Season 2010-2011 The Philadelphia Orchestra

Thursday, January 20, at 8:00 Friday, January 21, at 2:00 Saturday, January 22, at 8:00

Alan Gilbert Conductor Richard Woodhams Oboe

Rouse Oboe Concerto (in one movement) First Philadelphia Orchestra performances

The Philadelphia Orchestra

The Philadelphia Orchestra is among the world’s leading orchestras. Renowned for its artistic excellence since its founding in 1900, the Orchestra has inspired audiences through thousands of live performances, recordings, and broadcasts in Philadelphia and around the world.

With only seven music directors throughout more than a century of unswerving orchestral distinction, the artistic heritage of The Philadelphia Orchestra is attributed to extraordinary musicianship under the leadership and innovation of Fritz Scheel (1900- 07), Carl Pohlig (1907-12), Leopold Stokowski (1912-41), Eugene Ormandy (1936-80), Riccardo Muti (1980-92), Wolfgang Sawallisch (1993-2003), and Christoph Eschenbach (2003-08). After 30 years of a celebrated association with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Charles Dutoit continues the tradition as chief conductor.

Since Mr. Dutoit’s debut with the Orchestra in July 1980 he has led hundreds of concerts in Philadelphia, at Carnegie Hall, and on tour, as artistic director of the Orchestra’s summer concerts at the Mann Center, artistic director and principal conductor of the Orchestra’s summer residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and now as chief conductor. With the 2012-13 season, the Orchestra honors Mr. Dutoit by bestowing upon him the title conductor laureate.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin assumed the title of music director designate in June 2010, immediately joining the Orchestra’s leadership team. He takes up the baton as The Philadelphia Orchestra’s next music director in 2012.

The Philadelphia Orchestra annually touches the lives of countless music lovers worldwide, through concerts, presentations, and recordings. Each year the Orchestra presents a subscription season at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, education and community partnership programs, and annual appearances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center; it also regularly tours throughout the world. Its summer schedule includes performances at the Mann Center, free Neighborhood Concerts throughout Greater Philadelphia, and residencies at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. For more information on The Philadelphia Orchestra, please visit www.philorch.org.

Conductor

Alan Gilbert became music director of the New York Philharmonic in September 2009, the first native New Yorker to hold that post. In the 2010–11 season he conducts the orchestra in a staged presentation of Janá ček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Mahler’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies and Kindertotenlieder, the New York premiere of Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s a Voice, a Messenger, the New York premiere of composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft, and both programs in the orchestra’s new music series, CONTACT! Mr. Gilbert will also lead the orchestra in two tours of European music capitals, two performances at Carnegie Hall, and a free Memorial Day concert at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York.

This season Mr. Gilbert will also conduct several other leading orchestras at home and abroad, including Hamburg’s NDR Symphony, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and, for the first time, Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He has previously led such ensembles as the Berlin and Los Angeles philharmonics; the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Bavarian Radio symphonies; and the Cleveland and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras. His Philadelphia Orchestra debut was in 2003.

In 2009 Mr. Gilbert became the first person to hold the William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies at the Juilliard School. In June 2008 he was named conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic following his final concert as chief conductor and artistic advisor. He has been principal guest conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony since 2004, and he was the first music director of the Santa Fe Opera, from 2003 to 2006.

Mr. Gilbert studied at Harvard University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School. From 1995 to 1997 he was the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. His recording of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite with the Chicago Symphony was nominated for a 2008 Grammy Award, and his recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic received top honors from the Chicago Tribune and Gramophone magazine. In May 2010 the Curtis Institute of Music awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Music degree.

Soloist

Richard Woodhams became principal oboe of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1977, succeeding John de Lancie, his distinguished teacher at the Curtis Institute. Mr. de Lancie was a pupil of Marcel Tabuteau, one of the most influential instrumentalists of the 20th century, who served as principal oboe of the Orchestra from 1915 until 1954.

