CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
San Francisco Symphony

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Walter Frisch, Professor of Music, Columbia University.

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
Erin Wall, Soprano
Kendall Gladen, Mezzo-Soprano
Garrett Sorenson, Tenor
Alastair Miles, Bass
New York Choral Artists
Joseph Flummerfelt, Chorus Director

OLIVER KNUSSEN Symphony No. 3

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9

Program Notes:

OLIVER KNUSSEN (b. 1952)
Symphony No. 3, Op. 18

Scoring: 4 flutes (fourth doubling piccolo), 2 oboes and English horn, 4 clarinets (third doubling E-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani (4 drums), percussion divided among 6 players in 4 groups (Group I: timpani, clashed cymbals, large tam-tam, anvil, triangle, tambourine, and crotales; Group II: small suspended cymbal, hi-hat cymbal, bass drum, temple blocks, whip, maracas, and bongos; Group III: suspended cymbal, tambourine, claves, glockenspiel, xylophone, and marimba or xylorimba; Group IV: side drum, tenor drum, large double-headed bass drum, tubular bells, suspended cymbal, vibraslaps, and guiro), celesta, guitar doubling mandolin ad libitum, harp, and strings.

Knussen’s Symphony No. 3 received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on November 19, 1981, with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by André Previn.

Oliver Knussen was not yet 16 when, in 1968, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of his First Symphony. He then spent a formative period in the US, where he studied composition with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. In 1975 he returned to the UK, serving as artistic director from the mid-1980s until 1998 for the Aldeburgh Festival founded by Benjamin Britten. His early rapport with Michael Tilson Thomas helped solidify an expanding reputation and was a harbinger of things to come. The premiere of the Third Symphony at the London Proms in 1979—conducted by MTT, to whom the work is dedicated—was a pivotal moment in Knussen’s reception as a mature composer.

Knussen’s music tends toward concentrated brevity, expressed through his exquisitely crafted sound world. This symphony’s expanse of musical and emotional detail seems out of proportion with the quarter-hour it takes to perform. The composer has suggested that the best way to listen to his music is “with one ear in either direction”: that is, with one ear attuned to what should be a “clear and direct” big picture (“when you stand back from it”) and the other to the “internal network” of relationships happening on the most detailed level.

Knussen initially planned the Symphony No. 3 as a work in three movements, inspired by his response to Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Michael Tilson Thomas in fact premiered what Knussen had envisioned as the opening movement—the first part of the present symphony—in 1974, as a separate piece entitled Introduction and Masque. But by 1979, when he completed the Symphony, Knussen had cut some of the intervening material and used it elsewhere (including in a piece called Ophelia Dances, Book 1, which Tilson Thomas premiered in 1975).

The symphony became a single-movement span with two connected larger parts that evoke Knussen’s musical images of Ophelia’s madness and drowning. An introductory section, marked Andante misterioso, sets the scene for her final hours. From an enigmatic phrase in clarinets against a ghostly backdrop of string tremolos, a central thematic idea emerges, claustrophobic with tightly overlaid harmonies, though the music proceeds in a sequence of rapidly shifting textures. The clarinets launch into one of several mad fanfares, percussion heightening the sense of bedlam. Here we also realize how Knussen’s orchestration and musical thought are interlaced.

A new section, labeled fantastico, brings in a Stravinsky-like profusion of simultaneous rhythms. With leering mockery, the brass intone a hopping figure that almost resembles a children’s song—a desperate attempt by Ophelia to turn back the engulfing madness? Then the Allegro proper begins, as violins trace a tormented, two-layered melody over an extended range. Knussen’s score moves with the orchestral equivalent of rapid scene changes, each time foregrounding a new combination of forces. Notice in particular the effect of the celesta, harp, and guitar as they suddenly introduce an eerily soothing calm.

