Table of Contents | Week 7

7 bso news 17 on display in symphony hall 18 bso music director andris nelsons 20 the boston symphony 23 changing dynamics: reflections on the bso’s recent european tour by gerald elias 34 this week’s program

Notes on the Program

36 The Program in Brief… 37 Jean-Frédéric Neuburger 43 Béla Bartók 53 61 To Read and Hear More…

Guest Artists

65 Christoph von Dohnányi 67 Martin Helmchen

70 sponsors and donors 80 future programs 82 symphony hall exit plan 83 symphony hall information

program copyright ©2015 Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. program book design by Hecht Design, Arlington, MA cover photo of Andris Nelsons by Chris Lee cover design by BSO Marketing

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, MA 02115-4511 (617)266-1492 bso.org

andris nelsons, ray and maria stata music director bernard haitink, lacroix family fund conductor emeritus , music director laureate 135th season, 2015–2016

trustees of the boston symphony orchestra, inc.

William F. Achtmeyer, Chair • Paul Buttenwieser, President • George D. Behrakis, Vice-Chair • Cynthia Curme, Vice-Chair • Carmine A. Martignetti, Vice-Chair • Theresa M. Stone, Treasurer

David Altshuler • Ronald G. Casty • Susan Bredhoff Cohen • Richard F. Connolly, Jr. • Alan J. Dworsky • Philip J. Edmundson, ex-officio • William R. Elfers • Thomas E. Faust, Jr. • Michael Gordon • Brent L. Henry • Susan Hockfield • Barbara W. Hostetter • Stephen B. Kay • Edmund Kelly • Martin Levine, ex-officio • Joyce Linde • John M. Loder • Nancy K. Lubin • Joshua A. Lutzker • Robert J. Mayer, M.D. • Susan W. Paine • John Reed • Carol Reich • Arthur I. Segel • Roger T. Servison • Wendy Shattuck • Caroline Taylor • Stephen R. Weber • Roberta S. Weiner • Robert C. Winters • D. Brooks Zug life trustees

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

Mark Volpe, Managing Director • Thomas D. May, Chief Financial Officer • Bart Reidy, Clerk of the Board board of overseers of the boston symphony orchestra, inc. Philip J. Edmundson, Chair

Noubar Afeyan • James E. Aisner • Peter C. Andersen • Bob Atchinson • Lloyd Axelrod, M.D. • Liliana Bachrach • Judith W. Barr • Lucille M. Batal • Linda J.L. Becker • Paul Berz • Mark G. Borden • Partha Bose • William N. Booth • Karen Bressler • Anne F. Brooke • Gregory E. Bulger • Joanne M. Burke • Bonnie Burman, Ph.D. • Richard E. Cavanagh • Yumin Choi • Dr. Lawrence H. Cohn • Charles L. Cooney • William Curry, M.D. • Gene D. Dahmen • Michelle A. Dipp, M.D., Ph.D. • Dr. Ronald F. Dixon • Ursula Ehret-Dichter • Sarah E. Eustis • Joseph F. Fallon • Beth Fentin • Peter Fiedler • Steven S. Fischman • John F. Fish • Sanford Fisher • Jennifer Mugar Flaherty • Alexandra J. Fuchs • Robert Gallery • Levi A. Garraway • Zoher Ghogawala, M.D. • Cora H. Ginsberg • Robert R. Glauber • Todd R. Golub • Barbara Nan Grossman • Nathan Hayward, III • Rebecca M. Henderson • James M. Herzog, M.D. • Stuart Hirshfield • Albert A. Holman, III • Lawrence S. Horn • Jill Hornor • Valerie Hyman •

week 7 trustees and overseers 3

photos by Michael J. Lutch

Everett L. Jassy • Stephen J. Jerome • Darlene Luccio Jordan, Esq. • Paul L. Joskow • Karen Kaplan • Stephen R. Karp • John L. Klinck, Jr. • Tom Kuo • Jay Marks • Jeffrey E. Marshall • Paul M. Montrone • Sandra O. Moose • Robert J. Morrissey • Cecile Higginson Murphy • Peter Palandjian • Donald R. Peck • Steven R. Perles • Wendy Philbrick • Randy Pierce • Claudio Pincus • Lina S. Plantilla, M.D. • Irving H. Plotkin • Irene Pollin • Jonathan Poorvu • William F. Pounds • Claire 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 • Susan Rothenberg • Joseph D. Roxe • Malcolm S. Salter • Kurt W. Saraceno • Donald L. Shapiro • Phillip A. Sharp, Ph.D. • Anne-Marie Soullière • Michael B. Sporn, M.D. • Nicole Stata • Margery Steinberg • Patricia L. Tambone • Jean Tempel • Douglas Thomas • Mark D. Thompson • Albert Togut • Joseph M. Tucci • Sandra A. Urie • Edward Wacks, Esq. • Sarah E.R. Ward • Dr. Christoph Westphal • June K. Wu, M.D. • Patricia Plum Wylde • Marillyn Zacharis • Dr. Michael Zinner overseers emeriti

Helaine B. Allen • Marjorie Arons-Barron • Diane M. Austin • Sandra Bakalar • James L. Bildner • William T. Burgin • Mrs. Levin H. Campbell • Earle M. Chiles • Carol Feinberg Cohen • Mrs. James C. Collias • Ranny Cooper • Joan P. Curhan • Phyllis Curtin • James C. Curvey • Tamara P. Davis • Mrs. Miguel de Bragança • Paul F. Deninger • JoAnne Walton Dickinson • Phyllis Dohanian • Alan Dynner • Harriett Eckstein • George Elvin • Pamela D. Everhart • Judy Moss Feingold • Richard Fennell † • 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 • Martin S. Kaplan • Mrs. Gordon F. Kingsley • Robert I. Kleinberg • David I. Kosowsky • Robert K. Kraft • Farla H. Krentzman † • Peter E. Lacaillade • Benjamin H. Lacy • Mrs. William D. Larkin • Robert J. Lepofsky • Edwin N. London • Frederick H. Lovejoy, Jr. • Diane H. Lupean • Mrs. Harry L. Marks • Joseph B. Martin, M.D. • Joseph C. McNay • Dr. Martin C. Mihm, Jr. • Robert Mnookin • Joseph Patton • John A. Perkins • Ann M. Philbin • May H. Pierce • Dr. John Thomas Potts, Jr. • Dr. Tina Young Poussaint • Daphne Brooks Prout • Robert E. Remis • John Ex Rodgers • Alan W. Rottenberg • Kenan Sahin • Roger A. Saunders • Lynda Anne Schubert • L. Scott Singleton • Gilda Slifka • Christopher Smallhorn • Samuel Thorne • Diana Osgood Tottenham • Paul M. Verrochi • David C. Weinstein • James Westra • Mrs. Joan D. Wheeler • Margaret Williams-DeCelles • Richard Wurtman, M.D.

† Deceased

week 7 trustees and overseers 5

BSO News

Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 the Newest Google Play Release From Andris Nelsons and the BSO Last June, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra released live performances of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, Pathétique— both drawn from Maestro Nelsons’ BSO subscription performances of October 1-3, 2014—as the first releases in Google Play Music’s recording initiative “Classical Live,” which offers live concert performances from a number of worldwide. Next up from Andris Nelsons and the BSO in this series is Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, from their concerts of March 26-31, 2015, to be released on November 15 along with a free holiday bonus track, Joy to the World—A Fanfare for Christmas Day, with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops Orchestra. Through “Classical Live,” the BSO and other participating orches- tras expand their recording libraries by creating new digital recording catalogues with potential international access to more than one billion Android mobile and web devices by way of digital downloads and streaming subscription opportunities at music.google.com and classical-live.com.

Boston Symphony Chamber Players 2015-16 Season at Jordan Hall: Four Sunday Afternoons at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall The Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform four Sunday-afternoon concerts each sea- son at Jordan Hall at the New Conservatory, beginning this Sunday on November 15 with music of J.C. Bach, Piston, Jeremy Flower, Hindemith, and Beethoven. Complete details of this season’s programs, which span the full spectrum of chamber music repertoire and include guest appearances by Jeremy Flower, Randall Hodgkinson and Garrick Ohlsson, and baritone John Brancy, are shown in the display ad on page 9. Subscriptions to the four-concert series are available at $132, $95, and $75; please call the Subscription Office at 1-888-266-7575. For single tickets at $38, $29, and $22, visit the Symphony Hall box office or bso.org, or call (617) 266-1200. Please note that on the day of the concert, tickets can only be purchased at the Jordan Hall box office.

Introducing the BSO App The Boston Symphony Orchestra has launched a new, free app providing concertgoers with a new platform through which to interact with the Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, and . A highlight of the app, “Watch & Listen,” provides users with a variety of concert- related content including program notes, audio podcasts, and multimedia video podcasts. The app also provides ticketing and schedule information, as well as practical information

week 7 bso news 7 8 about, and planning your visit to, Symphony Hall. In addition it includes a social media feed connecting concertgoers with other listeners on Facebook and Twitter, as well as to reviews, comments, photos, and other social-media-generated content. The app is available for download and installation on iPhone devices via the iTunes App Store, and on Android devices via Google Play.

BSO Community Chamber Concerts in November The BSO continues its series of free Community Chamber Concerts in communities through- out the greater Boston area this season, offering chamber music performances by BSO musicians on Sunday afternoons at 3 p.m. Each program lasts approximately one hour and is followed by a coffee-and-dessert reception for the audience and musicians. This month, on November 15 at the Norwood Theatre, and on November 22 at the Waltham Community Center, the BSO hosts a program pairing Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat for winds and strings, Opus 20, and a selection of Bartók’s Duos written originally for violins but here performed on double basses. Admission is free, but reservations are required; please call 1-888-266- 1200. For further details, please visit bso.org and go to “Education & Community” on the home page.

Continuing a Collaboration: Free Concerts by BSO Members at Northeastern University’s Fenway Center The Boston Symphony Orchestra and Northeastern University are pleased to continue their collaboration offering free concerts by BSO members at the Fenway Center, at the corner of St. Stephen and Gainsborough streets, at 1:30 p.m. on selected Friday afternoons during

week 7 bso news 9 the 2015-16 season. This Friday’s concert on November 13 offers a program of Bartók and Beethoven, with three further programs to come on February 12 (music for brass quintet), March 18 (Williams, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy), and April 1 (Srnka and Hindemith). Tickets are available at tickets.neu.edu and at the door. For more information, please visit north- eastern.edu/camd/music.

