CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

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

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Simon Morrison, Professor of Music, Princeton University.

Orchestre symphonique de Montréal
Kent Nagano, Music Director and Conductor
Joshua Bell, Violin

DEBUSSY Le martyre de St. Sébastien: Symphonic Fragments
TCHAIKOVSKY Violin Concerto
UNSUK CHIN Rocaná (US Premiere)
SCRIABIN The Poem of Ecstasy

Encores:
CORIGLIANO Excerpts from "The Red Violin"
BIZET Farandole from L’Arlésienne

Program Notes:

By Robert Markow

CLAUDE DEBUSSY Le martyre de Saint Sébastian (The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian)
Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.

Debussy composed the music for d’Annunzio’s complete mystery play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien between February and May of 1911; André Caplet conducted the first performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on May 22, 1911. Caplet also chose and arranged the four symphonic fragments, which were first performed by the Czech Philharmonic under Edgard Varèse on January 4, 1914. The symphonic fragments received their Carnegie Hall and US premiere on February 12, 1912, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Kurt Schindler.

Scoring: 4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tama-tam, celesta, 3 harps, and strings.

The poet Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938) was a prominent Italian dramatist and writer of mystical novels. In 1910 he moved to Paris and became close to the dancer Ida Rubinstein. Enamored of her physical beauty and balletic talents, d’Annunzio conceived for Rubinstein a five-hour stage extravaganza about the third-century Christian martyr St. Sebastian. (A woman enacting the role of a male did not bother d’Annunzio, as he had learned that this sometimes occurred in medieval mystery plays.) Debussy was asked to supply the music (but only after two others refused)—choruses, preludes, and interludes—and to do it quickly. Since time was so short, Debussy asked his friend André Caplet to assist in the orchestration.

The Martyrdom is part opera, part ballet, part mystery play, part cantata, and requires for a complete performance an oversized orchestra, chorus, vocal soloists, narrator, elaborate stage machinery, sets, costumes, lights, and dancers. Its first performance was a hopelessly confused affair whose only real strength, it seems, was Debussy’s music. To salvage Debussy’s contribution to the production, Caplet arranged four purely symphonic passages from the complete score. Numerous lines originally sung were assigned to orchestral instruments. The subtitles were also Caplet’s work. The first fragment is the prelude to Act I. A mood of mystery and quiet exaltation is created by the organ-like writing for woodwinds. Later, the delicate tracery of solo winds against a background of rippling harps portrays the saint’s suffering. The second fragment accompanies St. Sebastian’s dance on glowing embers (proving his sanctity). The joyous sounds that conclude Act I (and this fragment) portray a vision of the celestial gates of heaven.

In La passion, the saint gives a symbolic enactment of the passion of Christ before the court of Caesar Augustus, filled with pagan gods. The final fragment introduces Act IV. Sebastian is about to be tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. The music is suffused with an unearthly, mystical radiance created from a veritable catalogue of Impressionist techniques: softly shimmering string tremolos, various bowed effects, mutes, multiple divisions of string parts, plucked harps, and short, fragmented solos for woodwinds.

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk; died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg

Scoring: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings and solo violin

Tchaikovsky composed his Violin Concerto in March and April of 1878. Adolf Brodsky was soloist in the first performance, given in Vienna on December 4, 1881 by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Hans Richter. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 6, 1893, with Adolph Brodsky, violin, and the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Tchaikovsky composed his Violin Concerto during March and April of 1878 while staying at Clarens, on Lake Geneva. He originally dedicated the work to the celebrated virtuoso and teacher Leopold Auer. But Auer pronounced it unplayable. Nearly four years passed before Adolf Brodsky took up its cause, giving the first performance not in Russia but in Vienna. Tchaikovsky rewrote the dedication to Brodsky, who went on to perform the concerto in London and Moscow, eventually winning public support for it. Even Auer, in his old age, finally saw its merits; the concerto would become one of the mainstays in the repertories of his prodigies, including Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist. Today’s students readily master yesterday’s most fiendish difficulties, and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is now one of the two or three most popular works in the genre.

