SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT IN COLLABORATION WITH THE SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART: “THE ART OF MUSIC”

November 14, 2015

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF The Isle of the Dead, Op. 29

ADAM SCHOENBERG Finding Rothko Orange Yellow Red Wine

OTTORINO RESPIGHI Trittico Botticelliano Primavera L’adorazione dei Magi La nascita di Venere

CLAUDE DEBUSSY La mer De l’aube à midi sur la mer Jeux de vagues Dialogue du vent et de la mer

The Isle of the Dead, Op. 29 SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Born April 1, 1873, Oleg Died March 28 1943, Beverly Hills

In 1880 the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin painted the first of what would be a series of one of the spookiest, most evocative images ever committed to canvas. Over the next few years he would produce four variations of that painting, which would eventually come to be known as Die Toteninsel: “The Isle of the Dead.” All versions of the painting show essentially the same thing. Against a dark and threatening sky, a small island reflects the late afternoon sun, which illuminates its rock cliffs and towering cypresses, a tree identified with cemeteries and with death. In the foreground a small boat approaches the island. A dark-clad oarsman sits in the stern, and in front of him a figure shrouded in pure white stands slightly hunched over a long white box garlanded (in some versions of the painting) with red flowers. All who see the painting are quick to interpret what it “means.” Some have seen it as a depiction of Charon bearing the dead across the River Styx, but Böcklin refused to offer an explanation of his work. He is reported to have told a friend that “it must produce such an effect of stillness that anyone would be frightened to hear a knock on the door,” And so he intentionally left it mysterious (even the name Die Toteninsel was supplied by someone else). But no one can see that painting without an immediate visceral response, and over a century later it continues to haunt all who see it. Among those haunted was Serge Rachmaninoff, who composed his tone poem The Isle of the Dead in 1909, eight years after Böcklin’s death. One of the most effective things about Böcklin’s painting is his eerie combination of colors (gray, gold, black, dark green, deep blue), but the curious thing is that Rachmaninoff first encountered the image in Paris in Böcklin’s black and white sketch for the painting, and the composer much preferred that to the color version, which he came to know only later. He said: “I was not much moved by the color of the painting. If I had seen the original first, I might not have composed my Isle of the Dead. I like the picture best in black and white.” In any case, Rachmaninoff caught the mood of Böcklin’s painting perfectly. The Isle of the Dead has one of the most somber openings in all of music. It begins quietly and slowly, with the 5/8 meter catching perfectly the sound of softly-lapping water as the oarsman directs the boat toward the forbidding island. A lonely horn solo sets the bleak mood, and this figure is quickly taken up solo and then . Pay particular attention to that horn solo: embedded within it is the shape of the ancient Dies Irae plainchant, a theme that virtually obsessed Rachmaninoff (and Berlioz and Liszt before him). The music builds to a great brass chorale on this shape, and soon a dancing violin melody arcs high above. This has been called the “life theme,” a counterbalance to the dark opening, though one should not interpret this music too literally – it remains a mood-piece throughout. The Isle of the Dead builds to a huge climax on great chords spit out by brass and timpani. In the aftermath of that violence, tremolo strings gloomily intone the Dies Irae motif, the music winds down on a quiet wind chorale, and on the rocking 5/8 meter from the very beginning The Isle of the Dead fades into mysterious silence.

