Season 20 Season 2011-2012

Season 2020111111----2020202011112222 The Philadelphia Orchestra Thursday, March 888,8, at 8:00 Friday, March 999,9, at 222:002:00:00:00 Saturday, March 101010,10 , at 8:00 James Gaffigan Conductor Stewart Goodyear Piano Bernstein Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront Gershwin/orch. Grofé Rhapsody in Blue Intermission Tchaikovsky Excerpts from Swan Lake, Op. 20 I. Scene II. Waltz III. Dance of the Swans IV. Scene V. Hungarian Dance, Czardas VI. Spanish Dance VII. Neapolitan Dance VIII. Mazurka IX. Scene X. Dance of the Little Swans XI. Scene XII. Final Scene This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes. American conductor James Gaffigan, who is making his Philadelphia Orchestra debut with these performances, was recently appointed chief conductor of the Lucerne Symphony and principal guest conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic; he assumed both posts in the summer of 2011. This season he debuts with the Atlanta Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and makes return visits to the Minnesota Orchestra and the Baltimore, Dallas, Milwaukee, National, and Toronto symphonies. Recent and upcoming festival appearances include the Aspen, Blossom, Grant Park, and Grand Teton music festivals, and the Spoleto Festival USA. In Europe he makes debuts with the Czech, Dresden, and London philharmonics. In 2009 Mr. Gaffigan completed his three-year tenure as associate conductor with the San Francisco Symphony. Prior to that appointment he was assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. He has appeared with such North American orchestras as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Chicago, Detroit, Houston, New World, Seattle, and Saint Louis symphonies. Internationally he has worked with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, the Camerata Salzburg, the Munich and Rotterdam philharmonics, the Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, among others. A New York City native, Mr. Gaffigan attended La Guardia High School of the Performing Arts as an electric guitar player, focusing on jazz and rock music. He took up the bassoon because everyone needed to be in the orchestra, and it was Frank Zappa’s favorite orchestral instrument. Mr. Gaffigan entered the New England Conservatory of Music as a bassoon major and it was there that he began his interest in conducting; he earned a master’s in conducting from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Mr. Gaffigan's international career was launched when he was named a first prize winner at the 2004 Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt. He resides in Lucerne with his wife, Lee Taylor Gaffigan, and daughter, Sofia. He is also an enthusiastic gourmand and his blogs, which can be found on his website, www.jamesgaffigan.com, frequently contain restaurant and wine recommendations along with his experiences as a conductor. Pianist Stewart GoodyearGoodyear’s career spans many genres—concerto soloist, chamber musician, recitalist, and composer. He has performed with many of the world’s major orchestras, including the New York, Los Angeles, and Royal Liverpool philharmonics; the Cincinnati, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Bournemouth, Montreal, Toronto, Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit, and Seattle symphonies; the Cleveland and Mostly Mozart Festival orchestras; and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. He made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1992 at the Mann Center. Conductors with whom Mr. Goodyear has collaborated include Daniel Barenboim, Andrew Davis, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, JoAnn Falletta, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Yakov Kreizberg, Emmanuel Krivine, Jun Märkl, Roberto Minczuk, Peter Oundjian, Stefan Sanderling, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Gerard Schwarz, Michael Tilson Thomas, Hugh Wolff, and Pinchas Zukerman. Mr. Goodyear has appeared in recitals in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Toronto, Bad Kissingen, and at the Kennedy Center. He has also performed with the festivals of Caramoor, Santa Fe, and Ravinia. In addition to his talents as a pianist, Mr. Goodyear is a composer and frequently performs his own works, including his Variations on “Eleanor Rigby” for solo piano, which was premiered at Lincoln Center in 2000, and his Piano Sonata. He was commissioned by the Toronto Youth Symphony for its 25th anniversary, as well as by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. His Piano Concerto was premiered in 2010 at the Peninsula Music Festival, and the Cincinnati Symphony recently commissioned him to compose a fanfare in honor of Paavo Järvi’s last season as music director of that ensemble. A new work for chorus was premiered by the Nathaniel Dett Chorale in Toronto in 2005. Mr. Goodyear is also noted for improvising his cadenzas when performing concertos from the Classical period. A native of Toronto, Mr. Goodyear holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with Oxana Yablonskaya. He previously studied at the Curtis Institute of Music with Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, and