Although full of bravura passage work, the concerto also contains a wealth of pure romantic lyricism for which Tchaikovsky is so noted. The first movement boasts both a lyrical first and second theme, and even the cadenza emphasizes the expressive over the virtuosic. The second movement, subtitled Canzonetta, has a certain melancholic wistfulness to it—soulful though not mournful. The muted solo violin presents the first folklike theme. This movement is followed without pause by the exhilarating finale, whose themes suggest Russian dance tunes and rhythms, especially the Trepak.

UNSUK CHIN Rocana
Born July 14, 1961, in Seoul, South Korea; now living in Berlin.

Scoring: 3 flutes (1st doubling alto flute, 3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, marimbaphone, vibraphone, xylophone, chimes, crotales, cencerros, Japanese temple blocks, triangle, small triangle, high-hat, 3 cymbals (small, medium, large), 3 tam-tams (small, medium, large), glass wind chime, 3 snare drums (small, medium, large), sand box, maracas, 2 anvils, bass drum, 4 metal blocks, piano, celesta, harp, and strings

Composed in early 2008, Rocana was commissioned by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and the Bayerische Staatsoper. It was first performed on March 3 of this year in Montreal. Tonight’s performance marks the US premiere of this work.

Unsuk Chin is probably the best-known living composer from South Korea. Following studies at Seoul National University, she moved to Hamburg in 1985 to study with György Ligeti, then to Berlin in 1988, where she has been living ever since. In 2001 she was appointed composer-in-residence with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, which commissioned her to write the Violin Concerto that in 2003 won the highly coveted Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition given by the University of Louisville, Kentucky, and worth $200,000.

Ms. Chin came to international attention in the mid-1990s with her Acrostic-Wordplay for soprano and ensemble. Other important works include a Piano Concerto (1997), a Double Concerto for Piano, Percussion, and Ensemble (2003), and the opera Alice in Wonderland, premiered last June by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich with Kent Nagano conducting. Ms. Chin is currently composer-in-residence with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

Rocana is the Sanskrit word for “room of light.” Maris Gothoni explains her work in these terms:

In Rocana, I was concerned with the behavior of beams of light—their distortion, refraction, reflections, and undulations). Since sound waves—as the physical phenomenon of a bodiless oscillation—are similar to light waves, music is the appropriate medium for a “translation” of light phenomena. Physical phenomena like space depth and space density, spatial perceptions and illusions of various sorts were also realized musically.

The music flows uninterruptedly. The overall picture and the overall structure are one entity, one “tonal sculpture.” However, one can look at it from various angles, since the inner structures are constantly changing. Even if the music at times gives the impression of stagnation, subtle impulses, interactions, and reactions are continually present. Certain elements appear time and again, yet always in varied form. They are not developed: they instead lead seamlessly into one another and blend, forming new interactions and processes. Orderly structures suddenly turn into turbulence and vice versa. Primarily through the combination of various instrumental techniques, through rhythmic development and the interplay of overtone structures and microtones, shifts and changes of timbre are achieved; light and color phenomena playfully alternate with one another.


ALEXANDER SCRIABIN The Poem of Ecstasy, Op. 54
Born January 6, 1872, in Moscow; died April 27, 1915, in Moscow.

Scriabin composed The Poem of Ecstasy between 1904 and 1908. It received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 10, 1908, with the Russian Symphony Society of New York conducted by Modest Altschuler.

Scoring: 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, tam-tam, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, small and large bells, celesta, organ, 2 harps, and strings.

The life of Alexander Scriabin was one of the strangest in the history of music. He started out by writing graceful, sensuous little piano pieces in a quasi-Chopin style and ended up totally, even maniacally, absorbed in mysticism and the occult. He absorbed into his philosophical system elements of Oriental religions, the Nietzschean Superman, theosophy, and Marxist socialism. Towards the end of his life, he thought of sound in terms of colors, eroticism, and planes of ecstasy. “I wish I could possess the world as I possess a woman,” he once said.