Along with nonsequitur babblings in the flutes, Knussen develops earlier thematic material. The sense of distraction grows, focusing on a massive chord at the symphony’s climactic center. This chord attenuates and leads into the second part, molto tranquillo, where Ophelia meets her death in the “weeping brook.” As counterweight to the busyness of the first part, here Knussen builds an ominous stasis around a series of pallid, shimmering chord sequences. Bayan Northcott observes that these chords form a passacaglia theme around which Knussen then weaves seven variations. These provide the composer more opportunities to exercise his fertile imagination for instrumental colors and hybrids. A gathering climax spills into a remarkable moment in the fifth variation as the horns overlap in forlorn cries. For the final pages, Knussen returns to the symphony’s beginning. The initial atmosphere of uneasy suspense again reigns as strings tremble and clarinets murmur in fragments. It fades out inconclusively, as if the cycle could begin again where it started.

—Thomas May

Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater. He is the author of Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader. Michael Steinberg, a contributing writer to the San Francisco Symphony’s program book, is former SFS Program Annotator.



LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125

Scoring: 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, and strings, plus (in the finale) soprano, alto, tenor, and bass soloists, and four-part mixed chorus.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 16, 1894, with Olga Pevny, soprano; Mrs. Carl Alves, contralto; William H. Rieger, tenor; Ericsson Bushnell, bass; the Oratorio Society of New York; and the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

The Ninth Symphony claims a special place in the history of the symphony and in Beethoven’s growth as artist, Mensch, and public figure. Its performance can never be an ordinary event.

Since 1812, Beethoven’s life had been in a continuous state of crisis and he had written little. But by 1820 he “set about,” as Maynard Solomon puts it, “reconstructing his life and completing his life’s work.” The process was slow at first, but by 1822 he was again working in a rage of energy. As part of this regeneration, the various projects and ideas connected with the Ninth Symphony began to sort themselves out. The first movement was ready early in 1823; by February 1824, the score was finished.

The first performance was given on May 7, 1824, in Vienna. Beethoven was especially pleased with his young women soloists: Henriette Sontag, who had already created the title role in Weber’s Euryanthe and who was to go on to a career of high distinction, was only 18, while Caroline Unger, who later earned the considerable regard of Donizetti and Bellini, was just 20. The tenor Anton Haizinger also had an impressive career ahead of him; little, however, is known of the bass Joseph Seipelt other than that he was a compromise third-choice candidate and that at the concert his high F-sharp gave out. The deaf composer stood on stage beating time and turning the leaves of his score, but the real conducting was done by Michael Umlauf. At the end, Beethoven was still hunched over the pages of music, and Caroline Unger gently turned his head around so that he might see the applause he could not hear.

The Ninth Symphony traces a path from darkness to light, and of this process and the struggle for clarification, the famous opening offers a microcosmic view. The crescendo is achieved by more than an increase in volume. Rhythm and harmonic tension also play their part. The appearances of the descending two-note figure come to be more closely spaced, and they even become three until the whole orchestra reaches a great fortissimo summit.

The scherzo is a huge structure, as obsessive in its driving and exuberant play with few ideas as the first movement was generous in its richness of material. The trio carries a certain sense of hymnal or communal music about it. It reaches forward to the world of the Ode “To Joy.”

Two bars of upbeat ease us into the Adagio. Beethoven at first alternates two themes of contrasting gait, key, and temperature, varying each, soon dropping the second, but enveloping the first in ever more fanciful decoration. The effect is one of exaltation and, at the end, profound peace.

The most horrendous noise Beethoven could devise shatters that peace, and now an extraordinary drama is played. In the gestures of operatic recitative, cellos and basses protest. Quotations of music from the first, second, and third movements vividly dramatize the idea of search. When, after three tries and three rejections, the woodwinds propose something new, the cellos and basses, with some cheering along by winds and drums, lose no time in expressing their enthusiasm. Those hectoring strings change their tone. The orchestra rounds off their recitative with a firm cadence, and without a second’s pause one of the world’s great songs begins. Beethoven spreads it before us in a series of simple and compelling variations, interrupted by a return of the horrendous fanfare that began the movement. What earlier was matter for our imaginations to work on is now made explicit. The recitative is sung to words that Beethoven himself invented as preface to Schiller’s Ode.

