The Red Violin Saturday, October 6 & Sunday, October 7 Morihiko Nakahara, Music Director Finalist

Home , Joshua Bell, Symphonic poem, The First Emperor, The Red Violin

Notes for Classics 2: The Red Violin Saturday, October 6 & Sunday, October 7 Morihiko Nakahara, Music Director Finalist — Elizabeth Pitcairn, violin

• Tan Dun – Symphonic Poem of 3 Notes • Corigliano – Chaconne from The Red Violin • Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64

Tan Dun Symphonic Poem of 3 Notes

THE VITAL STATS:

Composer: born August 18, 1957, Simao, Hunan Province, China

Work composed: 2010. Commissioned by the Teatro Real Opera in honor of tenor Plácido Domingo’s 70th birthday.

World premiere: James Conlon led the orchestra of the Teatro Real Opera on January 21, 2011, in Madrid.

Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, 5 timpani, bass drum, 3 wheels, 2 sets of roto toms, chimes, 3 pairs of stones, 3 brake drums, tam tam, 5 tom toms, marimba, vibraphone, harp, and strings.

Estimated duration: 12 minutes

The music of Chinese composer Tan Dun straddles two worlds: the concert hall and the movie theatre. Other composers have written music for both venues, but most are known better for one genre than the other. Dun is the uncommon composer whose music has achieved renown in both arenas. Best known in North America for his score to Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Dun also composed the spectacular music for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Dun’s affinity for narrative and drama is also a central component of his concert and stage works; he has composed a number of operas, including The First Emperor (2006), commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera as a vehicle for Plácido Domingo, who originated the title role. The Symphonic Poem of 3 Notes grew out of Dun’s experience working with Domingo in 2006. “One day I received a phone call from the Teatro Real Opera in Madrid,” Dun recalls. “They were planning a surprise seventieth birthday celebration for Plácido Domingo and called me to ask whether I could write a work for the occasion. Instantly I said yes! Since working with Plácido on my opera The First Emperor, he has truly become one of my dear friends.” “The three solfège pitches LA, SI, and DO have always reminded me of the a-b-c phenomenon – the meaning of things starting, of beginning and the origin of everything,” Dun continues. “I was fascinated by how this idea became a metaphor for man and nature’s life and spirit. “When first imagining the piece, I thought it very celebratory to use Plácido’s name as part of the music – when you rap his name “Plácido” it sounds like [P]LA SI DO. I used the notes LA SI DO/A-B- C to form the musical theme of this symphonic poem. The beginning of the piece echoes the start of new life, like a dream it unfolds with the sounds of birds, incense, wind and rain … this theme then unfolds in a variety of textures: symphonic rapping, instrumental and vocal hip-hop, blowing sounds and stones. Through the course of the piece, the industrial break drums and car wheel sounds join in representing nature and life growing and progressing into cities and societies. The climax erupts with the rapping and shouting of “PLA-CI-DO,” and falls with chanting and foot stamping as these three notes return back to nature, back to the origin and back to the future.”

John Corigliano Chaconne from The Red Violin

THE VITAL STATS:

Composer: born February 16, 1938, New York City

Work composed: 1997

World premiere: Violinist Joshua Bell and the San Francisco Symphony, led by Robert Spano, gave the first performance in Davies Hall in San Francisco, CA, on November 26, 1997.

Instrumentation: solo violin, 3 flutes (2 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, bass drum, bell tree, chimes crotales, glockenspiel, ratchet, slapstick, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tambourine, tam tam, tenor drum, vibraphone, xylophone, harp, piano or celesta, and strings.

Estimated duration: 17 minutes

John Corigliano’s music constitutes one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years. Corigliano’s works, now numbering over one hundred, have earned him the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, three Grammy Awards, and an Oscar, and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Corigliano currently serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music, and is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York “I was delighted to accept when asked to compose the score for François Girard’s fascinating film The Red Violin,” says Corigliano. “How could I turn down so interesting and fatalistic a journey through some three centuries, beginning as it did in Cremona, home of history’s greatest violin builders? … The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra draws upon music I composed for the film, [which] spans three centuries in the life of a magnificent but haunted violin in its travels through space and time. A story this episodic needed to be tied together with a single musical idea. For this purpose I used the Baroque device of a chaconne: a repeated pattern of chords upon which the music is built. Against the chaconne chords I juxtaposed Anna’s theme, a lyrical yet intense melody representing the violin builder’s doomed wife. From these elements I wove a series of virtuosic etudes for the solo violin, which followed the instrument from country to country, century to century. “I composed these elements before the actual filming, because the actors needed to imitate actual performance of the music. Then, while the film itself was shot, I made – from Anna’s theme, the chaconne, and the etudes – this concert work. While I scored the film just for the soloist and string orchestra (to emphasize the “stringiness” of the picture), I composed this seventeen-minute concert work for violin and full orchestra.” “The Red Violin … also gave me an opportunity to visit my own past, since my father, John Corigliano (I was a ‘Jr.’), was a great solo violinist and the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for more than a quarter of a century. My childhood years were punctuated by snatches of the great concertos being practiced by my father, as well as by the scales and technical exercises he used to keep in shape.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64

THE VITAL STATS

Composer: born May 7, 1840, Kamsko-Votinsk, Viatka province, Russia; died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg.

Work composed: between May and August 26, 1888

World premiere: Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere on November 17, 1888, in St. Petersburg.

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani and strings.

Estimated duration: 47 minutes

“I desperately want to prove, not only to others, but also to myself, that I am not yet played out as a composer,” wrote Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to his patron Nadezhda von Meck in the spring of 1888. With the benefit of hindsight, the idea that Tchaikovsky could think of himself as “played out” is puzzling; after he completed the Fifth Symphony he went on to write Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and the “Pathétique” Symphony. All artists go through periods of self-doubt, however; and Tchaikovsky was plagued by creative insecurity more than most. If you ask a Tchaikovsky fan to name their favorite symphony, they’ll most likely choose either the Fourth, with its dramatic “Fate” motif blaring in the brasses, or the Sixth (“Pathétique”). Sandwiched in between these two monuments is the Fifth Symphony, often overlooked or undervalued when compared to its more popular neighbors. But the Fifth is a monument in its own right, as it showcases Tchaikovsky’s undisputed mastery of melody; indeed, the Fifth rolls out one unforgettable tune after another. Over time it has come to take its rightful place in Tchaikovsky’s symphonic output, and in the orchestral repertoire itself, but Tchaikovsky, as did 19th century music critics, wavered in his opinion of its worth. At the end of the summer in 1888, Tchaikovsky wrote to von Meck, “It seems to me that I have not blundered, that it has turned out well,” and to his nephew Vladimir Davidov after a concert in Hamburg, “The Fifth Symphony was magnificently played and I like it far better now, after having held a bad opinion of it for some time.” After a performance in Prague, however, Tchaikovsky wrote to von Meck, “I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some over- exaggerated color, some insincerity of fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes.” Critics dismissed the new symphony as beneath Tchaikovsky’s abilities, and one American critic damned him with faint praise when he opined, “[Tchaikovsky] has been criticized for the occasionally excessive harshness of his harmony, for now and then descending to the trivial and tawdry in his ornamental figuration, and also for a tendency to develop comparatively insignificant material to inordinate length. But, in spite of the prevailing wild savagery of his music, its originality and the genuineness of its fire and sentiment are not to be denied.” The Fifth Symphony features a theme that appears in all four movements. The clarinets open the symphony with this foreboding melody, which exploits the clarinet’s lowest chalumeau register and convey an air of ominousness. Musicologist Michael Steinberg describes the theme’s effects in all the movements: “It will recur as a catastrophic interruption of the second movement’s love song, as an enervated ghost that approaches the languid dancers of the waltz, and … in majestic and blazing E major triumph.” The poignant melancholy of the horn solo in the Andante cantabile has inspired music lovers beyond the classical realm. In 1939, this melody morphed into the popular song Moon Love, which became a hit for Glenn Miller.