THE ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Zubin Mehta Music Director
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UMS PRESENTS THE ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Zubin Mehta Music Director Saturday Evening, March 15, 2014 at 8:45 Hill Auditorium • Ann Arbor 59th Performance of the 135th Annual Season 135th Annual Choral Union Series Photo: Zubin Mehta; photographer: Oded Antman. 9 UMS PROGRAM Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 8 in c minor Allegro moderato Scherzo: Allegro moderato Adagio: Feierlich langsam, doch nicht schleppend Finale: Feierlich, nicht schnell WINTER 2014 This evening’s performance is supported by Gil Omenn and Martha Darling. Funded in part by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts. Media partnership provided by WGTE 91.3 FM and Detroit Jewish News. Special thanks to Daniel Herwitz, Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of Comparative Literature, History of Art, Philosophy, and Art & Design at the University of Michigan, for speaking at this evening’s Prelude Dinner. Special thanks to Tom Thompson of Tom Thompson Flowers, Ann Arbor, for his generous contribution of lobby floral art for this evening’s concert. Special thanks to Kipp Cortez for coordinating the pre-concert music on the Charles Baird Carillon. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra gratefully acknowledges Milton and Tamar Maltz for their generous underwriting of the Orchestra’s United States touring program, and American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra as the principal underwriter of this tour. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra appears by arrangement with Opus 3 Artists, New York, NY. ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA 10 BE PRESENT NOW THAT YOU’RE IN YOUR SEAT… With the sole exception of Richard Wagner, no 19th-century composer remains as controversial today as Anton Bruckner. The monumental proportions of his symphonies can still cause bewilderment, and the unique way he mixed an advanced Romantic idiom with a sacred mysticism rooted in the past still gives discomfort to some critics — if only because these features make the composer so hard to “place.” Yet what matters, ultimately, is not so much to “place” Bruckner as to accept him for who he was: a maverick who went where no one else dared to tread, who in his symphonies expressed intense religious feelings without recourse to the liturgical word, and who carried out radical musical innovations with an essentially conservative mindset. The composer himself called his Eighth Symphony a “mystery,” and the work may never lose that special aura. With every hearing, we penetrate the “mystery” ever more deeply as we re-encounter the last symphony Bruckner ever completed. Those who may be new to the mystery are in for a momentous discovery. Symphony No. 8 in c minor hear an almost inaudibly soft tremolo in (1884- 87, revised 1889–90 by Leopold Nowak) the strings. Very gradually and with some Anton Bruckner hesitation, a theme emerges from this Born September 4, 1824 in Ansfelden, Austria background. The mood is awe-inspiring WINTER 2014 Died October 11, 1896 in Vienna and festive. The slow pace at which the music unfolds is a clear indication that UMS premiere: Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 time has to be measured in unusually long has never been performed on a UMS concert. units. We are listening to a symphony by Anton Bruckner. SNAPSHOTS OF HISTORY…IN 1884–1892: In order to enjoy Bruckner, we must be • Notable political events: Africa is divided among European colonial powers at the Berlin conference able to place ourselves on his wavelength, (1884); Rudolf, the Crown Prince of Austria, commits and accept him for the maverick composer suicide at Mayerling (1889); Wounded Knee he was. He is often accused of having massacre in South Dakota (1890) • Notable musical premieres: Johannes Brahms, written the same symphony nine times Symphony No. 4 (1885); Giuseppe Verdi, Otello over, and this is a grossly unfair judgment, (1887); Piotr Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker (1892) or at least an extremely superficial one. • Notable literary works: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus However, it cannot be denied that there Spoke Zarathustra (1889); Oscar Wilde, The Picture is a single idea underlying all the mature of Dorian Gray (1891) symphonies, although it is expressed • Notable works of visual art: Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (1885); Georges Seurat, Sunday differently in each case. Each symphony is Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886); a new solution to the same compositional Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais (1889) problem, a new manifestation of the same • Notable events in science and technology: Louis Pasteur introduces the rabies vaccine (1885); Karl fascinating personality. Benz patents the first automobile (1886); the Eiffel To understand that personality, Tower is erected in Paris (1889) commentators have time and again drawn attention to the many peculiarities