BSO 101, the BSO’s Free Adult Education Series at Symphony Hall and Beyond “BSO 101: Are You Listening?” offers the opportunity to increase your enjoyment of upcom- ing BSO concerts. As the season continues, four free Wednesday sessions with BSO Director of Program Publications Marc Mandel joined by members of the BSO—on January 20, February 10, March 9, and April 6, all from 5:30-6:45 p.m. in Higginson Hall—will enhance your listening abilities and appreciation of music by focusing on upcoming BSO repertoire. All of the sessions include recorded musical examples, and each is self-con- tained, so no prior musical training, or attendance at any previous session, is required. Also this season, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, “BSO 101: Listening Up Close” takes to the road, offering four more BSO 101 sessions with Marc Mandel and BSO musicians on Sunday afternoons from 2-3:30 p.m., at the Waltham Public Library (this Sunday, November 15), UMASS Lowell (February 7), Newton Free Library (March 20), and Watertown Arsenal Center for the Arts (April 10). For further details, please visit bso.org, where BSO 101 can be found under the “Education & Community” tab on the home page. individual tickets are on sale for all concerts in the bso’s 2015-2016 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.

BSO Broadcasts on WCRB Beethoven, with conductor Christoph von BSO concerts are heard on the radio at 99.5 Dohnányi and Martin Helmchen WCRB. Each Saturday-night concert is broad- (November 14; encore November 23); music cast live at 8 p.m. with host Ron Della Chiesa, of Bach, Berg, and Shostakovich with Andris and encore broadcasts are aired on Monday Nelsons, violinist Isabelle Faust, and the nights at 8 p.m. In addition, interviews with Tanglewood Festival Chorus (November 21; guest conductors, soloists, and BSO musicians encore November 30), and music of Haydn, are available online, along with a one-year Bartók, and Tchaikovsky with Maestro Nelsons archive of concert broadcasts. Listeners can and pianist Yefim Bronfman (November 28; also hear the BSO Concert Channel, an online encore December 7). radio station consisting of BSO concert per- formances from the previous twelve months. Join Our Community of Music Visit classicalwcrb.org/bso. Current and upcoming broadcasts include the American Lovers—The Friends of the BSO premiere of Unsuk Chin’s BSO co-commission Attending a BSO concert at Symphony Hall is Mannequin, plus music of Liszt and Schumann, a communal experience—thousands of con- with conductor Ken-David Masur and pianist certgoers join together to hear 100 musicians Louis Lortie (encore November 16); the world collaborate on each memorable performance. premiere of French composer Jean-Frédéric Without an orchestra, there is no perform- Neuburger’s Aube, plus music of Bartók and ance, and without an audience, it is just a

week 7 bso news 11 rehearsal. Every single person is important to their children James and Melinda Rabb and ensuring another great experience at Sym- Betty (Rabb) and Jack Schafer—provide a phony Hall. There’s another community that rare opportunity to go behind the scenes at helps to make it all possible, one that you Symphony Hall. In these free guided tours, might not notice while enjoying a concert— experienced members of the Boston Sym- the Friends of the BSO. Every $1 the BSO phony Association of Volunteers unfold the receives in ticket sales must be matched with history and traditions of the Boston Symphony an additional $1 of contributed support to Orchestra—discussing its musicians, conduc- cover its annual expenses. Friends of the BSO tors, and supporters—while also offering in- help bridge that gap, keeping the music play- depth information about the Hall itself. Free ing to the delight of audiences all year long. walk-up tours are available on most Wednes- In addition to joining a community of like- days at 4 p.m. and two Saturdays each month minded music lovers, becoming a Friend of at 2 p.m. during the BSO season. Please visit the BSO entitles you to benefits that bring bso.org/tours for more information and to you closer to the music you cherish. Friends register. receive advance ticket ordering privileges, discounts at the Symphony Shop, and access to the BSO’s online newsletter InTune, as Planned Gifts for the BSO: well as invitations to exclusive donor events, Orchestrate Your Legacy such as BSO and Pops working rehearsals There are many creative ways that you can and much more. Friends memberships start support the BSO over the long term. Planned at just $100. To join our community of gifts such as bequest intentions (through music lovers as a Friend of the BSO, please your will, personal trust, IRA, or insurance contact the Friends Office at (617) 638-9276, policy), charitable trusts, and gift annuities [email protected], or join online at can generate significant benefits for you now bso.org/contribute. while enabling you to make a larger gift to the BSO than you may have otherwise thought Go Behind the Scenes: possible. In many cases, you could realize significant tax savings and secure an attrac- The Irving W. and Charlotte F. Rabb tive income stream for yourself and/or a Symphony Hall Tours loved one, all while providing valuable future The Irving W. and Charlotte F. Rabb Symphony support for the performances and programs Hall Tours—named in honor of the Rabbs’ you care about. When you establish and devotion to Symphony Hall with a gift from notify us of your planned gift for the Boston

week 7 bso news 13

Symphony Orchestra, you will become a The Concord Chamber Music Society, found- member of the Walter Piston Society, joining ed by BSO violinist Wendy Putnam, performs a group of the BSO’s most loyal supporters Bridge’s Phantasy Piano Quartet in F-sharp who are helping to ensure the future of the minor, Corigliano’s Sonata for Violin and BSO’s extraordinary performances. Members Piano, and Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A minor, of the Piston Society—named for Pulitzer Op. 84, on Sunday, November 29, at 3 p.m. Prize-winning composer and noted musician (pre-concert talk at 2 p.m.) at the Concord Walter Piston, who endowed the BSO’s prin- Academy Performing Arts Center, 166 Main cipal flute chair with a bequest—are recog- Street, Concord, MA. Joining Ms. Putnam nized in several of our publications and are violinist Axel Strauss, BSO principal viola offered a variety of exclusive benefits, includ- Steven Ansell, BSO cellist Mihail Jojatu, and ing invitations to various events in Boston pianist Vytas Baksys. Tickets are $42 and and at Tanglewood. If you would like more $33, discounted for seniors and students. For information about planned gift options and more information, visit concordchambermu- how to join the Walter Piston Society, please sic.org or call (978) 371-9667. contact Jill Ng, Director of Planned Giving and Senior Major Gifts Officer, at (617) 638- 9274 or [email protected]. We would be delighted Those Electronic Devices… to help you orchestrate your legacy with As the presence of smartphones, tablets, and the BSO. other electronic devices used for communica- tion, note-taking, and photography continues to increase, there have also been increased The Information Table: expressions of concern from concertgoers Find Out What’s Happening and musicians who find themselves distracted at the BSO not only by the illuminated screens on these Are you interested in upcoming BSO concert devices, but also by the physical movements information? Special events at Symphony that accompany their use. For this reason, Hall? BSO youth activities? Stop by the infor- and as a courtesy both to those on stage and mation table in the Brooke Corridor on the those around you, we respectfully request Massachusetts Avenue side of Symphony that all such electronic devices be completely Hall (orchestra level). There you will find the turned off and kept from view while BSO per- latest information on performances, member- formances are in progress. In addition, please ship, and Symphony Hall, all provided by also keep in mind that taking pictures of the knowledgeable members of the Boston Sym- orchestra—whether photographs or videos— phony Association of Volunteers. The BSO is prohibited during concerts. Thank you very Information Table is staffed before each con- much for your cooperation. cert and during intermission. Comings and Goings... BSO Members in Concert Please note that latecomers will be seated by BSO violinist Lucia Lin and former BSO cellist the patron service staff during the first con- Jonathan Miller are the soloists in Brahms’s venient pause in the program. In addition, Double Concerto with Robert Lehmann and please also note that patrons who leave the the North Shore Philharmonic on Sunday, auditorium during the performance will not November 15, at 3 p.m. at Swampscott High be allowed to reenter until the next convenient School, 200 Essex Street in Swampscott. Also pause in the program, so as not to disturb the on the program is music of Mozart, Johann performers or other audience members while Strauss II, and Stravinsky. Tickets at $25 ($20 the music is in progress. We thank you for seniors and students) are available at the your cooperation in this matter. door or [email protected]. For further infor- mation, call (781) 286-0024.

week 7 bso news 15 on display in symphony hall This season’s BSO Archives exhibit once again displays the wide variety of holdings in the Boston Symphony Archives. Much of this year’s exhibit was inspired by the series of Shostakovich recordings currently being made by Andris Nelsons and the BSO in collaboration with Deutsche Grammophon. highlights of this year’s exhibit include, on the orchestra level of symphony hall: • a display case in the Brooke Corridor documenting the commercial recording history of the BSO • two displays cases in the Brooke Corridor focusing on historic BSO performances of Shostakovich’s music, and spotlighting the visit to America by a delegation of Soviet composers led by Shostakovich in November 1959, including a visit to Symphony Hall • two display cases in the Huntington Avenue corridor focusing on BSO members of Russian and Eastern European descent, and the BSO’s historic 1956 tour to the Soviet Union, the first visit by an American orchestra to exhibits on the first-balcony level of symphony hall include: • a display case in the first-balcony corridor, audience-right, devoted to the appointment of as conductor of the BSO • a display case, also in the first-balcony corridor, audience-right, spotlighting the , which was founded by Koussevitzky (as the Berkshire Music Center) in 1940 and celebrated its 75th anniversary this past summer • a display case in the first-balcony corridor, audience-left, marking the 80th birthday this past September of BSO Music Director Laureate Seiji Ozawa • three exhibit cases in the Cabot-Cahners Room highlighting collections of memorabilia—the Paul Cherkassky, Albert Sand, and Josef Zimbler collections— originally belonging to BSO members of Russian or Eastern European origin

TOP OF PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT: 78rpm label for one of the BSO’s recordings from its very first commercial session in 1917, the Prelude to Act III of Wagner’s “” with November 1959 photo of (from left) Russian-born BSO violinists Vladimir Resnikoff and Victor Manusevitch with Dmitri Shostakovich at Symphony Hall (photo by Ed Fitzgerald) BSO manager Thomas D. Perry’s telegram of June 7, 1956, informing Charles Munch that the BSO has accepted the USSR’s invitation to perform in Leningrad and Moscow

week 7 on display 17 ac Borggreve Marco

Andris Nelsons

In 2015-16, his second season as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Ray and Maria Stata Music Director, Andris Nelsons leads the BSO in thirteen wide-ranging programs, three of them being repeated at Carnegie Hall in New York. This past August, Maestro Nelsons’ contract as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was extended through the 2021-22 season. In 2017 he becomes Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhaus- orchester , in which capacity he will also bring the BSO and GWO together for a unique multi-dimensional alliance exploring historic connections between the two. Highlights of this season’s BSO programs include concert performances of Strauss’s Elektra; three weeks marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare; new works by and George Tsontakis; and the continuation of the orchestra’s multi-year Shostakovich recordings project in collaboration with Deutsche Grammophon, “Shostakovich Under Stalin’s Shadow,” to be drawn from live performances at Symphony Hall of Shostakovich’s symphonies 5 through 10, the Passacaglia from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and selections from Shostakovich’s incidental music to Hamlet and King Lear, all composed during the period the composer labored under the life-threaten- ing shadow of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Following this past summer’s Tanglewood season, Andris Nelsons and the BSO undertook a twelve-concert, eight-city tour to major European capitals, including Berlin, Cologne, London, Milan, and , as well as the Lucerne, Salzburg, and Grafenegg festivals. An eight-city tour to Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg is scheduled for May 2016.