Scriabin considered his Third Symphony (The Divine Poem) to be a major turning point in his career. “This was the first time I found light in music, the first time I found this rapture, this soaring flight, this suffocation from joy!” The Poem of Ecstasy is the logical continuation of The Divine Poem, and even before the Third Symphony was premiered (1905), the composer was contemplating a Fourth. This eventually became the single-movement Poem of Ecstasy.

The first step took the form of a verse poem written by Scriabin himself and privately printed in Geneva in 1906: “369 lines of inflated mystical fantasizing,” in the words of Hugh Macdonald. “The poem,” continues Macdonald, “tells of the spirit’s search for ecstasy; its state of longing is threatened by the ‘terrible rhythms of dark presentiment.’ These are triumphantly overcome … and the spirit gives itself to the joys of love

The Poem of Ecstasy is essentially an extended symphonic movement with a double development and coda, but it is best heard as a succession of moods that include languid, playful, erotic, volatile, yearning, assertive, desperate, intoxicated, and triumphant. Changes of mood are often abrupt or impulsive. No fewer than eight themes or motifs are presented within the work’s opening pages. The labels are Scriabin’s own: 1) “Longing,” heard by a flute, then violin, in the opening bars; 2) “Dreaming,” a gently lyrical theme for clarinet; 3) “Floating,” a more nervous, upwardly leaping motive given first to the flute, then the oboe; 4) “Engendered Creatures,” for a sweetly expressive solo violin; 5) “Unrest,” a galloping, almost menacing rhythmic figure for horns; this is followed immediately by 6) “Will,” a proud theme for solo trumpet; 7) “Self-assertion” or “Victory,” also for trumpet, consisting of a succession of rising steps that fall back only to rise higher in the theme’s repetition; 8) “Protest,” a motif for muted trombones, characterized by wide leaps.

Scriabin develops and combines these themes into a vast sonic mosaic that fairly bursts with creative tension, exultant impulses, and iridescent hues. The music rises to several ecstatic climaxes, culminating in an overwhelming blaze of C major.


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Robert Markow writes program notes for orchestras and concert societies across North America; he is also a contributor to American Record Guide, Opera News, and Opera magazine.

Orchestre symphonique de Montréal
Kent Nagano, Music Director and Conductor
Kent Nagano has established a reputation as a gifted interpreter of both the operatic and symphonic repertoire. In September 2006 Nagano became General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and also began his tenure as Music Director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.

After having opened his first season in Munich with a world premiere of Rihm’s Das Gehege, paired with Strauss’s Salome, Mr. Nagano also conducted productions of Britten’s Billy Budd and Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina in the 2006–07 season. In June 2007 he opened the Munich Opera Festival with a world premiere of Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland. New productions at the Bavarian State Opera in the 2007–08 season include Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Mozart’s Idomeneo. Also this season, guest engagements will lead Mr. Nagano and the Bavarian State Orchestra to Milan, Linz, Bolzano, Regensburg, Nuremberg, Budapest, and Baden-Baden.

Highlights of the season with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal will be a guest performance at Carnegie Hall in New York and a tour of Japan in April 2008, among others. After the success of last season’s Tristan and Isolde, Kent Nagano conducted a concert version of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Montreal.

A very important period in Nagano’s career was his time as artistic director and chief conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin from 2000 to 2006. With the orchestra, he has performed Schönberg’s Moses und Aron (in collaboration with Los Angeles Opera), and he took them to the Salzburg Festival to perform both Zemlinsky’s Der König Kandaules and Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, as well as to the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden with Parsifal (2004) and Lohengrin (2006) in a production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff. Parsifal, Die Gezeichneten, and Lohengrin have also been released on DVD. Recordings with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin for Harmonia Mundi include repertoire as diverse as Bernstein’s Mass, Bruckner’s Third and Sixth symphonies, Beethoven’s Christus am Ölberge, Wolf lieder, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Schönberg’s Die Jakobsleiter and Friede auf Erden, as well as Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 and Schönberg’s Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31.

Kent Nagano became the first music director of Los Angeles Opera in 2003, having already held the position of principal conductor for two years. Productions there ranged from a series of Mozart operas to Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Tosca, and Wagner’s Lohengrin and Parsifal.

