4f3eb6a22732b9.19341282

57FEBRUARY / MARCH 2012 MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA

Minnesota OrchestraOsmo Vänskä, conductor

Christian Tetzlaff, violin

Friday, March 16, 2012, 8 pm

Saturday, March 17, 2012, 8 pm

Orchestra Hall

Orchestra Hall

Jean Sibelius

Karol Szymanowski

Zoltán Kodály

I N T E R M I S S I O N ca. 20’

Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Opus 63 ca. 32’

Tempo molto moderato, quasi adagio

Allegro molto vivace

Il tempo largo

Allegro

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 35 ca. 23’

[In one movement]


Dances of Galánta (Galántai Táncok) ca. 16’

mar 16, 17Vänskä Conducts Sibelius

thank you With Friday’s concert, we recognize the support of General Mills Foundation.

Minnesota Orchestra concerts are broadcast live Friday evenings on stations of Minnesota Public Radio.

The concerts are also featured in American Public Media’s national programs, SymphonyCast and Performance Today.

Regional broadcasts are supported by the Minnesota Orchestra and by Patterson, Thuente, Skaar and Christensen.

M i n n e s o t a O r c h e s t r a All materials copyright © 2012 by the Minnesota Orchestra.

5858 MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA SHOWCASE

Osmo Vänskä, conductor

Profi le appears on page 14.


German violinist Christian Tetzlaff has garnered international acclaim for his interpretations of repertoire spanning the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and modern eras. He performs regularly with leading orchestras throughout the world.Minnesota Orchestra: Tetzlaff debuted with this Orchestra at Sommerfest 1996 and last appeared here in 2010, playing Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto under Osmo Vänskä’s direction. Current season: Highlights of his calendar include performances with the London Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Philharmonia Orchestra; tours with European orchestras that will take him to South America, Asia, France and Spain; a nationally televised performance at the Mostly Mozart Festival; and an East Coast recital tour with pianist Lars Vogt. Discography: Among his recent albums are Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic and string quartets of Schoenberg and Sibelius with the Tetzlaff Quartet.More: cmartists.com, christiantetzlaff.com.

Meet a MusicianRebecca Albers, viola3/16 at 7 pm3/17 at 7 pmOrchestra Hall Auditorium

Ask Osmo!3/17, post-concertStay after the Saturday night concert for a Q&A with Music Director Osmo Vänskä.

one-minute notesSibelius: Symphony No. 4 An enigma from the pre-World War I years, Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony is dark music from a dark moment in the composer’s life. The beginning question, elaborated by solo cello, is pondered throughout the work. The scherzo emerges as if from nowhere, and the Largo rises slowly, singing, to a Brucknerian climax. Before the fi nale’s brusque ending, it brims with ideas and the bright sonority of bells.

Szymanowski: Violin Concerto No. 1The First Violin Concerto of Szymanowski is a work of passion and lyricism. Its single movement opens with brilliant fl ashes of sound, then continues with hints of humor and extended passages of joyful, carefree song.

Kodály: Dances of GalántaThe composer memorializes Galánta, his boyhood home, imposing his own structure on fi ve dances the local gypsy band had played—haunting, majestic, stomping and whirling—producing a vivid image of yesteryear.

mar 16, 17 Artists



mar 16, 17Program Notes

ibelius’ Fourth Symphony comes from the time leading up to 1914, the year Europe went up in fl ames. It was also that most amazing moment in the history of Western music when composers as

diverse as Bartók, Berg, Busoni, Debussy, Elgar, Falla, Fauré, Ives, Kodály, Mahler, Nielsen, Prokofi ev, Puccini, Rachmaninoff , Ravel, Reger, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Sibelius, Strauss, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams and Webern gave us some of their greatest music.

We now think of Sibelius as inhabiting the more conservative end of that spectrum. He was in fact distressed by much of the new music by Bartók, Schoenberg and Stravinsky he encountered at this time. Nonetheless, when it was new, the Fourth Symphony was a hard nut to crack for even very experienced musicians, and we can say quite objectively that it is the most extreme point Sibelius reached as a composer of problematic “modern” music. It is one of those pieces that, like certain

Jean SibeliusBorn: December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland

Died: September 20, 1957, Järvenpää

Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Opus 63

works of Bach and late Beethoven, will always be new and challenging, and never “easy listening.”

