CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 2:00 PM

Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela
Gustavo Dudamel, Music Director and Conductor
Emanuel Ax, Piano

BERLIOZ Le Carnaval romain Overture
CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 5
ARTURO MÁRQUEZ Danzón No. 2
BERNSTEIN Mambo from West Side Story
GINASTERA Malambo from Estancia

Encore:
CHOPIN Waltz in A Minor, Op. 34, No. 2 (played by Mr. Ax just before intermission)

The Berlin in Lights festival is made possible by a leadership gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Martha and Bob Lipp and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding provided by Axel Springer AG, GWFF USA Inc., and the Jerome Robbins Foundation.

This performance is sponsored by Fundación Mercantil (Venezuela).

Program Notes:

By Steven Ledbetter

HECTOR BERLIOZ Le carnaval romain Overture, Op. 9
Born December 11, 1803, in La Côte‑Saint‑André, Isère; died March 8, 1869, in Paris.

Composed in the fall of 1843, Le carnaval romain Overture was based on music from Berlioz’s opera Benvenuto Cellini. The Overture was first performed on February 3, 1844, in Paris, under the composer’s baton. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on April 24, 1892, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, timpani, 2 tambourines, cymbals, triangle, and strings.

Berlioz conceived this piece as an afterthought to his opera Benvenuto Cellini, a fictionalized treatment of the life of the famous Renaissance sculptor, which reaches its climax in the casting of his great bronze “Perseus.” The opera had been performed in 1838 without much success, owing to the politics of French musical life. In this, Berlioz was perpetually an outsider; no matter how hard he worked, he was simply too witty, too honest, and too talented to make his way easily in a world of backstabbing and self-promotion by entrenched musical figures (though he himself was no mean self-promoter). The opera had been seriously hampered in performance by poor conducting from François-Antoine Habeneck, who was hostile to the work. The catastrophic experience of Benvenuto Cellini had a sobering effect on Berlioz, and he never forgot the humiliation of that opening night.

The experience convinced Berlioz that every composer owed it to himself to become a conductor, too, so he could have some control over the treatment given his new pieces. He took his own advice to become active as a conductor and wrote a series of effective concert pieces for use on his tours. To that end he returned to the lively second-act finale of Benvenuto Cellini, which takes place in Rome during the unbuttoned pre-Lenten period known as carnival time and drew upon it for Le carnaval romain (The Roman Carnival) described as a “characteristic overture.” It became one of Berlioz’s most popular compositions.

For this concert showpiece, Berlioz begins with a brief outburst of the main saltarello theme at a devil-may-care speed, followed by an exquisite slow, lyrical melody in the English horn (drawn from the duet between Cellini and Teresa in the opera’s first act). The third time through, we hear it in tight canonic imitation. Once into the Allegro, the material comes almost literally from the Act II finale of Cellini for nearly 200 measures. The brief fugato that comprises the development keeps the galloping saltarello rhythm constantly present while the lyric melody recurs in sustained notes. The climactic moment involves the combination of all these elements—saltarello, canon, lyric passages, and tricky phrase elisions—to make a wonderfully invigorating close that leaves the listener, as well as the performers, breathless with its non-stop, headlong rush.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21
Born March 1, 1810, in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw; died October 17, 1849, in Paris.

Composed in 1829, the F‑Minor Concerto was first performed on March 17, 1830, in Warsaw, with the composer as soloist. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on December 2, 1893, with Richard Burmeister, piano, and the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

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

Chopin composed his two piano concertos within a year of each other, when he himself had barely finished his formal studies. He had begun composition work at the age of 12 with Jozef Elsner, director of the Warsaw Conservatory, in 1822. His pianistic talent had been recognized even earlier: he had appeared in public playing a concerto of Gyrowetz a month before his eighth birthday. And even then he had begun to compose little piano pieces. When Elsner took him in hand, he hoped that his gifted pupil would one day compose the great Polish national opera, but it was not to be. Eventually Elsner realized that the young man had such remarkable gifts that it was useless to impose an outside taste on them.

