CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Lucerne Festival Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Christopher H. Gibbs, Professor of Music, Bard College.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor
Anna Larsson, Contralto
Women of the Westminster Symphonic Choir
Joe Miller, Conductor
The American Boychoir
Fernando Malvar-Ruiz, Music Director

MAHLER Symphony No. 3

This concert is made possible, in part, by The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.

Program Notes:

The Concert At a Glance

Many a music lover would have envied the proverbial fly on the wall at the meeting between two great symphonists of the period around 1900. On that occasion, in contrast to Sibelius’s advocacy of rigorous musical logic as the foundation stone of symphonic style, Mahler declared that a symphony should be all-embracing, like the universe itself. There is nothing in his formidable output—not even the Eighth Symphony, known as the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the gigantic performing apparatus it calls for—that fulfills this aim more comprehensively than the Third Symphony. Here the composer explores every corner of the world and every shade of human emotion, ranging from sheer physical exuberance and the enjoyment of nature to contemplation of ultimate mysteries and celebration of the delights of heaven.

Notes on the Program
By Bernard Jacobson

GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 3
Born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia; died May 18, 1911, in Vienna.

Begun in 1895 and completed on August 5, 1896, at Steinbach-am-Attersee in Salzburg Province, the Third Symphony was first performed complete on June 9, 1902, in Crefeld, under the composer’s direction, with Luise Geller-Wolter as also soloist; in 1896 and 1897, individual movements had been performed separately under Arthur Nikisch and Felix Weingartner. The Third Symphony received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 2, 1922, with contralto Julia Claussen, the St. Cecilia Club, the Paulist Choristers Boys Chorus, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Willem Mengelberg.

Scoring: alto solo; women’s chorus, boys’ chorus; 4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolos), 4 oboes (4th doubling English horn), 3 B-flat clarinets (3rd doubling B-flat bass clarinet), E-flat clarinet, 4 bassoons (4th doubling contrabassoon), 8 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, timpani (2 players), percussion (glockenspiel, snare drum, triangle, tambourine, cymbals, tam-tam, bass drum with cymbals), 4 bells, 2 harps, strings

Through most of the 1890s Mahler was busy with a series of orchestral songs, based on a collection of folk poetry published by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). Mahler never made any sharp differentiation between the two genres of song and symphony that constitute all of his mature output. Of his 11 symphonies (including Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished Tenth), six include voice parts. Among these, Nos. 2, 3, and 4 are often referred to as the Wunderhorn symphonies, because each of them includes a setting of a poem from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection.

Originally, the vast scheme of the Third Symphony was to end with not one but two Wunderhorn settings. Evidently Mahler became convinced that this would be too much of a good thing even by his monumental standards, and when the Third Symphony was completed in 1896 it ended with a purely orchestral slow movement. (The discarded seventh movement was pressed into service instead as the finale of the Fourth Symphony, under the title “Das himmlische Leben,” or “Life in Heaven.”) What has come down to us is still a six-movement work, laid out in two parts and lasting more than an hour and a half. Its sheer physical size, like its extraordinary expressive range, is no accident, but simply a realization of Mahler’s universe-encompassing conception of the symphonic medium. He planned it, he observed in a letter to the soprano Anna von Mildenburg, as a vast celebration of nature, life, and love:

Just imagine a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world—one is, so to speak, only an instrument, played on by the universe … My symphony will be something the like of which the world has never yet heard! … In it the whole of nature finds a voice … Some passages in it seem so uncanny to me that I can hardly recognize them as my own work.

The cosmic picture he was aiming at led Mahler at first to put in words a programmatic scheme for the whole symphony, which read as follows:

THE JOYFUL KNOWLEDGE
A Summer Morning’s Dream
I. Summer marches in
II. What the meadow flowers tell me
III. What the forest creatures tell me
IV. What night tells me (mankind)
V. What the morning bells tell me (the angels)
VI. What love tells me
VII. Life in Heaven (what the child tells me)

The last of these tableaux was, as we have seen, transferred to the Fourth Symphony. “A Summer Morning’s Dream” was changed in due course to “A Summer Noonday’s Dream,” “What the forest creatures tell me” became “What the twilight tells me,” and the phrase “Pan awakes” was added to the beginning of the scheme. But then Mahler decided, as he has done with the First and Second symphonies, to let the Third stand without an official program. The original headings nevertheless remain helpful as clues to the music’s expressive intent, even if they are also liable to some misunderstanding.

In particular, the “love” referred to in the title of the sixth movement needs clarification, which Mahler supplied when he told Anna von Mildenburg:

It’s a matter of a different kind of love from what you imagine. The motto to this movement reads:
Father, look at these wounds of mine!
Let not one creature of thine be lost!
… I could almost call the movement “What God tells me.” And truly in the sense that God can only be understood as love. And so my work is a musical poem embracing all stages of development in a stepwise ascent. It begins with inanimate nature and ascends to the love of God.


