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jan 26, 27
A Tribute Concert to Sir Neville Marriner
Minnesota Orchestra
Courtney Lewis, conductor
Thursday, January 26, 2017, 11 am
Friday, January 27, 2017, 8 pm
Orchestra Hall
Orchestra Hall
These performances are dedicated to the memory of Sir Neville Marriner,
the Minnesota Orchestra’s music director from 1979 to 1986, who had been scheduled
to conduct these concerts; sadly, he passed away on October 2, 2016, at age 92.
Felix Mendelssohn
The Hebrides Overture, Opus 26 (Fingal’s Cave)
ca. 10’
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 1 in C major, Opus 21
Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
Andante cantabile con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
Finale: Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace
ca. 25’
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Antonín Dvořák
OH+
(Orchestra Hall Plus)
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Symphony No. 8 in G minor, Opus 88
Allegro con brio
Adagio
Allegretto grazioso
Allegro ma non troppo
Concert Preview with host Phillip Gainsley and guests Michael Anthony, Luella Goldberg and Richard Cisek
Thursday, January 26, 2017, 10:15 am, Auditorium
Friday, January 27, 2017, 7:15 pm, Target Atrium
Minnesota Orchestra concerts are broadcast live on Friday evenings on stations of Classical Minnesota Public Radio,
including KSJN 99.5 FM in the Twin Cities.
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MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA
SHOWCASE
ca. 20’
ca. 36’
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A Tribute Concert to Sir Neville Marriner
Courtney Lewis,
conductor
Courtney Lewis, who in
2014 completed his
four-year tenure as the
Minnesota Orchestra’s
associate conductor, has
established himself as
one of his generation’s
most talented conductors. He is currently in
his second season as
music director of the
Jacksonville Symphony.
His additional past appointments have included assistant
conductor of the New York Philharmonic, which he will
return to in April for a week of subscription concerts. He has
also been a Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
From 2008 to 2014, he was the music director of Boston’s
acclaimed Discovery Ensemble. His additional guest
engagements this season include debuts with the Dallas
Symphony and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and a return to
the Colorado Symphony. Highlights of his 2015-16 season
included debuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic,
Milwaukee Symphony, Royal Flemish Philharmonic and
Colorado Symphony, as well as assisting Thomas Adès at the
Salzburg Festival for the world premiere of Adès’ opera
The Exterminating Angel. This is Lewis’ second time conducting
Minnesota Orchestra subscription concerts since the
conclusion of his tenure as associate conductor; he led an
all-Russian program in November 2014. More:
opus3artists.com, courtneylewis.com.
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Sir Neville Marriner
(1924-2016)
Sir Neville Marriner, music director of
the Minnesota Orchestra from 1979 to
1986, had been scheduled to conduct
these concerts. After his death last
October at age 92, the performances
were rededicated as a tribute in his
memory, while preserving the musical
repertoire he personally selected for
the program. During his seven seasons
as music director, he presided over a
number of firsts, including the
Orchestra’s first composer-in-residence
program and two international trips, to Australia in 1985 and Hong Kong
in 1986. In 1982 he led a star-studded, televised “Tonight Scandinavia”
concert attended by members of several Scandinavian royal families. In
1985 he achieved a distinction unique in the Orchestra’s annals by being
knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In his final performance with the Orchestra
in 2008, he conducted Elgar’s Violin Concerto with former Concertmaster
Jorja Fleezanis as soloist.
Born in England in 1924, Marriner began his music career as a violinist,
serving for 12 years as principal second violin of the London Symphony
Orchestra. In 1958 he established the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields,
which has become one of the world’s most highly-regarded chamber
orchestras, and one of the most prolific orchestras in recordings. He also
founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and led the Southwest
German Radio Orchestra in Stuttgart, among other professional posts, and
maintained a regular schedule of conducting major orchestras in Europe,
the U.S. and Asia. He is survived by his wife, Molly; a son, Andrew,
principal clarinetist of the London Symphony Orchestra; a daughter,
Susie; three grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
one-minute notes
Mendelssohn: The Hebrides Overture
Impressions of swirling waters and crashing waves unfold in The Hebrides Overture as Mendelssohn paints pictures of the dramatic sea and
the haunting scenery on the islands off the Western coast of Scotland.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 1
Beethoven’s First Symphony is full of crisp melodies and quick turns of phrase, as well as musical “inside jokes.” Later in life Beethoven
would revolutionize the symphonic form, but in this early work he is content to compose music of clean lines and undeniable beauty.
Dvořák: Symphony No. 8
Dvořák’s Eighth is full of luminous melodies and unexpected harmonic shifts. The second movement alludes to the funeral march of
Beethoven’s Eroica, but lighter elements prevail in a whirlwind finale that is delightfully Czech.
