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 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; 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 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. In the wake of that success, several violinists – most notably, Yehudi Menuhin – suddenly “discovered” and began to play Bartók’s theretofore-neglected Second Violin Concerto (written in 1938), which was enthusiastically received throughout the U.S. and in Britain. Although leukemia was diagnosed late in ’43, his outward appearance at the time indicated the Bartókian equivalent of robust health and he was able to write to a friend, “for the next three years, a modest living is secured for us [from royalties]”. His medical bills, which were substantial even before the onset of leukemia, were being paid by ASCAP. After the Concerto for Orchestra, he tackled commissions from Menuhin for a solo violin sonata and from William Primrose for a viola concerto. The knowledge by the music world at large that artists of such distinction as Koussevitzky, Menuhin, and Primrose were championing the composer made his stock, and spirits, rise – although happiness, like health, was always relative for this reserved, basically morose man. He did complete the sonata for Menuhin and write his Third Piano Concerto (as a legacy for his wife), the latter lacking all but the final 17 measures, which were supplied by his friend and musical executor, Tibor Serly (1901-1978). Serly would subsequently prepare for performance and publication the far more fragmentary Viola Concerto. On September 8, 1945, less than three weeks before his death, Bartók wrote to Primrose: “I am very glad to be able to tell you that your viola concerto is ready in draft, so that only the score has to be written, which means a purely mechanical work... If nothing happens, I can be through in 5 or 6 weeks, that is, I can send you a copy of the orchestra score in the second half of October... This work will be rather transparent, more transparent than in a violin concerto. Also, the somber, more masculine character of your instrument executed [exerted?] some influence on the general character of the work. The highest note is ‘A,’ but I exploit rather frequently the lower registers. It is conceived in a rather virtuoso style. Most probably some passages will prove to be uncomfortable or unplayable. These we will discuss later according to your observations.” There was, of course, no “later.” The composer must have had a good deal more of the Concerto in his mind than he had committed to paper. The “draft” that Bartók left turned out to be 15 unnumbered manuscript pages, undecipherable to all but those most familiar with his methods, and hardly easy even for them, as Serly quickly discovered. Serly next had to fill out harmonies and, finally, to orchestrate the whole, which, he noted, “presented the least difficulty, for the leading voices and contrapuntal lines upon which the background is composed were clearly indicated in the manuscript.” What Bartók referred to as “a purely mechanical work,” which it would have been for him, required over two years for another man to execute. In December of 1949, the Viola Concerto was performed for the first time. Primrose was the soloist and Bartók’s onetime pupil, Antal Doráti, conducted the Minneapolis Symphony. The following is excerpted from Serly’s analysis of the Concerto:

“[It] starts with the solo viola accompanied by light rhythmic beats. The solo’s -like acceleration discloses the first thirteen bars to be an introduction, after which the theme proper starts... [The second subject, is a] “fantastically chromatic and contrapuntal theme, without parallel in any of Bartók’s other music. Scales rise, fall and intertwine. Yet... the actual effect is one of restful calm.”

“A brief interlude, Lento parlando, precedes the second movement... bringing to mind a cantor’s improvisation... A motive from the solo bassoon connects it to the second movement proper. The expressive simplicity of this music is [determined] by the A-B-A ternary song form... Bartók has succeeded [here] in exploiting all the registers of the viola... Toward the end, the motive of the first movement’s theme is again heard, accelerating into a cadenza that leads without pause into an allegretto introduction to the third movement.

“In contrast to what has preceded, the finale is a gay dance, in rondo form... more Rumanian than Hungarian in character. The solo viola moves at a breathless pace, becoming slightly slower with the folklike tune of the trio... From here on, ascending and descending chromatic scale formations recall a similar use of chromatics in the second theme of the first movement. A four-bar fortissimo tutti, followed by an upward scale passage for the viola... brings the [Concerto] to a breathtaking end.”

