Season 2012-2013

23 Season 2012-2013 Sunday, January 13, at 3:00 28th Season of Chamber The Philadelphia Orchestra Music Concerts—Perelman Theater Mozart Fantasia in C minor, K. 396, for solo piano Imogen Cooper Piano (Guest) Mozart Quintet in E-flat major, K. 452, for piano and winds I. Largo—Allegro moderato II. Larghetto III. Rondo: Allegretto Imogen Cooper Piano (Guest) Peter Smith Oboe Samuel Caviezel Clarinet Mark Gigliotti Bassoon Jennifer Montone Horn Intermission Mozart String Quintet No. 5 in D major, K. 593 I. Larghetto—Allegro II. Adagio III. Menuetto: Allegretto IV. Finale: Allegro Amy Oshiro-Morales Violin David Nicastro Violin Anna Marie Ahn Petersen Viola Renard Edwards Viola Hai-Ye Ni Cello This program runs approximately 1 hour, 40 minutes. 224 Story Title The Philadelphia Orchestra Jessica Griffin Renowned for its distinctive vivid world of opera and Orchestra boasts a new sound, beloved for its choral music. partnership with the keen ability to capture the National Centre for the Philadelphia is home and hearts and imaginations Performing Arts in Beijing. the Orchestra nurtures of audiences, and admired The Orchestra annually an important relationship for an unrivaled legacy of performs at Carnegie Hall not only with patrons who “firsts” in music-making, and the Kennedy Center support the main season The Philadelphia Orchestra while also enjoying a at the Kimmel Center for is one of the preeminent three-week residency in the Performing Arts but orchestras in the world. Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and also those who enjoy the a strong partnership with The Philadelphia Orchestra’s other area the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Orchestra has cultivated performances at the Mann Festival. an extraordinary history of Center, Penn’s Landing, artistic leaders in its 112 and other venues. The The ensemble maintains seasons, including music Philadelphia Orchestra an important Philadelphia directors Fritz Scheel, Carl Association also continues tradition of presenting Pohlig, Leopold Stokowski, to own the Academy of educational programs for Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Music—a National Historic students of all ages. Today Muti, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Landmark—as it has since the Orchestra executes a and Christoph Eschenbach, 1957. myriad of education and and Charles Dutoit, who community partnership Through concerts, served as chief conductor programs serving nearly tours, residencies, from 2008 to 2012. With 50,000 annually, including presentations, and the 2012-13 season, its Neighborhood Concert recordings, the Orchestra Yannick Nézet-Séguin Series, Sound All Around is a global ambassador becomes the eighth music and Family Concerts, and for Philadelphia and for director of The Philadelphia eZseatU. the United States. Having Orchestra. Named music been the first American For more information on director designate in 2010, orchestra to perform in The Philadelphia Orchestra, Nézet-Séguin brings a China, in 1973 at the please visit www.philorch.org. vision that extends beyond request of President Nixon, symphonic music into the today The Philadelphia 25 The Music Fantasia in C minor, K. 396, for solo piano Wolfgang Amadè Mozart The history of music is littered with great unfinished Born in Salzburg, projects. Among the most ambitious are operas, ranging January 27, 1756 from the barely begun (Verdi’s King Lear) to the nearly Died in Vienna, finished (Puccini’s Turandot and Berg’s Lulu), and December 5, 1791 symphonies. Schubert completed two glorious movements of his B-minor Symphony (the “Unfinished”), but sketched only part of a third movement and left nothing for a finale. Mahler was making headway on his Tenth Symphony during his final year, but beyond the opening movement most of the rest survives only in detailed sketches. Such pieces raise important aesthetic questions, as well as ethical ones. As with great incomplete works of literature and painting it would often be a significant artistic loss if they were unavailable to be heard, read, or seen. Music, which needs to be completed and performed in some manner in order to reach an audience, poses particular challenges. It seems an even greater loss if access to unfinished compositions were limited to notated sketches and drafts known only to musicologists in archives and never aurally realized in actual performance. But there is also the problem of honesty, responsibility, and acknowledgement when it comes to authorship and how an unfinished musical work makes it from the written page to the sounding performance. If one is disappointed hearing Mahler’s Tenth, is that Mahler’s fault or that of the eager musician who speculatively completed the score? In Mozart’s brief 35-year lifetime he wrote a superhuman quantity (not to mention quality) of music. It is not surprising that there were