CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Cleveland Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director and Conductor
Measha Brueggergosman, Soprano
Nancy Maultsby, Mezzo-Soprano
Stuart Skelton, Tenor
Raymond Aceto, Bass
The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus
Robert Porco, Director

MOZART Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, K. 183
DEBUSSY Nocturnes

JANÁČEK Glagolitic Mass

Program Notes:

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)
Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, K. 183

A typical 18th-century concert program did not identify the works performed with anything resembling the specificity we are accustomed to nowadays. Usually, only the genre (symphony, concerto, etc.) and maybe the key signature (C major, D major, etc.) were listed. Because composers rarely, if ever, numbered their own works, but could (and often did) write several symphonies and concertos in the same key, printed records from the 18th century are relatively imprecise in what they tell us. When we read about a “symphony by Herr Mozart in D major” performed at a certain time, we are somewhat in the dark as to exactly what the audience actually heard. The possibilities are narrowed, but we can never be certain.

But then, the 18th century did not feel a need to distinguish among different symphonies by the same author nearly as much as we do today. The notion that every symphony must have an unmistakable personality of its own did not become prevalent until Beethoven’s time. Previously, symphonies were similar enough in scope and intent to seem almost interchangeable to audiences (if not to the composers). This situation began to change gradually around the 1770s, when Haydn and Mozart (as well as others) started to write symphonies that were increasingly differentiated in tone.

Mozart’s early Symphony in G Minor (he wrote two in this key), now known as Symphony No. 25, was written when Mozart was 17 years old. It stands out among his works as an early example of how symphonies were becoming individualized. It is also one of the earliest of Mozart’s works to show complete artistic maturity. Its exceptional nature is signalled by its very tonality, as it is one of only two Mozart symphonies in a minor key—the other being No. 40, also in G minor. Along with the choice of the minor key came a whole array of special and distinguishing stylistic traits, such as excited syncopations, harder-than-usual dissonances, and a variety of other features creating an increased level of dramatic tension.

The work might have been Mozart’s response to several Haydn symphonies from the early 1770s that exhibit some of the same characteristics. These symphonies are often described as products of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) period. The group includes such works as No. 44 in E Minor (“Mourning”), No. 45 (“Farewell”), and No. 52 in C Minor. At the time, Mozart had not yet met Joseph Haydn in person, but he knew Joseph’s younger brother Michael, a noted composer in his own right, who was living and working in Salzburg, Mozart’s hometown. There are numerous references to both Haydn brothers in the correspondence of Wolfgang’s father, Leopold Mozart, himself an outstanding musician. And although this is challenging to document, it seems certain that, in his teens, Wolfgang already knew quite a few works by Joseph Haydn, who would later become a close friend.

The opening unison melody of the symphony, featuring a bold descending diminished-seventh interval, introduces a movement that is relentlessly passionate throughout. The gentle, second-movement Andante offers temporary respite, but the third movement is one of Mozart’s darkest minuets (despite a tender, lyrical, major-mode Trio section, played by winds alone). Contrary to most symphonies in minor keys, which resolve the inherent tension by modulating to the major mode in the finale, there is no such relief here. The tension of the minor key and the storm-and-stress atmosphere prevail to the very end.
© 2009 Peter Laki


CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918)
Nocturnes

Composed after the breakthrough orchestral writing of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the tripartite Nocturnes are further evidence of the new way of conceiving musical texture and nuance with which Debussy opened the door to a new century of innovation. The “nocturnal” aspect indicated by the title apparently derives from Debussy’s inspiration by the French Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier—in particular, from his collection Trois Scènes au Crépuscule (“Twilight Scenes”).

At first, Debussy conceived writing the pieces as a sort of violin concerto, which he had sketched out by 1894, for eminent contemporary virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe. However, before the music reached the public, Debussy nixed that plan and substantially recast Nocturnes, omitting the violin solo and, for the final panel, Sirènes (“Sirens”), adding a wordless female chorus.

Debussy famously bristled at the later comparisons routinely made between his style and that of the Impressionist painters. He particularly objected to the one-size-fits-all application of the term by critics to all manner of artists. Yet Debussy was deeply sensitive to the visual arts. Describing his Nocturnes project to Ysaÿe, he said, “It is an experiment with the various combinations of texture that can be made from one color—like a study in grays in the realm of painting.”

