Program Notes for November 12, 2016

Antonín Dvořák Overture: In Nature’s Realm, Op. 91 Antonín Dvořák was born in Mühlhausen, Bohemia in 1841 and died in Prague in 1904. He composed this concert overture in 1891 and led the first performance in Prague the following year. The score calls for 2 flutes, 3 , English , 3 , bass , 2 , 4 horns, 3 , 3 , , , percussion, and strings. ***** When Dvořák composed three concert overtures meant to represent the “three great creative forces of the Universe,” he called them Nature, Life, and Love. He originally intended that they should be played together as a set—there is some thematic unity among the three and they do make an interesting trilogy. But he eventually decided to issue them separately, and renamed them In Nature’s Realm, Carnival, and . Dvořák composed these works at his secluded home in the Vysoká forest, and his deep reverence for nature informs all of them. What’s more, the main theme of In Nature’s Realm appears in the other overtures, too. This links them not just musically, but philosophically as well: to Dvořák, the gentle beauty of Nature, the spirit of Life, and the joys (and jealousies) of Love were all of a piece, three facets of the human condition and of nature itself. In Nature’s Realm brings us back to the source of it all. The overture begins quietly, with fragments of a theme here and there, finally coalescing into a loud, stirring statement of the theme itself. From here we have a sonata form, but quite unlike those we’re used to. Instead of primary themes and secondary themes Dvořák gives us places: a meadow, a glen, a thicket, a river. The development reminds us that there are dark aspects of nature, too. As the piece returns to its opening music, Dvořák leads us to expect a grand and noisy ending, but instead the overture gradually fades into the same distance from which it came—into the deep forest of Vysoká. This little masterpiece is sadly neglected: the boisterous Carnival gets all the attention, and more performances than the other two overtures combined. Yet it is here, In Nature’s Realm, that we find not just Nature, but also Life and Love in their purest form.

***** Tan Dun Contrabass Concerto: The Wolf Tan Dun was born in 1957 in the Hunan province of China. He composed this work in 2014 in a co- commission from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony, the Taiwan Philharmonic, and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Tan led the first performance in 2015 in Amsterdam with Dominic Seldis, contrabass and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The score calls for contrabass solo, 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. ***** Tan Dun’s life story and musical development are bound together as one. He was born in 1957 to middle- class parents in the Hunan province of China. When the commissars of the Cultural Revolution decreed that his white-collar parents might better serve the State by working in the rice fields, he was sent to live with his grandmother in the country. She taught him to play the erhu, the traditional Chinese fiddle, and also taught him the ritual-laden ways of Chinese peasant culture. His fiddling earned him the leadership of a local Peking opera troupe and eventually a place at the Central Conservatory. It was there, at age 19, that he first heard Western music, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra on a cultural exchange tour. “From that moment,” Tan says, “I wanted to be a composer like Beethoven.” His earliest compositions won him international praise but brought him afoul of the Chinese cultural establishment, which was operating like its Soviet counterpart. Before long he was denied permission to travel outside China. This ban was finally lifted when he was invited by Chou Wen-Chung to study composition at Columbia University in 1986. Since that time his works have been performed and recorded by orchestras all over the world, and he has received music’s highest honors, including the Bartók Prize, the Suntory Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, and both an Academy Award and a Grammy Award for his film score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Tan currently lives in New York. Just as Tan’s life has been a synthesis of East and West, so too is his music. A large part of his inspiration for composing his Contrabass Concerto: The Wolf was the Chinese novel Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong. This period epic portrays the extinction of both the culture of the Mongols and of the Mongolian Wolf, an animal sacred to them. As Tan says, the work shows how the wolf was “the mirror of the human being, how we used to share one sky, one grassland. But now, the mirror is broken.” In this way, both the novel and Tan’s concerto speak to us about humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The concerto is in a traditional three-part form. The first movement begins quietly and otherworldly, and while the contrabass enters as part of this, it soon comes to dominate what we hear with its mournful and melancholy voice. A galloping allegro soon follows; in it we hear the running of both the wolves and the Mongolian horses in the grasslands. The soloist takes up the galloping motive and with the orchestra drives the movement to its surprising finish. In the luminous second movement, a wolf pup laments the loss of its mother and its home. The contrabass sings it in long, elegiac lines. The running horses return to lead off the Finale, a breathtaking blend of virtuosity and sheer spirit.

***** Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 Pastorale Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827. He composed his Sixth Symphony for the most part in 1807 and 1808, though there are sketches that go back as far as 1803. The work premiered in 1808 at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna. The symphony’s score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, and strings. ***** Beethoven carved the Fifth Symphony from marble and granite, fashioning a monument to the works of Man. In an abrupt turn, Beethoven made the Sixth from softer stuff, in homage to the works of Nature. We often think of Beethoven as a profoundly unhappy man with much to be unhappy about. But he always found relief and renewal in his daily tramps around the ramparts of Vienna and his summers in a nearby village. The natural world was a tonic for him, his only reliable source of happiness. In the Sixth Symphony, Beethoven turned those feelings into sounds. He called the Sixth a “characteristic symphony, a recollection of country life,” adding, “more an expression of feelings than a painting.” Nonetheless, he wrote painterly titles for each movement. His “recollections” of the country are simple, not grand. He takes time to ponder a single tree, a brook, a bird. Beethoven calls the first movement Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country, and the music itself awakens with a gentle phrase that stops even before it gets going. The similar full-stop in the Fifth Symphony creates a heightened feeling of tension; here the very same technique marks the leisurely pace of Nature’s world. This sense of timelessness is carefully cultivated. Melodic and harmonic elements are simple and direct. The harmonies proceed at a stately pace, sometimes lingering on a single chord for astonishingly long periods. While listening it doesn’t seem possible, but in the development Beethoven gives us the same melodic figure— taken from the second bar of the piece—repeated over seventy times. This has been likened to the “sublime monotony” of Nature itself, like the repeating patterns of the leaves in the trees. Beethoven varies the key, color, and dynamic of this figure to give the leaves their many variations of light and shade. The second movement, Scene by the Brook, is undulating and serene. Beethoven violates his own dictum against tone-painting by depicting a nightingale (flute), quail (), and cuckoo (clarinet), all marked explicitly so in the score. Beethoven’s friend Anton Schindler told how the composer enjoyed hearing the unpolished playing of village bands. Beethoven once asked Schindler if he had noticed “how village musicians often played in their sleep, keeping quite still, then waking up with a start, getting in a few vigorous blows or strokes, and then dropping off to sleep again.” This is lovingly—not mockingly—related in the Scherzo, Merry Gathering of Country Folk. The oboe seems not quite ready to begin its theme, for it starts a beat late. Later, the seems to briefly wake, play three notes, and doze off again. When the clarinet takes the melody—similarly unready—it seems to waken the violas, who in turn rouse the cellos. Everyone joins in the foot-stomping rustic dance of the trios; to Beethoven, this is as much a sound of Nature as the quail or cuckoo. The fourth movement’s Thunderstorm begins not with a bang, but with the anxious calm before the storm. When the skies burst, it is with genuine fury. Up to this point Beethoven had not written a single diminished chord, nor even a passing F-minor; there are plenty now, and their presence is startling. Many composers have tried to depict a thunderstorm, but none surpass Beethoven, even those with much larger orchestras at their disposal. When the sky clears, we hear the Shepherd’s Song—Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm. A reverent hymn begins, and then the shepherd’s song leads us back to fresh-scrubbed leaves, cool breezes, and the continuum of Nature. The ease and gentility of the first movement return, as if they had never left, and the thankfulness turns to joy. Beethoven turned to the ever-constant yet always-changing face of Nature when the works of Man made him sour. That he could not hear the bird-calls or the murmuring brook didn’t matter: those sounds lived deep inside him. For centuries composers have tried to evoke Nature with their music, but only Beethoven has so eloquently captured its uplifting spirit. —Mark Rohr Questions or comments? [email protected]