Chopin never composed a work that did not include the piano, but on his chosen instrument he was most original, always inventing new sonorities and techniques that set him apart. In 1829, at the age of 19, he went to Vienna and attracted a great deal of attention with his overtly Polish works. He began the F‑Minor Concerto on this trip (despite its numbering, it was the first of his two concertos to be written), and when he returned to Poland, he concentrated on finishing the piece. He wrote to a friend that his Adagio had been inspired by tender feelings for one Constantia Gladkowska, a vocal student at the Warsaw Conservatory, “whom I dream of.” He finished the work that winter and premiered it at a program of his recent works the following March.

It would be unrealistic to expect a piano concerto written by a budding young virtuoso not out of his teens to display a command of the symphonic style of concerto writing, especially because the most advanced concertos of the day—Beethoven’s, for example, were still unknown in Poland. Hummel was the major composer, and it was his flashy, decorative concertos that provided the model for Chopin’s early works.

Yet despite the young composer’s relative inexperience, his concertos are extraordinary in that special way that makes his music personal and immediately identifiable. The opening movement begins with a series of typical concerto gambits, but when the soloist enters, Chopin’s personality at once takes over. While obviously influenced by the decorative art of Hummel and Moscheles, Chopin’s highly ornamented writing is far more expressive, far more poignant. In form, his first movement is simple and straightforward, but its content proclaims the budding master.

The slow movement already reveals the genius; Chopin’s teacher Elsner praised its originality, and he was right to do so. It has a simple A‑B‑A outline that Chopin decorates with extraordinary freedom. The finale is related to that Polish country dance, the mazurka, that Chopin made so wonderfully his own. The traditional mazurka was in triple time accompanied by strong accents on the second or third beat (when danced, the accents are reinforced by a strong tap of the heel). This movement is a rondo with several sharply contrasting themes in mazurka style, closing with a dramatic coda.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.

Completed in the spring of 1808, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was first performed on December 22, 1808, with the composer conducting. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on May 9, 1891, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch, as part of the Hall’s Opening Week Music Festival.

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

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was first heard in a long concert that he gave at Vienna’s Theater‑an‑der‑Wien to present an amazing series of his own works, all first performances. The evening began at 6:30 PM with the Sixth Symphony, followed by the concert aria “Ah, perfido!” two movements from the Mass in C, and the Fourth Piano Concerto (with the composer himself as soloist) on the first half. After intermission, the audience heard for the first time the Fifth Symphony, a piano fantasy improvised by the composer, and the Choral Fantasy. The last piece did not end until 10:30 PM!

Given the length of the evening, most reports on the event detail the one real catastrophe of the evening—when the orchestra fell apart in the middle of the Choral Fantasy and the whole piece had to be started over. Thus, the most important and influential reaction to the Fifth Symphony did not come until a year and a half later, when the famous writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (who was also a composer) gave an enthusiastic appraisal of the Fifth Symphony as a landmark in the history of music.

Early audiences were stupefied or exhilarated. When someone asked Beethoven, “What does it mean?” he replied, “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” As such things go, it was appropriate enough. Fate working out a path to victory has long been associated with the piece. The “victory” is inherent in the music itself. This is why the score grips us today no matter how many times we have heard it.

Is it possible, at this late date, to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth not as if it were the most familiar of symphonies, but rather as if it were brand new? The opening four‑note figure assumes great importance from the outset, but we gradually realize that this musical atom is not a theme in itself; it is the rhythmic foreground to an extraordinarily long‑limbed melody, made up of a chain of four‑note atoms. We hear a long phrase, but no one in the orchestra actually plays it. Instead, one section overlaps another, then another. The tensely climbing phrase is an aural illusion. The rapid interplay of orchestral sections, a constantly boiling cauldron in which each has its own brief say before yielding to the next, lends a dramatic quality to the sound of the orchestra from the very opening.

