CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Philadelphia Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Charles Dutoit, Chief Conductor
Yuja Wang, Piano

BARBER Adagio for Strings
PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 2

BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique

Program is approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes, including one intermission

Program Notes:

SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981)
Adagio for Strings

The hauntingly elegiac second movement of Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11, is the composer’s most famous work—just not in its original version. Arturo Toscanini premiered Barber’s own arrangement of the piece for full string orchestra with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1938. Under the title Adagio for Strings the work catapulted the 28-year-old composer to fame, and eventually emerged as one of the most beloved pieces of the 20th century.

Slow movements seem particularly susceptible to such independent fame. The second movement (actually marked Allegretto) of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was one of the composer’s most popular works during his lifetime. The Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung called it the crown of modern instrumental music and noted that it had to be repeated at its 1813 premiere. The movement was often performed apart from the rest of the symphony in the years to follow.

The Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony won a similar fame. Scored for strings and harp, the movement became Mahler’s best-known piece and, like Barber’s Adagio, entered popular culture through its use in films. In addition to their cinematic appropriations, Barber’s Adagio and Mahler’s Adagietto also share the distinction of being called upon in times of mourning and crisis. The Adagio for Strings was heard on the radio just after the announcement of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945 and was later enlisted for memorial services of other prominent figures.

The list of luscious slow movements could go on. As with Barber and Mahler, and with especially popular ones from the Baroque period by Bach, Pachelbel, and Albinoni (who actually did not write his celebrated Adagio in G Minor), these pieces are usually scored either entirely or most prominently for strings.

Barber’s original String Quartet dates from 1936. Another ethereal work was on his mind when he began composing it that summer in Europe. As he wrote in letter: I finished copying [Wagner’s] Siegfried ‘Idyll’ the other day, a sort of joyful penitence for certain orchestral indiscretions which I committed this winter. How beautiful the instrumentation of the ‘Idyll’ is! He went on to remark how difficult writing a quartet was proving to be, but by mid-September could prophetically report to Orlando Cole, cellist of the Curtis String Quartet: I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is knockout! Now for a finale. The last movement continued to cause Barber a great deal of trouble; it went through various revisions even after the quartet’s premiere at the Library of Congress in April 1937.

Toscanini and the Premiere
Barber had met Toscanini in Italy a few years before, and the conductor took an interest in the young composer, going so far as to say that he would like to perform some of his music. In January 1936, Barber sent him the Adagio for Strings and his Essay for Orchestra, but they were returned without any response. According to Barber’s own later account, he declined to visit Toscanini that summer in Italy. When his companion, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, went alone and offered excuses that this was due to health, the conductor replied: I don’t believe that. He’s mad at me. Tell him not to be mad. I’m not going to play one of his pieces, I’m going to play both.

Toscanini’s performance of both compositions with the NBC Symphony, then in its second season, was nationally broadcast on November 5, 1938. The Adagio for Strings was generally well received, notably from New York Times critic Olin Downes, but it sparked controversy in letters to the paper. Some complained that the piece was not identifiably American, while others objected that it was not modern. Toscanini performed the Adagio for Strings on tour in South America and England, and in 1942 recorded the work, further enhancing its fame. Barber later made yet another arrangement of the piece, a choral version to which he fitted the words of the Agnus Dei.

A Closer Listen
It may not be surprising that Barber’s final reincarnation for his Quartet movement should be religious—a solemn, even chant-like character is there from the beginning. The work opens with the first of a series of slow phrases consisting of a stepwise diatonic melody accompanied by chords from the other strings. The work builds to a powerful climax, louder, more chromatic, and in the highest register of the instruments. After a grand pause the music settles down with the calm return of the opening theme.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

Scoring: 5-part orchestral strings

Performance time: approximately 8 minutes

Composed in 1936, Barber’s Adagio for Strings received its New York premiere in Carnegie Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on May 1, 1939, with the Orchestrette Classique conducted by Frederique Petrides.


SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953) <PHOTO>
Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 16

Just four months after the Parisian riot that greeted Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps in May 1913, Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto was treated to a similarly chaotic premiere in the Russian resort town of Pavlovsk. The concerto left the listeners frozen with fright, their hair standing on end, in the hyperbolic description of one observer. In order to understand how this work’s tame tonalities could cause such a furor, one must consider the conservatism of Russian audiences of the day, which were attuned to the pleasantries of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Ironically, when the concerto was performed in France a decade later in a reconstructed version, it was greeted with virtual indifference by the Parisians, who claimed that the work wandered between the old and the new. By then the French had grown inured to the far more shocking modernisms of Stravinsky.

A Lost Concerto Reconstructed
Prokofiev was a 21-year-old student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory when he began working on the Second Concerto, which he completed the following year amidst travels to England, France, and Switzerland. It was one of several important works he composed on the eve of World War I, which also included piano works such as the Toccata, Op. 11, and the Sarcasms—pieces intended for the composer’s own concerts as one of Russia’s most promising new keyboard virtuosos. With the Second Concerto, Prokofiev outdid even his own brilliant but melodic First Piano Concerto, producing a work of such ferocious pianistic difficulty that even he himself had to practice the solo part for several months before performing it.

When Prokofiev fled Russia in 1918 to escape the revolutionary chaos that followed World War I, he left a number of scores behind in his St. Petersburg (or Petrograd) apartment, among them the only existing manuscript of the Second Piano Concerto. According to rumor, the manuscript was burned by refugees who occupied the house during the civil war—used as fuel, Prokofiev reports, good-naturedly, with which to cook an omelet.

During the ensuing decade, which the composer spent mostly in Europe and the US, he was increasingly in demand as a pianist; in 1923 he decided to reconstruct the lost Second Concerto from memory, leaving the work’s essential form intact—as he later described the process—but increasing the contrapuntal texture of the accompaniment and making the structural divisions less clear-cut. The unique result was the work we know today, the product of two different periods of the composer’s career, fused in an unusual blend of maturity of design with the (no doubt imperfect) memory of the youthful fervor of the work’s original version.

A Closer Look
The concerto is cast in a somewhat atypical four-movement design. An opening slow movement (Andantino) built from a tuneful subject announced by the soloist sandwiches a stomping Allegretto between its lyrical outer sections; its concluding cadenza is as harrowing for the soloist as that of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, and ultimately more thrilling. The racing Scherzo is a perpetuum-mobile piece of unrelenting drive and good-natured interplay between soloist and orchestra; it is followed by an Intermezzo of alternately cool and heavy-footed march rhythms. The finale, Allegro tempestoso—complete with a brilliantly fluid cadenza bearing similarities to that of the first movement—brings the work to a tumultuous close.

—Paul J. Horsley


Scoring:
2 flutes (doubling piccolo)
2 oboes
2 clarinets
2 bassoons
4 horns
2 trumpets
3 trombones
Tuba
Timpani
Percussion
Strings

Performance time: approximately 31 minutes

Prokofiev composed his Second Piano Concerto from 1912 to 1913 and reconstructed it in 1923; it received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 7, 1930, with Prokofiev as soloist and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.


HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803–1869) <PHOTO>
Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, according to statistics compiled by the American Symphony Orchestra League, emerged in the 1990s as the most frequently performed orchestral work in the United States. Like Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, Berlioz’s amazing first symphony is a revolutionary composition that eventually triumphed over all objections and became enshrined as a concert favorite, a warhorse. It requires some historical imagination, therefore, to recapture the most shocking aspects of the work, written by a composer in his mid-20s, and to appreciate the ways in which it helped to change the subsequent history of music.

Romantic Innovations
Not only is the Symphonie fantastique today ubiquitous in performance and on recordings, it turns up in nearly every music history textbook as the quintessential example of musical Romanticism. Premiered in 1830, just three years after Beethoven’s death, some of its novel features seem to point far into the future, building on Beethoven’s own innovations. (Berlioz briefly alludes to the Ninth Symphony in the third movement of the Symphonie fantastique, which owes a debt to the Pastoral Symphony as well.) Beethoven had found remarkable ways of unifying large, multi-movement works, especially in his Fifth and Ninth symphonies, by recycling motives. Such cyclicism had a profound impact on Romantic composers, who took the concept even further by ingeniously transforming themes. One strategy Berlioz uses to unify the Symphonie fantastique is to have a melody, which he calls an idée fixe, appear in each of the five movements, sometimes in quite different guises.

