Season 2020111111----2020202011112222 The Philadelphia Orchestra ThursdThursday,ay, April 22262666,, at 888:008:00:00:00 Saturday, April 22282888,, at 8:00 Sunday, April 29, at 2:00 Simon Rattle Conductor Brahms Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90 I. Allegro con brio II. andante III. Poco allegretto IV. Allegro—Un poco sostenuto Intermission Webern Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (revised version, 1928) I. Langsam II. Bewegt III. Mässig IV. Sehr mässig V. Sehr langsam VI. Langsam Schumann Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 97 (“Rhenish”) I. Lebhaft II. Scherzo: Sehr mässig III. Nicht schnell IV. Feierlich V. Lebhaft This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes. The April 26 concert is sponsored by Medcomp. Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Following 15 years as a regular guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Mr. Rattle became its chief conductor and artistic director in 2002. He is also artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, where he appears regularly with the Berlin Philharmonic. Between 1980 and 1998 he was principal conductor and artistic adviser of the City of Birmingham Symphony, then music director. Mr. Rattle is a regular guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and The Philadelphia Orchestra, where he made his debut in 1993. He is also a principal artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and founding patron of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. An exclusive EMI artist for many years, Mr. Rattle has made over 70 recordings for the label. Releases with the Berlin Philharmonic include Holst’s The Planets, together with Colin Matthews’s Pluto, and related works by Kaija Saariaho, Matthias Pintscher, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Brett Dean; Shostakovich’s First and Fourteenth symphonies; Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Debussy’s La Mer; Dvořák’s tone poems; Schubert’s “Great” Symphony; Orff’s Carmina burana; Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4; the Nielsen Clarinet and Flute concertos; and Brahms’s A German Requiem, which won a Grammy Award for Best Choral Recording. His recent releases include Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (recipient of a Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance), Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, and Brahms’s symphonies. Mr. Rattle was knighted in 1994 by the Queen of England. He has received many other distinctions, including the Grosse Verdienstkreuz by the German government, the Shakespeare Prize by the Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, and in 1997 the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts. His educational program with the Berlin Philharmonic, Zukunft@Bphil, has also earned him the Comenius Prize, the Schiller Special Prize from the city of Mannheim, the Golden Camera, and the Urania Medal. He and the Berlin Philharmonic were appointed International UNICEF Ambassadors, the first time this honor has been conferred on an artistic ensemble. FRAMING THE PROGRAM The three works on the program today invite us to think about the possibilities of hidden musical meaning. Schumann, Brahms, and Webern are generally associated with “absolute music” and were reluctant to disclose background information concerning their compositions. Brahms’s symphonies do not have titles or tell overt stories, although there are often elements that suggest personal significance. His Third Symphony is saturated with the notes F-A-F, a musical motif he used in various pieces representing his personal motto Frei aber Froh (Free but Happy). The opening theme of the first movement, as well as other moments in the piece, seems to allude to the Third Symphony (the “Rhenish”) of his mentor Robert Schumann, which closes the program today. Brahms composed his Third Symphony during the summer of 1883 while staying on the Rhine. Anton Webern developed a reputation as a meticulous composer of abstract miniatures. His Six Pieces for Orchestra, however, are deeply personal, as he informed his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, to whom they are dedicated. The pieces are reflections on the death of his mother, beginning with foreboding, extending to the shock of the news, the funeral, and finally to feelings of “remembrance and resignation.” Schumann did not give the title “Rhenish” to his Third Symphony (actually the last of his four symphonies to be completed), but he surely would have approved; as he told his publisher soon after its completion, the piece “here and there reflects a bit of local color.” Further information was apparently passed on to a music critic who said the Symphony presents “a slice of Rhenish life” and outlined the poetic content of each of the five movements. Parallel Events 1850 Schumann Symphony No. 3 Music Wagner Lohengrin Literature Turgenev A Month in the Country