Season 2011-2012

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Saturday, June 23, at 8:00

Yannick Nézet-Séguin Conductor

Stokowski Celebration at the Academy of Music

Bach/orch. Stokowski Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565

Tchaikovsky from Suite from The Nutcracker, Op. 71a: III. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy VII. Dance of the Reed Flutes V. Arabian Dance VI. Chinese Dance IV. Russian Dance VIII. Waltz of the Flowers (with Fantasia)

Dukas The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (with Fantasia)

Intermission

Bernstein/orch. Ramin and Kostal Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Igor Stravinsky Suite from The Firebird (1919 version) I. Introduction—The Firebird and its Dance II. The Princesses’ Round Dance III. Infernal Dance of King Kastcheï— IV. Berceuse— V. Finale

Wagner “The Ride of the Valkyries,” from Die Walküre

This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Presentation licensed by Disney Music Publishing © Disney

Named one of “Tomorrow’s Conducting Icons” by Gramophone magazine, Yannick Nézet-Séguin has become one of today’s most sought-after conductors, widely praised for his musicianship, dedication, and charisma. A native of Montreal, he made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 2008 and in June 2010 was named the Orchestra’s next music director, beginning with the 2012-13 season. Artistic director and principal conductor of Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain since 2000, he became music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic in 2008.

In addition to concerts with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s 2011-12 season included his Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, debut; a tour of Germany with the Rotterdam Philharmonic; appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, and Netherlands Opera; and return visits to the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics and the Dresden Staatskapelle. Recent engagements have included the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Orchestre National de France; Vienna Philharmonic projects at the 2011 Salzburg, Montreux, and Lucerne festivals; and debut appearances at the Bavarian Radio Symphony and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s Rotterdam Philharmonic recordings for EMI/Virgin comprise an Edison Award-winning disc of works by Ravel, the Beethoven and Korngold violin concertos with Renaud Capuçon, and Fantasy: A Night at the Opera with flutist Emmanuel Pahud. Recent releases with BIS Records include Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Four Last Songs and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Death of Cleopatra. Mr. Nézet-Séguin has also recorded several award-winning albums with the Orchestre Métropolitain for ATMA Classique.

Mr. Nézet-Séguin studied piano, conducting, composition, and chamber music at Montreal’s Conservatory of Music and continued his studies with renowned conductors, most notably Carlo Maria Giulini. He also studied choral conducting with Joseph Flummerfelt at Westminster Choir College. Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s honors include a Royal Philharmonic Society Award, an Echo Award, the Virginia-Parker Award from the Canada Council, and the National Arts Centre Award. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Quebec in Montreal in 2011.

Symphony V.0

Stage Director James Alexander has had an extensive career in the performing arts, where among other things he founded a music theater company in his native Scotland, managed the Boston Pops on international tours, and directed both plays and musicals in London’s West End. Mr. Alexander has also been on the A&R team at the Decca Record Company, managed classical soloists and conductors, and produced television and staged operas on three continents with a large number of prestigious companies, orchestras, and conductors.

In Europe his productions and engagements range from staging Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to various productions with Scottish Opera, Opera North, the Gabrieli Consort & Players, and to the Olivier Award-winning production of Carmen Jones at London’s Old Vic Theatre. In the U.S. Mr. Alexander has been a long-time collaborator with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, where he helped create stagings of Strauss’s Elektra and Salome, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, Mozart’s Idomeneo, and the 50th Anniversary production of Britten’s Peter Grimes at Tanglewood. More recently he collaborated with conductor Roger Norrington on a highly-acclaimed production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for Cincinnati Opera.

Recently Mr. Alexander staged a Theater of a Concert presentation of John Adams’s opera A Flowering Tree for the Atlanta Symphony. This summer he will create a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Aspen Music Festival, for which he has written new dialogue in English. In early 2012 Mr. Alexander became artistic director for Symphony V.0, a production company he founded that is dedicated to realizing revolutionary technological presentations with symphony orchestras and opera companies.

Symphony V.0 is a collective of creative professionals who design rich interactive experiences for orchestras and opera companies across the world. Symphony V.0 uses the latest technology in light and video to create a hybrid of symphonic music and operatic staging to inspire a new generation of audiences.

