BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC The Little Orchestra Society THOMAS SCHERMAN, Music Director HERBERT BARRETT, Manager

ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION SERIEs-SEASON 1969-1970 Second Concert-Sunday, November 16, 1969, at 2:30p.m. THOMAS SCHERMAN, Conductor GRANT JOHANNESEN, Soloist

DOUGLAS MOORE (1893-1969) Farm Journal* a. Up early b. Sunday Clothes c. Lamplight d. Harvest Song Played in memory of the composer

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1 791) Symphony in B flat No. 33 K 319 DARIUS MILHAUD (1892- ) Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra Grant Johannesen, soloist

Intermission

DARIUS MILHAUD L'Homme et son desir First Violin: Peter Dimitriades Second Violin: James Nassy Viola: Lotte Bamberger Cello: George Koutzen Bass: Angelo La Penna Flute: Andrew Lolya Piccolo: Martin Orenstein Oboe: Duane Voth English Horn: Harriet Orenstein Clarinet: Wallace Shapiro Bass Clarinet: Harold Freeman Bassoon: Sanford Sharoff French Horn: Brooks Tillotson First Trumpet: Murray Karpilovsky Second Trumpet: Richard San Filippo Harp: Cynthia Otis Percussion: Ronald Gould, Wallace Deyerle

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Concerto in C minor for piano and orchestra K 491 Grant Johannesen, soloist

*Commissioned by The Little Orchestra Society-World premiere January 19, 1948

Baldwin Piano Mr. Johannesen plays the Steinway

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM by BERNARD JACOBSON Douglas Moore Farm Journal ( 1893-1969)

The opening work on tonight's program is offered by way of a homage. Douglas Moore, who died earlier this year at the age of 75, wrote Farm Journal in 1947 for Thomas Scherman and his then newly formed Little Orchestra Society, who gave it its premiere in January, 1948. He was the first of many composers to respond to commissions from Mr. Scherman's pioneering organization. The link between the two men goes back further than that, to 1935, when Mr. Scherman, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, took a modern music course under Moore, who was at the time an associate professor in the Music Department and shortly afterwards became its head. Mr. Scherman described Moore in a recent article as an "optimistic conservative." Speaking of his gradually developing respect for Moore, he explained : "When I first became acquainted with him, I was a young ambitious musician-full of ideas which I felt sure would shatter the world, or at the very least, 57th Street. I was incapable at the age of 19 to appreciate the true meaning of 'conservative,' and in the brashness of youth, I equated it with 'reactionary.' It was not until I had the opportunity to work as a student under him, and later the rare privilege to get to know him and his music more intimately, that I became aware that a true conservative artist must have just as much or more courage and deep conviction than a 'forger of new paths'." Moore's own training was by no means exclusively conservative, nor was it in the least insular. After taking B.A. and B.Mus. degrees at Yale and serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in World War I, he went to Paris to continue his studies under Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum, and under Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied organ. How­ ever, it was as an almost archetypically American composer that he was later to make his name. The Americanism is evident in his choice of themes for several highly successful operas- they included The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Carry Nation. But his gift for expressing himself directly and strongly in American terms is equally demonstrated by his orchestral music, from the early Pageant of P. T. Barnum down to the charming and typical Farm Journal. As Thomas Scherman has acknowledged, Farm Journal "helped to launch the series by tacitly revealing to the musical public Moore's own judgment of the Society's musical worth." With gratitude, and In Memoriam, that compliment is hereby reciprocated.