The fifteenth music director in the history of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Nelsons made his BSO debut at Carnegie Hall in March 2011 with Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. He made his Tanglewood debut in July 2012, leading both the BSO and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra as part of Tanglewood’s 75th Anniversary Gala (a concert avail- able on DVD and Blu-ray, and telecast nationwide on PBS). His first compact disc with the BSO—live recordings of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2—

18 was released last November on BSO Classics. Their first Shostakovich disc—the Symphony No. 10 and the Passacaglia from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk—was released by Deutsche Grammophon this past summer.

From 2008 to 2015, Andris Nelsons was critically acclaimed as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the next few seasons, he continues his collabora- tions with the Berlin Philharmonic, Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. He is a regular guest at the Royal Opera House, , and , and in summer 2016 returns to the for a new pro- duction of Wagner’s Parsifal.

Born in in 1978 into a family of musicians, Andris Nelsons began his career as a trumpeter in the Orchestra before studying conducting. He was principal conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Herford, Germany, from 2006 to 2009 and music director of the 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.” For more information about Andris Nelsons, please visit andrisnelsons.com and bso.org. ac Borggreve Marco

week 7 andris nelsons 19 Boston Symphony Orchestra 2015–2016

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

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

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

week 7 boston symphony orchestra 21

ejmnEalovega Benjamin

Changing Dynamics: Reflections on the BSO’s Recent European Tour by Gerald Elias

Former BSO violinist Gerald Elias continues to play regularly with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood each summer and was a member of the BSO’s violin section for the orchestra’s three-week European tour to London, Salzburg, the Grafenegg Festival outside Vienna, Lucerne, Milan, Paris, Cologne, and Berlin following this past summer’s Tanglewood season.

A big reason Boston concertgoers have been lining up at the Symphony Hall box office for the past 115 years to hear its beloved orchestra perform is that they can be confident their expectations for a musically rewarding experience will be fulfilled.

Similarly for the musicians. Like the Red Sox in the friendly confines of Fenway Park, BSO musicians have an inherent home-field advantage, being as acclimated to the acoustics of Symphony Hall as Sox players are with the Green Monster, and equally attuned to the indefinable but all-important synergy between orchestra and audience. In the lead-up to a typical Symphony Hall concert, the musician has time for a comfortable dinner, knows when to leave home to beat traffic to the Hall, to get dressed, warm up, and voil`a: ready to go! That predictability of acoustics, audience responsiveness, and routine creates a comfort level that all but guarantees a winning performance.

When an orchestra is on tour, all of that changes. Performing in different, unfamiliar concert halls on an almost daily basis, with constant travel by plane, train, and bus; living out of a suitcase; eating odd things at odd hours; enduring jetlag and health issues—all

At London’s Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, August 22, 2015

week 7 changing dynamics 23 24 ui Wesely Julia

At the Grafenegg Festival outside Vienna, August 28, 2015

present challenges to playing on the road, even when a hall has excellent acoustics, which is not always the case.

The first stop on the orchestra’s recent European tour, the Royal Albert Hall in London, was a case in point. The interior of the ornately Victorian hall is a huge cylinder with the ceiling seemingly about two miles high. Positioned at one point on the perimeter of the cylinder, the orchestra is arranged on risers with a drastic difference in altitude from the violins at the bottom to the trombones at the top. The hall is so large that viewing the balcony audience directly opposite from the stage would benefit from use of binoculars, if not a telescope. Given these idiosyncrasies, the acoustics are surprisingly commodious, though the same can’t be said for the temperature. We’ve played some concerts there that were icily cold and others that were shirt-drenching. These days, there are rumors that they do have air conditioning, but turn it off before the performance, ensuring a literally warm reception.

What’s most notable about the Proms at the Royal Albert, though, is the audience. With no seats on the floor of the hall, several hundred music-lovers stand sardined together throughout the entire performance. It’s admirable how still and quiet they are, no small accomplishment with the likes of a seventy-five-minute monster like Mahler’s Sixth Symphony on the program! What makes the Proms tradition even more unique are the zany antics of various cadres on the floor, who, before the concert or at intermission, shout out witty chants apropos of the occasion for all to hear. At our second concert, on August 23, one group shouted out an advert for raising money for a musical charity. Another group, cleverly silent, held up a string of red socks to honor the Boston connec- tion. Regardless of their shenanigans, the Royal Albert groundlings are among the most passionate audiences anywhere, and the musicians did their best to please them.

It’s hard to overstate the relevance of acoustics. The hall is a real part of every instrument

week 7 changing dynamics 25 in the orchestra. If you think of a violin, for instance, as a vibrating wooden box, then the concert hall is, in a similar way, simply a bigger vibrating wooden box, and has to be “played” with the same finesse and attention to sound production. I learned that lesson only too well the first time I auditioned for the Boston Symphony when I was nineteen. I played the preliminary round at Symphony Hall, where, thanks to the complimentary acoustics, my violin had never sounded better. I was invited to the final round, my confi- dence soaring. The finals, however, were at Avery Fisher Hall in New York while the orchestra was on tour, because that was the only time left in the season when the musi- cians’ audition committee and Maestro Ozawa would be in the same place at the same time. With my success at the prelims, I walked out onto the Avery Fisher stage almost tasting victory, but as soon as I tuned my violin, the taste turned suddenly bitter. My sound seemed to project about one foot and then just drop like a lead balloon. At that tender age, not knowing how to compensate for such a change in acoustics doomed my audition. But it was a great learning moment, and made me thankful that when I finally did win an audition to the BSO—at the advanced age of twenty-two—I had the luxury of earning my keep at Symphony Hall.

That being said, consensus about acoustics is often far from unanimous. A lot of it depends upon where one sits on stage, what instrument one plays, and one’s particular sense of what “sounds good.” For example, when we played the Mahler Sixth at La Scala in Milan, I thought the acoustics were excellent—clear and precise, yet with depth. I felt my 1785 Gagliano projected well and with warmth, sounding like my violin is supposed to. However,

week 7 changing dynamics 27

uan Diesner Susanne

At the performing Strauss’s “Don Quixote” with soloist Yo-Yo Ma, September 3, 2015

my opinion turned out to be clearly in the minority. Many of my colleagues were quite certain the sound was dry, and while being polite about it, gave me the same look of dis- belief with which I’ve become familiar as a Democrat in Utah. Our principal oboist, John Ferrillo, formerly of the Metropolitan Opera, diplomatically suggested that the acoustics were designed to enhance the clarity of singers’ diction, for after all it is an opera house. I confess that my happiness with La Scala might in part have been affected subliminally by the visual beauty of the place; by playing in the same auditorium where Verdi and Puccini were crowned kings of opera; and by being back in Italy—albeit for a grand total of eight- een hours—with anticipation of an amazing post-concert dinner at La Foglia ristorante. And though you may chuckle at such subjectivity, I maintain it’s the totality of the concert experience that sways one’s impression. And that’s what live performance is all about.

Few of the halls were without their peculiar peccadilloes. Construction on the spanking new Philharmonie de Paris was clearly not quite complete. Though the intensely modern, metallic exterior and wave-like auditorium design appeared at first glance good to go, the backstage seemed to have been assembled in haste and with little of the esthetic consid- eration given to the parts of the building that the audiences see. Even on stage, however, there were some unexpected concerns. For one, every few minutes the lights flickered, threatening to extinguish entirely. And though they never did, it was a distraction that put us on edge and made it harder to concentrate, let alone see the music. A friend of mine who attended the concert but is not a frequent concertgoer thought the light show was intentional, somehow coordinated with the flow of the music. As we often say in my family, “design flaw into design feature.”

Another issue in Paris was the deflection of the stage floor. It felt as if the substructure might not be able to withstand the weight of an entire symphony orchestra, especially one that had been subsisting on daily all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets. But the crucial consideration, the sound, was very curious. As with many European-style concert halls,

week 7 changing dynamics 29 30 ac Borggreve Marco

Acoustic rehearsal for the Mahler Sixth at Berlin’s Philharmonie, September 5, 2015

at the Philharmonie there are a large number of seats behind the orchestra, placing the front of the orchestra almost dead center in the hall. At our rehearsal, the sound—at least to my ears—was like playing in a big bathroom: very boomy with little clarity. But what a difference an audience can make! Once everyone was seated for the concert, the sound was distinctly better. What had previously been “amorphous” (bad connotation) was now “round” (good connotation). One of my colleagues commented that a possible reason for the change was that not only were there 1500 bodies to absorb some of that excess resonance, but also that the seat bottoms, which had been folded up at the rehearsal, were no longer reflecting sound off their hard undersides. I had never thought of that before, but I like the sound of that theory.

Before a performance at each new hall, we had a rehearsal to go over some crucial spots. Some of these are called “acoustic rehearsals” and are a mere fifteen minutes long. In that time, the music director and the musicians need to determine how to adjust individ- ual playing and overall balance to the new surroundings; whether one needs to play with more aggressive articulation or with a fuller sound, or with greater or lesser intensity. With a hundred instruments onstage, the variables are infinite, and each hall presents different challenges. And then there were some specific issues presented by the reper- toire itself that had to be dealt with at each venue. For example, how much should the door be cracked opened for the offstage trumpets in Strauss’s ; how loudly should the offstage cowbells in the Mahler Sixth be clanged; and last but not least, how hard should the gargantuan hammer of fate in the finale of that symphony be whacked?

The outdoor facility at Grafenegg, Austria’s version of Tanglewood an hour outside of Vienna, presented challenges unlike the other venues. Number one, the temperature had soared into the nineties. (It was, in fact, very hot for the first couple weeks of the tour, and the European halls, consistent with the continent’s dedication to energy conservation—

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God bless ’em—kept the a.c. turned off.) Number two, the acoustics were troublesome. From where I sat in the violin section, the trumpets sounded miles away. Number three was that audience-connectivity thing. And I’m not referring to the poor woman who passed out from the heat (and pre-concert wine and cheese?) at the end of the first movement of the Haydn symphony and had to be escorted out on a stretcher. (I heard later from our intrepid tour physician, Dr. Partridge, who helped treat the woman, that she soon recovered.) It was that I just had a subjective suspicion—totally unsubstanti- ated—that this particular audience would have been more in the mood for Vienna’s illustrious Strauss, Johann, than for his distant descendant, Richard. But I must admit that, although their initial response was a bit tepid, the longer we took our bows the more enthusiastic they became.

In fact, all the audiences were quite supportive. The La Scala crowd was perhaps the most vociferous, as one might expect, with cries of “Braviiii! Braviiii!” echoing through the hall. On the other hand, one could argue—if one adds foot-stomping and rhythmic applause into the mix—that the audiences in Paris, Cologne, and Berlin made the most noise.

When I first performed at the Berlin Philharmonie, the city was still divided among the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The hall was new, the architecture considered avant-garde, and the acoustics were wonderful. Time has passed since then. Berlin and Germany are unified and the hall no longer feels futuristic. But the acoustics are as good as always—the best, depending of course on whom you ask, of any of the halls in which we performed on this tour. Perhaps inspired by the acoustics or by the fact that it was our final tour performance, it was especially gratifying to receive an overwhelming response to our Mahler Sixth from such a musically savvy audience.

I haven’t even mentioned the fine halls in Salzburg, Lucerne, and Cologne—where the musicians were greeted with glasses of excellent local beer as we exited the stage (a tradition I propose we emulate at Symphony Hall)—which rounded out our schedule. As one of my violin colleagues proclaimed, “We came. We sawed. We conquered.” gerald elias, former violinist with the Boston Symphony and associate concertmaster of the Utah Symphony, performs with the BSO at Tanglewood and is music director of Vivaldi by Candle- light in Salt Lake City. Elias is also author of the award-winning “Daniel Jacobus” mystery series set in the dark corners of the world. His essays and short fiction have graced many prestigious publications. For more information, visit geraldelias.com.

week 7 changing dynamics 33 andris nelsons, ray and maria stata music director bernard haitink, lacroix family fund conductor emeritus seiji ozawa, music director laureate Boston Symphony Orchestra 135th season, 2015–2016

Thursday, November 12, 8pm Friday, November 13, 8pm | the norman v. and ellen b. ballou memorial concert Saturday, November 14, 8pm

christoph von dohnányi conducting

neuburger “aube” for orchestra (2015) (world premiere; commissioned by the boston symphony orchestra, andris nelsons, music director, through the generous support of the new works fund established by the massachusetts cultural council, a state agency; and with additional support through a grant from the face contemporary music fund, a program of face with major support from the cultural services of the french embassy, sacem, institute français, the florence gould foundation, and the andrew w. mellon foundation)

bartók music for strings, percussion, and celesta Andante tranquillo Allegro Adagio Allegro molto

{intermission} hi Lee Chris

34 beethoven piano concerto no. 5 in e-flat, opus 73, “emperor” Allegro Adagio un poco mosso Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo martin helmchen

thursday evening’s performance is supported by a generous bequest from arlene m. jones. friday evening’s performance of beethoven’s piano concerto no. 5, “emperor,” is supported by a gift from tom kuo and alexandra delaite. saturday evening’s performance of beethoven’s piano concerto no. 5, “emperor,” is supported by a gift from nancy koehn in honor of dietrich bonhoeffer. bank of america and emc corporation are proud to sponsor the bso’s 2015-16 season.

These concerts will end about 10. Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe performs on a Stradivarius violin, known as the “Lafont,” generously donated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra by the O’Block Family. 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. Special thanks to The Fairmont Copley Plaza and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, and Commonwealth Worldwide Chauffeured Transportation. 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 concert, 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 orchestra—whether photographs or videos—is prohibited during concerts.

week 7 program 35 The Program in Brief...

The BSO’s first world premiere of the 2015-16 season is Aube (“Dawn”) by the young French composer Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, which the BSO commissioned at the request of conductor Christoph von Dohnányi. Neuburger is also known as a pianist of wide- ranging interests and repertoire. He studied piano and general musicianship at the Paris Conservatoire and composition with Michael Jarrell in . Aube is a single eleven-minute movement that explores slowly evolving harmony and scintillating orches- tral colors and textures.

Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta contains a number of markers of Bartók’s mature style. One of his best-known works, it shows a deep concern for musical form, a unique approach to modernist harmonic and melodic trends, and the explicit influence of Central European folk music, which was fundamental to his sensibilities. Completed in 1936, the four-movement work was commissioned by the conductor Paul Sacher for his Basel Chamber Orchestra to celebrate the group’s tenth anniversary; that ensemble gave the premiere in January 1937. The string orchestra is equally divided onstage, separated by the percussion and keyboards and allowing for a clearer presentation of contrapuntal passages. The work’s first movement is a big, harmonically exploratory fugue, the shifting chromatics of its theme balanced by the clarity of its overall form. This chromatic theme reappears in various forms in the subsequent movements. The third movement is also slow; the second and fourth are quick, with the finale clearly evoking an exuberant folk dance.

Beethoven composed the last of his piano concertos, later dubbed the “Emperor,” in 1809, dedicating it to his friend, patron, and pupil the Archduke Rudolph. Its premiere took place in Leipzig in November 1811, and it wasn’t until February 1812 that Carl Czerny gave its first Vienna performance. Beethoven had naturally played the first performances of all of his earlier concertos, but his hearing by this time was too diminished to take the chance in a public performance. The Emperor (the title is not Beethoven’s own) is Beethoven’s most virtuosic and majestic concerto. Its character is established immedi- ately: the orchestra provides the majesty, the solo piano the virtuosity. Following the orchestra’s unequivocal E-flat major opening chord, the solo piano’s opening flourishes lead to the orchestral exposition, beginning with a bright and elegant march theme. The piano’s participation in this large-scale movement amounts to what is nearly a long, joyful cadenza incorporating virtually all of the most daring techniques for the instrument, but with enough subtlety and variety to sustain the brilliance. The middle movement is an aria with variations. The finale is a buoyant, galloping romp in high good humor.

Robert Kirzinger

36 aoeBellaiche Carole

Jean-Frédéric Neuburger “Aube” for orchestra (2015)

JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC NEUBURGER was born in Paris on December 29, 1986, and lives there. He wrote “Aube” (“Dawn”) between February and May 2015, on commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, with additional support through a grant from the FACE Contemporary Music Fund. The score is dedicated “to Christoph von Dohnányi and the musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.” These are the world premiere performances, and the first time the BSO has played any music by Neuburger.

THE SCORE OF “AUBE” calls for two flutes (first doubling alto flute and optional piccolo, second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two B-flat clarinets (second doubling A clarinet and bass clarinet), two bassoons (second doubling contrabassoon), two horns, two trum- pets, two trombones (one tenor, one bass), tuba, timpani, percussion (two players: I. vibraphone, bass marimba, large thunder sheet, lion’s roar, high mokubio [Japanese wood block], wood chimes; II. tenor steel drum, snare drum, bass drum, tam-tam, large Chinese cymbal, two suspended cym- bals, metal chimes, reco-reco [rasp]), harp, celesta, and strings. The duration of the piece is about eleven minutes.

The conductor Christoph von Dohnányi has worked with Jean-Frédéric Neuburger the pianist on several occasions, and in the course of their interaction had the opportunity to see a number of Neuburger’s compositions. He was impressed by what he saw. Dohnányi discussed the idea of a Boston Symphony Orchestra commission with BSO Artistic Administrator Anthony Fogg, and approached Neuburger about the project after collaborating with him in performances of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris in 2014. The result is Neuburger’s single-movement orchestral work Aube (“Dawn”), receiving its world premiere performances this weekend.

As an active pianist, Neuburger performs repertoire from Bach and Beethoven through to Bartók and Barraqué, as well as his own works. Along with recitals and chamber music concerts, he has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the , , , and London Philharmonic,

week 7 program notes 37 among many others. It was as a pianist that he began his formal studies. Having grown up in a household of classical music lovers, it was expected and natural that he take piano lessons, which he started at age eight. His talent was quickly spotted, and he soon moved on to more serious study. His most important early teacher, Emile Naoumoff, was himself a student of , and brought to Neuburger a holistic approach incorporating not only piano technique but lessons in counterpoint and analysis. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at age twelve.

Neuburger was exposed to and interested in contemporary music at a fairly early stage, and was particularly drawn to works of Boulez and Stockhausen. When he was thirteen he met and received encouragement from Henri Dutilleux. Although he studied traditional compositional techniques (counterpoint, harmony, and form) at the Conservatoire, he was otherwise self-taught until he began to work with Michael Jarrell in Geneva. Other influences, which can be heard with varying clarity in his music, include Iannis Xenakis, the “spectrale” composers Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, and Kaija Saariaho, along with many others, but for the most part Neuburger has sought out and recombined the work of his predecessors in fundamentally personal ways.

Apart from some early, withdrawn works, Neuburger’s “opus 1”—the piece he considers his first mature composition—is his for two pianos and percussion, inspired by Xenakis’s monumental percussion work Pleiades. He followed this with the big piano piece Maldoror, which takes its title from Les Chants de Maldoror by the 19th-century

week 7 program notes 39

French poet Comte de Lautréamont. This brings us to another source of influence for Neuburger: evoking Mahler, he has said that a work must be “like a country,” having many different aspects and characters, rather than limiting itself to one exhaustively examined musical thought (which he calls the “étude” approach). His models here are not composers but, especially, the 19th-century French writers Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, and in particular the latter’s vast poem cycle La Légende des siècles (“The Legend of the Ages”).

To that end, Neuburger is assembling a thoughtfully diverse body of work as a foundation for bigger, bolder plans. His catalog includes Sinfonia; the two significant piano works Maldoror and Vitrail à l’homme sans yeux; his Cantate profane sur deux poèmes d’Aimé Césaire, which was performed by the Radio- Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir under Pascal Rophé’s direction; several works of chamber music, and Chanson for piano and orchestra. His most recent works are a piece for voice and ensemble for Ensemble ALMAVIVA and his first string quartet. In progress is a large-scale concerto based on an extant single movement work for piano and orchestra.

Given the practical constraint of writing a piece of some twelve minutes’ length, Neu- burger’s approach in Aube involved deciding what not to do as well as challenging himself to write something he hadn’t attempted before. He opted to write meditative, slow music suggesting “the sensation of time being longer than reality,” referencing Olivier Messiaen’s discussions of varieties of musical and perceived time. Along with the “dawn” metaphor, the composer also suggests the analogy of travel through a landscape, seeing the same views from different perspectives. Aube explores a glacial progression of harmonies, chords gradually evolving, along with ever-changing combinations of instrumental color, some textures of which were suggested by the exotic sonorities of electronic music. There are, though, surprising contrasts and events: the introduction of the harp and steel drum several minutes into the piece marks a new spaciousness and harmonic world, and there are two widely separated “seismic shocks” in the form of fortissimo chords, the second a kind of resonant memory of the first.

Exceptionally among Neuburger’s works, Aube is a contemplation of a single idea, reflected in its title; he reveals that he chose the name about halfway through the process of com- position, by which time the work’s essential character and trajectory were already estab- lished. A long tradition of “dawn” music includes Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Wagner’s “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from Götterdämmerung, the sunrise episode in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, and Sibelius’s tone poem Night Ride and Sunrise, to name just a few. Jean-Frédéric Neuburger’s scintillating symphonic poem Aube joins this tradition.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and annotator robert kirzinger is Assistant Director of Program Publications of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

week 7 program notes 41

Béla Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

BÉLA BARTÓK was born in the village of Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (then part of Hungary but now absorbed into Rumania) on March 25, 1881, and died in on September 26, 1945. Paul Sacher, founder and conductor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, commissioned the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and gave the first performance on January 21, 1937, in Basel, in celebration of his orchestra’s tenth anniversary. Bartók had completed the score in on September 7, 1936, and the work was first heard there in February 1938, Ernö Dohnányi conducting.

