Juilliard Orchestra Karina Canellakis, Conductor
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Saturday Evening, September 21, 2019, at 7:30 The Juilliard School presents Juilliard Orchestra Karina Canellakis, Conductor MISSY MAZZOLI (b. 1980) Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827) Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19 Allegro con brio Adagio Rondo: Molto allegro Intermission RICHARD STRAUSS (1864–1949) Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), Op. 40 The Hero The Hero’s Adversaries The Hero’s Companion The Hero’s Deeds of War The Hero’s Works of Peace The Hero’s Retirement Performance time: approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, including an intermission The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. Information regarding gifts to the school may be obtained from the Juilliard School Development Office, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6588; (212) 799-5000, ext. 278 (juilliard.edu/giving). Alice Tully Hall Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. and gently out-of-tune guitars, and I draw on Notes on the Program inspirations as diverse as Baroque music, by James M. Keller noise, and modern electronica.” Much of that description characterizes Sinfonia (for Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) Orbiting Spheres), written in 2013 for cham- MISSY MAZZOLI ber orchestra and revised in 2016 for full Born October 27, 1980, in Lansdale, symphony orchestra. She described it as Pennsylvania “music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around An esteemed and productive presence in each other within a larger orbit.” New York City’s new-music scene, Missy Mazzoli has written works in many genres, “The word ‘sinfonia’ refers to baroque from chamber music to symphonic scores works for chamber orchestra,” Mazzoli to operas. “To some extent,” she told an said, “but also to the old Italian term for interviewer when Sinfonia (for Orbiting a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instru- Spheres) was played at a 2017 Proms con- ment with constant, wheezing drones that cert in London, “I try to reinvent myself are cranked out under melodies played with each piece; I always try to explore a on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that new organizational technique, a different churns and roils, that inches close to the approach to orchestration or texture. There listener only to leap away at breakneck are also some techniques I return to again speed, in the process transforming the en- and again—I’m obsessed with harmony semble turns into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, and will often start a piece by creating a flung recklessly into space.” chord progression.” Clustered harmonies are apparent from Mazzoli received advanced musical training the outset (marked “slow, stately”), with at Boston University, Yale School of Music, groups of instruments (sometimes the and Royal Conservatory of the Hague in the microtonal exhalations of harmonicas) Netherlands with teachers including Louis hovering nebulously, typically entering and Andriessen, David Lang, Aaron Jay Kernis, exiting gently against the prolonged orna- Martin Bresnick, and John Harbison. From mental lines of the violins, flutes, or oboes. 2007 to 2010 she served as executive di- Although the piece is notated mostly in rector of the MATA Festival in New York 6/8 time, a listener would be hard-pressed and in 2011–12 was composer/educator-in- to identify its metric pulse except in a residence at the Albany Symphony. In 2012 persistently energized section in the mid- she was named composer-in-residence of dle. There, flashes of urgently repeated the Opera Company of Philadelphia (now rhythms seem generated from the loins of Opera Philadelphia), and since then she has minimalism. On the whole, though, a lis- had three operas produced: Song from the tener is likely to be left with an impression Uproar (2012), Breaking the Waves (2016), of waves gradually emerging and receding, and Proving Up (2018). She teaches compo- an evocation of precisely the cosmic vast- sition at the Mannes School of Music/The ness the title implies. New School in New York and in 2018 began a two-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony’s composer-in-residence. “My music is usually composed of strange, dense harmonies and propulsive rhythms,” Mazzoli observed, “often layered in unex- pected ways. I’m interested in unusual in- struments like harmonicas, junk percussion, Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, major Concerto, although it is conceivable Op. 19 that the “new concerto of his invention” LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN he played was the C-major one. His friend Born December 16, 1770 (probably, since Franz Wegeler related that “not until the he was baptized