Finding Rothko ADAM SCHOENBERG Born November 15, 1980, Northampton, MA

Adam Schoenberg graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and went on to receive his Masters and DMA from the Juilliard School, where he studied with John Corigliano and Robert Beaser. His music, which has been widely performed, includes works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and film scores. Schoenberg lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He has been composer-in-residence with the Aspen Music Festival and with the Kansas City Symphony, which has recorded several of his works. The premiere of Finding Rothko, by the IRIS Orchestra under the direction of Michael Stern, took place on January 13, 2007. On his website, the composer has offered a program note: Finding Rothko was Schoenberg’s first real professional commission, arranged by Michael Stern for the IRIS Chamber Orchestra, and was written in 2006 while the composer was just beginning doctoral studies at Juilliard. After experiencing a “visceral reaction” to a group of paintings at MOMA by the Abstract Expressionist artist Mark Rothko, Schoenberg decided to make Rothko’s art the “muse” for this piece. Although played without a break, it is in four distinct movements, each devoted to a specific Rothko painting and named after the principal color used in the painting. (Coincidentally, the order of the four movements turned out to be exactly the same as the order in which Rothko completed the paintings.) These four movements are delineated and linked by a gentle three-chord motif the composer has labeled “Rothko’s theme.” Finding Rothko doesn’t try to portray Rothko’s use of color and shape, or attempt to “set” the paintings to music. The artworks are simply a pretext, an inspiration. Yet the choice of paintings and the color connections between them formed a narrative in the composer’s imagination that is expressed clearly in the music. “Orange” opens with “Rothko’s theme” and is somewhat atmospheric – a Copland-esque dawn, perhaps. The composer describes it as “a reflective moment yet to be fully realized.” “Yellow,” on the other hand, “is the realization of that moment,” and is the most upbeat of the four movements, beginning with a rocking minimalist accompaniment that gradually expands into a broad, bright landscape. The painting on which “Yellow” was based included a streak of red, providing an immediate narrative connection to the third movement. “Red” is intense, drawing on the saturated colors of the painting; the composer interprets that intensity in the movement’s jagged, irregular rhythms and mercurial personality. The final movement, “Wine,” is based on the last of the four paintings Schoenberg saw in person. It was the most difficult to locate and gain access to, and the journey to find it inspired the spirit of the piece and is the source of its title. “Wine” repeats “Rothko’s theme” and develops it gradually through slow, haunting phrases toward a shining final apotheosis. [Program note by Luke Howard, Ph.D.]

Trittico Botticelliano OTTORINO RESPIGHI Born July 9, 1879, Bologna Died April 18, 1936, Rome

Many composers have written music inspired by paintings; the opportunity to take a static arrangement of color, shape and space, and transform that frozen moment into dynamic music-drama has been difficult to resist. In the nineteenth-century, such works were usually written as virtuoso vehicles for pianists: Liszt wrote some pieces inspired by the Italian masters, and Mussorgsky composed his Pictures at an Exhibition, based on paintings by his friend Viktor Hartmann. But in the twentieth century, particularly after sensing the range of color Richard Strauss had discovered in the virtuoso orchestra, composers turned to the orchestra for their painting-inspired music. Some of these works have become accepted parts of the repertory, such as Hindemith’s symphony Mathis der Maler, based on paintings from Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. More recent examples include Martinů’s Frescoes of Piero della Francesca and Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. It was natural that Ottorino Respighi, a cultured man who was much in love with the Italian renaissance (and heavily influenced by Strauss’ tone poems), should turn to masterpieces of Italian painting for the inspiration of one of own his orchestral works. Doubtless Ravel’s dazzling orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures in 1922 had an influence on him as well. But when Respighi composed his Trittico Botticelliano (“Botticelli Triptych”) in 1927, he used not the huge orchestra of Ravel’s orchestration or of his own Pines and Fountains of Rome, but a chamber orchestra. He chose three paintings of Sandro Botticelli (c.1440-1515), a Florentine artist famous for his use of color and his paintings on mythological and religious subjects, and wrote a three-movement orchestral score that is all the more effective for being modest in scope and restrained in manner. This is not to suggest that the Trittico Botticelliano is dull or muted music. Far from it. But the use of a small orchestra brings a restraint to this score, a welcome change from the opulence of Respighi’s Roman tone poems. The first movement, based on Botticelli’s painting Spring, is full of swirling motion as the season comes to powerful life. In Botticelli’s painting, Venus, Mercury, and dancing graces stand on striking black grass, while above their heads the trees burst with flowers and oranges. Respighi’s delicate writing for winds here contrasts with powerful fanfares and canonic writing, and the music reaches a climax full of trills and shimmering sounds as the power of spring unfolds. Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi features the Virgin with the Child in her lap at the center of the painting; before and below her are figures in robes of rich reds, blues and browns. The music begins with lonely and oboe solos, like the sound of shepherds’ pipes. Soon comes a long melody, clearly based on the old hymn “O come, O come, Emanuel/And ransom captive Israel,” and this develops nobly; Respighi includes a number of exotic sounds to depict the three kings. The music rises to a climax, then falls away to end quietly on the lonely bassoon theme from the beginning, now under high string chords. The final movement is based on one of the most famous of all paintings, The Birth of Venus, in which the goddess of love rises from the sea on a shell. The music opens with gently-rocking string chords (the lapping of foamy waves?), and this lulling sound continues throughout. This movement too is full of shimmering sounds, but here the music remains calm, almost radiant. It rises to an ecstatic climax that gives way to sudden silence. The rocking accompaniment resumes, and the music moves to a glowing close. La mer CLAUDE DEBUSSY Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye Died March 25, 1918, Paris

