CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Cleveland Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director and Conductor
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano

GEORGE BENJAMIN Duet for Piano and Orchestra (NY Premiere)

SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 7, "Leningrad"

This concert, presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with Lucerne Festival, is made possible through generous support of Roche.

Program Notes:

GEORGE BENJAMIN (b. 1960)
Duet for piano and orchestra

In the year 1976, two young musicians—one English, the other French—met as students at the Paris Conservatoire. Both were exceptionally talented and precocious, both studied with the French pianist Yvonne Loriod, and both worked with her husband, the superbly original composer Olivier Messiaen.

Over the years that followed, each of these musicians continued to develop and flourish. The French pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, proved himself one of the finest keyboard artists of his day. His mastery of both old and new piano music, and his devoted advocacy of the latter, is all but unique among the major pianists of our day. He is serving as The Cleveland Orchestra’s Malcolm E. Kenney Artist-in-Residence for the 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 seasons.

George Benjamin, Messiaen’s gifted English student, has now established himself as one of the leading composers of his generation. After leaving Paris, he studied at Cambridge University with the composer Alexander Goehr. At age 20, he garnered widespread attention when a performance of his orchestral work Ringed by the Flat Horizon at the BBC London Proms made him the youngest composer ever to have a piece played at that prestigious concert series. Mr. Benjamin followed this, his first major orchestral score, with a series of works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, voices, and piano, and recently made his first foray into opera.

Although Pierre-Laurent Aimard and George Benjamin pursued separate career paths, the friendship they established at the Paris Conservatoire endures to this day. The two have often collaborated in performance, Mr. Benjamin conducting and Mr. Aimard playing the piano, and the composer has written several pieces for Mr. Aimard. Notable among them is Shadowlines, a piece for solo piano, which Aimard premiered and has recorded.

And now comes a new fruit of their friendship: a single-movement concerto titled Duet for piano and orchestra. Mr. Benjamin wrote this piece expressly for Mr. Aimard and The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst as part of the Roche Commissions project in a partnership between The Cleveland Orchestra, Lucerne Festival, and Carnegie Hall.

George Benjamin has for years hesitated to attempt a work for piano and orchestra. That hesitancy stemmed from a keen awareness of the inherently disparate sound qualities of the piano and orchestral instruments. “The piano can transverse over seven octaves with the greatest ease and, with the help of the sustaining pedal, accumulate harmonies containing literally dozens of notes,” the composer wrote in a brief note for the Lucerne premiere of Duet. “These are feats with which no orchestral instrument can compete. And yet every note of the piano begins to die away immediately after being struck, a characteristic so different from the legato capacities of string and wind instruments.”

To Mr. Benjamin’s thinking, most major piano concertos of the past have relied on the hope that through certain kinds of figuration, and with a great player, the piano and orchestra can achieve the illusion of a blended tone. “But,” he cautioned in an interview given while he was completing Duet, “when you put the piano with instruments that can really sustain, can really crescendo and hold notes, then the illusion is shattered.”

In composing Duet, Mr. Benjamin decided to forego any attempt at that fiction. Instead, he sought to find acoustical common ground for the soloist and orchestra. Accordingly, tuned percussion, harp, and strings playing pizzicato, which the composer considers the piano’s “nearest relatives” in the orchestra, enjoy special prominence, and several passages find the piano conversing intimately with those instruments.

Moreover, much of the piano part is restricted to a few registers with near equivalents of tone quality within the orchestra. The orchestra also is restricted, especially in its constitution. Because the notes of the piano’s upper register decay relatively quickly, Mr. Benjamin has explained, matching them against the sustained tones of violins, which play in roughly that same register, is especially problematic. His solution was to omit violins from his orchestra entirely. (This omission has ample precedent. Brahms wrote for an orchestra without violins in his Serenade in A Major, Op. 16, and in music of the last century, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms is only the most famous composition that uses a violin-less orchestra.)

But not all of Duet is concerned with equivalences of piano and orchestral sounds. For while the solo instrument does sometimes find concordance with other instruments, on the whole it remains, as Mr. Benjamin puts it, “an alien figure in the orchestral landscape and often treads an independent path through instrumental textures that can seem intentionally oblivious of it.” The conception of the soloist as a lonely wanderer in a strange environment diverges radically from the Romantic concerto ideal of a heroic individual striving with, or against, a massed society, personified by the orchestra. Mr. Benjamin calls this scenario “a false dramatic pairing,” and feels that it has no legitimate place in contemporary music. Instead, he esteems the novel approaches to keyboard-with-orchestra writing embodied in diverse ways by Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques, Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, and Elliott Carter’s Double Concerto for Piano, Harpsichord, and Orchestra, as well as by the piano concertos of Mozart, which he particularly admires. Duet offers yet another approach to creating satisfying discourse between piano and orchestra.
© 2009 Paul Schiavo


DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975)
Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, “Leningrad”

Shostakovich began work on his Seventh Symphony about four weeks after Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. He worked at a feverish speed and finished the 30-minute first movement in about a month. Although he had planned to begin a new symphony even before the German attack, it seems certain that some aspects of his plan were changed in response to the war.