on the 17th), in Bonn, afternoon of the second day before the con- Germany cert did he write the rondo, and then while Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna suffering from a pretty severe colic which frequently afflicted him. … In the anteroom Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto sat four copyists to whom he handed sheet in B-flat major occupied him sporadically after sheet as soon as it was finished.” He through the decade of the 1790s, and he didn’t set down the piano part until six years may have premiered it as early as March 29, later, when he wrote to his publisher, “As 1795. His Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major is usual with me, the pianoforte part in the appears to date entirely from 1795 and to concerto was not written out in the score, have been premiered on December 18 of and only now have I done so, hence be- that year. Concerto No. 1 was brought out in cause of the haste, you will receive that part print in March 1801 and Concerto No. 2 not in my own illegible manuscript.” until that December, with the result that the C-major one was identified as the compos- Anyone writing a piano concerto in Vienna er’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and the earlier one at that time did so in the shadow of the late was labeled No. 2. lamented Mozart. Beethoven sticks to a Mozartean norm in this work’s general Beethoven was an adept keyboard play- structure: The first movement is a sonata er from an early age. In 1783 his teacher, form with an orchestral exposition, the sec- Christian Gottlob Neefe, contributed a glow- ond a lyrical slow movement, and the third ing report of his pupil to Cramer’s Magazine a rondo. The orchestral writing follows the der Musik, noting that “he plays the piano Mozartean ideal of an integrated texture in very skillfully and with power, reads at sight which the piano is primus inter pares. None- very well, and … would surely become a theless, within this idealized scoring the so- second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he loist has plenty to keep busy; and if the fin- were to continue as he has begun.” In 1787 ger-work sounds not quite Mozartean, the Beethoven visited Vienna, where he may fact remains that the apple has not fallen far have taken piano lessons from Mozart. In from the tree November 1792 he finally moved to Vienna, which remained his home for the rest of Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), Op. 40 his life. In his luggage was the preliminary RICHARD STRAUSS work he had done on his Piano Concerto in Born June 11, 1864, in Munich B-flat major. Died September 8, 1949, in Garmisch- Partenkirchen, Germany. A high-profile event came his way on March 29, 1795, when he was featured as both An enduring contribution of the “Music of composer and pianist at a charity concert the Future” camp of Berlioz, Wagner, and at Vienna’s Burgtheater, held for the bene- especially Liszt, was the symphonic poem fit of the Vienna Composers Society, which or tone poem—a single-movement (if multi- looked after the welfare of musicians’ wid- sectioned) orchestral work based on literary ows and orphans. It is widely assumed that or other extra-musical inspiration. One of the he seized this occasion to premiere his B-flat circle’s ancillary figures was Alexander Ritter, who composed six symphonic poems of his such an exercise. It would be a symphonic own and served as associate concertmaster poem with strong classical leanings in terms of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, which was of structure, a sort of expanded “Classical conducted by Hans von Bülow. In Meiningen symphony.” It would be set in E-flat major, a he grew friendly with the young Richard key resonant with memories of Beethoven’s Strauss, whom von Bülow had brought in as Sinfonia eroica, which had been inscribed an assistant music director in 1885. Strauss “To celebrate the memory of a great man”— would later say that Ritter revealed to him the an idea not so very different from that con- greatness of the music of Wagner, Liszt, and veyed by the title “A Hero’s Life.” Like Berlioz and, by extension, opened his eyes Beethoven’s Eroica, it would be a work of to the possibilities of the symphonic poem. hefty proportions—Ein Heldenleben typically runs to three-quarters of an hour—and its or- From 1886 through 1915, Strauss produced chestration, including 8 horns and 5 trumpets ten tone poems that many feel represent the in its imposing 18-member brass section, genre at its height. He was drawn to the idea would leave the ears highly stimulated. (as he would recall in a memoir) that “new ideas must search for new forms; this basic Asked to explain his piece’s program, Strauss principle of Liszt’s symphonic works, in which declined, insisting: “There is no need of a the poetic idea was really the formative program.