THE TITLE OF THE WORK reflects its unusual scoring for small drums (with and without snares), cymbals, tam-tam, bass drum, xylophone, timpani, celesta, piano, harp, and strings.

Introducing Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta to his New York Herald-Tribune read- ers in 1937, Lawrence Gilman characterized Bartók thus: “Acrid, powerful, intransigent; the musician of darkly passionate imagination, austerely sensuous, ruthlessly logical, a cerebral rhapsodist; a tone-poet who is both an uncompromising modernist and the res- urrector of an ancient past.” If there is one quintessential Bartók composition, one work in which we can find all his strengths, the paradoxes in his music and the contradictions, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta is it.

In 1936, Bartók was fifty-five and at the summit of his powers and reputation. He had begun to compose at eight and had played the piano in public since he was ten. At twenty- six, he had become professor of pianoforte at the Conservatory in Budapest, succeeding his teacher, István Thomán, and over the course of thirty years he had earned an enviable reputation as a collector and scholar of Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian, and Arabic folk music. He was even a success as a composer. It is true that his last American years were wretched, medically and fiscally, that he was discouraged to the point of giving up, that the support tendered by Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra for Boston, and by was literally life-saving. To imagine, how-

week 7 program notes 43 Program page for the first Boston Symphony performance of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta on February 18, 1947, with conducting (BSO Archives)

44 ever, that Bartók’s whole life was spent in the condition of unrecognized genius is to have the picture quite wrong. There were, to be sure, failures and frustrations, like Mengelberg’s cancellation of the New York premiere of the Piano Concerto No. 1 on Bartók’s first American tour, or the endless delays and unpleasantnesses that dogged the early career of The Miraculous Mandarin, but since the triumphant Budapest premiere in 1917 of his choreographic poem The Wooden Prince, his importance was understood, he had a good contract with a first-rate publisher (“This is a splendid thing.... [It] counts as my great- est success as a composer so far”), and his music was widely and well performed.

He accepted Paul Sacher’s commission on June 27, 1936, indicating in his letter that he was thinking of a work “for strings and percussion (thus, besides the strings, there would be piano, celesta, harp, xylophone, and percussion instruments),” and he completed the score ten weeks later, on September 7. Though he seems to have entertained ideas about renaming the piece later, he retained its working title, Musique pour instruments à cordes, batterie et céleste en quatre mouvements. The other percussion instruments turned out to be small drums, with and without snares, cymbals, tam-tam, bass drum, xylophone, and kettledrums. In the finale, the piano part is sometimes for four hands, the third and fourth belonging to the celesta player. Bartók wants the strings on stage in two separated groups, and his score includes a suggested seating plan which puts first and second violins, first violas, and first cellos on the left, third and fourth violins, second violas, and second cellos on the right, basses across the back (firsts on the left, seconds on the right), and

week 7 program notes 45

Program from the premiere of the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta on January 21, 1937, given by the Basel Chamber Orchestra with Paul Sacher conducting

the other instruments in the middle, piano and celesta toward the left, harp and xylophone toward the right.

First, a dark fugue. The instruments are muted and it is a long time before they rise from pianissimo. The gait is irregular and mystifying. The theme itself is constricted, its range only a fifth. The texture is dense and tight. Then, mutes are removed, the tempo quickens, kettledrums and cymbals join in, and a thwack on the bass drum signals the arrival of a tearing climax. The music drops rapidly from this height: the mutes return, the celesta adds new and magic colors, and the sounds disappear into the silence from which they had come.

That music is the source of most of the rest. The shapes in the second movement are derived from it, though this Allegro comes in as a drastic contrast—quick, bright, inclined to be regular in its rhythms (though often and delightfully syncopated). Piano and harp make their first appearance, and there is constant antiphonal play between the two string orchestras. At its recapitulation, the first theme is pushed together so that what took four beats before is allowed only three.

The Adagio, beginning and ending with atmospheric dialogues of xylophone and kettle- drums, traverses many moods, successive phrases of the fugue subject heralding the

week 7 program notes 47 appearance of each new section. The finale is country dance music: right at the beginning, the first orchestra strums and the second has a headlong Bulgarian tune. Here, too, the first movement’s theme returns, but transformed, its intervals stretched wide, its har- monies open and unambiguous, and at the end, even the wild Bulgarian tune turns expansive in a harmonization that might have been invented by Bartók’s compatriot and friend, Zoltán Kodály.

And so this work is in Bartók’s life a marker from which we can look both back and forward: the first movement is the summation of endeavors from about 1919 into the middle ’30s, the time of the tough, concentrated, often fiercely dissonant music of The Miraculous Mandarin, the Dance Suite, the two sonatas for violin and piano, the first two piano con- certos, the quartets Nos. 3, 4, and 5, the Cantata profana, while the radical reinterpretation of that material in the finale anticipates the “easier” writing of the later years, of the No. 2, the Concerto for Orchestra, and the Piano Concerto No. 3.

Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta is a work of exuberant invention, of rhapsody, of sometimes lacerating passion. But recall Gilman’s phrase, “cerebral rhapsodist.” There was, to Bartók’s mind, the side that produced the darkness and passion of this fugue, that produced the high spirits of the second and fourth movements, the nocturnal mys- teries of the Adagio of this Music, the ferocity of the first movements of the Fourth and Fifth string quartets, the scurrilous humor of the Burletta in the Sixth. But with inspiration and fantasy there went a passion for order. He was equipped with an uncannily accurate inner clock and he could tell when music marked to be played at metronome 112 was in fact going at 111 or 113.

One manifestation of Bartók’s exquisite feeling for time and proportion was his fascina- tion with the golden section, that division of a line where the smaller segment is to the larger as the larger is to the whole (the relation is about 382:618). Almost always in Bartók’s mature music, something critical happens at that point of division. In the fugue of the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, it is the place where the mutes come off and where a percussion instrument, a kettledrum, enters for the first time (to the beat, it is the moment at which we first hear unmuted strings)—the place from which the music begins to move with energy toward its climax. In the second movement, it is the point at which the development really gets going, and it is marked by a striking new sonority and pattern, an ostinato in the second orchestra and harp, punctuated by unpredictably spaced chords on the piano and in the second orchestra, which plays those special Bartók pizzicatos where the string rebounds against the fingerboard with a hard slap. In the Adagio, it is at this point of division that the most amazing sounding section begins, the part where the soft tremolando dialogue of the two groups of strings is heard as though through a scrim of glissandos, scales, and broken chords from celesta, harp, and piano.

The design of the first movement is in another way a marvel and a delight to the mind. In tonal music, the most important note is called the tonic or keynote. The next most important is called the dominant, and it is the fifth note of the scale: the chord built on that note is the one with the strongest magnetic pull toward the tonic. If you keep going

week 7 program notes 49 Béla Bartók with Paul Sacher, January 1937

up a fifth at a time, you will touch all twelve notes and come back to your starting point, a voyage you can represent graphically by means of a circle. That circle of fifths also illustrates something else important: keys that we call closely related, i.e., those with the greatest number of notes in common, are the ones closest to each other on the circum- ference of the circle. The remotest relationships, i.e., those where there is actually only a single common note, are those between keys directly opposite one another on the cir- cumference.

Now Bartók starts his fugue on A. Each successive entrance of a voice starts on another of the twelve available pitches, but arranged so as to fan out from A in both directions around the circle alternately. The fff climax with the single blow on the bass drum is reached when the process arrives at E-flat, the point opposite A on the circle, the maxi- mum distance from home. That climax, that point of highest tension, is placed quite classically two-thirds through the movement, and the unwinding of the fugue will there- fore entail some compression. Bartók moves in gigantic and quick strides across half the circle from E-flat to B-flat to F, then, after a breath, begins the journey back, during which, for a kind of symmetry, he presents the theme upside down. Starting with a series

50 of fragmentary entrances on C and F-sharp, he retraces his steps until he reaches A. The homecoming is occasion for celebration: there are two simultaneous entrances on A, one giving the theme in its original form, the other in its inversion, and this is when and why the music is so wonderfully garlanded in the figurations of the celesta. When the piece began, the task was to conquer the whole tonal territory. Now the task is to stabilize. So, where the first twelve fugal entrances were on twelve different pitches, the last twelve are all on A. At the end, only two sections of violins remain: they start together on A, move in opposite directions until both reach E-flat, then converge quietly again on A. In those eighteen notes, Bartók shows us the whole movement in microcosm.

What draws us in is the expressive wealth of Bartók’s music. We perceive its shape as natural, spontaneous, and inevitable: the most ardent romantic could desire no more. With coolest precision it has been calculated to make just that effect. Bartók’s colleague, the man who in irritated response to his newly rich brother’s signing a letter “land-owner” signed his reply, “Ludwig van Beethoven, brain-owner,” would have understood.

Michael Steinberg michael steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilations of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and the great works for chorus and orchestra.

THEFIRSTAMERICANPERFORMANCES of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta were led by , who introduced it to this country at concerts of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society on October 28 and 29, 1937.

THEFIRSTBOSTONSYMPHONYPERFORMANCES were given by Leonard Bernstein in February 1947, subsequent ones being given by Charles Munch, Guido Cantelli, Ernest Ansermet, Michael Tilson Thomas, Seiji Ozawa (on numerous occasions between 1976 and 1993, including the most recent Tanglewood performance on August 11, 1979, performances during the BSO’s late-summer European tour in 1979, and performances in Japan in February 1986), , and (the most recent subscription performances, in December 2004).

week 7 program notes 51

Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, Opus 73, “Emperor”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN was baptized in Bonn (then an independent electorate) probably on December 16, 1770 (he was baptized on the 17th), and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He com- posed the “Emperor” Concerto in 1809, but it was not performed in Vienna until February 12, 1812, when the soloist was Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny. The first known performance was given in Leipzig on November 28, 1811, by pianist Friedrich Schneider, with Johann Philipp Christian Schulz conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra. The score, like many of his others (including the Fourth Piano Concerto), was dedicated by Beethoven to his patron, student, and friend, Archduke Rudolph.

IN ADDITION TO THE SOLO PIANIST, the score of the “Emperor” Concerto calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Beethoven has always had a reputation as a revolutionary: “The Man Who Freed Music” and so on. In his lifetime, the era of the French Revolution and its aftermath, that radical frisson earned him his most fervent supporters—mainly among socially and artistically progressive Romantics—and also his bitterest enemies. There is no question that he brought a bold and singular new voice to Western music, and there is no better example than the Emperor Concerto. Yet a close look at the progress of his work in each of his genres, including the concertos, shows an artist better described as an evolutionary.

