Season 20102010----20112011

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Thursday, January 131313,13 , at 8:00 Saturday, January 151515,15 , at 8:00

Gianandrea Noseda Conductor David Kim Juliette Kang Violin

Respighi Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 3 I. Italiana II. Arie di corte III. Siciliana IV. Passacaglia

Bach Concerto in D minor for Two and String Orchestra, BWV 1043 I. Vivace II. Largo, ma non tanto III. Allegro

Intermission

Dvořák Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88 I. Allegro con brio II. Adagio—Poco più animato—Tempo I. Meno mosso III. Allegretto grazioso—Coda: Molto vivace IV. Allegro, ma non troppo

This program runs approximately 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Gianandrea Noseda currently serves as music director of the Teatro Regio in Turin, chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, Victor de Sabata Guest Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, principal conductor of the Orquesta de Cadaqués, and artistic director of the Stresa Festival. Formerly principal guest conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic from 1999 to 2003 and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI from 2003 to 2006, he became the first foreign principal guest conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1997 and later was co-founder and principal conductor of the Mariinsky Young Philharmonic.

Born in Milan, Mr. Noseda appears all over the world with orchestras such as the New York, Oslo, and philharmonics, and the Chicago, Boston, London, and NHK symphonies. In Italy he regularly conducts the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, the Filarmonica della Scala, and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra. Future engagements include his debuts with the National Symphony in Washington and the Orchestre de . He made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut this past December.

Mr. Noseda is an exclusive Chandos recording artist and his extensive discography includes music by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Karlowitz, Dvořák, Smetana, Shostakovich, and Mahler. He has also made recordings of works by such Italian composers as Respighi, Dallapiccola, Wolf-Ferrari, and Casella, in addition to a complete cycle of Liszt’s symphonic works. Mr. Noseda’s recordings with the BBC Philharmonic on Chandos include live performances of Beethoven’s complete symphonies as well as the complete symphonies of Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Brahms.

Mr. Noseda works closely with youth orchestras worldwide, including the Joven Orquesta Nacional de España, the Orchestra of the Royal College of Music in London, the National Youth Orchestra of the United Kingdom, the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana of Fiesole, and the European Union Youth Orchestra. For his activity in Italy and abroad, Mr. Noseda has received the honor of Cavaliere Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.

Mr. Noseda’s appearances are made possible by the kind permission of the Metropolitan Opera.

Violinist David Kim was named concertmaster of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1999. Born in Carbondale, Illinois, in 1963, he started playing the violin at the age of three, began studies with the famed pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the age of eight, and later received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Juilliard School. In 1986 he was the only American violinist to win a prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Mr. Kim was founder and, for 20 years ending in 2008, artistic director of the Kingston Chamber Music Festival at the University of Rhode Island, from which he also was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Arts in 2001. In conjunction with the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, he founded an annual outreach program that took him to elementary schools, performing and speaking about classical music in an effort to cultivate future audiences. In the State of Rhode Island alone, he performed for well over 12,000 young people during his tenure there. He continues to devote a portion of his schedule each year to bringing classical music to children and visits numerous schools in the Philadelphia area.

Mr. Kim appears as soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra each season, as well as with numerous orchestras around the world. Conductors with whom he has performed include Myung-Whun Chung, Christoph von Dohnányi, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Vladimir Jurowski, Peter Oundjian, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. Mr. Kim also appears internationally at festivals such as MasterWorks (USA) and Pacific (Japan), and he is a member of the Kumho Art Hall Chamber Music Society in Seoul, Korea.

The latest additions to Mr. Kim’s discography are The Lord Is My Shepherd, a collection of sacred works for violin and piano with pianist and composer Paul S. Jones, and Encore, a collection of recital favorites with pianist Gail Niwa.

Mr. Kim’s instrument is a J.B. Guadagnini from Milan, Italy, ca. 1757 on loan from The Philadelphia Orchestra. He resides in a suburb of Philadelphia with his wife, Jane, and his daughters, Natalie and Maggie. For more information, please visit www.davidkimviolin.com.

A native of Edmonton, Canada, Juliette Kang came to Philadelphia as first associate concertmaster from the Boston Symphony, where she served as assistant concertmaster from 2003 to 2005. Prior to that, she was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra from 2001 to 2003. During the 1999-2000 season, she was principal second violin with the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra.

