Juilliard Wind Orchestra Photo by Claudio Papapietro
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Juilliard Wind Orchestra Photo by Claudio Papapietro Juilliard Scholarship Fund The Juilliard School is the vibrant home to more than 800 dancers, actors, and musicians, over 90 percent of whom are eligible for financial aid. With your help, we can offer the scholarship support that makes a world of difference—to them and to the global future of dance, drama, and music. Behind every Juilliard artist is all of Juilliard—including you. For more information please contact Tori Brand at (212) 799-5000, ext. 692, or [email protected]. Give online at giving.juilliard.edu/scholarship. iii The Juilliard School presents Juilliard Wind Orchestra William Short, Conductor Saturday, October 13, 2018, 3pm Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater WOLFGANG AMADEUS Selections from Don Giovanni (1787) MOZART (arr. Josef Triebensee) (1756-1791) Introduzione Notte e giorno faticar Dalla sua pace: Fin ch'han dal vino Batti, batti, o bel Masetto Finale: Già la mensa è preparata LUDWIG VAN Symphony No. 7 (1813) BEETHOVEN Poco sostenuto - Vivace (1770–1827) Allegretto Presto Allegro con brio Performance time: approximately 1 hour This afternoon’s concert will be played without an intermission. Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. 1 Notes on the Program By David Crean Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Selections from Don Giovanni The final scene of Mozart’s Don Giovanni contains perhaps the most famous Wolfgang example of self-parody in the operatic repertoire. Upon sitting down to dine, Amadeus Mozart the Don is entertained by an onstage group of wind players—a Harmonie, as it was known at the time—consisting of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, Born: January 27, and bassoons, plus a double bass. As was customary for noblemen of the 1756, in Salzburg, late 18th century, Giovanni’s dinner entertainment consisted of excerpts Austria from popular operas, including Mozart’s own Marriage of Figaro, at that time a very recent, but already widely popular, work. With a wink to the Died: December audience, Giovanni’s servant Leporello remarks that he knows that excerpt 5, 1791, in Vienna, only too well. Austria All joking aside, however, Harmoniemusik was a significant (and lucrative) enterprise for composers of the late 18th century. At less than 10 players, the ensemble was not only cheaper to maintain than a full symphony orchestra, but also more portable. By the end of the century, most Austrian aristocrats of any financial means kept such a group on hand to provide entertainment for meals and (especially) outdoor parties. Many of Mozart’s serenades and divertimentos written during his Salzburg years feature winds prominently, with nearly a dozen written exclusively for that group. He continued to rely on that experience with winds after his move to Vienna, writing to his father in July 1782 that he was working quickly on a Harmonie arrangement of his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio so that another musician might not preempt him and enjoy the profits. The fact that Mozart’s letter was written just a few days after the premiere testifies to the popularity and profitability of these arrangements, which he described as “no little trouble.” “A work of uninterrupted perfection,” according to composer Charles Gounod, Don Giovanni was the second of Mozart’s three collaborations with Italian librettist and court composer Lorenzo Da Ponte. Like The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni is structurally an opera buffa (comic opera), although its emotional range, supernatural elements, and dramatic conclusion—where the title character is dragged to hell— transcend the generally lighthearted conventions of that genre. Don Giovanni is the prototypical lothario, a callously selfish (and prodigiously successful) seducer of women whose single-minded pursuit of pleasure leaves a wake of emotional destruction. Premiered in Prague in 1788 to great acclaim, Mozart’s score is remarkable for its harmonic richness and for the fascinating characterizations of the Don and his foils. It has never really left the repertoire and as of 2018 is the 10th most performed opera in the world, according to the website Operabase. Either due to lack of interest or (more probably) lack of time, Mozart seems not to have attempted a wind transcription of Don Giovanni, despite his earlier enthusiasm. Several of his contemporaries were, however, only 2 too happy to accommodate the still significant demand for such works. Perhaps the most popular arrangement (and the one we're hearing at today's concert) was made by Josef Triebensee, a Czech oboist who was part of the orchestra for the premiere of The Magic Flute in 1791. As Mozart wrote in reference to his earlier opera, the process of transforming a full-scale opera into a suite for eight wind players is a daunting task. Much of the drama is inevitably lost, along with the libretto and stage action, but the nuances of chamber music orchestration add new and surprising shadings to some of Mozart’s most memorable melodies. Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 Late in his life, Beethoven wrote to a friend that “If I had wanted to devote my life’s power to such a [married] life, what would have remained for Ludwig van the nobler, better things?” While the Beethoven of the 1820s might have Beethoven preferred to portray his lifelong bachelorhood as high-minded artistic renunciation, in actual fact he had made several attempts at romantic Born: Probably on relationships, the most famous of which was the “immortal beloved” December 16, 1770 episode of 1812. Bound up in this last and most passionate of Beethoven’s (he was baptized on romantic endeavors was his work on the seventh symphony, finished that the 17th), in Bonn, summer and premiered in 1813 at a concert benefiting wounded soldiers. then an independent electorate of The seventh symphony is one of Beethoven’s more energetic, upbeat Germany works, although it also contains perhaps his most poignant and well-loved slow movement. Beginning with the fifth symphony of 1808, Beethoven Died: March 26, had been experimenting with various means of unifying symphonies, no 1827, in Vienna, easy task given the disparate keys, tempos, and moods explored over the Austria course of an extended multi-movement work. The fifth symphony is the paradigm of thematic integration, while the sixth is held together by its loose narrative framework. As most analysts have observed, the unifying element in the seventh symphony is a reliance on rhythm, which Lockwood describes as its “characteristic form of expression ... exuberant in the first movement; slow and steady in the second; rapid, hurtling forward motion in the third; wild abandon in the finale.” The first movement, famously described by Richard Wagner as “the apotheosis of dance” and possibly influenced by Beethoven’s work arranging Scottish folk songs, opens with the most extensive slow introduction in his symphonic oeuvre. Stately and elegant, its transition into the movement proper is at once effortless and startling. Beethoven’s use of 6/8 meter for a symphonic first movement was largely unprecedented at the time, but his idiosyncratic approach to traditional forms was already well established. Thematic contrast, traditionally one of the hallmarks of Classical sonata form, is here all but eliminated thanks to the primary and secondary themes’ similar rhythmic profiles. 3 Notes on the Program By David Crean (continued) While thematic differentiation is notably downplayed in the opening movement, the contrast between the first and second movements is quite stark. The allegretto (a “slow” movement only in relation to the rest of the symphony) proved so popular at its premiere that it was encored, and has remained one Beethoven’s most admired works. Its slow, deliberate crescendo from low strings to full orchestra and obsessively repetitive rhythm have occasionally led to comparisons with the funeral march from the third symphony. There does seem to be something inexorably tragic about the opening section, which was used as the soundtrack to nephew Karl’s suicide attempt in the 1994 biopic Immortal Beloved (starring Gary Oldman as Beethoven). The subsequent move to A Major offers a welcome respite, and the two ideas seem to vie for supremacy in the remainder of the movement, with the bleak opening ultimately prevailing. The lighthearted mood of the first movement returns for good in the scherzo, which, like many of Beethoven’s late works, contains two contrasting trio sections. The scherzo is characterized by dialog between the sections punctuated by occasional orchestral tuttis. A scherzo is literally a musical “joke,” and the joke here is the replacement of those tuttis with pianissimo figures in the second appearance of that section. Donald Tovey described the final movement, which is also indebted to Beethoven’s folk song arrangements, as “a triumph of Bacchic fury.” As with the rest of the symphony, the movement draws much of its momentum from its strongly defined rhythmic profile. A rare fff (extremely loud) dynamic concludes “one of the most fully satisfying of all Beethoven’s works” (Lockwood). The arrangement for winds heard in this afternoon’s concert dates from Beethoven’s lifetime and was purportedly done under his supervision, although no evidence for his involvement has emerged apart from the statement of the original publisher. David Crean teaches organ at Wright State University in Ohio. He is a graduate of the C.V. Starr Doctoral Program at Juilliard and was the recipient of the 2014 Richard F. French Doctoral Prize. 4 Meet the Artist William Short was appointed principal bassoon of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 2012. He previously served in the same capacity with the Delaware Symphony Orchestra and has also performed with the Houston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra.