Season 2020111111----2020202011112222

The Orchestra

Sunday, May 1313,, at 3:00 27th Season of ConcertsConcerts————PerelmanPerelman Theater

Takemitsu Rain Tree, for vibraphone and two marimbas Christopher Deviney Vibraphone Angela Zator Nelson Marimba Anthony Orlando Marimba

Zivkovic Trio per uno, Op. 27, for percussion trio I. Meccanico II. Contemplativo III. Molto energico Christopher Deviney Percussion Angela Zator Nelson Percussion Anthony Orlando Percussion

Ravel , for two marimbas ChristopheChristopherr Deviney Marimba Angela Zator Nelson Marimba

Intermission

Janáček No. 1 (“Kreutzer Sonata”) I. Adagio—Con moto II. Con moto III. Con moto—Vivo—Andante— I IV. Con moto—Adagio—Maestoso Noah Geller Violin Jennifer Haas Violin Renard Edwards Viola John Koen

Ravel String Quartet in F major I. Allegro moderato II. Assez vif, très rhythmé—Lent—Tempo I III. Très lent IV. Vif et agité Jennifer Haas Violin Noah Geller Violin Renard Edwards Viola John Koen Cello

This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes. Rain Tree

TTTōruTōru Takemitsu Born in Tokyo, October 8, 1930 Died there, February 20, 1996

The Oriental influence is not new in art music. Composers from Mozart to Debussy and, more recently, Olivier Messiaen, Henry Cowell, and John Cage often turned to Asia as an exotic alternative, or a corrective remedy, to the established traditions of European culture. But these were, of course, Western composers appropriating the gestures, textures, and sounds of Asian music. The first Asian composer to bridge the cross-cultural gap from the other direction was the Japanese musician Tōru Takemitsu, who paved the way for the later “New Wave” of Asian composers in the West during the 1980s and ’90s.

While retaining its sense of “other”-ness, Takemitsu’s music was influenced by a number of Western musical styles including jazz and popular song. He also incorporated avant-garde procedures and, later, traditional Japanese music into a synthetic amalgam that honored both East and West. And in a kind of reverse homage, Takemitsu based his harmonic idiom largely on the music of Debussy and Messiaen, two of the composers who, in turn, were powerfully influenced by Asian musical practices. Added into the mix of Takemitsu’s musical language were some of Cage’s chance procedures and theories of silence and sound.

Largely self-taught in his , Takemitsu’s musical training was interrupted by World War II. But it was while serving as part of a student relief organization during the latter years of the war that he first heard the French popular song “Parlez-moi d’amour,” an experience that convinced him music was his life’s calling. After the war he worked in the kitchen at an American military base, which gave him free access to a piano. Then, as his career developed through the 1950s, he aligned himself with a number of avant-garde groups of Japanese artists and musicians that consciously fostered new approaches to artistic performance and composition.

The first of Takemitsu’s works to gain international attention was his Requiem for Strings from 1957, written to honor one of his music teachers, the composer Fumio Hayasaka. Stravinsky spoke glowingly of the Requiem after hearing it in 1958. Then Takemitsu’s scores began to be performed even more frequently in North America when his friend and compatriot was appointed conductor of the Toronto Symphony. Film scores for the famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa further strengthened the composer’s reputation in both and the West.

Takemitsu wrote three musical works based on a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe titled Atama no ii, Ame no Ki (The Ingenious Rain Tree). In a passage from this novel, a tree is described as being so abundant with foliage that raindrops continue to fall from it for hours, long after the rain itself has stopped. Two of these compositions, Rain Tree Sketch (1982) and Rain Tree Sketch II (1992), both for piano solo, are among Takemitsu’s most frequently performed keyboard works. The first work in this trilogy is titled simply Rain Tree, and was composed in 1981 for three-person percussion ensemble consisting of vibraphone and two marimbas, with each performer also playing crotales.

Gentle raindrops from the crotales open this single-movement piece, which then merges into the metallic sounds of the vibraphone. It evokes impressionistically both the randomness of individual raindrops and the overall textural consistency of the rain itself. Marimba ostinatos multiply as the “rain tree” of the title begins to shower down in droplets, slowing and pausing periodically but never ceasing entirely. The ostinatos gradually transform into rising scales and motifs, as if our gaze turns upward to see where the drops are falling from. In place of a predictable arching form with a climax and conclusion, the composer crafts a subtle ebb and flow of meditative sound. Marimba shimmer in the light, and the interdependent layering of water, light, and vision continues to the end, punctuated by glistening crotales effervescences.

—Luke Howard

Trio per uno

Nebojša Živković Born in Sremska MitroMitrovica,vica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), July 5, 1962 Now living in Stuttgart

Serbian composer and marimbist Nebojša Živković completed graduate studies in composition, theory, and percussion in Mannheim and Stuttgart, where he has lived since 1980. Since that time he has become one of the most performed composers of percussion music in the world today, with many of his works enjoying an international reputation as standards in the percussion repertory. Živković is one of the few musicians today who can honestly lay claim to being both a virtuoso performer and a renowned composer—a rare combination that harks back to the 19th-century traditions of Liszt and Paganini.

Živković is perhaps best-known for his series of pieces written especially for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, including a concerto for percussion and orchestra ( The Concerto of the Mad Queen, from 2000), Born to beAT WILD (2001) for Glennie and trumpet virtuoso Håkan Hardenberger, and Quasi una sonata (2001) for piano and percussion, premiered by Glennie and pianist Emanuel Ax. Živković is also widely known for his Funny Mallets series of composition for younger players.

The marimba is Živković’s preferred instrument, and it dominates his compositions. This makes his Trio per uno, composed in 1995, somewhat unusual in his oeuvre because it is written for a percussion ensemble that includes pitched percussion, but without the marimba. The title—Trio for One—refers to the sets of percussion instruments that are literally at the center of each performance of the piece. In each of the three movements, one percussion set is surrounded by the three performers who draw out the music from it.

In the first movement (MeccanicoMeccanicoMeccanico), each of the three players surrounds a central bass drum, which is laid flat between them, and plays the drum with timbale sticks. Each performer also has Chinese gongs and a pair of bongos. The bass-drum dominates the first movement, beginning with a steady, energized pulse that expands into rimshots and elaborations on the gongs and bongos. Although there are no pitched instruments as such in this percussion set, it still produces a tremendous variety of registers, from the deep visceral thumping of the bass drum through the mid-range bongos, the high clacking of the rimshots and the clash of the gongs. The rhythms and precisely coordinated movements of the players suggest an elaborate primal ritual that merges archaic dance and musical performance.

The second movement (ContemplativoContemplativoContemplativo), the longest of the three, is lyrical and meditative. The percussion set here includes a single vibraphone and a set of suspended crotales. Two players perform on the vibraphone, overlapping rhythmic patterns with arching motifs in . Against this gentle backdrop, the crotales sound out a pensive, exotic melody in cross-rhythms.

For the finale (MoltoMolto energicoenergico), which returns to unpitched percussion, each player performs on snare drum and a pair of tom-toms. In this rapid-fire finale, the rhythmic patterns are often played in unison, but occasionally break up into complex cross-rhythms, propelling the Trio to its dynamic, virtuoso conclusion.

—Luke Howard

Alborada del gracioso

Maurice Ravel Born in Ciboure, Lower Pyrenees, March 7, 1875 Died in , December 28, 1937

By 1904 Ravel had already been forced to leave Gabriel Fauré’s composition class at the Paris Conservatory. “Audacious” works such as his String Quartet—today a cornerstone of the repertory—hardly stood him in good stead in a musical climate where formal instruction was still based on the arcane study of Renaissance polyphony. Finally he dropped out of the class altogether, becoming involved instead in a group of aesthetes who called themselves “”—a disparate collection of intellectuals who met to discuss art, literature, music, and history. It was at meetings of the “Apaches” that Ravel tried out his more daring piano works, often for audiences that included such imminent musicians as Manuel de Falla and Florent Schmitt. There his friend Ricardo Viñes first played Ravel’s 1904 collection of for piano, two of which would later become concert favorites in the composer’s orchestral transcriptions: the painterly Une Barque sur l’océan and the complex, sun- splashed final piece, Alborada del gracioso, orchestrated in 1918.

“The Miroirs form a collection of piano pieces that mark a rather considerable change in my harmonic evolution,” Ravel wrote in his 1928 autobiography. “This shift disconcerted musicians who until then had been thoroughly accustomed to my style.” These pieces differed from the composer’s earlier works in that they were informed less by form or logic than by color, light, and shade.