Mozart Symphony N o. 33 in B flat major, K. 319 (1756-1791) Allegro assai Andante moderato Minuet and Trio Finale: Allegro assai Mozart's 33rd Symphony looks both ways. It is modest in scoring-apart from the usual strings, only oboes, bassoons, and horns in pairs are required-and no less so in formal dimensions. As originally composed, in Salzburg during July, 1779, it consisted (like No. 31, the "Paris" Symphony, and like the original version of No. 34 in C major) of only three movements: the minuet was added three years later for a performance in Vienna. Stylistically, there are some backward-looking characteristics- the very begin- rung, for instance, with no fewer than eleven alternations of loud and soft in the space of 35 measures, evokes traditions both of the Parisian orchestral world and of the mid-18th­ century Mannheim style. Yet the "Haffner," first of the six great works that concluded Mozart's symphonic production, was only three years away. And it was not purely for a whim that when Mozart needed K. 319 again for that 1782 performance, though he left the original scoring intact, he took the step of adding a minuet. For this work is no longer the close cousin of the three-movement Italian opera overture that many of Mozart's earlier symphonies are. For all its unassuming scale, it already foreshadows the individuality of the late, great Mozart. The new accent becomes unmistakable if we compare it with the "Paris" Symphony. That D major work is admittedly more ambitious, in formal plan as well as in orchestral layout. Yet there is an intimacy and graciousness about K. 319 that makes it far more rewarding and more Mozartean listening than its comparatively super­ ficial predecessor. It is not surprising that Beethoven, as musicologist Alfred Einstein pointed out, thought highly enough of the work to use its first and last movements as a sort of springboard for the corresponding movements of his Eighth Symphony; and it may not be fanciful to find, in the jaunty little march near the end of Beethoven's First Sym­ phony, an equally clear reminiscence of the one in Mozart's finale. The most striking formal feature of the first movement and finale of K. 319 had a still more profound influence on Beethoven: the development sections of both movements are founded on new material, instead of taking their themes exclusively from the exposition. The "new" theme in the first movement is in fact one of the oldest and most familiar in music: it is the four-note figure most familiar from its use as cornerstone of the "Jupiter" Symphony's celebrated finale, but it was part of the common stock of composers long before Mozart's time, and he himself had used it earlier in the Credo of the F major Mass, K. 192. Another unusual, though not unique, feature of the first movement is that Mozart dispenses with the traditional exposition repeat. The first movements of the "Paris" and of K. 334 likewise omit the repeat mark-altogether, one might think, a circumstance that ought to interest the many performers who disregard repeat marks in Mozart's later works on the pretext that "he only put them in out of habit." The new intimacy already mentioned comes to fullest expression, as we might expect, in the Andante moderato second movement, whose subsidiary theme is, it appears, a quotation from an opera by Giovanni Paisiello (17 40-1816) . But even the minuet is a movement full of subtle and personal touches-listen, for instance, to the first bass figure (played by bassoons, cellos, and basses, with violas in thirds above), and then observe how Mozart turns it upside down when the theme returns in the second section. Such, indeed, are the fingerprints of full maturity.

Milhaud Piano Concerto No.1 (b. 1892) Tres vif Mouvement de Barcarolle Final: Anime For sheer size and diversity, Darius Milhaud's output is more astonishing than that of any other living composer. A list embracing a dozen operas, more than a dozen ballets, incidental music for over forty plays, two dozen film scores, three dozen choral works, a dozen symphonies for large or small forces, more than twenty miscellaneous orchestral works, concertos for a dozen different instruments, eighteen string quartets (two of them, Nos. 14 and 15, also playable together as an octet), a wide variety of sonatas and smaller chamber and instrumental pieces, and over 200 songs-all this suggests a kind of 20th­ century Telemann, especially since, like his urbane forerunner of the German baroque, Milhaud has somehow found time to do a good deal of conducting too. The two men share, moreover, a tendency toward light-heartedness that is, in Milhaud's case, most noticeable in the instrumental and orchestral works, and an insatiable interest in novel media. The Piano Concerto No. 1 (first of five essays in the form-composed in 1933, and dedicated to the French pianist Marguerite Long) is standard enough in orchestral layout-the scoring is for two flutes, two oboes, E fiat clarinet, B flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, three trumpets, two trombones, tuba, harp, timpani, percussion, and strings-but the music is full of the busy exuberance that links even the most diverse examples of Milhaud's oeuvre. Still, below the bustling surface activity, a conplementary vein of lyricism is never far distant. This more tranquil mood is repre­ sented, in the first movement of the Concerto, by a second theme introduced in sustained form by violins and muted trumpet while the solo piano plays it in a figured version. Its influence permeates much of the movement's middle section, and it is at least as strong a d~terminant of the character of the piece as the more extrovert triplets and 16th-notes of the opening quick march. Lyricism is even more pervasive in the central movement, a barcarolle of only moderately slow tempo whose hushed beginning for high, middle, and low clarinets beautifully exemplifies Milhaud's taste for cool woodwind sonorities. The finale returns, with even sharper accentuation, to the straightforward vigor of the first movement's outer sections-so that the second and third movements may be regarded as distinct intensifications of the two disparate elements that go to make up the first.

Milhaud L'Homme et son desir Milhaud spent most of 1917 and 1918 in Rio de Janeiro, as secretary to the French author-diplomat Paul Claude!, who was serving as his country's minister to Brazil. The composer was powerfully impressed by the mystery and grandeur of the Brazilian forest at night. When Diaghilev's Ballets Russes visited the country, the combination of stimuli produced L'Homme et son desir ("Man and his Desire"), which still stands as one of Milhaud's most perfect and poetic works. Listed as the first of his ballets, it is subtitled a ''plastic poem"-though in view of the adjective's somewhat unesthetic associations in our own day, "poem in plastique" might be a safer, if more affected, translation. The scenario, which was furnished by Claude!, is an allegorical one that seeks to evoke the mystical forces of the forest and their power over man. The ballet might be described as a subtropical counterpart to Sibelius' symphonic poem Tapiola, which likewise takes its inspiration from sagas of "the Northlands' mighty forests"; and nothing better illustrates the gulf between the northern and the southern temperaments than the contrast between the two works-Sibelius' massive, impersonal, loftily austere, and Milhaud's, for all its awesome setting, always keeping touch with humanity in its scale and mode of expression. Yet even here, misty personifications are to be found-in particular, a phantom Woman symbolizing Love and Death, a combination that is not confined to the imaginations of solid Germans like Wagner, since it recurs in French music from Chausson to Messiaen. Audrey Parr's original stage setting for L'Homme et son clesir employed interlocking spatial areas organized in four tiers, and this visual technique is mirrored in one of the most remarkable features of the music-a stereophonic deployment of instruments fully comparable to the spatial methods used half a century later by composers like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Elliott Carter, and Ralph Shapey. The music is scored for five separate groups: a quartet of singers who vocalize without words, replaced in the concert version to be performed tonight by trumpet, english horn, horn, and bassoon; oboe, trumpet, harp, and double-bass; piccolo, flute, clarinet, and bass clarinet; a large percussion battery played by two musicians; and a string quartet. No less important is the rhythmic layout of the score. It is written in 4/ 4 time through­ out, but the various groups of instruments rarely coincide rhythmically. Instead there is a constantly changing interplay of contrasting meters which, simple in themselves, form complexes whose constituent parts overlap in many different ways. Milhaud's most serious lack as a composer is of a sense of harmonic movement strong enough to provide large­ scale contrasts of pace and pulse; but here, like John Cage in some of his works of the forties and fifties, he has contrived to produce a parallel sense of contrast by purely rhythmic means. The actual sound of the music, with its clinking and tapping of percussion and, once again, its predominance of woodwind timbres, is curiously suggestive of the music of the medieval and renaissance periods. Proven9al by birth and long residence, Milhaud sounds here as if he has been listening to the music of his earliest precursors in the region where his family had meanwhile settled. The spirit of L'Homme et son desir is far closer to the cromorne and recorder, the pipe and tabor, than to the symphonic traditions of more recent growth.

Mozart Piano Concerto in C minor, K. 491 Allegro Larghetto Allegretto The C minor Concerto is the culmination of Mozart's endeavors in the genre in which, together with opera, he achieved his greatest work. Generally known as "No. 24," it is in fact the eighteenth of his original piano concertos-the first four in the traditional num­ bering were student arrangements of sonata movements by older composers, made when Mozart was eleven, and the other two numbers making up the difference between 18 and 24 are the concertos for three and two pianos, K. 242 and K. 365 respectively. Along with its immediate successor in C major, K. 503, the C minor Concerto is the grandest of all Mozart's orchestral works. This is not the same thing as saying that it is the most ''symphonic." Commentators as perceptive in other ways as Einstein have suggested such a judgment, but the idea that symphonic thought is of necessity the highest form of musical thought is an illusion. The classical concerto is certainly no less, and perhaps more, demanding of a composer's subtlety and strength of constructive thought than the sym­ phony. The towering greatness of Mozart's mature piano concertos lies precisely in the fact that they are not symphonies in disguise-just as the weakness of Beethoven's early concertos lies in the fact that they are. It's not surprising that Mozart's piano concertos have misled theorists, because theorists deal essentially in generalizations, and Mozart's concertos are far too varied to allow of any but the broadest generalization. At any rate, the old analytical chestnut about "first exposition of the two principal themes by the orchestra; second exposition of said themes with the soloist taking part; development; recapitulation of principal themes; cadenza; coda'· is hopelessly wide of the mark. As far as any general description of Mozart concerto first movements may be given, it would go something like this: the orchestra begins by stating a number of themes, staying in or close to the tonic key; the solo enters and also states a number of themes, but it has considerable freedom of modulation within the scheme of related keys, and moreover some of its themes are new ones; the orchestra rounds this section off briefly; then follows a modulating section, usually referred to as the development, but very often better describably as a fantasy, since in many cases it is unconnected with the themes of the rest of the movement; solo and tutti in collaboration then recapitulate the main ideas of the movement; another short tutti leads to the solo cadenza; and matters are rounded off by a coda. Being exceptionally concentrated in thought, the C minor Concerto is one of those in which the "development" really is a development. Indeed, a measure of its concentration is the extraordinary persistence of the characteristic rhythmic figure of the principal subject-in triple time, quarter notes on the first two beats of the bar, and then, after a rest, a short ''kick-off" note at the end of the third beat. This pattern recurs no fewer than 96 times, in one or another part of the texture, during the 523 measures that make up the movement. But with all this single-mindedness, the other principle-the rich element of variety introduced in the solo exposition-still holds. Three distinct new themes make their appearance in this second exposition (two of them played first by the piano, the third introduced by the oboe and then embroidered by the piano), and their importance is almost as great as that of the dark, unison-octave "principal" theme that launches the movement on its intensely dramatic course. As always, the main intellectual problems are posed and solved in the first movement. The other two serve to some degree as foil and relaxation. But the emotional tensions, in this case, go too deep to be entirely dispelled. After a central movement in rondo form of idyllic limpidity and poise, the shadows return in the finale. Though this theme-and­ variations movement is fairly simple in form, it is as determinedly serious as the first Allegro, and still darker and more fateful in its C-minor coloration. Mozart's only other minor-key concerto--the D minor, K. 466-allowed its finale to escape at the end into D-major hilarity. Here there is no such release. The coda screws not merely meter (from 2/2 to 6/8) but passion also to a higher pitch of urgency-as Beethoven said to his pupil Ries when he heard this passage rehearsed: "Ah, my dear fellow, we shall never get an idea like this!"