Schiller had been dead 18 years when Beethoven set An die Freude, Schiller did not think much of the poem, which is an enthusiastic drinking song. Perhaps Beethoven saw through it, perhaps he read into it what he needed. What is sure is that he transformed it. And once the words are there, they, and of course even more Beethoven’s transcendent responses to them, sweep us along “As joyously as His suns fly/Across the glorious landscape of the heavens,/...Gladly, like a hero to the conquest.”

—Michael Steinberg

Program notes copyright © 2008 San Francisco Symphony

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
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 in 2007 their recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony won 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. For two decades, the SFS Adventures in Music program has brought music to every child in grades 1 through 5 in San Francisco’s public schools. SFS radio broadcasts, the first in the US 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, DVD, the World Wide Web (keepingscore.org), and radio (The MTT Files). San Francisco Symphony recordings are available at shopsfsymphony.org.


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 Orchestra. 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. 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.

Erin Wall, Soprano
Erin Wall was born in Calgary, Alberta; studied piano at the Vancouver Academy of Music; and holds degrees from Western Washington University and Rice University. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2004 and in 2006 was featured with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 on tour in Luxembourg and at the Lucerne Festival; she reprises her role in that work with the SFS in November, in performances to be recorded. Ms. Wall is a sought-after Mozart and Strauss soprano. She appeared in a gala concert with Ben Heppner at the National Arts Centre, and she recently made debuts at La Scala Milan and Los Angeles Opera. At the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where she was engaged as a member of the Lyric Opera’s Center for American Artists, she has sung Freia in Das Rheingold, Gerhilde in Die Walküre, Marguerite in Faust, and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni on opening night of Lyric Opera’s 50th anniversary season. At the Minnesota Opera, she has sung the Countess in Figaro and Pamina in The Magic Flute. She made her Santa Fe Opera debut in the title role of Strauss’s Daphne and her South American debut at the Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile, as Marguerite in Faust. A concert of Massenet opera excerpts with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra was recorded for CBC Radio and Television. Ms. Wall has appeared with Bryn Terfel and Andrea Bocelli in a televised concert of arias and duets at Mr. Terfel’s Faenol Festival, and she has been a soloist with the Chicago Symphony in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Ravinia Festival. She made her European concert debut in Britten’s War Requiem with the London Symphony Orchestra. Among Ms. Wall’s awards are the 2004 ARIA Award from the Aria Foundation and a Richard Tucker Award. She represented Canada in the finals of the 2003 BBC Singer of the World competition and has also received awards from the Dallas Opera Career Grant Competition, the George London Foundation, and the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions.

Kendall Gladen, Mezzo-Soprano
Kendall Gladen is currently in her second year as an Adler Fellow with San Francisco Opera, where she was a participant in the Merola Opera Program. The American mezzo-soprano made her San Francisco Opera debut as Giovanna in Rigoletto and has also appeared there as Mercédès in Carmen, the Second Lady in The Magic Flute, and Elizabeth Keckly in the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Appomattox. Last year she was a soloist in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, and earlier this month she made her San Francisco Symphony debut in that same work. This season Ms. Gladen makes her Los Angeles Opera debut as Mercédès in Carmen in performances conducted by Emmanuel Villaume, also assuming the title role for two performances conducted by Plácido Domingo. Ms. Gladen sang Lily in Porgy and Bess with Washington National Opera, and at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis she was responsible for the roles of Mercédès, the Abbess in Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and the Third Lady in The Magic Flute. Kendall Gladen is a graduate of Washington University, where she performed such roles as the First Prioress in Dialogues des Carmélites, Nancy in Albert Herring, and Mrs. Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor. A winner of numerous awards and prizes, she was granted the Career Achievement Award from the Monsanto Fund, the Gunther & Isle Kern Award by the Sarasota Opera Endowment Fund, and an encouragement award from the Sullivan Foundation. During her four years as a member of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s Gerdine Young Artists Program, she received the Richard Gaddes Award, and Wedgewood and Kenneth Billups Award. Ms. Gladen was a first-place district and second-place regional finalist prize winner for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. She also won first place in the National Association of Teachers of Singing Competition.