Mr. Woodhams’s tenure has included solo appearances with The Philadelphia Orchestra in Philadelphia, as well as in New York, Boston, and other cities throughout the United States and Asia in collaboration with its four previous music directors. His recordings with the Orchestra include Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto with Wolfgang Sawallisch. Mr. Woodhams has given first performances with The Philadelphia Orchestra of solo works by J.S. Bach, Bellini, Haydn, Rochberg, Joan Tower, and Vaughan Williams. He has also given premieres of chamber works by William Bolcom, Chuck Holdeman, Thea Musgrave, Bernard Rands, Ned Rorem, Richard Wernick, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Mr. Woodhams has played solo works with such notable musicians as violinists Alexander Schneider and Itzhak Perlman, pianists Christoph Eschenbach and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and the Guarneri, Shanghai, and de Pasquale string quartets. He has also recorded Joan Tower’s Island Prelude with the Tokyo String Quartet.

Active as a teacher at the Curtis Institute and Temple University, Mr. Woodhams’s former pupils occupy prominent positions in orchestras both in the United States and abroad, including principal posts in the orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Pittsburgh. He is also a founding and current member of the World Orchestra for Peace, an internationally assembled orchestra founded by Sir Georg Solti in 1995, now led by Valery Gergiev.

Since 2000 Mr. Woodhams has taught and played annually at the Aspen Music Festival, where he performed Christopher Rouse’s Oboe Concerto in 2009 with David Robertson; he has also participated in the Marlboro and La Jolla music festivals, among others. He began his musical studies in his native Palo Alto, California, with Raymond Dusté and started his orchestral career with the Saint Louis Symphony under Walter Susskind at the age of 19.

The Music Oboe Concerto

Christopher Rouse Born in Baltimore, February 15, 1949 Now living there

During the early 1980s Christopher Rouse was considered one of the most promising young American composers of his generation. But while many others have been saddled (or cursed) with similar labels over the years, Rouse is among the few to have translated that potential into genuine success and widespread acclaim, becoming one of the most sought-after composers in America today. What has helped Rouse stand out from the others who also “showed promise?” Partly it is his exceptional familiarity with many varieties of music—from Bach and Bruckner to folk and hard rock—and partly his development of an eclectic, versatile, and distinctive style that can easily be adapted to different modes of musical expression.

Numerous Influences Rouse learned to play percussion at a young age. It proved not only to be a linking thread between the classical and pop music traditions that he enjoys in equal measure, but also influenced his later works, which often employ expanded percussion sections. Early in his career, Rouse favored sustained energetic and percussive works of unflagging intensity. He also freely acknowledged the influence of rock music in his work—Bonham for example, which Rouse composed in 1988 for eight percussionists, honors the memory of John Bonham, drummer of famed rock band Led Zeppelin. But Rouse’s scores then began to combine these propulsive, percussive allegros with elegiac movements of soulful yearning. At the same time his music blended tonal harmony and aggressive chromaticism (though even in its atonal passages, Rouse’s harmonies are never far away from tonality).

With the joint influences of the Western classical tradition and vernacular music (including folk music) still evident even in his mature works, Rouse has developed a unique style based on the synthesis of sometimes widely disparate elements. And in addition to quoting other musical styles, he frequently makes reference to specific works by other composers, partly as homage and partly as a thread in the fabric of this multilayered musical texture. This stylistic synthesis is demonstrated most tellingly in his two symphonies (a third is due to be premiered in May 2011), and in the series of concertos for bass (1985), trombone (1991), cello (1992), flute (1993), and clarinet (2000) that, along with the symphonies, are among his most lauded scores.

Rouse’s reputation hinges mainly on his orchestral compositions, with some significant chamber pieces and a highly regarded choral Requiem (from 2007) rounding out his major works. But the scale and complexity of his scores belie a rather idiosyncratic compositional process. Rather than working out musical ideas at the piano (an instrument he doesn’t play well) or in a sketchbook, he reportedly mulls them over and embellishes them in his head until, Mozart-like, they are ready to be written out complete, in full score, starting at the first measure.

Rouse has held faculty positions at some of the most respected music schools in the country—the University of Michigan, the Eastman School of Music, and the Juilliard School—and in 2002 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 he was named Musical America ’s “Composer of the Year.”

Rouse has composed more than 10 concertos to date, dividing them into two general categories based at least partly on the reputation, range, and timbre of each instrument. The “somber” concertos include those for lower-range instruments such as trombone and cello, while the “genial” concertos comprise, among others, the Guitar Concerto from 1999 and the Oboe Concerto, written in 2004 to a commission by the Minnesota Orchestra in celebration of its centennial season. (Rouse once reported that he used to call these more upbeat works his “recreational” concertos, but he then started referring to them as “genial” because he didn’t want to give the impression that writing them was easy.)

A Closer Look Rouse’s concertos tend toward the programmatic, but the Oboe Concerto is an exception. Instead, it attempts to exploit the oboe’s purely musical personalities as a melodic instrument capable of playing sustained lyrical lines, and as an agile and virtuosic instrument that can negotiate wide leaps and rapid passagework. Some notes on the oboe Rouse considers especially lovely, such as the A (to which the orchestra traditionally tunes), and his goal was to write a work that highlights the instrument’s strengths while providing plenty of opportunity for virtuosic display.

Cast in the traditional three-sectioned format (but played without a break), the Oboe Concerto has what the composer describes as “an overall feeling of coloristic romanticism.” It begins quietly (sereno), with a sustained five-note chord (built of stacked thirds) in the orchestral strings that generates much of the entire work’s melodic and harmonic content. The solo oboe enters with birdcall-like flourishes, set off by punctuating celesta decorations, before launching into a molto allegro that tests the soloist’s agility with rapid arpeggios and wide staccato leaps. Chamber-like episodes, in which the oboe pairs up with members of the percussion and woodwind families, alternate with larger orchestral tuttis throughout this opening section.

A short, cadenza-like passage, in which the oboist is accompanied by the chiming of celesta, harp, and clarinet, leads directly into the central slower section (senza misura). The free, unmeasured figures in this passage are in marked contrast to the energized and mercurial rhythms of the preceding section, and with expressive solo lines the soloist floats over sustained harmonies in the strings. The harp and celesta continue to provide atmospheric color throughout. Then, gradually and sporadically, the tempo quickens until loud repeated chords from the entire orchestra signal the start of the Concerto’s final section.

Triplet dance-like rhythms and rapidly repeated notes characterize the work’s finale, with the soloist sometimes joining in, and other times exploring angular melodic variations. But gradually the strings begin to sustain their harmonies, and the rhythmic energy starts to dissipate. Finally, the Concerto ends almost exactly as it began, with gentle harp and celesta accompaniments over the same string harmony heard at the opening.

—Luke Howard

Rouse composed his Oboe Concerto in 2004.

These are the first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of the work.

The composer scored the piece for piccolo (doubling alto flute), two flutes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, percussion (bass drum, Chinese cymbal, claves, glockenspiel, güiro, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, tambourine, temple block, tom-toms, wood block, xylophone), harp, celesta, strings, and solo oboe.

The Concerto runs approximately 20 minutes in performance.

Program note commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra Association; © 2011 Luke Howard. All rights reserved.

Season 2012-2013 The Philadelphia Orchestra

Friday, May 3, at 8:00 Saturday, May 4, at 8:00 Sunday, May 5, at 2:00

Yannick Nézet-Séguin Conductor

Mahler Symphony No. 1 in D major I. Langsam. Schleppend. Wie ein Naturlaut—Immer sehr gemächlich II. Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell—Trio: Recht gemächlich—Tempo primo III. Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen— IV. Stürmisch bewegt

The May 3 concert is sponsored by the Louis N. Cassett Foundation.