It is in this universal context that the role of the meadow flowers and the forest creatures must be understood. In a letter to Dr Richard Batka, Mahler remarked that separate performances of the “flowers” movement given before the symphony was complete

will doubtless present me to the public as the “sensuous,” perfumed “singer of nature.” That this nature hides within itself everything that is terrifying, great, and also lovely (which is exactly what I wanted to express in the entire work, in a sort of evolutionary development)—of course no one ever understands this. It always strikes me as odd that most people, when they speak of “nature,” think only of flowers, little birds, and woodsy smells. No one knows the god Dionysus, the great Pan.

Within the symphony’s dramatic arc, the element of Dionysian terror—of Panic in the etymological significance of the word—makes several awe-inspiring incursions. It is to be heard in the huge chords that punctuate the first movement, which the great Mahler scholar Deryck Cooke memorably described as

the most original and flabbergasting thing Mahler ever conceived. To express the primeval force of nature burgeoning out of winter into summer, he built an outsize, proliferating sonata structure out of a plethora of “primitive” material: a rugged … march tune for unison horns, like a great summons to awake; deep soft brass chords, eloquent of hidden power, sullen … growls on trombones, like primordial inertia; bayings of horns, upsurgings of basses, shrieks on woodwind, subterranean rumblings of percussion, and gross, uncouth trombone themes, like monstrous prehistoric voices.

It is implicit in the piccolo fanfares, played out of tempo, that suggest a kind of inimical birdsong (Alfred Hitchcock before his time), and it erupts again toward the end of the “forest creatures” movement, when the echoes of a long-drawn, shimmering offstage posthorn solo redolent of high summer in the deep woodland are brusquely thrust aside by the eruption of a fortissimo E-flat-minor chord that fills the orchestral landscape: so close, in Mahler’s conception, is the enchantment of nature to the visceral fear that lies beneath it.

The work’s remaining explicit Knaben Wunderhorn movement is the setting of “Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang” (“Three angels were singing a sweet song”) for boys’ and women’s voices. Though purely instrumental, the “forest creatures” scherzo is based on the thematic material of one of Mahler’s earliest Wunderhorn settings, “Ablösung im Sommer,” which tells the story of the cuckoo’s death. The other textual element in the symphony comes from a very different source: Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song,” which furnishes mankind’s nocturnal questionings in the fourth movement. Powerful out of all proportion to its brevity and dynamic restraint, this is (to quote Cooke’s unimprovable description once again) “one of the stillest things in all music, with its cry of a night bird (oboe glissando) and its long-held contralto notes backed by thirds on trombones echoed by piccolos.”

It is after such mysteries, and after the carol-like naivety of the succeeding angels’ song, that “love” presents its grand, unhurried apotheosis. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra’s previous concert three days ago, might well serve as an illustration of the musicologist Sir Donald Tovey’s axiom that, once the human voice has been introduced into a score, any return to purely instrumental writing will be anticlimactic. But every rule worthy of the name has an exception, and Mahler’s Third Symphony provides an utterly convincing one. Try to imagine the opening of this sumptuous finale following on the end, not of the two vocal movements, but of the orchestral scherzo, and it will surely be evident that the sense of haven-within-reach would in that scenario be sadly missing.

Following the dying vocal bell-syllables of the fifth movement without a break, this full-throated orchestral finale is at once reminiscent of traditional 19th-century religious styles, and prophetic of the equally expansive slow finale of Mahler’s own Ninth Symphony. Yet this conclusion, close to unique in the composer’s output, contains none of the emotional indirectness and underlying irony that render the Adagio of the Ninth—and indeed almost all of his music—so poignantly ambivalent. More than any other movement in Mahler, the finale of the Third Symphony lives its feelings without camouflage or self-defense, and thereby communicates them to the listener with an immediacy as consumingly vivid as any he ever achieved.


Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Bernard Jacobson writes frequently about classical music and is the author of A Polish Renaissance, part of the 20th-Century Composers series published by Phaidon Press.


IV. O Mensch! Gib Acht!
Text: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

O Mensch! Gib Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
Ich schlief!
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht!
Die Welt ist tief!
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht!
Tief ist ihr Weh!
Lust tiefer noch als Herzeleid!
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit!
Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!

Translation: Larry Rothe
Oh man, take heed!
What does deep midnight say?
I slept!
I have woken from a deep dream!
The world is deep—
Deeper than the day had thought!
Deep is the pain!
Joy deeper still than heart’s sorrow!
Pain says: Vanish!
Yet all joy aspires to eternity,
To deep, deep eternity.