Sibelius began work on the Symphony No. 4 in the spring of 1910 and completed the score early in 1911. He led the premiere in Helsinki on April 3, 1911.

a rich fund of experienceIn 1910 and 1911, Sibelius had a rich fund of human and musical experience to draw on. New people he had met (Mahler was one), new landscapes he had experienced, his country’s political situation, his survival despite a gloomy prognosis aft er cancer surgery: all these went to feed his artistic fantasy. Th e Fourth Symphony is a monument to a richly lived, deeply considered and by no means easy life.

Th ose things ghosting about the background of this symphony all tend to make one feel small, and so should the Fourth as a whole. Aloneness, a sense of the contrast between human and superhuman, the impact of concentrated experience—these are perhaps the images that, unbidden, lodged in Sibelius’ mind as he conceived and began to fi x the musical gestures of this unsettling masterwork.

tempo molto moderato, quasi adagio. He begins with a question. Basses and cellos, fortissimo but muted, together with bassoons sound a huge C, from which two other notes, D and F-sharp, detach themselves. Th e F-sharp falls back to E, and for a long time we hear only a rocking, back and forth, between these two pitches. It is the kraken’s roar. I have called it a question. Th ese four notes—C/D/E/F-sharp—are part of a whole-tone scale, an elusive, ambiguous creation all of whose intervals are alike, which therefore presents no articulation and has neither beginning nor end. Th is so-called tritone interval between the outer notes, C and F-sharp, is pungent, and medieval theorists called it diabolus in musica. It is an uncomfortable dissonance that demands resolution.

Th e most natural resolution is outward, to a perfect fi ft h, and that is eventually accomplished in this symphony—in the fi nale! For the time being, though, we must be satisfi ed with gnomic adumbrations of this possibility. We will also gradually discover that the music heard in the fi rst few minutes, including the solo cello melody, provides the stuff from which all the rest of the symphony will be drawn.

allegro molto vivace. When this questioning, almost slow

In 1911, when Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4 is fi rst performed: • Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen leads the fi rst

expedition to the South Pole • Physicist Marie Curie wins a Nobel Prize for her pioneering

research in radioactivity • The Indianapolis Motor Speedway holds its fi rst 500-mile

automobile race

Szymanowski ’s First Violin Concerto premieres in 1922, the year: • Warren G. Harding becomes the fi rst U.S. President to give

a speech broadcast by radio • British archaeologist Howard Carter discovers the entrance

to King Tutankhamen’s tomb • Russia and three neighboring republics form the

Soviet Union

at the same time...

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movement fi nds its end, the scherzo emerges from it at once. Th e tritone disturbs the calm, the dactyls in duple meter disturb the lilt of the opening tune, and the somber second half of the movement disturbs the architectural and expressive set of the piece as a whole.

il tempo largo. Th e third movement—and this is truly slow music—is the symphony’s center, and here, tentatively at fi rst, then more openly, Sibelius sings. He allows himself one climax, lacerating and laconic at the same time. We might remember that when Sibelius heard the Bruckner Fift h it had moved him to tears. Sibelius’ Largo ends, like his fi rst movement, in repetitions and a question mark.

allegro. Th e fi nale emerges immediately, as the scherzo did from the fi rst movement. Th e allegro quality—in its literal sense of “cheerful” as well as its musical one, indicating a quick tempo—is instantly compromised by the grinding dissonance that occurs when the second violins join the fi rsts. Th e issue of the tritone is still very much alive.

In this fi nale, in striking contrast to the economy of the fi rst three movements, Sibelius almost overwhelms us with a profusion of ideas. Th at richness sets off the coda, in which all this music is brought down to the irreducible. It falls back from bright major to dark minor, then disintegrates into scarcely audible tremolandi. A fl ute voices an appeal, to which the oboe makes crowing, heartless response.

Neither affi rmative nor pathetic, the end, mezzo-forte and rigorously in tempo, is shattering in its matter-of-factness. Sir Colin Davis, a deeply penetrating Sibelius conductor, described this moment as “a brusque hand that smoothes the earth over the grave.”

Instrumentation:2 fl utes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets,

3 trombones, timpani, bells and strings

Program note by the late Michael Steinberg, used with permission.

mar 16, 17 Program Notes

f Elgar’s Violin Concerto is in spirit the last of the great 19th-century examples of the genre (its actual calendar date is 1910), Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1, written in 1915-16, is the fi rst in an amazing

series of truly 20th-century violin concertos that would, over the next 25 years, come to include masterpieces by Stravinsky, Berg, Prokofi ev, Sessions, Schoenberg, Bartók, Bloch, Barber, Britten, Hindemith, Piston, Walton and Hartmann among others—not to forget Szymanowski’s own Second Concerto of 1932.

