CONCERT PROGRAMME
2016/17 SEASON
Sun 19 Mar 2017 at 3.00 pm
Malaysian Philharmonic Youth Orchestra
Naohisa Furusawa, conductor
PROGRAMME
SHOSTAKOVICH
Festive Overture 7 mins
SMETANA
The Moldau 12 mins
INTERVAL 20 mins
SHOSTAKOVICH
Symphony No. 5 in D minor 48 mins
All details are correct at time of printing. Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS reserves the right to vary without notice the artists and/or repertoire as
necessary. Copyright © 2017 by Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS (Co. No. 462692-X). All rights reserved. No part of this programme may be
reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright owners.
Naohisa Furusawa
conductor
Naohisa Furusawa has been a member
of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra
(MPO) double bass section since 2003.
Born in Tokyo in 1973, he started to play
the violin when he was four years old
and later joined his junior high school
orchestra as a double bass player at age
12; his first conducting experiences were
with this orchestra. Later, he studied
double bass with Prof. Nobuo Shiga,
and piano and conducting with Prof.
Kazue Kamiya at Tokyo’s Toho Gakuen
School of Music.
Furusawa has performed as a double
bass player with the NHK Symphony,
Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, Tokyo
Metropolitan Symphony and several
other orchestras, under the direction of
many conductors including Seiji Ozawa,
Kazuyoshi Akiyama, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Horst Stein, Lorin Maazel, Herbert
Blomstedt, Pierre Boulez and Valery Gergiev.
In 1998, Furusawa was awarded a scholarship from the Cultural Affairs Agency
of Japan to study double bass at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. He has
conducted Beethoven’s 9th Symphony five times with Tokyo’s MAX Philharmonic
Orchestra. He also conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony with the MAX
Philharmonic to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second
World War.
He has conducted many young musician ensembles including MPO’s Encounter
Training Ensemble and the Miri Tutti Project in East Malaysia as part of the MPO’s
Education and Outreach Programme.
PROGRAMME NOTES
Shostakovich’s most popular overture, his most popular symphony and Smetana’s
most popular work of any kind constitute this MPYO programme. Smetana’s
Moldau is a vivid musical description of a river running its course through the
beautiful Bohemian countryside. Shostakovich claimed that his Fifth Symphony
had a subject (“I saw man with all his experiences in the center of the composition”)
but that was only a concession to Party doctrine; in fact it is purely abstract music.
Abstract too is his sparkling Festive Overture although it is not hard to imagine it
portraying a splendid carnival scene or a boisterous celebration of some sort.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)
Festive Overture, Op.96 (1954)
The Background
The Festive Overture was written in late
1954 to commemorate the 37th anniversary
of a momentous event in Soviet history: the
October Revolution of 1917. For the occasion,
the composer remarked that he wanted
“to convey the feelings of a man who has
experienced the hardship of the war years
and the enthusiasm of peaceful labour at the
construction projects of the new five-year plan”.
These were sweet words to Party officials;
furthermore, the Festive Overture contained
precisely the kind of music they endorsed:
uplifting, optimistic, tuneful, pertinent to an
event in the nation’s history, and capable of
being enjoyed by every last factory worker and
government clerk.
The Music
Much of Shostakovich’s “Party” music is of historical interest only (cantatas and
songs to patriotic texts, film scores, etc.) but the Festive Overture rises above
these in the brilliance of its scoring, its fine craftsmanship, and witty effects to claim
a niche among the composer’s most popular works on several continents. There
are three themes: the opening mock-heroic brass fanfare, a sparkling subject
in the woodwinds that whirrs along at supersonic speed, and a broadly lyrical
theme for strings. There is just enough time to insert a pseudo-balalaika episode
(pizzicato strings) before the themes begin to return, all richly adorned with plenty of
percussion. The overture ends with an unabashed appeal for applause.
BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824-1884)
The Moldau (1874)
The Background
Smetana is generally regarded not only as the
first Czech composer of international stature
but as the musical personification of his
country’s national spirit. Smetana poured his
patriotism, loyalty and love for his country into
a cycle of six symphonic poems collectively
known as Má Vlast (My Fatherland). Outside
the Czech Republic, only the second, Vltava
(The Moldau), is heard with any frequency,
but within those borders, Má Vlast has
become something of a national treasure,
an epic enshrined in tone. The music speaks
directly and fervently to the Czechs; in it they
find a vivid musical manifesto of their countryside, their legends, traditions, history,
dances, folksongs and hope for a noble future of freedom and glory. This last point
was as important in Smetana’s lifetime as it remains today, for during the 1870s,
when Má Vlast was written, the region was still under Hapsburg rule and was beset
by numerous internal disputes as well.
The Music
Smetana provided his own verbal description for The Moldau: “Two springs burst
forth in the shade of the Bohemian forest, one warm and gushing, the other cool
and tranquil [undulating flutes]. Their waves, joyously rushing down over the rocky
beds, unite and glisten in the rays of the morning sun. The forest brook, hastening
on, becomes the river Vltava [a warm, rich melody in E minor, played by violins].
Coursing through Bohemia’s valleys, it grows into a mighty stream. Through thick
woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn
are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where
a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dance. At night, wood and water
nymphs revel in its sparkling waves [flutes, accompanied by muted strings, horns,
clarinets and harp]. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles ̶ witnesses
of bygone days of knightly splendour and the vanished glory of fighting times.
At the St. John’s Rapids the stream rushes ahead, winding through the cataracts,
hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad
river bed in which it flows on in majestic peace toward Prague and is welcomed by
time-honored Vyšehrad [a castle perched on a high rock], whereupon it vanishes in
the far distance beyond the poet’s gaze”.