228 Story Title The Philadelphia Orchestra Jessica Griffin

Renowned for its distinctive Philadelphia is home and Carnegie Hall and the sound, beloved for its the Orchestra nurtures Kennedy Center while also keen ability to capture the an important relationship enjoying a three-week hearts and imaginations not only with patrons who residency in Saratoga of audiences, and admired support the main season Springs, N.Y., and a strong for an unrivaled legacy of at the Kimmel Center but partnership with the Bravo! “firsts” in music-making, also those who enjoy the Vail festival. The Philadelphia Orchestra Orchestra’s other area The ensemble maintains is one of the preeminent performances at the Mann an important Philadelphia orchestras in the world. Center, Penn’s Landing, tradition of presenting and other venues. The The Orchestra has educational programs for Philadelphia Orchestra cultivated an extraordinary students of all ages. Today Association also continues history of artistic leaders the Orchestra executes a to own the Academy of in its 112 seasons, myriad of education and Music, a National Historic including music directors community partnership Landmark. Fritz Scheel, Carl Pohlig, programs serving nearly Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Through concerts, 50,000 annually, including Ormandy, Riccardo Muti, tours, residencies, its Neighborhood Concert Wolfgang Sawallisch, and presentations, and Series, Sound All Around Christoph Eschenbach, and recordings, the Orchestra and Family Concerts, and Charles Dutoit, who served is a global ambassador eZseatU. as chief conductor from for Philadelphia and for In February 2013 the 2008 to 2012. With the the U.S. Having been the Orchestra announced a 2012-13 season, Yannick first American orchestra recording project with Nézet-Séguin becomes the to perform in China, in Deutsche Grammophon, eighth music director of 1973 at the request of in which Yannick and The Philadelphia Orchestra. President Nixon, today The the ensemble will record Named music director Philadelphia Orchestra Stravinsky’s The Rite of designate in 2010, Nézet- boasts a new partnership Spring. Séguin brings a vision that with the National Centre extends beyond symphonic for the Performing Arts For more information on music into the vivid world of in Beijing. The Orchestra The Philadelphia Orchestra, opera and choral music. annually performs at please visit www.philorch.org. 4 Music Director

Jessica Griffin Yannick Nézet-Séguin triumphantly opened his inaugural season as the eighth music director of The Philadelphia Orchestra in the fall of 2012. From the Orchestra’s home in Verizon Hall to the Carnegie Hall stage, his highly collaborative style, deeply-rooted musical curiosity, and boundless enthusiasm, paired with a fresh approach to orchestral programming, have been heralded by critics and audiences alike. The New York Times has called Yannick “phenomenal,” adding that under his baton, “the ensemble, famous for its glowing strings and homogenous richness, has never sounded better.”

Over the past decade, Yannick has established himself as a musical leader of the highest caliber and one of the most exciting talents of his generation. Since 2008 he has been music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic, and since 2000 artistic director and principal conductor of Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain. He has appeared with such revered ensembles as the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics; the Boston Symphony; the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; the Dresden Staatskapelle; the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; and the major Canadian orchestras. His talents extend beyond symphonic music into opera and choral music, leading acclaimed performances at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, London’s Royal Opera House, and the Salzburg Festival.

In February 2013, following the July 2012 announcement of a major long-term collaboration between Yannick and Deutsch Grammophon, the Orchestra announced a recording project with the label, in which Yannick and the Orchestra will record Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. His discography with the Rotterdam Philharmonic for BIS Records and EMI/Virgin includes an Edison Award-winning album of Ravel’s orchestral works. He has also recorded several award-winning albums with the Orchestre Métropolitain for ATMA Classique.

A native of Montreal, Yannick studied at that city’s Conservatory of Music and continued studies with renowned conductor Carlo Maria Giulini and with Joseph Flummerfelt at Westminster Choir College. In 2012 Yannick was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. His other honors include Canada’s National Arts Centre Award; a Royal Philharmonic Society Award; the Prix Denise-Pelletier, the highest distinction for the arts in Quebec; and an honorary doctorate by the University of Quebec in Montreal.

To read Yannick’s full bio, please visit www.philorch.org/conductor. 37 The Music Symphony No. 1

When Mozart wrote his First Symphony, at the tender age of eight, he was probably not much concerned with his place in music history. For the Romantics, however, the symphony was the proving ground of greatness. Expectations were intense, which led some composers, like Brahms and Bruckner, to delay for many years the public presentation of a symphony. Others tried to reinvent the genre, writing not a traditional Symphony No. 1, but rather a symphonic poem or some other kind of large orchestral work, often with an extramusical program based on Gustav Mahler literature, history, or nature. Born in Kalischt (Kališteˇ), Bohemia, July 7, 1860 Mahler began confronting this challenge in his 20s. Died in Vienna, There are what appear to be apocryphal stories of earlier May 18, 1911 “student” symphonies now lost or destroyed, and he tried his hand at chamber music, songs, a large cantata (Das Klagende Lied), theater music, and opera (a completion of Carl Maria von Weber’s Die Drei Pintos). Most of the First Symphony was composed during the spring of 1888; Mahler remarked that it “virtually gushed like a mountain stream.” By the time that piece was premiered in the final form we know it today, in Berlin in March 1896, Mahler was 35 years old and already a celebrated conductor. From Symphonic Poem to Symphony The Symphony went through various incarnations before reaching the four- movement version performed today. In November 1889 Mahler premiered a “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts” in Budapest, where he served at the time as director of the Royal Hungarian Opera. This five-movement composition was greeted with bewilderment and hostility. Mahler set about revising the work, now calling it Titan, “A Tone Poem in the Form of a Symphony.” (The title probably alludes to a once-famous novel by Jean Paul Richter.) Still in five movements split in two parts, each one now had a specific title. Mahler further provided some programmatic explanations, generally quite minimal except for the innovative fourth movement, a “funeral march” that had most puzzled the first listeners. The program for Mahler’s concert on October 27, 1893, in Hamburg announced the following: 38

“TITAN” A Tone Poem in the Form of a Symphony Part I. From the Days of Youth: Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-pieces 1. “Spring without End” (Introduction and Allegro comodo). The introduction presents the awakening of nature from a long winter’s sleep. 2. “Blumine” (Andante) 3. “Under Full Sail” (Scherzo). Part II. Commedia humana 4. “Stranded!” (A Funeral March “in the manner of Callot”). The following may serve as an explanation: The external stimulus for this piece of music came to the composer from the satirical picture, known to all Austrian children, “The Hunter’s Funeral Procession,” from an old book of children’s fairy tales: The beasts of the forest accompany the dead woodman’s coffin to the grave, with hares carrying a small banner, with a band of Bohemian musicians in front, and the procession escorted by music-making cats, toads, crows, etc., with stags, deer, foxes, and other four-legged and feathered creatures of the forest in comic postures. At this point the piece is conceived as the expression of a mood now ironically merry, now weirdly brooking, which is then suddenly followed by: 5. “Dall’ Inferno [al Paradiso]” (Allegro furioso) The sudden outburst of the despair of a deeply wounded heart. Mahler conducted this five-movement Titan two times, in Hamburg and in Weimar the following year. In 1896, however, he decided to drop the second movement, a lilting andante he had originally written as part of the incidental music to accompany Joseph Viktor von Scheffel’s poem Der Trompeter von Säkkingen (The Trumpeter from Säkkingen). He now called the work simply Symphony in D major. The “Blumine” movement was gone (it sometimes appears as a separate concert piece), as were the two-part format, the titles, and the other extramusical clues. By this time Mahler was increasingly moving away from wanting to divulge what was behind his works. The Viennese Response Opinion was divided in 1900 when Mahler conducted the First Symphony in Vienna’s Musikverein with the Vienna Philharmonic. Theodor Helm reported that the work “was truly a bone of contention for 39 the public as well as for the critics. This is not to say that the piece wasn’t superficially a success: A large majority of the audience applauded, and Mahler was repeatedly called out. But there were also startled faces all around, and some hissing was heard. When leaving the concert hall, on the stairs and in the coatroom, one couldn’t have heard more contradictory comments about the new work.” For many, apparently, the issue was Mahler’s suppression of all background information. Helm stated that Mahler was “not well served by this veil of mystery … it was cruel of the composer to deprive his unprepared Philharmonic audience of not only the program book but also any technical guide to this labyrinth of sound.” The most powerful critic of the day, Eduard Hanslick, champion of Brahms and absolute music, foe of Wagner and all things programmatic, called himself a “sincere admirer” of Mahler the conductor, the man who had accomplished such great feats with the Vienna Court Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra. Although Hanslick did not wish to rush to judgment about this “strange symphony,” he felt he had the responsibility to tell his readers that the work was for him that “kind of music that is not music.” He was placed in the awkward position of wanting to know more about what was behind the work: Mahler’s symphony would hardly have pleased us more with a program than without. But we cannot remain indifferent to knowing what an ingenious man like Mahler had in mind with each of these movements and how he would have explained the puzzling coherence. Thus we lack a guide to show the correct path in the darkness. What does it mean when a cataclysmic finale suddenly breaks forth, or when a funeral march on the old student canon “Frère Jacques” is interrupted by a section entitled “parody”? To be sure, the music itself would have neither gained nor lost anything with a program; still, the composer’s intentions would have become clearer and the work therefore more comprehensible. Without such aid, we had to be satisfied with some witty details and stunningly brilliant orchestral technique. Listeners like Hanslick were baffled by Mahler’s ingenious juxtapositions of irony and sublimity, of parody and exultation, as well as by his merging of the genres of song and symphony. One young critic, Max Graf, perceived that this was the start of something new in music history and believed that only a new “generation can feel the work’s great emotional rapture, pleasure in intensely colored 40

