CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Opening Night Gala

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 7:00 PM

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Daniele Gatti, Conductor
Evgeny Kissin, Piano
Ann Hobson Pilot, Harp

BEETHOVEN Coriolan Overture, Op. 62
CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21
JOHN WILLIAMS On Willows and Birches, for harp and orchestra (NY Premiere)
DEBUSSY La mer

Encores:
LISZT Soirées de Vienne (Valses caprices d’après Schubert), No. 6
CHOPIN Waltz in D-flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1, "Minute"

Opening Night Gala Sponsor: PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

Program Notes:

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918)
La Mer, Three symphonic sketches

Debussy had very little real experience of the sea; yet among the few views of his childhood that the unusually private composer vouchsafed to the world was the occasional affectionate reference to summer vacations at Cannes. His parents even made plans that he should become a sailor (a life that could hardly have suited him for long), but they were scotched when a certain Mme. Mauté, who was giving the nine-year-old boy piano lessons, discovered his musical talent, and within a year he was studying piano and theory at the Paris Conservatoire.

Still, when he came to write La Mer 30 years later, Debussy commented that he was able to draw upon “innumerable memories” and that these were “worth more than reality, which generally weighs down one’s thoughts too heavily.” In the meantime, his memories were charged with images drawn from literature and art, and art was probably the most direct inspiration for La Mer. Debussy had admired the sea paintings of Turner, with their misty impalpability, shortly before he began composing La Mer. Still more influential were the Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige, whose work was enormously popular in France at the end of the 19th century. When the score of La Mer was published, Debussy requested that the cover design include a detail of Hokusai’s most famous print, The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa, the part showing the giant wave towering above and starting to curve over in its downward fall, its foaming billows frozen in a stylized pattern that almost resembles leaves on a tree.

Debussy came to La Mer soon after the great success of his one completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, which was performed to great acclaim in April 1902. In the following years, he showed a new confidence in his art, prolifically turning out the second set of Fêtes galantes, the first set of Images for piano, and the brilliant piano solo L’Îsle joyeuse, as well as La Mer. And for all of Debussy’s modesty in calling it simply “three symphonic sketches,” La Mer is nothing less than a full-fledged symphony, with interrelationships between the movements and an artful balance of tension and repose, climax and release. It has been called the greatest symphony ever written by a French composer.

The first movement’s title, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, is not intended to prescribe a particular program but merely to indicate a progression from near darkness, in which objects are indistinct, to brightness, in which they are clearly perceptible. Debussy’s pictorialism is wonderfully evocative in its suggestion of indistinct outlines that gradually appear to view, the light evidently breaking forth in the undulating tremolos of the strings just at the moment that the principal key, D-flat major, is established. The second movement, Play of the Waves, is a lighter scherzo, scored with extreme delicacy—an interlude between the stormy and emphatic passions of the first and last movements. Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea begins with an evident pictorial image: the waves softly surging up in the low strings, answered by the winds—the woodwinds, in fact—blowing high up in chromatic shrieks. The struggle of wind and waves is developed at length, turning to material drawn from the opening movement, all building to a brilliant sunlit conclusion.

—Steven Ledbetter


Scoring: 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons and contrabassoon (the latter in the third movement only), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 cornets à piston (third movement only), 3 trombones, bass tuba, timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, bass drum, 2 harps, and strings

Performance time: approximately 23 minutes

Begun in the summer of 1903 and completed in March 1905, La Mer was first performed on October 15, 1905, in Paris, with Camille Chevillard conducting the Lamoureux Orchestra; the work received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on March 21, 1907, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karl Muck.


Program notes © 2009 Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights reserved.