F101317 Berkshire Sympony Concert Notes

Hsin-Yun Huang has forged a career as one of the leading violists of her generation, performing on international concert stages, commissioning and recording new works, and nurturing young musicians. Ms. Huang has been soloist with the Berlin Radio Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Taiwan Philharmonic, the Russian State Symphony, Zagreb Soloist International Contemporary Ensemble; and the London Sinfonia, among many others. She performs regularly at festivals, including Marlboro, Santa Fe, Rome Chamber Music Festival, and Spoleto USA. Other festivals include Moritzburg, Divonne, Cartagena, Prague Spring, Telluride, and Salt Bay, among many others. She tours extensively with the Brentano String Quartet, most notably including performances of the complete Mozart string Quintets at Carnegie Hall. Ms. Huang was the Artistic Director of the Sejong International Music Festival which took place at the Curtis Institute of Music from 2013-15. The 2014-2015 season will bring the debut of a series of three chamber concerts presented by the 92nd Street Y. Other recent highlights include complete Hindemith Viola Concerti with the Taiwan Philharmonic and Taipei City Symphony; concerto appearances in the Alice Tully Hall and Central Park of New York City. Ms. Huang has in recent years embarked on a series of major commissioning projects for solo viola and chamber ensemble. To date, these works include compositions from Steven Mackey (Groundswell), which premiered at the Aspen Festival. Shih-Hui Chen (Shu Shon Key) and Poul Ruders (Romances) Ms. Huang’s 2012 recording, titled “Viola Viola,” for Bridge Records, included those works along with compositions by Elliott Carter and George Benjamin; the CD has won particular accolades from Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. A native of Taiwan and an alumna of Young Concert Artists, Ms. Huang received degrees from The Juilliard School and The Curtis Institute of Music. She has given master classes at the Guildhall School in London, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University. She served on the jury of the 2011 Banff International String Quartet Competition as well as the 2015 Honen’s Piano Competition as a Collaborative Artist. Ms. Huang first came to international attention as the gold medalist and the youngest competitor in the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. In 1993 she was the top prize winner in the ARD International Competition in Munich, and was awarded the highly prestigious Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award. Ms. Huang was a member of the Borromeo String Quartet from 1994 to 2000. She is a founding member of the Variation String Trio with violinist Jennifer Koh and cellist Wilhelmina Smith. Ms. Huang now serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music. ~Program Notes~ Berkshire Symphony Orchestra October 13th, 2017 Claude Debussy (1862-1918) Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune Though the critics were divided in their response to Debussy's Prélude á I'Aprés-midi d’un faune following its premiere on December 22, 1894, by the Société Nationale de MusiQue in Paris under the direction of Swiss conductor Gustave Doret, the audience's reaction was uneQuivocal: the piece was encored. The occasion was Debussy's first great triumph, and the Faun remains, along with La Mer (1903-05), one of the composer's best-known and most popular works for orchestra. In fact, with his Prelude, Debussy established himself as a composer for orchestra not just with the membership of the Society: a repeat performance of the entire program was given the day after the premiere, with the Society's doors opened for the first time to the general public. There is evidence to suggest that Debussy's Prelude represents the end product of what was originally planned as a score of incidental music to accompany a reading, or perhaps even a dramatized staging, of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé's eclogue, L'Aprés- midi d’un faune. Debussy began his work in 1892 and completed the full score on October 23, 1894. During the period of composition, the work was announced in both Paris and Brussels as Prélude, Interludes et Paraphrase finale pour I'Aprés-midi d’un faune, but there is no evidence at present to suggest that anything but the Prelude ever came near finished form. Before the premiere, the conductor Doret spent hours going over the score with the composer; Debussy made changes until virtually the last moment, and it was reported that at the first performance, "the horns were appalling, and the rest of the orchestra were hardly much better. " But nothing about the performance seems to have diminished the work's success. Though the first printed edition of Mallarmé's poem dates from 1876, L'Aprés-midi d’un faune in fact went through various stages, being conceived originally as an Interméde