CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 8:00 PM

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor
Daniel Barenboim, Piano

SCHOENBERG Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38
SCHOENBERG Piano Concerto, Op. 42

WEBERN Six Pieces, Op. 6
MAHLER Adagio from Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp Major

Encore:
SCHUBERT Impromptu in A-flat Major, D. 935, No. 2

Program is approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes, including one intermission

Sponsored by Continental Airlines, the Official Airline of Carnegie Hall

This concert is made possible, in part, by the Audrey Love Charitable Foundation.

Program Notes:

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951)

Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38

About the Composer

Schoenberg completed his Op. 9 Chamber Symphony in July 1906. Rightly pleased with the work, he began a companion piece a month later. Though he had carried his draft quite far forward before ending his summer vacation on the Tegernsee, he broke off the composition soon after. As often happened in such circumstances, he found it very difficult to pick up the thread of inspiration. Despite a few attempts to finish the piece in the next few years, he finally put it aside.

The impetus to take it up again did not come until he had moved to the United States and was living in Los Angeles. On March 25, 1939, he received a letter from the conductor Fritz Stiedry in New York, telling of the recent success of his orchestra, the New Friends of Music, and asking for a new piece running between 20 and 25 minutes. He eagerly accepted Schoenberg’s proposal that he complete the long-unfinished Second Chamber Symphony. In addition to completing the score, Schoenberg expanded the ensemble, so that, despite the title, it is no longer really a work for chamber orchestra.


About the Work

The Op. 9 Chamber Symphony has long been regarded as one of the masterpieces of Schoenberg’s early phase of extended tonality. Op. 38 has always been far less familiar—indeed, virtually unplayed—by comparison. This is surprising, for the Second Chamber Symphony is quite accessible in style and even displays in its fast movement a musical wit that few listeners have been inclined to attribute to Schoenberg.

The piece is the fascinating result of two crucial periods in Schoenberg’s artistic development. The first of these was the “crisis of tonality” of his early years, from which he developed the music that we identify as “atonal” and his later system of “composition with 12 tones related only to one another.” The second came after his arrival in America, where his reputation as a fearsome musical ogre had preceded him; here he began once again to create music that had some basis in tonality.

The Second Chamber Symphony, like the First, is tonal in a very extended way. Perhaps the most striking feature of the opening Adagio, compared to the frenetic energy of the works composed around the time this music was conceived, is its sense of stability and normality. The listener is certainly aided by the fact that the rhythm is a straightforward 2/4 almost throughout, that it is clearly in E-flat minor, and that the texture seems inspired by J. S. Bach.

The second movement, though contrapuntally conceived, has the energy of an orchestral scherzo in sonata form. The pulsing eighths of the 6/8 meter support a lively dialogue of witty chatter. Thematic ideas from the first movement recur in the development and come back at the end to take over the musical discourse, rounding off the entire work in E-flat minor with thematic shapes developed from the first movement, but presented at a still slower tempo to round off the work with this reflective—and reflexive—epilogue.



ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951)

Piano Concerto, Op. 42

About the Composer

By the early 1940s, Schoenberg and his family had settled permanently in Los Angeles. He was rapidly nearing 70, the mandatory retirement age that would force him to give up his teaching at UCLA, which was his one source of steady income. Fortunately, Carl Engel at his American publisher G. Schirmer was one of the Schoenberg’s most enthusiastic supporters and encouraged him to compose. In the summer of 1942, Schoenberg began working on a piano concerto, which he completed that December.

Schoenberg’s friend Eduard Steuermann played through the concerto for the publisher, who suggested that he play it for Leopold Stokowski. The conductor agreed to program it with the NBC Symphony on a radio broadcast scheduled for January 6, 1944. Though the performance went well, the work created such a public furor that NBC did not renew Stokowski’s contract. Most of the New York critics lambasted the piece. The one honorable exception came from the pen of Virgil Thomson, a composer whose style was drastically different from Schoenberg’s. Thomson felt that Stokowski had not only honored one of the greatest living composers, but also the audience in playing this new work that represented (in its romantic expressiveness) the best of the Viennese tradition.


About the Work

The listener who finds Schoenberg’s music fearsome in prospect may well find the Piano Concerto surprisingly accessible. Despite its 12-tone language, it could almost be called a neo-Classical work, though not in the same sense that the term is used for Stravinsky’s music of this period. Schoenberg’s interest in textural clarity, and his return to classical principles of scoring for the orchestra, gives the listener at once a feeling of being in relatively familiar country. The opening is comfortingly familiar, with its lyrical piano solo laid out in a broad melody in the right hand (evidently modeled on the first theme of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony) against a clearly accompanimental figure in the left. The concerto is cast in one large movement with four fundamental sections, played without pause. At one point, Schoenberg jotted down the following laconic comments, which may have been intended to serve as the basis for a personal program for the work:

Life was so easy
suddenly hatred broke out (Presto)
a grave situation was created (Adagio)
But life goes on (Rondo)



ANTON WEBERN (1883–1945)

Six Pieces, Op. 6

About the Composer

The very brief movements that make up Webern’s Six Pieces for orchestra were conceived and composed in the summer of 1909, soon after the completion of his Five Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 5. These works, like others that Webern wrote after completing his studies with Schoenberg, demonstrate powerful compression. For a decade, Webern found that the only way he could write longer music was to use a text as a prop. He even suggested once (no doubt facetiously) that a piece of music should consist of exactly 12 notes, every note in the scale, heard once, and then ending, because anything else would be redundant.