— Herbert Glass

Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Symphony No. 6, Opus 74 “Pathetique”

Nikolai Grigorievich Rubinstein, who Tchaikovsky hoped would be the first to play his B-flat minor piano concerto and who did actually conduct the premiere of his first four symphonies, of Eugene Onegin, and of a whole run of shorter works including Romeo and Juliet, Marche slave, Francesca da Rimini, the Suite No. 1, Capriccio italien, and the Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, was born in Moscow in 1835, trained in law as well as in music, and was director of the Moscow Conservatory from its founding in 1866 until his death in 1881. He was younger brother to Tchaikovsky's teacher, the famous Anton Rubinstein, generally not quite so highly esteemed a- a pianist, but considered the better conductor and teacher of the two. The list of Tchaikovsky premieres he led between 1866 and 1880 tells its own story of the close- ness of the two men, but their encounter over the B-flat minor piano concerto was a disaster, Tchaikovsky having gone to Rubinstein for advice ("he was not only the best pianist in Moscow but also a first-rate all-round musician," wrote Tchaikovsky) only to be told that his work was "worthless and unplayable. . .beyond rescue. . .bad, vulgar...," leaving the composer astonished and outraged. A few years later, Tchaikovsky had a similar collision with Leopold Auer over the Violin Concerto. The two stories, moreover, had parallel happy endings. As Auer and pupils of his like Heifetz, Elman, Milstein, and Zimbalist eventually became particularly associated with the Violin Concerto, so did Rubinstein become an ardent champion of the Piano Concerto, and his pupils Sergey Taneyev, Alexander Siloti, and Emil von Sauer constituted with Hans von Bülow, Vassily Sapelnikov, and Adele aus der Ohe the first generation of who established it as indispensable. The premiere took place far from home, in Boston's Music Hall, now the Orpheum Theatre on Washington Street. Hans Guido von Bülow, ten years older than Tchaikovsky, had a distinguished double career as pianist and conductor. He had been particularly associated with the Wagnerian movement, had led the premieres of Tristan and Meistersinger, and would later become an important interpreter of Brahms and give the young Richard Strauss his first lift up the career ladder. Von Bulow's young wife Cosima, daughter of , had by degrees left him for Wagner during the second half of the '60s, and, much embittered, he retired from the concert stage for some years. He resumed his career in 1872 and in March 1874 gave a recital at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Tchaikovsky was stirred by the combination of intellect and passion in von Bulow's playing; von Bülow, in turn, liked Tchaikovsky's music. Soon after, he took the opportunity of smuggling a good word for Tchaikovsky into an article on Glinka's A Life for the Tsar:

At the present moment we know but one other who, like Glinka, strives and aspires, and whose works—although they have not yet attained to full maturity—give complete assurance that such maturity will not fail to come. I refer to the young professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory— Tchaikovsky. A beautiful string quartet of his has won its way in several German cities. Many other works by him merit equal recognition—his piano compositions, two symphonies, and an uncommonly interesting Romeo and Juliet Overture, which commends itself by its originality and its luxuriant melodic flow. Thanks to his many-sidedness, this composer will not run the danger of being neglected abroad as Glinka was.

Von Bülow was happy to accept the dedication in Rubinstein's stead and made arrangements to introduce the "Grand Concerto (Op. 23) in B-flat," as the program had it. at the fifth of a series of concerts in Boston. The audience was informed that:

the above grand composition of Tschaikowsky, the most eminent Russian maestro of the present day, completed last April and dedicated by its author to Hans von Bülow, has NEVER BEEN PERFORMED, the composer himself never having enjoyed an audition of his masterpiece. To Boston is reserved the honor of its initial representation and the opportunity to impress the first verdict on a work of surpassing musical interest.

Von Bülow sent the composer a telegram announcing the triumphant reception of the concerto, and Tchaikovsky spent most of his available cash, of which just then he had very little, on a return message. Von Bülow consolidated his success by repeating the concerto at his matinee five days later and upon his return to Europe introduced it as speedily as possible in London and at other musical centers. The Boston concert was a strenuous one for von Bülow, who also played the Moonlight Sonata and Liszt's version with orchestra of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy. (There were also overtures by Spohr and Beethoven, and Mendelssohn's Wedding March to finish up with.) And one does wonder what it all sounded like with B.J. Lang's orchestra with its four first violins! The music needs no explication. Listeners of sufficient antiquity will remember that the theme of the introduction flourished in the early '40s as a pop song; the title was "Tonight we love," and the meter was stretched on the rack from three beats in the measure to four. Tchaikovsky himself had borrowed two of the concerto's other melodies: the hopping theme that starts the Allegro is a song traditionally sung by blind beggars in Little Russia, while the scherzo-like interlude in the middle of the second movement is a song, "Il fau s'amuser, danser et rire,” from the repertoire of Desiree Artot, a superb Belgian soprano whom Tchaikovsky courted briefly in the winter of 1868-69.

—Michael Steinberg