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 was sound, and ecstasy of passion; only they can enjoy its composed from 1885 to 1888. parody and distortion of sacred emotion. I myself am far The first Philadelphia Orchestra too close to this generation not to empathize with the performances of the First work as if it were my own. Yet I can almost understand Symphony were not until that an older generation finds it alien.” December 1946, with Dimitri A Closer Look Mahler marked the mysterious and Mitropoulos conducting. The extraordinary introduction to the first movement Wie ein most recent appearances of the work were those with Naturlaut—“Like a sound from nature.” The music seems Charles Dutoit in September to grow organically from the interval of a falling fourth. 2010. In between it has (As critics have long noted, this sound of a cuckoo is been led by such conductors “unnatural.” Mahler did not use the interval of the minor as Eugene Ormandy, Itsván third that Beethoven had in his “Pastoral” Symphony.) Kertész, Seiji Ozawa, Carlo The two notes are in fact the opening of the main theme, Maria Giulini, Yuri Temirkanov, derived from one of Mahler’s own songs, “Ging heut’ Michael Tilson Thomas, Klaus Morgens über’s Feld” (This morning I went out o’er the Tennstedt, Riccardo Muti, Erich fields), the second in his cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Leinsdorf, Rafael Frühbeck Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer). The scherzo movement de Burgos, Leonard Slatkin, (Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell) is a Ländler, Riccardo Chailly, and Christoph an Austrian folk-dance that was to become one of Eschenbach. Mahler’s favorites. Once again he uses an earlier song, The Symphony has been “Hans und Grethe,” to provide melodic material. recorded twice by the Philadelphians: in 1969 with The third movement (Feierlich und gemessen) is the Ormandy (which includes the one that Mahler felt most needed explanation. It opens with “Blumine” movement) for RCA, a solo double bass playing in a high register a minor-key and in 1984 with Muti for EMI. version of the popular song “Bruder Martin” (Brother Martin, better known in its French version as “Frère Jacques”). With The work is scored for four the air of a funeral march (as found in so many of Mahler’s flutes (II, III, and IV doubling piccolo), four oboes (III symphonies), it is first presented as a round but interrupted doubling English horn), three by what sounds like spirited dance music in a Bohemian clarinets (III doubling bass style such as Mahler had heard played in village squares clarinet and second E-flat while growing up in the Czech lands. Another contrast clarinet), E-flat clarinet, comes in the middle of the movement when Mahler three bassoons (III doubling uses the fourth Wayfarer song, “Die zwei blauen Augen” contrabassoon), seven horns, (The two blue eyes). The finale (Stürmisch bewegt) five trumpets, four trombones, moves from fiery defiance to reconciliation, from Hell to tuba, two timpanists, Paradise as the original title had it. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, percussion (bass drum, a confidant of Mahler’s, informed a Viennese critic that in cymbals, tam-tam, triangle), the end the hero of the work becomes the master of his harp, and strings. fate: “Only when he has triumphed over death, and when all The First Symphony runs the glorious memories of youth have returned with themes approximately one hour in from the first movement, does he get the upper hand: and performance. there is a great victorious chorale!” —Christopher H. Gibbs

Program notes © 2013. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.