héroïque. A draft from the summer of 1865, entitled Monogue du Faune, took the form of a theatrical scene for a narrator with actors performing in mime, and even as late as 1891 a list of Mallarmé's works characterized L'Aprés-midi d’un faune as being "for reading or for the stage." Mallarmé himself at various times described his conception as "definitely theatrical," as representing "not a work that may conceivably be given in the theater" but one that "demands the theater." With this in mind, it is not surprising that Debussy, who already knew Mallarmé Quite well by 1892 and was a close enough member of the poet's circle to be among those first notified of Mallarmé's death in 1898, would originally have thought to write a score of incidental music. And that the sense of the poetry might one day lend itself to musical expression was in fact foreshadowed by Mallarmé himself, who wrote of his early Intermede, "What is frightening is that all these impressions are reQuired to be woven together as in a symphony . ." Following Mallarmé's first hearing of the music, at Debussy's apartment, and on which occasion the composer played the score at the piano, the poet com- mented, "I didn't expect anything like this! This music prolongs the emotion of my poem, and sets its scene more vividly than color." The history of Mallarmé's poem is treated in considerable detail in Edward Lock- speiser's crucial biography, DeBussy: His Life and Mind. Lockspeiser points out that by the final version of Mallarmé's poem, which takes as its overt subject "a faun dreaming of the conQuest of nymphs," transitions between dream and reality had become more ambiguous, with imagery more subtle than the boldly erotic content of earlier stages. The poem plays not only with the distinctions between dream and reality, between sleep and waking awareness, but also with those between consciousness and unconsciousness, between desire and artistic vision. Indeed, in its more literal rendering of Mallarmé's subject matter and imagery, Vaslav Nijinsky's 1912 choreography to Debussy's score, first performed in Paris by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on May 29 that year with Nijinsky as the faun, scandalized audiences when it crossed the line between artistic allusion and masturbatory fantasy (aside from the fact that the stylized poses of the dancers were generally deemed inappropriate to the fluidity of the musical discourse). Debussy's orchestra here is not especially large. It should be noted, however, that while trumpets, trombones, and timpani are entirely absent, the wind section, with its third flute and English horn, is a source for particularly rich sonorities. In his History of Orchestration (1925), Adam Carse already highlighted what made Debussy's Prelude so innovative for its time, not just in its treatment of the orchestra, but also in its ap- proach to harmony and musical structure: "Such a word as tutti is hardly usable in connection with orchestration which, like Debussy's, speaks with a hushed voice in delicately varied and subtly blended tone-colours, and often with intentionally blurred outlines." Nowadays, when listeners may respond to the opening flute solo by sinking back into their seats with complacent familiarity, any fresh look at Debussy's score is obliged to reveal its boldly imagined instrumental hues as if it were a newly restored painting. Immediately following that opening melody, suggested by the indolent flute-playing of Mallarmé's faun, glissandos in the harp and distant, evocative horncalls conjure a dreamlike woodland atmosphere heightened by Debussy's avoidance of clear-cut harmonies: an atmosphere to which the colors of rustling strings, cascading wood- winds, blossoming outbursts from the full orchestra, and, near the magical close, antiQue cymbals, all prove themselves ideally suited. —Marc Mandel Béla Bartók (1881-1945) Concerto for Viola and Orchestra During the last years of his life, Bartók lived frugally in a tiny apartment on Manhattan’s upper West Side. But he was hardly alone or neglected, as romantically inclined commentators would have us believe. He had the companionship of his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, and he had work, i.e., commissions from some musical heavyweights. If he could also have had his health, Bartók might have lived to the see the acclaim his music would receive by the late 1950s, to say nothing of the near- worship it inspires today, when his name is linked with those of Stravinsky and Schoenberg as one of the three inviolable giants of modern music. Early in 1943, after some years in which the composer had every right to be depressed over the paucity of performances of his works, and the conseQuent lack of royalties, a turnaround began. 1943 saw the creation and successful premiere by the Boston Symphony of his Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky.

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