Beethoven had models for most of his efforts and considered it his business to master the norms of his craft, to understand the individual nature of each genre, and on that foundation to make his own statement. Until he was ready to make that statement, he waited. Besides his inherent Germanic respect for tradition, part of the background of his approach was practical. In taking up every genre, he studied what he considered the best of its kind. When it came to string quartets, that meant Haydn above all. For piano writ- ing, he looked to predecessors including Clementi. When he took up concertos, the main model was inevitably Mozart.

week 7 program notes 53 Program page from the first Boston Symphony performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto on January 28, 1882, during the orchestra’s inaugural season, with soloist Carl Baermann under the direction of Georg Henschel (BSO Archives)

54 At the same time, he knew that his models were also going to be his competition. His string quartets would be up against Haydn’s, his concertos up against Mozart’s. So when his works were going to be measured against the finest of their type, he was cautious. His first string quartets are masterful but not notably bold; he was not yet ready to compete with Haydn. His solo piano music was bolder earlier, because he knew Clementi was no rival, and he considered the keyboard music of Haydn and Mozart to be more redolent of harpsichord than piano.

None of this is to say that Beethoven was afraid of anybody. But as a practical and pro- fessional matter, until he saw his path clearly he was not going to issue ambitious work to challenge the competition past or present. His first two piano concertos are a case in point. They are very much late-18th-century, though with novel touches that at the time raised eyebrows. His Third Concerto, later recognized as the transition to the mature Beethovenian voice of the last two piano concertos, is the most audibly indebted to Mozart.

Meanwhile, Beethoven generally respected the performing traditions of a given genre. Piano sonatas were expected to be played in private venues, so he never performed a sonata on the public stage. When he took up concertos, he created them as the time understood them: pieces to show off himself or the virtuosos they were written for. This is the milieu in which his first three piano concertos were created; all of them are vehicles for his virtuoso career, more au courant than “revolutionary.” With the Fourth Concerto of 1806, he was ready to make his statement: from the radical step of starting with the soloist (though Mozart had done that too) to the brooding, inward quality of the solo opening, the Fourth Concerto was the kind of epochal new take on tradition that his Third Symphony (Eroica) and Razumovsky string quartets had been.

As usual for a composer/performer, Beethoven himself premiered the Fourth Concerto in 1807. By that point, however, his days as a virtuoso were ending. His hearing had been

week 7 program notes 55

Archduke Rudolph of Austria, dedicatee of the "Emperor" Concerto and other works by Beethoven (oil painting by Johann Baptist Lampi, c.1825)

declining for years, and he had made the transition from composer/pianist to composer, period. After this he never performed a major work in public again. So he did not pre- miere the Piano Concerto No. 5, Opus 73, later dubbed Emperor, written in 1808-09, and first performed in November 1811.

The concerto is dedicated to his most generous and distinguished patron, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, who was a Beethoven pupil in piano and composition. The majestic quality that earned the concerto its name is sometimes credited to the influence of its dedicatee and his exalted position—he was brother of the Emperor. More relevantly, Rudolph got the dedication of what was dubbed the Archduke Trio, which is elegant and aristocratic in tone. But in fact Beethoven dedicated many pieces to Rudolph, including the Fourth Piano Concerto, and their characters range widely. Some have found a con- nection of the Fifth’s tone to its being written in the middle of a war frenzy—Napoleon’s latest advance and his occupation of Vienna. But the exalted tone of the piece would hardly connect to Beethoven’s feelings toward the war and the occupation, of which he wrote, “What a destructive, disorderly life I see and hear around me, nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery in every form.”

A more likely reason for the tone of the Fifth Concerto is simply that Beethoven had written nothing like it, and he wanted maximum variety from his output in a given genre; for example, the Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, is virtually the anti-Fifth. Like most Beethoven works, the Emperor Concerto lays out its essential character and ideas in the first seconds. It is in E-flat major, often a heroic key for him, and so it is here. We hear a fortissimo chord from the orchestra, which summons bravura torrents of notes from the piano. The radical step here is less the idea of beginning with the soloist than the cadenza- like quality, which will mark much of the solo part (and which is why the usual conclud- ing cadenza is omitted). A second towering chord from the orchestra is answered by

week 7 program notes 57 more heroic peals from the piano, this time sinking to some quiet espressivo phrases that foreshadow the second movement.

Only then does the orchestra set out on the leading theme, in a grand and sweeping military style. By now it’s clear that this piece is heroic in tone, and the hero is the soloist. The opening theme will dominate the movement. The appearance of a softly lilting second theme in the exotic key of E-flat minor presages a work marked by unusual key shifts, their effect ranging from startling to mysterious. At the end of the orchestral exposition the soloist sneaks back in on a rising chromatic dash that leads to a two-fisted procla- mation of his own version of the orchestra’s theme. It dissolves into flashing garlands of notes, continuing the kind of endless cadenza of the solo part in what adds up to an enormous movement.

After an opening that is more consistently militant in style than in any other Beethoven concerto, the second movement unfolds in a serenely spiritual atmosphere, beginning with an eloquent theme in muted strings that Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny said was based on pilgrims’ hymns. It echoes the quiet espressivo phrases of the first movement’s opening. In turn, the gentle and spiritual quality of the second movement is punctuated with moments of the soloist’s first-movement bravura.

Picking up directly from the end of the slow movement, the rondo finale begins with a lusty, offbeat theme in the piano. Call its tone playfully heroic. As in the first movement,

58 the opening theme dominates. Toward the end, thrumming timpani accompany what seems to be the approach of the final cadenza. But once again there is no cadenza because the soloist has been showing off in a quasi-improvisatory fashion all along. Beethoven’s last completed concerto ends with an ebullient burst of offbeat exclama- tions that land on the beat only at the last moment. A critic of the time noted that at the premiere the finale left the audience “in transports of delight,” and so it has done with audiences ever since.

Jan Swafford jan swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose books include biographies of and Charles Ives, “The Vintage Guide to Classical Music,” and, most recently, “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.” He is currently working on a biography of Mozart.

THEFIRSTAMERICANPERFORMANCE of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto was given at the Boston Music Hall on March 4, 1854, with pianist Robert Heller and the orchestra of the Germania Music Society under the direction of Carl Bergmann.

THEFIRSTBOSTONSYMPHONYORCHESTRAPERFORMANCE of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto featured Carl Baermann under the direction of Georg Henschel on January 28, 1882, dur- ing the BSO’s first season. BSO performances since then have featured Baermann, Carl Faelten, Adele aus der Ohe, Helen Hopekirk, Ignace Paderweski, Samuel S. Sanford, Frederic Lamond, and Ferruccio Busoni (all with conducting); Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler, Franz Rummel, and Eugen D’Albert ( conducting); Baermann (); Paderewski, Harold Bauer, Teresa Carreño, and Leonard Borwick (Karl Muck); Paderewski, H. Gebhard, Ernest Hutcheson, Busoni, Elizabeth Howland, and Wilhelm Backhaus (); Carreño (Otto Urack); Bauer (); Josef Hofmann, Bauer, and Claudio Arrau (); Alfred Cortot, Walter Gieseking, Hofmann, Egon Petri, Alexander Borovsky, Jacob Lateiner, and Nadia Reisenberg (Serge Koussevitzky); Rudolf Ganz, Leonard Shure, Jesús María Sanromá, and Reisenberg (Richard Burgin); (G. Wallace Woodworth); , Lélia Gousseau, Robert Casadesus, Serkin, Arrau, and Eugene Istomin (Charles Munch); Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, and Grant Johannesen (); Vladimir Ashkenazy (Charles Wilson); Serkin (Max Rudolf); Rudolf Firkušný and Jerome Lowenthal (); Philippe Entremont (); (Seiji Ozawa, Colin Davis, and Ferdinand Leitner); André-Michel Schub (Ozawa and Joseph Silver- stein); Serkin, Alexis Weissenberg, Murray Perahia, Russell Sherman, Krystian Zimerman, Alfred Brendel, Dubravka Tomsic, and Árcadi Volodos (Ozawa); Emanuel Ax (Christoph Eschenbach and Bernard Haitink); André Watts ( and Thomas Dausgaard); Radu Lupu (Sir Simon Rattle); Horacio Gutiérrez (Richard Westerfield); Garrick Ohlsson (); Cliburn and Stephen Kovacevich (Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos); Jonathan Biss (James Conlon); (Donald Runnicles); Marc-André Hamelin (Jens Georg Bachmann); Leon Fleisher and Anton Kuerti (with Julian Kuerti conducting, and his father Anton Kuerti substituting for Fleisher in the last performance of the series); Jonathan Biss and Emanuel Ax (Stéphan Denève); Yefim Bronfman (the most recent subscription performances, in March 2014 with Christoph von Dohnányi), and Garrick Ohlsson (the most recent Tanglewood performance, on July 31, 2015, with Ken-David Masur).

week 7 program notes 59

To Read and Hear More...

Basic information about Jean-Frédéric Neuburger may be found at the website of the artist management company Kajimoto: www.kajimoto.com. A few of Neuburger’s com- positions have been released commercially, including the piano work Maldoror performed by the composer, along with works of Barraqué, Liszt, and Debussy (Mirare), and his live recording from Tokyo’s Suntory Hall of his Bagatelle for piano, on a CD with works of Bach, Ravel, Stravinsky, and others (Mirare). Neuburger’s discography as pianist also includes all-Beethoven and all-Ravel discs, the Chopin works for cello and piano, and the Piano Quintet and Zwei Gesänge of Brahms (all Mirare). For more compositions by Neuburger, consult YouTube, where one can find Maldoror, the piano piece Vitrail à l’homme sans yeux, Chanson for piano and orchestra, and the Cantate profane sur deux poèmes d’Aimé Césaire for chorus and orchestra.

Robert Kirzinger

Paul Griffiths’s Bartók in the Master Musicians series (Dent paperback) is a useful sup- plement to Halsey Stevens’s The Life and Music of Béla Bartók, which has long been the standard biography of the composer (Oxford paperback). Béla Bartók by Kenneth Chalmers is a volume in the copiously illustrated series “20th-Century Composers” (Phaidon paperback). Three relatively recent books offer wide-ranging consideration of Bartók’s life, music, critical reception, and milieu: Bartók and his World, edited by Peter Laki (Prince- ton University Press); The Bartók Companion, edited by Malcolm Gillies (Amadeus paper- back), and David E. Schneider’s Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of a Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality (University of California Press). Agatha Fassett’s personal account of the composer’s last years has been reprinted as The Naked Face of Genius: Béla Bartók’s American Years (Dover paperback). Béla Bartók: His Life in Pictures and Documents by Ferenc Bónis is a fascinating compendium well worth seeking from secondhand book dealers (Corvino).

The Boston Symphony Orchestra recorded Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in 1976 with Seiji Ozawa (Deutsche Grammophon), who went on to record it again later with the Berlin Philharmonic (also Deutsche Grammophon) and Saito Kinen Orchestra (origi- nally Philips). Other recordings include Marin Alsop’s with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Naxos), Leonard Bernstein’s with the New York Philharmonic (Sony Classical), ’s with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (Sony), Antál Dorati’s first with the London Symphony Orchestra (Mercury) and later with the Detroit Symphony (Decca),

week 7 read and hear more 61 62 Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (RCA), ’s with the (EMI), ’s with the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon), James Levine’s with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon), Fritz Reiner’s with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (RCA), and ’s also with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (London).

