Season 20102010----20112011 The Philadelphia Orchestra Thursday, March 242424,24 , at 8:00 Friday, March 252525,25 , at 222:002:00:00:00 SaturSaturday,day, March 262626,26 , at 888:008:00:00:00 Stéphane Denève Conductor Imogen Cooper Piano Dutilleux Métaboles I. Incantatoire— II. Linéaire— III. Obsessionel— IV. Torpide— V. Flamboyant Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major, K. 271 (“Jenamy”) I. Allegro II. Andantino III. Rondeau (Presto)—Menuetto (Cantabile)—Tempo primo Intermission Debussy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun Roussel Symphony No. 3 in G minor, Op. 42 I. Allegro vivo II. Adagio—Più mosso—Adagio III. Vivace IV. Allegro con spirito This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes. The March 24 concert is sponsored by MEDCOMP. Stéphane Denève is chief conductor designate of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony (SWR), and takes up the position in September 2011. He is also music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), a post he has held since 2005. With that ensemble he has performed at the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh International Festival, and Festival Présences, and at venues throughout Europe, including Vienna’s Konzerthaus, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and Paris’ Théatre des Champs-Élysées. Mr. Denève and the RSNO have made a number of acclaimed recordings together, including an ongoing survey of the works of Albert Roussel for Naxos. In 2007 they won a Diapason d'Or award for the first disc in the series. Highlights for Mr. Denève in the current season include a concert at the BBC Proms with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and pianist Paul Lewis; his debut with the Bavarian Radio Symphony; return visits to the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonieorchester Berlin, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic; and his debut at the Gran Teatre de Liceu in Barcelona, conducting Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue. Mr. Denève’s recent engagements have included a European tour with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and violinist Hilary Hahn; debuts with the NDR Symphony Hamburg, Maggio Musicale Florence, and the London, San Francisco, Barcelona, BBC, and Danish National symphonies; return visits to the Philharmonia and Cleveland orchestras and the Los Angeles, Royal Stockholm, and Rotterdam philharmonics; and his debut at La Scala conducting Gounod's Faust. A graduate of the Paris Conservatory, where he was awarded a unanimous First Prize in 1995, Mr. Denève began his career as Georg Solti's assistant with the Orchestre de Paris and the Paris National Opera. He also assisted Georges Prêtre at the Paris National Opera and Seiji Ozawa at the Saito Kinen Festival. Mr. Denève made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 2007. Stéphane Denève’s appearance on March 25 is generously underwritten by Frank and Mollie Slattery. In the 2010-11 season pianist Imogen CooperCooper’s engagements include an appearance with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; performances of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet with the Takacs Quartet in London, Spain, and Germany; and three concerts as part of the Mozart Unwrapped series at Kings Place in London. Last season Ms. Cooper performed with the Toronto and Cincinnati symphonies and made appearances playing with and directing the Northern and Britten sinfonias. During 2008 and 2009 she performed Schubert’s late solo piano works as part of the International Piano Series in London, which she also recorded and released on the Avie label. Ms. Cooper has appeared with the New York, London, and Vienna philharmonics; the Gothenburg, London, and NHK symphonies; and the Philharmonia, Royal Concertgebouw, and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras. She has also undertaken tours with the Camerata Salzburg and the Australian and Orpheus chamber orchestras. She made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 2009. Ms. Cooper has premiered works by Thomas Adès and Deirdre Gribbin at the Cheltenham International Festival, and she has also collaborated with members of the Berlin Philharmonic for the premiere of Brett Dean’s Voices for Angels. Ms. Cooper is a committed chamber musician and performs regularly with the Belcea Quartet. She has had a long collaboration with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, which included recitals in venues throughout Europe and several recordings for the Philips label. She also performs frequently with the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton; their recordings include a CD set of Brahms sonatas and works by Bach on the RCA label. Mr. Holzmair and Ms. Wieder- Atherton both feature in the box set Imogen Cooper and Friends on Philips. Ms. Cooper has recorded four Mozart piano concertos with the Northern Sinfonia for the Avie label and a solo recital at Wigmore Hall on the Wigmore Live label. Ms. Cooper received a CBE in the Queen’s New Year Honors in 2007 and was the recipient of an award from the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2008. FRAMING