A brilliant virtuoso piano piece in its original version, Alborada also makes for dazzling fireworks for orchestra and in the version we hear today, for two marimbas. The piece tapped into the craze for “things Spanish” that overcame French composers from this period; it employs rhythms and percussive effects that powerfully suggest the strike of guitar strings, or the twists and turns of a maracas-tapping dancer. The critic and fellow Apache Michel Calvocoressi (the dedicatee of Alborada ) described it as “a big independent scherzo in the manner of Chopin and Balakirev.” The title, perhaps best translated as “Morning- Serenade of the Jester,” refers to a type of energetic love-serenade, as performed in the early morning hours by the gracioso —the stock character of the “court clown” in the classical Spanish theater of Lope de Vega and others.

—Paul J. Horsley

String Quartet No. 1 (“Kreutzer Sonata”)

LLLeošLeoš Janáček Born in Hukvaldy, Moravia (now Czech Republic), July 3, 1854 Died in Ostrava, August 12, 1928

Alongside Smetana and Dvořák, Leoš Janáček is one of the best-known Czech composers of the last two centuries. But there is an important distinction in his cultural heritage and the musical style it engendered. Janáček was from Moravia, a region with closer affinities to the more eastern Slavic cultures than the Bohemia of Smetana and Dvořák, whose music is correspondingly nearer in style and spirit to the German-Austrian tradition.

Even before Kodály and Bartók sought inspiration in folk materials, Janáček began to study Moravian and Slavonic folksong, and these influences are seen throughout his works. Through the process of collecting and arranging these folk melodies, he developed a theory of “speech-melody” in which the natural rhythms and inflections of the spoken language are transferred directly to the music. This is primarily evident in his operatic works such as Jenůfa, but was an important feature in all his texted compositions. Janáček even extended this theory to the point where he believed that the melodic and rhythmic features of all music, not just vocal works, were grounded in the patterns of spoken language, and his instrumental compositions frequently employ speech-like melodies and rhythms.

Toward the end of his career Janáček underwent a period of mental and creative rejuvenation, and many of his most famous works date from the very last years of his life. His last four operas—Kát’a Kabanová, , The Makropolous Case, and From the House of the Dead —rank among the major achievements of 20th-century opera. His is an astonishingly vibrant setting of the traditional Slavonic mass text. (Though now Catholic Moravia was originally converted to Christianity through the Byzantine church, hence the use of Slavonic in the traditional liturgy.) Several of his major instrumental works, such as the chamber Concertino and two string quartets, also date from this final period.

Both of Janáček’s string quartets—the first from 1923, the second from the year of his death, 1928—spring from the same inspirational source. Since 1917 the composer had been in love with an unhappily married woman, Kamilla Stösslová. Although accounts differ on the degree to which she returned that love, Janáček’s Second Quartet (subtitled “Intimate Letters”) was written as a programmatic outpouring of emotion based on their relationship. Stösslová’s influence on the First Quartet is less overt, but just as deep. That work is based loosely on an 1889 novella by Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (named after Beethoven’s Op. 47 Sonata for violin and piano), in which one of the central characters is an unhappy woman, tormented and unloved by her husband, who falls in love with a violinist. Despite the work’s tragic ending—the woman is violently murdered by her jealous husband—Janáček felt particularly drawn to this character, and admitted to Stösslová a year after the Quartet was completed that he was thinking of her when he wrote it.

Tolstoy’s novella is a cautionary tale on the destructive potential of passionate emotions. It seems to have stimulated in Janáček the freedom to write a work that, while not strictly programmatic, clearly relies on a non-classical narrative form. It maintains an expressionist psychological continuity through its alternations of anxiety and despair, with the tempo indication Con moto appearing in all four movements, as if the onward rush of fate is unavoidable. Scattered throughout the Quartet also are dramatic score markings such as “timidly,” “as if speaking,” “fiercely,” and “as in tears,” that serve to underscore the work’s psychological drama.

Moved by Tolstoy’s story, Janáček worked quickly on the Quartet, and had fully drafted the score a little more than a week after receiving the commission in October 1923. He remarked that when writing the Quartet, “note after note fell smoldering from my pen” as he thought again of “that poor woman, troubled, beaten, murdered.”

The twin elements of constrained emotions and passionate yearning are heard from the very beginning of the Quartet’s opening movement (AdagioAdagioAdagio————ConCon motomoto), whose motifs may be derived directly from the nervous exposition of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. Short fragments of happiness emerge haphazardly through the omnipresent anxiety, which is highlighted by Janáček’s general tendency to repeat motifs obsessively at increasing . In the nervous and flighty second movement (ConCon motomoto), darting motifs and dramatic tremolos continue to raise the emotional intensity.