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A Tribute Concert to Sir Neville Marriner
MARRINER MEMORIES
The Minnesota Orchestra family fondly remembers
Sir Neville Marriner, music director from 1979-86
“I owe Sir Neville and the musicians’ committee a tremendous debt, as it was they who hired me back
in 1981. He always showed me kindness and good humor on and off the podium. Our tour to Australia
was one highlight of my tenure. I also learned a good many tricks about recording as I watched him go
through the process many times with us.”
—Principal Trumpet Manny Laureano, Minnesota Orchestra musician since 1981
“Neville, of course, was one of the most experienced recording conductors ever. I remember that one of
his ‘rules’ was that recording tempos needed to be ever so slightly faster than performance tempos. This
allowed for the absence of the ‘visual ear.’ Neville embodied the new age of the democratic conductor
as opposed to the autocratic leader of old. Both he and his wife Molly were a friend to everyone. They
brought a charming spirit of collegiality that served the Orchestra and the community exceedingly well.”
—Marcia Peck, Minnesota Orchestra cellist since 1971
“One of my best pieces, Casa Guidi, was commissioned by Neville as a vehicle for mezzo-soprano
Frederica von Stade. Neville not only gave it a glowing premiere in 1983, he took it along on a
national tour with the Minnesota Orchestra which included performances at Carnegie Hall and the
Kennedy Center. Eiji Oue later recorded Casa Guidi with von Stade and the Minnesota Orchestra, and
that recording was awarded the 2003 Grammy for Best Classical Composition—an honor bestowed on
a work whose success owes a great deal to Neville’s championing, generosity and kindness.”
—Dominick Argento, Minnesota Orchestra Composer Laureate
“Mr. Marriner was a kind and gentle soul who I very much enjoyed making music with. He
always had a smile on his face and helped bring this Orchestra up to another level in the world of
classical music.”
—Acting Principal Bassoon Mark Kelley, Minnesota Orchestra musician since 1982
“Through our work together for the Orchestra, my husband, Stan,
and I, became lifelong friends of Sir Neville and his wife, Molly. Less
than one week before Neville died, the four of us enjoyed a
wonderful lunch in Padua, Italy, where Neville was conducting. For
five hours, we talked, laughed, reminisced and planned for the
Marriners’ January visit to Minnesota. Sir Neville recalled with
fondness the Scandinavian and British Festivals he led here,
the recordings and the tours to Hong Kong and Australia. He had
planned to conclude his concert here with Dvořák’s Symphony
No. 8, a work he was very proud of having recorded with the
Minnesota Orchestra. How fortunate Sir Neville was to be doing
what he loved until the very end, and how fortunate the Minnesota
Orchestra is to count him among our distinguished Music Directors.”
—Luella Goldberg, Minnesota Orchestra Board Chair, 1980-83, and
current Life Director
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Program Notes
Felix Mendelssohn
Born: February 3, 1809,
Hamburg, Germany
Died: November 4, 1847,
Leipzig, Germany
The Hebrides Overture,
Opus 26 (Fingal’s Cave)
Premiered: May 14, 1832
f all the master composers who were great traveling
companions, Mendelssohn ranks with the best. This affable
genius, a man of boundless curiosity and charm who made
friends wherever he went, recorded his impressions not only in
descriptive letters and on his sketchpad, but in music of
extraordinary tonal imagination, like the Hebrides Overture.
Richard Wagner praised it as “one of the most beautiful pieces we
possess,” recognizing that Mendelssohn’s vivid tone painting was
a prelude to his own sea music.
o
an adventure across Scotland
At 20, Mendelssohn was intent on seeing the world, beginning
with England; accompanying him was his best friend Karl
Klingemann. The capstone of their trip was an adventure across
Scotland. That journey eventually paid off in two masterpieces:
the Symphony No. 3, known as the Scottish, an idea for which
struck him at Holyrood Castle; and the Hebrides Overture, also
known as Fingal’s Cave, named for a tourist attraction off the tiny
isle of Staffa. Mendelssohn recorded his impression of the cave in
a 21-bar musical fragment which he sent to his sister Fanny on
August 7, 1830, telling her: “In order to make you realize how
extraordinarily the Hebrides have affected me, the following
came into my mind there.” These opening measures have
virtually the final form in which they appear in the Overture that
Mendelssohn finished in Italy in 1830, but withheld from
performance until he was fully satisfied.
Klingemann, an aspiring poet and future diplomat, cast his
impression in words that anticipate Mendelssohn’s music: “We
were put out in boats and lifted by the hissing sea up to the pillar
stumps to the famous Fingal’s Cave. A greener roar of waves
never rushed into a stranger cavern—its many pillars making it
look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding,
absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea
within and without.”
Addressing his family from Paris on January 31, 1832,
Mendelssohn sniffed at his manuscript: “The whole so-called
development tastes more of counterpoint than of whale-oil and
seagulls and cod-liver oil, and it ought to be the other way
jan 26, 27
around.” Soon he revised the score and brought it to London,
where, on May 14, the Philharmonic Society gave the first
performance. Despite its success, the meticulous composer made
still more changes, finally submitting it for publication in 1833,
when he remarked to his mother that the work “had become
much better through threefold revisions.”
There is no prelude: the theme invented on the spot is
immediately unfolded by a somber blend of low strings and
bassoon, casting us into the midst of swirling waters and
melancholy visions. As the motif expands, it draws more
instruments into a vortex of subtly shifting harmonies. The
powerful second theme left its imprint on many later Romantic
composers. In the work’s brass fanfares, Mendelssohn’s
contemporaries detected an epic, Ossianic quality—the wild,
Romantic impulse that inspired the poems of the legendary
Gaelic hero, imitated by the Scotsman James MacPherson in his
grandiloquent rhythmic prose.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Program note by Mary Ann Feldman.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born: December 16, 1770,
Bonn, Germany
Died: March 26, 1827,
Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 1 in C major,
Opus 21
Premiered: April 2, 1800
eethoven began sketches for a symphony in C major in
1795, three years after he arrived in Vienna, but the piece
did not go well, and he abandoned it. The symphony was the
grandest of purely instrumental forms, and, because he did not
want to rush into a field where Haydn and Mozart had done such
distinguished work, Beethoven used the decade of the 1790s to
refine his technique as a composer and to prepare to write a
symphony. He slowly mastered sonata form and began to write
for larger chamber ensembles and for wind instruments; he also
composed two piano concertos before re-approaching the
challenge of a symphony. By 1800 he had completed his First
Symphony, and it was premiered in Vienna on April 2, 1800.
b
crisp and exuberant music
The genial First Symphony has occasionally been burdened with
ponderous commentary by those who feel that it must contain
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Program Notes
the seeds of Beethoven’s future development—every modulation
and detail of orchestration has been squeezed for evidence of the
revolutionary directions the composer would later take. Actually,
Beethoven’s First is a very straightforward late 18th-century
symphony, the product of a talented young man quite aware of
the example of Haydn and Mozart and anxious to master the
most challenging form he had faced so far. In fact, one of the
most impressive things about Beethoven’s First Symphony is just
how conservative it is. It uses the standard Haydn-Mozart
orchestra of pairs of winds plus timpani and strings; its form is
right out of Haydn, with whom Beethoven had studied; and its
spirit is consistently carefree. There are no battles fought and
won here, no grappling with darkness and struggling toward the
light—the distinction of the First Symphony lies simply in its crisp
energy and exuberant music-making.
adagio molto–allegro con brio. The key signature of this symphony
may suggest that it is in C major, but the first movement’s slow
introduction opens with a stinging discord that glances off into
the unexpected key of F major. This leads to another “wrong” key,
G major, and only gradually does Beethoven “correct” the tonality
when the orchestra alights gracefully on C major at the Allegro
con brio. Many have noticed the resemblance between
Beethoven’s sturdy main theme here and the opening of Mozart’s
Jupiter Symphony, composed twelve years earlier. This is not a
case of plagiarism or of slavish imitation—only a young man’s
awareness of the thunder behind him. This energetic movement,
with its graceful second theme in the woodwinds, develops
concisely and powerfully.
andante cantabile con moto. The second movement is also in
sonata form. The main theme arrives as a series of polyphonic
entrances, and Beethoven soon transforms the dotted rhythm of
this theme’s third measure into an accompaniment figure: it trips
along in the background through much of this movement, and
Beethoven gives it to the solo timpani for extended periods.
Beethoven’s stipulation con moto is crucial: this may be a slow
movement, but it pulses continuously forward along its 3/8
meter, driving to a graceful climax as the woodwind choir sings a
variant of the main theme.
menuetto: allegro molto e vivace. By contrast, the third movement
bristles with energy, and Beethoven’s marking Menuetto frankly
seems incorrect: this may well be a minuet in form, but the
indication Allegro molto e vivace banishes any notion of dance
music. This movement is—in everything but name—a scherzo,
the first of the remarkable series of symphonic scherzos
Beethoven would write across his career. The trio section is
dominated by the winds, whose chorale-like main tune is
accompanied by madly-scampering violins.
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MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA
SHOWCASE
finale: adagio–allegro molto e vivace. The most amusing joke in this
symphony comes at the opening of the finale, where a rising scale
emerges bit by bit, like a snake coming out of its hole; at the
Allegro molto vivace, that scale rockets upward to introduce the
main theme. With this eight-bar theme, the movement seems at
first a rondo, but it is actually in sonata form, complete with
exposition repeat and development of secondary themes. A
vigorous little march drives the symphony to its resounding close.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Program note by Eric Bromberger.
