CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Minnesota Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Walter Frisch, Professor of Music, Columbia University.

Minnesota Orchestra
Osmo Vänskä, Music Director and Conductor
Leonidas Kavakos, Violin

SIBELIUS The Wood Nymph, Op. 15
SIBELIUS Violin Concerto
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7

Encore:
TÁRREGA (arr. Ricci) Recuerdos de la Alhambra

Sponsored by Deloitte LLP

Program Notes:

JEAN SIBELIUS (1865–1957)
The Wood Nymph, Op. 15

This haunting tone poem was composed in 1894–1895, when Sibelius was 30, and it was received enthusiastically upon its premiere in Helsinki on April 4, 1895. The composer must have been taken by the subject, a poem by the Swedish Viktor Rydberg (1828–1895), since he ultimately based four works on it. But the tone poem was heard only once more, in the 1930s, before Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra revived it in 1996 to great acclaim. Why did it languish through the 20th century? Some have speculated that Sibelius withdrew it, fearing that the work was too confessional. Vänskä disagrees: “It’s a tremendous piece. He never managed to revise it, but nothing is wrong with the music. Sibelius never forbade performance of The Wood Nymph.”

In time, Sibelius would blaze two distinct trails: one to tone poems, the other to symphonies. But The Wood Nymph, like Kullervo, lives in both worlds. The four stanzas of Rydberg’s poem suggest a symphonic design, but musical events follow the narrative of the poem. And that script leads the composer to a radical and original solution: open-ended, “progressive” tonality. The work begins frankly in C major, slips into A minor, and ends—with the hero abandoned as if on a cold hillside—a half-step higher than it began, in C-sharp minor. As Sibelius put it, “This has nothing to do with form, it has to do with life and death.”

The scenario of The Wood Nymph begins with strong, handsome Björn going to a party one moonlit, breezy autumn evening, setting off to the tune of a sturdy march played by the brass. As he enters an unfamiliar, terrifying realm, clarinets animate rustic rhythms, which are taken up by oboes, trumpets, and, ultimately, trombones. One hears sighing strings, slithering woodwinds, and a long bass drum roll: This is no place for humans. The opening march returns, followed by a rustling transition. Now the night is summer-sweet: Two eyes invite the hero to sleep and dream in peace of love. Time stops, as solo cello and shadowing horn engage in an erotic dance.

But the heart that is stolen by a wood nymph is never returned. Björn grows old in his empty home, listening with inconsolable grief to the sigh of the woods. In three ever-climbing statements of an emphatic, stuttering melody, violins ascend from the gutsiest string to the highest pitch of emotion. Sibelius parodies Wagner’s Liebestod, but rather than fulfillment, this hero finds eternal torment. The liaison has been his undoing, and we hear his cortège.

—David Evan Thomas


JEAN SIBELIUS
Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47

From Bach to Bartók, many of the great keyboard concertos have been written by composers for themselves. Rather more of the famous violin concertos have been written for others to play.

Sibelius wrote his for a kind of ghostly self. He was a failed violinist. He had begun lessons late, at 14, but then, as he wrote, “the violin took me by storm, and for the next 10 years it was my dearest wish, my overriding ambition, to become a great virtuoso.”

In fact, aside from the double handicap of his late start and the provincial level of even the best teaching available in Finland, he had neither the physical coordination nor the temperament for such a career. In 1890–1891, when he was in Vienna studying composition with Robert Fuchs and Karl Goldmark, he played in the conservatory orchestra (its intonation gave him headaches), and on January 9, 1891, he auditioned for the Philharmonic.

“When he got back to his room,” we read in Erik Tawaststjerna’s biography, “Sibelius broke down and wept. Afterwards, he sat at the piano and began to practice scales.” With that, he gave up. And his Violin Concerto, written some 10 years later, is imbued both with his feeling for the instrument and the pain of his farewell to his “dearest wish” and “overriding ambition.”

In no violin concerto is the soloist’s first note—delicately dissonant and off the beat—more beautiful. It made Sibelius happy, too: In September 1902 he wrote to his wife Aino—and this was the first mention of the work—that he had just had “a marvelous opening idea.” But after that inspired start, the history of the piece was troubled.

Sibelius, drinking heavily, was limitlessly inventive when it came to finding ways of running from work in progress. He behaved outrageously toward Willy Burmester, the German virtuoso who had been the concertmaster in Helsingfors for a while in the 1890s, admired Sibelius and was ambitious on his behalf, stirred him up to write a violin concerto, and, of course, hoped to give the first performance.

Sibelius sent the score to Burmester (“Wonderful! Masterly!” came the response) and let word get out that he would dedicate the work to him. But meanwhile, Sibelius was pushing for a premiere at a date when Burmester was not free or, at best, would not have had enough time to learn such a technically demanding piece. Sibelius instead chose Victor Nováèek, a violin teacher with no reputation as a performer. That he would fail with this concerto was a foregone conclusion, yet that was the plan chosen by the self-destructive and, in this instance, also sadistic Sibelius. The first performance took place on February 8, 1904, in Helsinki (then Helsingfors), with Victor Nováèek as soloist and the composer conducting the Helsingfors Philharmonic.

After the near-disastrous premiere, Burmester offered his services again—“I shall play the concerto in Helsingfors in such a way that the city will be at your feet”—only to find himself passed over again, this time in favor of Karl Halir, concertmaster in Berlin, a former member of the Joachim Quartet and the leader of a quartet of his own. Sibelius withdrew the work for revision, and on October 19, 1905, Halir premiered the work in its new and present form in Berlin, with Richard Strauss on the podium.

I. Allegro moderato. Sibelius assigns a role of unprecedented importance to his first-movement cadenza, which in fact takes the place and function of the development section. The original 1903–1904 version has two large cadenzas in the first movement: the familiar one that survives and another, near the end, that is full of echoes of the solo Bach pieces to which Sibelius the aspiring violinist never advanced.

What leads up to that big cadenza is a sequence of ideas that begins with the sensitive, dreamy melody that introduces the voice of the soloist. This leads to what we might call a mini-cadenza, starting with a flurry of 16th-notes marked veloce. From this solo passage there emerges a declamatory statement upon which Sibelius’s personal voice is ineluctable—an impassioned, super-violinistic recitation. What follows is a long tutti that slowly subsides from furious march music to wistful pastoral to darkness. It is out of this darkness that the development/cadenza erupts, an occasion for sovereign virtuosity, brilliantly, fancifully, and economically composed.

Whether comparing his own concerto with Brahms’s—which he heard in Berlin in January 1905—or, many years later, with Prokofiev’s D-Major Concerto, Sibelius set store by having composed a soloistic concerto rather than a symphonic one. Sibelius opposes rather than meshes solo and orchestra, or casts the orchestra as accompanist.

Sibelius’s first movement, with its bold sequence of highly diverse ideas; its quest for the unity behind them; its daring substitute for a conventional development; its recapitulation, which continues to explore, rearrange, and develop; and its wedding of violinistic brilliance to compositional purposes, is one in which the breath of the symphonist—one who was to become perhaps the greatest symphonist after Brahms—is not to be mistaken.

II. Adagio di molto. The second and third movements are less ambitious as structures, but that does not keep the Adagio from being one of the most moving pages Sibelius ever achieved. Between its introductory measures and main theme there is a fascinating disparity. Clarinets and oboes in pairs suggest an idea of rather tentative mien, one also in which something survives of Sibelius’s early passion for Wagner. This is a gentle beginning, leading to the entry of the solo violin with a melody of vast breadth. Sonoro ed espressivo, it speaks in accents we know well and the gestures of Beethoven.

Sibelius never found—perhaps never sought—such a melody again: this, too, is farewell. Very lovely, later in the movement, is the imagination for orchestral sound that has Sibelius accompany the melody (now in the clarinet and bassoon) with scales, all pianissimo, broken octaves moving up in the violin, and with a soft rain of slowly descending scales in flutes and quiet strings.

III. Allegro, ma non tanto. “Evidently a polonaise for polar bears,” said D. F. Tovey of the finale—a remark it seems no program note writer can resist quoting. The charmingly aggressive main theme was an old one, going back to a string quartet from 1890. The enlivening accompaniment in timpani and strings is one of the fruits of revision. As the movement goes on, the rhythm becomes more and more giddily inventive, especially in the matter of the recklessly against-the-beat bravura embellishment the soloist fires across the themes. It builds to a drama that reminds us how much Sibelius enjoyed Dvoøák’s D-Minor Symphony when he heard Hans von Bülow conduct it in Berlin in 1890, and it ends in utmost and syncopated brilliance.

Program note excerpted from Michael Steinberg’s The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 1998), by permission of the author.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

Beethoven turned 40 in December 1810, and things were going very well. True, his hearing had deteriorated to the point where he was virtually deaf, but he was still riding that white-hot explosion of creativity that has become known, for better or worse, as his “heroic” style.

Over the decade-long span of that style, from 1803 to 1813, Beethoven essentially reimagined music and its possibilities. The works that crystallized the heroic style—the “Eroica” and the Fifth symphonies—unleashed a level of violence and darkness previously unknown in music and then triumphed over them. In these symphonies, music became not a matter of polite discourse but of conflict, struggle, and resolution.

In the fall of 1811, Beethoven began a new symphony, his seventh, which would differ sharply from those two famous predecessors. Gone is the sense of cataclysmic struggle and hard-won victory. Instead, this music is infused from its first instant with a mood of pure celebration.

Such a spirit has inevitably produced interpretations as to what this symphony is “about”: Berlioz heard in it a peasants’ dance, Wagner called it “the apotheosis of the dance,” and, more recently, Maynard Solomon has suggested that the Seventh is the musical representation of a festival, a brief moment of pure spiritual liberation.

But it may be safest to leave the issue of meaning aside and instead listen to the Seventh simply as music. There had never been music like this before, nor has there been since: This symphony contains more energy than any other piece of music ever written. Much has been made (correctly) of Beethoven’s ability to transform small bits of theme into massive symphonic structures, but here he begins not so much with theme as with rhythm: tiny figures, almost scraps of rhythm. Gradually he releases the energy locked up in these small figures and from them creates one of the mightiest symphonies ever written.

I. Poco sostenuto—vivace. The first movement opens with a slow introduction so long that it almost becomes a separate movement of its own. Tremendous chords punctuate the slow beginning, which gives way to a poised duet for oboes. The real effect of this long Poco sostenuto, however, is to coil the energy that will be unleashed in the true first movement, and Beethoven conveys this rhythmically: The meter of the introduction is a rock-solid (even square) 4/4, but the main body of the movement, marked Vivace, transforms this into a light-footed 6/8. This Vivace begins in what seems a most unpromising manner, however, as woodwinds toot out a simple dotted 6/8 rhythm and the solo flute announces the first theme. This simple dotted rhythm saturates virtually every measure of the movement, as theme, as accompaniment, as motor rhythm, always hammering into our consciousness. At the climax, horns sail majestically to the close as the orchestra thunders out that rhythm one final time.

II. Allegretto. The second movement, in A minor, is one of Beethoven’s most famous slow movements, but the debate continues as to whether it really is a slow movement. Beethoven could not decide whether to mark it Andante, a walking tempo, or Allegretto, a moderately fast pace. He finally decided on the latter, though the actual pulse is somewhere between those two. This movement too is built on a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the first five notes—long-short-short-long-long—and this pattern repeats here almost as obsessively as the pattern of the first movement. The opening sounds like a series of static chords—the theme itself occurs quietly inside those chords—and Beethoven simply repeats this theme, varying it as it proceeds. The central episode in A major moves gracefully along smoothly-flowing triplets before a little fugato on the opening rhythms builds to a great climax. The movement winds down on the woodwinds’ almost skeletal reprise of the fundamental rhythm.

III. Presto. The scherzo explodes to life on a theme full of grace notes, powerful accents, flying staccatos and timpani explosions. This alternates with a trio section for winds reportedly based on an old pilgrims’ hymn, though no one, it seems, has been able to identify that hymn exactly. Beethoven offers a second repeat of the trio, then seems about to offer a third before five abrupt chords drive the movement to its close.