Th e voice behind Szymanowski’s two concertos is that of Paweł Kochanski, fi ery and sweet-toned virtuoso, and one of the most admired violinists in a brilliant time. Th e plan was for Kochanski, who wrote the cadenza for Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto and to whom the work is dedicated, to give the fi rst performance in St. Petersburg at the end of 1917, but the Russian Revolution got in the way. Th e premiere fi nally took place in Warsaw on November 1, 1922, with Jósef Ozimiński as soloist and Grzegorz Fitelberg conducting.

Karol Maciezj Szymanowski was a member of an interestingly lively and talent-fi lled family. His father, an impassioned patriot, was a landowner who dabbled in science, read voraciously in many languages and played cello and piano, both well. His mother, remotely descended from Swedish nobility, was a good pianist, and two of his grandparents were amateur musicians of more than ordinary accomplishment. His four siblings were a pianist and composer of light music, a highly regarded soprano, a poet and a painter. He himself studied fi rst with his father and with another musical relative, Gustav Neuhaus, but it was really aft er this, in the course of travel, independent study and quite simply experience, that his true education began. He had been brought up on the three B’s plus Chopin and, surprisingly for so

Karol SzymanowskiBorn: October 3, 1882, Tymoszówka, UkraineDied: March 29, 1937, Lausanne, Switzerland

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 35

i



mar 16, 17Program Notes

conservative an environment, Scriabin. Now his horizons expanded to embrace Wagner, Strauss and Reger, then Debussy and Ravel, eventually and crucially Stravinsky, whose Firebird and Petrushka he saw in their original productions by Diaghilev, about whom he wrote the fi rst serious articles in Polish, and who became a friend as well.

a language all his ownSzymanowski’s music moved away from German Romanticism to become—what? To say “more French” would be both true but also too limiting, for what he wrote, in words as well as music, more and more refl ected his contacts with cultures removed in time and place from 20th-century Europe. He had made long journeys through Sicily, with its evocative remnants of the Greek and Byzantine worlds, and through North Africa. He read the Greek classics, Plato and histories of the Byzantine, Islamic, Roman and early Christian worlds. Admiring Bartók and what he was doing for and with Hungarian music, Szymanowski began to study and imaginatively to utilize Polish folk music. As a patriot he was—or at least became—his father’s son, and the political climate, with Poland’s new-won independence and Paderewski’s assumption of the prime minister’s offi ce, nourished these sentiments.

In sum, Szymanowski drew on many sources, but fused them into a colorful, malleable language all his own. Th e Myths, Songs of a Fairy Tale Princess, Th e Song of the Night (Symphony No. 3), the Violin Concerto No. 1, the opera King Roger and the Stabat Mater, to name just a handful of the most important scores, amount to a legacy of unusual diversity, imposing originality and expressive strength.

the concerto: a poemSzymanowski cast his First Violin Concerto as a single movement of about 23 minutes’ duration. Th e analytical ear and eye readily enough distinguish diff erent sections and the recurrences of certain ideas, but what the spontaneous listening ear responds to is the seamless, self-generating fl ow. (In what might seem paradoxical, violinist and conductor must be fully aware of the former in order to create the impression of the latter.) Th e dominant impression is that of an intensely lyric, enchantingly colorful music that is in constant fl ux. Th e work is as much a poem as it is a concerto, being in fact based on a rhapsody, Summer Night, by one of the composer’s literary contemporaries, Tadeusz Miciński.

Summer Night is a feast of fantastical images—donkeys in crowns settled majestically on the grass, fi refl ies kissing the wild rose, and many birds—and it is not surprising that the sounds oft en come close to those in Bartók’s haunting “night musics,” such as we fi nd in works from the piano suite Out of Doors to the Th ird Piano Concerto.

Christopher Palmer has vividly described the opening in his Szymanowski monograph for the BBC Music Guides: “Its fantastic little dashes and fl ashes of sound, bitonally propelled, fl uttering and dancing like a thousand tiny fi res, suggest endless parallels, musical and otherwise: a distant fi reworks display; a pointillist canvas; an imperial Fabergé jewel aglitter with sequins; César Franck’s wonderful defi nition of the nervous appeal of Debussy’s music as ‘de la musique sur la pointe des aiguilles,’ music on needlepoints.”

