CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with John Adams, David Robertson and Jeremy Geffen, Director of Artistic Planning, Carnegie Hall.

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director and Conductor
Christian Tetzlaff, Violin

BRAHMS Tragic Overture
BERG Violin Concerto
SIBELIUS Tapiola
JOHN ADAMS Doctor Atomic Symphony (NY Premiere, Co-commissioned by The Carnegie Hall Corporation, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC)

Encore:
BACH Andante from Solo Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 1003 (played by Christian Tetzlaff)

Nonesuch at Carnegie

Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2007–2008 season are made possible, in part, by a grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

By Paul Schiavo

JOHANNES BRAHMS Tragic Overture, Op. 81
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.

Composed in 1880, the Tragic Overture received its first performance in Vienna on December 26 of that year, with Hans Richter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 18, 1900, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Gericke.

Scoring: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

Brahms composed his Tragic Overture during the summer of 1880, the same season that produced his Academic Festival Overture. The nearly simultaneous appearance of these very different overtures—one humorous, the other dark and brooding—prompts the question of whether one piece called the other into being, whether Brahms felt a need to balance the levity of the Academic Festival Overture with a work of more serious character.

The composer’s extreme reticence about his creative process prevents us from answering this question definitively, or from knowing whether Brahms composed the Tragic Overture with a specific dramatic scenario in mind. A proposal to mount a production of Goethe’s Faust in Vienna around the time the piece was written may have provided the impetus for its creation, but the play proved too difficult to stage and the production was abandoned. Brahms refused to acknowledge a connection between his overture and Faust or any other inspiration. Moreover, his sketches indicate that Brahms conceived some of the music 10 or 12 years earlier. In view of this, it is more reasonable to hear the work as an expression of tragedy in a general sense rather than as a response to any particular literary stimulus.

The Tragic Overture opens with a pair of shattering chords, a terse hammer-blow gesture that recalls the opening of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. From that figure a broad theme rises in the strings. This subject expands powerfully and leads to two others: a march-like idea that grows out of the opening theme, and a tender melody whose inherent warmth transcends the restraint with which Brahms treats it. (It is this theme and its extension that the composer had worked out in sketches made in the late 1860s.) Their development yields music whose form and dramatic character are thoroughly symphonic.


ALBAN BERG Violin Concerto
Born February 9, 1885, in Vienna; died there December 24, 1935.

Composed in 1935, Berg’s Violin Concerto received its first performance on April 19, 1936, at a festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, in Barcelona. Louis Krasner was the soloist, and Hermann Scherchen the conductor. The Concerto received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on March 11, 1937, with Krasner and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.

Scoring: solo violin, 2 flutes (both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets (third doubling alto saxophone and bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani and other percussion, harp, and strings.

Alban Berg was, along with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, part of a triumvirate of Viennese composers who pioneered a radically new musical language in the early decades of the 20th century. Yet Berg was not a musician of revolutionary temperament. On the contrary, he had great reverence for musical tradition. And his Violin Concerto is not an iconoclastic piece but one that draws substance from, and pays homage to, the musical past.

We owe this composition to the American violinist Louis Krasner, who early in 1935 asked Berg to write a new work for him. In response, the composer began sketching a violin concerto, but the character of the composition soon took on a new dimension. In April, the composer learned that Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler by her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius, had succumbed to polio. Berg had remained close to Gustav Mahler’s widow since that composer’s death, in 1911. He was particularly fond of Manon, and he now developed a conception of the Violin Concerto as a requiem for her. Working at a pace unprecedented in his career, he completed it in a matter of months. Sadly, he never heard this, his final composition. By the end of the year, Berg himself was dead from blood poisoning resulting from an insect sting.

Berg cast the concerto in two movements, each in turn divided into two subsections. The first movement, widely regarded as a portrait of Manon Gropius, begins with an elegiac Andante in which the solo violin is heard “tuning up” on its open strings. This tuning motif recurs in varied forms throughout the work. There follows a scherzo-like section into which Berg weaves an Austrian folk song, first sung nostalgically by the French horn.