Antonín Dvořák
Born: September 8, 1841,
Mühlhausen, Bohemia
Died: May 1, 1904, Prague
Symphony No. 8 in G minor,
Opus 88
Premiered: February 2, 1890
n the summer of 1889 Dvořák took his family to their summer
retreat at Vysoka in the countryside south of Prague. There,
amid the rolling fields and forests of his homeland, he could
escape the pressures of the concert season, enjoy the company of
his wife and children, and indulge one of his favorite pastimes:
raising pigeons.
i
“melodies pour out of me”
Dvořák also composed a great deal that summer. On August 10
he completed his Piano Quartet in E-flat major, writing to a friend
that “melodies pour out of me,” and lamenting “If only one could
write them down straight away! But there—I must go slowly,
only keep pace with my hand, and may God give the rest.” A few
weeks later, on August 25, he made the first sketches for a new
symphony, and once again the melodies poured out: he began the
actual composition on September 6, and on the 13th the first
movement was done. The second movement took three days, the
third a single day, and by September 23 the entire symphony had
been sketched. The orchestration was completed on November 8,
and Dvořák himself led the triumphant premiere of his Eighth
Symphony in Prague on February 2, 1890. From the time Dvořák
had sat down before a sheet of blank paper to the completion of
the full score, only 75 days had passed.
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Program Notes
allegro con brio. “Symphony in G major,” says the title page, but
the beginning of this work is firmly in the “wrong” key of G
minor, and this is only the first of many harmonic surprises. It is
also a gorgeous beginning, with the cellos singing their long
wistful melody. But—another surprise—this theme will have little
to do with the actual progress of the first movement. We soon
arrive at what appears to be the true first subject, a flute theme of
an almost pastoral innocence (commentators appear unable to
resist describing this theme as “birdlike”), and suddenly we have
slipped into G major. There follows a wealth of themes; someone
counted six separate ideas in the opening minutes of this
symphony. Dvořák develops these across the span of the opening
movement, and the cellos’ somber opening melody returns at key
moments, beginning the development quietly and then being
blazed out triumphantly by the trumpets at the stirring climax.
adagio. The two middle movements are just as free. The Adagio is
apparently in C minor, but it begins in E-flat major with dark and
halting string phrases; the middle section flows easily on a
relaxed woodwind tune in C major in which some have heard the
sound of cimbalon and a village band. A violin solo leads to a
surprisingly violent climax before the movement falls away to its
quiet close.
allegretto grazioso. The third movement opens with a soaring
waltz in G minor that dances nimbly along its 3/8 meter; the
charming center section also whirls in 3/8 time, but here its
dotted rhythms produce a distinctive lilt. The movement
concludes with nice surprises: a blistering coda, Molto vivace,
whips along a variant of the lilting center section tune, but
Dvořák has now transformed its triple meter into a propulsive
2/4. The movement rushes on chattering woodwinds right up to
its close, where it concludes suddenly with a hushed string chord.
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Instrumentation: 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes
(1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns,
2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani and strings.
Program note by Eric Bromberger.
c da
The Minnesota Orchestra performed Mendelssohn’s Hebrides
Overture for the first time on February 20, 1910, at the
Minneapolis Auditorium, under the baton of the Orchestra’s
founding Music Director Emil Oberhoffer. Earlier that month,
William D. Boyce founded the Boy Scouts of America.
The Orchestra gave its initial performance of Beethoven’s First
Symphony on January 17, 1905, at First Baptist Church in
Minneapolis, also with Emil Oberhoffer conducting. The
Orchestra has recorded the work only once, in June 2007 as
part of its acclaimed Beethoven symphonies cycle on the BIS
Records label.
The Orchestra’s first performance of Dvořák’s Eighth
Symphony came on January 23, 1942, at Northrop Memorial
Auditorium, with Dimitri Mitropolous conducting. Sir Neville
Marriner conducted the symphony on the historic occasion of
his first concerts as the Orchestra’s music director in September
1979, and subsequently recorded the work with the Orchestra
in 1980.
allegro ma non troppo. The finale is a variation movement—sort of.
It opens with a stinging trumpet fanfare, an afterthought on
Dvořák’s part, added after the rest of the movement was complete.
Cellos announce the noble central theme (itself derived from the
flute theme of the first movement), and a series of variations
follows, including a spirited episode for solo flute. But suddenly the
variations vanish: Dvořák throws in an exotic Turkish march full of
rhythmic energy, a completely separate episode that rises to a great
climax based on the ringing trumpet fanfare from the opening.
Gradually things calm down, and the variations resume as if this
turbulent storm had never blown through. Near the end comes
lovely writing for strings, and a raucous, joyous coda—a final
variation of the main theme—propels this symphony to its
rousing close.
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