Ms. Kang was the gold medalist in the 1994 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. In 1989, at age 13, she was a Young Concert Artists Audition winner, leading to recitals at New York City’s 92nd Street Y and at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in Washington, D.C. She won the Grand Prize at the Menuhin Violin Competition in Paris in 1992. Ms. Kang has been awarded numerous Canadian prizes and grants, including the Sylva Gelber Award of the Canada Council for the Arts, given annually to the most talented Canadian artist under age 30. In 1994 she was profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine as one of 30 people under 30 “most likely to change the culture over the next 30 years.” Ms. Kang holds a Master of Music degree from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Dorothy DeLay and Robert Mann. She began violin studies at the age of four, and six years later she entered the Curtis Institute of Music as a student of Jascha Brodsky.

Ms. Kang has performed chamber music at numerous summer festivals and her solo engagements have included appearances with the orchestras of Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto, Baltimore, Montreal, Detroit, Indianapolis, Calgary, and Edmonton, as well as with the Boston Pops, the Hong Kong and Czech philharmonics, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, and the National Arts Centre Orchestra.

An accomplished recitalist, Ms. Kang has performed in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Tokyo at Suntory Hall, in Boston at the Gardner Museum, and in New York at the Frick Museum. In 1996 her recital at Carnegie Hall was recorded and released on the Samsung/Nices label. She has also recorded on the CBC label.

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1931 Respighi Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 3 Music Varèse Ionisation LiteLiteraturerature Buck The Good Earth Art Brancusi Mlle. Pogany History First trans-African railroad line completed Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 3

Ottorino Respighi Born in Bologna, July 9, 1879 Died in Rome, April 18, 1936

Respighi’s work as a composer often overlapped with his interest in earlier music. He composed a Piano Concerto employing the ancient mixolydian mode, wrote a ballet suite for Diaghilev ( The Fantastic Toyshop ) based on melodies borrowed from Rossini, and penned a suite of pieces called The Birds that utilized Baroque compositions imitative of birds. But chief among Respighi’s compositions that mined the past were three suites based largely on lute and guitar pieces from the Renaissance. He composed the first of these—Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 1—in 1917, at the height of his popularity as a composer, and the second a few years later.

The last of them, Suite No. 3, came in 1931 and was the final composition of Respighi’s to achieve repertoire status. Unlike the others, it is scored for strings alone, and more than one commentator has noted that both the tunes Respighi chose and the manner in which he arranged them reflect a kind of honeyed melancholy not found in the earlier suites. The Third Suite is in four movements. The first, Italiana, is a slim piece in moderate three. The tune comes from an anonymous 16th-century lute song, or vocal work accompanied by the lute.

The second movement, Arie di corte (Airs of the Court), is a suite within the Suite. In a movement nearly as long as all the others combined, six lute songs of Jean-Baptiste Besard, French court composer of the late 16th century, are treated to a string of brief settings. The whole is framed by one of them, the plaintive “It is sad to be in love with you.” This opens and closes the movement in a doleful mood. Between, in the order they are heard, are: “Farewell forever, shepherdess,” a rather gleeful goodbye, filled with promises of future amorous meetings; “Lovely eyes that see clearly,” which follows immediately and closes quickly and wistfully; “The skiff of love,” a warm meditation in the strings’ lower register; “What divinity touches my soul,” a very short, rapid back-and-forth of pizzicato statements and bowed answers; and “It is for my innocence that you love me,” an exuberant piece in a broad six-four.

The third movement is a stately Siciliana from an anonymous source, slower and more sedate than the Italiana, though at length it rises to the first true dramatic peak of the entire Suite. The early guitar music of 17th-century Italian Ludovico Roncalli forms the basis of the closing Passacaglia, made by Respighi into a real post-Romantic composition, as close to Jean Sibelius as it is to the Renaissance.

—Kenneth LaFave

The Third Suite of the Ancient Airs and Dances for Lute was composed in 1931.

The first complete Philadelphia Orchestra performances of Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 3, were in April 1971, conducted by Roberto Benzi. Eugene Ormandy led the second movement alone in November and December 1945. The complete Suite was last performed on the Orchestra’s Glorious Sound of Christmas Concerts in December 2007, led by Rossen Milanov.

The Philadelphians recorded the Arie di corte only in 1946 with Ormandy for CBS.