Garrett Sorenson, Tenor
Garrett Sorenson, a graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, has been featured frequently at the Met, where his roles have included Cassio in Otello, Da-Ud in Richard Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena, Alfredo in La traviata, Alfred in Die Fledermaus, Scaramuccio in Ariadne auf Naxos, Arturo in Lucia di Lammermoor, the Shepherd in Tristan und Isolde, the Young Man in Die Frau ohne Schatten, and the Youth in Moses und Aron. Last season he made his role debut as Rodolfo in La Bohème with Houston Grand Opera, and he debuted at Opera Colorado as Alfredo in La Traviata. He made role debuts as Hoffmann in Les contes d’Hoffmann with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and in the title role in Faust with New Orleans Opera. He appeared with the Gotham Chamber Opera in Janáček’s Diary of One Who Vanished at the Pierpont Morgan Library and also took part in the Marilyn Horne Foundation’s annual concert at Zankel Hall. The American tenor has been featured in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Verbier Festival and has appeared with the Cleveland Orchestra in Elektra as well as with the New York Philharmonic in a program of Viennese music and with the Baltimore Symphony in an aria and duet concert. At Los Angeles Opera, he made his debut as the Italian Tenor in Der Rosenkavalier in a new production by actor/director Maximilian Schell. At the Santa Fe Opera, where he made his debut as Leukkipos in Strauss’s Daphne, he was a member of the company’s Apprentice Program and made a last-minute substitution for the role of Werther in the Apprentice Showcase Scenes. Among his honors and awards, Mr. Sorenson was winner of the Opera Birmingham Young Singer Contest and the Sorantin Young Artist Award. He was also a finalist in the Loren L. Zachary Society Contest for Young Opera Singers and The Metropolitan Opera National Council Audition’s Southwest Region. He was a winner at the 2003 George London Foundation Competition and a Sara Tucker Study Grant Winner. This was followed by a 2004 Richard Tucker Foundation Career Grant.

Alastair Miles, Bass
Alastair Miles has been heard in opera and in concert around the world. The British bass has sung at the Metropolitan Opera (Giorgio in I Puritani and Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor); Opéra National de Paris (Raimondo); the Vienna State Opera (Philip II in Don Carlos, Zaccaria in Nabucco, Cardinal Brogni in La juive, de Silva in Ernani, and Giorgio); the Bavarian State Opera (the title role of Saul and Zoroastro in Orlando); San Francisco Opera (Giorgio and Raimondo and Basilio in Il barbiere di Siviglia); the Royal Opera, Covent Garden (Rodolfo in La sonnambula, Elmiro in Otello, Frère Laurent in Roméo et Juliette, Banquo in Macbeth, and concert performances of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, also recorded by Opera Rara); and with many other companies. He is featured on more than 50 recordings, including Elijah (with Kurt Masur conducting, on Teldec—winner of the 1993 Gramophone Best Choral Recording), Verdi’s Requiem (with John Eliot Gardiner conducting, on Philips), and Handel’s Saul and Agrippina (both under Gardiner’s direction, on Philips). His first solo disc for Chandos was chosen as one of the best recordings of the year by the International Record Review, and recent recital performances have included a program recorded for BBC Radio Three’s Hugo Wolf centenary series. Future plans include La forza del destino and Nabucco at the Vienna State Opera, Nick Shadow in The Rake’s Progress at the Theater an der Wien with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Melisso in Alcina and Lord Sidney in Il viaggio a Reims at La Scala Milan, Mayr’s Medea in Corinto in Munich, and Halévy’s La juive in Amsterdam, as well as concert appearances in London, at the BBC Proms, and in New York, Salzburg, Amsterdam, and Vienna. Mr. Miles made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony earlier this month at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, as a soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting.

New York Choral Artists
Joseph Flummerfelt, Chorus Director