27 Season 2012-2013

Monday, December 31, at 7:30 The Philadelphia Orchestra

Yannick Nézet-Séguin Conductor Todd Burnsed Dancer Michele Camaya Dancer Mark Stuart Dancer Ron Todorowski Dancer Jaime Verazin Dancer

R. Strauss Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59

Haydn Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp minor (“Farewell”) I. Allegro assai II. Adagio III. Menuet: Allegretto IV. Presto—Adagio

Intermission

J. Strauss, Jr. “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” , Op. 314

Brahms Hungarian No. 1 in G minor

Shostakovich Waltz 2, from Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1

Satie/orch. Debussy Gymnopédie No. 3

Falla “Ritual Fire Dance,” from El amor brujo

J. Strauss, Jr. “Champagne” , Op. 211

Bernstein/orch. Ramin & Kostal “Mambo,” from West Side Story

This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes.

The dancers on tonight’s program appear under the auspices of Dance Affiliates, Randy Swartz, artistic director. 228 Story Title The Philadelphia Orchestra Jessica Griffin

Renowned for its distinctive vivid world of opera and Orchestra boasts a new sound, beloved for its choral music. partnership with the keen ability to capture the National Centre for the Philadelphia is home and hearts and imaginations Performing Arts in . the Orchestra nurtures of audiences, and admired The Orchestra annually an important relationship for an unrivaled legacy of performs at Carnegie Hall not only with patrons who “firsts” in music-making, and the Kennedy Center support the main season The Philadelphia Orchestra while also enjoying a at the Kimmel Center for is one of the preeminent three-week residency in the Performing Arts but orchestras in the world. Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and also those who enjoy the a strong partnership with The Philadelphia Orchestra’s other area the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Orchestra has cultivated performances at the Mann Festival. an extraordinary history of Center, Penn’s Landing, artistic leaders in its 112 and other venues. The The ensemble maintains seasons, including music Philadelphia Orchestra an important Philadelphia directors Fritz Scheel, Carl Association also continues tradition of presenting Pohlig, Leopold Stokowski, to own the Academy of educational programs for Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Music—a National Historic students of all ages. Today Muti, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Landmark—as it has since the Orchestra executes a and Christoph Eschenbach, 1957. myriad of education and and Charles Dutoit, who community partnership Through concerts, served as chief conductor programs serving nearly tours, residencies, from 2008 to 2012. With 50,000 annually, including presentations, and the 2012-13 season, its Neighborhood Concert recordings, the Orchestra Yannick Nézet-Séguin Series, Sound All Around is a global ambassador becomes the eighth music and Family Concerts, and for Philadelphia and for director of The Philadelphia eZseatU. the United States. Having Orchestra. Named music been the first American For more information on director designate in 2010, orchestra to perform in The Philadelphia Orchestra, Nézet-Séguin brings a China, in 1973 at the please visit www.philorch.org. vision that extends beyond request of President Nixon, symphonic music into the today The Philadelphia

29 Dancers

Todd Burnsed, an area native, graduated from the Juilliard School. He has toured with Moses Pendleton’s MOMIX, the Next Stage Project, and ’s Movin’ Out. Other credits include Come Fly Away on Broadway, Dirty Dancing in , the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, and the Metropolitan Opera. As a freelance artist he has also worked with Paul Taylor, Hans van Manen, Katherine Helen Fisher, Daniel Ezralow, Igal Perry, and Doug Varone.

Michele Camaya has toured in Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away, Fame (first national tour), ! (first national and Japan), and The Lion King (first national, Broadway, and Las Vegas). She can be seen dancing in the Disney movie Enchanted and Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of Geisha. She was the runner up on Bravo’s Step It Up & Dance. She is a founding member of Mark Stuart Dance Theatre.