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op.47 (1937)
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Moderato
Allegretto
Largo
Allegro non troppo
The Background
Many of the works we today hail as masterpieces suffered difficult birth pangs.
But Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony sprang into the world fully accepted. In this
case, there is a double irony, for the composer managed to please two entirely
different, in fact, diametrically opposed, ideological fronts simultaneously, right
from the symphony’s premiere on 21 November 1937 in Leningrad (today
St. Petersburg again):
1) Soviet officialdom, which was demanding from Shostakovich music free of
“formalistic perversion”, i.e., music easily intelligible to the Soviet masses;
2) those who believed in the mandate for a creative artist to produce only
according to the dictates of his esthetic impulses and personal convictions.
Shostakovich subtitled his symphony “A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism”
as a palliative to the heavy-handed government critics who had mercilessly railed
at his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and other works. Further for the benefit
of Soviet officialdom, Shostakovich claimed that the symphony had as its theme
“the making of a man. … The finale is the optimistic solution of the tragically tense
moments of the first movement”.
Government officials swallowed the hypocrisy. The composer’s true feelings
were revealed to the public, at least in the West, only years later: “I never thought
about any exultant finales, for what exultation could there be? The rejoicing is
forced, created under threat”. Occupying a middle ground between the forces
of the exhilarated and the bitter, we might simply take the traditional romantic
view of a big symphony as a generalized portrayal of conflict and struggle
leading to triumph, as seen in such works as the Fifth Symphonies of Beethoven,
Tchaikovsky and Mahler.
The Music
The symphony abounds in extended but easily recognizable and memorable themes
that lend themselves to fragmentation and development. There are passages of
haunting beauty (the closing pages of the first movement especially, described by
one critic as “strange spatial loneliness”); mordant wit (the cumbersome, grotesquely
ponderous effect of the opening of the second movement, set off by squealy high
woodwinds a moment later); pressing intensity (the inexorable build-up to the
climax of the third movement); strident militarism (the sardonic march in the first
movement or the principal theme of the finale); and an almost unlimited number of
imaginative and inventive orchestral effects: fanfares, extremes of range (the finale’s
coda begins with horns in unison playing just about the lowest note ever written for
the instrument), prominent use of piano and celesta, wide leaps with mischievous
effects, unexpected contrasts of high/low and loud/soft, and chamber-music delicacy
contrasted with massive tuttis.
Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra
Mark Wigglesworth, conductor
Stephen Hough, piano
BEETHOVEN
BRAHMS
Piano Concerto No. 4
Symphony No. 2
SAT 25 MAR 2017
SUN 26 MAR 2017
8:30PM
3:00PM
RM200 RM160 RM130 RM100
MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC YOUTH ORCHESTRA
FIRST VIOLIN
Concertmaster
Low Zi Yang
Aldrich Tanying Pinso*
Andrea Sim Yi Xian
Eben Ting Ik Peng
Hoi Khai-Weing
Izzywan Musib
Khairul Aziem**
Lee Jin Yen
Lee Yan Xing
Timothy Song
SECOND VIOLIN
Azhad Sulaiman
Dania Munira Che Salman**
Joey Young
Joshua Chew Caleb
Kylie Tan Khai Li
Lee Fong Ying
Nicole Leong Ka Yeng
Tan Kwan Wynn
Wong How Yuen
VIOLA
Benjamin Phoon Zu Ying*
Chanel Lee Lynn
Cheryl Choi Shi Wei*
Danish Mubin
Evelyn Chow**
Melvin David**
Ng Zhan Shen**
Nigel Ang Zhau Tien
CELLO
Awang Mohd Thairy**
Chan Chun Yeen**
Charissa Tan Tian Ai
Charlene Lee Ann
Dylan Lee Mihn Tang*
Goh Wen Chih
Nathalie Kwan Wei Ling
Stanley Hoh
Stephen Tseu Tze Jie
BASSOON
Ivy Fung Ai Wei*
Kevin Chean Teng Jun*
Stephen Mak Wai Soon
DOUBLE BASS
Gillian Too
Lee Kar Yan
Lin Yi Rou
Siti Aishah Hassan
Yong Yoon May
TRUMPET
Aiman Ikram*
Firdaus Zainal*
Liaw Wen Xiang
Wong Sze Yen*
FLUTE
Alwin Wong Ru Kiet
Bonnie Kong Tien Li
Chiu Peng Chong
Japheth Law Sze Cheng
Tan Wei Harn
Wooi Wei Kane
OBOE
Maizatul Mardziah**
Mohd Izzat Bukhori**
Muhammad Azamuddin
Tho Jun Meng
Tunku Amanina
CLARINET
Emily Tiow Yu Xian
Eugene Chee Jia Jiunn
Lee Shi Min
Tang Kit Ying
FRENCH HORN
Chloe Chai Mei Qin
Eric Tiow Xian Liang
Mohd Adznan Mokhtar
Ong Yong Hang*
TROMBONE
Abdul Hanif Abd Hamid
Lance Low Wen Hong*
Teh Yoong Wei
TUBA
Muhamad Hakimi
TIMPANI & PERCUSSION
Adriel Wong Xian Lih*
Norman Cheen Xin Tao
Winnie Chong Yee Nie*
Natasha Chua Pei Wen**
Muhammad Nur Imaduddin*
PIANO & CELESTE
Choong See May
Tengku Mohd Hadif
Wun Chern Zhi
HARP
Madelaine Chong Zhia Chee
Kathrina Chair Ping Jeh
*MPYO Alumni
**Guest musician
Note: Musicians are listed alphabetically and rotate within their sections.
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