The musical procedures support a programmatic and ultimately personal goal. Romanticism saw a new relationship between music and literature. Berlioz adored the works of Virgil, Shakespeare, and Goethe in particular; this found expression not only in his symphonic works and operas, but also in his delightful memoirs and other writings. In the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz tells a story. He devised a program (excerpted below) that was to be handed out at performances. Indeed, the flyer states that distribution of the program to the audience is indispensable for a complete understanding of the dramatic outline of the work. At a time before printed programs were regularly given out at concerts, such an idea was unusual.

Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is often pointed to as an earlier programmatic model. But Beethoven was quite clear about what he was doing—he wrote in sketches for the work: more an expression of feeling than painting and painting carried too far in instrumental music loses its effect. In other words, he sought to express and convey an atmosphere, not to be realistic. Berlioz wanted to do both—to express emotions and feelings but also to tell a story, much as an opera did. He did not shy away from representing concrete events in his music.

Romantic Passions
Berlioz chose not any old story: It was autobiographical. The symphony is called Episode in the Life of an Artist, and that young artist is clearly Berlioz himself. His passion for Shakespeare inspired him in September 1827 to attend performances at the Paris Odéon Theater of Hamlet and Romeo et Juliette that featured the young Irish actress Harriet Smithson. He soon fell hopelessly in love, even though he could barely understand a word of the English-language productions. By the third act, half suffocated by emotion, he wrote of Smithson’s portrayal, with the grip of an iron hand upon my heart, I cried out to myself, ‘I am lost! I am lost!’

The initial course of this passion (to cut to the chase: They later married, but eventually separated) coincided with the genesis of the Symphonie fantastique and left its mark on the story. Berlioz heard gossip, for example, that Miss Smithson was having an affair with her manager. This led to real flights of Romantic fancy in the symphony. Berlioz has his musical hero take an overdose of opium (then very much in fashion, as evident in De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater), but this induces a bad trip in which he murders his former beloved, is sentenced to be executed, and dreams of a wild witches’ Sabbath.

This combination of sex, drugs, and the Gothic was typically Romantic, and Berlioz brings it off with startling brilliance. From the very first performance in December 1830, the final two movements—the execution march and witches’ Sabbath—have proved the most popular. Berlioz had, in fact, written the March to the Scaffold some years earlier for an unfinished opera and decided to incorporate it in the symphony by adding a brief coda in which we hear the idée fixe, followed by the slice of the guillotine, the head bouncing to the ground, and the cheers of the crowd. It is all very graphic and fantastic.

A New World of Sound
There is another musical point that helps define the extraordinary historical importance of this symphony: the sound world that Berlioz creates. The composer’s own instrument was the guitar and this no doubt influenced the way he conceived of chords and colors. Berlioz was a master conductor and the author of a famous treatise on orchestration. He often wrote for enormous ensembles—he at one point specified 220 players for the Symphonie fantastique—and used individual instruments with extreme precision. He employs some unusual ones in this piece: cornets, English horn, the small E-flat clarinet, an ophicleide (precursor to the modern bass tuba), and church bells. Even the more familiar instruments are asked to produce special effects with mutes, slides, and bowing techniques.

It should be noted that Berlioz revised the Symphonie many times before its first publication in 1845, and that in the process he changed the orchestration, as well as some of the formal elements of the piece. We are not exactly sure what the music sounded like at the 1830 premiere, and it may not have been quite as bold as the piece we now know so well.

A Closer Look: Berlioz’s Program
Berlioz also wrote many versions of the program for the Symphonie fantastique, which differ in minor as well as significant ways. The earliest one appeared in selected newspapers in advance of the work’s premiere, but was different from what was actually distributed at the concert, and different still from ones used on later occasions. In 1832, Berlioz wrote a sequel to this symphony called Lélio, or the Return to Life, which was meant to be performed on the same concert after the Symphonie fantastique. In this case, the entire earlier symphony is cast under the haze of a drug-induced fantasy from which the hero emerges at the start of Lélio.

Below is a condensed version of the program published in the first printed edition of the full score of the Symphonie fantastique in 1845:

The composer’s intention has been to develop, insofar as they contain musical possibilities, various situations in the life of an artist. The outline of the instrumental drama, which lacks the help of words, needs to be explained in advance. The following program should thus be considered as the spoken text of an opera, serving to introduce the musical movements, whose character and expression it motivates.

First Movement: Daydreams, Passions. The composer imagines that a young musician, troubled by that spiritual sickness which a famous writer has called the emptiness of passions, sees for the first time a woman who possesses all the charms of the ideal being he has dreamed of, and falls desperately in love with her ... The beloved vision never appears to the artist’s mind except in association with a musical idea, in which he perceives the same character—impassioned, yet refined and diffident—that he attributes to the object of his love. This melodic image and its model pursue him unceasingly like a double idée fixe [fixed idea]. That is why the tune at the beginning of the first Allegro constantly recurs in every movement of the Symphony.

Second Movement: A Ball. The artist is placed in the most varied circumstances: amid the tumult of a party; in peaceful contemplation of the beauty of nature—but everywhere, in town, in the meadows, the beloved vision appears before him, bringing trouble to his soul.

Third Movement: In the Meadows. One evening in the country, he hears in the distance two shepherds playing a pastoral song; this duet, the effect of his surroundings, the slight rustle of the trees gently stirred by the wind … all combine to bring an unfamiliar peace to his heart, and a more cheerful color to his thoughts. He thinks of his loneliness; he hopes soon to be alone no longer … But suppose she deceives him! This mixture of hope and fear, these thoughts of happiness disturbed by a dark foreboding, form the subject of the Adagio. At the end, one of the shepherds again takes up the song. The other no longer answers … Sounds of distant thunder … solitude … silence.

Fourth Movement: March to the Scaffold. The artist, now knowing beyond all doubt that his love is not returned, poisons himself with opium. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to take his life, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions. He dreams that he has killed the woman he loved, and that he is condemned to death, brought to the scaffold, and witnesses his own execution. The procession is accompanied by a march that is sometimes fierce and somber, sometimes stately and brilliant … At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe recur like a last thought of love.

Fifth Movement: Sabbath Night’s Dream. He sees himself at the witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a ghastly crowd of spirits, sorcerers, and monsters of every kind, assembled for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, far-off shouts to which other shouts seem to reply. The beloved tune appears once more, but it has lost its character of refinement and diffidence; it has become nothing but a common dance tune, trivial and grotesque; it is she who has come to the sabbath … A roar of joy greets her arrival … She mingles with the devilish orgy … Funeral knell, ludicrous parody of the Dies irae, Sabbath round dance. The sabbath dance and the Dies irae in combination.

—Christopher H. Gibbs


Scoring:
2 flutes (doubling piccolo)
2 oboes (doubling English horn)
2 clarinets (doubling C, A, and E-flat clarinets)
4 bassoons
4 horns
2 trumpets
2 cornets
3 trombones
2 ophicleides
Timpani
Percussion
2 harps
Strings

Performance time: approximately 50 minutes

Composed in 1830, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 17, 1899, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Emil Paur.


Program notes © 2009. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.

More Information:

These three works make an infallible impression. Barber’s Adagio always touches the heart, and Symphonie fantastique always creates fantastic images of ballrooms and witches. In the concerto there’s an extra attraction: an irresistible young Chinese virtuoso who stops the show each time she plays.

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Charles Dutoit, Chief Conductor
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
Founded in 1900, The Philadelphia Orchestra has distinguished itself as one of the leading orchestras in the world through a century of acclaimed performances, historic international tours, best-selling recordings, and its unprecedented record of innovation in recording technologies and outreach. The orchestra has maintained unity in artistic leadership with only seven music directors throughout its history: Fritz Scheel (1900–1907), Carl Pohlig (1907–1912), Leopold Stokowski (1912–1941), Eugene Ormandy (1936–1980), Riccardo Muti (1980–1992), Wolfgang Sawallisch (1993–2003), and Christoph Eschenbach (2003–2008).

This rich tradition is carried on by Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit. Mr. Dutoit has a longstanding relationship with the orchestra, having made his debut with the ensemble in 1980. Highlights of his second season include performances of Berlioz’s Te Deum and Symphonie fantastique, part of Mr. Dutoit’s four-year focus on the works of that composer, and a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Samuel Barber’s birthday. During his tenure, Mr. Dutoit will also showcase the music of the Ballets Russes, continuing in the 2009–2010 season with performances of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Le Sacre du printemps.

Recent Philadelphia Orchestra highlights include the opening of the orchestra’s online music store, thephiladelphiaorchestra.com; regular broadcasts on NPR; a series of critically acclaimed recordings on the Ondine label; and a $125 million endowment campaign.

The Philadelphia Orchestra annually touches the lives of more than one million music lovers worldwide through its performances, publications, recordings, and broadcasts. Each year the orchestra presents a subscription season in Philadelphia, education and community partnership programs, annual appearances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, and a three-week tour. Its summer schedule includes performances at Philadelphia’s Mann Center for the Performing Arts, free Neighborhood Concerts, and residencies at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Please visit philorch.org for more information.


CHARLES DUTOIT
Chief Conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra—as well as Artistic Director and Principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic (beginning in 2009) and Music Director of the Verbier Festival Orchestra—Charles Dutoit regularly collaborates with the world’s leading orchestras. Since his debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1980, Mr. Dutoit has been invited each season to conduct all the major orchestras of the US. He has also performed regularly with all the great orchestras of Europe, Japan, South America, and Australia. Mr. Dutoit has recorded extensively for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips, CBS, Erato, and other labels. His more than 170 recordings—half of them with the Montreal Symphony—have garnered over 40 awards and distinctions.

Since 1990, Mr. Dutoit has been Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra’s summer festival at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Between 1990 and 1999, he also directed the orchestra’s summer series at the Mann Center, and led them in a series of distinctive recordings. From 1991 to 2001, he was music director of the Orchestre National de France. In 1996 he was appointed principal conductor, and in 1998 music director, of the NHK Symphony in Tokyo. For 25 years (1977 to 2002), Mr. Dutoit was artistic director of the Montreal Symphony.

Mr. Dutoit holds honorary doctorates from McGill University, the University of Montreal, and Université Laval. In 1982 he was named Musician of the Year by the Canadian Music Council; in 1988 the same organization awarded him the Canadian Music Council Medal. In 1991, Mr. Dutoit was made an Honorary Citizen of the City of Philadelphia. In 1994 the Canadian Conference of the Arts awarded him their Diploma of Honour. In 1995 the government of Québec named him Grand Officier de l’Ordre National du Québec, and in 1996 the government of France made him Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has also been invested as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest award of merit. Mr. Dutoit was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and his musical training took him to Geneva, Siena, Venice, and Tanglewood, where he worked with Charles Munch.

A globetrotter motivated by his passion for history and archaeology, political science, art, and architecture, Mr. Dutoit has traveled and visited all the nations of the world. He maintains residences in Switzerland, Paris, Montreal, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo.

Yuja Wang, Piano
YUJA WANG
At age 22, Chinese pianist Yuja Wang has already performed with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, and NHK symphonies; the Los Angeles, China, London, and Nagoya philharmonics; the Tonhalle Orchestra; and Orchestra Mozart. In 2006 she made her New York Philharmonic debut at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, and she performed the following season as part of that ensemble’s tour to Japan and Korea. In 2008 she toured the US with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields led by Neville Marriner, and in 2009 she performed as a soloist with the YouTube Symphony. Ms. Wang gives recitals in major cities throughout North America and abroad, and makes regular appearances at festivals; she is also a dedicated performer of chamber music. She made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 2008 in Saratoga.

Highlights of Ms. Wang’s 2009–2010 season include the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Piano Concerto with the National Symphony; US tours with the Shanghai Symphony and the Russian National Orchestra; and performances with the Indianapolis, New World, and San Francisco symphonies; the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in Beijing; and the Royal and Hong Kong philharmonics. She will give recitals in San Francisco, Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, among other cities worldwide, and will return to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and the Verbier Festival in the summer of 2010. Ms. Wang is an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon recording artist, and her debut recording, Sonatas and Etudes, was released in spring 2009.

Born in Beijing, Ms. Wang began studying piano at age six, later training at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. After attending three Morningside Music summer programs at Calgary’s Mount Royal College from 1999 to 2001, she moved to Canada to study at the Mount Royal College Conservatory. Ms. Wang moved to the US at age 15 to study with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she graduated in 2008. In 2006, Ms. Wang received the Gilmore Young Artist Award.