Mark Stuart’s and performances have been featured in films, commercials, music videos, on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall, and at Lincoln Center. He recently served as choreographer on the Diesel: Fuel for Life television ad campaign. He currently appears in a Revlon commercial with Olivia Wilde and served as assistant choreographer for the world-premiere Broadway musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. He is the recipient of the 2011 BroadwayWorld Award for Choreography for The Wiz. 30 Dancers

Ron Todorowski was resident director on the first national tour of Come Fly Away, along with playing two principal roles. He has been a member of Complexions Contemporary , Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, the Parsons Dance Company, and Mia Michaels’s dance company RAW. He has appeared in the Broadway shows Come Fly Away, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Movin’ Out, Wicked, Guys and Dolls, and Footloose. He also appeared in the London and first national tour of Movin’ Out, receiving a Helen Hayes Award for Best Actor in a musical. He was the assistant choreographer for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Lyric Theater in Oklahoma City and Celine Dion’s A New Day in Las Vegas.

Jaime Verazin danced professionally with MOMIX, performing both nationally and internationally. In commercials she can be seen representing Hanes, Revlon, and Carioca Coffee. She danced for three seasons with the Metropolitan Opera, where she performed the non-vocal lead role Love in Rossini’s Armida. She now freelances with choreographers Mark Stuart, Mark Dendy, Brice Mousset, Adam Battelstein, John Rua, and Katherine Helen Fisher.

32 The Music Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

“Light, flowing tempi,” wrote Strauss of the manner in which one should approach the performance of his opera Der Rosenkavalier, “without compelling the singers to rattle off the text. In a word: Mozart, not Lehár.” Indeed Strauss’s incomparable opera has a uniquely lyrical quality that for many listeners is more serious than comic— perhaps the 18th-century term “semi-seria” should be called into service here, a word that was used to describe comic opera with a foundation of profundity. (Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro comes to mind.) Strauss composed Richard Strauss Rosenkavalier during 1909 and 1910, working closely Born in Munich, June 11, with his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; it was the 1864 second of their six collaborations, and from an artistic Died in Garmisch- standpoint the most successful. Already lionized by Partenkirchen, the German public—partly as a result of the immense September 8, 1949 popularity of his salacious shocker Salome—Strauss was surprised to see the successes of Rosenkavalier nearly surpass those of his earlier Greek tragedy. It was first performed at the Dresden Court Theater in January 1911; it was gobbled up by the public and at the same time snatched up by theaters all over Europe. To this day it remains Strauss’s most popular opera. Set in the 18th-century Vienna of Empress Maria Theresia, Rosenkavalier is permeated with waltz (even though the waltz as genre did not come into being until the later 18th century, at the very earliest). The piece is full of wistful romance, with a serious undercurrent of sadness, and this is heard in the music. Several instrumental suites have been spawned from this glorious music, including a background score for a silent-film version of the opera that Strauss himself prepared in 1926. In 1945 the conductor Artur Rodzinski created an orchestral suite for performance with the New York Philharmonic, which was approved by Strauss himself and which quickly became a favorite of Eugene Ormandy and of Philadelphia Orchestra audiences. The Suite includes the prelude to Act I, the presentation of the silver rose, the arrival of Baron von Ochs in Act II, the second-act waltzes, and finally the duet, trio, waltz, and the “Ist ein Traum” duet from Act III. —Paul J. Horsley 33 The Music Symphony No. 45

Franz Joseph Haydn, hailed as the “Father of the Symphony,” came to the genre surprisingly late, after he had already written a great deal of other kinds of music. Yet over the course of his long career he wrote more than 100 symphonies. He did not, of course, really “invent” the symphony, but he is nonetheless its “father,” the composer who elevated the genre to a new artistic status and who established the standards and practices that Mozart, Beethoven, and later composers would both follow and break.