Respighi scored the work for strings alone.

Performance time is approximately 18 minutes.

Concerto in D minor for Two Violins

Johann Sebastian Bach Born iiinin Eisenach, March 21, 1685 Died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750

Bach’s preeminence as a composer of sacred music has long invited mystified accounts of his musical career. He has often been cast as a “Fifth Evangelist,” taking divine dictation from God. Notwithstanding his deep faith, Bach was a practical, practicing musician, who hailed from a long line of musicians. He had to please both secular and religious employers at different phases of his life. Most of his organ music, for example, came early in his career, when he was employed as a church organist in Weimar. Beginning in 1717, when he was appointed Kapellmeister (court conductor) in Cöthen, he created a large quantity of instrumental music, including his famous Brandenburg Concertos.

InstrumenInstrumenttttalal Offerings Bach moved in 1723 to Leipzig, where his principal duties shifted once again to producing religious music, although he continued composing a great amount of secular music. Many instrumental pieces were written for the Collegium Musicum, a group Georg Philipp Telemann had founded in 1702 and which Bach took over in 1729. Throughout his maturity he wrote keyboard pieces for his many children and also explored more purely compositional issues in large-scale projects such as the two books of the Well- Tempered Clavier, A Musical Offering, and The Art of the Fugue.

Despite his commanding position in music history since the 19th century, Bach was relatively unrecognized in his own time and for more than a half century after his death. It is not surprising therefore that many of his works were lost, and that little background information is known about many of his surviving pieces. Dating his output has proved a formidable problem that has occupied generations of scholars. Although the Concerto performed on tonight’s concert is traditionally viewed as dating from Bach’s Cöthen years, musicologist Christoph Wolff has recently made a compelling case, based both on manuscript evidence and stylistic considerations, that the work was in fact written in Leipzig, perhaps around 1730.

One of the ways that Bach arrived at the forms and styles for his concertos was by looking to earlier models, mainly Italian and specifically those by the celebrated Venetian Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). Indeed, some of Bach’s concertos were arrangements of pieces by Vivaldi that he adapted for different instruments. Likewise, Bach on occasion transformed his own violin concertos into ones for keyboard. He arranged the Concerto we hear tonight for two harpsichords, transposing the piece down a whole-step (Concerto in C minor, BWV 1062).

A Closer Look The work is popularly known as the “Double ,” although Bach’s own title page reads “Concerto à 6, 2 Violini Concertini, 2 Violini e 1 Viola Ripieni, Violoncello e Continuo.” This is, in fact, chamber music, most likely originally performed by just eight musicians, with two of the four violins featured with and against the rest of the ensemble.

Baroque concertos are typically based on so-called ritornello form. As the name suggests— “a little thing that returns”— relatively short passages of music played by the entire ensemble alternate with sections dominated by the soloists. Bach particularly admired Vivaldi’s handling of this form and learned from the older Italian composer. The is in three movements, with a lyrical slow movement framed by two fast ones.

As befits a double concerto pairing the same instrument, the opening movement Vivace begins fugally and sustains its relentless energy throughout. The heart-rending Largo, ma non troppo is in a contrasting major key and 12/8 meter, featuring the two violin soloists in continuing dialogue. The Concerto concludes with an intense AllegroAllegro,,,, somewhat different from Bach’s usual approach in that it does not have a dance-like character.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

The Concerto in D minor for Two Violins was probably composed around 1730.

Fritz Scheel led the first Philadelphia Orchestra performance of the Concerto, on March 21, 1902, with Elkan Kosman and Cornelius Franke. The work has been performed by the Orchestra fewer than a dozen times since then. The last subscription performances were in April 1953, with violinists Jacob Krachmalnick and David Madison and Eugene Ormandy on the podium. More recently, the piece was heard at the Mann Center in July 1977 with violinists Henryk Szeryng (who also conducted) and David Arben.

The score calls for harpsichord, strings, and two solo violins.

The Concerto runs approximately 15 minutes in performance.

Symphony No. 8

Antonín Dvořák Born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, September 8, 1841 Died in Prague, May 1, 1904

The late 1880s constituted a sort of golden era in Dvořák’s career, a period in which he solidified his position as Bohemia’s preeminent composer and at the same time made essential strides toward establishing himself as a musician of international significance. Some of his works, such as the Slavonic Dances (which were considered charming and quaint by non-Czechs), were selling briskly throughout Europe, in German editions by the publisher Simrock. And although the Vienna Opera had rejected his stage works The Cunning Peasant and Dimitrij, the celebrated conductor Hans Richter (a friend and champion of the music of Brahms as well) had enthusiastically promoted works such as the Symphonic Variations. Most important, Dvořák’s music had sparked the imagination of the English concert public—and the commissions, performances, and conducting engagements in England did much toward furthering his international reputation.

A “Summery” and Cheerful Work Dvořák’s stormy, Brahmsian D-minor Symphony (No. 7) had created a stir in 1885, both at home and abroad. Inspired immeasurably by the reaction to it, in 1889 the composer set about sketching the symphony that in many ways represented the pinnacle of his Czech years—the last major orchestral work he was to complete before embarking for New York in 1892. The Eighth is very unlike either the Seventh or the Ninth (the “New World”): It is cheerful in the manner of Brahms’s Second Symphony, yet in many ways is Dvořák’s most self-consciously “Czech” symphony. It was begun at Vysoká, the family’s Bohemian summer home, in September 1889, shortly after the finishing touches had been put on the E-flat Piano Quartet. The idyllic setting of Vysoká has caused many writers to comment on a sort of “summery” quality in the Eighth; it indeed contains some of Dvořák’s most uncomplicatedly joyous music.

The Symphony was performed the following February in Prague’s Rudolfinum, under the composer’s baton. The acclaim, both critical and popular, was hearty and vigorous. Richter was so taken with the piece that he took it up and performed it in London and in Vienna in 1890 and ’91. “My dear, bad friend,” he wrote to Dvořák in Prague after one of these concerts. “You certainly would have been happy with this performance. We all felt that this was a splendid work, and thus we were all very enthusiastic. Brahms dined with me after the performance and we drank to the health of the unfortunately absent ‘father’ of the ‘Symphony No. 4.’ … The success was warm and sincere.” (Because the Eighth was the fourth of Dvořák’s symphonies to be published, it was called “No. 4” for many years.)

The Eighth was printed in 1892—not by Simrock of , with whom Dvořák had quarreled in recent years, but by Novello in London. The degree of the composer’s satisfaction with the piece can be gauged by his submission of the work for—as he writes on the title page— “acceptance into the Czech Academy of Emperor Franz Joseph, for Science, Literature, and the Arts.” In 1890 Dvořák was elected to the prestigious Academy, membership in which functioned as a sort of conclusive badge of “arrival” for artistic and literary professionals in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A Closer Look The flute plays a prominent role in the Eighth, which some have suggested is an echo of a bird song Dvořák might have heard that summer at Vysoká. After an introductory subject by clarinet, bassoon, and cello, the solo flute presents the lilting principal theme of the opening movement (AllegroAllegro con briobrio), which is taken up by the whole orchestra. The discursive transition ensues, somewhat apart from the theme, until an assertive theme in B minor is introduce by flutes and clarinets. The plaintive introduction returns to usher in the elaborate development section, and then yet again (fortissimo) at the beginning of the recapitulation. The flute comes to the fore again in the Adagio, a reflective movement that one could easily construe as an evocation of the Bohemian countryside. Likewise the Allegretto grazioso is a quiet country dance, whose placement in the key of G minor comes to us as only vaguely disquieting.

The finale (Allegretto,Allegretto, ma non troppotroppo), announced by two trumpets, is a set of variations on a theme (presented by cellos) that grows directly from the first movement’s opening flute subject. The theme undergoes a variety of configurations, with the length of each variation determined by the nature of the developing material; even the introductory trumpet call is woven into the fabric at one point. Dvořák’s conclusive working-out of the simple theme, which has lingered in the ear since the opening movement, makes this one of his most satisfyingly “organic” finales.

—Paul J. Horsley

Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony was composed in 1889.

The first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of the Eighth Symphony took place in January 1955, with Thor Johnson on the podium. Most recently on subscription it was played in March 2009, under the baton of Neeme Järvi.

The Orchestra has recorded the Eighth twice: in 1977 with Eugene Ormandy for RCA and in 1989 with Wolfgang Sawallisch for EMI.

The Symphony is scored for two flutes (II doubling piccolo), two oboes (II doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

The Eighth runs approximately 35 minutes in performance.

Program notes © 2011. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.