The second movement opens with an accompanied soliloquy for the solo instrument. Beginning with a succession of violent chords, this section builds to a shattering climax, the rhythms of the folk song transformed into piercing orchestral cries. This gives way almost at once to the comforting strains of a hymn, the Lutheran chorale Es ist Genug (“It is Enough”) in its familiar harmonization by Bach. Around this melody Berg constructs the final Adagio. Again and again, phrases of the hymn emerge from the musical texture: “Es ist genug”—“It is enough.” A last, wistful recollection of the folk song dissolves back into the chorale, and the tuning motif brings the concerto to rest peacefully. The reverent quality of this final movement explains and is explained by Berg’s dedication of the score: “To the Memory of an Angel.”


JEAN SIBELIUS Tapiola, Op. 112
Born December 8, 1865, in Hämeenlinna, Finland; died September 20, 1957, in Järvenpää, Finland.

Composed in 1926, Tapiola received its first performance on December 26 of that year in New York, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra; the Carnegie Hall premiere took place a few days later on December 30, again with Damrosch leading the New York Symphony Orchestra.

Scoring: 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.

Broadly they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the forest’s mighty god,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic spells.

These lines were inscribed by Jean Sibelius at the head of his tone poem Tapiola. The composition’s title refers, as does the brief preface quoted above, to the mythological god Tapio. The “forest’s mighty god” figures importantly in the Kalevala, Finland’s epic folk tale. During the 1890s, Sibelius composed several major works based on episodes from the Kalevala, and he continued to draw inspiration from the poem over the course of his long career. Written in 1926, Tapiola was the composer’s final musical reflection on his homeland’s national legend and his last major work of any kind.

Although usually described as a tone poem, Tapiola is not a programmatic work in the usual sense of that term. Certainly the allusive preface quoted above gives no narrative structure such as we find in most well-known tone poems. Nor do we encounter instrumental bird calls or other onomatopoeic figures that previous generations of composers had used to suggest forest and fields. Instead, Tapiola stands as a piece of abstract nature music, a nonspecific evocation of the Scandinavian forest.

But if Tapiola lacks stock devices of orchestral tone painting, it is rich in two other compositional traits. One is Sibelius’s highly imaginative use of orchestral sound. This is difficult to describe generally, since the composer’s scoring avoids formulaic procedures and exhibits continual variety. Still, we can note such effective combinations of instrumental color as the combination of high woodwinds and violins to create bright, ethereal sonorities; a telling use of timpani strokes and rolls, beginning in the work’s opening moments; organ-like sonorities at several points, including the final measures; and a near riot of sonorities in the work’s most violent passage, about three-quarters of the way through the piece.

The other striking feature of this piece is its construction as variation of a single melodic idea. The theme that generates the work is stated at the outset as a chant-like phrase in the violins. Thereafter it recurs in myriad transformations.

After completing Tapiola, Sibelius fell silent. Although more than three decades remained to him, he wrote only a handful of minor pieces during the rest of his life. This work has therefore acquired a special status with the composer’s admirers, who treasure it as a kind of final testament. However, it is not only the chronological position of Tapiola but the quality of musical thought it embodies that has earned it reverence among Sibelius enthusiasts and, increasingly, with audiences generally.


JOHN ADAMS Doctor Atomic Symphony
Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, Massachusetts; currently resides in Berkeley, California.

Composed in 2006–07, the Symphony had its first performance on August 21, 2007, in London, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer; it receives its New York premiere tonight.

Scoring: piccolo, 2 flutes (the second player doubling on another piccolo); 3 oboes (third doubling English horn); 3 clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet); 3 bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon); 4 horns, 4 trumpets (fourth doubling piccolo trumpet), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani and other percussion, harp, celesta, and strings.

John Adams is widely recognized as the pre-eminent American composer of his generation. Colorful, energetic, and accessible in the best sense of that term, Adams’s music enjoys the virtues of different traditions: the expansive sonic architecture of the Romantic masters, the harmonic sophistication of 20th-century composers, the rhythmic vitality of American popular music, the shimmering textures of the so-called “minimalist” school, and the delight in new discoveries that has always characterized the American avant-garde.

To date, Adams has produced four full-length operas. Three of these—Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), and Doctor Atomic (2005)—examine pivotal events in 20th-century history, presenting them not in documentary fashion but in mythic and poetic terms. Doctor Atomic concerns the final days of the Manhattan Project, the American effort during World War II to create an atomic bomb, and concludes with the detonation of the world’s first nuclear device, in July 1945, in the New Mexico desert.

