BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Sunday, January 14, 2001, at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS Malcolm Lowe, violin Richard Svoboda, bassoon Steven Ansell, viola James Sommerville, horn Jules Eskin, cello Charles Schlueter, trumpet Edwin Barker, double bass Ronald Barron, trombone Jacques Zoon, flute Everett Firth, percussion William R. Hudgins, clarinet with KEISUKE WAKAO, oboe JONATHAN MENKIS, horn MARK McEWEN, oboe GREGG HENEGAR, contrabassoon CRAIG NORDSTROM, clarinet RANDALL HODGKINSON, piano SUZANNE NELSEN, bassoon ILAN VOLKOV, conductor SCHUBERT String Trio No. 1 (Allegro) in B-flat, D.471 Messrs. LOWE, ANSELL, and ESKIN KIRCHNER Music for Twelve (in two movements, played without pause) Messrs. LOWE, ANSELL, ESKIN, and BARKER; Messrs. ZOON, McEWEN, HUDGINS, and SVOBODA; Messrs. SOMMERVILLE, SCHLUETER, BARRON; Mr. HODGKINSON ILAN VOLKOV, conductor INTERMISSION BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7, arranged for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns, two bassoons, and contrabassoon Poco sostenuto—Vivace Allegretto Presto Allegro con brio Messrs. WAKAO, McEWEN, HUDGINS, NORDSTROM, SOMMERVILLE, MENKIS, SVOBODA; Ms. NELSEN; Mr. HENEGAR Baldwin piano Nonesuch, DG, Philips, RCA, and New World records Franz Schubert (1797-1828) String Trio No. 1 (Allegro) in B-flat, D.471 Schubert began two trios for the combination of violin, viola, and cello, both in the key of B-flat. The first was composed, though left incomplete, in September 1816. The sec- ond, his only finished string trio (D.581), followed it exactly a year later. Both were among the many Schubert works that remained almost entirely unknown after the com- poser's premature death. The earlier trio, D.471, remained unpublished until 1890. It is a relatively unprepossessing work illustrating the kind of lighthearted chamber music that Schubert wrote in his youth, largely for use in the circle of his family and friends, where music-making was a regular pastime. Yet it also seems to be aiming at a rather more elevated style, and it is probably significant that Schubert wrote it at about the same time as an overture in B-flat, in which he was consciously trying on Beethovenian wings {the chamber work and the overture grow out of a similar Allegro theme). Lyrical throughout, and covering a remarkably wide range of emotion, the completed move- ment shows the young genius—not yet out of his teens—aiming at a very high mark indeed. After completing the Allegro, Schubert wrote only a few bars of the slow move- ment and then, for reasons unknown, dropped the work. He never returned to it again. LeonKirchner (b.1919) Music for Twelve When the Boston Symphony Orchestra celebrated its hundredth birthday in 1981, a dozen commissions went out to as many composers. One of these was for a work to be written for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, and it naturally went to a com- poser whose works have included everything from solo songs to piano concertos, sym- phonic works, and opera, but whose chamber music has been especially honored. A native of Brooklyn (born January 24, 1919), Leon Kirchner received most of his education in southern California at a time when the cultural life in Los Angeles was marked by the presence of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and a host of writers and other cultured emigres from Europe. The young Kirchner attracted the attention of Ernst Toch, who suggested that he study composition with Schoenberg at UCLA. He later worked also with two of the other great American composer-teachers of this century, Ernest Bloch in Berkeley and Roger Sessions in New York. After military service, Kirch- ner finished his M.A. degree at Berkeley. He spent the years 1948-50 in New York, where he received the first wide acclaim for his music. From 1950 to 1961 he lived again on the west coast, teaching at the University of Southern California and at Mills College. He moved to Harvard in 1961, where he became Walter Bigelow Rosen Profes- sor of Music, retiring in 1989. During his Harvard years, he was also active as conductor of the Harvard Chamber Orchestra and Friends, which has considerably enriched the repertory of orchestral music performed in the Boston area, and he served on several occasions as composer-in-residence at Tanglewood. Kirchner's first two string quartets (1949, 1958) were given the New York Critics Circle award. His Piano Concerto No. 1 (1953, performed 1956) received the Naum- burg Award, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for his Third String Quartet (with elec- tronic tape, 1966). His output also includes other orchestral and chamber works, songs, solo piano pieces, and the opera Lily, based on Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King. In September 1997, Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Kirchner's "Of things exactly as they are" for chorus, soprano and bari- tone soloists, and orchestra; this was