CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
New York String Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 2:00 PM

New York String Orchestra
Jaime Laredo, Conductor
Joseph Kalichstein, Piano
Shai Wosner, Piano
Alon Goldstein, Piano

HARBISON The Most Often Used Chords
MOZART Concerto for Three Pianos in F Major, K. 242

MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 3, "Scottish"

This concert is made possible, in part, by an endowment fund for young artists established by Stella and Robert Jones.

Program Notes:

JOHN HARBISON The Most Often Used Chords 

John Harbison’s The Most Often Used Chords is a “work of play, taking place where theory meets fantasy”; its four movements are based on the titles of blank musical manuscript notebooks:

Toccata: “Here are the two scales you need: major and minor … Use these charts to form chords in any key—major, minor, diminished, and augmented. To make one chord from another, just change one or more tones one half-step … There are seven modes; each begins on a different white key.”

Variazione: “The chord of chords is the triad, for example C-E-G.”

Ciaccona: In the notebook, the 10 “most often used chords” were displayed separately, in C, then transposed upwards by half-steps. Their Italian chroniclers never meant them to be played in sequence. Nevertheless, here they form a base from which a melody emerges. This melody presses to break free, succeeding (for a while) after the sixth Chaconne statement. Then the “found object” resumes in another world of feeling.

Finale: “The Circle of Fifths is easy to memorize: Starting with F and moving clockwise, the keys can be learned by saying “Fat Cats Go Down Alleys Eating Bread.” The keys counterclockwise are learned by repeating “Boys Eat Aging Dogs Good Cold Food.” Also present in this movement are the Table of Contracting Note Values and the Table of Expanding Intervals (coincidentally all 12 tones).

The Most Often Used Chords takes full advantage of the orchestral pedagogy of the last several hundred years by layering sonically familiar orchestral quotes in compelling ways, utilizing all the tricks that a high-caliber orchestra is capable of achieving. The swelling string melodies and the orchestration contrast with the sharper, staccato sections where woodwinds and percussion take center stage. Harbison’s dissection of the pamphlet on “the most often used chords” (from where the tonal material is deduced) shades this piece with certain qualities of common tonalities. At the same time he resists using more obvious mechanisms to reference specific time periods and composers long-dead. The Most Often Used Chords is a tour de force of orchestral writing.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Concerto for Three Pianos in F Major, K. 242 
The Concerto for Three Pianos, K. 242, was written for countess Lodron and her two daughters, Aloysia and Josepha. It is dated February 1776, a time that saw the flourishing of two other important piano concertos, K. 238 and K. 243, “Lutzow.” Mozart obliged the aristocratic circles of Salzburg with these concertos—models of refinement, affability, and levity.

This Concerto is in the style of a concerto grosso where the soli sections consist of a handful of instruments and the alternating tutti sections are equally balanced. The third piano part of this concerto is subordinate to the other two; it only serves as a ripieno, filling in the harmony and adding a few echo effects. Because of its slight capacity, Mozart suppressed this part in his revision a few months later without substantially altering the original.

Experiments with sonority are favored over thematic development in this concerto—a piece that achieves astonishing combinations through the engagement of the solo instruments.

The overall mood of the first movement is jovial, verging on the humorous; its solo parts are constantly engaged in an amusing quarry. The simple sonata form has few peculiarities, though the cadenza is of interest for its motivic rather than generic extemporization with both pianos alternating beguilingly. Sound and its sonic possibilities alone are the second movement’s focus in a seemingly perpetual state of dream. The Adagio is indeed one of Mozart’s most original conceptions. At one point during the cadenza, the pianos seem to literally take flight in an air of fantastic rococo evanescence.

The brief finale is a rondo marked in a moderately paced Tempo di Minuetto. The solo figurations recall Clementi’s obliging piano trios where urbanity prevails over emotion; though this finale seems at times formulaic in expression, much of it is characteristically superb.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 56, “Scottish”
“Everything [here] is crumbling and decaying; the roof is open to the sky. I think today I may have found the beginning of my Scottish Symphony here.” Mendelssohn’s letter written in 1829 while at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh leaves no doubt about the influence of this symphony’s surroundings. In fact, there and then Mendelssohn jotted down the somber Andante opening theme with instrumental cues for the orchestration. Just as the atmospheric Fingal’s cave in the Hebridean island of Staffa stimulated the composer’s inspiration, so did Edinburgh’s “moldering, ivy-colored ruins: Both the Hebrides Overture and the “Scottish” Symphony were going to occupy Mendelssohn for a number of years. The latter, he withheld from publication in his lifetime, owing—he said—to his will to revise the finale, though this is hard to believe of a work combining such spontaneity and craftsmanship.

The first movement’s gloomily scored Andante is unequivocally charged with the Nordic temperament that was so frequently idealized in the Romantic period, following the fashions of writers such as Ossian and Walpole. This “arboreal” dream had seized most of the German society of the time who saw it as a celebration of the German present and its memories of a Scottish past. This explains the dark hues, open-spaced chords, drone-like fifths, and trudging harmonic progressions.

The celebrated second movement (Vivace non troppo) is a typical Mendelssohnian scherzo, rapid and spirited; the clarinet intones a vivacious theme that is eventually picked up by the other instruments.

The Adagio, like the slow movement of the “Italian” Symphony, was written with a procession in mind—in this case, one Mendelssohn had witnessed at Rome.

The unruly Saltarello (a bouncy Neapolitan dance akin to a Tarantella) is agitated and in the minor mode; at the very end Mendelssohn adds a finale in A-major with striking brass writing that casts a bronzed ray of hope over the work.

There have been a number of interpretations about a possible programmatic narrative for the Symphony and indeed Mendelssohn himself called the outer movements of the “Scottish” introduction and Allegro guerriero (warlike Allegro) in the foreword to the Symphony’s first edition, but the evocative sounds of this work are to be heeded individually.

—Cody Franchetti
© 2008 The Carnegie Hall Corporation