Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert Programs, Season 116, 1996

—— BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Bernard Haitink, Principal Guest Conductor One Hundred and Sixteenth Season, 1996-97 SUPPER CONCERT I Thursday, October 17, at 6 Saturday, October 19, at 6 HAWTHORNE STRING QUARTET RONAN LEFKOWITZ, violin SI-JING HUANG, violin MARK LUDWIG, viola SATO KNUDSEN, cello KEISUKE WAKAO, oboe BRITTEN Phantasy for oboe, violin, viola, and cello, Opus 2 Andante alia marcia—Allegro giusto Molto piu lento—Molto piu presto Tempo 1° Andante alia marcia HAYDN String Quartet in G, Opus 64, No. 4 (Hob. 111:66) Allegro con brio Menuetto; Trio Adagio cantabile sostenuto Finale. Presto Please exit to your left for supper following the concert. Week 3 Benjamin Britten Phantasy for oboe, violin, viola, and cello, Opus 2 Today we think of Britten primarily as a composer of vocal music—of operas, choral works, church parables, canticles, folksong arrangements, the War Requiem, and so on. Even works with "instrumental" titles, like the Spring Symphony, are in fact primarily vocal compositions, however brilliant and colorful the instrumental part may be. But in the early years of his career, Britten was regarded primarily as an instrumental composer; eighteen of his first twenty-five large works are for instruments alone, and they were generally bigger and more noticeable pieces than the vocal works of the time. The Phantasy quartet began to make the young composer's name both in his homeland and in wider musical circles as well. Composed in 1932, the same year as his Opus 1 Sinfonietta, it was performed in Florence at the 1934 festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music. (Few composers are lucky enough to be heard at an international forum with only the second work they deem worthy of their craft.) The single subdivided movement of the Phantasy aims to suggest flexibility within architectural constraint. The very term "fantasy," a common one in the English con- sort music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, implies imaginative freedom, but, like many composers of his time, Britten is also concerned to shape the work in a coherent way derived from the sonata principle. The work as a whole forms a large arch beginning and ending with a lyric melody in the oboe undercut by a more sharply rhythmic march figure in the strings; this frames a sonata design, with clearly perceptible sections of statement and recapitulation, though the expected development section turns unexpectedly into a central "slow movement." Britten's musical language grows out of the modal scales of such composers as Vaughan Williams and Hoist, who recovered the heritage of English folk song and Eliza- bethan polyphonic song for twentieth-century musicians, but it moves beyond that in implying extended tonal centers to characterize the sections that shape his piece. Though it is relatively little-known in this country and far from prepossessing, the Phantasy reveals in an attractive early score the textural imagination and the rich- ness of thematic artifice that were two of the composer's greatest strengths. Franz Joseph Haydn String Quartet in G, Opus 64, No. 4 (Hob. 111:66) The six quartets published as Opus 64 constitute Haydn's second tribute to Johann Tost, the principal second violin in Haydn's orchestra from 1783 to 1788, who must have been a fine violinist, but who had a rather complicated relationship with the composer, not least because of his eagerness to set up an establishment to copy and sell music to foreign publishers without the composer's knowledge. Haydn had already had a great deal of difficulty with such practices. Yet even after Tost had gone to Paris in 1788, carrying some of Haydn's works off with him, Haydn was willing to compose for him again! Tost's specialty was floating high notes that soar far above the rest of the ensemble, and Haydn made sure that the dozen quartets he wrote for Tost had plenty of examples. The Opus 64 set of 1790 is the last group of quartets that Haydn composed before leaving for England on his first visit. H.C. Robbins Landon considers the set as a whole to be his "greatest single achievement of the period—six flawless master- pieces" showing "unity of purpose, perfection of execution and profundity of spirit." The opening Allegro con brio suggests a mood of constant cheerful chatter as the tail at the end of the theme becomes the link that begins a modulation to the new key. Everything seems normal until suddenly Haydn veers into D minor. (Robbins Landon refers to this passage as a "stone guest" in the middle of the movement, a reference to the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart's Don Giovanni, which Haydn certainly knew, who arrives in a similar D minor passage.) This surprising purple patch affects our feeling of the "simplicity" of this passage, even though it only lasts a few bars. Haydn takes pains to give Tost, playing the first violin, a showy part in the development and recapitulation. The first violin plays alone for two beats at the beginning of the Menuetto, and the rest of the ensemble punctuates the line with chords on the next two beats. Without looking at the written score, it is hard to tell, at first, where the downbeat is; the ear wants to hear those chords as "one, two," but in fact they are "two, three," as Haydn cheerfully misleads us for a short time. Having suggested a galumphing wrong- footed start to the dance, he allows the rest of the movement to be more straightfor- ward. The slow movement, Adagio, is once more a gift to the first violinist, who has a lavishly elegant line that allows and invites an intensely lyrical performance, while the three lower parts provide support, like an opera orchestra backing up the prima donna. The finale, a rollicking jig in 6/8 time, offers more harmonic surprises like the opening movement, but does so with such grace and wit that the unex- pected moments pass almost before the listener has become aware of them. —Notes by Steven Led better Formed in 1986, the Hawthorne String Quartet includes Boston Symphony Orches- tra violinists Ronan Lefkowitz and Si-Jing Huang, BSO violist Mark Ludwig, and BSO cellist Sato Knudsen. The quartet has performed extensively in Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States, including return engagements at the Tan- glewood and Ravinia festivals and the U.S. Department of Education Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony in Washington, D.C. In October 1991 the quartet performed in Terezfn and Prague, in ceremonies marking the opening of the Ghetto Museum in Terezin and commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the first trans- ports to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In April 1993 the quartet began recording for London/Decca as part of that company's "Entartete Musik" project, having previously produced two discs through the efforts of the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation and including first recordings of music by composers perse- cuted during World War II. Among other works, the group has also recorded Ervin Schulhoff's Concerto for String Quartet with Wind Orchestra, with which it made its first Boston Symphony appearances in February 1995. Born in Oxford, England, Ronan Lefkowitz joined the Boston Symphony in 1976. Mr. Lefkowitz is a graduate of Brookline High School and Harvard College; among his teachers were Gerald Gelbloom, Max Rostal, Luise Vosgerchian, Joseph Silver- stein, and Szymon Goldberg. In 1972 he won the Gingold-Silverstein Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he now coaches chamber music. Having performed the American premiere of Lutostawski's Chain 2 for violin and chamber orchestra as part of the 1986 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, he later played the piece under the composer's direction in its BSO premiere. Mr. Lefkowitz has concertized extensively on both sides of the Atlantic as first violinist of the Hawthorne String Quartet. Violinist Si-Jing Huang joined the BSO at the beginning of the 1989-90 season, having graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York in May 1989. Mr. Huang's numerous scholarships and awards included the Lincoln Center Scholar- ship; he was also a winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions held in Hawaii. Mr. Huang's teachers included Glenn Dicterow and Dorothy DeLay, as well as his father, Da-Ying Huang. A former member of the Juilliard Orchestra, he has partici- pated in the chamber music festivals at Aspen and Taos, toured the United States with the Classical String Players, and has performed internationally with the Hawthorne String Quartet. Originally from Philadelphia, violist Mark Ludwig joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1982. He received his bachelor of music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Joseph de Pasquale and Raphael Bronstein. His teachers also included his father, Irving Ludwig, a violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra. Before joining the Boston Symphony he was co- principal violist of the Kansas City Philharmonic. Artistic director of the Richmond Performance Series, which he founded in the Berkshires in 1985, Mr. Ludwig is also director of the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation, a non-profit organization which, through concerts, lectures, and recordings, promotes an understanding and appreciation of the music of Jewish musicians incarcerated in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. Born in Baltimore in 1955, cellist Sato Knudsen joined the Boston Symphony in 1983. His teachers included David Soyer at Bowdoin College and Stephen Geber, Robert Ripley, and Madeleine Foley at the New England Conservatory of Music. He also attended the Piatigorsky Seminar in Los Angeles and was a Fellow for two summers at the Tanglewood Music Center.

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