CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

“They produced extraordinary beauty.”—New York Sun

“A force to be reckoned with” (New York Times), the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra performs the US premiere of Widmann’s invigorating concert overture Con brio (“with spirit”), a short orchestral tribute to Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies. Emanuel Ax joins the BRSO for Mozart’s grand C-major piano concerto, one of Beethoven’s favorites because of its heroic themes. Tchaikovsky described his Fourth Symphony, finished in the aftermath of his collapsed marriage, as “an echo of your most intimate thoughts and emotions”—and even claimed that its first movement represents fate.

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Marilyn McCoy, Visiting Professor of Music, Clark University.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Mariss Jansons, Chief Conductor
Emanuel Ax, Piano

JÖRG WIDMANN Con brio (US Premiere)
MOZART Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 4

Encores:
SCHUBERT Impromptu in A-flat Major, D. 935, No. 2
HAYDN String Quartet in F Major, Op. 3, No. 5, "Serenade" (String Orchestra version, arr. Haydn)
TCHAIKOVSKY Czardas from Swan Lake

The Trustees of Carnegie Hall gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Debs in support of the 2008-2009 season.

Program Notes:

JÖRG WIDMANN (b. 1973)Con brio: Concert Overture for Orchestra (US Premiere)
An accomplished clarinetist, the young German musician Jörg Widmann continues to perform as well as teach, even while enjoying an ever more active and prominent career as a composer. He has already made meaningful contributions in a variety of genres, contending fearlessly with the largest and most traditional of forms. Among his recent works are Das Gesicht im Spiegel, named by Opernwelt magazine as the most important new opera of 2003–2004; a series of five string quartets, the fifth including soprano; a notable violin concerto, premiered by the eminent Christian Tetzlaff; a cycle of piano works, Eleven Humoresques, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and debuted by Yefim Bronfman; and a trilogy for large orchestra (Lied, Chor, and Messe) that explores the relationship between vocal and instrumental forms.

Con brio was commissioned by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to open is 2008–2009 season. A reflection on Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies, Widmann’s overture premiered on a program with Beethovian inspirations. Widmann does not quote Beethoven verbatim, however, nor suffer the anxiety of influence. Instead, the overture celebrates its heritage with good humor. The timpani part has been colorfully (and sympathetically) described as sounding “like a hamster with unclipped nails locked in the dryer.”

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503Mozart composed K. 503 in 1786 (along with the “Prague” Symphony, K. 504) to perform on a series of Advent concerts in Vienna. No. 25 caps off a remarkable series of works—between 1782 and 1786, he wrote 15 piano concertos, but only two more followed—and pairs with the slightly earlier K. 491, written in the complementary key of C minor. Whereas K. 491 mines a dark and tragic vein, K. 503 is quite pellucid and easily accessible to the listener.

The venerable English critic Donald Francis Tovey turned to K. 503 to define the form of the Classical piano concerto. His analysis of the first movement aspired “to discover true concerto form.” Nearly a century later, the matter still unsettled, pianist and critic Charles Rosen found a basic truth about the concerto, before brandishing his own analysis of first-movement form.

“The most important fact,” Rosen writes, “is that the audience waits for the soloist to enter, and when he stops playing, they wait for him to begin again.” As much ink has been spilled (and many trees felled) by scholars debating the nature of concerto form as a sonata, ritornello, or some type of hybrid, the interaction between soloist and orchestra governs the concerto genre.

That relationship is most often described by analogies to cooperation and competition: soloist and orchestra engage in dialogue, enjoy a conversation, and collaborate with each other; they battle, jockey for position, seek supremacy, and debate one another. If more recent writers have emphasized the combative, dramatic nature of the concerto (and extended the analogy by mapping musical conflicts onto social ones—or example, reading the relations of soloist and ensemble as the emancipation of the individual from the group), many 18th-century thinkers cared equally for collaboration. Philosopher David Hume considered “the best way of composing a dialogue” to be “for two persons that are of differing opinions about any question of importance, to write alternately the different parts of the discourse, and reply to each other.” They should, he asserted, argue always “with temper, moderation, and good manners.” Thus musicologist Simon Keefe, in his study of Mozart’s concertos, posits piano and orchestra as interlocutors rather than rivals.