Franz Joseph Haydn Not only did it take Haydn some time to begin immersing Born in Rohrau, Lower himself in symphonic writing, but there also were periods Austria, March 31, 1732 when he composed relatively few of them, concentrating Died in Vienna, May 31, instead on other music. His output at various points in his 1809 career tended to reflect the demands of his job at the time. He spent most of his professional life in the service of the exceeding rich Esterházy family. Since Prince Nikolaus Esterházy played the baryton (a cello-like instrument), Haydn wrote some 125 baryton trios, now long forgotten. The family employed its own orchestra, presented plays and operas, and was a remarkable patron of the arts. The work we hear tonight is one of the best known of Haydn’s earlier symphonies. The Symphony in F-sharp minor was composed in November 1772 for Prince Esterházy. It is an unusual work in many respects, beginning with the key in which it was written, unheard of for any other symphony of the period. It is the extraordinary last movement that has earned the work its nickname “Farewell,” which was applied to the Symphony as early as 1794. The last movement begins as a presto in what seems will be a lively finale in standard sonata form. But at the recapitulation the music suddenly slows down to a gentle adagio and the various instruments stop playing, in the end leaving only two solo violins. Already in performances in London and Paris during the 1790s it became the custom for the instrumentalists to leave the stage, although there is no such indication in the score. The idea behind the Symphony is typical of Haydn’s wit, but in the process he composed one of his most innovative and remarkable symphonies. —Christopher H. Gibbs 34 The Music “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” Waltz

The world’s most famous waltz began as a commission from a Viennese men’s choral organization. The text was a simple verse in praise of the Danube River. Johann Strauss, Jr., known as the Waltz King, composed it in 1867, while living at 54 Praterstrasse with his first wife, Jetty. The is now the site of a Strauss museum. The premiere, in the version with men’s chorus, was greeted indifferently. But when Strauss introduced an all- orchestral version in concert later that year at the Vienna Johann Strauss, Jr. Volksgarten in the inner city, the lilting strains of this Born in Vienna, irresistible waltz shot to immediate popularity. The “Blue October 25, 1825 Danube” is now the unofficial second national anthem of Died there, June 3, 1899 Austria, and is inescapable when talking of, or thinking about, Vienna. After a slow, dramatic introduction in A major, the piece settles down into the customary tempo di valse in gracious D major. The now-familiar melody swells from the chords of the key as naturally as waves might from the river Danube itself. The famous opening notes are nothing more than a D-major chord arpeggiated, and this gesture continues throughout the waltz’s first strain. The rest of the waltz grows naturally out of the opening. Even the reflective slow section in F major starts by outlining an ascending F-major chord, while the brilliant coda piles arpeggiated triad upon arpeggiated triad until the end comes in an irresistible frenzy. Almost universally praised as the greatest waltz ever composed, the “Blue Danube” is a little tone poem in waltz form, a picture of the river and of the life along the river. The distinguished music critic Eduard Hanslick called it “the definition of all that is Vienna: beautiful, pleasant, and merry.” Strauss’s friend, the great composer Johannes Brahms, once autographed a copy of the score to the “Blue Danube” with the words, “Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.” —Kenneth LaFave 35 The Music Hungarian Dance No. 1

The patterns of migration that are often brought about by war, famine, or social upheaval can play a vital role in the cultural cross-fertilization with which art continually renews itself. Thousands of Hungarians fled Europe after the Austrians quashed an uprising of 1848; a great many of them set sail from or stayed and lived in Brahms’s hometown, the port city of Hamburg. It was thus that the young Brahms had his first contact around 1850 with the alla zingarese (gypsy) style. The 19th-century craze for this dashing musical style of the czárdás, the lassu, and Johannes Brahms the friss pervaded all Europe. Born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833 Brahms was especially fascinated with the music’s Died in Vienna, April 3, extremes of rubato (rhythmic “give-and-take”) and its 1897 irregular, complex meters. Through his friendship with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Hoffmann (known as Reményi), with whom he toured Europe in the early 1850s as piano accompanist, the composer not only learned the zingarese style of playing but also became acquainted with a large number of the tunes—many of which were appearing in popular published collections. Brahms began his Ungarische Tänze (Hungarian ) in 1852, while still in his teens and over the next 17 years he set 21 numbers for piano four-hands. Three of these were original compositions in the style of the romany music; the rest were settings of gypsy tunes in various combinations. These dances were enormously popular and not only enjoyed brisk sales but also inspired widespread imitation; even Dvorˇák acknowledged his debt to them when he prepared the publication of his own Slavonic Dances, also first conceived for piano duet. Brahms himself orchestrated only three of the dances, Nos. 1, 3, and 10, in 1873—the first of which is heard on this evening’s program. —Paul J. Horsley 36 The Music Waltz 2, from Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1