The second and third movements were written after the blockade of Leningrad had begun, while Shostakovich was serving on the fire-fighting brigade at the city’s Conservatory. He frequently had to interrupt his work to escort his family to the bomb shelter during air raids. Many people in Leningrad knew that Shostakovich was working on a new symphony even as food was becoming extremely scarce in the city, and there appears to have been a certain pride in knowing that art was still alive in spite of the many increasing hardships. How much of the pride was stirred by propaganda ministers and how much by a communal coming together under duress, we cannot know.

At the end of September, Shostakovich and his family were evacuated by Soviet authorities from the besieged city. They were flown to Moscow and, two weeks later, traveled to the city of Kuibyshev on the Volga river by train—a 600-mile journey that, amidst the wartime chaos, took an entire week to complete. Shostakovich remained in Kuibyshev for a year and a half; in the spring of 1943, he moved to Moscow. After the war, he never lived in his hometown of Leningrad again.

It was almost inevitable that the “Leningrad” Symphony should be thoroughly politicized both in the Soviet Union and abroad. The Soviets made political capital of what they decided was a paean to the heroism of the people of Leningrad during the “Great Patriotic War.” At the same time, the symphony became a major sensation in the West. The adventure-filled story of how the manuscript reached the US was itself made into a movie—the score was microfilmed near Moscow, flown to Tehran, driven from there to Cairo, and finally flown to New York City via Casablanca and South America. A crew of photographers then worked for 10 days to create paper prints of the 252-page score, from which conductors could work and parts could be made. Some of the most prominent music directors in the US, including Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, Artur Rodzinski in Cleveland, and Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia, vied for the first American performance. The race was finally won by Arturo Toscanini for a national radio broadcast in July 1942.

Shostakovich was variously described in the press as the “new Beethoven” and the “new Berlioz.” Toscanini’s NBC broadcast was referred to in Newsweek as “the premiere of the year”; Time Magazine carried a stylized painting on its July 20, 1942, cover of the composer wearing a fire helmet, with the caption: “Fireman Shostakovich—Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad he heard the chords of victory.” It was clear that war propaganda helped to promote the symphony in ways unheard previously in the annals of music.

Indeed, the most significant early performance of the work was probably the one given in besieged Leningrad. Overcoming difficulties beyond description, conductor Karl Eliasberg (a cousin of Cleveland Orchestra violinist Lev Polyakin) assembled an orchestra of nearly starving, exhausted musicians and played the work on August 9, 1942. This concert was itself a propaganda ploy by Stalin, intended to show that the city of Leningrad could never be defeated. But to those in the audience, this hardly mattered at the time. Every seat in the hall was filled, and many members of the audience wept openly. For added effect, the performance was broadcast through loudspeakers at the defensive frontline toward the besieging German troops. As Solomon Volkov wrote in St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (1995): “Leningraders wept for their fate and that of their city, slowly dying in the grip of the most ruthless blockade of the 20th century.”

The most famous segment of the symphony begins partway through the first movement, depicting the approaching Nazi army. By far the simplest and most accessible of all the symphony’s themes, it occurs after a confident C-major opening and a dream-like, ethereal section suggesting a peaceful idyll. Then, the march begins, very quietly at first, and repeated in identical fashion eleven times, in a gradual crescendo adding more and more instruments—and inevitably inviting comparisons with Ravel’s Boléro. Shostakovich commented: “Idle critics will no doubt reproach me for imitating Ravel’s Boléro. Well, let them, for this is how I hear the war.”

After reaching a monumental climax, the war theme gradually dissolves and the idyllic opening music returns. (The lyrical bassoon solo has been interpreted as a dirge for those who died in the war.) Ultimately, all that remains of the war theme is a distant and quite harmless echo at the movement’s close.

Initially, Shostakovich intended to have this movement stand by itself as a symphonic poem. When he changed his plans and wrote three more movements to complete a classical symphony scheme, he faced the obvious problem of where to go after such a strong opening. According to his own words, the two middle movements were meant to “ease the tension” and the finale to portray “victory.” The third movement is, in Shostakovich’s words, the “dramatic center of the whole work.” It may have been “Our Country’s Wide Spaces” according to the official program, yet it was (and is) widely perceived as a lament for the victims of the war.

The fourth-movement finale is not a straight-forward leap to loud and boisterous victory. Shostakovich’s optimism is not the cheap socialist-realist variety promoted by the authorities. The triumphant conclusion arrives only at the very end, with the recapitulation of the first movement’s opening C-major theme. Now at last the triumph is complete, with no holds barred, as the majestic fanfares take over the entire orchestra in a penetrating triple fortissimo.
© 2009 Peter Laki

The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director and Conductor
Long Considered one of America’s great orchestras, The Cleveland Orchestra stands today among the world’s most revered symphonic ensembles. In concerts at home in Severance Hall, each summer as part of the Blossom Festival, in residencies from Miami to Vienna, and on tour around the world, The Cleveland Orchestra continues to set standards of artistic excellence, imaginative programming, and community engagement.

Under the leadership of Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, The Cleveland Orchestra has become one of the most sought-after performing ensembles in the world. The partnership has earned the Orchestra unprecedented residencies in the US and in Europe, including at the Musikverein in Vienna, the first of its kind by an American orchestra. The Orchestra returned for its third Musikverein residency in the autumn of 2007 as part of an 11-concert European tour. The Orchestra also regularly appears at European festivals. Its travels in 2008 included an eight-performance summer residency at the Salzburg Festival and a continuation of its ongoing series of residencies at the Lucerne Festival (featuring Roche Commissions, a project involving the Orchestra, the Festival, and Carnegie Hall). Domestically, the Orchestra and Mr. Welser-Möst have toured from coast to coast, and in January 2007 began an unprecedented 10-year residency project in Miami, Florida, where they perform annually at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County.

The Cleveland Orchestra has a long and distinguished recording and broadcast history. A series of DVD and CD recordings under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst has recently been added to an extensive and widely praised catalog of audio recordings made during the tenures of the ensemble’s former music directors. In addition, Cleveland Orchestra concerts are heard in syndication each season on radio stations throughout North America and Europe.

The Cleveland Orchestra was founded in 1918 by a group of local citizens intent on creating an ensemble worthy of joining America’s top ranks. Over the next eight decades, the Orchestra grew from a fine regional organization to become one of the most admired symphonic ensembles in the world. Extensive concert seasons at home in Cleveland were augmented with educational programs that have introduced hundreds of thousands of Cleveland-area schoolchildren to classical music. Touring performances throughout the US and, beginning in 1957, to Europe and across the globe have confirmed Cleveland’s coveted place among a handful of the world’s best orchestras. Radio broadcasts and recordings along with television performances and free community concerts have enlarged the ensemble’s total audience by millions of supporting patrons, enthusiastic fans, and discerning connoisseurs.

Today, The Cleveland Orchestra stands at a crossroads in its storied history, inaugurating new programs, residencies, and fiscal opportunities while eagerly pursuing its long tradition of artistic excellence, educational engagement, and community service. For additional information, please visit clevelandorchestra.com.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano
Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is acclaimed as a key figure in both the music of our time and the standard piano repertoire. He made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in February 1996; his most recent appearances with the Orchestra were in 2008 for the world and US premieres of George Benjamin’s Duet for piano and orchestra. For the 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 seasons, he is appearing as the Orchestra’s Artist-in-Residence.

Born in Lyon, France, in 1957, Mr. Aimard studied at the Paris Conservatory with Yvonne Loriod and in London with Maria Curcio. Early in his career, he received first prize in the 1973 Messiaen Competition and was appointed at age 19 by Pierre Boulez as the Ensemble Inter¬Contemporain’s first solo pianist. For nearly 20 years, he collaborated with György Ligeti, recording his complete works for piano. Mr. Aimard performed the world premiere of Peter Eötvös’s CAP-KO (Concerto for Acoustic Piano, Keyboard, and Orchestra) in 2006—and performed the American premiere of the work’s two-piano version in Cleveland in April 2008. He received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist Award in 2005 and 2006.

Mr. Aimard performs with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2001 and maintains a regular relationship there, as well as with the Berlin Philharmonic, Konzerthaus Vienna, Philharmonie Cologne, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and London’s South Bank Centre. Through professorships in Paris and Cologne, as well as concert lectures and workshops worldwide, Mr. Aimard works to shed an inspiring and personal light on music and music making. He was inaugural artist-in-residence at the Salle de Concerts Grande-Duchesse Joséphine-Charlotte in Luxembourg for 2005–2006, and last season became artistic partner with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. In 2009 he succeeds Thomas Adès as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival in England.

Mr. Aimard has an extensive discography and records regularly for Teldec / Warner Classics. He has received two ECHO Classic Awards, in 2003 for the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and in 2004 for Debussy’s Images and Etudes. His recording of the “Concord” Sonata and songs of Charles Ives with Susan Graham won a 2005 Grammy Award. Recent releases include solo works by Ravel and Carter and the complete Mozart piano concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, directed from the keyboard by Mr. Aimard.