THOMAS SCHERMAN

Imagination in programming, introduction of both established and new artists to the New York musical scene plus revivals of rarely heard operatic and symphonic master­ pieces have placed The Little Orchestra Society and its Music Director, Thomas Scherman, in the foreground of musical activities in this country. Nationwide and overseas tours by the ensemble have also brought critical acclaim and opportunities for the public to experience exciting Jive performances previously available only by way of recordings. The Little Orchestra Society is celebrating its twenty-second season in New York and in addition to its series of orchestral, oratorio and operatic concerts in Philharmonic Hall, the Society will be among the major musical organizations which will be a part of the 1969-70 season in the magnificent new Alice Tully Hall. Both governments of Italy and France have joined in recognizing Maestro Scherman's many contributions to the musical scene by honoring him with the titles of Cavaliere Officiate dell'Ordine and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, respectively. The Society's ever-popular Concerts for Young People will again be presented in Philharmonic H all , highlighted by the. appea.r­ ance of the unique Shinichi Suzuki Violinists and the inimitable drawings of L1sl Weil. GRANT JOHANNESEN Since his notable New York debut twenty-five years ago, Grant Johannesen has appeared with all the major American orchestras and has frequently been re-engaged with those of Europe and South America. He is a familiar and enthusiastically welcomed figure in the concert halls of five continents. Grant Johannesen is a native of Salt Lake City, and his early musical training took place there. At eighteen Johannesen continued his work in New York, and then he went to Europe for scholarship study with Robert Casadesus. He was a winner of the International Piano Competition at Ostand, Belgium and also the recipient of the Harriet Cohen International Award given annually in London for outstand­ ing artistry in performance. His first Moscow appearance in 1963 was ach.nowledged "one of the greatest triumphs by a visiting artist in Moscow." Mr. Johannesen has played repeatedly at the music festivals of Aix-en-Provence, Amsterdam, Helsinki, as well as the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, Ann Arbor and Ravinia. During the 1968-69 season, Johannesen's schedule was highJighted by one of his many repeat performances with the New York Philharmonic. The 25th anniversary recital of his New York debut prompted Harold C. Schonberg to write "Such mastery will remain one of the high points of the season." The celebrated pianist has recorded for HMY, Vox and Golden Crest labels. He has made many appearances on the Bell Telephone TV Hour and with the Ed Sullivan Show. FORTHCOMING C~ONCERTS IN THIS SERIES

Tuesday Evening, January 27, 8:00 p.m. Gustav Holst AT THE BOAR'S HEAD with Guus Hoekman, Jean Sanders, Emile Renan and Vaughan-Williams RIDERS TO THE SEA

Tuesday Evening, March 24, 8:00 p.m. Hector Berlioz L'ENFANCE DU CHRIST with Josephine Veasey, Kenneth Riegel and Adair McGowan

ALVARO CASSUTO, Assistant Conductor WILLARD STRAIGHT, Vocal preparation PETER DIMITRIADES, Concert Master GEORGE KOUTZEN, Personnel BERNARD JOY, Stage Manager RICHARD CASLER, Lighting HERBERT BARRETT, Manager THOMAS MATTHEWS, Associate Manager MARKS LEVINE, Consultant The Little Orchestra Society 1860 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10023 PL 7-3460 THE ORDER IN WHICH THE WORKS OF THIS AFTERNOON'S CONCERT WILL BE PERFORMED HAS BEEN REVISED. THE ORDER IS AS FOLLOWS:

MOORE "Farm J oumal" MILHAUD "L'Homme et son desir" MOZART Concerto inC Minor for Piano and Orchestra, K 491 Intermission

MOZART Symphony No. 33 in B-flat major, K 319 MILHAUD Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra