Season 202010101010----20202020111111

The Philadelphia Orchestra

ThursThursday,day, March 33,, at 777:007:00:00:00

Beyond the Score ®®®: Natural BeautiesBeauties????

David Kim Leader and Violin Gerard McBurney Host Alex Bechtel Actor

A multimulti----mediamedia exploration of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons

Intermission

VivaVivaldildi The Four Seasons I. Spring, Concerto in E major, RV 269 a. Allegro b. Largo c. Allegro II. Summer, Concerto in G minor, RV 315 a. Allegro non molto—Allegro b. Adagio alternating with Presto c. Presto III. Autumn, Concerto in F major, RV 293 a. Allegro—Piano e larghetto—Allegro assai b. Adagio molto c. Allegro IV. Winter, Concerto in F minor, RV 297 a. Allegro non molto b. Largo c. Allegro—Lento

This program runs approximately 2 hours.

Beyond the Score® is made possible by support from the Hirschberg-Goodfriend Fund in memory of Adolf Hirschberg as established by Juliet J. Goodfriend and by the Wachovia Wells Fargo Foundation. Additional funding comes from the Annenberg Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.

Beyond the Score® is produced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Gerard McBurney, Creative Director, Beyond the Score Martha Gilmer, Executive Producer, Beyond the Score

Violinist David Kim was named concertmaster of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1999. Born in Carbondale, Illinois, in 1963, he started playing the violin at the age of three, began studies with the famed pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the age of eight, and later received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Juilliard School. In 1986 he was the only American violinist to win a prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Mr. Kim was founder and, for 20 years ending in 2008, artistic director of the Kingston Chamber Music Festival at the University of Rhode Island, from which he also was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Arts in 2001. In conjunction with the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, he founded an annual outreach program that took him to elementary schools, performing and speaking about classical music in an effort to cultivate future audiences. In the State of Rhode Island alone, he performed for well over 12,000 young people during his tenure there. He continues to devote a portion of his schedule each year to bringing classical music to children and visits numerous schools in the Philadelphia area.

Mr. Kim appears as soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra each season, as well as with numerous orchestras around the world. Conductors with whom he has performed include Myung-Whun Chung, Christoph von Dohnányi, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Vladimir Jurowski, Peter Oundjian, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. Mr. Kim also appears internationally at festivals such as MasterWorks (USA) and Pacific (Japan), and he is a member of the Kumho Art Hall Chamber Music Society in Seoul, Korea.

The latest additions to Mr. Kim’s discography are The Lord Is My Shepherd, a collection of sacred works for violin and piano with pianist and composer Paul S. Jones, and Encore, a collection of recital favorites with pianist Gail Niwa.

Mr. Kim’s instrument is a J.B. Guadagnini from Milan, Italy, ca. 1757 on loan from The Philadelphia Orchestra. He resides in a suburb of Philadelphia with his wife, Jane, and his daughters, Natalie and Maggie. For more information, please visit www.davidkimviolin.com.

A native of England, Gerard McBurney studied in Cambridge and at the Moscow Conservatory before returning to London, where he worked for many years as a composer, arranger, broadcaster, teacher, and writer. He is artistic programming advisor for the Chicago Symphony and creative director of Beyond the Score.

Mr. McBurney’s original compositions include orchestral works, a ballet, a chamber opera, songs, and chamber music, as well as many theater scores. He also is well known for his reconstructions of various lost and forgotten works by Dmitri Shostakovich.

As a scholar Mr. McBurney has published mostly in the field of Russian and Soviet music. His journalistic work includes articles on many different musical subjects. For 20 years he created and presented hundreds of programs on BBC Radio 3, as well as occasional programs for other radio stations in the U.K., Europe, and the former Soviet Union. He has also written, researched, and presented more than two dozen documentary films for British and German television channels.

For many years Mr. McBurney lectured and taught, first at the London College of Music and then for more than 10 years at the Royal Academy of Music. He has also acted as advisor and collaborated with many orchestras and presenters, including Lincoln Center, the Emerson String Quartet, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mr. McBurney joined the staff of the Chicago Symphony in September 2006 and made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut last season.

Alex Bechtel is a Philadelphia-based actor, writer, and musician. As an actor, writer, composer, and music director, he has worked with the Walnut Street Theatre ( The Musical of Musicals ), 1812 Productions ( This Is the Week That Is ), New Paradise Laboratories (FATEBOOK ), Act II Playhouse ( First Impressions, Here’s Tony) , Theatre Horizon ( Honk!, An American Songbook ), and Philadelphia Theatre Workshop ( Traveling Light) . He has also given readings, concerts, and workshops at 1812, the Wilma Theater, and Pig Iron Theatre Company. Mr. Bechtel is co-creator and co-star of The Bech/Doh Sketch/Show —a comedy show with writer/actor Michael Doherty. BEYOND THE SCORE ®

Begun in 2005 the Chicago Symphony’s Beyond the Score seeks to open the door to the symphonic repertoire for first-time concertgoers as well as to encourage an active, more fulfilling way of listening for seasoned audiences. The lifeblood of Beyond the Score is its firm rooting in the live tradition: musical extracts, spoken clarification, theatrical narrative, and hand-paced projections on a large central screen are performed in close synchrony—an arresting and innovative approach that illuminates classical music more idiomatically than other methods (program notes, pre-concert lectures, filmed documentary, etc.). After each 60-minute program focusing on a single masterwork, audiences return from intermission to experience the piece performed in a regular concert setting, equipped with a new understanding of its style and genesis.

This format’s potential was quickly recognized by orchestras in the United States and abroad; a rapidly expanding licensing program has since brought Beyond the Score to audiences throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and Holland, presented by organizations of many sizes. Recognizing that a large population is economically or geographically unable to attend these performances in person, the Chicago Symphony also offers digital video downloads of selects programs from its website at www.beyondthescore.org.

In September 2008, the Chicago Symphony released Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, led by its principal conductor, Bernard Haitink, on its CSO Resound label. Accompanying this Grammy Award-winning recording of the Symphony is a free bonus DVD video of the Beyond the Score production examining Shostakovich’s controversial and powerful work— the first commercially released video from this acclaimed concert series.

For more information on Beyond the Score, including video downloads, please visit www,beyondthescore.org.

NATURAL BEAUTIESBEAUTIES????

In early-18th-century Venice, one of the most beautiful and civilized cities in Europe, there were a number of celebrated boarding schools in which young girls were trained in singing and playing instruments to spectacular virtuosity. Antonio Vivaldi—composer, violinist, and Catholic priest—was the musical director of the most famous of these schools, the Pietà.

For the girls of the Pietà’s orchestra he poured out a torrent of glittering music that astonished Europe. The immensely popular sequence of four concertos called The Four Seasons was published in a book called The Argument of Harmony and Invention.

Each is preceded by a poem by Vivaldi himself, in which he describes the actions and delights of each season as depicted in his music with all the vividness of one of the great Italian paintings from the same period.

Parallel Events 1725 Vivaldi The Four Seasons Music Bach Anna Magdalena Notebook Literature Ramsay The Gentle Shepherd Art Canaletto Four Views of Venice History Peter the Great dies

The Four Seasons

Antonio Vivaldi Born in Venice, March 4, 1678 Died in Vienna, July 28, 1741

The idea of depicting the seasons through music did not originate with Vivaldi—indeed, spring’s sensuous languor and winter’s icy chill had been favorite topics of the Renaissance madrigalists—but the notion reached one of its most eloquent expressions in the four concertos that constitute what Vivaldi called The Four Seasons. Since 1725, when these works first appeared in print in Amsterdam, dozens of composers have followed suit, not only in works intended to depict all four seasons (symphonies of Hadley and Malipiero, a ballet by Glazunov, a piano suite of Tchaikovsky, an oratorio by Haydn), but also in compositions that characterize the mood or activities of a single season (Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, Schumann’s “Spring” Symphony, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Alfvén’s Midsommarvaka, Grieg’s Im Herbst ).

Vivaldi’s set of four concertos remains among the most popular of these—indeed, among the most celebrated programmatic music of all time. They were initially published as part of the composer’s Op. 8, a set of 12 concertos published in 1725 as The Contest of Harmony and Invention. The provocative title hinted at the composer’s challenge of creating works that were musically powerful but also poetically interesting. The concertos bore colorful titles, including not only the names of the four seasons (for the first four concertos), but others such as “The Hunt,” “The Storm at Sea,” “Pleasure,” etc. Dedicated to Count Vaclav Morzin of Bohemia, a frequent visitor to Venice, Op. 8 contains some of the most dazzling instrumental music of the Baroque.

A Prolific Composer Yet these concertos form but a tiny part of a vast oeuvre. Few composers can begin to match the sheer volume of Vivaldi’s output, much less its peerless consistency. In addition to 50 operas, 150 vocal works, and more than 100 solo sonatas, the Venetian cleric and composer known as the Red Priest (because of his hair) wrote more than 500 concertos, for all manner of soloistic instruments. The sheer variety of this concerto output is fascinating enough: In addition to 250 concertos for solo violin, there are works for oboe, bassoon, flute, recorder, cello, viola d’amore, mandolin, lute, and sundry other instruments. There are also some 80 ensemble concertos for two or more soloists, cast in every conceivable combination. Considering the lightning-speed at which they must have been written, it is amazing that so many are absolutely first-rate pieces. Despite the fact that even during his lifetime Vivaldi was criticized for assembly-line-style composition (the same trait that has given rise, more recently, to the quip that he “wrote the same concerto 500 times”), a large number of these works have durably withstood the test of time. Like his younger contemporary Handel, Vivaldi was born with an extraordinary facility: He could compose a piece faster than others could copy it.

A Closer Look For the publication of Op. 8 Vivaldi appended a poem for each of the concertos of The Four Seasons; though the verses are not signed, many scholars have assumed that they are from Vivaldi’s own pen, largely because of the meticulous detail with which the programmatic elements of the poetry follow the musical events of the concertos. Vivaldi’s expression of the mood of each season is quite ingenious, in fact, and even led him to a new approach to the ritornello concerto (a term chosen to describe the manner in which full-orchestra material returns again and again, lending cohesiveness to an otherwise fairly fluid design). The orchestral tutti s are often used to depict the overall mood of the season (such as the frozen landscape at the beginning of “Winter,” or the melting heat of “Summer”), while the soloistic passages evoke more specific elements—such as the bird songs at the opening of “Spring,” or the Bacchic harvest-revelry at the opening of new wine, as expressed in the opening solo passagework of “Autumn.”

—Paul J. Horsley

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was published in 1725.

Carlo Maria Giulini led the first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of the complete Four Seasons in December 1973; Norman Carol was the soloist. Eugene Ormandy and violinist Anshel Brusilow premiered three of the four movements with the Orchestra: “Spring” in March 1960, “April” in April 1960, and “Autumn” in December 1959. “Winter” was first performed in January 1958, with Ormandy and Jacob Krachmalnick. Most recently the entire work was performed on subscription concerts in January 2007, with soloists David Kim, Juliette Kang, Kim Fisher, and Paul Roby; Christoph Eschenbach conducted.

The Orchestra, Ormandy, and Brusilow recorded the complete Four Seasons in 1959 for CBS.

The score calls for harpsichord, strings, and solo violin.

Running time is approximately 40 minutes.

Spring Spring has come, and joyfully the birds welcome it with cheerful song, and the streams, at the breath of zephyrs, flow swiftly with sweet murmurings.

But now the sky is cloaked in black and thunder and lightning announce themselves; when they die away, the little birds turn afresh to their sweet song.

Then on the pleasant flower-strewn meadow, to the gentle rustle of the leaves and branches the goatherd rests, his faithful dog at his side.

To the rustic bagpipe’s gay sound, nymph and shepherd dance beneath the fair spring sky in all its glory.

Summer In the torrid heat of the blazing sun, man and beast alike languish, and even the pine trees scorch; the cuckoo raises his voice, and soon after the turtledove and finch join in song.

Sweet zephyrs blow, but then the fierce north wind intervenes; the shepherd weeps, anxious for his fate from the harsh, menacing gusts;

He rouses his weary limbs from rest in fear of the lightning, the fierce thunder and the angry swarms of gnats and flies.

Alas! his fears are justified, for furious thunder irradiates the heavens, bowing down the trees and flattening the crops.

Autumn The peasant celebrates with song and dance his joy in a fine harvest and with generous draughts of Bacchus’ cup his efforts end in sleep.

Song and dance are done, the gentle, pleasant air and the season invite one and all to the delights of sweetest sleep.

At first light a huntsman sets out with horns, guns, and dogs, putting his prey to flight and following its tracks;

Terrified and exhausted by the great clamor of guns and dogs, wounded and afraid, the prey tries to flee but is caught and dies.

Winter To shiver icily in the freezing dark in the teeth of a cruel wind, to stamp your feet continually, so chilled that your teeth chatter;

To remain in quiet contentment by the fireside while outside the rain soaks people by the hundreds; to walk on the ice, with slow steps in fear of falling, advance with care.

Then to step forth strongly, fall to the ground, and again run boldly on the ice until it cracks and breaks;

To listen as from the iron portals winds rush from south and north, and all the winds in contest; such is winter, such the joys it brings.

Program note © 2011. All rights reserved. Program note may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.