The drama in the Fifth Symphony is musical: How is a coherent and fully satisfying conclusion in the major mode achieved in a symphony that begins in the minor? Throughout the four movements of this symphony, C major keeps appearing without ever quite exorcizing the haunting sense of C minor—never, that is, until the end of the last movement. In the opening Allegro, the C major appears right on schedule where it is conventionally expected—at the recapitulation of the secondary theme. But then the lengthy coda goes on—in C minor—to show that there is still a struggle ahead.

In the Andante, Beethoven keeps moving with a surprising modulation from the home key of A-flat to a bright C major, reinforced by trumpets and timpani. But that C-major idea is never once allowed to come to a full conclusion; rather, it fades away, shrouded in harmonic mists and sustained tension.

The very unjoking scherzo (in C minor) turns to C major for a Trio involving some contrapuntal buffoonery, but the fun comes to an end with a hushed return to the minor‑key material of the opening. Finally we begin to approach the light, moving through the darkness of a tense passage linking the movements to a glorious sunburst of C major that opens the finale. Even then we have one more struggle. Beethoven recalls the scherzo and the tense linking passage just before the recapitulation (another shift from gloom to bright day). Only then have we safely arrived in C major. An extended coda—an extraordinary peroration—needs to be as long as it is because it is not just the conclusion of the last movement, but rather of the entire symphony, culminating a demonstration of unification on the very grandest scale to which virtually every composer since has aspired, though few have succeeded.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Steven Ledbetter, musicologist and program annotator of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, writes and lectures widely on
many aspects of classical music.

Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela
Gustavo Dudamel, Music Director and Conductor
One of today’s gifted conductors, Gustavo Dudamel continues to thrill international audiences and bring the highest level of musicianship to orchestras worldwide. He is currently Principal Conductor of Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, has recently been appointed the Music Director of Los Angeles Philharmonic (effective the 2009–10 season), and enters his ninth year as Music Director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.

Mr. Dudamel’s 2007–08 season officially opened with his first concert as Principal Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. In September 2007, he returned to the Lucerne Festival for his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic with piano soloist Daniel Barenboim, and later in the season, he debuts with the New York Philharmonic, the Berliner Philharmoniker, and Berlin Staatskapelle. In August 2007, Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela embarked on a European tour with performances at the Edinburgh Festival and the BBC Proms in the UK, and five German venues, including Schleswig Holstein Festival, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Dresden Semperoper, Bonn Beethovenfest, and Frankfurt Alte Oper, followed by a US tour in October. Gustavo Dudamel returns to work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and conducts the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. Dudamel also debuts this season with the San Francisco Symphony and returns to the Philharmonia Orchestra in London in June 2008. Other highlights include a performance at Berlin Staatsoper with La bohème and a return to La Scala, also with La bohème, along with concerts at Madrid’s Orquestra Nacional de España, Filarmonica della Scala and Orquestra Sinfonica dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Italy.

Mr. Dudamel is an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist. He received the 2007 New Artist of the Year Echo Award (Germany) for his debut recording of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, released worldwide in September 2006. His second recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Orchestra was released in May 2007.

Born in 1981 in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he studied violin with José Luis Jiménez at the Jacinto Lara Conservatory and with José Francisco del Castillo at the Latin American Academy of Violin. In 1996, he began his conducting studies with Rodolfo Saglimbeni and during the same year was named Music Director of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra. In 1999, along with assuming the Music Director position of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, he began conducting studies with José Antonio Abreu, the Orchestra’s founder. In May 2007, Dudamel was awarded the Premio de la Latindad by the Union Latina, an honor, given for outstanding contributions to Latin cultural life, which is presented by the 37 Latin American and African member states of the Union Latina organization.

THE SIMÓN BOLÍVAR YOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
The Simón Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1975 by José Antonio Abreu, has continuously aimed to create new opportunities for Musical Excellence in Venezuela for the past 30 years. Heading a national system, the State Foundation for the Venezuelan System of Youth and Child Orchestras (FESNOJIV), this orchestra is comprised of more than 200 young musicians between the ages of 16 and 20, all products of a system that is of equal social, musical, and educational importance in Venezuela. The orchestra has worked with such conductors as Claudio Abbado and Sir Simon Rattle. They tour with their Music Director and colleague Gustavo Dudamel.

FESNOJIV involves some 135,000 musicians from across the country in a system of pre-school orchestras (4 to 6 years), over 90 children’s orchestras (7 to 16 years), over 130 youth orchestras (16 to 20 years), and over 30 professional adult symphony orchestras.

Emanuel Ax, Piano
Emanuel Ax is renowned not only for his poetic temperament and unsurpassed virtuosity but also for the exceptional breadth of his performing activity. Each season, his distinguished career includes appearances with major symphony orchestras worldwide, recitals in the most celebrated concert halls, a variety of chamber music collaborations, the commissioning and performance of new music, and additions to his acclaimed discography on Sony Classical.

Mr. Ax captured public attention in 1974 when, at age 25, he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975, he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists and, four years later, took the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. He has been an exclusive Sony Classical recording artist since 1987, making his debut on that label with a collection of Chopin scherzos and mazurkas. Mr. Ax’s third volume in the recording cycle of Haydn Piano Sonatas (Nos. 29, 31, 34, 35, 49) received a Grammy Award in February 2004, following the previous recording in the cycle (Sonata Nos. 47, 53, 32, 59), also a Grammy winner. Recent releases include Strauss’s Enoch Arden narrated by Patrick Stewart (June 2007); two discs of two-piano programs (with Yefim Bronfman) of works by Brahms and Rachmaninoff; period-instrument performances of Chopin’s complete works for piano and orchestra (on two discs); and a reissue of both Brahms Piano Concertos with Bernard Haitink and James Levine.

In the 2007–08 season, Mr. Ax performs with the New York, Chicago, Houston, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Minnesota, and National symphony orchestras. In Europe, he will appear with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra, the London Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra. A solo recital tour in Europe and North America will take him to celebrated venues such as London’s Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and New York’s Carnegie Hall.

For the opening gala of the New York Philharmonic in September 2006, Mr. Ax appeared with Mr. Bronfman in Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos conducted by Lorin Maazel with live national TV coverage. As an On Location artist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 2006–07 season, he contributed to a series of chamber and orchestral programs centered around Mozart and Strauss works. In the 2005–06 season, Mr. Ax served as Pianist-in-Residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker, performing with the orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle in Berlin and New York.

A committed proponent of contemporary composers, Mr. Ax gave the world premiere of John Adams’s Century Rolls with The Cleveland Orchestra in 1997, the European premiere with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1998, and the New York premiere with The Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2000. Another concerto dedicated to him, Christopher Rouse’s Seeing, was premiered in 1999 with the New York Philharmonic and received its European debut at the BBC Proms in 2001. Mr. Ax premiered Krzysztof Penderecki’s Resurrection with The Philadelphia Orchestra in May 2002. In March 2003, he joined Yo-Yo Ma, David Zinman, and the New York Philharmonic to premiere Bright Sheng’s Song and Dance of Tears, and in May 2003, he premiered a concerto written for him by Melinda Wagner, Extremity of Sky, with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony.

Mr. Ax has regularly performed chamber music with such artists as Young Uck Kim, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, and Jaime Laredo. He made a series of acclaimed recordings with Mr. Ma, and as a duo they have won three Grammy Awards for the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. The pair has also joined with Richard Stoltzman for a Grammy Award–winning album of clarinet trios and with Pamela Frank, Rebecca Young, and Edgar Meyer for the Schubert “Trout” Quintet. The Ax-Stern-Laredo-Ma Quartet recorded the piano quartets of Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, Fauré, Mozart, and Schumann for Sony Classical.

Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax studied at The Juilliard School and attended Columbia University, where he majored in French. He holds an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Yale University.

Mr. Ax resides in New York City with his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki, and two children, Joseph and Sarah. For more information about Mr. Ax, visit EmanuelAx.com.