Edmund Morris’s Beethoven: The Universal Composer is a first-rate compact biography aimed at the general reader (Harper Perennial paperback, in the series “Eminent Lives”). Jan Swafford’s Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph is an important recent addition to the Beethoven bibliography (Houghton Mifflin). Other full-scale modern biographies, both titled simply Beethoven, are by Maynard Solomon (Schirmer paperback) and Barry Cooper (Oxford University Press, in the “Master Musicians” series). Noteworthy, too, are Swafford’s chapter on Beethoven in The Vintage Guide to Classical Music (Vintage paperback); Richard Osborne’s chapter on Beethoven in A Guide to the Symphony, edited by Robert Layton (Oxford paperback); Robert Simpson’s chapter, “Beethoven and the Concerto,” in A Guide to the Concerto, also edited by Layton (Oxford paperback), and Beethoven: The Music and the Life, by the Harvard-based Beethoven authority Lewis Lockwood (Norton paperback). The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination by the Boston-based critic Matthew Guerrieri, published in 2012, examines the impact of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 from a broad cultural perspective (Knopf). Dating from the 19th century, but still crucial, is Thayer’s Life of Beethoven as revised and updated by Elliot Forbes (Princeton paperback). Michael Steinberg’s program notes on the Beethoven concertos are in his compilation volume The Concerto–A Listener’s Guide (Oxford paperback). Donald Francis Tovey’s notes on the concertos are among his Essays in Musical Analysis (Oxford).

The Boston Symphony Orchestra recorded Beethoven’s five piano concertos in the 1980s with Rudolf Serkin under Seiji Ozawa’s direction (Telarc) and in the 1960s with Arthur Rubinstein under the direction of Erich Leinsdorf (RCA). Other noteworthy sets of the five piano concertos (listed alphabetically by soloist) include ’s with Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra (EMI), Alfred Brendel’s recorded live with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Philips), Yefim Bronfman’s with David Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich (Arte Nova), Leon Fleisher’s with and the (Sony), Stephen Kovacevich’s with Colin Davis and the BBC Symphony and London Symphony orchestras (Decca), Murray Perahia’s with Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam (Sony), and Mitsuko Uchida’s with Kurt Sanderling conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam (Philips). Among historic issues, Artur Schnabel’s recordings from the 1930s with Malcolm Sargent conducting the London Philharmonic have always held a special place (various CD reissues).

Marc Mandel

week 7 read and hear more 63

Guest Artists

Christoph von Dohnányi

Christoph von Dohnányi is recognized as one of the world’s preeminent orchestral and opera conductors. His longstanding relationship with London’s Philharmonia began with his appoint- ment as that orchestra’s principal guest conductor in 1994; he served as principal conductor for eleven years from 1997, before being appointed Honorary Conductor for Life in 2008. Mr. Dohnányi opened his 2015-16 season on tour with the Philharmonia to Saffron Walden, Dortmund, Berlin, Prague, and Cologne, followed by the orchestra’s 70th-anniversary celebra- tory concert. Other season highlights include concerts with the Orchestre de Paris, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and the symphony orchestras of Boston, Sydney, and Chicago. In summer seasons he is a frequent guest at Tanglewood, leading concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. Last season he con- ducted the Orchestre de Paris, Israel Philharmonic, Filarmonica della Scala, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, New York Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony Orchestra, and also led a concert with the student orchestra of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. Music Director Laureate of the Cleveland Orchestra (the first to hold that post), he was that ensemble’s music director from 1984 to 2002, following two years as music director designate. Highlights of his tenure there included extensive touring and recording. In 1953 Sir Georg Solti appointed Mr. Dohnányi as répétiteur and assistant conductor at Oper . At twenty-seven he became Germany’s youngest general music director, at Theater Lübeck. Other appointments have included opera directorships in Frankfurt and Hamburg, and principal orchestral conducting posts in Germany, London, and Paris. His distinguished career as an opera conductor includes productions at the Royal Opera House–Covent Garden, the Metro-

week 7 guest artists 65 66 politan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opéra National de Paris, and, since the 1990s, Zurich Opera. He also led a variety of new productions at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris with the Philharmonia Orchestra and many productions at the Vienna State Opera. With the , he has appeared frequently at the Salzburg Festival and in concert, and has recorded several operas, as well as the complete symphonies of Mendelssohn. Born in Berlin, Christoph von Dohnányi studied law in Munich from the age of sixteen. After two years he changed to music, studying composition, piano, and conducting at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Prize for conducting by the City of Munich. He continued his studies in the United States with his grandfather, Ernst von Dohnányi, at Florida State University and at the Tanglewood Music Center. His many awards and recognitions include honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music, the Eastman School of Music, and Oberlin College of Music. Christoph von Dohnányi made his BSO subscription series debut in February 1989 and has been a frequent guest with the orchestra at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood since his BSO subscription concerts of November 2002, most recently for two subscription weeks in March 2015 and two Tanglewood concerts this past July.

Martin Helmchen

Born in 1982, Martin Helmchen has already performed with many of the world’s most presti- gious orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Vienna Philharmonic, and the NHK Symphony in Japan. Mr. Helmchen made a notable U.S. orchestral debut in August 2011 playing the Schumann Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood under Christoph von Dohnányi. He made his New York Philharmonic debut last season at Lincoln Center with Dvoˇrák’s Piano Concerto. Highlights of his 2015-16 season include this week’s subscription series debut with the Boston Symphony at Symphony Hall and his Grand Rapids Symphony debut, as well as returns to the Houston Symphony and Marlboro Festival. In 2016-17 he will make debuts with the Chicago Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Martin Helmchen has also appeared with the symphony orchestras of Dallas, Portland (Oregon), Saint Louis, and San Francisco, as

week 7 guest artists 67 well as with the Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom. In May 2014 he made a highly acclaimed Washington, D.C., recital debut at the Kennedy Center. International engagements have included appearances with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the Gürzenich-Orchester in Cologne, Musikkollegium Winterthur, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, the Prague Symphony, Royal Flemish Phil- harmonic, Moscow’s Svetlanov Symphony, and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. Artist-in- residence with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra during the 2011-12 season, he has appeared with many other European ensembles and under the direction of numerous distinguished conductors. Recital appearances have taken him to the Frick Collection in New York, Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall (with cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker), the Coast Recital Society, San Francisco Performances, ArtSpring, London’s Wigmore Hall, and the in Frankfurt. He also appears regularly at major German festivals, as well as at the Schubertiade, Lockenhaus, and Marlboro. Under an exclusive contract with , his debut disc of Mozart concertos with the Netherlands Chamber Philharmonic was released in September 2007, followed by a second Mozart concerto disc with the same orchestra in 2013. His first solo CD, a recording of works by Schubert, won an ECHO Award in 2009. Other PentaTone discs include the Mendelssohn concertos, the Schumann and Dvoˇrák concertos, and Schubert’s complete works for violin and piano with . With a passion for chamber music, largely ignited by his early collaborations with the late cellist Boris Pergamenschikow, Mr. Helmchen now performs regularly with Heinrich Schiff and Marie-Elisabeth Hecker. Other partners include Juliane Banse, Veronika Eberle, Julia Fischer, , , , , Lars Vogt, and . Last summer he was invited to return to Elena Bashkirova’s International Chamber Music Festival in Jerusalem.

week 7 guest artists 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 Mr. and Mrs. George D. Behrakis • John F. Cogan, Jr. and Mary L. Cornille

five million Alli and Bill Achtmeyer • Bank of America • Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser • Cynthia and Oliver Curme/The Lost & Foundation, Inc. • Alan J. and Suzanne W. Dworsky • EMC Corporation • Germeshausen Foundation • Sally ‡ and Michael Gordon • Ted and Debbie Kelly • NEC Corporation • Megan and Robert O’Block • UBS • Stephen and Dorothy Weber • Anonymous

two and one half million Mary and J.P. Barger • Gabriella and Leo Beranek • Roberta and George ‡ Berry • Peter and Anne Brooke • Eleanor L. and Levin H. Campbell • Chiles Foundation • Mara E. Dole ‡ • The Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts • Jane and Jack Fitzpatrick ‡ • Susan Morse Hilles ‡ • Stephen B. Kay and Lisbeth L. Tarlow/The Aquidneck Foundation • The Kresge Foundation • Lizbeth and George Krupp • Liberty Mutual Foundation, Inc. • Massachusetts Cultural Council • Kate and Al ‡ Merck • Cecile Higginson Murphy • National Endowment for the Arts • William and Lia Poorvu • John S. and Cynthia Reed • Carol and Joe Reich • 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 • 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 • Country Curtains • Diddy and John Cullinane • Edith L. and Lewis S. ‡ Dabney • Elisabeth K. and Stanton W. Davis ‡ • Mary Deland R. de Beaumont ‡ • Bob and Happy Doran • Alan and Lisa Dynner and Akiko ‡ Dynner • William and Deborah Elfers • Elizabeth B. Ely ‡ • Nancy S. and John P. Eustis II ‡ • Shirley and Richard ‡ Fennell • Anna E. Finnerty ‡ • 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 ‡ • Edith C. Howie ‡ • Dorothy and Charlie Jenkins • John Hancock Financial Services • Muriel E. and Richard L. ‡ Kaye • Nancy D. and George H. ‡ Kidder • Kingsbury Road Charitable Foundation • Farla and Harvey Chet Krentzman ‡ • Barbara and Bill Leith ‡ • Nancy and Richard Lubin • Vera M. and John D. MacDonald ‡ • Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation • Carmine A. and Beth V. Martignetti • Commonwealth of Massachusetts • 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 • Mrs. Mischa Nieland ‡ and Dr. Michael L. Nieland • Mr. ‡ and Mrs. Norio Ohga • P&G Gillette • 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 • Kristin and Roger Servison • Ruth ‡ and Carl J. Shapiro • 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 • Helen and Josef Zimbler ‡ • Brooks and Linda Zug • Anonymous (7)

‡ Deceased

week 7 the great benefactors 71

Administration

Mark Volpe, Eunice and Julian Cohen Managing Director, endowed in perpetuity Anthony Fogg, Artistic Administrator 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 Thomas D. May, Chief Financial Officer Kim Noltemy, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Bart Reidy, Director of Development Ray F. Wellbaum, Orchestra Manager administrative staff/artistic

