TCHAIKOVSKY’S VIOLIN CONCERTO 2018-19 HAL & JEANETTE SEGERSTROM FAMILY FOUNDATION CLASSICAL SERIES Pacifi c Symphony Mozart OVERTURE TO DON GIOVANNI Rune Bergmann, conductor Philippe Quint, violin Tchaikovsky VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR Allegro moderato Canzonetta: Andante Finale: Allegro vivacissimo Philippe Quint Intermission Nielsen SYMPHONY NO. 4, “THE INEXTINGUISHABLE” Allegro Poco allegretto Poco adagio quasi andante Allegro Preview talk with Alan Chapman at 7:00 PM Thursday, November 15, 2018 @ 8:00 PM Friday, November 16, 2018 @ 8:00 PM Saturday, November 17, 2018 @ 8:00 PM Segerstrom Center for the Arts Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall Offi cial Hotel Offi cial TV Station Offi cial Classical Music Station This concert is being recorded for broadcast on Sunday, February 17, 2019, at 7 p.m. on Classical KUSC. 7 PROGRAM NOTES WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: introduced by slow, majestic chords that seized upon the idea of composing it after OVERTURE TO DON GIOVANNI give way to a more rapid and cheerful tempo. hearing others he liked, particularly the Mozart’s contemporaries heard the energetic, five-movement Symphonie The first music we hear Don Giovanni overture in an era when live espagnole (a concerto in spite of its title) in Mozart’s Don Giovanni performances were rarefied events and by Edouard Lalo. “For the first time in my is a terrifying spiral into recordings did not exist. That’s one reason life I have begun to work on a new piece the depths of D minor that why its sound carried an emotional wallop before finishing the one on hand,” he wrote portends the hellfire in store that Hollywood special effects can’t begin to to Madame von Meck. “I could not resist the for the opera’s protagonist, convey more than two centuries later. Here pleasure of sketching out the concerto ...” who will receive the punishment Dante is how the French composer Charles Gounod Composition proceeded swiftly, blessedly reserved for those who knowingly refuse described the sheer terror he felt upon first free of emotional encumbrance. to reject sin. “Abandon all hope, ye who hearing this music at age 13: “From the start He chose the great violinist Leopold Auer enter here,” Dante warns these willful of the overture I felt myself transported into as its dedicatee and to play the premiere, transgressors at the gates of his Inferno. In an absolutely new world by the solemn and and planned to convey the completed Michelangelo’s vision of The Last Judgment majestic chords of the Commandant’s final manuscript to the virtuoso via their mutual in the Sistine Chapel, one image of this scene, I was seized by a terror which froze student, Josif Kotek. Kotek has been the despair leaps out from among hundreds: me, and as the menacing progression began, subject of scholarly speculation, and we can the anguish visible in a face from behind one with the descending and ascending scales only imagine Tchaikovsky’s distress when clutching hand as a damned man confronts unrolling above it, merciless and implacable Kotek eventually refused the manuscript Dante’s terrible gateway. Yet Mozart follows as a death sentence, I was overcome by such outright. But having seen the work in horror with the joyful abundance of divine dread that I buried my face in my mother’s progress, Auer had expressed his misgivings creation in all its glory and humor, as the shoulder … enveloped in the twofold with harshness, pronouncing the concerto overture shifts gears into affirmative D major embrace of the beautiful and the terrible.” “unplayable,” a judgment that Kotek would and the tempo becomes sprightly. And that’s have been unwise to ignore. just in the first two minutes! Finding an alternate soloist for the Michelangelo did not name his primal concerto hardly lifted the cloud hanging over sinner, but painted him a century before it. Reviewing the premiere performance the Spanish monk Tirso de Molina invented PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: in Vienna on December 4, 1881, Eduard Don Giovanni’s progenitor, the treacherous VIOLIN CONCERTO IN Hanslick—the dean of the Viennese music Sevillan seducer Don Juan. Still later, in D MAJOR critics and one of the era’s most influential Don Giovanni, Mozart—who had traveled tastemakers—lambasted it as “music that extensively in Italy and loved its culture— Tchaikovsky began stinks to the ear,” one of the most infamous tipped his hat to these Renaissance composing his Violin phrases in the annals of mistaken criticism. masterpieces in one of his own. Mozart Concerto after his With hindsight it’s easy to dismiss such chose to call Don Giovanni a “dramma disastrous, self-deluded invective, but it tormented Tchaikovsky, who giocoso,” suggesting both the jocundity of decision to marry left reportedly re-read Hanslick’s review until he comedy