to register his feelings in music (and at a subconscious level to try to justify Schumann’s faith in him), and in March 1854, only weeks after Robert’s suicide attempt, Brahms set out to create that most dramatic and challenging of forms, a symphony. He was not even 21 at this time and had never written anything for orchestra, so he first sketched this symphony as a sonata for two pianos. Brahms soon realized that he was not yet ready to compose a symphony. He abandoned the project but salvaged a great deal of music from his sketches: ten years later the symphony’s projected slow scherzo became the second movement – Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras – of his German Requiem. Brahms saw more immediate possibilities in the pianistic brilliance of the sketches and decided to transform the first movement into the opening movement of a piano concerto. Once this was completed, he composed a new slow movement and a new rondo-finale. Still desperately uncertain of his abilities, Brahms worked on this concerto for four years before he was willing to try it out in a private performance in March 1858. The first public performance did not take place until January 1859, nearly five years after he had set out to write his symphony. Brahms marks the first movement Maestoso, but it hardly feels majestic. Instead, it feels catastrophic. Brahms told Joseph Joachim that this violent opening was a depiction of his feelings when he learned of Schumann’s suicide attempt. At well over 20 minutes, this is a huge movement, and Malcolm MacDonald has described it as “nearly the longest, and probably the most dramatic, symphonic movement since Beethoven.” After the opening sound and fury, the piano makes a deceptively understated entrance, and this in turn points to a remarkable feature of this movement: in general, the orchestra has the more aggressive material, the piano the friendlier music. While the piano part is extremely difficult, this is not an ostentatiously virtuoso concerto in the manner of Liszt and other pianist-composers at mid-century (this massive first movement has no cadenza, in fact). To call this a “symphony-concerto,” as some have done, goes too far, but such a description does point toward the unusually dramatic character of this music and its refusal to treat the piano as a display instrument. The huge exposition leads to a relatively brief development that includes a shimmering, dancing episode in D Major, but the recapitulation is long and fairly literal. It offers no emotional release, no modulation into a major key, and the movement drives unrelentingly to its close in the mood of the very opening. Relief arrives with the Adagio. In the early stages of its composition, Brahms had written in the manuscript “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini”: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” The young Brahms had playfully addressed the older Schumann as “Domini,” and some have felt that this must be a tribute to that composer, but in a letter from December 1856 Brahms wrote to Clara: “I am also painting a lovely portrait of you; it is to be the Adagio.” When this music was published, however, Brahms had removed the Latin inscription and any hint of larger reference. In D Major, this movement has a quiet expressiveness, an almost consoling quality after the furies of the opening movement. The last movement, a vigorous rondo, returns to the mood – and D minor tonality – of the opening. Solo piano leads the way here, and all the movement’s thematic material seems to grow out of this opening theme. The theme itself makes few literal returns but is skillfully transformed on each reappearance, including one use as the subject for a brief fugue. Brahms offers two cadenzas in this movement, the first almost Bachian in its keyboard writing, and at the end the rising shape of the rondo theme helps propel the movement – finally in D Major – to a heroic close. Initial reaction to this concerto was harsh. After a performance in Leipzig, Brahms wrote to Clara: “You have probably already heard that it was a complete fiasco; at the rehearsal it met with total silence, and at the performance (where hardly three people raised their hands to clap) it was actually hissed.” A Leipzig critic described the concerto as “a composition dragged to its grave. This work cannot give pleasure…it has nothing to offer but hopeless desolation and aridity…for more than three quarters of an hour one must endure this rooting and rummaging, this straining and tugging, this tearing and patching of phrases and flourishes! Not only must one take in this fermenting mass; one must also swallow a dessert of the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds.” It must have given Brahms particular pleasure when – 35 years later, in 1894 – he conducted a program in Leipzig that included both his piano concertos. He heard this product of his youth cheered in the same hall where it had been reviled so many years before. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Why This Program? Why These Pieces? By Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist In the opinion of our conductor, “The Pastorale is the most lyrical and joyous of the Beethoven symphonies. Jahja Ling continued, “That may make it even more difficult for some conductors who may be far more used to the emotionally thunderous Beethoven, different from the natural, refreshing-sounding thunderstorm he introduces in this work. But he makes it actually easier not to be otherwise thunderous when, at the end, he introduces an old German hymn to serve as the bridge before the final movement which, in itself, is a hymn to God. It even ends with a musical “Amen,” instead of the usual lengthy Beethoven codas and endings with loud, multiply-repeated chords. All of that, of course, fits in so well with my own deep feelings of faith and hope. The feeling of the whole piece is so different from all the others, so much more lyrical. Stokowski conducted this work more than any other Beethoven symphony, including it in the original Disney Fantasia – and I have conducted it only once before here. It really needs repetition here.” Jahja Ling also told me that he really feels very close to the Brahms First Piano Concerto as both conductor and pianist. When he was much younger and more active as a pianist, he spoke of needing to prepare it for competitions. “In contrast to the symphony on this program, this Brahms concerto actually continues the heroic, fighting spirit of Beethoven in its outer movements, so familiar in so much of Beethoven's music. Everything is power in this concerto, like so much of Beethoven, but with a big, Brahmsian, romantic orchestra. Some musical authorities have referred to it as the mightiest of all piano concertos. Its second movement, though, is actually a Benedictus, and it can really be chanted as one. At the end of the great cadenza in that movement, Brahms has incorporated an old folk song about longing and loneliness, obviously reminiscent of his deep, never fulfilled feelings toward and about Clara Schumann. So despite being mighty, this concerto is also heartfelt. Horacio Gutiérrez is perfect to play it here. He has the requisite power and the requisite heart.” Performance History Gary Graffman was the soloist when the San Diego Symphony, under the baton of Earl Bernard Murray, presented Brahms' immensely powerful Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1961. The orchestra's ninth, most recent presentation of this great music was during the 2006-07 season, when Garrick Ohlsson was the soloist under Jahja Ling's baton. Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, always an audience favorite, was first heard at these concerts under the direction of Earl Bernard Murray, during the season 1961-62. Jahja Ling conducted the most recent performance of this work at the Opening Weekend performances of the 2007-08 season. That was the ninth San Diego Symphony presentation of this beloved work.