What’s in a name? A waltz is a waltz is a waltz. But when it comes to the origin of Shostakovich’s Waltz 2, the proper name is a puzzle. For decades, the eight-part suite that contains Waltz 2 was thought to be the Jazz Suite No. 2, composed in 1938 and referred to by the composer in correspondence. But in 1999 the long-lost autograph score of Jazz Suite No. 2 was found and lo and behold, it contained no Waltz 2, nor even a Waltz 1. Jazz Suite No. 2 was actually a three-movement work of remarkably different character than the eight-part suite. Subsequently, Dmitri Shostakovich what had formerly been Jazz Suite No. 2 was now Born in St. Petersburg, renamed Suite for Variety Orchestra. September 25, 1906 Died in Moscow, August 9, “Variety” certainly fits the feeling of the waltz more 1975 appropriately than “jazz.” There’s nothing at all jazzy about this melody, which glides sweetly about in the manner of Franz Lehár or Emil Waldteufel. The main gesture is a simple downward motion, first in C minor, then in E-flat major. The plunging line does not, however, create a sad or depressing mood, but a strangely uplifting one; the sensation is of a petal falling or birds swooping low. The Waltz 2 was first performed in a Western country on December 1, 1988, in London’s Barbican Hall, when conductor Mstislav Rostropovich premiered the Suite then named Jazz Suite No. 2. It was an immediate success with pops audiences. Director Stanley Kubrick later used it ironically in his film Eyes Wide Shut, while the non- ironic performance by André Rieu’s band gets audiences dancing along. In retrospect researchers might have known that the Waltz 2 did not hail from 1938, since it forms an important part of Shostakovich’s score to the 1955 film The First Echelon. Clips including the waltz can be viewed on YouTube. —Kenneth LaFave 37 The Music Gymnopédie No. 3

In December 1887, eccentric young Parisian musician Erik Satie visited the famous Chat Noir nightclub for the first time. When the club’s owner asked him his profession, the shy and self-effacing Satie declined to answer “composer” and answered instead “gymnopaedist”—a word without distinct meaning, but connoting, from roots in ancient Greek, someone who dances with “naked (gymn) feet (ped).” Three months later Satie composed a set of three leisurely piano pieces in three-four time that he called Gymnopédies, apparently in honor of his faux-profession. Erik Satie Born in Honfleur, France, An admirer of Satie’s music, Claude Debussy attempted May 17, 1866 to help his destitute friend by orchestrating two of the Died in Paris, July 1, 1925 Gymnopédies in 1898. Pronouncing the second of them intrinsically pianistic and therefore unfit for orchestration, Debussy set the first and third, but reversed the numbering inadvertently. Thus, many amateur pianists will recognize this Gymnopédie No. 3 as Gymnopédie No. 1. In gentle D major, the work sways back and forth between two chords as a wandering melody laces itself in and out of the harmonic texture. Debussy’s orchestration fills in many of the empty moments in Satie’s original. The piano piece is a study in bare outline, while the orchestration swells with sustained strings, horns, and harp. The orchestration helped Satie’s piano pieces achieve a certain popularity during the composer’s lifetime. —Kenneth LaFave 38 The Music “Ritual Fire Dance,” from El amor brujo

