Bernstein @ 100 Featuring Jamie Bernstein, Wallis Giunta, Sebastian
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Bernstein @ 100 featuring Jamie Bernstein, Wallis Giunta, Sebastian Knauer, and the ARC Ensemble Friday, April 6, 2018 at 8:00pm Pre-concert Talk at 7:00pm This is the 814th concert in Koerner Hall Jamie Bernstein, narrator Wallis Giunta, mezzo-soprano Sebastian Knauer, piano ARC Ensemble (Artists of The Royal Conservatory) Erika Raum, violin Marie Bérard, violin Steven Dann, viola Julie Hereish, cello * Joaquin Valdepeñas, clarinet PROGRAM Leonard Bernstein: Anniversaries INTERMISSION Walter Kaufmann: String Quartet No. 11 I. I. Lento –– Allegro ma non troppo II. II. Un poco grave III. III. Allegro molto IV. IV. Allegro barbarico Leonard Bernstein: Eight Songs (arr. Peter Tiefenbach) “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story “I Can Cook, Too” from On the Town “A Little Bit in Love” from Wonderful Town “It Must Be So” from Candide “I Am Easily Assimilated” from Candide “Nothing More Than This” from Candide “Some Other Time” from On the Town “New York, New York” from On the Town * guest member Composer, conductor, pianist, writer, teacher, Leonard Bernstein’s extravagant talents were accompanied by a nonchalance that many found frustrating. Frustrating because Bernstein’s diverse supporters – the classical music devotees who would have had him compose more and conduct less, the Broadway fans who saw him as the saviour of the American musical, and the academics and educators who watched him demystify music (without removing the mystery) – all wanted him to commit himself to the part of his genius in which they were most invested. But Bernstein would have none of it. He pursued every project with the commitment of the moment and he consumed life in much the same way. Most music-lovers, at least those of a certain age, seem to have experienced at least one revelatory Bernstein event. For me there were three and each was utterly different. The first was a student concert of the “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story. It was a dreadful performance, but it was also bold and committed, and every player was completely seduced by the score. I had never seen any piece elicit or communicate such unbridled enthusiasm. The second was my traversal (on LP) of the “The Unanswered Question,” the series of Norton lectures Bernstein gave at Harvard in 1973. These were so much more than any lecture I had attended. They were virtuosic transmissions of universal musical truths, and Lenny explained them more vividly than anyone. The third was a run of Mahler rehearsals with the London Symphony Orchestra at London’s Henry Wood Hall. Just a few feet away from the podium, I watched the maestro reassemble and sculpt the music. Each of these experiences illuminated a separate creative gift, and to me it seemed that each should rightfully have belonged to a separate human being. “My father was not a very good sleeper,” relates Jamie Bernstein. “He never slept. He was always up late, and in the middle of the night he would go to the piano and write little sketches.” Between 1942 and 1988 Bernstein composed a series of 29 piano vignettes he called Anniversaries. They were tributes to and, in some measure, musical descriptions of significant individuals in his life. He composed a set of seven in 1942/43, a set of four in 1948, a further five between 1949 and 1951, and completed the final 13 in 1988. The pieces are rarely longer than a minute or two – the first, dedicated to his friend and mentor Aaron Copland, is all of 19 measures. The Anniversaries are part of the keyboard miniature tradition that had its origins in the Renaissance, and with pieces by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin, its flowering in the Romantic era. Some of the Anniversaries provide the musical DNA for more elaborate Bernstein works. For example, the material in the Anniversary dedicated to the memory of Sergei Koussevitzky’s wife Nathalia, provides the building blocks for the Jeremiah Symphony and reappears in its final Lamentation movement. Elements of four of the Five Anniversaries reappear in Bernstein’s Serenade for Violin Solo, Strings, Harp, and Percussion. Bernstein’s remarkable ability to compose and conduct extended works – one thinks of his own symphonies as well as his attachment to Mahler’s – has led some commentators to see the brevity of the Anniversaries as anomalous. And yet capturing atmosphere, emotion, and ambiguity in a handful of notes is equally evident in Bernstein’s musicals, and the set of songs that ends this Bernstein celebration clearly demonstrate this: the unsettled opening of “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story is as enigmatic as the song’s title. Bernstein's first musical, On the Town, was premiered on December 28, 1944. The previous year had seen his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic (substituting at short notice for an ailing Bruno Walter) as well as the premiere of both the Jeremiah Symphony and the ballet Fancy Free. The latter provided the