Founded in 1934 by a group of devoted music lovers, with the backing of the Québec Government, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal is one of the major cultural organizations of the city whose name it bears with pride.

The music directors who have contributed to its growth and success are Wilfrid Pelletier, a Montrealer by birth and conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York who became the first Artistic Director of the OSM; Désiré Defauw; Igor Markevitch; Zubin Mehta, who guided the OSM from 1961 to 1967, bringing increased prestige to the Orchestra since under his direction the OSM began its touring career in Europe; Franz-Paul Decker; Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos; Charles Dutoit, from 1977 to 2002, with whom the OSM assumed an important place on the international stage; and, since September 2006, Kent Nagano.

From Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, one of the venues in the Place des Arts cultural complex, nestled in the heart of the city, the OSM delivers the international repertory of symphonic music to the widest possible audience throughout Québec and Canada. By virtue of its international tours and recordings, the Orchestra has become an ambassador, wholeheartedly assuming its role in promoting cultural and artistic exchanges.

The excellence of the OSM has been demonstrated in the course of 37 national and international tours. The Orchestra has toured in Asia seven times, visiting Japan on six of those, and has toured Europe on nine occasions and South America twice. The OSM has also performed at the Hollywood Bowl, as well as the Ravinia and Tanglewood festivals. Moreover, since 1982 the Orchestra has been an almost annual visitor to Carnegie Hall, where it plays to packed houses.

In 2006 the OSM offered a concert at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet, its first international concert with Kent Nagano. In April 2007 the Orchestra completed its first coast-to-coast Canadian tour, placed under the direction of Kent Nagano. Tonight’s concert marks the Orchestra’s Carnegie Hall debut under Maestro Nagano, and they will embark on a multi-city tour of Japan and South Korea this coming April.

The OSM has produced 95 recordings with Decca, EMI, Philips, CBC Records, and recently, a record with Analekta, earning 47 national and international awards, including two Grammys.

Joshua Bell, Violin
Joshua Bell’s 2007–08 season follows a seminal year highlighted by receiving the coveted Avery Fisher Prize and being appointed to Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music faculty as senior lecturer. In concerts and on recordings, his bold, charismatic artistry continues to bring a fresh voice to the most venerable masterpieces as well to new works like John Corigliano’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra “The Red Violin.”

After summer performances at Tanglewood, the Verbier Festival, and Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, Bell’s season includes concerts with the BBC Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall; a European tour with Kurt Masur conducting the Orchestre National de France; and appearances with the Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Chicago symphonies, the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, and the Tonhalle-Orchester. In October, he premiered a new work by Jay Greenberg with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Bell concluded 2007 with the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve Gala at Lincoln Center broadcast on PBS. A recital tour with Jeremy Denk takes the pair to Europe and the US, with appearances at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. Mr. Bell will also tour Europe as guest soloist with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

For over two decades, Bell has been captivating audiences with his poetic musicality. He came to national attention at age 14 in his orchestral debut with Riccardo Muti and The Philadelphia Orchestra. A Carnegie Hall debut, the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and a recording contract further confirmed his presence in the music world.

Mr. Bell has recorded more than 30 CDs since first signing at age 18 with London/Decca.
He joined the Sony Classical label in 1996, resulting in a richly varied catalogue of recordings. Recently released recordings include The Essential Joshua Bell and Voice of the Violin, which continues to soar on the heels of Romance of the Violin, which Billboard named the 2004 classical CD of the year and for which Mr. Bell was named classical artist of the year. He received a Mercury Prize and Grammy Award for the Maw Violin Concerto. He has collaborated with numerous artists and on film scores including the Oscar-winning soundtrack for The Red Violin.

Bell received his first violin at age four and by age 12 was serious about the instrument, thanks to the inspiration of renowned violinist and pedagogue Josef Gingold.

In 1989, Joshua received an artist diploma from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He has been named an “Indiana Living Legend,” received the Indiana Governor’s Arts Award, and in 2005 was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. Joshua serves on the artist committee of the Kennedy Center Honors. He plays a 1713 Gibson ex Huberman Stradivarius.