CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
San Francisco Symphony

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
Gil Shaham, Violin

WILLIAM SCHUMAN Violin Concerto
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 3, "Eroica"

Encore:
SCHUBERT "Zwischenakt III" from Entr'acte (Act III) from Rosamunde

Program Notes:

Tues, Mar 11, 2008

WILLIAM SCHUMAN Violin Concerto
Born August 4, 1910, in New York City; died there February 15, 1992.

Composed in 1947 and revised in 1959, Schuman’s Violin Concerto was first performed (in its original version) on February 10, 1950, with Isaac Stern, violin, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch; the same players gave the work’s New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on March 15 of that year. The first performance of the revised version of the Concerto took place on August 9, 1959, with soloist Roman Totenberg and the Aspen Festival Orchestra conducted by Izler Solomon.

Scoring: 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (second ad libitum), English horn, 3 clarinets (third ad libitum), bass clarinet, 2 bassoons (second ad libitum), contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, snare drum (with and without snares), suspended cymbal, bass drum, crash cymbals, chimes, and strings.

William Schuman was the first composer to win the Pulitzer Prize, the first to win the New York Critics’ Circle Award, the first to get a commission from the US government, Director of Publications for the publishing house of G. Schirmer, a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College, the man who moved The Juilliard School into the 20th century while serving as its president, the first President of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the composer of ten symphonies. He was a powerful force on our musical scene for more than half a century.

He was nearly 20 when he encountered classical music. That was when he was dragged to one of Toscanini’s New York Philharmonic concerts, which included the Symphony No. 3 by the other Schuman(n). He had gotten his start in popular music and, by the time he quit the field, he had written some 200 songs. The Philharmonic concert turned his life around. At that time Schuman was a student at the New York University School of Commerce and, for all his practical experience, still a musical illiterate. He stopped in at the Malkin School of Music and said, “I want to be a composer. What do I have to do?” He was told he would have to study harmony, which would be $1 per class or $3 for a private lesson. Next thing, he was a pupil of Max Persin, whom Schuman described as “something of a visionary . . . a wonderful influence and a marvelous teacher.”

He also studied with Roy Harris at The Juilliard School. Harris’s tough, broad-spanned, extroverted style affected Schuman powerfully. His own leaning was in just those directions, and his lessons with Harris gave him a vocabulary, the beginnings of a technique, and a validation of his own expressive stance.

In 1938, after Aaron Copland heard Schuman’s Symphony No. 2, he wrote in the influential magazine Modern Music that “Schuman is, so far as I am concerned, the musical find of the year.” He called Serge Koussevitzky’s attention to the young composer, and from that moment on, Schuman had an enthusiastic champion in the Boston Symphony’s conductor.

While Schuman’s symphonies have particularly ensured his place as the great Public Orator among America’s composers, he also worked with striking originality and strong effect in the concerto. The Violin Concerto, begun in the mid-1940s, was well received at its premiere in 1950, but Schuman himself was dissatisfied. It assumed its final form—the one in which Gil Shaham plays it this evening—only nine years later.

When William Schuman described himself as “an unabashed Romantic,” as he liked to do, he was thinking of artists full of fervor and fire. The way the Violin Concerto begins leaves no doubt about the composer’s temper and conviction. Schuman described his two-movement design as “two big chunks of music . . . each self-contained but inter-dependent.” The solo violin gets things going with an ample melody, which is also a seedbed for subsequent developments, as is the accompaniment. A long tutti begins with wild energy but calms into more lyrical music, preparing the way for a glorious new solo opportunity, molto tranquillo. The solo evolves into duets with clarinet and flute. A bridge returns us to the first tempo and more transformations of the opening melody. The violin part, becoming more virtuosic, is allowed ample play in a real cadenza, beginning in brilliance and ending reflectively. The close of the movement brings still more new thoughts about the opening material.

The second movement begins with a slow introduction, forceful writing for brass and strings underlined by a pugnacious timpani solo. The violin’s response is to wax more lyrical than ever. The orchestra grows silent, and the movement proper begins with a snappy fugue for strings. A dramatic and sonorous passage for orchestra leads to a lyric adagietto in which the violin’s thoughts again turn to the first movement. Gradually the music speeds up, and the solo violin is engulfed in a triumphant close.
—Michael Steinberg


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55, “Eroica”
Born probably on December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1805, the “Eroica” Symphony was first performed in Vienna on April 7 of that year, at the Theater an der Wien; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 11, 1892, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

In May 1804, Napoleon, who had been acceptable to Beethoven as a military dictator as long as he called himself First Consul, had himself crowned Emperor, and the disappointed and angry composer scratched out the words “intitolata Bonaparte” on the title page of his newly completed symphony. Actually Beethoven blew hot and cold on that issue. In August of that same year, he told the publishing firm of Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig that this symphony “is really called ‘Ponaparte’ [sic].” At some point, too, Beethoven penciled the words “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte” (“Written on Bonaparte”) on that mutilated title page. But the score of the Third Symphony as printed in October 1806 tells us that this is a sinfonia eroica, a “heroic symphony . . . composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.”

