CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Ara Guzelimian, Provost and Dean, The Juilliard School, and José Antonio Abreu, Founder/Director, FESNOJIV (the Venezuelan National Youth Orchestra System).

Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela
Gustavo Dudamel, Music Director and Conductor
Sir Simon Rattle

BARTÓK Concerto for Orchestra
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 10

Encore:
BERNSTEIN Mambo from West Side Story

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

BÉLA BARTÓK Concerto for OrchestraBorn March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (then part of Hungary but now absorbed into Rumania); died September 26, 1945, in New York.

Composed between August 15 and October 8, 1943, the Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned in the spring of 1943 by Serge Koussevitzky through the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the first performances on December 1 and 2, 1944. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 10, 1945 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.
Scoring: 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (third doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets (with a fourth trumpet marked ad lib.), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, bass drum, tam-tam, cymbals, triangle, 2 harps, and strings.

Early in the 1940s, with a world war raging in Europe, Bartók immigrated to the US, where he had a position doing research on recordings of Eastern European folk songs housed at Columbia University. But he was concerned that his position there was only temporary. Worse, he had begun to have a series of irregular high fevers that the doctors were unable to diagnose, but which turned out to be the first indication of leukemia. By early 1943, the state of his health and the fact that Americans showed little interest in his music brought him to a low point. He insisted that he never wanted to compose again. The medical men were unable to do much, yet powerful medicine that spring came not from a doctor, but rather from a conductor—Serge Koussevitzky.

Violinist Joseph Szigeti had told Koussevitzky of Bartók’s situation, warning him that the proud composer would not accept anything remotely smacking of charity. Koussevitzky therefore offered work: $1,000 to write a new orchestral piece with a guarantee of a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The commission was a tonic for the ailing composer; at once he was filled with ideas for a new composition, which he composed in just eight weeks—August 15 to October 8, 1943—while resting under medical supervision at a sanatorium at Lake Saranac in upstate New York.

Bartók described the premiere in Boston as excellent; Koussevitzky hailed the Concerto for Orchestra as the “best orchestra piece of the last 25 years,” and demonstrated his confidence in the score by putting it in the Boston Symphony Orchestra program again only three weeks after the premiere performances. In the program book for the premiere, Bartók wrote that his work traced “a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.” He chose the title Concerto for Orchestra because his work was designed to spotlight by turn each of the sections and most of the principal players.

The Concerto opens with a soft and slightly mysterious introduction laying forth the essential motivic ideas that eventually explode in an Allegro vivace. The second movement is entitled “Game of Pairs,” a simple but original chain-like sequence of folk-like melodies presented by pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes, and trumpets. The third movement, Elegia, is one of those expressive “night music” movements that Bartók delighted in. The Intermezzo interrotto (Interrupted Intermezzo) alternates two very different themes: a rather choppy one first heard in the oboe, then a flowing, lush, romantic one that is Bartók’s gift to the viola section. Later there is a sudden interruption in the form of a vulgar, simple-minded tune that descends the scale in stepwise motion: it is Bartók’s parody of a theme from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, which so incensed him when he heard the American premiere conducted by Toscanini on a radio broadcast that he created this nose-thumbing burlesque. The last movement begins with characteristic dance rhythms in an equally characteristic Bartokian perpetuo moto that rushes on and on, throwing off various motives that gradually solidify into themes, the most important of which appears in the trumpet and turns into a massive fugue, complicated and richly wrought, but building up naturally to a splendidly sonorous climax.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93
Born September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg; died August 9, 1975, in Moscow.

Composed in 1953, the Tenth Symphony was first performed on December 17, 1953, in Leningrad (the name given to St. Petersburg during the Soviet period), under the direction of Yevgeny Mravinsky. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 14, 1954, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Scoring: 2 flutes, 2 piccolos, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, tambourine, tam-tam, and strings.

Shostakovich made his impressive debut as a symphonic composer at the age of 19 with a work of real talent—and more—that established him overnight as a new Russian composer of significance. But during these years he suffered vicissitudes far beyond those that composers must normally deal with in presenting new works—the problems of unsympathetic and uncomprehending audiences or perhaps insufficiently prepared performances. Shostakovich’s additional difficulties were political. Like all Soviet artists, Shostakovich was expected to produce works that served to educate or enlighten the proletariat, to engender enthusiasm for the revolution or the state, to serve, in short, a didactic or propagandistic function over and above the purely musical one.

By 1932, the original enthusiasm for modern art had ended; the Soviet government reigned in its artists, demanding that composers produce works that were no longer simply “music” but rather “Soviet music”; this period of hard-line regimentation lasted until the death of Stalin in 1953 (and it did not really come to an end even after that). No composer—at least none who survived Stalin’s purges—was more affected by it than Shostakovich. Stalin was not musical, but he recognized the value of artistic propaganda and sought glorification in works of art.

After years of criticism (and fear that he might be one of the next to lose his life to Stalin’s unpredictable moods), Shostakovich gave up writing symphonies after his Ninth, in 1945. Until the death of Stalin in 1953, he limited himself to smaller works for the most part—string quartets and piano pieces that were harder to “interpret” politically.

In July 1953, four months after Stalin’s death, Shostakovich began the composition of his Tenth Symphony, finishing the work in September. Its first performance took place within three months. The symphony is now widely regarded as Shostakovich’s finest work in the genre, with a successful union of expressive qualities and technical means. It also represents the long tradition of the four-movement symphony for orchestra alone, to which Shostakovich did not return until his Fifteenth (and last) Symphony of 1971, the intervening works all having vocal elements as well. The appearance of the Tenth Symphony aroused a heated debate among Soviet musicians. Its manifestly personal expression raised once again the issue of the artist’s role: could he express himself subjectively as an individual rather than objectively as one element of a collective group? Shostakovich’s Tenth ran dangerously close to the border of the unacceptable.

Before a debate in the Composer’s Union, Shostakovich spoke of the symphony with a modesty that seems overdone, probably with the aim of disarming attacks by “confessing” certain faults in the piece (some sections too short, some too long), to which he added, “It would be very valuable to have the comrades’ opinions on this.” But he did not reveal anything about the immediate impetus for writing what many felt to be a highly personal work. When asked whether the symphony had a program, he responded evasively with a smile, “No, let them listen and guess for themselves.” Even in the relative liberation of late 1953 he could certainly not feel safe in revealing what many now feel to be the case: that the Tenth Symphony is his reaction to the Stalinist period.

The first three movements are unified by a motive consisting of the first three steps of the minor scale. Shostakovich chose to write a moderately slow first movement, conceived in a lyric and contrapuntal vein, beginning with a twisting slow theme in cellos and basses that occasionally resembles a basso ostinato. After an opening paragraph for strings alone, the solo clarinet introduces a lyrical melody that gradually expands outward and then contracts again to the note on which it began. These materials are used to build up the first orchestral tutti, which then dissolves into individual sections: strings, followed by brass, followed by solo clarinet expanding on its first statement before leading to a new motive, introduced by the solo flute in a low register—a hovering, rocking figure in eighth notes that keeps moving away from the first pitch and then returning to it. The rest of the movement is developed from these three motives with great imagination and economy of means.

The second movement has been variously interpreted, even at the time by Soviet musicians, but its perpetual motion, built on a single motive, is simultaneously exhilarating and threatening, with an evident parodistic intent. It is now widely believed that the movement is Shostakovich’s portrait of Stalin, wily and brutal.

The third movement, which begins as a pensive waltz of a somber character, is an early example of Shostakovich’s practice of composing his personal motto DSCH into his music, something that happens also in the Violin Concerto and the Eighth String Quartet, among others. (DSCH stands for the German transliteration of the composer’s initials, Dmitri SCHostakovich, which is then translated into musical pitches according to German terminology: D, S (Es, or E-flat), C, H (B natural); the resulting four-note motive fits naturally into the key of C minor or its near relations.

The finale consists of a long, slow introduction followed by a vigorous Allegro, less hysterical than the forced rejoicing of the comparable movement in the Fifth Symphony, but fundamentally outgoing nonetheless, despite frequent reminders of the DSCH motto. That reference to the third movement, along with the slow introduction, helps prevent the sheer youthful energy of the Allegro from allowing us to forget the very different character of the first three movements. Here, as throughout the work, Shostakovich has kept his own counsel, telling us things by way of melody, harmony, and rhythm that he could not say in words.

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.

Sir Simon Rattle
Sir Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Between 1980 and 1998, Rattle was Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In addition, he conducted leading orchestras in the US and Europe, enjoying a close collaboration with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for many years and, in more recent seasons, with The Philadelphia Orchestra. He is a regular guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he has recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos (with Alfred Brendel) and is also a Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Founding Patron of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Since his first appearance at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1977 directing Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen, Simon Rattle has conducted opera on a regular basis. In the framework of the Salzburg Easter Festival, Simon Rattle has directed the Berliner Philharmoniker in stage productions of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, and Mozart’s Idomeneo.

Even before taking up his post as Chief Conductor, Simon Rattle enjoyed a 15-year collaboration with the Berliner Philharmoniker. His concert programs cover a broad spectrum, ranging from Bach and Rameau to such figures as Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, to contemporaries like Adès, Berio, Boulez, Grisey, Gubaidulina, Lindberg, and Turnage. The Berliner Phiharmoniker has for many years had close links with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and, since his Berlin appointment, Simon Rattle has led two projects in Venezuela. Simon Rattle’s 2007–08 season includes the Berliner Philharmoniker’s 125th birthday celebrations, its Carnegie Hall residency as part of the Berlin in Lights festival, and a Scandinavian tour.

An exclusive EMI artist for many years, Rattle has made over 70 recordings for the label and received numerous prestigious international awards. Recent releases with the Berliner Philharmoniker include Holst’s The Planets, Colin Matthews’s recently written Pluto, as well as Brahms’s A German Requiem with Dorothea Röschmann and Thomas Quasthoff, which won the 2007 Gramophone Award for Best Choral Recording.

Sir Simon Rattle, who was knighted in 1994 by the Queen of England, has received many distinctions in recognition of his artistic activities. In 1996, he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, and in 1997, he received the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts. Since taking up his appointment as Artistic Director of the Berliner Philharmoniker in September 2002, he has broken new ground with the orchestra with the educational program Zukunft@Bphil. For his commitment, he was awarded the Comenius Prize in 2004, the Schiller Special Prize from the city of Mannheim in May 2005, and the Golden Camera, as well as the Urania Medal in spring 2007.