co-commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Current projects include a new piano work commis- sioned by the pianist Ralph Berkowitz, a benefactor to a variety of music organizations, Today's performance is given in memory of Arlene M. Jones. and who worked years back with the renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky as well as at Tanglewood; a piece for violin and piano in memory of Felix Galimir, to be given its premiere this summer at the Marlboro Festival by Pamela Frank and Claude Frank; and a new violin concerto commissioned by violinist Young-Uck Kim, to be premiered with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In Music for Twelve, Kirchner pursues the expressive ends that have always been part and parcel of his work: he has always desired his music to be received directly and with immediate impact. Changes of tempo or pace through metrical subdivision may lead to a new rhythmic state almost without the listener's noticing until it has been accomplished. Still more important for Kirchner is the importance of harmony, in which he seeks a "loveliness in verticality," the richness and beauty of the chords that was so much a part of the music of Schubert or Schumann (though, of course, his own harmonic language is quite different from theirs). He is troubled by separation of twelve-tone or serial music in recent decades from the "harmonic power, the struc- tural connectiveness" of the past. Certainly Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, innova- tive as they were in their harmonic complexity, were the heirs of a rich history in which composers demonstrated a full command of the way in which the melodic lines joined to make the vertical sonorities, which, in sequence, provided the means of shaping the piece as a whole. Kirchner notes that it is jazz musicians, who have never separated themselves from performance, who have most clearly retained the sense of the harmonic structure and its importance in their music. Music for Twelve is cast in two movements performed without break and connected by a dramatically expressive cello passage. Any chamber work composed on this large scale for an ensemble of so many diverse instruments (four strings, four woodwinds, three brass, and piano) inevitably conjures up the image of a chamber symphony and, in particular, the locus classicus, Schoenberg's Opus 9. In fact, the language of Music for Twelve here and there pays homage to the Schoenberg work, though this is, in Kirchner's words, "fleeting regard," not stylistic or structural imitation. It recalls, though, the model of a master as concerned with the vertical as with the horizontal elements of music, and with shape and expression, which are also the ideals of Leon Kirchner's art. Conductor Ilan Volkdv has been an assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since the start of the 1998-99 season and continues in that position through the summer of 2001. He made his BSO debut at Tanglewood in 1999, followed by his subscription series debut in January 2000* Born in Israel in 1976, Mr* Volkov began playing the violin at age six* He continued his violin studies with Chaim Taub, leader of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, while studying piano with Alexander Volkov and composition with Abel Ehrlich* From 1991 to 1993 he studied conducting with Mendi Rodan at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. In 1993 he went to England to study at the Royal Academy of Music with Colin Metters, George Hurst, Sir Colin Davis, and Ilya Musin. From 1996 to 1998 he was the Northern Sinfonia's Young Con- ductor in Association, during which time he had sole responsibility for the Young Sinfo- nia, Northern Sinfonia's youth orchestra, and also collaborated with composer John Casken to set up the contemporary music group Vaganza. In 1997 Mr. Volkov became principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. Last summer he served as assistant conductor to Sir Andrew Davis for a new Glyndebourne production of Le nozze dx Figaro. Recent engagements have included concerts with the New York Philharmonic and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. >-• • :. : Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No. 7, arranged for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns, two bassoons, and contrabassoon We are so aware of the Classical era as the time in which the symphony (based in the string family) and the string quartet rose to prominence that we often overlook the prominence of wind-based ensembles in that same period. For one thing, no army would have moved anywhere without its own wind band, partly for entertainment, largely for the more practical purpose of moving its units efficiently. In the cities, the air was filled with wind music, especially in the case of outdoor performances, since the sounds of a wind ensemble would carry much further in the open air than would the sounds of string instruments, which are also more prone to going out of tune or being damaged by inclement weather.