CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Anne Sofie Von Otter
Brad Mehldau
Bengt Forsberg

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Anne Sofie von Otter, Mezzo-Soprano
Bengt Forsberg, Piano
Brad Mehldau, Piano

SIBELIUS "To Evening," Op. 17, No. 6
SIBELIUS "The North," Op. 90, No. 1
SIBELIUS "Reed, Reed, Rustle," Op. 36, No. 4
SIBELIUS "Enticement," Op. 17, No. 3
SIBELIUS "Den judiska flickans sång," from Belshazzar's Feast, Op. 51
SIBELIUS "Was It a Dream?" Op. 37, No. 4
RAVEL Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn
HAHN "À Chloris"
HAHN "Quand je fus pris au pavillon"
HAHN "Le plus beau présent"
DUKAS Prélude élégiaque sur le nom de Haydn
SCHUMANN "Die Kartenlegerin," Op. 31, No. 2
SCHUMANN "Des Sennen Abschied," Op. 79, No. 22
SCHUMANN "Verratene Liebe," Op. 40, No. 5
SCHUMANN "Der Soldat," Op. 40, No. 3
SCHUMANN "Dein Angesicht," Op. 127, No. 2
BRAD MEHLDAU Love Songs (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)
TRAD. American popular songs (to be announced from the stage)

Encores:
BERNSTEIN "Some Other Time" from On the Town
KORNGOLD "Glückwunsch," Op. 38, No. 1
GRIEG "I Love but Thee," Op. 5, No. 3

Program Notes:

JEAN SIBELIUS (1865–1957)
“Till kvällen,” Op. 17, No. 6; “Vårförnimmelser,” Op. 90, No. 1; “Säf säf susa,” Op. 36, No. 4; “Fågellek,” Op. 17, No. 3; “Den judiska flickans sang,” Op. 51; “Var det en dröm,” Op. 37, No. 4

The idea of “nationalism” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—the suggestion that composers outside the realm of Austro-German art music were best heard as representing their local traditions—has been overplayed, to the benefit of Austro-German composers. Their music is naturalized as “classical” and thus seemingly unmarked by distinctive national characteristics, whereas everyone else is heard as the exotic, colorful “Other.” Within the Scandinavian sphere, however, nationalism needs to be considered, at least with regard to Jean Sibelius, Finland’s greatest composer. Born in 1865, Sibelius grew up speaking Swedish, the language of culture and government that was the legacy of Finland’s long rule by its neighbor. Yet his early exposure to a growing Finnish education laid the groundwork for a nativist reaction. Sibelius dedicated himself to the language, culture, and music of his own country; even when he composed songs in Swedish, he began to apply patterns and formulas from Finnish folk epics, just as he drew inspiration from national subjects in his instrumental music.

The songs on this program are drawn from various collections. “Den judiska flickans sång” has an unexpected American connection: It is Sibelius’s own arrangement of incidental music he composed for a play on the subject of Belshazzar’s Feast. Later in life, the composer returned to this “Jewish Girl’s Song,” arranging it for the remarkable African-American contralto Marian Anderson as “Solitude” and dedicating the song to her.

Oddly enough for a composer so invested in language itself, Sibelius declared that his songs “could also be sung without words.” The words, he lamented, “are always a burden to my art.” What he meant, according to musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg, is that the essential sentiment of a text, its emotional core, could best be captured in music—even in a single gesture. Like Schumann, Sibelius often distilled his reading of a poem into a concentrated musical idea. The “relentless concentration on the musical evocation of a single poetic conceit,” Kallberg argues, shifts “attention away from discrete words and towards overall meaning” of the poem. In “Var det en dröm” the shimmering piano accompaniment distills the hazy unreality of a dream into a memorable motif.
—Elizabeth Bergman

Elizabeth Bergman earned her Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University, and has authored numerous award-winning books and articles.


MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)
Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn
PAUL DUKAS (1875–1947)
Prélude elégiaque sur le nom de Haydn

Maurice Ravel pioneered the systematic use of a musical cipher, working with a system that associated letters of a name with notes in a scale. Some names translate very simply, the easiest being Bach. In German, “B” is equivalent to B-flat and “H” (“Ha”) to B natural; A and C name pitches in both the German and English systems. Thus his surname exactly matches a musical motif. Bach himself encoded his name into an unfinished movement from the Art of Fugue (1751), and, some 200 years later, Robert Schumann composed six fugues on B-A-C-H (Op. 60) for organ (the choice of instrument referring also to Bach).

The name “Haydn,” however, poses a problem. The letters “H,” “A,” and “D” refer to notes. But how to translate “Y” and “N” into pitches? There are no simple equivalents in any language. Ravel and his peers used a rudimentary (thus easily broken) musical code. The basic seven-note, diatonic scale A-B-C-D-E-F-G is written on a staff as usual, then the next letters are filled in below, H-I-J-K-L-M-N, continuing all the way to Z. The first pitch in the scale, A, thus corresponds to four letters: A-H-O-V. In this system, “Haydn” translates to A-A-D-D-G. This may not be the most compelling motif in and of itself, but Ravel made much of it, as did Debussy, Dukas, and Hahn. All were commissioned by a leading French music journal, Revue musicale mensuelle de la Société Internationale de Musicologie, to compose works celebrating the centenary of Haydn’s death in 1909, and the editor of the journal, Jules Ecorcheville, created the specific cipher.

These same composers were not only invested in marking the musical past but were also engaged in charting the modernist future. In 1909 impresario Serge Diaghilev introduced Paris to his daringly modern dance troupe, the Ballets Russes, for whom Ravel composed his longest work, Daphnis et Chloé. Diaghilev also solicited ballet scores from Dukas and Hahn. The latter’s Le Dieu Bleu (The Blue God) was an Indian-themed extravaganza featuring choreography by Michel Fokine and a set designed by Leon Bakst—two of the same collaborators involved with Stravinsky’s scandalous Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913).
—Elizabeth Bergman


REYNALDO HAHN (1875–1947)
“À Chloris”; “Quand je fus pris au pavilion”; “Le plus beau présent (Maurice Magre)”

Although no longer as well known as his contemporaries, among them Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, and Charles Ives, Reynaldo Hahn enjoyed a successful career as a composer, critic, and conductor. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, as the youngest of 12 children, Hahn showed his talent at an early age. His family relocated to Paris when he was only four, and at six he performed at a musical soirée hosted by Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I. Hahn himself was a fine singer, who could count among his admirers the great French writer Marcel Proust. The two became intimate sometime in 1894, with Proust affectionately calling Hahn “my master” and “Buncht,” an endearment of unknown origins and many baby-talk variations (Bunibuls, Buninuls, Burnuls, Gunibuls). Hahn dubbed Proust “my pony.” The character of Vinteuil in Proust’s masterwork Remembrance of Things Past was likely modeled on Hahn. The two artists remain close: They are buried in the same division of Père Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetery.
—Elizabeth Bergman


ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810–1856)
“Die Kartenlegerin,” Op. 31, No. 2; “Des Sennen Abschied,” Op. 79, No. 23; “Verratene Liebe,” Op. 40, No. 5; “Der Soldat,” Op. 40, No. 3; “Dein Angesicht,” Op. 127, No. 2


Robert Schumann made important contributions to every musical genre of his age but in 1840 devoted himself to vocal composition. During his so-called Liederjahr (year of songs), he produced major collections comprising anywhere from 6 to 16, or more, songs. His outburst of creativity was perhaps inspired by his wedding that same year to Clara Wieck. Having married against her father’s wishes, the newlyweds found themselves flung into a nasty court battle, which found Wieck leveling charges of drunkenness against his intended son-in-law and the composer seeking a doctoral degree to shore up his reputation. Understandably, Schumann was drawn to poems about love in all its phases and facets.

Unlike Schubert, who wrote exceptional songs on some undistinguished texts, Schumann believed that great songs required great poetry. He chose texts by Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine, Rückert, Burns, and Byron. Often working with large cycles, he sought to mirror the coherence of poetic themes in his musical settings. Nine of the collections from 1840–41 qualify as cycles, including the five songs on texts by Hans Christian Andersen in Op. 40. The Andersen Lieder fall in between two better-known cycles—Liederkreis, Op. 39 (1840), on texts by Eichendorff, and Frauenliebe und –leben, Op. 41 (1840), on texts by Chamisso—but display the same musical and poetic unity as those larger groupings.
—Elizabeth Bergman


BRAD MEHLDAU
Love Songs

When I received the commission from Carnegie Hall to write songs for Anne Sofie von Otter, I found three poems of Sara Teasdale fairly quickly and began to set them. The poet made her subject and the songlike nature of her poems very clear in her book of poems, simply titled Love Songs. I have used the title of her collection for the five songs here.