Bridget P. Carr, Senior Archivist • Kristie Chan, Assistant to the Artistic Administrator • Julie Giattina Moerschel, Executive Assistant to the Managing Director • Vincenzo Natale, Chauffeur/Valet • Sarah Radcliffe-Marrs, Manager of Artists Services administrative staff/production Christopher W. Ruigomez, Director of Concert Operations H.R. Costa, Technical Director • Erik Johnson, Chorus Manager • Tuaha Khan, Stage Technician • Jake Moerschel, Technical Supervisor/Assistant Stage Manager • Leah Monder, Operations Manager • John Morin, Stage Technician • Mark C. Rawson, Stage Technician • Emily W. Siders, Concert Operations Administrator • Nick Squire, Recording Engineer • Andrew Tremblay, Assistant to the Orchestra Personnel Manager/Audition Coordinator boston pops Dennis Alves, Director of Artistic Planning 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 • Natasa Vucetic, Controller Sophia Bennett, Staff Accountant • Angelina Collins, Accounting Manager • Karen Guy, Accounts Payable Supervisor • Minnie Kwon, Payroll Associate • Evan Mehler, Budget Manager • Nia Patterson, Senior Accounts Payable Assistant • Mario Rossi, Staff Accountant • Lucy Song, Accounts Payable Assistant • Teresa Wang, Staff Accountant • Maggie Zhong, Senior Endowment Accountant

week 7 administration 73 74 development

Susan Grosel, Director of Annual Funds and Donor Relations • Nina Jung, Director of Board, Donor, and Volunteer Engagement • Ryan Losey, Director of Foundation and Government Relations • John C. MacRae, Director of Principal and Major Gifts • 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 • Leslie Antoniel, Leadership Gifts Officer • Erin Asbury, Manager of Volunteer Services • Stephanie Baker, Assistant Director, Campaign Planning and Administration • Nadine Biss, Assistant Manager, Development Communications • Diane Cataudella, Associate Director, Donor Relations • Caitlin Charnley, Donor Ticketing Associate • Allison Cooley, Major Gifts Officer • Catherine Cushing, Assistant Manager, Donor Relations • Emily Diaz, Assistant Manager, Gift Processing • Emily Fritz-Endres, Executive Assistant to the Director of Development • Barbara Hanson, Senior Leadership Gifts Officer • James Jackson, Assistant Director, Telephone Outreach • Jennifer Johnston, Graphic Designer/ Print Production Manager • Katherine Laveway, Major Gifts Coordinator • Andrew Leeson, Manager, Direct Fundraising and Friends Program • Anne McGuire, Assistant Manager, Corporate Initiatives and Research • 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 • Drew Schweppe, Major Gifts Coordinator • Alexandria Sieja, Manager, Development Events • Yong-Hee Silver, Senior Major Gifts Officer • Szeman Tse, Assistant Director, Development Research education and community engagement Jessica Schmidt, Helaine B. Allen Director of Education and Community Engagement Claire Carr, Senior Manager of Education and Community Engagement • Emilio Gonzalez, Manager of Education and Community Engagement • Elizabeth Mullins, Assistant Manager of Education and Community Engagement • Darlene White, Manager of Berkshire 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 • Thomas Davenport, Carpenter • Michael Frazier, Carpenter • Steven Harper, HVAC Technician • Sandra Lemerise, Painter • Adam Twiss, Electrician environmental services Landel Milton, Lead Custodian • Rudolph Lewis, Assistant Lead Custodian • Desmond Boland, Custodian • Julien Buckmire, Custodian/Set-up Coordinator • Claudia Ramirez Calmo, Custodian • Errol Smart, Custodian • Gaho Boniface Wahi, Custodian tanglewood operations Robert Lahart, Director of Tanglewood Facilities Bruce Peeples, Grounds Supervisor • Peter Socha, Buildings Supervisor • Fallyn Girard, 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 7 administration 75 information technology Timothy James, Director of Information Technology Andrew Cordero, IT Asset Manager • Ana Costagliola, Database Business Analyst • Isa Cuba, Infrastructure Engineer • Stella Easland, Telephone Systems Coordinator • Michael Finlan, Telephone Systems Manager • Karol Krajewski, Infrastructure Systems Manager • Brian Van Sickle, User Support Specialist • Richard Yung, IT Services Manager public relations

Samuel Brewer, Public Relations Associate • Taryn Lott, Senior Public Relations Associate publications Marc Mandel, Director of Program Publications Robert Kirzinger, Assistant 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 • Sid Guidicianne, Front of House Manager • Roberta Kennedy, Buyer for Symphony Hall and Tanglewood • Sarah L. Manoog, Director of Marketing • Michael Miller, Director of Ticketing Amy Aldrich, Associate Director of Subscriptions and Patron Services • Christopher Barberesi, Assistant Manager, Corporate Partnerships • Gretchen Borzi, Associate Director of Marketing • Lenore Camassar, Associate Manager, SymphonyCharge • Megan Cokely, Group Sales Manager • Susan Coombs, SymphonyCharge Coordinator • Jonathan Doyle, Graphic Designer • Paul Ginocchio, Manager, Symphony Shop and Tanglewood Glass House • Leslie Kwan, Associate Director of Marketing Promotions and Events • George Lovejoy, SymphonyCharge Representative • Ronnie McKinley, Ticket Exchange Coordinator • Michelle Meacham, Subscriptions Representative • Michael Moore, Associate Director of Internet Marketing and Digital Analytics • Laurence E. Oberwager, Director of Tanglewood Business Partners • Meaghan O’Rourke, Internet Marketing and Social Media Manager • Greg Ragnio, Subscriptions Representative • Doreen Reis, Advertising Manager • 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 • Amanda Warren, Graphic Designer • David Chandler Winn, Tessitura Liaison and Associate Director of Tanglewood Ticketing box office Jason Lyon, Symphony Hall Box Office Manager • Nicholas Vincent, Assistant Manager box office representatives Jane Esterquest • Arthur Ryan event services James Gribaudo, Function Manager • Kyle Ronayne, Director of Event Administration • Luciano Silva, Manager of Venue Rentals and Event Administration tanglewood music center

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

week 7 administration 77

Boston Symphony Association of Volunteers executive committee Chair, Martin Levine Vice-Chair, Boston, Gerald L. Dreher Vice-Chair, Tanglewood, Alexandra Warshaw Secretary, Susan Price Co-Chairs, Boston Suzanne Baum • Trish Lavoie • Leah Lee Co-Chairs, Tanglewood Judith Benjamin • Bob Braun • David Galpern Liaisons, Tanglewood Glass Houses, Stanley Feld • Ushers, Carolyn Ivory boston project leads 2015-16

Café Flowers, Stephanie Henry and Kevin Montague • Chamber Music Series, Rita Richmond and Christine Watson • Computer and Office Support, Helen Adelman • Flower Decorating, Linda Clarke • Guide’s Guide, Audley H. Fuller and Renee Voltmann • Instrument Playground, Melissa Riesgo • Mailings, George Mellman • Membership Table/Hall Greeters, Sabrina Ellis • Newsletter, Richard Pokorny • Recruitment, Retention, Reward, Rosemary Noren • Symphony Shop, Karen Brown • Tour Guides, Cathy Mazza

week 7 administration 79 Next Program…

Thursday, November 19, 8pm Friday, November 20, 11am (Friday Preview from 9:45-10:15 in Symphony Hall) Saturday, November 21, 8pm

andris nelsons conducting

bach “komm, jesu, komm!,” motet for double chorus, bwv 229 “es ist genug,” chorale from cantata no. 60 tanglewood festival chorus edward maclary, guest chorus conductor

berg violin concerto Andante—Allegretto Allegro—Adagio isabelle faust

{intermission}

shostakovich symphony no. 5 in d minor, opus 47 Moderato Allegretto Largo Allegro non troppo

Two of the 20th century’s most important works—Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto—were composed within two years of one another. Shostakovich’s symphony, which follows a trajectory from darkness to triumph, has long been considered his reaction to official condemnation of his music by the Soviet government, and by Stalin in particular, but the reality is far subtler than that. These performances continue the BSO’s survey under Andris Nelsons of the composer’s Stalin-era works. Berg’s Violin Concerto was composed as a memorial to eighteen-year- old Manon Gropius (daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler), who had recently died. The entire work is suffused with elegy. Its second movement quotes Bach’s chorale Es ist genug, which has deep musical connections to Berg’s piece. That brief Bach chorale from Cantata No. 60, as well as the short motet Komm, Jesu, komm!, both featuring the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, open and set the tone for this program.

80 Coming Concerts… friday previews and 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. (9:45-10:15 a.m. on November 20) and the Open Rehearsal Talks from 9:30-10 a.m. in Symphony Hall.

Sunday, November 15, 3pm Tuesday ‘C’ November 24, 8-10:05 Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory Friday ‘A’ November 27, 1:30-3:35

BOSTONSYMPHONYCHAMBERPLAYERS Saturday ‘A’ November 28, 8-10:05 with JEREMYFLOWER, computer and piano ANDRISNELSONS, conductor and RANDALLHODGKINSON, piano YEFIMBRONFMAN, piano J.C.BACH Quintet in G for flute, oboe, HAYDN Symphony No. 30, Alleluja violin, viola, and continuo, BARTÓK Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 11, No. 2 TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 1, Winter PISTON Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet, Daydreams and Bassoon FLOWER Shamu and Clinical, for horn, electronics, and piano Thursday ‘A’ January 7, 8-10 HINDEMITH Sonata for Double Bass and Friday ‘B’ January 8, 1:30-3:30 Piano Saturday ‘B’ January 9, 8-10 BEETHOVEN String Trio in G, Op. 9, No. 1 Tuesday ‘B’ January 12, 8-10 FRANÇOIS-XAVIER ROTH, conductor Thursday ‘C’ November 19, 8-10 ELIZABETHROWE, flute Friday ‘B’ November 20, 11am-1pm JESSICAZHOU, harp (note early start time) GOSSEC Symphonie à 17 parties Saturday ‘B’ November 21, 8-10 MOZART Concerto in C for Flute and ANDRISNELSONS, conductor Harp ISABELLEFAUST, violin BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 3, Eroica TANGLEWOOD FESTIVAL CHORUS, EDWARDMACLARY,GUESTCHORUSCONDUCTOR

J.S.BACH Komm, Jesu, komm!, Motet, BWV 229 J.S.BACH Es ist genug, Chorale from Cantata No. 60 BERG Violin Concerto SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 5

Programs and artists subject to change.

Single tickets for all Boston Symphony concerts throughout the season are available online at bso.org, 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. (Saturday from 12 noon to 6 p.m.). Please note that there is a $6.50 handling fee for each ticket ordered by phone or online.

week 7 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 infor- mation 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 (12 noon until 6 p.m. on Saturday), until 8:30 p.m. on concert evenings, and for a half-hour past starting time for other events. In addition, the box office opens at least two hours prior to most Sunday performances. Single tickets for all Boston Symphony subscription concerts are available at the box office. 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 6 p.m. Monday through Friday (12 noon to 6 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 avail- able 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 pro- gram 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 7 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 $9 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 con- certs. 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 bal- cony, 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 All-Classical. 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 infor- mation, 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 Thursday 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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