Webern eventually found his way out of this impasse when Schoenberg announced his discovery of what he called “composition with 12 tones related only to one another.” The new approach made it possible for Webern to try longer works again. But his Op. 6 was composed before that realization. When Schoenberg conducted the premiere in Vienna in 1913, the concert ended in a riot, with police called in to restore order.


About the Work

Webern never liked to speak explicitly about his musical ideas to audiences, and he generally avoided speaking of its expressive character. But it is worth highlighting an explanation he gave to Schoenberg in January 1913 because listeners are often inclined to think of his music as highly intellectual and devoid of feeling, when in fact it is hyper-romantic. Webern revealed to his teacher that the six movements all reflected the sadness that still haunted him over his mother’s death in 1906. While composing in 1909, he retained his memory of that event, including a hurried train ride to Carinthia in hopes of seeing her one last time (no. 1), the tragic news of her death (no. 2), impressions of the fragrance of a kind of heather that he gathered in the forest for her funeral bier (no. 3), the funeral march itself (no. 4), and the two closing movements as a retrospection.



GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911)

Adagio from Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp Major

About the Composer

Mahler’s last years were a race against ill health, which he knew was persistently gaining on him. During the summer of 1908, he composed Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), a work that he carefully avoided calling his Ninth Symphony out of a superstitious fear that no composer after Beethoven could live beyond a ninth. The work composed in 1910 and called the Ninth Symphony was actually, in the composer’s view, his Tenth; he thus hoped to circumvent fate’s limit. No sooner had he finished the Ninth than he began extensive and concentrated work on what was to be the Tenth. It was not to be finished. At his death he left extensive sketches, but not a completed copy of even a single movement.

There are plenty of indications on the manuscript sketches that the Tenth was to be an unusually personal symphony and a very painful one. In 1910, Mahler was tormented by the knowledge that his greatly beloved, lively, and beautiful wife Alma was seriously considering leaving him for another man, Walter Gropius, who was on the verge of a distinguished career in architecture. She chose to stay with Mahler, who told her later that if she had left him then, “I would simply have gone out like a torch deprived of air.” On the score of the symphony, Mahler wrote personal notes of pleading and despair to his “Almschi,” begging her to remain with him.


About the Work

At the time of Mahler’s death, it seemed unlikely that any of the music from the Tenth would ever be heard. In 1924, Alma asked her new son-in-law, Ernst Krenek, to prepare a practical full score of the two movements that were most nearly complete. Thus the first movement Adagio entered the repertory in a shadowy sort of way. Several musicians have created full versions of the symphony in recent decades, and it has been performed and recorded many times. But there remains a scholarly dispute as to the ethics of guessing at the completion of a composer’s unfinished work, especially in the case of movements that were so fragmentary as were some of the five movements of the Tenth. What we have here is the first movement only, which was nearest to completion; it is performed in the edition that follows the readings of Mahler’s manuscript as exactly as possible.

The Adagio, actually marked Andante for the first 15 measures, begins with a probing upbeat in the violas, questioning and wandering—a beginning that does everything but affirm the tonic of F-sharp. The main thematic material arrives in F-sharp in the first violins (marked quiet, but very warm) and becomes an urgent duet with the second violins (always seated, in Mahler’s day, on the opposite side of the stage from the firsts). The viola music from the opening recurs in developments through various keys as a questioning alternative to the warm F-sharp music. The conversation builds to a powerful climax in A-flat minor: Woodwinds and brass instruments sustain full chords at maximum volume while harp and strings sweep up and down in broken-chord figurations, attempting to stem the crisis. A sustained solo trumpet holding a long high A is opposed by the second violins, then the cellos, which bring in a last recurrence of the F-sharp music, partaking of reminiscences and fragments of all the thematic ideas before closing in a wide-spaced, gentle cadence.

—Steven Ledbetter © 2010

More Information:

Here we have Schoenberg, the most modern of composers, looking back in his Second Chamber Symphony toward his early tonal style. His Piano Concerto sounds thoroughly advanced, though it still looks to the past for its musical form. Webern’s Six Pieces, by contrast, seem to tremble on the edge of something new. And Mahler, in his final work, contemplates eternity.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor
Pierre Boulez, Conductor

Pierre Boulez is one of the most important musical and intellectual figures of our time, currently serving as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus. He was named principal guest conductor of the CSO in March 1995, and served in that position until 2006 when he became Conductor Emeritus.

