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BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

James Levine, Music Director Bernard Haitink, Conductor Emeritus Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Laureate 129th Season, 2009-2010 €r*<& CHAMBER TEA I Friday, October 30, at 2:30

COMMUNITY CONCERT I

Sunday, November 1, at 3, at First Church in Dedham This concert is supported by the Dedham Institution for Savings Foundation, in memory of R. Willis Leith, Jr.

COMMUNITY CONCERT II

Sunday, November 8, at 3, at Blessed Mother Teresa Parish, Dorchester

These free concerts are made possible by a generous grant from The Lowell Institute.

SHEILA FIEKOWSKY, violin (1st violin in Honegger) BO YOUP HWANG, violin (1st violin in Beethoven) RACHEL FAGERBURG, viola ALEXANDRE LECARME, cello

HONEGGER Quartet No. 2 in D Allegro Adagio Allegro marcato

BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat, Opus 74, Harp Poco adagio—Allegro Adagio ma non troppo

Presto—Piu presto quasi andantino—Tempo I Allegretto con variazioni

Week5

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) Quartet No. 2 in D

Arthur Honegger was born in Le Havre, France, to Swiss parents, and grew up there. In 1913 he moved with his family to Zurich, where he attended the Conservatory for two years before moving to Paris to study at the Conservatory there in a range of musical subjects, including violin. While there he got to know his fellow students Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, and Darius Milhaud, all of whom would later be lumped together as "Les nouveaux jeunes" and later (along with Francis Poulenc and Louis Durey) "" in association with Satie and Cocteau, although the interests of the individual composers soon outstripped allegiance to the group. The success of Honegger's incidental music for the Swiss playwright Rene Morax's Le Roi (King David, 1921), and of a subsequent concert version, ele- vated his reputation immeasurably. Although quite prolific and drawn to all gen- res, he clearly preferred those compositional projects that demanded a reaction to extramusical stimulus. Even his abstract orchestral music often grew from concrete triggers, such as in his Rugby and train-inspired . (Honegger loved machines, and he loved rugby.) This sense of atmosphere-creation and drama led him to explore the nascent art of film music, resulting in dozens of movie scores, among the best-known of which are those for Raymond Bernard's 1936 Les Miserables and the 1938 Leslie Howard film of Shaw's Pygmalion. Honegger's most honored and performed work after Le Roi David was his dramatic Jeanne d'Arc au biicher (Joan ofArc at the Stake, 1935), on a text of Paul Claudel. The first of Honegger's three string quartets dates from his early maturity, 1916-17. He wrote nos. 2 and 3 in the middle 1930s for his friends the Pro Arte Quartet. He began the Quartet No. 2 in 1934 and completed the finale in June 1936. The Pro Arte Quartet gave the premiere of this nearly twenty-minute, three-movement work at the Venice Biennale in September 1936. Honegger's contemporary voice can be heard in the motoric rhythms and gestures that permeate this piece, as well as in its ostentatious polytonality. At the very begin- ning of the Allegro first movement, the first violin's melody is in A minor, while the accompaniment hints at B-flat minor for the second violin, F major for the viola, and D minor for the cello, which begins the piece with a march-like pulse. The glissandos that appear near the end of the movement are a novel texture. Older practices, such as the use of sonata form in the first movement and a prevalence of well-balanced counterpoint, reveal Honegger's conservative side. The Adagio features a quivering little accompaniment figure that permeates the movement. The finale, Allegro marcato, has scherzo features, with a running 12/8 line and tricky rhythmic clashes ratcheting up the energy to the end. —Robert Kirzinger

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat, Opus 74, Harp

The year 1809 was horrendous. Since April, Austria had been at war with France for the fourth time in eighteen years. In May, Napoleon's armies were in the suburbs of Vienna. The war dragged on until mid-July. At the end of that month, Beethoven told his Leipzig publisher, Gottfried Christoph Hartel, that he had not been able to summon a coherent musical thought since the beginning of May. But within a few days he regained his energy and ability to concentrate, and in less than half a year he had completed three masterpieces, all in E-flat major: the so-called Emperor Concerto, the present string quartet, and the Farewell Sonata, as well as two smaller sonatas, the wonderfully lyric F-sharp major, Opus 78, and its snappy com- panion in G major, Opus 79. There is grief in the slow movement of the Farewell Sonata—it is titled "Absence"—but in the rest of this music is affirmation, triumphant in the concerto, serene in the quartet and the sonatas. Beethoven begins Opus 74 with a slow introduction: spacious music leaning at once and persistently toward veiled harmonies. The whole introduction is a kind •''••

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m Km of questioning, most so the final passage in which the first violin ascends by half- nBBBK steps through a whole octave. Then the sturdy and unambiguous start of the Allegro provides an answer. Pizzicato is prominent early on, and Opus 74 is sometimes

called the Harp Quartet. I know of no precedent for so much pizzicato that is not simply accompaniment. The movement as a whole is a fascinating mixture of the demure and the unpredictable, not least at the pianissimo close of the recapitulation, mMr from which the music goes down even further, to a pianississimo that is not only

extraordinarily still, but deeply disquieting in its sudden harmonic incertitude. The slow movement starts with a broad melody that is delicately varied on each of its returns, with the accompaniment more active each time. Its serenity is soon darkened by Mozartean sighs and harmonies in minor, clouds that will not be completely dispelled until the last measures of the poignant and beautifully settled 3k^3n& EBB coda. The C minor scherzo is the most boisterously unmannerly sort of Beethoven; the Trio comes around twice, which is the sometimes rather arbitrary-sounding way Beethoven had at this time of making his scherzos match his expanding structures in scale.