Concerto No. 25 begins formally and majestically, displaying a “greatness of spirit,” in the words of one commentator. Chords formed by all instruments playing together are punctuated by timpani hits and alternate with softer replies in the winds, one of which makes a sneaky turn to the minor mode. The pomp and circumstance prepares for the modest and poised entrance of the soloist. Common in Mozart’s music, virtuosity is defined by musical challenges rather than technical difficulties. The shaping of phrases, the balance between melody and accompaniment, the seamless and seemingly effortless movement up and down the keys: These are the things that try a soloist’s soul and test his or her musical mettle. In the case of K. 503, so many phrases trail off so gracefully that it is easy to imagine Mozart himself at the piano, turning to conduct the orchestral passages. Two basic ideas alternate throughout the movement: the repeated chords and a little march, gorgeously developed in counterpoint in the middle section of the movement, before the recapitulation of the opening chords.

The second movement is a sweet, affecting, and charming Andante whose relative simplicity serves as a foil for both the grand gestures of the first movement and brilliant style in the finale. The checked virtuosity of the first movement is here unleashed, with flamboyant runs, dramatic passagework, and luscious chords emerging after the tuneful opening theme. Mozart found the main theme of the rondo-finale in his own catalogue of works: The melody is taken from his opera Idomeneo. Although eminent musicologist Joseph Kerman finds the importation “disquieting,” while deeming the entire concerto “austere and abstracted” as well as “strangely cold,” it is possible to hear (and feel) a warm heart beating behind the admittedly imposing surface of the music.
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840–93)Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36
Tchaikovsky did himself no favors to history by writing a fanciful epistle to his patron Nadezhda von Meck about the Fourth Symphony, but scholars, critics, and program annotators have since done the composer far graver disservice by misreading a flattering letter as a program note and personal confession. All the blather about fate, sexuality, and suffering is just that. (The composer enjoyed a happy career committed to a Mozartian ideal of pursuing beauty and pleasure in music for the benefit of listeners.) As one of Tchaikovsky’s more responsible and perceptive interpreters, musicologist Simon Morrison, succinctly states in reference to The Queen of Spades, “the notion that the composer relied on tonal symbolism in his operas—like the notion that his symphonies bear autobiographical programs—is an interpretive red herring.”

Certainly the composer penned the Fourth Symphony during a difficult period in his life. Tchaikovsky had rashly and regrettably married; the relationship ended after only a few days. He threw himself into his music, but Tchaikovsky struggled with a musical challenge he set for himself rather than a personal problem he was compelled to express. The challenge in the Fourth, Morrison convincingly argues, concerns the contest of genres: dance, march, and song.

Following Morrison’s reading, we hear at the outset a fearsome polonaise in triple meter whose dotted rhythms connote imperial ceremony and stately power. The introduction leads to the first theme, which takes the form of a waltz. Likewise in triple meter, the affect is now distinct and individual rather than impersonal and ceremonial; musicologist Richard Taruskin interpreted the waltz as a sonic sign of the wholly human, a musical mark of subjectivity. The two dances in the same time occupy the same floor, but neither share the spotlight.

In the development, the two genres—or two topoi, to use the language of 18th-century musical rhetoric, as Tchaikovsky himself speaks in his interpretation—battle each other, and the polonaise prevails. In the coda, the waltz is forced to stretch its steps to match the meter of the polonaise. The second Andantino movement is a melancholy song for oboe, while the third scherzo movement features the strings playing only pizzicato (“plucked”). The finale incorporates a Russian folksong, “Vo Pole Beryioza Stoyala” (“A Birch Tree Rustled in the Field”) with inventive variations.