For Manuel de Falla, a sense of regional or ethnic identity was central to one’s creative being. Born in Andalusia of a Valencian father and Catalonian mother, Falla absorbed influences not only from the Andalusian and gypsy folk music he heard around him as a boy, but also from traditional operatic and orchestral music he heard in his native town of Cádiz. Significantly, the music of Edvard Grieg fired young Falla’s imagination when he first encountered it in the 1890s—especially Grieg’s way of infusing traditional styles with the folk materials of the Manuel de Falla Norwegian peoples. Born in Cádiz, Spain, November 23, 1876 Falla experimented with the zarzuela, an informal type Died in Alta Gracia, of Spanish comic opera prevalent in the 18th century. Argentina, November 14, He also composed a number of songs in folk idioms, 1946 which were extraordinarily popular. But his crowning achievement in the area of folkloric song was the “opera-ballet” El amor brujo. The impetus for the work’s inception came from Pastora Imperio, one of the great gypsy-Andalusian dancers of her era. She approached the Spanish poet and choreographer Gregorio Martinez Sierra about a stage work to be danced and sung by her and members of her family. Imperio and her mother sang songs and told folkloric stories to Martinez and Falla; the composer carefully notated the songs and studied them. The piece first heard in Madrid in 1915, however, differed radically from the fully-scored version that is played today. The original Amor brujo was like an opera: It contained more songs and a more elaborately spun story line. The Madrid reception was chilly and the following year Falla expanded the orchestration and cut out many of the work’s songs and recitatives. The story of Love, the Magician (or “the sorcerer”) opens as the gypsy-woman Candelas “reads the cards” to see if they augur the return of her lover, Carmelo, whom she wishes to marry. The cards and the sound of the sea foretell evil. Obsessed with the idea that the spirit of her dead husband, who was a worthless scoundrel, will return to prevent her from remarrying, she casts a spell to conjure a she-spirit to draw the husband’s attention away from her. The spell works, and Carmelo returns to marry Candelas. —Paul Horsley 39 The Music “Champagne” Polka

It is said that Emperor Franz Joseph reigned over Austria only until Johann Strauss, Jr., died. So completely was Strauss’s music associated with the latter years of the Hapsburg Empire that it is now difficult to conceive of this era without also thinking of the music of the Waltz King. In fact, many music-lovers today know little of this period but Strauss’s music. Even during his lifetime Strauss was recognized as the master of the waltz—as the composer whose utmost mastery of this distinctly Viennese dance transformed it into something more resembling a concept Johann Strauss, Jr. than a dance. In addition to being the Waltz King, Johann Strauss also distinguished himself with “regal” contributions to the development of the 19th-century genres of polka and quadrille, publishing almost as many works in these genres as in the waltz—some 125 in all, and some 50 quadrilles, spanning the course of his entire 50-year career. The former type is represented this evening by the “Champagne” Polka. —Kenneth LaFave 40 The Music “Mambo,” from West Side Story

“Street brawls, double death—it all fits.” Thus the 30-year- old Leonard Bernstein had first mused over the idea of making Shakespeare’s classic into a Broadway musical. During the mid-1950s, when he and his collaborator, Arthur Laurents, began sketching out the piece that would become one of the most successful musicals of all time, the issue of juvenile crime was reaching epidemic proportions in America. And it was in this setting that Bernstein found the ideal backdrop for his love story—a musical that succeeded not just because of its wonderful Leonard Bernstein songs, but because it dealt in a subject matter that Born in Lawrence, yearned toward universality. Massachusetts, August 25, 1918 “The chief problem,” wrote the composer, “is to tread Died in , the fine line between opera and Broadway, between October 14, 1990 realism and poetry, ballet and ‘just dancing,’ abstract and representational … [to tell] a tragic story in musical- comedy terms.” West Side Story, which received its premiere in August 1957 in Washington’s National Theater, treads that line as effectively as any musical has. It was an enormous hit then, and it has remained a model for composers of musical theater for the entire 40 years since. “I am now convinced,” wrote the composer later, “that what we dreamed all these years is possible; because there stands that tragic love story, with a theme as profound as love versus hate.” A sense of impending doom is palpable throughout West Side Story, as it is in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—but it doesn’t prevent the principals from singing and dancing as if their lives depended on it. The “Mambo” is heard in the dance scene from Act I, where members of the rival gangs (the Jets and the Sharks) perform a “challenge dance,” and where Tony and Maria first meet. —Paul J. Horsley

Program notes © 2012. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or Kenneth LaFave. 41 January/February The Philadelphia Orchestra Jessica Griffin

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