Claude Frank. FRAMIFRAMINGNG THE PROGRAM Many beloved works of classical music have found a welcome home in the concert hall despite the fact that they were originally written or inspired by other settings and circumstances. Music composed for the theater, opera, ballet, and film takes on a life of its own, detached from its non-musical associations, which allows listeners to focus ever more closely on the sounds themselves. The 35-year-old Leonard Bernstein composed the brilliant film score to Elia Kazan’s Academy- Award winning On the Waterfront in 1954 and the next year extracted the Suite we hear today. This allowed Bernstein to turn his musical ideas into a symphonic tone poem that masterfully weaves together material spread throughout the film into a fabric with a coherence and logic all its own. One of the striking elements of the legendary premiere of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at New York’s Aeolian Hall in February 1924 was the idea of presenting music associated with dance halls in a classical concert setting. Commissioned by Paul Whiteman for his Palais Royal Orchestra, the piece marvelously merges Tin Pan Alley tunes with the gestures of a virtuoso concerto. Following the example of 19th-century French ballets that he admired, Tchaikovsky brought the genre to new heights in Russia. His entrancing scores for Swan Lake (1875-76), The Sleeping Beauty (1889), and The Nutcracker (1892) endure as works for the theater, but suites drawn from them, such as the one we hear today from Swan Lake, are frequent presences in the concert hall. Parallel Events 1876 Tchaikovsky Swan Lake Music Brahms Symphony No. 1 Literature James Roderick Hudson Art Renoir Le Moulin de la Galette History World Exhibition in Philadelphia 1924 Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue Music Berg Chamber Concerto Literature Forster A Passage to India Art Braque Sugar Bowl History Lenin dies 1919195419 545454 Bernstein On the Waterfront Music Schoenberg Moses and Aron Literature Golding Lord of the Flies Art Dubuffet Les Vagabonds History McCarthyism takes hold SymphonSymphonicic SSSuiteSuite from On the Waterfront Leonard Bernstein Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, August 25, 1918 Died in New York City, October 14, 1990 Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 film score for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront shook up many of our contemporary notions of cinematic music. Critic Hans Keller, writing at the time of the film’s premiere, called Bernstein’s work “about the best film score that has come out of America.” More than a half century later, it still is. Bernstein’s biographer, Humphrey Burton, sees it today as “a twentieth-century equivalent of Tchaikovsky’s fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet, with the film’s principal characters, Terry and Edie, as the star-crossed lovers.” Music for a Classic Film Based on Budd Schulberg’s harsh story of the labor unions among New York City’s dock workers, On the Waterfront has long been considered a classic American film. It now seems clear, too, that Bernstein’s music played no small role in the impact that the film had when it was released. Starring Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb, the film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor. Ironically, the score was passed over by the Academy in favor of Dmitri Tiomkin’s admittedly decent (but largely forgotten) music for The High and the Mighty. Bernstein worked on the music for On the Waterfront during the late winter and spring of 1954, at first intimidated by this terra incognita. It was only when he began to see the rough footage that the whole project fell into place for him. “I heard music as I watched: that was enough,” the composer said. “And the atmosphere of talent that this film gave off was exactly the atmosphere in which I love to work and collaborate. … Day after day I sat at a movieola, running the print back and forth, measuring in feet the sequences I had chosen for the music, converting feet into seconds by mathematical formulas, making homemade cue sheets.” Nevertheless he found film scoring a frustrating exercise, “a musically unsatisfactory experience for a composer to write a score whose chief musical merit ought to be its unobtrusiveness.” If this old-school type of scoring has sometimes been replaced in recent years by progressive approaches (in which some directors have tried to make music a conspicuous part of the action), it was still very much a part of “film culture” in 1950s Hollywood. But Bernstein produced a marvelous score anyway, rich in short, potently concentrated passages that together added up to about 35 minutes of music. In the summer of 1955 he turned this into a symphonic tone poem, taking these fragments and weaving them into a fabric with a coherence and logic all its own. The composer wrote of the musical materials going through “metamorphoses, following as much as possible the chronological flow of the film score.” Thus it is helpful but not necessary to be familiar with the film in order to enjoy the beauty and design of the Suite.

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