When Szymanowski fi rst actually heard this music in rehearsal in Warsaw he was thrilled and wrote to Kochanski: “Th e sound is so magical that people here were completely transfi xed. And just imagine, Paweleczka, the violin is continually on top.” With the magic of the fi refl ies goes the ecstasy of lyric song. Th e Concerto is a work of white-hot passion, set in a magical landscape inhabited by, among others, the fi gure of Pan, part humorous, part threatening, whom Szymanowski invokes so wonderfully in the third of the Myths. Szymanowski said that the true national music of his country was not “the stiff ened ghost of the polonaise or mazurka, nor a fugue on the Chmielu wedding song … but the solitary, joyful, carefree song of the nightingale in a fragrant night in Poland.” In this Concerto, he set that ecstatic song down for us to share.

Instrumentation: solo violin with orchestra comprising 3 fl utes

(1 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling E-fl at clarinet), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (1doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, glockenspiel, celesta, piano, two harps and strings

Program note by the late Michael Steinberg, used with permission.



mar 16, 17 Program Notes

he two composers and ethnomusicologists who brought to the concert hall a striking Hungarian national music—Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály—were born just a year apart, in 1881 and 1882. Both were

determined to be true to their Magyar origins, creating music whose foundation was folksong, even when all the tunes were entirely original with them. Th ey started from the then-uncharted songs and dances of the peasants, which they tracked down by wandering from village to village, equipped with primitive recording equipment as well as a good ear for notating what they heard.

At times Kodály’s researches were frustrated because the peasants, too oft en tricked, had grown suspicious of city slickers. Recalling his journeys with Bartók across Transylvania, where they divided certain districts between them, he wrote: “It wasn’t so bad as long as we went on foot, but when we needed a carriage to take all our equipment—the paraphernalia, including wax cylinders, fi nally provided by the government—they smelled a rat, suspecting some kind of ‘business.’ ” Getting the women to sing, except on the sly, was not always easy, for in those days it was generally thought that women only sang in public if they’d had too much to drink. “Th e men, however, were ready enough to cooperate, once they had had a glass or two.”

richly ornamented tunes, remembered from boyhoodKodály’s fi rst research took him back to the village of his boyhood, Galánta, on the main train line from Budapest to Vienna and Prague, where his father had been appointed stationmaster in 1885. He started by looking up his old schoolmates and persuading them to sing; he subsequently elicited songs from the family’s former servants, notating what they performed. Th is is the town, with its joyous memories of a rustic boyhood, that he memorializes in his Dances of Galánta.

Zoltán Kodály Born: December 16, 1882, Kecskemét;

Died: March 6, 1967, Budapest

Dances of Galánta (Galántai Táncok)

But the actual tunes in the work, familiar from that vague wash of childhood recollection, did not derive from his own collecting but rather from some almost forgotten volumes compiled around 1800. Published in Vienna, this collection had preserved the old verbunkos tradition (from the German Werbung, “recruiting”). Th e verbunkos was a Hungarian dance associated with a ritual method of enlisting soldiers during the imperial wars of Haydn’s time. Performed by a dozen or so hussars, led by their sergeant, the essence of the dance was the alternation of slow fi gures with quick ones; the tunes, mostly simple folksongs, were extravagantly elaborated by the accompanying gypsy musicians. Th us a striking feature of the verbunkos to be heard in the Dances of Galánta is its rich ornamentation, coupled with crisply syncopated rhythms and wide leaps.

Th e Dances of Galánta date from Kodály’s middle years, the most rewarding period for him as a composer. Recognizing Kodály’s musical individuality, Toscanini conducted many of his works, including, in 1930, the Dances of Marosszék. Th ree years later, upon a commission for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic, Kodály composed the complementary Dances of Galánta, fi rst performed on October 23, 1933.Th e work includes a chain of fi ve connected dances, gradually accelerating in tempo, upon which Kodály imposed an original structure.

First there is a slow introduction, with a haunting gypsy motive to set the mood. Th e various solo statements of this idea (cello, horn, fl ute/oboe, and so forth) are separated by whirling fi gures out of which the clarinet comes to the fore; aft er a showy cadenza, it delivers the majestic strain of the fi rst dance. Th is theme functions as the refrain for roughly the fi rst half of the work—a rondo whose episodes generate new dances. Th e fourth dance, with its own subsection (a little march, somewhat slower), launches the second half, which culminates in a fi ery, lavishly ornamented dance that Kodály paints in the most brilliant orchestral colors (Allegro vivace). Suddenly the motion is arrested, and a short coda recalls the stately rondo, but only momentarily, for the whirling, stomping dancing soon resumes to leave the listener with an unforgettable image of Eastern Europe as it was in our great grandfathers’ time.

Instrumentation: 2 fl utes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,

4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, bells, snare drum, triangle and strings

Program note by Mary Ann Feldman.

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