In the preface to his score, Debussy elaborated: “The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. Therefore it is not meant to designate the usual form of a nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests.” Indeed, each of Debussy’s three parts pursues a distinctive form and characteristic tone color. The opening Nuages (Clouds) presents “the slow motion of the clouds” in pastel shadings that drift against a plaintive figure from the English horn. Toward the end, flute and harp float a languid lyricism. This kind of evocation by exquisite detail and suggestion, rather than through traditional thematic development, marks a stunningly original advance.

Following the contrastingly extroverted Fêtes (Holidays)—which, the composer wrote, “gives us the vibrating atmosphere with sudden flashes of light”—Debussy returns to the ambiguously floating sensibility of Nuages in Sirènes, the longest of the three panels. And in fact Debussy here intends an oceanic effect by depicting “the sea and its countless rhythms.” The title refers to the mythic creatures of the Odyssey, the island nymphs whose beautiful singing is fatal to passing sailors, causing them to cast themselves into the sea. (While his men plug their ears with wax, Odysseus cleverly has himself tied to the mast so that he can experience their ravishing music and not be driven to self-destruction.)
© 2009 Thomas May


LEOŠ JANÁÈEK (1854–1928)
Glagolitic Mass (Slavonic Mass)

Late bloomers should take encouragement from the tremendous outburst of creativity that marked Leoš Janáèek’s final decade. Not that he had been idle before then. Through most of his career, he devoted himself to a wide range of musical activities in addition to composing, including educational work as head of the music school that became the Brno Conservatory and studies of the folk music of his native Moravia.

But Janáèek’s inspiration was fired to a new level with the belated smash success of his opera Jenùfa when it was produced at Prague’s National Theater in 1916. While it had first been seen in 1904, it had thus far remained confined to regional opera houses. After years of obscurity, Janáèek suddenly found himself on the cusp of international fame, and the rejuvenating effect was immediate. There seemed to be no limit to the Janáèek’s creative energy as he composed several of his most acclaimed works in rapid succession. These included several operas (Káťa Kabanová among them), the symphonic rhapsody Taras Bulba, the Sinfonietta, the string quartets, and the Glagolitic Mass, written at the age of 72.

Another impetus behind Janáèek’s splendid Indian summer was the jolt of optimism that came with the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state in the wake of the Hapsburg Empire’s collapse following World War I. Indeed, Janáèek wanted to emphasize the shared cultural heritage of the Slavs. He hoped “to portray faith in the certainty of the nation,” as he put it, by using the flavor of the Slavonic language. Thus he embarked on composing a Mass in the summer of 1926. But the language, written in the Glagolitic alphabet, was to be but one of many unusual elements in this new work.

The Glagolitic Mass follows the general form of the Roman Catholic Latin Mass (along with a few variants) and contains the sections of the Ordinary familiar from traditional musical settings: the Kyrie, Gloria, and so on. But Janáèek worked with a version of the liturgy in which Old Church Slavonic texts as reconstructed by scholars replaced the Latin. Old Church Slavonic was the first literary language among the Slavic peoples. For a time, it played a role roughly equivalent to the Latin prevailing to the West.

Glagolitic is the flowery alphabet invented by two ninth-century missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodus, who set out to evangelize the Slavs. The Cyrillic alphabet later replaced Glagolitic. (Despite its name, the Cyrillic alphabet was the invention of one of Cyril’s followers.) Thus, the title Glagolitic Mass refers not to a language but to the earliest alphabet designed to transcribe Old Church Slavonic.

Still, for Janáèek it connoted a patriotic as well as pan-Slavic impulse and conjured a quasi-mythic past: “I hear in the tenor solo some sort of a high priest, in the soprano solo a maiden-angel, in the chorus our people,” wrote the composer. “The candles are high fir trees in the wood, lit up by stars; and in the ritual somewhere out there I see a vision of the princely St. Wenceslas [patron saint of the Czechs].”

This conflation of a pagan celebration of nature with early Christianity is one of the Glagolitic Mass’s characteristically paradoxical aspects. Yet another source of inspiration was Janáèek’s late-flowering but intense love for a much younger married woman, Kamila Stösslová, who served as a kind of involuntary muse for several of the greatest compositions in his last decade. Janáèek first met her in 1917 in the same small Czech spa town where he later drafted the Mass in a mere three weeks. Recapping his cathedral-in-the-forest metaphor, he privately confessed to Kamila that his vision included a couple “marching ceremonially along a fully carpeted path of green grass” and wishing to be married. These personal and political currents contribute to the exuberance of musical expression we hear in the work. In his essay Testaments Betrayed, the novelist Milan Kundera even describes it as “more an orgy than a mass.”

Yet the most intriguing paradox about the Glagolitic Mass is Janáèek’s own attitude toward religion. The composer had grown up in a devout Catholic milieu, studying in an Augustinian monastery and later conducting a great deal of sacred choral music. He even embarked on composing a Latin Mass in 1907 (fragments of which he incorporated into the Glagolitic Mass). But Janáèek came to espouse an agnostic point of view. When the critic Ludvík Kundera (father of Milan) suggested the composer had, in the familiar pattern, gotten religion as “an old man,” Janáèek fired back with a famously indignant reply: “Young fellow, for one thing I am no old man, and I am not at all a believer; no, not at all. Until I see for myself.”

Even so, Janáèek’s highly personal and expressive setting of the ritual texts is evidence that they triggered something important inside him, whether we think of that as an existential or even a pantheistic approach to humanity’s role in creation.

The performance by The Cleveland Orchestra at this concert uses a score edition prepared by Janáèek expert Paul Wingfield in the early 1990s. It seeks to restore the composer’s original vision, which became distorted when the score was first published soon after his death. The latter reflected numerous compromises that had been made to accommodate practical needs in the first performances and thus smoothed over some of Janáèek’s most original touches (both in rhythm and orchestration). Among the most obvious changes, the work has been restored to a nine-movement structure by playing the closing Intrada at the very opening.
© 2009 Thomas May

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.

Measha Brueggergosman, Soprano
Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman has been praised for both her voice and musicianship, as well as for her sovereign stage presence. She made her Cleveland Orchestra debut in summer 2006 and has sung with the Orchestra each season since. Earlier this year, she sang Wagner’s Wesendonck Songs with the Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst in Cleveland and Miami. Ms. Brueggergosman studied at the University of Toronto and in Germany, and won the Grand Prize at the 2002 Jeunesses Musicales Montreal International Competition. She has also received awards in competitions in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Great Britain, and the US. Ms. Brueggergosman’s recent operatic engagements have included appearances in Cincinnati, Vancouver, and Stuttgart. She has also performed with the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Ottawa, San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington DC, as well as with the Israel Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. For CBC Records, she recorded So Much to Tell and Extase. Now an exclusive DG artist, Ms. Brueggergosman can be heard on a new album titled Surprise! She has appeared in recital at venues throughout the world.

Nancy Maultsby, Mezzo-Soprano
American mezzo-soprano Nancy Maultsby is in demand by opera companies and orchestras throughout the world, in repertoire from Monteverdi’s operas to the works of John Adams. She graduated from Westminster Choir College and studied with Margaret Harshaw as a graduate student at Indiana University School of Music. Ms. Maultsby is an alumna of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Center for American Artists and winner of the Marian Anderson Award and Martin E. Segal Award. She regularly performs the major heroines of 19th-century French, Italian, and German opera, including appearances with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Netherlands Opera, London’s Royal Opera, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Seattle Opera, and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. She has also appeared as a soloist with the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, and at major US festivals including Aspen, Cincinnati May, Ravinia, Saratoga, and Tanglewood. She can be heard on recordings released by BIS, Naxos, and Telarc. Ms. Maultsby made her Cleveland Orchestra debut in March 1998.

Stuart Skelton, Tenor
Australian singer Stuart Skelton is considered one of the finest heroic tenors of his generation, and is acclaimed for his voice, musicianship, and dramatic portrayals. He received his early training in Sydney and earned a master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music. His honors include participating in the San Francisco Opera’s Adler Fellowship and winning Vienna’s Belvedere Competition and the Sullivan Foundation Award. Mr. Skelton has performed in opera and concert on three continents, including appearances in Adelaide, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, and Vienna. He is especially known for his role as Siegmund in the State Opera of South Australia’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre. For his performance on the Melba label’s recording of that opera, he received the Helpmann Award and the Orphée d’Or Prix Lauritz Melchior from the Académie du Discque Lyrique in Paris. Mr. Skelton’s recent and upcoming engagements include singing Siegmund at the Hamburg State Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, and the Zurich Opera. He made his Cleveland Orchestra debut with performances last month of Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, and returns to Severance Hall in March for Brahms’s Schicksalslied.

Raymond Aceto, Bass

The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus
Robert Porco, Director