The lights are dimmed, the conductor in Bruckner’s biography: his seemingly steps on the podium, raises his baton after endless years of study, his awkward a moment of suspenseful silence, and we country-bumpkin demeanor which 11 UMS became the butt of so many jokes in term whose connotations include cosmopolitan Vienna, and his devout intensification, gradual increase in pitch, Catholicism. It follows from these personal dynamics, harmonic activity, and/or characteristics that symphony-writing tempo. Bruckner’s themes are simple and did not mean the same thing to Bruckner relatively unremarkable in themselves: as it did to Brahms (his great rival) or short scales and other melodic fragments any of his contemporaries. To Bruckner, that usually don’t add up to full-fledged composition was nothing less than a re- Classical periodic structures. Yet they are enactment of the Divine Creation. He did particularly susceptible to treatment by not waste his time on “trifles” like songs Steigerung, as in the first movement of or short piano pieces. Almost all of his the Eighth, where the music goes from compositions are large-scale symphonies pianissimo to fortissimo so gradually or sacred works, grandiose and solemn in that the change is almost imperceptible. tone, and symbolically reaching out to the The same technique is also used in the Deity. opposite direction, so that our first Nowhere is this artistic intent more impression of the movement’s form apparent than in the Eighth, the last is a series of mighty surges alternating symphony Bruckner ever completed. with moments of relaxation, a kind of As Robert Simpson, one of the best musical ebb and flow on a monumental authorities on Bruckner, has written: scale. That is just the first impression, however; the movement in fact observes The sweeping dramatic force of the Eighth traditional sonata form, with exposition, is almost new in Bruckner. No whole work development, and recapitulation, anticipates its character, not even the although it is hard to say exactly where Third, the most dramatically inclined of the recapitulation begins. That moment WINTER 2014 the earlier symphonies. The Fifth has an is concealed behind one of Bruckner’s immense inner tension resembling that most dramatic transitions, in the course of Gothic architecture, and is dramatic as a totality rather than as a process; of which he presents both main themes there is nothing in it that quite suggests of the movement simultaneously in triple the dark sense of crisis that fills the first forte, and then repeats this statement movement of No. 8. The Eighth is the first two more times, each time raising the full upshot of matters hitherto hidden in pitch by a third. What a contrast, after undercurrents and only intermittently this tremendous climax, to hear a single allowed to erupt. But it eventually reveals flute accompanied by a soft timpani roll. its true background in the “Finale,” the The rest of the orchestra gradually joins background, in a sense, of Bruckner’s life- in, and when we finally hear the second work, a contemplative magnificence of theme played by the strings, we realize mind beyond the battle. This Finale is not that we have been in the recapitulation so much a victory over tribulation as a state that had to be found behind it, slowly for some time. But in this reprise nothing and somewhat painfully uncovered by the is repeated literally. The exposition is only “Adagio.” hinted at (and strongly abridged), rather than brought back unchanged. The slow uncovering of hidden The ending of the first movement magnificence starts right at the very was completely rewritten in 1890. beginning. Bruckner was nothing if Originally there was a powerful fortissimo coda, which Bruckner discarded, and ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA not a master of Steigerung, a German 12 BE PRESENT wrote a new ending in which the main Even though the “Michel” theme theme fades away — the only time consists of only a few notes, Bruckner Bruckner ended a first movement softly. avoids monotony by employing an The composer described this ending to extremely varied instrumentation. While his pupil and biographer August Göllerich Bruckner is universally recognized as as the “Totenuhr” (“the clock of death”): an architect of musical structures of “It is as when one lies dying and opposite unprecedented complexity, he is not often hangs a clock that goes to the end while acknowledged as the great orchestral he is alive — always ticking regularly: tick, colorist that he was. In my opinion, tock, tick, tock.” This was almost certainly the effect of this movement depends an after-the-fact description and was primarily on the orchestration, especially not necessarily on Bruckner’s mind at the contrast between lyrical woodwind the time of composition; yet it illustrates passages and powerful tutti moments. the extraordinary evocative power of the In the latter, the use of the eight horns music. and the contrabass tuba is particularly For the first time in a Bruckner noteworthy, as is the timpani part, with symphony, the scherzo is in second place, drums tuned in six different pitches.