THE PROGRAM The program today explores a musical “French Connection” with works by three native composers and by one admiring visitor. Mozart spent a considerable amount of time in Paris between 1763 and 1766 and again in 1778. His Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major was long known by the nickname “Jeunehomme” (young man), which it turns out was a mistaken version of the name “Jenamy.” Victoire Jenamy, for whom Mozart wrote the Concerto, was the daughter of his good friend Jean-Georges Noverre, a well-known French dancer and choreographer. The concert opens with Métaboles by the eminent French composer Henri Dutilleux, who turned 95 two months ago. After intermission comes Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, one of the earliest and most influential essays in musical Impressionism. Closing the program is Albert Roussel’s exhilarating Third Symphony, a work notable for its marvelously inventive use of the orchestra, especially of percussion and harps that give a distinctive flavor. Parallel Events 1777 MMMozartMozart Piano Concerto No. 9 Music Haydn Symphony No. 63 LLLiteratureLiterature Sheridan The School for Scandal Art Gainsborough The Watering Place History Revolutionary War 1894 Debussy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun Music Dvořák Cello Concerto Literature Kipling The Jungle Book Art Munch Vampire History Bureau of Immigration created 1964 Dutilleux Métaboles Music Stockhausen Plus/Minus Literature Pinter Homecoming Art Magritte The Son of Man HisHisHistoryHis tory Alaska earthquake Métaboles Henri Dutilleux Born in Angers, January 22, 1916 Now living in Paris Henri Dutilleux is widely regarded as one of the leading composers of our time, securely ensconced in the pantheon of 20th- and early-21st-century composers alongside Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, Poulenc, Messiaen, Boulez, and others. Yet for much of his life, musical politics kept him largely out of the international public eye. Some have cited the exaggerated influence of his countryman Pierre Boulez, whose at times dogmatic serialist outlook scoffed at music that emulated Britten, Bartók, or Stravinsky more than it did Schoenberg. But Boulez is in his mid-80s now, and Dutilleux turned 95 earlier this year; any hard feelings from the past have mellowed as both have achieved near-legendary status. “Our relations are now very good, très chaleureux,” Dutilleux told a British journalist in 2005. Today we can rejoice that Dutilleux’s music has found its way to American concert halls with increasing frequency, for no picture of French music is complete without it. His music is constructed with an uncanny intuition for rhetorical discourse and is painted with vivid colors; it often finds comparison to literature or to the visual arts. Dutilleux has said that Marcel Proust’s novels and Baudelaire’s poetry, for example, encouraged him to venture beyond traditional forms. Other works pay homage to visual arts, such as Timbres, espace, mouvement , inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The Composer But whereas the paternal side of Dutilleux’s family boasted painters, lithographers, and printers, it was the musical ancestry on his mother’s side that had the deepest impact on Henri’s artistic development. The youngest of four children in an intensely musical home, he advanced quickly on the piano and enrolled in the Douai Conservatory at the age of eight—composing from his early teens and landing in the prestigious composition class of Henri Büsser. He also studied counterpoint and fugue with Noël Gallon, harmony with Jean Gallon, and orchestral conducting with Philippe Gaubert. He won the Prix de Rome in 1938 (for his cantata L’Anneau du roi ) but spent only a few months in Rome before World War II forced him to return home. He worked as a medical orderly during the war, then as pianist, conductor and arranger. He was choral director at the Opéra de Paris in 1942-43 and served as director of music productions for Radio France from 1945 to 1963. Although he composed numerous works during the 1930s and ’40s, he called his Piano Sonata No. 1 (1948) his first mature work and suppressed the earlier ones. He was professor of composition at the Ècole Normale in Paris (1961-70) and from 1971, at the Paris Conservatory. He also taught at the Tanglewood Music Festival during the 1990s. Dutilleux’s earlier works tended to bear conventional titles (Symphony No. 1) but by the 1960s he was moving toward more descriptive, poetic titles ( Tout un monde lointain …, for cello and orchestra). By the 1970s he was receiving major commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation and Mstislav Rostropovich, and he has subsequently written for Isaac Stern, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Renée Fleming. Dutilleux has published relatively few works, and to each he brings an exceptionally high level of polish—at times returning to alter a work or to add a movement. In 2010, for example, he added a third movement to his chamber work Les Citations for oboe, harpsichord, double bass, and percussion, begun in 1985 with an additional movement appended in 1991.