James Alexander, Artistic Director Brian Pirkle, Director of Production Ryan Richards, Technical Director Jeff Sandstrom, Director of Creative Services Dorian Usherwood, Director, Business Development Jon H. Weir, Lighting Designer Brad Sitton, Content Developer

Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 (orch. Stokowski) Composed probably around 1708

Johann Sebastian Bach Born in Eisenach, March 21, 1685 Died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750

Born in London of a Polish father and an Irish mother, Leopold Anthony Stokowski (1882- 1977) would become one of the most original musicians of his generation. While still in his 20s, he emigrated to the United States to take up the post of organist at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, and in 1912 he accepted an offer from the relatively new Philadelphia Orchestra to become its conductor. For the next quarter century he brought the Orchestra to a level of unsurpassed excellence, establishing a tradition of virtuosity and brilliantine sonority that continues to this day. He was also a bit of a celebrity in his younger years, appearing in Hollywood movies, courting Greta Garbo and Gloria Vanderbilt, and presenting highly publicized world and U.S. premieres of works by Stravinsky, Berg, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Ives, and others.

Among his favorite activities during his tenure with the Philadelphians was to transform music he loved into lush, vibrantly colored orchestrations of his own. The sources of these “recompositions” range widely, from cantatas and organ works of J.S. Bach to operatic arias, from ancient plainchant to piano music of Chopin and Debussy. The approaches to orchestration are wide-ranging, too. In Debussy’s piano music, for example, he responds to that composer’s delicate coloristic palette to create richly transparent tone-pictures. For Bach’s organ music he was more inclined to create a thick, aggressive tone that at times sounds like a gigantic pipe organ.

Completed in late 1925, Stokowski’s rendering of J.S. Bach’s well-known D-minor Toccata and Fugue was first performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra in February 1926. Since then it has become the stuff of legends—as well as an important part of Disney’s 1940 animated feature Fantasia, which opens with a striking image of Stokowski conducting the work with the help of a well-known mouse.

It was a piece that Stokowski felt strongly about: “It is among the freest in form and expression of Bach’s works,” he wrote. “The Toccata probably began as an organ improvisation in the church of St. Thomas in Leipzig. In this lengthy, narrow, high church the thundering harmonies must have echoed long and tempestuously, for this music has a power and majesty that is cosmic. Of all the creations of Bach this is one of the most original. Its inspiration flows unendingly. Its spirit is universal … it will always be contemporary and have a direct message for all men.”

Stokowski’s chronology is a bit skewed (the piece apparently dates not from Bach’s Leipzig period, but from much earlier, probably before 1708), but he was correct in his analysis of the work’s power and drama. His transcription, which uses a gigantic orchestra, brings the drama of this piece decisively into the present age.

—Paul J. Horsley

Suite from The Nutcracker, Op. 71a Composed from 1891 to 1892

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Born in Kamsko-Vodkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840 Died in St. Petersburg, November 6, 1893

Tchaikovsky’s last years were marked by melancholy and joy—by growing emotional depression and by great artistic successes. With five of the numbered symphonies under his belt, and with splendid operas and ballets such as Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty bringing him growing public acceptance, he could only feel satisfaction at the progress of his life as an artist—despite the turmoil and frustrations of his inner life. Indeed, one can’t help hearing a certain exhilaration in the music of The Nutcracker, which Tchaikovsky composed between February 1891 and April 1892. The miracle of these last years, in fact, is that the same person who expressed such ebullient lebensfreude in this ballet score could compose, just a few months later, the torridly tragic strains of the Sixth Symphony, full of the most painful premonitions of death. The composer would die in late 1893, less than a year after the Nutcracker first appeared on the stage, and just a few weeks after completing the Symphony.

Reception of the two-act ballet was tepid at its St. Petersburg premiere in December 1892. But The Nutcracker would take on a life of its own, primarily through the 20-minute suite that the composer had cobbled together in February 1892; it would become his most familiar and frequently performed score. Subsequently conductors and others have created their own sets of excerpts.

The Nutcracker is based on the story Nussknacker und Mausekönig by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the great Romantic writer whose work inspired composers as diverse as Offenbach and Robert Schumann—and classics of the dance such as Coppélia. The scenario tells the tale of the young girl Clara and the nutcracker she receives for Christmas, which comes to life as a handsome prince and spirits her away to a snowy place she quickly realizes is every child’s dream—a Kingdom of Sweets. Most of the individual movements that are traditionally excerpted for concert use are drawn from the ballet’s second act, in which courtiers of the Kingdom of Sweets entertain young Clara with a variety of exotic delights.

—Paul J. Horsley

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Composed in 1897

Paul Dukas Born in Paris, October 1, 1865 Died there, May 17, 1935

When hearing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Philadelphia Orchestra audiences may think first of Disney’s Fantasia, for which their Orchestra provided the soundtrack (for every number except Dukas’s famous work). But the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice came to life long before the music and in fact has high-flown literary origins.

The legend on which this musical piece is based crops up as early as the second century. The Classical writer Lucian relates the story of a lazy apprentice who tries to charm a broom into doing his work for him. (In the original myth the magic stick is actually a “pestle” or large club; it was Disney’s cartoonists who devised the piquantly whimsical image of broomsticks with arms and legs.) When the boy orders the rapidly multiplying brooms to carry water for him, he finds that his knowledge of wizardry does not extend far enough to permit him to “turn off” the spell. As most of us know, the Sorcerer returns to find that the enchanted broomsticks have flooded the house.

Many serious readers will know this story through Goethe’s telling of it, in his 1797 poem Der Zauberlehrling. But American audiences are probably most familiar with the version in Disney’s 1940 film. The Parisian composer Paul Dukas doubtless knew Lucian’s tale, but he based his 1897 programmatic tone poem on Goethe’s telling.

Although he was a prolific composer of cantatas, symphonies, ballet scores, and several operas, Dukas was forced to come to terms with the fact that—even during his lifetime—the latter part of his career was shaped largely by the popularity of one 10-minute piece. And for over a century now The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has maintained its position as one of the most popular works in the orchestral repertory.

Dukas called the piece The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Symphonic Scherzo after a Ballad of Goethe. And it is indeed a classical scherzo, complete with the humor and rhythmic spice typical of the genre, combined with spiky, racing excitement and bright orchestral colors. Completed only days before its premiere in Paris in May 1897, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was an immediate success. Half a century later, the inspired retelling by Disney’s artists would soon become a part of America’s national “pop” mythology.

—Paul J. Horsley

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (orch. Ramin & Kostal) Composed in 1957, arranged in 1961

Leonard Bernstein Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, August 25, 1918 Died in New York City, October 14, 1990

“Street brawls, double death—it all fits.” Thus the 30-year-old Leonard Bernstein had first mused over the idea of making Shakespeare’s classic into a Broadway musical. During the mid-1950s, when he and his collaborator, Arthur Laurents, began sketching out the piece that would become one of the most successful musicals of all time, the issue of juvenile crime was reaching epidemic proportions in America. And it was in this setting that Bernstein found the ideal backdrop for his love story—a musical that succeeded not just because of its wonderful songs, but because it dealt in a subject matter that yearned toward universality.

“The chief problem,” wrote the composer, “is to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and ‘just dancing,’ abstract and representational … [to tell] a tragic story in musical-comedy terms.” West Side Story, which received its premiere in August 1957 in Washington’s National Theater, tread that line as effectively as any musical has. It was an enormous hit then, and it has remained a model for composers of musical theater for the entire 40 years since. “I am now convinced,” wrote the composer later, “that what we dreamed all these years is possible; because there stands that tragic love story, with a theme as profound as love versus hate.”

A sense of impending doom is palpable throughout West Side Story, as it is in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—but it doesn’t prevent the principals from singing and dancing as if their lives depended on it. A great many arrangements of this music, for a variety of instrumental combinations, have been produced over the years; the best of these is the 20-minute collection of Symphonic Dances arranged by the composer with his friends Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had worked with Bernstein in orchestrating the original West Side Story.

The Prologue, depicting the rivalry between the two gangs, the “Jets” and the “Sharks,” contains the famous “finger-snapping”—to be executed by “as many members of the orchestra as possible,” as Bernstein writes in the score. Its climax segues directly into Somewhere, the visionary scene in which the gangs momentarily unite in friendship, breaking out of the city’s grimy confines (in the Scherzo) to find themselves in a dreamlike world where there is no hatred. The Mambo returns the listener to the gangs and their grudges.

In the Cha-Cha and the Meeting Scene the doomed lovers meet for the first time, dance together (amidst general disapproval), and speak for the first time (the “Maria” tune is heard here). The “Cool” Fugue finds the Jets in a conciliatory mood, “stylizing” their aggression with a strutting dance-complex. Rumble depicts the final gang war, in which the two leaders die. The “Somewhere” melody returns for the Finale, as if to say, there is a place for our “forbidden” love, somewhere—but not here, not now.

—Paul J. Horsley

Suite from The Firebird (1919 version) Composed from 1909 to 1910

Igor Stravinsky Born in Lomonosov, Russia, June 17, 1882 Died in New York City, April 6, 1971

Stravinsky left Russia as a very young man, settling first in Paris and then the United States and finally becoming for all practical purposes a citizen of the world. Yet something of the spirit and character of his native Russia remained with him throughout his long and fruitful life. This spirit, consisting partly of a deep knowledge of Russian folklore, and partly of a large repertoire of folk tunes of which he made liberal use in his scores, grew from his own adventurous nature.

Young Stravinsky’s veneration of Russian folklore was manifested early on, in the loving care with which he set to music the fairy-tale of the Firebird in 1909. Written on commission from the great dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the ballet Firebird was composed for the first Parisian season of the exiled Ballets Russes. Its enormous success at the Paris Opéra premiere in June 1910 not only established Diaghilev as the leader of Paris’ avant-garde, it proclaimed Stravinsky as the most promising of Europe’s young generation of composers. Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, both also composed for Diaghilev, followed in rapid succession. Igor Stravinsky, aged 27, had “arrived.”

The tale of the Firebird is simple, even elemental. An enchanted bird guides Crown Prince Ivan, who is lost in the woods, to the castle of Kastcheï the Deathless. The evil Kastcheï, who holds 13 princesses captive, would ordinarily turn Ivan to stone, as he has all the other knights who have attempted to free the princesses. But Ivan is more valiant; and he has a magic bird on his side, too, which helps a great deal. Aided by the Firebird, the prince slays Kastcheï and his band; the magic castle vanishes with a “poof,” all the knights come back to life to comfort the freed princesses, and Ivan makes away with the most beautiful princess, of course, who becomes his bride as the dark woods fill with light and all dance to the familiar finale-music.

After the ballet’s premiere, Stravinsky prepared a five-movement concert suite from Firebird; in 1919 he revised this suite, omitting two movements and adding the “Berceuse” and Finale. The concise form and lavish orchestration of the 1919 suite have made it the favorite of concert performances.

—Paul J. Horsley

“The Ride of the Valkyries,” from Die Walküre Composed in 1856

Richard Wagner Born in Leipzig, May 22, 1813 Died in Venice, February 13, 1883

What is a valkyrie, anyway? It all starts with Wotan, the egotistical yet somehow lovable Zeus figure of Norse mythology. In the version of this myth that Wagner plotted out for his 16-hour Ring of the Nibelungen during the 1850s, Wotan is a partial instrument to the theft of an accursed ring (the same magic ring that would later pique J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination). Wotan’s crime will bring evil to the gods until the ring is returned to the waters of the Rhine; but in order to achieve this, he has been compelled to spawn a race of half-mortals, who might become the agents of the action barred of the gods (who are not supposed to meddle in earthly affairs, though of course they do).

Since Wotan’s relationship with his wife, Fricka, is pretty rocky anyway, he has actually rather enjoyed fathering a large number of illegitimate children, including nine daughters conceived by the “earth-goddess” Erda. These nine are the valkyries, amazon-like women (not really mortals, but not quite goddesses either) who swoop about on steeds and perform heroic deeds. The single valkyrie of the opera’s title is Wotan’s favorite of the nine, Brünnhilde—she of the much-maligned horned helmet.

Perhaps that’s already more than you need to know in order to hear the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Act III of Die Walküre (composed in 1856), which is the second of the four Ring operas, takes place on the summit of a rocky mountain. The thrilling music of the “Ride” serves as accompaniment to the appearance on horseback of eight of the nine of Wotan’s valkyrie-daughters, whose function in life is to rescue dead heroes from the battlefields and then spirit them away to a sort of hero’s eternal life at Valhalla. Brünnhilde finally appears, but instead of bearing a dead hero she has Sieglinde, who is pregnant with Siegfried, the boy who becomes the agent for the ring to be returned … but it’s a long story.

The point is that the “Ride” comes at a pivotal moment in the action of Walküre, when Wotan realizes Brünnhilde has disobeyed him by trying to save Siegmund (Siegfried’s father)—whom he had already preordained to die. Brünnhilde’s punishment for disobedience is crucial, because it is Siegfried who later rescues her from Wotan’s ring of flame, at which point they fall in love and he reforges the sword … Oh, never mind. In any case, the “Ride” makes a breathless, gripping concert-piece.

—Paul J. Horsley