A native of Montbrison, France, Mr. Boulez pursued studies in piano, composition, and choral conducting at the Conservatoire de Paris. In 1953–1954, he founded Concerts du Petit Marigny, a series dedicated to modern music, which later became the Domaine Musical. He subsequently was involved with musical analysis, and taught in Darmstadt, Germany, and at Basel University in Switzerland. In 1962–1963 he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and in 1976 he became a professor at the Collège de France.

Mr. Boulez began his conducting career in 1958 with the Southwest Radio Orchestra in Baden-Baden, Germany. From 1969 to 1972, he was principal guest conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra. In 1971, he became both chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and music director of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held until 1977.

Mr. Boulez’s difference of opinion about state intervention in the arts as espoused by André Malraux led him into voluntary exile for several years. He returned to France in 1974, when the government invited him to create and direct a music research center at the Centre Pompidou. From the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM) sprang the Ensemble Intercontemporain, one of the world’s finest contemporary music ensembles. In 1991, Mr. Boulez resigned as conductor of the ensemble while continuing as its president.

The compositions of Pierre Boulez are widely performed, including Le Marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli, three piano sonatas, Eclat/Multiples, Le Visage nuptial, Répons, Notations, and … explosante-fixe … . He has also published five books about music. His awards include honorary doctorates from Leeds, Cambridge, Basel, and Oxford universities, among others; Commander of the British Empire; and Knight of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Mr. Boulez’s discography includes prize-winning recordings of Parsifal and Berg’s Lulu. He has 26 Grammy Awards to his credit.


Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

There is perhaps no other musical ensemble more consistently and closely associated with the history and tradition of European classical music than the Vienna Philharmonic. In the course of its more than 160-year history, the musicians of this most prominent orchestra of the capital city of music have been an integral part of a musical epoch that—thanks to an abundance of uniquely gifted composers and interpreters—must certainly be regarded as unique.

The orchestra’s close association with this rich musical history is best illustrated by the statements of countless preeminent musical personalities of the past. Richard Wagner described the orchestra as being one of the most outstanding in the world; Anton Bruckner called it “the most superior musical association”; Johannes Brahms counted himself a “friend and admirer”; Gustav Mahler claimed to be joined together through “the bonds of musical art”; and Richard Strauss summarized these sentiments by saying, “All praise of the Vienna Philharmonic reveals itself as understatement.”

The Vienna State Opera Orchestra holds a special relationship with the private association known as the Vienna Philharmonic. In accordance with Philharmonic statutes, only a member of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra can become a member of the Vienna Philharmonic. The engagement in the Vienna State Opera Orchestra provides the musicians a financial stability that would be impossible to attain without relinquishing their autonomy to private or corporate sponsors.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s mission is to communicate the humanitarian message of music into the daily lives and consciousness of its listeners. In 2005, the orchestra was named Goodwill Ambassador for the World Health Organization; since 2006, the orchestra has also been a supporter of the Phonak initiative Hear the World. As of November 2008, Rolex is the worldwide presenting sponsor of the Vienna Philharmonic. The musicians endeavor to implement the motto with which Ludwig van Beethoven, whose symphonic works served as a catalyst for the creation of the orchestra, prefaced his Missa Solemnis: “From the heart, to the heart.”

Daniel Barenboim, Piano
Daniel Barenboim, Piano

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942. He received piano lessons from his mother and father, who would remain his only piano teachers. At the age of seven, he gave his first public concert in Buenos Aires. In 1952, he and his parents moved to Israel.

At age 11, Mr. Barenboim took part in conducting classes in Salzburg under Igor Markevitch. In the summer of 1954, he also met Wilhelm Furtwängler, who then wrote, “The 11-year-old Daniel Barenboim is a phenomenon.” In the following two years, Mr. Barenboim studied harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

At age 10, Mr. Barenboim gave his international debut performance as a solo pianist in Vienna and Rome, followed by concerts in Paris, London, and New York. Since then, he has regularly toured Europe and the United States, as well as South America, Australia, and the Far East. Mr. Barenboim began his recording career as a pianist in 1954, and he has recorded the complete piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart.

Mr. Barenboim had his debut as a conductor in London with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1967 and as an opera conductor at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. In 1981, he conducted for the first time at the Bayreuth Festival, where he would conduct every summer for the next 18 years.

Mr. Barenboim has been music director of the Orchestre de Paris (1975–1989) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1991–2006); since 1992, he has been Music and Artistic Director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. In 2000, the Staatskapelle Berlin appointed him Principal Conductor for Life. At the opening of the 2007–2008 season, Mr. Barenboim began a close relationship with the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

In 1999, Mr. Barenboim, together with the Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, set up the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together young musicians from Israel and Arab countries each summer. The orchestra seeks to enable a dialogue between the various cultures of the Middle East through the experience of making music together.

Mr. Barenboim has published a number of books, including an autobiography, A Life in Music, and Parallels and Paradoxes, which he wrote together with Mr. Said. Recently, he has published Everything Is Connected and, together with Patrice Chéreau, Dialoghi su musica e Teatro: Tristano e Isotta.