After deciding to stay with love as a guiding theme for the other songs I would set, my only requirement was that they not be as optimistic as Teasdale’s, so that the group of songs would have more variety of mood. My search was surprisingly difficult and frustrating. There was no shortage of poems addressing love in one way or another that moved me when I read them. When I thought about setting them, though, they often seemed to be either too specific or not specific enough. There is either a lot to say about love, or very little. I made a stab at one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, to no avail. The density of meaning in each word could not carry over into song in my attempts, and that discovery summarizes a general challenge: The song should not diminish the meaning of the poem; it should compliment it or at least be equal to the tenor of the words themselves. This applies to any song setting, but I felt that challenge more acutely in the trial and error of finding poems about love to set.

Poems about love can invoke the celebration of love or the pain of love, and my approach was to frame the five songs here with a painful poem at the beginning and the end of the set, and position the more sunny Teasdale poems in the middle. This seemed right: We love and are loved with immediacy, but if that love is unable to bloom, as in Philip Larkin’s “We Met at the End of the Party,” or threatened, as in E. E. Cummings “it may not always be so; and I say” then pain takes its place. In the Cummings poem, that pain is felt with the same immediacy as the act of love itself; it is in fact an expression of love. The Larkin poem, on the other hand, is about missing a chance at love. The narrator is removed from an event that took place in the past, and his pain is less immediate, but also broader and more resilient—it is suffused through the passage of time.

The way time is rendered is central to Larkin’s poem. Larkin addresses his beloved in the present moment, but we know that their meeting never spawned a lasting relationship. He speaks, though, in three distinct tenses: In the first half of the poem, everything is in the past tense; in the next three lines, we are in the present moment; finally, the last five lines are in the conditional mood, looking back to what could have been. The brevity of the poem and conversational tone of the speaker are masterfully misleading, because this poem is really three poems in one – a poem about love in the past, a poem about unrequited love in the present, and a poem about a love that could have been. I decided to focus on these three sub-moods within the poem, letting them guide my setting. The motoric rhythm of the piano that begins the song represents the passage of time; in the middle section, time “stops” and we focus on the voice more speaking to his/her beloved. The last section moves again, but slower with more pathos. The motoric rhythm resumes briefly in the piano to end the song, signaling a synthesis – what was and what could have been, considered here and now.

“Child, Child” is the first Sarah Teasdale setting here; it is also the first in her book. Here, the tone is imperative: “Love,” it commands, and tells us how and why; this is a statement of purpose for the poems that follow, and voices the poet’s conviction that love is not just another feeling, but a necessity for us to live. I imagined a ritualistic dance in my setting, in which love is praised and prayed for. In “Twilight,” the piano traces the sound of the falling rain and the falling wings of night; from the voice, we hear the sound of the bird calling and the woman’s own voice calling out to her lover. “Because” is the ballad of the five songs here, meant to mirror the devotion expressed in the poem.

Starting the group with a poem from an older narrator who looks to the past was a counterintuitive move on my part, partially to not end on too gloomy a note. The more youthful bookend of Cummings also seemed right to end on because when one falls in love at any age, one becomes young again, and not just in the joyful, carefree sense. This green disposition is thus a permanent possibility as long as blood flows through our veins. One engages in youthful folly even if he or she has been down that road before. While I was setting Cummings’s poem, I was reading Phillip Roth’s recent novel, “Exit Ghost” which wonderfully portrays that kind of folly through the actions and thoughts of its septuagenarian narrator. “it may not always be so; and I say” is a so strong because it telegraphs the speaker’s inability to put such a mixture of adoration and despair into words. Cummings’s singular way of messing with syntax works perfectly here, as in the lines: “in such a silence as I know, or such / great writhing words as, uttering over much, / stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;”. We feel the anguish of the speaker as he gets stuck on those writhing words, swallowing them.
—Brad Mehldau

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Anne Sofie von Otter, Mezzo-Soprano
Anne Sofie von Otter is considered one of the finest singers of her generation and is sought after by many of the world’s major conductors, orchestras, opera companies, and recording companies. Born in Sweden, her studies began in Stockholm and continued with Vera Rozsa at London’s Guildhall. She commenced her professional career as a principal member of the Basel Opera before she was launched on an international career that has now spanned more than two decades. Renowned for her interpretation of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, she has recorded the role for EMI with Bernard Haitink, and also performed it in Stockholm, Munich, Chicago, Covent Garden, and at the Paris Bastille, as well as in Vienna, at the Metropolitan Opera, and in Japan with the late Carlos Kleiber (the latter available on DVD).

Ms. von Otter has scored many personal successes on the main operatic stages of Europe. Recent engagements include Gluck’s Orfeo in Geneva, Alceste at the Châtelet; Handel’s Ariodante, Sesto in both Clemenza di Tito and Giulio Cesare, and Clairon in Strauss’s Capriccio at Paris’s Palais Garnier; Oktavian at Vienna’s State Opera; the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos; Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at the Aix-en-Provence Festival; and Ottavia in the same work at the Theatre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where she also made debuts as Handel’s Xerxes and Lully’s Thesée. In addition, she returned to Sweden’s historic Drottningholm Festival for performances as Ruggerio in Handel’s Alcina and made her debut as Carmen at the Glyndebourne Festival. At the Royal Stockholm Opera, she added the role of Concepcion in Ravel’s L’heure Espagnole to her repertoire and enjoyed success as Orphée in a new staging by Mats Ek; in addition, she returned to the Geneva Opera as Didon in Iannis Kokkos’s staging of Berlioz’s Les Troyens.

Ms. von Otter enjoys an ongoing relationship with the Metropolitan Opera and James Levine; in recent seasons she has sung numerous performances of Rosenkavalier, Clemenza di Tito, and Idomeneo there and made her stage debut as Mélisande. In 2006 she made her debut at the Santa Fe Opera Festival as Carmen, conducted by Alan Gilbert.

An acclaimed recitalist, Ms. von Otter performs around the globe with her accompanist, Bengt Forsberg, and an equally busy concert career takes her regularly to the major halls of Europe and North America. Last season Ms. von Otter enjoyed a residency at Vienna’s Musikverein, where her performances included Chausson’s Poeme de l’amour et de la mer with Philippe Jordan, lieder recitals with Mr. Forsberg, and chamber music and jazz concerts. Ms. von Otter also appeared twice with the Boston Symphony and James Levine in Das Lied von der Erde and Les Troyens, the latter at Tanglewood. In 2007 she joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen for semi-staged performances of Tristan und Isolde, in which she debuted her highly acclaimed Brangäne.

Ms. von Otter’s recording relationship with Deutsche Grammophon began in 1985, and today she boasts an extensive personal discography. Together with Mr. Forsberg, she has made many award-winning lieder and chamber music recordings featuring works by Schubert, Chaminade, Schumann, Korngold, Brahms, and Grieg, among other composers. With orchestra she has recorded Weill, Mahler, Bach, and Zemlinsky (Gardiner); Berlioz and Brahms (Levine); Mozart (Pinnock); Berg, Mahler, and a Grammy Award–winning Schubert collection (Abbado); Ravel and Mahler (Boulez); and Offenbach (Minkowski). Other recordings for DG have included For the Stars, an award-winning collaboration with Elvis Costello; Music for a While, a Baroque recital with harpsichord and lute; I Let the Music Speak, a celebration of the music of Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus; and, most recently, her highly acclaimed and award-winning Terezín/Theresienstadt recording with Bengt Forsberg and Daniel Hope, a collection of moving songs and musical works composed by musicians imprisoned in the Theresiensdadt concentration camp.

Ms. von Otter’s opera catalogue includes Dorabella with Solti, Monteverdi’s Ottavia, and Glück’s Orfeo, as well as Sesto and Idamantes with Gardiner, Cherubino with Levine, Marguérite with Chung, Dido with Pinnock, and Strauss’s Composer with Sinopoli. A frequent performer of opera in concert, Ms. von Otter has also made live recordings of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle, Charlotte in Werther, Ariodante, Hercules, Sesto in Giulio Cesare, and Baba the Turk in The Rake’s Progress, all for DG Archiv.

Ms. von Otter’s engagements in the current season include her house debut at Theater an der Wien in The Rake’s Progress, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and her debut as Waltraute in Götterdämmerung at the Stockholm Opera, followed by the same role at the Aix-en-Provence Festival conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. In concert Ms. von Otter will return to Los Angeles in a Peter Sellars staging of Oedipus Rex conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen; tour with Concerto Copenhagen and Lars Ulrich Mortensen in Bach, and Les Arts Florissants and William Christie in French Baroque; and take her band on tour to the Far East for a series of Christmas concerts.

Bengt Forsberg, Piano
Swedish pianist Bengt Forsberg studied at the Gothenburg College of Music, majoring in both piano and organ. As a soloist, chamber musician, and accompanist, Mr. Forsberg enjoys promoting music by lesser-known composers such as Medtner, Alkan, and Franz Schmidt, as well as rarely heard music by more well-known figures such as Fauré, Sibelius, and Franck. His repertoire of both well-known and unknown composers is wide and varied, and he manages his own Chamber Music Society in Stockholm to him promote this music.

Together with Anne Sofie von Otter, Mr. Forsberg has made recordings of songs by composers as diverse as Strauss, Korngold, Stenhammar, Schumann, Weill, Chaminade, Schubert, and Grieg, all on the Deutsche Grammophon label. He has also made several highly praised recordings for Hyperion with Swedish cellist Mats Lidström and solo recordings of piano music by Schubert and Schumann and late-Romantic Swedish composers, as well as various chamber music recordings.

Mr. Forsberg has traveled the world for recital tours and chamber music concerts, including a three-concert showcase at Alice Tully Hall, where hs also has seved as artistic advisor, and as guest artist for two consecutive years at the Perth Chamber Music Festival in Australia. With Ms. Von Otter he has appeared in recital in Berkeley, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka, Perth (Scotland), and at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Solo engagements have included Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 with the Jönköping Sinfonietta; Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto in Gothenburg; Nicolas Medtner’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, “The Age of Anxiety,” d’Indy’s Sinfonie cévenole, and Ingemar Liljefors’s Piano Concerto, Op. 11, with Uppsala Chamber Orchestra; and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 with Dalasinfoniettan. Mr. Forsberg appears regularly at many of the world’s international festivals, including a leading role in the recent Dutilleux Festival in Stockholm.

In the current season, Mr. Forsberg will perform in recitals with Anne Sofie Von Otter throughout the US, Asia, and Europe.

Brad Mehldau, Piano
Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has recorded and performed extensively since the early 1990s. He has worked primarily with the same trio since 1995, featuring bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. Between 1996 and 2000, they released a series of five records on the Warner Brothers label entitled The Art of the Trio, and in 2004 released the album Anything Goes. Mehldau also has a solo piano recording entitled Elegiac Cycle, and a record called Places that includes both solo piano and trio songs. These latter two recordings might be called “concept” albums. They are made up exclusively of original material and have central themes that hover over the compositions. Outside of the piano solo or trio format, Mehldau collaborated with the innovative musician and producer Jon Brion on Largo, released in 2002. His first album for Nonesuch Records, the solo recording Live in Tokyo, was released last year.
Mehldau is first and foremost an improviser, and greatly cherishes the surprise and wonder that can occur from a spontaneous, directly expressed musical idea. But he also has a deep fascination for the formal architecture of music, which informs everything he plays. In his most inspired playing, the actual structure of his musical thought serves as an expressive device. As he plays, he listens to how ideas unwind, and the order in which they reveal themselves. Each tune has a strongly felt narrative arc, whether it expresses itself in a beginning and an end, or as something left intentionally open-ended. The two sides of Mehldau’s personality—the improviser and the formalist—play off each other, and the effect is often something like controlled chaos.
Mehldau has performed around the world at a steady pace since the mid-nineties, with his trio and as a solo pianist. His performances convey a wide range of expression, and he favors juxtaposing extremes. Often, the intellectual rigor and density of information in the abstraction of one tune is followed by a stripped down, emotional directness in the next. Over the years, he has attracted a sizeable following, which has grown to expect a singular, intense experience in his performance.
In addition to his trio and solo projects, Mehldau has worked with a number of great jazz musicians, including a rewarding gig with saxophonist Joshua Redman’s band; recording and concerts with Charlie Haden and Lee Konitz; and recording as a sideman with the likes of Wayne Shorter, John Scofield, and Charles Lloyd. For more than a decade, he has collaborated with several musicians whom he respects greatly, including guitarists Peter Bernstein and Kurt Rosenwinkel and tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. Mehldau also has played on a number of recordings outside of the jazz idiom, like Willie Nelson’s Teatro and singer-songwriter Joe Henry’s Scar. His music has appeared in several movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Wim Wender’s Million Dollar Hotel. He also composed an original soundtrack for the French film Ma femme est une actrice. For more information, visit www.bradmehldau.com.