V. Es sungen drei Engel
Translation: Larry Rothe

Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang,
Mit Freuden es selig im Himmel klang;
Sie jauchzten fröhlich auch dabei,
Dass Petrus sei von Sünden frei.
Denn als der Herr Jesus zu Tische sass,
Mit seinen zwölf Jüngern das Abendmal ass,
So sprach der Herr Jesus: “Was stehst du denn hier?
Wenn ich dich anseh’, so weinest du mir.”
“Und sollt ich nicht weinen, du gütiger Gott!”
Du sollst ja nicht weinen!
“Ich hab übertreten die Zehen Gebot;
Ich gehe and weine ja bitterlich.”
Du sollst ja nicht weinen!
“Ach komm und erbarme dich über mich!”
“Hast du denn übertreten die Zehen Gebot,
So fall auf die Knie und bete zu Gott,
Liebe nur Gott in alle Zeit,
So wirst du erlangen die himmlische Freud.”
Die himmlische Freud ist eine selige Stadt,
Die himmlische Freud, die kein End mehr hat;
Die himmlische Freud war Petro bereit
Durch Jesum und allen zur Seligkeit.

Three angels sang a sweet song.
It resounded throughout heaven;
They also rejoiced
That Peter was free of sin.
For as the Lord Jesus sat down at the table
And ate the evening meal with his twelve disciples,
The Lord Jesus said, “Why are you standing here?
When I look at you, you cry.”
“And shouldn’t I cry, you kind God?”
You shouldn’t cry!
“I have broken the Ten Commandments;
I go and cry bitterly.”
You shouldn’t cry!
“Oh come, and have mercy on me!”
“If you’ve broken the Ten Commandments,
Fall on your knees and pray to God.
Just love God always,
And you will have heavenly joy.”
Heavenly joy is a blessed city,
Heavenly joy, which has no end;
Heavenly joy was prepared for Peter
By Jesus, and for everyone’s salvation.

Translation copyright © 2003 by the San Francisco Symphony

Lucerne Festival Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor
The birth of Lucerne Festival dates from the gala concert with Arturo Toscanini conducting élite musicians in front of Richard Wagner’s former home in Tribschen in 1938. With this historic concert the idea of a Festival Orchestra was conceived. Besides Toscanini, other conductors in the Festival’s “early days” included Bruno Walter, Ernest Ansermet, and Vittorio de Sabata. The year 1943 witnessed the formation of the Swiss Festival Orchestra, with top musicians from all over Switzerland. This ensemble, which played under such commanding figures as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Otto Klemperer, contributed to the Festival’s rapidly growing prestige, holding concerts on an annual basis until 1993.

It was this tradition that inspired Claudio Abbado and executive director Michael Haefliger to establish a new and unique ensemble in 2003: The Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Soloists of international repute sit on its front desks, while the main body of the ensemble is drawn from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. A number of its members appear in various combinations in chamber recitals and chamber orchestra concerts during the opening weeks of the Festival.

The first guest performance took the Lucerne Festival Orchestra to Rome in 2005, followed by a residency in Tokyo in 2006. In August 2007 the Orchestra will its debut concert at the BBC Proms—all concerts under the baton of Claudio Abbado. Besides the traditional Lucerne Summer Festival, since 1988 the Easter Festival has taken place on an annual basis, as has the Piano Festival, held each November since 1998. Pierre Boulez is the artistic and conceptual director of the Lucerne Festival Academy for contemporary music. This forward-looking training workshop was designed in 2004 with the aim of instructing gifted young musicians to perform the music of our time.

Anna Larsson, Contralto
A native of Stockholm, Anna Larsson completed her musical training there at the University College of Opera. Her operatic repertoire includes roles in Das Rheingold and Siegfried (with the Munich State Opera), the First Norn in Götterdämmerung (Berlin State Opera), Waltraute in Götterdämmerung (Finnish National Opera), Orfeo in Orfeo ed Euridice (Royal Opera Copenhagen), Ottone in L’incoronazione di Poppea (at Aix-en-Provence) and Andronico in Handel’s Tamerlano (Drottningholm Court Theater, Stockholm). Her richly varied concert repertoire includes Mahler’s Second and Third symphonies, the St. Matthew Passion, the Messiah, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Das Lied von der Erde, Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony, Brahms’s Alt-Rhapsodie, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, and the Verdi Requiem. She has also appeared with orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the London Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, working with conductors such as Rattle, Haitink, Masur, Abbado, Harding, Ozawa, and Maazel. Her performances have also taken her to the festivals of Lucerne and Edinburgh.