and the seriousness of drama. him emotionally ravaged. had committed it to memory. In the opera’s overture we hear both His emotional conflicts Hanslick’s outburst is all the more the seriousness and the fun of the dramma seemed only to strengthen the merits of his shocking in light of the characteristically giocoso form. In shifting from its grave greatest opera, Eugene Onegin, which he singing melodies in which this concerto opening to a brisker, more lighthearted composed during the same period, and in abounds. Its first movement, an allegro pace, the overture seems to whisk us from correspondence with his patron Nadezhda moderato in D major, is all graceful lyricism— street level to a merrier, more detached von Meck, he seemed to take unalloyed seemingly an affectionate description of view—in the modern phrase, “at 30,000 pleasure in the prospect of composing the the scenic charms of Clarens, the Swiss feet.” Mozart’s overture to The Magic Flute violin concerto, though the reality proved resort town where it was composed. But is another example of an allegorical tale more problematic than the idea. He had its virtuosity and vigor seem to delineate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Born: 1756. Salzburg, Austria Born: 1840. Votkinsk, Russia Died: 1791. Vienna, Austria Died: 1893. St. Petersburg, Russia Overture to Don Giovanni Violin Concerto in D Major Composed: 1787 Composed: 1878 World premiere: Oct. 29, 1787, at the Prague Estates Theatre. World premiere: Dec. 4, 1881, in Vienna with Adolph Brodsky as soloist. Most recent Pacific Symphony performance: Feb. 24, 2013, with Most recent Pacific Symphony performance: Sept. 3, 2016, with Carl St.Clair conducting. Carl St.Clair conducting. Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets; timpani; strings four horns, two trumpets; timpani; strings, solo violin Estimated duration: 7 minutes Estimated duration: 33 minutes 8 NOVEMBER the existential questions that are always conductor Osmo Vanska; the scholar Daniel the layers of the emotional life that are passionately articulated in Tchaikovsky’s Grimley; and most of all, listeners who still half-chaotic and wholly elementary. major works. This emotional intensity have discovered this Danish composer’s In other words the opposite of all reaches a climax in the buildup to the first exhilarating music. They are tired of it being programme music, despite the fact that cadenza. The second movement, a serenely neglected or erroneously “lumped” with that this sounds like a programme. mournful andante cantabile, contrasts of the Finnish master Jean Sibelius, whose “The symphony is not something with markedly with the first; the violin’s entry is mellow, glowing scores contrast markedly a thought-content, except insofar as the melancholy, and it voices a singing lament with Nielsen’s dynamic sound. structuring of the various sections and that eventually gives way to a happier Though he is known as a 20th-century the ordering of the musical material are pastoral melody, like a song of spring. composer, Nielsen’s life straddled the turn of the fruit of deliberation by the composer Both moods shadow each other for the the century, and his compositions make the in the same way as when an engineer duration of the movement, as we alternate transition from their origins in Romanticism sets up dykes and sluices for the water between brighter and darker soundscapes. to the chromatic and occasionally dissonant during a flood. It is in a way a completely The concerto’s final movement follows the harmonies that came later. We hear all thoughtless expression of what make second without pause. It is extravagantly of these in his fourth symphony. One of the birds cry, the animals roar, bleat, marked allegro vivacissimo and returns his most admired works, it is an ardent run and fight, and humans moan, groan to the opening movement’s D major key, expression—almost a manifesto—of his exult and shout without any explanation. recapturing its exuberant energy. This belief in music itself. While many composers The symphony does not describe all this, movement also incorporates an energetic have written tributes to music, Nielsen but the basic emotion that lies beneath Russian dance (Hanslick’s reported “whiff praises it not merely as consolation (as in all this. Music can do just this, it is its of vodka”?) that leaps off the page as Schubert’s An die Musik), but as the divine most profound quality, its true domain the violinist’s bow dances along with it. force of life itself (as in Handel’s Ode for St. … because, by simply being itself, it has A nostalgic second theme provides an Cecilia’s Day). But where Handel’s cantata performed its task. emotional counterpoint to the movement’s is disciplined and orderly, Nielsen’s music “For it is life, whereas the other arts higher-energy passages, but it is finally makes the sparks fly.