Following the initial production of Doctor Atomic, mounted by the San Francisco Opera in October 2005, Adams adapted portions of his score as an orchestral work. The resulting Doctor Atomic Symphony premiered last summer in London. Its first American performance was given a week ago in St. Louis by David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

The piece unfolds in a single movement, beginning forcefully with music taken from the opera’s overture. The opening passage, Adams says, was suggested by Edgard Varèse’s Déserts and is meant to conjure a devastated post-nuclear landscape. The frenzied music that follows evokes a fierce storm that lashed the desert the night before the bomb test. Of the ensuing episodes, two derive from recitations by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the poetry-loving physicist who directed the scientific part of the Manhattan Project. Verses by Charles Baudelaire, a writer especially dear to Oppenheimer, prompt declamatory phrases over complex, atmospheric accompaniment. Later, John Donne’s famous sonnet “Batter My Heart” brings music of Baroque gravity, a trumpet replacing the opera’s baritone voice. The latter passage serves as a poignant interlude within the “countdown” music of the opera’s final scene.

Program notes copyright © 2008 by Paul Schiavo

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director and Conductor
American conductor David Robertson is in his third season as Music Director of the 128-year-old Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, while continuing as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, a post to which he was appointed in 2005. In addition to his commitments with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Robertson continues to guest conduct nationally and internationally throughout the 2007–08 season. Highlights of the season included a residency just completed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic entitled Concrete Frequency, which showcased three separate programs, and included the world premiere of a new work by Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison. Additional US engagements include performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera. International guest engagements include appearances with the Tonhalle Orchestra (Zürich), Swedish Radio Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

A recognized expert in 20th- and 21st-century music with extensive international conducting credits, Mr. Robertson has held several posts abroad. Prior to his Saint Louis Symphony and BBC Symphony Orchestra appointments, Mr. Robertson was the first artist ever to simultaneously hold the posts of Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon and Artistic Director of that city’s Auditorium, posts he held from 2000 to 2004. From 1992 to 2000, he was Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, of which Pierre Boulez is Honorary President, and from 1985 to 1987 he was resident conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Mr. Robertson was educated at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied French horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. He is the recipient of Columbia University’s 2006 Ditson Conductor’s Award, and he and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra received the ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming for the 2005–06 season from the League of American Orchestras. Musical America named Mr. Robertson Conductor of the Year for 2000. In 1997, Mr. Robertson received the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, the premier prize of its kind, given to exceptionally-gifted American conductors. David Robertson has two teenage sons, and, with his wife, pianist Orli Shaham, twin boys born in September 2007.

Christian Tetzlaff, Violin
From the outset of his career, Christian Tetzlaff has performed a broad spectrum of the repertoire, ranging from Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas and partitas to 19th-century masterworks by Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Brahms; from 20th-century concertos by Bartók, Berg, and Stravinsky to world premieres of contemporary works. Since his performances of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto, which brought him to international attention at age 22, Mr. Tetzlaff has been recognized for his playing of the less frequently heard areas of the literature. Nonetheless, he considers Mozart and Brahms to be just as central and challenging to his musical development. In honor of his artistic achievements, Musical America named Mr. Tetzlaff Instrumentalist of the Year in 2005.

Born in Hamburg in 1966 to a minister’s family in which music occupied a central place, his three siblings are all professional musicians. He frequently performs with his sister Tanja, a cellist. Mr. Tetzlaff began playing the violin and piano at age six, but pursued a regular academic education while continuing his musical studies. He did not begin intensive study of the violin until making his concert debut playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto at the age of 14. Mr. Tetzlaff attributes the establishment of his musical outlook to his teacher at the conservatory in Lübeck, Uwe-Martin Haiberg, who placed equal stress on interpretation and technique. Mr. Tetzlaff came to the United States during the 1985–86 academic year to work with Walter Levine at the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music, and also spent two summers at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont.

Highlights of Mr. Tetzlaff’s 2007–08 season include appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston, Detroit, and New World symphonies; and a series of concerts playing all ten Beethoven sonatas for violin and piano with Alexander Lonquich at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

Christian Tetzlaff makes his home near Frankfurt with his wife, a clarinetist with the Frankfurt Opera, and their three children. He currently performs on a violin made by the German violin maker Peter Greiner, modeled after a Guarneri del Gesu.