Art Courbet The Stone Breakers History CA becomes a state 1883 Brahms Symphony No. 3 Music Chabrier España Literature Maupassant Un Vie Art Cézanne Rocky Landscape History Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic 1909 Webern Six Pieces for Orchestra Music Strauss Elektra Literature Wells Tono-Bungay Art Picasso Harlequin History Peary reaches North Pole Symphony No. 3 Johannes Brahms Born in HamHamburg,burg, May 7, 1833 Died in Vienna, April 3, 1897 The shortest of Brahms’s four symphonies, the Third is nonetheless one of the composer’s subtlest and most complex works. It was a product of the summer of 1883, and followed closely on the heels of such consummate pieces as the C-major Piano Trio and the F-major String Quintet. Having intended to spend the summer at Bad Ischl (a posh spa near Salzburg), Brahms was suddenly struck with ideas for a symphony while traveling in the Rhineland; he decided to forgo the baths and remain in the region to work through these ideas. Taking rooms in picturesque Wiesbaden, he composed the F-major Symphony in a matter of weeks, completing and scoring it by the fall. Hans Richter conducted the premiere in Vienna on December 2, 1883, with the Vienna Philharmonic. A Slow and Laborious Process Six years had separated this work from its predecessor, the Second Symphony in D major, composed in 1877, shortly after the laborious completion of the First. To be sure, Brahms had continued to hone his skills in the symphonic realm during this hiatus, with such works as the Violin Concerto, the Second Piano Concerto, and the Academic Festival and Tragic overtures. But writing a symphony was a different challenge altogether: Ever since Beethoven had “reinvented” the symphonic idea, the act of writing a symphony had become, for many, a composer’s most perilous task. (“You don’t know what it’s like to be dogged by his footsteps,” Brahms had said to the conductor Hermann Levi during the slow and painful progress toward his own First Symphony.) In 1881 Brahms had befriended the conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow, who had offered him the use of the famous Meiningen Court Orchestra as a sort of “rehearsal ensemble.” (Von Bülow was also to become one of the chief proponents of Brahms’s music.) A concert of his own works performed by the orchestra in November made a deep impression on the composer—and the ensemble’s precision and sonority might well have played a role in inspiring him to reenter the daunting realm of the symphony. There is some evidence, too, that Brahms did not “start from scratch” when working on the Third during the summer of 1883. For the middle two movements of the Symphony he might have drawn upon music already sketched in 1881 as incidental music for Goethe’s Faust. (Several commentators have claimed to hear echoes of Schumann here, since Brahms would have been aware of his mentor’s own Faust music.) In any case, the composer has integrated these movements into a symphonic conception of almost unprecedented unity. Some have gone so far as to characterize the Third in terms of a cyclic plan like that of Liszt’s piano concertos, in which an entire multi-movement work is conceived as a single continuous structure. Indeed the tonal plan of the Third Symphony is unusual in many respects—such as the use of C major and C minor, respectively, for the two inner movements—and the return of initial thematic material at the end of the work is only one of many means by which the four movements are unified. “What a harmonious mood pervades the whole!” said Clara Schumann of the Third, immediately perceiving this sense of organicism. “All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart, each one a jewel.” A Closer Look Much has been written of the rising motto that opens the Symphony’s Allegro con brio, which forms an essential building-block for the entire piece. The signature of F, A- flat, F is heard not only in the massive wind chords that begin the piece, but also in the bass line that accompanies the subsequent string theme. The A-natural of the main theme’s outline of F-A-F (often said to be an anagram for the composer’s “personal motto” Frei aber Froh, “Free but Happy”) casts itself in immediate relief with the A-flat of the bass, creating a major- minor tension whose spring-like coil unwinds itself throughout the course of the Symphony. And if the development section seems too concise for the material presented in the exposition, Brahms makes up for this by extending the movement through a substantial coda that elaborates the essential descending motif. The second movement is an uncomplicated but darkly shaded Andante, containing a hymn- like first theme and a pointedly contrasted second subject (heard in the clarinets and bassoons) that is not repeated in the movement’s recapitulation—but instead reappears at the climax of the final movement, by way of “straightening out” (in musicologist David Brodbeck’s formulation) the A/A-flat conflict.