“I’ll pay another Kreuzer if the thing will only stop,” a gallery wit called out at the public premiere of the “Eroica” in 1805. One critic conceded that in this “tremendously expanded, daring, and wild fantasia” there was no lack of “startling and beautiful passages in which the energetic and talented composer must be recognized,” but he felt that the work “loses itself in lawlessness.” Beethoven had given his audience plenty to be upset about—a symphony half again as long as any they would have known, and one unprecedented in demands on orchestral virtuosity that almost certainly were met inadequately, unprecedented as well in the complexity of its polyphony, in the unbridled force of its rhetoric, in the weirdness of details like the famous “wrong” horn entrance in the first movement (the horn has already reached the home chord of E-flat while the violins are still preparing its arrival with a dissonance), and with procedures so radical as the disintegration of the theme at the end of the monumental Funeral March.

Another newness in the “Eroica” is the shift of the center of gravity from the first movement to the Finale. Facing a new challenge, Beethoven turned to old music; that is, he made a set of variations on a theme he had first used in a group of contradances in 1800–01, which he had introduced at about the same time in the finale of his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, and which had also yielded Fifteen Variations and a Fugue for Piano in 1802. In the Symphony he provides a grand, rhetorical introduction or “frame.” After the witty exploration of the possibilities of the bass alone comes a powerful set of variations on the combined melody and bass. He infuses his variations with polyphony throughout their course, and the vitality of texture this creates is one of the chief sources of the movement’s propulsive energy. True to classical tradition for variations, Beethoven slows the tempo near the end. The slow variations here are a climax of towering force. Carefully Beethoven dismantles this structure: The music is almost an echo of the “disintegration” of the Funeral March. Then he resumes speed to fulfill his “heroic symphony” in triumphantly affirmative noise.
—Michael Steinberg


All program notes copyright © 2008 by the San Francisco Symphony, except for the note on Strauss’s Four Last Songs, copyright © New York Philharmonic, in whose program book it first appeared in different form.

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas first conducted the San Francisco Symphony in 1974 and has been Music Director since 1995. A Los Angeles native, he studied with John Crown and Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California, becoming Music Director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra at 19 and working with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Copland at the famed Monday Evening Concerts. He was pianist and conductor for Piatigorsky and Heifetz master classes and, as a student of Friedelind Wagner, an assistant conductor at Bayreuth. In 1969, Mr. Tilson Thomas won the Koussevitzky Prize and was appointed Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony. Ten days later he came to international recognition, replacing Music Director William Steinberg in mid-concert at Lincoln Center. He went on to become the BSO’s Associate Conductor, then Principal Guest Conductor. He has also served as Director of the Ojai Festival, Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, a Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Principal Conductor of the Great Woods Festival. He became Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988 and now serves as Principal Guest Conductor. For a decade he served as co-Artistic Director of Japan’s Pacific Music Festival, which he and Leonard Bernstein inaugurated in 1990, and he continues as Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, which he founded in 1988. Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings have won numerous international awards, and his recorded repertory reflects interests arising from work as conductor, composer, and pianist. His television credits include the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, and in 2004 he and the SFS launched Keeping Score on PBS-TV. His compositions include From the Diary of Anne Frank, Shówa/Shoáh (commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing), Poems of Emily Dickinson, Urban Legend, Island Music, and Notturno. Among his honors are Columbia University’s Ditson Award for services to American music and Musical America’s 1995 Conductor of the Year award. He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gramophone named him its 2005 Artist of the Year.

The San Francisco Symphony gave its first concerts in 1911 and has grown in acclaim under a succession of music directors: Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Basil Cameron, Issay Dobrowen, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and, since 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas. The SFS has won such recording awards as France’s Grand Prix du Disque, Britain’s Gramophone Award, and the United States’s Grammy. For RCA Red Seal, Michael Tilson Thomas and the SFS have recorded music from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, two Copland collections, a Gershwin collection, Stravinsky ballets (Le sacre du printemps, The Firebird, and Perséphone), and Charles Ives: An American Journey. Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 inaugurated a Mahler cycle on the Symphony’s own label and in 2003 captured a Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance. In 2004, the MTT/SFS recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony captured the Grammy for Best Classical Album, and last year their recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony captured Grammys for Best Orchestral Performance and Best Classical Album. Some of the most important conductors of the past and recent years have been guests on the SFS podium, among them Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, and Sir Georg Solti, and the list of composers who have led the Orchestra includes Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and John Adams. The SFS Youth Orchestra, founded in 1980, has become known around the world, as has the SFS Chorus, heard on recordings and on the soundtracks of such films as Amadeus and Godfather III. Adventures in Music, this season celebrating its 20th anniversary, brings music to every child in grades 1 through 5 in San Francisco’s public schools. SFS radio broadcasts, the first in America to feature symphonic music when they began in 1926, today carry the Orchestra’s concerts across the country. In a multimedia program designed to make classical music accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds, the SFS has launched Keeping Score on PBS-TV, DVD, the World Wide Web (keepingscore.org), and radio (The MTT Files). San Francisco Symphony recordings are available at shopsfsymphony.org.

Gil Shaham, Violin