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Season 20 Season 2011-2012 Season 2020111111----2020202011112222 The Philadelphia Orchestra Thursday, March 229999,, at 8:00 FriFriFridayFri dayday,, March 303030,30 , at 222:002:00:00:00 Saturday, March 313131,31 , at 8:00 EsaEsa----PekkaPekka Salonen Conductor Leila Josefowicz Violin Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta I. Andante tranquillo II. Allegro III. Adagio IV. Allegro molto Intermission Salonen Violin Concerto I. Mirage II. Pulse I III. Pulse II IV. Adieu First Philadelphia Orchestra performances Debussy La Mer I. From Dawn to Midday at Sea II. Play of the Waves III. Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea This program runs approximately 1 hour, 55 minutes. Conductor and composer EsaEsa----PekkaPekka Salonen has been principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London since 2008 and artistic director of the Baltic Sea Festival since 2003. He became conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, following 17 years at its helm as music director. In the 2011-12 season Mr. Salonen leads the Philharmonia in performances of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle as part of the “Infernal Dance: Inside the World of Béla Bartók” project, launched in January 2011. This season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Mr. Salonen conducted the world premiere of the recently-discovered Shostakovich opera Orango. As a composer Mr. Salonen has completed commissions for the Finnish Radio Symphony, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the North German Radio Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Présences Festival in Paris, and a piano concerto dedicated to, and premiered by, Yefim Bronfman. Mr. Salonen’s Violin Concerto, written for and premiered by Leila Josefowicz in 2009, received the 2012 Grawemeyer Award. His music is published exclusively by Chester Music. Recordings of Mr. Salonen’s works include releases on Sony and Deutsche Grammophon, as well as a Grammy-nominated CD of the Piano Concerto and his works Helix and Dichotomie with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Yefim Bronfman. Mr. Salonen’s other recordings include several discs with the Philharmonia Orchestra on the Signum label, a DVD of Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’Amour de loin (with the Finnish National Opera), and a Grammy-nominated recording of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. He has also recorded for the Sony Classical label. Recipient of honorary doctorates from the Sibelius Academy in Finland, the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, the University of Southern California, and the Royal College of Music in London, Mr. Salonen was named Musical America ’s “Musician of the Year” in 2006. In 1998 the French government awarded him the rank of Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was also elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Mr. Salonen made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1986. During the 2011-12 season, violinist Leila JosefowiczJosefowicz appears with the Boston and San Francisco symphonies playing Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto under the baton of the composer and returns to the Toronto, National, Atlanta, and Indianapolis symphonies, as well as to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. She is also The Philadelphia Orchestra's 2011-12 artist-in-residence and will be participating in subscription, Neighborhood, and Family concerts. Equally active internationally, her recent and upcoming engagements in Europe include appearances with the Royal Concertgebouw, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Finnish Radio, and Philharmonia orchestras; the London, Munich, and Czech philharmonics; and the London Symphony. Ms. Josefowicz's debut recording in 1994 for Philips Classics was awarded a Diapason d'Or. Subsequent releases on that label include Solo, a disc of unaccompanied violin works, which also won a Diapason d'Or, and several other recital and concerto discs. Her other recordings include John Adams's Road Movies, which received a 2004 Grammy nomination, for Nonesuch; a recital disc and Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata and Concerto No. 1 with the City of Birmingham Symphony, which received a 2007 ECHO Award, both for Warner Classics; and a live recording of Oliver Knussen’s Violin Concerto conducted by the composer at the BBC Proms for Deutsche Grammophon. Her most recent recording is of Mr. Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur with the composer conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic for DG Concerts released on iTunes. A recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, as well as a 2007 United States Artists Cummings Fellowship, Ms. Josefowicz was born in Ontario and moved with her family to Los Angeles at an early age. Her family discovered that she had perfect pitch when she went to the piano and played the exact pitch of the vacuum cleaner. While growing up, her favorite sport was tetherball, which she played with boxing gloves on her hands to protect her fingers. At the age of 13 her entire family moved to Philadelphia so that she could study at the Curtis Institute of Music, from which she graduated; her teachers there included Jaime Laredo and Jascha Brodsky. She currently performs on a 1724 Guarnieri del Gesù violin. Ms. Josefowicz made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1992. FRAMING THE PROGRAM In a rare appearance with The Philadelphia Orchestra this week, composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen leads works by two 20th-century composers whose music he has long championed and that frame a performance of his own recent Violin Concerto, written for soloist Leila Josefowicz. Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, composed in the summer of 1936 when the 55- year-old Béla Bartók was at the height of his powers, displays an astonishing range of techniques and moods while facing the challenge of using an orchestra without brass and woodwind instruments. One of the ways Bartók ingeniously expands the possible effects is by dividing the strings into two large groups positioned opposite one another and that engage in antiphonal interplay. Maestro Salonen began writing his Violin Concerto in 2008 at a crucial juncture in his life and career: the conclusion of a 17-year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the celebration of his 50th birthday (an occasion he wryly notes “brutally wipes out any hallucinations of still being young”). Over the course of its four movements the Concerto shifts “from the virtuosic and flashy to the aggressive and brutal, from the meditative and static to the nostalgic and autumnal.” Composers tend not much to like labels and it is perhaps understandable that Debussy rejected the term “Impressionism” when it was first applied to his works. Yet equally understandable is why critics and listeners would make connections between his music and currents in French painting of his time. La Mer, subtitled “symphonic sketches,” shows his marvelous ability to evoke scenes associated with the sea. Parallel Events Debussy La Mer Music Strauss Salome Literature Wharton House of Mirth Art Picasso Two Youths History Einstein formulates Theory of Relativity 1936 Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta Music Barber Symphony No. 1 Literature Mitchell Gone with the Wind Art Mondrian Composition in Red and Blue History Spanish Civil War begins Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta Béla Bartók Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania), March 25, 1881 Died in New York City, September 26, 1945 In the summer of 1936 the 55-year-old Béla Bartók, having by then achieved considerable international fame, tackled a formidable array of compositional challenges in his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, a work of astonishing synthesis, organicism, and technical brilliance. The synthesis is to be found in Bartók’s ability to integrate his profound knowledge of the Western musical tradition, immediately evident in the fugue that opens the piece, with his path-breaking research of folk music, particularly that of his native Hungary. The organicism of the Music for Strings comes from the way in which a four-movement piece grows out of, and is also unified by, the melody that begins the work. A Mature Masterpiece Paul Sacher commissioned the Music for Strings for the 10th anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, which premiered the work on January 21, 1937. During the rehearsal process, Bartók reported to his wife: Contrary to my expectations, things are going rather nicely, almost perfectly well. We’ve rehearsed a lot and been very thorough (they’ve supposedly devoted 25 rehearsals to this work in total); the conductor and orchestra have all worked with me showing the greatest affection and devotion; they claim to be very enthusiastic about the work (I am too!). A couple of spots sound more beautiful and startling than I had imagined. There are some very unusual sounds in it! Unlike Bartók’s other most famous orchestral work, his Concerto for Orchestra (1943), which gives many instrumentalists a chance to shine, the orchestral means are much more limited in the Music for Strings. Aside from the full string orchestra, which is divided into two equal groups on either side of the conductor with the basses in the back, is a battery of percussion instruments, as well as piano, harp, and celesta in the middle. The celesta is a keyboard instrument—it looks like a miniature upright piano—invented in the mid-19th century. (Tchaikovsky was the first famous composer to use it, in The Nutcracker. ) Its hammers hit not tightly wound strings, as they do in a piano, but rather metal plates, producing a bright, tingling sound. A Closer Look Bartók began his First String Quartet (1908-9) with a slow fugue— successive entries of each of the string instruments in complex imitation. This was a clear homage to Beethoven, who started his Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op.
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