The third movement (ConCon motomoto) begins with a two-part canon, a variation on a theme from Beethoven’s Sonata but altered into a haunting minor mode from the original cheerful major mode. This represents, perhaps, the point in Tolstoy’s story when the wife’s performance of the violin sonata with her lover enrages her husband, precipitating a tragic concoction of desire and jealousy. The resentful husband’s feelings are designated by the anxious interruptions that increase in force and frequency until they dominate. The finale (ConCon motomoto) begins with a mournful reinterpretation of the opening theme. Then memories of the passion, shock, and murder lead to a ferocious climax that, as in Tolstoy’s story, quickly dissipates into bleak despair.

—Luke Howard

String Quartet

Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel had a penchant for self-deprecating humor when speaking of his own compositional practice. He once described the infamous Bolero as the only masterpiece he ever wrote, but added as an afterthought, “Unfortunately, there is no music in it.” Similarly, when his friend Maurice Delage asked him about a he had been thinking about for some time but had never started, Ravel quipped, “My trio is finished. I only need the themes for it.”

The apparent distinction Ravel made between his compositional technique and “the music itself” was not merely a witty gambit. More than any of his colleagues, he was fastidious and methodical when it came to the technical craft of composition, independent of the purely musical ideas that go into a work. It was for this reason that Stravinsky once (unflatteringly) referred to Ravel as a “Swiss watchmaker.” And this preoccupation with craftsmanship is perhaps one reason why Ravel wrote so few chamber works, a genre in which compositional craft and technique are glaringly apparent.

While clearly a master orchestrator and exceptionally gifted writer for solo instruments, Ravel was not a prolific composer in chamber genres, composing only eight pieces for small ensemble in his entire career. These chamber genres seem to have presented him with especially challenging compositional issues that, for the most part, he preferred to avoid. While Ravel’s ear for instrumental color, harmony, and evocative melodic lines is undisputed, he seemed less confident when dealing with the transparency of chamber textures and the related focus on multiple contrapuntal lines.

In his 1903 String Quartet, for example, Ravel seemed determined to turn the quartet into an orchestra, with rich scoring, multiple stops, and a profusion of ornamenting devices that enlarge on the simple four-part counterpoint. Hedging his bets on the balance between technique and expression, he declared that this Quartet arose “from an idea of musical construction, probably imperfectly realized, but which seems clearer than in my earlier compositions.”

It is a fairly youthful work composed while Ravel, in his late 20s, was still a pupil of Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatory, but at a time when he was also being noticed and encouraged by Debussy. The polished technique of Fauré and the evocative impressionistic harmonies of Debussy both exerted equal influence on the Quartet, and the negotiation between craftsmanship and expression continued even after the work’s premiere in 1904. Fauré, the score’s dedicatee, declared that the last movement was too short, poorly balanced, “and, in short, a failure.” Debussy, on the other hand, countered, “In the name of all music’s gods, and for my sake, don’t change anything you’ve written in your quartet!” Ravel listened to Fauré, and revised the score for its second publication in 1910. By doing so, he touched off a feud with Debussy that was never fully resolved.

The Quartet’s opening movement (AllegroAllegro moderatomoderato) has a sonata-form outline to it; Ravel’s forms would always be more classical and traditional than Debussy’s. But the moment-to-moment harmonic language is as richly modal and nuanced as his older colleague’s. Combined with Fauré’s expressivity of phrasing and sensitive élan, it creates an idyllic scene in which the compositional language is still unmistakably Ravel’s (and would, in fact, be revisited orchestrally in Ravel’s score for the 1912 ballet Daphnis and Chloe ).

A lively and airy pizzicato motif opens the dance-like second movement (AssezAssez vifvif). Superimposed meters and cross rhythms lend an exotic Iberian flavor to the movement’s outer frames. The slower central section is more melancholy, but still dance-like in a reserved, courtly manner. Pizzicato ornaments and subtle tremolos continue even in this middle section, then take over as the opening dance returns.

The tonality slips down to F-sharp for a rhapsodic slow movement (TrèsTrès lentlent). Although improvisatory and impassioned, it makes continual reference to motifs from earlier movements as a way of anchoring its freely developed materials to the rest of the Quartet. The vigorous finale (VifVif et agitéagité) explodes in a frenetic 5/8 meter. Based on themes from the other movements, it serves as a dynamic peroration on the entire Quartet. Moments of calm and lightness of texture appear fleetingly before being swept up in the rhythmic vitality and virtuosity of the closing quasi-orchestral flourish.