artistic impetus for On the Town. It is difficult to think of another musician whose arrival prompted anything like the critical acclaim and the public fascination that greeted the 26-year-old Bernstein. The son of Jewish émigrés, he was a home-grown American, but in addition to brilliance and breadth, he had the charisma and the glamour on which Hollywood and America were beginning to insist. On the Town was premiered as WW II was drawing to a close, and although an Allied victory appeared certain, the exploits of three sailors on a high-energy, 24-hour furlough in New York, were ominously coloured by it. There is a similar urgency to Wonderful Town, not surprising given that the music was composed in just five weeks. Shortly after its premiere in 1953, the playwright and novelist Lillian Hellman approached Bernstein with the idea of a musical based on Voltaire’s Candide. Voltaire’s critique of Catholic dogma and 18th century hypocrisy would provide an analogue to the purges of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was in the midst of its paranoiac investigation of communist sympathizers, and which had blacklisted Hellman. Since its opening, the work has undergone a bewildering array of additions, subtractions, and, in 1989, some “final” emendations by the composer himself. In the process, Candide became more operetta send-up than political takedown. To complement the music of the ubiquitous Bernstein, who wrote very little chamber music, we are including a work by a contemporary who had a similarly wide range of interests but whose career was derailed by war and exile. Born in Carlsbad in 1907 (now Karlovy Vary) Walter Kaufmann trained at Berlin’s Musik Hochschule and Prague’s German University. By his mid-twenties, he was a seasoned conductor and composer, as well as an excellent pianist and violist. His symphonic works were being performed and broadcast by major orchestras and his operettas were enjoying considerable critical success. He had scored films at the UFA Studios in Berlin, and as a result of his studies with the musicologist Curt Sachs, he had developed a fascination with the music of India. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Kaufmann became acutely aware of the threat posed by National Socialism and the dangers Jews would face were they to remain in Europe. Kaufmann had long wanted to emigrate to the United States and Albert Einstein, who had befriended Kaufmann in Berlin, wrote to influential Americans on his behalf. But it took 23 years of limbo, of exile in Bombay, London, Halifax, and Winnipeg, before he finally moved to Bloomington and a post at Indiana University’s School of Music. Here he cemented his reputation as one of the world’s leading ethnomusicologists. While his books on Indian music are still widely available, most of Kaufmann’s compositions remain in manuscript. Indeed, tonight’s performance of his eleventh String Quartet, a work that seamlessly melds Indian and Western traditions, was last performed nearly 80 years ago as part of a weekly series presented by the Bombay Chamber Music Society at the Willingdon Sports Club. Kaufmann played the viola for that performance and the quartet would have been led by his friend Mehli Mehta, father of the esteemed conductor Zubin Mehta and, in a wonderfully satisfying coincidence, the grandfather of Mervon Mehta, Executive Director of Performing Arts at The Royal Conservatory. - Simon Wynberg, 2017 Jamie Bernstein Narrator Jamie Bernstein is a narrator, writer, and broadcaster who has transformed a lifetime of loving music into a career of sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with others. Her father, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, her mother, the pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre, and their legions of friends in the arts, fostered an upbringing bursting with music, theatre, and literature. Jamie’s symphony pops concert “Bernstein on Broadway” has enjoyed success with orchestras across North America and features her concert narration performed live with orchestra and vocalists. She has written and produced several concerts for young people on the music of Copland, Mozart, Bernstein, and others, including the acclaimed program “The Bernstein Beat,” a family concert about her father modeled after his own groundbreaking Young People’s Concerts. Jamie also travels the world as a concert narrator, performing both her own scripts and standard concert narrations. She is a frequent speaker and has hosted numerous shows for radio stations in the United States and Great Britain. Sebastian Knauer Piano Having made his concert debut at the age of 14 in the Laeiszhalle in his native city of Hamburg, Sebastian Knauer can already look back on a concert career lasting more than a quarter of a century. He has played in over 50 countries on four continents, appearing in such prestigious venues as the Berlin Philharmonie, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, London’s Wigmore Hall, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Lincoln Center in New York, and the NCPA in Beijing.