Here, however, is an occasion when Beethoven makes special use of his double ' Eh trip around the scherzo-Trio-scherzo cycle: he changes the character of the scherzo mSbM by making it almost all piano, pianissimo, even pianississimo on its last appearance. Then, just as the mutterings seem about to subside completely, a deceptive cadence 3m diverts the music onto a chord of A-flat, used, by Beethoven, calmly to prepare E-flat major, the quartet's home key and the place where, as finale, he will present six nicely uncomplicated variations of a clear-browed but also charmingly quirky theme. m Beethoven winds things up in a coda that begins by extending the last variation and that is full of surprises, right up to its last two chords. mm* —Michael Steinberg

Born in Korea, Bo Youp Hwang gave his first violin solo performance with orchestra when he was twelve, going on to study at the School of Music and Fine Arts and the University of Seoul. He won two prestigious prizes at age eighteen, leading to study with the Fine Arts String Quartet at the University of Wisconsin, and later won first prize in the Young Artists Competition. He was assistant concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for three years before joining the Boston Sym- phony Orchestra in 1973. He has performed on several occasions as a soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra, was also active as first violin of the Francesco String Quartet, and has returned to Korea several times to perform with orchestras there. Mr. Hwang has taught many successful young musicians over the years around SHnS the Boston area and has also taught at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute and New England Conservatory's Preparatory School.

A member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1975, Sheila Fiekowsky was born in Detroit and began studying the violin at age nine when she was offered a violin through a public school program. Her musical studies quickly progressed Hfcfc«3«?t! when her teacher, a bass player, insisted she begin lessons with Emily Mutter Austin, Se a violinist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Her summers were spent at the H Meadowmount School of Music, where she studied violin with Ivan Galamian and chamber music with Joseph Gingold. She appeared as a soloist with the Detroit Symphony at sixteen and that same year won the National Federation of Music Clubs Biennial Award. Ms. Fiekowsky attended the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied gUMRHC with Ivan Galamian and Jaime Laredo. In chamber music classes, she MJcJ

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' • - wat HI worked with Felix Galimir and members of the Guarneri Quartet. She holds a mas- ter's degree from Yale University, where her teacher was Joseph Silverstein. Her chamber music experience includes performances at the Marlboro, Norfolk, and Aspen music festivals. A regular performer in chamber music concerts at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood, she has been heard in numerous chamber music and solo concerts in the Boston area. Her solo appearances include concerts with the New- ton Symphony, North Shore Symphony, Mystic Valley Orchestra, and Boston Pops Orchestra. Ms. Fiekowsky plays a Hieronymus Amati violin made circa 1670 in Cremona, Italy.

Rachel Fagerburg joined the viola section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in December 1989. She can be heard frequently in chamber concerts at Symphony Hall and in chamber music performances in the Boston area and in the Berkshires. She was a member of the Renard String Quartet with fellow BSO members and has been a soloist with the Boston Pops under both John Williams and Keith Lock- hart. A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, she was a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in 1980. Ms. Fagerburg's teachers included Heidi Castleman and Eugene Lehner at the New England Conservatory and Abraham Skernick at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Before joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra she was a member of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, the Opera Company of Boston, Emmanuel Music, and the Boston Ballet Orchestra.

Cellist Alexandre Lecarme joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra in September 2008. A native of Grasse, France, Mr. Lecarme graduated with the Premier Prix de Violoncelle from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris in 1997. He moved to Boston at the invitation of Roman Totenberg, obtaining an Artist Diploma and master of music degree from Boston University as a recipient of the B. and Naomi R. Cohen Foundation Grant and a Dean's Scholarship. His principal teachers included Jean-Marie Gamard in Paris, David Soyer, Andres Diaz, Michael Reynolds, and George Neikrug. Mr. Lecarme is an avid chamber musician. As a founding member of the Tancrede Trio, he has performed extensively in the United States and Europe. Highlights have included concerts at Opera de Nice, at the Salle Olivier Messiaen in Grenoble, France, and at Shermetiev Palace in St. Peters- burg for the 300th anniversary of that city. He has collaborated with such artists as Roman Totenberg, Seymour Lipkin, and members of the Tokyo String Quartet, and has participated at the Pablo Casals, Domaine Forget, Kneisel Hall, and Norfolk chamber music festivals. In 2007, while a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center, he was principal cello of the TMC Orchestra for Verdi's Don Carlo under James Levine. Mr. Lecarme has released three CDs for Hammond GMAC Performing Arts, including works by Bach, Debussy, Schubert, Beethoven, and, most recently, cello sonatas of Rachmaninoff and Franck. The Saul B. and Naomi R. Cohen Foun- dation has generously loaned Mr. Lecarme a cello by JB Vuillaume.

The November 1 concert is sponsored by a generous gift from the Dedham Insti-

tution for Savings Foundation in memory of R. Willis (Bill) Leith, Jr., who not only served on the Board of Dedham Institution for Savings, but was also an esteemed board member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for over 20 years. The BSO is grateful for Bill's friendship, lay leadership, and beneficence. His spirit lives on in Symphony Hall, as the groundwork he laid for so many initiatives remains.