Women of the Westminster Symphonic Choir
Joe Miller, Conductor
Joe Miller is conductor of two of America’s most renowned choral ensembles—the 32-voice Westminster Choir and the 200-voice Westminster Symphonic Choir. As director of choral activities at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey, he oversees an extensive choral program that includes eight ensembles.

In addition to several collaborations with the Westminster Symphonic Choir and leading conductors and orchestras, Maestro Miller’s 2007–08 season includes conducting a series of concerts with the Westminster Choir at the Spoleto Festival USA and with the Westminster Chamber Choir in Italy, an intensive two-week choral program in Florence, Italy.

Guest conductor for numerous all-state and honors choirs, he will conduct the Florida All-State Honors Choir and the American Choral Directors Western Division High School Honors Choir this season. He will also serve as headliner for the 2008 Ohio Choral Directors Summer Conference.

Before his appointment at Westminster, Joe Miller was director of choral studies, professor of music and voice area chair at Western Michigan University School of Music. With the Western Michigan Chorale he received a number of awards, including the Silver Medal at the 2005 European Grand Prix for Choral Singing in Varna, Bulgaria, and the Grand Prize at the 2002 Robert Schumann International Choral Competition in Zwickau, Germany. He has also served as director of choral and vocal activities at California State University, artistic director/conductor of the Stockton Chorale, and music director of the Mother Lode Music Festival.

WESTMINSTER SYMPHONIC CHOIR

Composed of students at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, the Westminster Symphonic Choir has recorded and performed with virtually every major orchestra and internationally known conductor of the last 85 years. Recognized as one of the world’s leading choral ensembles, the choir has sung over 300 performances with the New York Philharmonic alone.

In addition to these performances with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the ensemble’s 2007–08 season includes performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and with Neeme Järvi and New Jersey Symphony Orchestra at Patriots Theater in Trenton and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. In May the ensemble will perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, “Symphony of a Thousand,” with Christoph Eschenbach and The Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.

Additionally, the 32-voice Westminster Choir that forms the core of the Symphonic Choir will perform Bach’s St. Matthew Passion led by Kurt Masur in February. Chorus-in-residence for the Spoleto Festival USA since 1977, the ensemble will present a concert tour of Texas in January and a series of performances in Michigan in March. Westminster Choir College is one of four colleges of Rider University, whose main campus is in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. A professional college of music with a unique choral emphasis, Westminster prepares students at the undergraduate and graduate levels for careers in teaching, sacred music and performance.

The American Boychoir
Fernando Malvar-Ruiz, Music Director
Fernando Malvar-Ruiz was appointed Litton-Lodal Music Director of The American Boychoir in 2004 after four years as its associate music director. Since then he has toured with the Choir throughout the United States and Canada. He prepared the Choir for performances at the 77th Annual Academy Awards and the Tanglewood Music Festival, and also for concerts with The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the Choir at the nationally televised US Open Tennis Tournament Women’s Finals in 2004 and the 2006 international broadcast of the Presidential Prayer Service commemorating the fifth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.

Mr. Malvar-Ruiz brings extensive experience in the field of choral music to The American Boychoir, having previously directed the Columbus (Ohio) Youth Choir, the Central Illinois Children’s Chorus, and choirs in Spain and Hungary. He has also taught choral music at Parkland College, where he conducted the school’s Chamber Singers. Widely sought as a guest conductor, lecturer, and clinician, he is recognized as one of the nation’s experts in the adolescent male changing voice. He served as an artistic director and guest conductor for the 2005 World Children’s Choir Festival in Hong Kong. For more than a decade he has been an instructor in the master’s program in music education at the Kodály Institute at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches conducting and musicianship.

THE AMERICAN BOYCHOIR

Currently celebrating its 70th Anniversary Season, The American Boychoir is the United States’ premier concert boys’ choir and one of the finest boychoirs in the world. It continues to dazzle audiences with its unique blend of musical sophistication, effervescent spirit, and ensemble virtuosity. Its members—boys in grades four through eight—come from across the country and around the world to pursue a rigorous musical and academic curriculum at The American Boychoir School in Princeton, New Jersey, the only non-sectarian boarding boys’ choir school in the nation. In addition to maintaining an active national and international touring schedule, the ensemble performs and records regularly with such world-class artists as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, soprano Jessye Norman, pop singer Beyoncé, and vocalist and conductor Bobby McFerrin. Additional orchestral engagements in 2007–08 include multiple performances of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with The Philadelphia Orchestra in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall.

The Boychoir has been extensively recorded and broadcast on radio and television, with some 45 commercial recordings to its name, the most recent on its own Albemarle Records label. A new CD entitled Harmony: American Songs of Faith will be released in mid-October. For information about The American Boychoir School, please visit americanboychoir.org.