a good many false starts and abandoned pieces. The most famous are his two greatest sacred pieces: the Mass in C minor and the Requiem, his final composition that he was writing on his deathbed and that is now performed in versions finished by others. Mozart’s wife, Constanze, left a 29-year-old widow with children to support, sought various ways to makes ends meet after the composer’s death in December 1791. She got a pension from the Emperor, gave concerts, and actively promoted the publication of her husband’s music. She enlisted one of his acquaintances, the theologian and musician Abbé Maximilian Stadler (1748-1833), to 26 sort through the surviving manuscripts. Together with the Danish diplomat Georg Nissen (whom Constanze would later marry), Stadler prepared a catalogue of Mozart’s fragments that was included as an appendix to an important biography of the composer written by Nissen. Stadler also published a strong defense of the authenticity of the Requiem for which Constanze was most grateful—in a letter she salutes him as “My most esteemed and still more beloved friend.” Stadler first heard Mozart perform when the composer was eight and later accompanied him in some violin sonatas that were published in 1781. The next summer, just after marrying Constanze, Mozart began a sonata movement for piano and violin that breaks off after 28 measures. He put the work aside and never returned to it in his remaining nine years. A decade after his death Stadler finished the work, omitting the violin entirely (Mozart had barely written any of its part) and casting it as a fantasy for solo keyboard. The first part follows Mozart’s manuscript closely, which is the exposition of a sonata form movement up to the double bar; Stadler continued from there, writing the development and recapitulation. Despite the Classical sonata form structure, the piece clearly has an improvisational quality captured by Stadler’s title. The work was published in 1802 in Vienna as “Fantaisie pour le Clavecin ou Pianoforte, dédiée à Mad. Constanze Mozart.” —Christopher H. Gibbs 27 The Music Quintet in E-flat major, K. 452, for piano and winds Wolfgang Amadè Mozart After the 1784 premiere of Mozart’s Piano Quintet in E-flat, K. 452, the composer reported to his father that the piece had “received the most remarkable applause; I myself consider it to be the best work I have ever composed. It is written for one oboe, one clarinet, one horn, one bassoon, and the pianoforte. How I wish you could have heard it! And how beautifully it was performed! To tell the truth I was really worn out in the end after playing so much—and it is greatly to my credit that my listeners never got tired.” Mozart’s novel Quintet had managed to impress even himself, but he never wrote another work like it. It is virtually unique in Mozart’s oeuvre, and in the corpus of Western classical music in general. When Mozart composed his Piano Quintet during March of 1784, he was in the middle of one of the most intense periods of concerto composition he ever undertook. He completed six concertos that year, and two more in early 1785. In fact, in Köchel’s chronological catalogue of Mozart’s compositions, the Quintet is immediately preceded by three piano concertos—No. 14 in E-flat (K. 449), No. 15 in B-flat (K. 450), and No. 16 in D (K. 451)—and is followed by another concerto, No. 17 in G (K. 453). These five new compositions were completed in a single three-month span. It’s no surprise then that the Quintet, with its almost unique instrumentation, is in the concertante style—it is essentially a piano concerto without a string section. The concerto connection was emphasized when the Quintet was premiered alongside two of the new concertos at a Vienna concert on April 1, 1784. While this work is obviously an experiment, it set Mozart on the path of piano-based chamber composition. Apart from a single set of divertimentos for piano trio from 1776, he had written no mature keyboard-based chamber works before the Quintet. But within a handful of years after the Quintet he had produced two piano quartets and a further six piano trios. The Quintet stands at the head of Mozart’s keyboard- based chamber works, but it also brings to a culmination his wind ensemble pieces, which include the divertimentos and more especially the serenades (K. 361, 375, 388) 28 composed in the years immediately preceding the Quintet. Mozart wrote almost no wind ensemble music after 1784. The Quintet is therefore a pivotal work, one that admits wind instruments into the refined world of chamber music (some for the first time), but also one that redefines the role of the wind section in subsequent works. The writing for winds in the Quintet changed, for example, Mozart’s approach to future concertos, where the winds no longer merely doubled the strings but began to be used idiomatically.

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