—Luke Howard

Program notes © 2012. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Association and/or Luke Howard.

Christopher Deviney became principal percussion of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2003. Previously he was a percussionist in the Houston Symphony and performed and recorded with the New Orleans and Toronto symphonies and the New York Philharmonic. He has performed at the Bard Music Festival and as a featured soloist with the Brevard (FL) Symphony. He was a student at the Aspen Music Festival and was also a two-year Tanglewood Institute Fellowship recipient. Mr. Deviney received his bachelor’s degree from Florida State University and his master’s degree from Temple University. He is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University and has given master classes at Temple University and the Curtis Institute and professional coaching at the New World Symphony.

Renard Edwards, viola, is a native Philadelphian. He attended Overbrook High School while studying with former Philadelphia Orchestra member Leonard Mogill at the Settlement Music School. Mr. Edwards continued his viola studies with Max Aronoff at the New School of Music and was coached in chamber music by Edgar Ortenberg, former violinist in the . Mr. Edwards also studied with Karen Tuttle in Philadelphia.

Noah Geller, violin and viola, joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2008 (he is acting assistant principal for the 2011-12 season). A laureate of the 2007 Michael Hill International Violin Competition, he received top prizes in the 2006 Corpus Christi International String Competition, the Skokie Valley Symphony Young Artists’ Competition, and Wisconsin Public Radio’s Neale-Silva Young Artists’ Competition. He has also won competitions at the Music Academy of the West and the Chicago Youth Symphony. As a chamber musician, Mr. Geller has appeared at the Marlboro Music Festival, Alice Tully Hall, and the Taos School of Music in New Mexico. He earned his Master of Music degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Donald Weilerstein and Cho-Liang Lin. Mr. Geller plays a violin made in 1783 by Nicolò Gagliano II, on loan from a benefactor.

Jennifer Haas joined the violin section of The Philadelphia Orchestra during the 2001-02 season. A Delaware native, she began studying privately at the age of three. She furthered her studies with at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she received a Bachelor of Music degree. Ms. Haas has appeared as soloist with numerous American orchestras and has won several prominent competitions, both locally and nationally. She made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut as a winner of the Robin Hood Dell Guild Audition. Ms. Haas currently is on the faculties of Temple University and the Wilmington Music School.

John Koen, cello, has been a member of The Philadelphia Orchestra since 1990. A member of the Mondrian Ensemble and the Network for New Music, he has also performed with 1807 & Friends. He has appeared as soloist with the New Symphony Orchestra of Sofia, Bulgaria, and he also appears regularly as a soloist with the Lansdowne Symphony, of which he is principal cello. He was a nominee for the 1998 Gay/Lesbian American Music Awards for his performance of Robert Maggio’s Winter Toccata on the recording Seven Mad Gods. Mr. Koen graduated from Curtis following studies with David Soyer and Peter Wiley, and with at the New School of Music. In 1988 Mr. Koen performed in the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra as solo cellist on European tours with , Leonard Bernstein, and Sergiu Celibidache.

Angela Zator Nelson, associate principal timpani and section percussion, joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1999 as the first female percussionist ever hired by the Orchestra. A native of the Chicago area, she holds a master’s degree from Temple University and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. Ms. Nelson performs regularly with the Network for New Music and the Philadelphia Orchestra Percussion Group, and she has premiered and recorded the first five of George Crumb’s American Songbooks. She has participated in numerous music festivals and performed as marimba soloist with several orchestras. Ms. Nelson is on the faculty of Temple University and she has presented classes at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. She also performs regularly with her husband, percussionist David Nelson, and as part of the Bob Beach Trio.

Anthony Orlando, associate principal percussion, joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1972. Prior to his appointment, he was principal percussion and/or timpanist with the Grand Teton Music Festival, the Ballet Orchestra, the Lyric Opera Orchestra, and the Greater Trenton Symphony. He has appeared with the Penn Contemporary Players, and he currently performs with the Network for New Music. Mr. Orlando played drums in a rock band before studying percussion at the Philadelphia Music Academy with Michael Bookspan; he was also an associate fellow at Tanglewood. He was a faculty member of the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts and the New School of Music and now teaches privately. He has given clinics in orchestral percussion at most area universities, as well as at the Oberlin Percussion Institute and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, among others.