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Home , Boston Pops Orchestra, Piano Suite (Poulenc), Russell Sherman

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

James Levine, Music Director Bernard Haitink, Conductor Emeritus , Music Director Laureate 125th Season, 2005-2006

CHAMBER PRELUDE I Saturday, October 15, at 6

COMMUNITY CONCERT I

Sunday, October 16, at 3, at Bethany Congregational Church, Foxboro

This free concert is generously supported by the State Street Foundation.

ELIZABETH OSTLING, flute KEISUKE WAKAO, oboe IAN GREITZER, clarinet RICHARD RANTI, bassoon RICHARD SEBRING, horn YA-FEI CHUANG, piano

RAVEL he Tombeau de Couperin, arranged for woodwind quintet by Mason Jones Prelude Fugue Menuet Rigaudon

TANSMAN Suite for Wind Trio Dialogue Scherzino Aria Finale

POULENC for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn Allegro vivace Divertissement: Andantino Finale: Prestissimo

FRAN^AIX L'Heure du berger, for piano and wind quintet

I. Les Vieux beaux

II. Pin-Up Girls

III. Les Petits nerveux

Steinway and Sons Pianos, selected exclusively for Symphony Hall.

Week 3 Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Le Tombeau de Couperin, arranged for woodwind quintet by Mason Jones

Maurice Ravel was the consummate piano composer, although he is better known to a wide audience for his brilliantly and imaginatively scored orchestral music.

Influenced by Debussy, he is usually aligned with the musical Impressionism of which Debussy was the creator, but throughout Ravel's music we find an interest in the abstract, purely musical ideas of Classical and Baroque models. Ravel's piano music reflects both sides of his aesthetic concern. In works like

Jenx d'eau ("Play of water") and the suites Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, he paints tone-pictures with piano textures every bit as imaginative and varied as those of his instrumental scores. On the other hand are the abstract genre pieces, such as the Sonatine and a number of works based on dance forms, including the Pavane pour line infante definite and the suite of Valses nobles et sentimentales. The present piece, Le Tombeau de Couperin, expands the genre piece to the level of the Baroque suite. In spring 1914 Ravel had transcribed a Forlane (a dance form found in the typi- cal French Baroque suite) from Francois Couperin's Concert royal. This engagement with the Baroque master touched off Ravel's homage, which he began in 1914 but didn't finish until 1917 because of a stint in a non-combatant role in World War I (a voluntary choice—Ravel was thirty-nine, in addition to being physically small and weak). In the interim the piece went from being an homage to Couperin, or as

Ravel put it, to 18th-century French music as a whole, and gained further gravity as a memorial to seven of Ravel's friends who had died in the war. The movements of the original Tombeau are Prelude, Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet, and Toc- cata. Each is dedicated to a different deceased friend, with the exception of the Rigaudon, which is inscribed to the brothers Pierre and Pascal Gaudin. The pianist Marguerite Long (the wife of the dedicatee of the Toccata) gave the suite's first performance in 1919; that same year Ravel chose four of the six move- ments for orchestration, leaving out the non-dance movements (the Fugue and Toc- cata). The arrangement for wind quintet that we hear tonight is by former Philadel- phia principal horn Mason Jones, who chose to include the Fugue movement of the original piano suite and to omit the Forlane and Toccata. The oboe takes the principal melody in the Prelude, as it does in Ravel's orchestration. There is a constant flow of sixteenth-notes throughout. The Fugue features a tentative but lyric theme. Jones opts to position the quietly stately Menuet as the third movement, then ends the piece with the Rigaudon, a lively French dance.

Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) Suite for Wind Trio

Alexandre Tansman was born in Lodz, Poland, but moved to Paris in 1920, where he remained for most of the rest of his long life. Having begun composing at nine, he had attended the Lodz Conservatory before earning a doctorate in law at Warsaw University. Although he had some early success in Poland, seeing several works per- formed while still in his teens and winning three prizes in the 1919 Grand Prize of Poland competition, he found his home country's musical culture too conservative for his style, which incorporated elements of polytonality and atonality. In France he became part of a scene that included Stravinsky, Ravel, and Martinu , the latter arriving fresh from Bohemia in 1923. Future Symphony conductor took up Tansman's music for his Paris concerts, conducting the Scherzo of his he could shift even within sinfonico in 1923 there and leading the BSO in first performances A minor Sym- the context of a single phrase from melancholy or somber phony (No. 2) in March 1927 and his No. 2, with the composer as lyricism to nose-thumbing impertinence. As Ned Rorem said in a memorial tribute, soloist, in December 1927/January 1928. Poulenc was "a whole man always interlocking soul and flesh, sacred and profane." Tansman became a French citizen in 1938, also that year marrying Colette Cras, Possessing the least formal musical education of any noted 20th-century composer, daughter of the French composer (and naval admiral) Jean Cras. Soon, however, like Poulenc learned from the music that he liked. His own comment is the best summary: Martinu and so many others, he and his family were compelled to flee the country The music of Roussel, more cerebral than Satie's, seems to me to have opened a after being blacklisted by Nazi authorities. In 1941 he settled in Los Angeles, mixing door on the future. I admire it profoundly; it is disciplined, orderly, and yet full with other expatriate European musicians there, renewing his acquaintance with of feeling. I love Chabrier: Espana is a marvelous thing and the Marche joyeuse is Stravinsky and Milhaud, and getting to know Schoenberg. He even wrote a few film a chef-d'oeuvre. ... I consider [the Massenet operas] Manon and Werther as part of scores, including music for Flesh and Fantasy (starring Edward G. Robinson) and French national folklore. And I enjoy the quadrilles of Offenbach. Finally my Paris Underground. In 1946, though, he returned to Paris. gods are Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Chopin, Stravinsky, and Mussorgsky. You may Following his return to France, career fortunes for the still respected Tansman suf- say, what a concoction! But that's how I like music: taking my models every- fered a perhaps inevitable, albeit ill-deserved, decline in the face of the nearly over- where, from what pleases me. whelming push for the "new" among younger, and a few older, composers. (The BSO hasn't played Tansman's work since 1956, when Vladimir Golschmann gave the first Poulenc originally composed his Sextuor for piano and winds in 1932, but he was American performances of his 1954 Concerto for Orchestra.) His style in the 1920s dissatisfied with the work and rewrote it entirely in 1939. It is a composition of enor- and '30s shared much with that of his progressive contemporaries, being a harmoni- mous charm, hardly profound, but brilliantly written for the participating instru- cally adventurous neoclassicism touched by his love of Chopin and the music of his ments. The piano—Poulenc's own instrument—is without doubt the leader, with home country, also fashionably borrowing now and then from jazz. His Jewish back- scarcely a measure of rest in the entire work. The winds carry on a cheeky dialogue ground figures in some works, including a Hebraic Overture. He wrote prolifically in throughout. The work is essentially a divertissement; though sudden turns of mood all genres, including seven operas, nine symphonies, and much chamber and choral and feeling recall the serious side of the composer, the overall spirit remains funda- music, and in 1948 wrote a book on Stravinsky. In 1983 he won the Polish Medal of mentally lighthearted. Cultural Merit. He died in Paris on November 15, 1986. Tansman's Suite for Wind Trio (oboe, clarinet, and bassoon) dates from 1949, follow- Jean Francaix (1912-97) ing his return to Paris from the United States. It is a masterfully crafted little work in L'Henre du berger, for piano and wind quintet four movements (slow-fast-slow-fast), using chromatically colored modality along Jean Francaix was a precociously gifted musician whose parents were themselves the lines of Stravinsky or Milhaud. Tansman's smooth melodic and contrapuntal professional musicians and music teachers. He was born in Le Mans, France, where writing in the slow, lyrical movements lacks the affectedness that French neoclassi- his father was director of the Le Mans Conservatoire, and was immersed in a musical cism often deliberately courted, and the fast passages have a bounce and verve trace- environment from an early age. His parents were encouraged by Ravel to foster the able, perhaps, to his Polish heritage. The first (Dialogue) and third (Aria) movements youngster's gifts, and while still young he began studies with Nadia Boulanger, the are both mournful and bittersweet, with fine balance among the three instruments. famous pedagogue. Francaix became a scintillating performer as solo pianist and ac- In the somewhat more chromatic Aria, a middle section, set off by short bassoon companist, and a prolific composer, writing several operas and ballets, a few film cadenzas, refers obliquely to the first movement. The second movement (Scherzino), scores, numerous orchestra works and concertos, a wide range of chamber pieces, based on a quick, aggressive five-beat measure, begins with a bassoon ostinato, over and both choral and solo vocal works. His style was more or less a French neoclassi- which oboe and clarinet play in rhythmic unison; then the ensemble fragments and cism, often using modern techniques within a firmly tonal context. reworks the material in rearrangements of its small motifs. In the Finale, we are left Although Francaix was more or less a generation younger than Poulenc, Milhaud, unsure of the beat pattern—is it two, or three, or both?—for the first highly charged and Honegger, his approach to music shares with the "" composers a certain section, a movement unto itself. A slow coda again referring to the melancholy first irreverence and irony as well as a penchant for the entertaining and the brilliant. In and third movements closes the work. the tradition of Ravel, he was an outstanding and imaginative orchestrator. One of his best-known accomplishments was his orchestration of Poulenc's L'Histoire de Babar (1899-1963) at the composer's request. Sextuor for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn L'Heure de berger ("The Shepherd's Hour") exists in two arrangements by the com- Critic Claude Rostand once wrote of Poulenc that he was "part monk, part gutter- poser: the present one for piano and winds, and another for piano with string quin- snipe," a neat characterization of the two strikingly different aspects of his musical tet. (There is also a nonet version, arranged by Friedrich Wanek.) The title is a figure personality. Much of his work from the early 1920s, when he was associated with the of speech, referring to the hour of the lover's tryst, or more broadly "when the time highly publicized "Groupe des Six," is lighthearted, even frivolous, sometimes bawdy, is ripe." The piece, which was actually written for a Parisian restaurant to be used as and thoroughly Parisian. An opposing strain appeared in his musical character in the background music, is an illustration in three movements of three kinds of French middle '30s, when the death of a close friend prompted the composition of a sacred country people. The first, "Les Vieux beaux" ("The beautiful aged") uses glissandi in choral work. Thereafter sacred and secular mingled almost equally in his output, and the winds over sprightly rhythms to evoke something slightly awry. A quicker middle section is full of staccato chromatic scales. The second movement, "Pin-Up Girls," is wind Quintet, and the Extension Works New Music Ensemble. Mr. Greitzer is on the languid, featuring a virtuosic solo turn for the clarinet. "Les Petits nerveux" is meant faculties of The Boston Conservatory, Rhode Island College, and Boston University Col- to depict different characteristics of "nervous young men." lege of Fine Arts. He has recorded for South German Radio, Philips, CRI, Koch Interna- Notes by Robert Kirzinger (Ravel, Tansman, — tional, Northeastern Records, Nu Classix, New World, and Newport Classics. Francaix) and Steven Ledbetter (Poulenc)

Associate principal bassoonist Richard Ranti joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra as assistant principal flute in Elizabeth Ostling joined the Boston Symphony the start of the 1989-90 season; he is also principal bassoonist of the Boston Pops Orches- associate principal flute as of the 1997-98 season, having September 1994 and was named tra. Born in Montreal, Mr. Ranti started bassoon at age ten, studying with Sidney Rosen- is also principal flute of the Boston Pops served as acting principal from March 1995. She berg and David Carroll. After graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, he studied with and graduated in May 1994 Orchestra. Ms. Ostling grew up in Ridgewood, , Sol Schoenbach at the Curtis Institute of Music. At nineteen he won the second bassoon Philadelphia, where she was a student of Julius Baker from the Curtis Institute of Music in position in the ; he spent six years with that orchestra, the last as year at Curtis she won first prize in the quadren- and Jeffrey Khaner. During her freshman acting associate principal. A 1982 Fellow at the Music Center, Mr. Ranti has in York City. As a Tanglewood Music nial Koussevitzky Competition for Woodwinds New also participated in the Spoleto and Marlboro festivals. He won second prize in the 1982 featured during Tanglewood's annual Festival of Contemporary Center Fellow she was Toulon International Bassoon Competition and is the recipient of two Canada Council concerto, Caution to the Wind. Ms. Ostling Music as soloist in Michael Gandolfi's chamber grants. Mr. Ranti can be heard frequently in Boston-area chamber performances with her: Gandolfi's Geppetto's Workshop for flute and has premiered two works written just for groups such as the Walden Chamber Players, with whom he has recorded an album of piano, (with the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra) Dan Coleman's Pavanes and and bassoon and string music. He is on the faculty of both the New England Conservatory orchestra she has also appeared with the Boston Pops, the Symmetries. As soloist with and Boston University School for the Arts. New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra in her home- town. frequent performer in solo and chamber recitals, she has also appeared with the A Richard Sebring is associate principal horn of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and prin- Boston Chamber Players and the Boston Artists Ensemble. Symphony cipal horn of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Born and raised in Concord, , Mr. Sebring studied at Indiana University, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the joined the Boston Orchestra as assistant principal oboe in Keisuke Wakao Symphony University of Washington, hi 1979 he was a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow. Previously the fall of having previously been a member of the World Symphony since 1990, New principal horn of the Rochester Philharmonic, he joined the BSO in 1981 as third horn; he its inaugural season. native of Tokyo, Mr. Wakao received his performance diploma A became associate principal horn of the BSO and principal horn of the Boston Pops Or- from the Manhattan School of Music, where he served on the faculty following his chestra in 1982. Mr. Sebring has been soloist with the Boston Symphony in Boston, at graduation in 1987. He performed with the New Japan Philharmonic under Seiji Tanglewood, and on tour; he has also been soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra. A Ozawa hi 1985 and made his concerto debut with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music, he is also a member of the under Kazuyoshi Akiyama in the summer of 1989. Since that time he has made numer- Walden Chamber Players. Mr. Sebring is an active studio musician whose work was fea- ous solo appearances, including performances with the Boston Pops Orchestra under tured prominently in 's score for the motion picture Saving Private Ryan. John Williams and the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1994 he was invited to participate in the chamber music division of the Spoleto Festival in Italy. He made his A prizewinner at the Cologne International Piano Competition at eighteen, Ya-Fei Tokyo recital debut in September 1997 and performed with pianist Christoph Eschen- Chuang has appeared at such festivals as the European Music Festival (Stuttgart), bach in a recital at Sapporo's Pacific Festival in July 1998. At the Manhattan School, Mr. Schleswig-Holstein, the Brahms-Tage, the Bach Festival in Leipzig, Ireland's Shannon Wakao studied with Joseph Robinson, principal oboist of the , Festival, Oulu (Finland), Ravinia, and the Oregon Bach Festival. She has appeared with with whom he gave a joint recital in Tokyo in 1984. While a Fellow at the Tanglewood the Spectrum Concerts in Berlin, at the Fromm Foundation concerts at Harvard, and at the Music Center in 1984 and 1987 he studied with Alfred Genovese and . American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA, performing in such venues A finalist in the 1988 Lucarelli International Oboe Competition at Carnegie Hall, Mr. as the Cologne and Berlin Philharmonien, Schauspielhaus Berlin, and Gewandhaus Wakao started the Keisuke Wakao Oboe Camp in Tokyo in 1988 and is currently on the Leipzig. She has worked as a duo-partner with Kim Kashkashian, Boris Pergamenshikov, faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music. and Robert Levin, and has performed with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony. Upcoming solo engagements include concerts Ian Greitzer serves as principal clarinet of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, the for the Handel & Haydn Society, Gardner Museum, Emmanuel Music in Boston, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, and the Boston Classical Orchestra, and also performs with Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the European Music Festival in Stuttgart, the the Boston Symphony, Cantata Singers, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Collage Piano Festival Ruhr, and the Beethoven Festival in Warsaw, as well as in Vienna, Salzburg, New Music. He holds bachelor of music and master of music degrees from the New Eng- Prague, and Ireland, and appearances with Christoph Eschenbach. Ya-Fei Chuang first land Conservatory and was a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center. A devoted per- performed on television in her native Taiwan at age eight and gave her first public former of contemporary music, he is a member of Boston Musica Viva, the Dinosaur solo recital at age nine. She moved to Germany at thirteen to pursue studies at the Annex Music Ensemble, and the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston. He has ap- Musikhochschule Freiburg, where she obtained a graduate degree with honors, followed peared at the Rockport (MA) Chamber Music Festival, Blossom Festival, Ravinia, Wolf by a final performance degree from the Musikhochschule Cologne. She subsequently Trap, Rockport (ME) Chamber Music Festival, Newport Music Festival, and Tangle- received a Graduate Diploma from the New England Conservatory, studying with wood, and has performed at the Library of Congress, Carnegie Recital Hall, and at the Russell Sherman. Edinburgh Festival. Mr. Greitzer has also appeared in concert with the Blair, Manhattan, Lydian, and Vermeer string quartets, and is a founding member of Zephyr (wind quin- tet-in-residence at The Boston Conservatory), the Arada Trio, the New England Wood-