In the summer of 1903, the 41-year-old Debussy took a cottage in the French wine country, where he set to work on a new orchestral piece inspired by his feelings about the sea. To André Messager he wrote, “I expect you will say that the hills of Burgundy aren’t washed by the sea and that what I’m doing is like painting a landscape in a studio, but my memories are endless and are in my opinion worth more than the real thing which tends to pull down one’s ideas too much.” That last phrase is a key to this music. While each of its three movements has a descriptive heading, La mer is not an attempt to describe the ocean in sound. Had Richard Strauss written La mer (he would have called it Das Meer), he would have made us hear the thump of waves along the shoreline, the cries of wheeling sea-birds, the hiss of foam across the sand. Debussy’s aims were far different. He was interested not in musical scene-painting but in writing music that makes us feel the way we feel in the presence of the ocean; what mattered for Debussy was not the thing itself but his idea of that thing. At the premiere in 1905 the critic Pierre Lalo, misunderstanding Debussy’s intentions in this music, complained: “I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the sea.” La mer sets out not to make us see white-caps but to awaken in us our own sense of the sea’s elemental power and beauty. Debussy subtitled La mer “Three Symphonic Sketches,” and it consists of two moderately-paced movements surrounding a scherzo. But these movements are not in the forms of German symphonic music, nor does Debussy write melodic themes capable of symphonic development. Rather, he creates what seem fragments of musical materials – hints of themes, rhythmic shapes, flashes of color – that will reappear throughout, like kaleidoscopic bits in an evolving mosaic of color and rhythm. From Dawn til Noon on the Sea begins with a quiet murmur, a quiet nevertheless full of elemental strength. Out of this darkness glints of color and motion emerge, and solo trumpet and English horn share a fragmentary tune that will return – both thematically and rhythmically – here and in the final movement. As the morning brightens, the music becomes more animated, and a wealth of ideas follows: swirling rhythmic shapes, a noble chorale for horns, a dancing figure for the cello section divided into four parts. From these fragments, Debussy builds his first movement, and at its close the horn chorale builds to an unexpectedly powerful climax. Out of this splendid sound, a solitary brass chord winds the music into silence. Play of the Waves opens with shimmering swirls of color, and this movement is brilliant, dancing and surging throughout; it has a nice sense of fun and play, as a scherzo should. One moment it can be sparkling and light, the next it will surge up darkly. The movement draws to a delicate close in which a few solo instruments seem to evaporate into the shining mist. The mood changes sharply at the beginning of the final movement. Debussy specifies that he wants Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea to sound “animated and tumultuous.” The ominous growl of lower strings prefaces a restatement of the trumpet tune from the very beginning, and soon the horn chorale returns as well. Debussy’s transformation of his material is particularly impressive here. A gentle chorale for woodwinds (marked “expressive and sustained”) sings wistfully at first, but the music builds to a huge explosion. Moments later that chorale tune returns in a touch of pure instrumental magic: against rippling harps and the violins’ high harmonics, solo flute brings back this tune with the greatest delicacy, and the effect is extraordinary – suddenly we feel a sense of enormous space and calm. Yet within seconds this same shape roars out with all the power of the full orchestra. As the movement proceeds, Debussy recalls themes from earlier movements, and the opening trumpet figure, the horn chorale, and the flute tune from this movement are all whipped into the vortex as the music hurtles to a tremendous climax. Debussy may be popularly identified as the composer of “impressionistic” moods, full of muted color and subtle understatement, but the conclusion of La Mer roars with savage power as dissonant brass shriek out the final chord. This is not the music of water lilies but music driven by a force beyond human imagination, and the normally understated Debussy makes us feel that wild strength in the most violent ending he ever wrote. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger