CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Discovery Day: Gustav Mahler

Weill Recital Hall
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 PM

Henry-Louis de La Grange, Speaker
Gilbert Kaplan, Speaker
Sedgwick Clark, Interviewer

Christianne Stotijn, Mezzo-Soprano
Inon Barnatan, Piano
Members of Ensemble ACJW

Mia Barron, Actor
Peter Friedman, Actor
David Christopher Wells, Actor

12:30-1:30 Introductory Lecture: The Music and Life of Gustav Mahler
Gilbert Kaplan

1:30-2:30 Performance
Members of Ensemble ACJW
·· Owen Dalby, Violin
·· Meena Bhasin, Viola
·· Julia MacLaine, Cello
·· Angelina Gadeliya, Piano

MAHLER Piano Quartet in A Minor

Christianne Stotijn, Mezzo-Soprano
Inon Barnatan, Piano

MAHLER "Rheinlegendchen"
MAHLER "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen"
MAHLER "Nicht wiedersehen!"
MAHLER "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt"
MAHLER "Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht"

Encore:
MAHLER "Ablösung im Sommer"

2:30-3:30 Break

3:30-4:30 Keynote Address: Mahler's Last Years in America
Henry-Louis de La Grange

4:30-5:30 Dramatic Reading
Actors Mia Barron, Peter Friedman, and David Christopher Wells read excerpts from letters from Alma and Gustav Mahler among others

5:30-6:30 Conversation
Henry-Louis de La Grange in conversation with Sedgwick Clark

Sound Insights
A Program of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall

Sound Insights is sponsored by Ernst & Young LLP

Program Notes:

About Discovery Days

Discovery Days are a part of Sound Insights, The Weill Music Institute’s innovative program for adult concertgoers seeking to enrich their concert experience. In addition to Discovery Days—that offer in-depth thematic explorations featuring lecture-demonstrations, film screenings, panel discussions, and readings—Sound Insights includes pre-concert talks, in which musicians and scholars share insights on the repertoire to be performed after each talk, as well as companion websites that provide
detailed background information on featured events at Carnegie Hall, and include audio interviews, musical examples, articles on related subjects, and archival images.

Visit carnegiehall.org/soundinsights for more information.

Piano Quartet in A Minor

The Piano Quartet is the earliest extant music by Mahler and the only surviving evidence of his student days. Dating to his years at the Vienna Conservatory, the piece shows familiarity with quartets by Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms (such compositional modeling is frequently included in the training of young composers, even today).
This quartet is clearly a first movement. Falling in traditional sonata-allegro form, the music dramatizes the contrasts and conflicts between various harmonies and affects, although the emotional range here is rather limited to a brooding discontent. The first theme is identified by a three-note gesture that leaps up and falls back down; heard first in the piano, this idea permeates the movement, becoming an obsessive refrain. Its character is of a terse interjection, insistent and unyielding. A brisk transition takes us to the second theme in the major mode, which features a longer descending contour and seems more a complete thought. Whereas the first theme is all exclamation, the second phrase is full of commas. The three-note gesture then returns, and the music grows ever more dramatic and stormy; although the intensity never abates, the music does quiet a bit. Just before the concluding coda, the violin erupts with a virtuosic aside in the manner of a cadenza.
Although sketches for a scherzo might belong to the work, Mahler never completed the quartet—and never wrote another.
—Elizabeth Bergman

Henry-Louis de La Grange, Speaker
Henry-Louis de La Grange was born in Paris to an American mother and a French father. He began his career as a music critic in 1952, writing for Opera News, Saturday Review, New York Herald, New York Times, Musical America, and Opus magazine in the United States; and Arts, Disques, La Revue Musicale, Harmonie, and Nouvel Obervateur in France.
The first volume of his Mahler biography was published by Doubleday (New York) in 1973, and Gollancz (London) in 1974. An enlarged and updated French version was published by Fayard in 1979, followed by second and third volumes. Greeted unanimously as an international musicological event, this monumental work received the Deems Taylor Award (US, 1974); the prize for the Best Book on Music, awarded by the Syndicat de la critique dramatique et musicale (France, 1983); and the Grand Prix de Littérature musicale of the Académie Charles Cros (France, 1984). Volume II of the revised and updated, four-volume edition of Mahler has been published in 1995 by Oxford University Press in England and the USA. The following year, it was awarded the Prize of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London. Volume III was published in 2000, and obtained the Price of the London Phiharmonic Society. Volume IV appeared in London and New York in 2008; an abridged version in one volume also appeared in French in 2007.
La Grange has been lecturing on Mahler for many years and has toured United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Holland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.
In June 1998, La Grange was invited by the San Francisco Orchestra to give nine pre-concert talks during the “Mahler Celebration.” He toured the US and Mexico in 2000 as a lecturer. In 2002, La Grange received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College. He gave a series four pre-concert talks in 2002in Philadelphia and New York for The Philadelphia Orchestra.

Gilbert Kaplan, Speaker
Gilbert Kaplan is a leading authority on Gustav Mahler. He is the author and editor of the award-winning The Mahler Album, an illustrated biography. His extensive writings on Mahler have also appeared in publications, ranging from London’s musicological journal The Musical Times to the New York Times. He served as the host of a 13-week Mahler series broadcast on 350 radio stations in the US and currently hosts “Mad About Music,” a celebrity classical music and interview show on New York’s WNYC. A faculty member of The Juilliard School. Kaplan has also lectured widely, and served as Chairman of Carnegie Hall’s 1994 symposium “Mahler in America.”

The Kaplan Foundation, founded in 1985, has made significant contributions to Mahler research, including the publication of a facsimile edition of Mahler’s original handwritten score of his Second Symphony, “Resurrection”; historical recordings; scholarly monographs; and Mahler Discography.

As conductor, Kaplan is widely considered one of the foremost interpreters of Mahler’s Second Symphony. He has led more than 50 orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, New Japan Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic, Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Philharmonic Orchestra of La Scala, the Kirov Opera Orchestra, and the China National Symphony (the premiere of Mahler’s Second in China). Kaplan’s recording of Mahler’s Second Symphony with the London Symphony was selected as one of the Records of the Year by the New York Times. With sales in excess of 180,000 copies, it has become the best-selling Mahler recording in history. A more recent recording with the Vienna Philharmonic has been the best-selling recording of the Second Symphony since its release in 2003.

Kaplan is a recipient of an honorary doctorate degree from Westminster Choir College of Princeton and the George Eastman Medal for distinguished musical achievement from the Eastman School of Music. Kaplan has served on the board of Carnegie Hall for more than 25 years, and is a member of the Visiting Committee to the Department of Music at Harvard University.

Sedgwick Clark, Interviewer

Christianne Stotijn, Mezzo-Soprano

Inon Barnatan, Piano

Members of Ensemble ACJW

Mia Barron, Actor
Mia Barron’s recent work includes the revival of House of Blue Leaves (Mark Taper) and the off-Broadway premiere of Hillary (New Georges). New York credits include Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award—winning trilogy The Coast of Utopia and QED at Lincoln Center; The Pain and the Itch, The World Over, and She Stoops to Comedy (at Playwrights Horizons); 1001(Page 73 Productions); Hardball and Kitty, Kitty, Kitty (Summer Play Festival); and The Grille Room and Sixteen Wounded (Cherry Lane). In New York, she also co-wrote and performed in the off-Broadway production of Big Times, directed by Leigh Silverman. Last season, Barron appeared with the Handel and Hayden Society in Baroque Jewels, and at the World Science Festival in Alan Alda’s play about Einstein, Dear Albert. This summer, she appears in the West Coast premiere of Farragut North at the Geffen Playhouse Work. Television and film appearances include Guiding Light, Blue Blood, The F Word, 27 Dresses, Righteous Kill, and The Venture Brothers. She received a master’s degree from the graduate acting program at New York University.

Peter Friedman, Actor
Peter Friedman played Tateh in the world premiere of the musical Ragtime in Toronto, as well as on Broadway, for which he received an Outer Critics Circle Award and both Tony and Drama Desk award nominations. Friedman recently appeared in the recent musicals The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, Body Wareness, and End Days; in the original New York productions of The Heidi Chronicles and The Common Pursuit (earning Drama Desk nominations for both), A Soldier’s Play, …and a Nightingale Sang, and Execution of Justice. He also appeared in New York in The Tenth Man, The Loman Family Picnic, My Old Lady and the Broadway revival of 12 Angry Men. Friedman participated in the New York Musical Theatre Festival in The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World. His films include The Savages, I’m Not There, Freedomland, Safe, The Seventh Sign, Single White Female, Blink, Paycheck, The Messenger, and Synecdoche, New York. Television appearances include The Muppet Show and Brooklyn Bridge.

David Christopher Wells, Actor
David Christopher Wells has appeared on Broadway in the award-winning trilogy The Coast of Utopia, and in The Rivals, both for Lincoln Center Theater. Most recently, he was seen in Seattle Rep’s production of Betrayal. Last year, Wells appeared in the regional premiere of Frost/Nixon for the St. Louis Rep, and as Mr. Darcy in a premiere adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for the Geva Theatre Center. He has also performed at the Old Globe in San Diego, and with the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival and Stonington Opera House, among others. Well holds bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a master’s degree from The Old Globe Theater / USD actor training program.