MALAYSIANPHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

The Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) gave its inaugural performance at Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS (DFP) on 17 August 1998. With the initial search for outstanding musicians involving a worldwide audition tour, the result was a symphony orchestra made up of musicians from 25 nations, including Malaysians, a remarkable example of harmony among different cultures and nationalities.

A host of internationally-acclaimed musicians have performed with the MPO including Lorin Maazel, Sir Neville Marriner, Yehudi Menuhin, Joshua Bell, Harry Connick Jr., José Carreras, Andrea Bocelli, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Chris Botti and Branford Marsalis, many of whom have praised the MPO for its fine musical qualities and vitality.

With each new season, the MPO continues to present an exciting programme of orchestral music drawn from over three centuries, as well as the crowd-pleasing concert series. Its versatility transcends genres, from classical masterpieces to film music, pop, jazz, traditional, contemporary and commissioned works.

The MPO regularly performs in major cities of Malaysia. Internationally, it has toured Singapore (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2018), Japan (2001, 2009 and 2017), Korea (2001), Australia (2004), China (2006), Taiwan (2007) and Vietnam (2013). The MPO has also released 21 commercial CDs.

Its Education and Outreach Programme (ENCOUNTER) reaches beyond the concert platform to develop musical awareness and appreciation through dedicated activities at such diverse venues as schools, colleges, hospitals and community centres.

The MPO’s commitment to furthering musical interest in the nation has been the creation of the Malaysian Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (MPYO); its debut concert at DFP in 2007 was followed by a Peninsula Malaysia tour. The MPYO has also performed in Sabah and Sarawak, Singapore, Brisbane and Hong Kong.

The MPO remains steadfast in its mission to share the depth, power and beauty of great music. Its main benefactor is PETRONAS and its patron is YABhg. Tun Dr. Siti Hasmah Haji Mohd Ali.

All details are correct at time of printing. Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS reserves the right to vary without notice the artists and/or repertoire as necessary. Copyright © 2019 by Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS (Co. No. 462692-X). All rights reserved. No part of this programme may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright owners.

Sat 16 Mar 2019 at 8.30 pmSun 17 Mar 2019 at 3.00 pm

Malaysian Philharmonic OrchestraOlari Elts, conductor

PROGRAMME

LISZT Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 11 minsSIBELIUS En Saga, Op.9 17 mins

INTERVAL 20 mins

LISZT (orch. ADAMS) La Lugubre Gondola 9 minsSIBELIUS Symphony No. 5 in E flat major, Op.82 31 mins

OLARI ELTSconductor

Olari Elts’ passion for distinctive programming rich with invention has earned him much praise on the international music scene. He appears with such orchestras as Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Finnish Radio Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, RTÉ Dublin Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre National de Lyon, Seattle Symphony, National Arts Centre Orchestra Ottawa, Melbourne

Symphony Orchestra, and the Warsaw, Rotterdam, Seoul and Slovenian Philharmonics. Soloists with whom he has collaborated include Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Renaud Capuçon, Brett Dean, Isabelle Faust, Alban Gerhardt, Martin Grubinger, Martin Helmchen, Stephen Hough, Lucas & Arthur Jussen, Felix Kleiser, Kari Kriikku, Alexander Melnikov, Maxim Rysanov, Simon Trpčeski and Antoine Tamestit.

In the 2018/19 season, Elts will make his debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Riga Sinfonietta and the Bilkent Symphony as well as a return to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música and Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra.

This season sees the release of a recording project of works by Estonian composer Heino Eller including a violin concerto with Baiba Skride and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.

Elts’ discography for Ondine includes a disc of Tüür’s works with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and Lawrence Power. His 2016 recording of Brahms’ arrangements with Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra won high praise. He also recorded the Borgström and Shostakovich violin concertos with Eldbjørg Hemsing and the Wiener Symphoniker on the BIS label, and Ruders’ Symphony No. 5 with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra for Bridge Records.

Elts made his mark in the opera field, having conducted Eugene Onegin, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Idomeneo and Berlioz’s La Damnation du Faust. Crossing genres, he toured to the Konzerthaus Berlin with a production which combines

© Katrin Viil

PROGRAMME NOTES

The spirit of the Romantic Age ̶ unabashed sentimentality, flamboyant virtuosity, brilliant colours and glorified individualism ̶ is nowhere more characteristically portrayed than in music of Hungarian-born Franz Liszt, particularly in his Hungarian Rhapsodies. The national spirit of Finland is portrayed in equal measure in Sibelius’ En Saga, a tone poem redolent of a primordial world and elemental forces of nature. Both composers were affable, charming, vastly cultured men of the world. Alternating on this programme is music by these two towering European figures, one work each from relatively early in their careers, and one from rather late (Sibelius lived until 1957 but virtually stopped composing around 1926).

FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886)Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (1847)

Liszt was captivated by Hungarian gypsy music all his life, right from childhood. He collected melodies he heard played at campsites and other locations. His writings are peppered with references to them and their music, and he even wrote a 450-page treatise on the subject, published in 1859. Liszt wrote 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano solo (later orchestrated),

of which No. 2 in C sharp minor, dedicated to Count László Teleky, has long been the most popular of them.

The rhapsody to Liszt was usually a loosely arranged medley of tunes in a sequence designed to achieve maximum dramatic impact. The form was free; contrasts and passages of gathering momentum were the shaping forces in the rhapsodies. Like many of them, No. 2 begins with a slow introduction leading into an Andante mesto, which features a lush, passionate theme played by the strings. The second main part is the friska, which begins quietly in the solo oboe, gradually building in speed, texture and volume. The whole orchestra finally gives out the principal theme of the friska in the major mode ̶ a sort of brilliant cancan-esque dance tune.

Mendelssohn's and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Tallinn-based theatre company NO99. For Bernstein’s 100th anniversary, Elts conducted the film On the Waterfront with ‘live’ orchestral accompaniment of the soundtrack.

Elts has held positions with the Orchestre de Bretagne, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. Born in Tallinn in 1971, he is founder of a contemporary music ensemble, NYYD Ensemble.

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JEAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957)En Saga, Op.9 (1892)

Sibelius composed En Saga (A Legend) in 1892, based on sketches he had made in 1890 as an octet for flute, clarinet and strings. He conducted the premiere on 16 February 1893, and, along with Valse triste and Finlandia, it was one of the works that most helped to spread his name abroad.

Although it is usually referred to as a symphonic poem, En Saga has no programme. Sibelius described it merely as “the expression of a state of mind”. Other writers have expanded on this theme. Charles O’Connell writes that the story Sibelius tells here “is an abstraction of all the

mighty tales with which the people of the North once passed the long sub-Arctic night”.

Although lasting less than twenty minutes, En Saga portrays all the grandeur of an epic symphony. It breathes the very spirit of Finland, with the mystic stillness of its endless dark forests, its shimmering lakes, pale light and barbaric splendour of its heroes of old and their military campaigns. No fewer than four themes ranging in character from the epic to the folkloric are presented and developed within the context of a free sonata-form design, which includes an introduction containing the seeds from which these themes germinate, and a haunting epilogue.

FRANZ LISZTLa Lugubre Gondola (1882; orch. Adams, 1989)

In 1882, late in life, Liszt composed two short piano pieces called La Lugubre Gondola (The Funeral Gondola). These desolate, austere works were written in response to his premonition of Wagner’s death, which did indeed occur the following year in Venice. Harmonically, the music looks forward to Debussy and Bartók. Here, we find bare wisps of melody, stark textures, unresolved dissonances and almost total lack of a tonal centre. The dissolution of tonality is so pronounced that even Wagner, famous for the advanced chromaticism in his operas Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, found in Liszt’s late piano pieces “the seeds of madness”.

In 1989, the American composer John Adams (b.1947) orchestrated Liszt’s second version of La Lugubre Gondola. Adams conducted the first performance on 27 October of that year with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. For performances in San

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Francisco two years later, programme annotator Michael Steinberg had these words to say: “It begins with strange, indeterminate tollings. Then violins begin a recitation deliberately shaped with its rising leap of a sixth and its sequences of chromatic notes so as to bring Tristan to mind. The paragraphs grow longer, an impassioned climax is reached, and the piece ends as it began”.

JEAN SIBELIUSSymphony No. 5 in E flat major, Op.82 (1915)

I. Molto moderato – Allegro moderato – Presto II. Andante mosso, quasi allegretto III. Allegro molto – Misterioso – Un pochettino largamente

In 1915, at the age of 50, Sibelius was a cultural hero with a guaranteed government stipend for life so that he could devote himself exclusively to composition. He was also reportedly the only Finn whose name was known throughout the world. His 50th birthday was celebrated in Finland as a national holiday. Part of these celebrations included a concert of his music, conducted by himself, at which his new Fifth Symphony was heard for the first time on 8 December 1915.

It is always a little dangerous to try to equate the external events of an artist’s life with the content of his work. Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony is a case in point. In 1915, the world was at war. Yet this symphony exudes a positive, life-affirming spirit. Even its opening horn call, the “motto” from which much of the symphony’s melodic material derives, sounds strongly reminiscent of that famous opening trumpet call in Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, the so-called “Nature” theme.

A detailed account of how each theme, motif and melodic fragment of the symphony fits into the grand scheme would require many pages of description, and would ultimately make tedious reading. Suffice it to say that Sibelius transforms his ideas (notably the soft opening horn call) with amazing diversity and imagination. He once said that this symphonic process “fascinates me in a mysterious way. As if God the Father had hurled pieces of a mosaic pattern from his celestial dwelling and asked me to describe how this pattern had been”.

The first movement was actually two separate ones in the original form of this symphony. The movement as it now stands consists of two entirely different parts, each with its own character, but the transition from one to the other is so gradual and seamlessly managed that the listener is scarcely aware that the playful, scherzo-like music has arrived.

The second movement has a gentler cast, and is essentially a series of continuously evolving variations on a simple ten-note figure of seemingly trivial import: five notes-pause-five notes, whose rhythmic pattern corresponds to the phrase “Do you like peanuts? Yes, I like peanuts”. The finale is characterized by an almost constant underlying scurrying effect in the strings and by the tolling of bells, an effect simulated much of the time by the horns and/or trumpets. A broad, noble melody is proudly proclaimed by the woodwinds, a theme that returns later in the darker colours of unison strings and leads into the symphony’s magnificent apotheosis in the heroic key of E flat major.

Note: Sectional string players are rotated within their sections. *Extra musician.

MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

RESIDENT CONDUCTORSNaohisa FurusawaGerard Salonga

FIRST VIOLINCo-ConcertmasterPeter DanišPrincipalMing GohCo-PrincipalZhenzhen Liang

Maho DanišMartijn NoomenSherwin ThiaRuna BaagöeMiroslav DanišEvgeny KaplanMarcel AndriesiiTan Ka MingPetia Atanasova*Marco Roosink

SECOND VIOLINSection PrincipalTimothy PetersCo-Principal*Barbora KolarovaAssistant PrincipalLuisa Hyams

Stefan KocsisAnastasia KiselevaCatalina AlvarezIonuț MazareanuChia-Nan HungYanbo ZhaoLing YunzhiRobert Kopelman

VIOLACo-PrincipalGábor Mokány

Ong Lin KernSun YuanFan RanThian Ai Wen*Samantha Lee*Ida Margit Kovacs*David James Samuel

CELLOCo-PrincipalCsaba KörösAssistant PrincipalSteven RetallickSub-PrincipalMátyás Major

Gerald DavisLaurențiu GhermanJulie DessureaultElizabeth Tan SuyinSejla Simon

DOUBLE BASSSection PrincipalWolfgang Steike

John KennedyJun-Hee ChaeNaohisa FurusawaRaffael BietenhaderAndreas Dehner*Douglas Rutherford

FLUTESection Principal*Ignacio de NicolásCo-PrincipalYukako YamamotoSub-PrincipalRachel Jenkyns

PICCOLOPrincipalSonia Croucher

OBOESection PrincipalSimon EmesPrincipal*Celia CraigCo-Principal*Michael Wilson

COR ANGLAISPrincipalNiels Dittmann

CLARINETSection PrincipalGonzalo EstebanCo-PrincipalDavid Dias da SilvaSub-PrincipalMatthew Larsen

BASS CLARINETPrincipalChris Bosco

BASSOONSection PrincipalAlexandar LenkovCo-Principal*Cavit KarakoçSub-PrincipalDenis Plangger

CONTRABASSOONPrincipalVladimir Stoyanov

HORNSection PrincipalsGrzegorz Curyla*Medet Cem AkcoraCo-PrincipalJames SchumacherSub-PrincipalsLaurence DaviesBarkin SönmezerAssistant PrincipalSim Chee Ghee

TRUMPETCo-PrincipalWilliam TheisSub-PrincipalsJeffrey Missal*Nuttapong VeerapunAssistant PrincipalMatthew Dempsey

TROMBONECo-PrincipalsFernando Borja*Marques YoungSub-Principal*Michael Robinson

BASS TROMBONEPrincipal*Martin McCain

TIMPANISection PrincipalMatthew Thomas

PERCUSSIONSection PrincipalMatthew PrendergastSub-PrincipalsJoshua VonderheideTan Su Yin

HARPPrincipalTan Keng Hong

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DEWAN FILHARMONIK PETRONAS – 462692-X MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA – 463127-H

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