IV. Allegro con brio. These chords set the stage for the finale, again built on the near-obsessive treatment of a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the movement’s opening four-note fanfare. This pattern punctuates the entire movement: It shapes the beginning of the main theme, and its stinging accents thrust the music forward continuously as this movement almost boils over with energy. The ending is remarkable: Above growling cellos and basses (which rock along on a two-note ostinato for 28 measures), the opening theme drives to a climax that Beethoven marks fff, a dynamic marking he almost never used.

This conclusion is virtually Bacchanalian in its wild power. No matter how many times we’ve heard it, it remains one of the most exciting moments in all of music.

Beethoven led the first performance of the Seventh Symphony in Vienna on December 8, 1813—a huge success, with the audience demanding that the second movement be repeated.

—Eric Bromberger

Minnesota Orchestra
Osmo Vänskä, Music Director and Conductor
The Minnesota Orchestra is recognized for distinguished performances around the world, award-winning recordings, radio broadcasts and educational programs, and commitment to building the repertoire of the future. Founded as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1903, the ensemble played its first regional tour in 1907, debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1912, and has returned for regular New York performances ever since. The orchestra, known since 1968 as the Minnesota Orchestra, has toured to Australia, Canada, Europe, the Far East, Latin America, and the Middle East. Its first nine music directors included Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Antal Dorati, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Neville Marriner, and Edo de Waart.

In 2003, the orchestra welcomed its 10th Music Director, Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, who guides a season encompassing nearly 200 concerts that are heard live by 400,000 individuals, and education and outreach programs that serve 85,000 music lovers of all ages. Thousands also hear the orchestra via live regional broadcasts, SymphonyCast and Performance Today.

In the early 1920s, the Minnesota Orchestra became one of the first ensembles to be heard on recordings and radio. Its landmark Mercury Living Presence LP recordings of the 1950s and 1960s have been reissued on compact disc to great acclaim. The Orchestra’s recent cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies has been hailed internationally, and it has undertaken new Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Bruckner recording projects.

Since its inception the Orchestra has nourished a strong commitment to contemporary composers, premiering and/or commissioning nearly 300 compositions. Among these are works by John Adams, Aaron Copland, John Corigliano, Charles Ives, Libby Larsen, Stephen Paulus and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, as well as Composer Laureate Dominick Argento, New Music Advisor Aaron Jay Kernis and Conductor Laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. The Orchestra has received 16 awards for adventuresome programming from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), including three consecutive Leonard Bernstein Awards for Educational Programming and, in 2008, the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music. Visit minnesotaorchestra.org for more information.

Leonidas Kavakos, Violin
Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos has established himself as one of today’s leading violinists, appearing regularly with prestigious orchestras throughout the world and giving recitals at the major international festivals and concert halls. In addition to concerts with the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, his engagements this season include performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, La Scala Filharmonia, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

In 2007, Mr. Kavakos became Artistic Director of the Austrian chamber orchestra Camerata Salzburg. He conducts the orchestra in regular appearances at the Mozarteum Salzburg, Salzburg Festival, the Mozartwoche, and its own festival, the Begegnung. This season he led the ensemble in additional concerts in Vienna, Greece, and Germany. In 2006, the orchestra visited Athens with three Mozart programs in which he performed the five violin concertos and conducted three late symphonies. These concerts were recorded and have been released by Sony to wide acclaim.

As a chamber musician, Mr. Kavakos collaborates with many distinguished partners, including Heinrich Schiff, Natalia Gutman, Emanuel Ax, Lars Vogt, and Elisabeth Leonskaya. He recently played a series of recitals with pianist Péter Nagy at venues including London’s Wigmore Hall and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Last season he appeared in chamber concerts at the Verbier Festival and gave recitals throughout England, Germany, and Italy.

Mr. Kavakos was soloist in the first-ever recording of the original version of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto for BIS. His additional albums include the Hindemith Violin Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic, solo sonatas by Ysaÿe, Sibelius’s Humoresques, and works by Debussy, Kreisler, Paganini, Bach, and Stravinsky. Please visit intermusica.co.uk or additional information.