CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Boston Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 8:00 PM

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano
Steven Ansell, Viola

ELLIOTT CARTER Dialogues, for Piano and Orchestra
BERLIOZ Harold in Italy

RAVEL Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
RAVEL Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2

Program is approximately 2 hours, including one intermission

Sponsored by KPMG LLP

Program Notes:

ELLIOTT CARTER (b. 1908)

Dialogues, for piano and orchestra

Elliott Carter, who celebrated his 101st birthday this past December, wrote his first concerto, the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, in 1961, and followed it a few years later with the Piano Concerto (premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1967). It would be 20 more years before he would write another vehicle for solo instrument with orchestra, his Oboe Concerto in 1987, but the genre has figured prominently in his music in the past two decades. The Oboe Concerto was followed by concertos for violin, clarinet, cello, horn, and (most recently) flute, plus three concerto-like works for piano and orchestra: Soundings, Interventions, and Dialogues. The Flute Concerto, written for Berliner Philharmoniker principal flutist Emmanuel Pahud, was a joint commission from the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Pahud played the world premiere in Jerusalem in September 2008. The BSO, with principal flute Elizabeth Rowe as soloist, gives the American premiere in Boston later this week.

This upsurge in concerto activity (even taking into account the upsurge in all of Carter's compositional activity) reflects the composer's strong relationships with a number of outstanding instrumentalists, such as Heinz Holliger, the great oboist and composer who requested the Oboe Concerto, as well as with leaders of ensembles anxious to expand the repertoire for their virtuoso performers, as when James Levine suggested Carter write a concerto for Boston Symphony principal horn James Sommerville. The piano-and-orchestra work Interventions was requested by Levine and Daniel Barenboim as a way of celebrating the composer's centenary; Barenboim was soloist and Levine conducted the BSO in a performance of the piece at Carnegie Hall on December 11, 2008, Carter's 100th birthday.

It was for the English pianist Nicolas Hodges that the BBC commissioned Carter's Dialogues, which was given its premiere by Hodges with the London Sinfonietta under Oliver Knussen's direction on January 23, 2004. Since then, several pianists have taken up this amiably brilliant piece, among them the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is a strong proponent of Carter's music generally and who has premiered several of the composer's smaller solo piano pieces.

Dialogues is a single, 14-minute movement that, like most of Carter's concertos, falls clearly into several smaller sections. The composer writes, "Dialogues for piano and chamber orchestra is a conversation between the soloist and the orchestra: responding to each other, sometimes interrupting the other, or arguing. The single varied movement is entirely derived from a small group of harmonies and rhythms. Commissioned for the brilliant young pianist Nicolas Hodges, it was composed in New York during 2003."

The presence of a kind of narrative involving different characters in "conversation," illustrated once again here, has been an essential metaphor in Carter's music, perhaps most dramatically in the Second String Quartet, and in the double dialogues of the Third. The succession of orchestral colors in opposition to the soloist is related to the subdivided orchestral textures of the ASKO Concerto and the Boston Concerto. Carter's writing for the piano is, as always, idiomatic, brilliant, and difficult, making the soloist a formidable conversationalist, while the orchestral responses are strongly differentiated. For example, the tentative but persistent solo English horn that begins the piece and contrasts so strongly with the opening piano passage is set off further with the appearance of the aggressive orchestral chords just after. The pianist is very busy but for a couple of areas of relative calm. The English horn, virtually alone in its role, returns on a couple of other occasions to reestablish the lyric impulse in the face of the piano's almost constant activity. The balance of the orchestra, meanwhile, gradually coalesces, from individual events for particular instrumental groups to acting largely in concert toward the end of the piece. Passages in which piano and ensemble are active together are extraordinary; the exuberance of the solo piano ultimately and definitively characterizes the whole.

In order to create a piece of great practical flexibility, Carter conceived Dialogues for a small orchestra of four woodwinds (flute/piccolo, oboe/English horn, clarinet, bassoon/contrabassoon), two horns, trumpet, trombone, and pairs of strings, but the string body may be expanded up to forty players.

—Robert Kirzinger



HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803–1869)

Harold in Italy, Symphony in four parts with viola solo, Op. 16

Berlioz spent more than a year in Italy in 1831 and 1832, having won the Prix de Rome, instituted by the French Government to enable French artists to study in an environment of classical art treasures. Musicians were loosely thought to need the same benefits, but for Berlioz the price of a few years' state pension was exile from the central sources of his art. He had already developed a strong distaste for all Italian opera; in Rome itself he found the cultivation of music indescribably narrow and parochial. He was not much interested in architectural treasures in themselves (more in their potential for music), and in Florence he was more preoccupied with reading Shakespeare than with his surroundings.

In the country, on the other hand, he really found musical inspiration. "I long to go to Mount Posilippo," he wrote, "to Calabria, or to Capri, and put myself in the service of a brigand chief. That's the life I crave: volcanos, rocks, rich piles of plunder in mountain caves, a concert of shrieks accompanied by an orchestra of pistols and carbines, blood and Lacryma-Christi, a bed of lava rocked by subterranean tremors: allons donc, voilà la vie!" At Alatri, on his return from Naples, Berlioz and his two Swedish hiking companions spent a dreadful night on hard beds, plagued by fleas and by the "young men serenading, going round the village all night singing beneath their mistresses' windows, to the accompaniment of a guitar and a terrible squawking clarinet."

Here clearly is the background to the last two movements of Harold in Italy. But the work did not come into being at that time. In 1834, over a year after Berlioz's return to Paris, Paganini, in admiration of the Symphonie fantastique, asked Berlioz for a work in which he could display his powers on a fine Stradivarius viola. Berlioz at first planned a choral work based on the last hours of Mary Queen of Scots, but somehow the ideas were transmuted into the four-movement symphony with solo viola Harold in Italy—a series of Italian souvenirs in a symphonic frame with a title alluding to Byron. Though the work does not enact the contents of the poem, Harold, while not a participant, is nevertheless the spectator of events and scenes. And he is, of course, a Byronic Berlioz, in that all four movements picture outdoor scenes drawn from the most vivid experiences of his Italian stay. The last movement borrows the device of parading previous themes in the manner of Beethoven's Ninth, to draw the work together and pay tribute to the finest symphonic model Berlioz knew. When it is the turn of Harold's theme to be recalled on the viola, it has become so protracted after its successive elongations in previous movements that it only achieves half its span. The frenetic vigor of the finale makes a stirring close interrupted only once by distant memories of the Pilgrims' March. The solo viola's final phrases in this brief interlude are drowned by the orchestra's savage interruption, and Harold is heard no more.

Harold in Italy remains a symphony, not a concerto, for the traditional balance between soloist and orchestra is shifted. Berlioz was the first to perceive the viola's potential as an expressive instrument, and because this is a dramatic and expressive rather than a virtuoso work, the soloist is rarely the protagonist, more often a bystander marking his presence with a recurrent theme. Paganini was startled and offended by this; he found the solo part "too full of rests" and never played it, though he later came to appreciate its worth in no uncertain terms by making Berlioz a gift of 20,000 francs at a time when the composer was most in need, allowing him to compose the next symphony, Roméo et Juliette, fittingly dedicated to Paganini.

The music of Harold in Italy is full of youthful vitality, tinged with that appealing romantic sensibility that Berlioz borrowed so poetically from literature. For him it was an autobiographical vignette; the Italian experience was something to which all his later music, from Benvenuto Cellini to Les Troyens, would bear powerful witness.

—Hugh Macdonald




MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)

Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

About 1930, Ravel found himself simultaneously with two commissions for piano concertos, one from his longtime interpreter Marguerite Long, and the other from Paul Wittgenstein, a concert pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I. Ravel worked on both commissions at the same time, but the results were quite different. The G major concerto composed for Marguerite Long falls into the category of brilliant entertainment music. The concerto for the left hand, perhaps inevitably, is one of the most serious of all the works of that urbane master.

Paul Wittgenstein was a remarkable member of a remarkable Viennese family. He was the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who also possessed considerable musical talent. Paul had barely begun his concert career when he was called into the Austrian reserves in 1914. Only a few months later he was wounded, and his right arm had to be amputated. After capture by the Russians (when the army hospital in which he was located was overrun), he was exchanged as an invalid and returned to Vienna, where he resumed his concert career in the 1916–1917 season. He quickly made a name for himself as a pianist with only one arm, and he induced many leading composers to write substantial works for him in all the genres—chamber and orchestral—that made use of a piano. Among those who responded to his requests were Richard Strauss, Franz Schmidt, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Britten, Prokofiev, Hindemith, and, most notably, Ravel.

Ravel wanted the solo part of the concerto to be as full and active as if it were intended for a pianist with two hands. The result—in one long movement divided into Lento and Allegro sections—is a fantastically difficult work perfectly gauged for
the shape of the left hand (which can have, for example, a rather large stretch between the thumb and index finger in the higher pitch levels and the upper ends of chords). As in his G-Major Concerto, there are jazzy elements that Ravel picked up during his visit to America, and the level of virtuosity required by the soloist increases to the end. Ravel rightly considered this, his last completed large-scale work, a supreme piece of illusion. Who can tell, just from listening, the nature of the self-imposed restriction under which he completed his commission?

—Steven Ledbetter



MAURICE RAVEL

Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2

Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé is based on a Greek romance written in prose by a shadowy author known only as Longus. The idea was more or less thrust upon Ravel by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, whose chief choreographer Michel Fokine wanted to do a Greek ballet. Fokine created the scenario, delighted by the fact that "the whole meaning of the story can be expressed by the dance." After Diaghilev's company had made a sensational splash in Paris with brilliant mountings of existing pieces, he began to commission new works, seeking out the brightest composers on the scene in Paris and Russia. His long collaboration with Stravinsky was to be epoch-making, but he also commissioned and performed important scores by Debussy, Ravel, Falla, Satie, Prokofiev, and many others.

Ravel was commissioned to write Daphnis and Chloé, his largest and finest orchestral score, in 1909, though he required changes in Fokine's scenario. He worked on it during the spring of 1910, completing a piano score by that May, substantially reworking the finale in 1911, and completing the scoring that same year. The ballet as a whole is, according to the composer, "constructed symphonically on a very strict tonal plan, with a number of themes whose developments assure the homogeneity of the work." When, after several postponements, the production finally came to fruition, it was somewhat cast into the shade by the premiere of Nijinsky's dancing of Debussy's Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun, regarded as scandalously erotic, just a week earlier.

In the first part of the ballet, Daphnis and Chloé are introduced as an attractive pair of potential lovers; but at the climax of the first scene, a horde of pirates attacks, seizing Chloé and carrying her away. The people invoke the god Pan, before whose statue they have been making sacrifices. A second scene, in the pirates' seaside camp, shows how Pan assists in the recovery of Chloé by evoking his characteristic effect—panic—on the terrified pirates.

The Suite No. 2 encompasses the final scene of the ballet. In one of Ravel's most brilliantly achieved strokes, dawn arrives unmistakably, with the singing of birds, the plashing of the waterfall, and the sun increasingly penetrating the mists. Shepherds arrive looking for Daphnis and Chloé; they find Daphnis and awaken him. He looks around for Chloé, and sees her arriving at last. They throw themselves into one another's arms (climactic statement, "very expressive").

The old shepherd Lammon explains that if Pan did indeed help them, it was in remembrance of his lost love for Syrinx. Daphnis and Chloé mime the story of Pan and Syrinx: Pan expresses his love for the nymph Syrinx, who, frightened, disappears in the reeds. In despair, Pan forms a flute out of a reed and plays upon it to commemorate his love. (During the ravishing flute solo, Chloé reappears and echoes, in her movements, the music of the flute.) The dance becomes more and more animated. At its climax, Chloé throws herself into Daphnis's arms, and they solemnly exchange vows before the altar. A group of young girls dressed as bacchantes enters with tambourines. Now the celebration can begin in earnest, in the extended Danse générale, one of the most brilliant and exciting musical passages ever written.

—Steven Ledbetter

Program notes © Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc.
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More Information:

Opening the night is music so happy it positively dances: Carter’s urbane Dialogues, a work written when he was in his 90s, still breathes the spirit of youth. Following are three French works. The dusky sound of the viola colors the Berlioz piece, based on Byron’s story of adventure and ribaldry. Ravel’s concerto sparkles with hints of jazz, while the ballet suite from Daphnis et Chloé dances even more, closing out the evening with a spectacular, theatrical rush.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor

Now in his sixth season as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine is the BSO's 14th music director since the orchestra's founding in 1881 and the first American-born conductor to hold that position. Highlights of Maestro Levine's 2009–2010 Boston Symphony programs, four of which travel to Carnegie Hall, include a Beethoven symphony cycle (the orchestra's first on subscription concerts in 75 years); the premieres of commissioned works from Peter Lieberson (Farewell Songs for baritone and orchestra), Elliott Carter (Flute Concerto), and John Harbison (Double Concerto for violin and cello); the premiere of John Williams's On Willows and Birches, written for former BSO harp principal Ann Hobson Pilot; Mendelssohn's Elijah (in its first Boston Symphony performances since 1982); a Pension Fund Concert featuring all four Strausses (both Johanns, Josef, and Richard); and music of Berg, Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Mozart, Ravel, Schubert, and Stravinsky.

Mr. Levine's programming each year balances orchestral, operatic, and choral classics with significant music of the 20th and 21st centuries, including newly commissioned works from such leading American composers as Babbitt, Carter, Harbison, Kirchner, Lieberson, Schuller, and Wuorinen. At Tanglewood each summer he also leads TMC classes devoted to orchestral repertoire, lieder, and opera. James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra made their first European tour together following the 2007 Tanglewood season; at Tanglewood in 2008 he was Festival Director for the Elliott Carter Centenary Celebration marking the composer's 100th-birthday year.

Maestro Levine is also Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, where, in the 38 years since his debut there, he has led nearly 2,500 performances of 85 different operas, including 15 company premieres. This season at the Met he conducts new productions of Tosca and Les Contes d'Hoffmann and revivals of Simon Boccanegra and Lulu, as well as concerts at Carnegie Hall with the MET Orchestra and MET Chamber Ensemble. Also a distinguished pianist, Maestro Levine is an active chamber music and recital collaborator, especially in lieder and song repertoire with the world's great singers.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano

Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and a leading interpreter of the standard piano repertoire, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career that transcends traditional boundaries. In recent seasons he has been invited by Carnegie Hall, Vienna's Konzerthaus, Berlin's Philharmonie, the Palais Garnier/Opéra de Paris, Lucerne Festival, Mozarteum Salzburg, the Cleveland Orchestra, and Cité de la Musique, Paris, for "Carte Blanche" and residency projects, performing chamber music, lieder, solo piano, and orchestral programs. He curated the Southbank Centre's Messiaen centenary festival in 2008, marked his first year as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2009, and was awarded Germany's Schallplattenkritik Honorary Prize in December 2009. Highlights of his 2009–2010 season include an "Auftakt" residency at the Alte Oper Frankfurt (a joint piano recital with Tamara Stefanovich, lieder with Christine Schäfer, and chamber music with instrumentalists from the Chamber Orchestra of Europe) and solo recitals in Paris, New York, Rome, Madrid, Vienna, and Berlin. He returns to the Berliner Philharmoniker, London Symphony Orchestra, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, joins the Britten Sinfonia as soloist and director, and appears as soloist on consecutive nights at Carnegie Hall with the Chicago Symphony and Boston Symphony. Mr. Aimard holds professorships in Cologne and Paris, gives concert/lectures and workshops worldwide, and recently led classes and seminars at the College de France, Paris. The recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Instrumentalist Award in spring 2005, he was Musical America's 2007 Instrumentalist of the Year.

Born in Lyon, France, in 1957, Pierre-Laurent Aimard studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Yvonne Loriod and in London with Maria Curçio. Early career landmarks included first prize in the 1973 Messiaen Competition, and his appointment at age 19, by Pierre Boulez, as the Ensemble InterContemporain's first solo pianist. For more than 15 years he collaborated closely with György Ligeti, recording his complete works. Mr. Aimard now records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon. His most recent releases include recital discs of Ravel, Carter, and Schumann; Mozart piano concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, directed by him from the keyboard; and Hommage à Messiaen, a disc of solo piano works.

Steven Ansell, Viola
Steven Ansell, Viola

Steven Ansell joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra as principal viola in September 1996, having already appeared with the orchestra in Symphony Hall as guest principal viola. A native of Seattle, he also remains a member of the acclaimed Muir String Quartet, which he co-founded in 1979 and with which he has toured worldwide. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Michael Tree and Karen Tuttle, Mr. Ansell was named professor of viola at the University of Houston at 21 and became assistant principal viola of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under André Previn at 23. As a recording artist he has received two Grand Prix du Disque awards and a Gramophone magazine award for Best Chamber Music Recording of the Year. He has appeared on PBS's In Performance at the White House and has participated in the Tanglewood, Marlboro, Schleswig-Holstein, Newport, Blossom, Spoleto, and Snowbird music festivals. Mr. Ansell teaches at the Boston University College of Fine Arts. As principal viola of the BSO, he is also a member of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. Mr. Ansell's solo performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra have included Mozart's Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola; Berlioz's Harold in Italy (under Emmanuel Krivine as well as James Levine); Bruch's Concerto for Viola, Clarinet, and Orchestra; and Strauss's Don Quixote.