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may 11, 12, 13
Mozart Sinfonia Concertante
Minnesota Orchestra
Osmo Vänskä, conductor
Erin Keefe, violin | Matthew Lipman, viola
Thursday, May 11, 2017, 11 am
Friday, May 12, 2017, 8 pm
Saturday, May 13, 2017, 8 pm
Orchestra Hall
Orchestra Hall
Orchestra Hall
Witold Lutosławski
Little Suite
Fujarka: Allegretto
Hurra Polka: Vivace
Piosenka: Andante molto sostenuto
Taniec: Allegro molto
ca. 11’
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major for Violin,
Viola and Orchestra, K. 320d [K. 364]
Allegro maestoso
Andante
Presto
Erin Keefe, violin | Matthew Lipman, viola
ca. 30’
I
ca. 20’
Paul Hindemith
N
T
E
R
M
I
S
S
I
O
N
Mathis der Maler, Symphony
Angel Concert
Entombment
Temptation of St. Anthony
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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ca. 25’
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Artists
Osmo Vänskä, conductor
Profile appears on page 8.
Williams’ The Lark Ascending, and the
Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms
Violin Concertos. She has appeared as
soloist with orchestras and ensembles such
as the New York City Ballet, New Mexico
Symphony, korean Symphony Orchestra,
Amadeus Chamber Orchestra, Sendai
Philharmonic and the Göttingen Symphony
Orchestra, among other ensembles. An
active chamber musician, she is an Artist
with the Chamber Music Society of
Lincoln Center and performs with the
Accordo ensemble in Minneapolis. keefe
has been awarded many major distinctions,
including the Avery Fisher Career Grant.
She has also been the recipient of the Pro
Musicis International Award, and the
Grand Prizes in the Valsesia Musica
International Violin Competition, Torun
International Violin Competition,
Schadt Competition and Corpus Christi
International String Competition.
More: minnesotaorchestra.org.
Erin Keefe, violin
Erin keefe, the Minnesota Orchestra’s
concertmaster since 2011, is a highlyregarded soloist, chamber musician and
festival artist. She has been featured
here in performances of Bach’s
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Vaughan
may 11, 12, 13
Matthew Lipman, viola
Matthew Lipman, now welcomed for his
Minnesota Orchestra solo debut, was the
Grand Prize winner of the Friends of the
Minnesota Orchestra Young Artist
Competition in 2012, and received a
prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in
2015. He has played concertos with the
Grand Rapids Symphony and the
Wisconsin Chamber, Juilliard, Ars Viva
Symphony and Montgomery Symphony
orchestras, and has performed with the
Chamber Music Society at Alice Tully
Hall, Wigmore Hall, and at the kissinger
Sommer Festival in Germany as a
member of CMS Two. His debut recording
of Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante with
violinist Rachel Barton Pine and the
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields with
Sir Neville Marriner was released in 2015
on the Avie label and reached No. 2 on
the Billboard classical charts. More:
matthew-lipman.com.
one-minute notes
Lutosławski: Little Suite
Four energetic movements fly by in the span of ten minutes in Lutosławski’s suite based on Polish folk tunes, ranging from an unusual polka
in triple meter to a vivacious concluding dance.
Mozart: Sinfonia concertante
A symphony that behaves like a concerto, Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante contrasts bright solo violin with dark solo viola to build the finest
of the composer’s string concertos. The soloists’ magical entrance is followed by a majestic Allegro, an operatic Andante of deep pathos and
a high-spirited Presto. The cadenzas are Mozart’s own.
Hindemith: Mathis der Maler
Mathis der Maler, based on themes from Hindemith’s opera of the same name, begins with a musical nod to the work’s Renaissance setting.
A powerful lament follows, and a fierce conflict climaxes in a joyous brass exclamation.
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Program Notes
Witold Lutosławski
Born: January 25, 1913,
Warsaw, Poland
Died: February 7, 1994,
Warsaw, Poland
Little Suite
Premiered: April 20, 1951
pretty tough story lurks behind this gentle little piece.
Witold Lutosławski graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory
in 1937, but his plans to study in Paris were thwarted by the
German invasion of Poland in September 1939. Lutosławski
served as a radio operator in the Polish army but was captured by
the Nazis. He escaped, walked 250 miles back to Warsaw, and
went underground. The Nazis banned concerts during the war,
and Lutosławski supported himself by playing the piano in
nightclubs until the Warsaw uprising in 1944 forced him to flee
that city—he lost all his early compositions when part of the city
was destroyed. After the war, Poland fell under the domination of
the Soviets, who enforced a rigorously-simplistic artistic doctrine:
all art must be accessible to the masses, inspiring and
uncomplicated. When Lutosławski’s First Symphony was
premiered in 1948, Russian critics walked out, the Polish
vice-minister of culture remarked that Lutosławski should be
thrown under a streetcar, and further performances were banned.
a
Serious composers found that any thought of developing
according to their own ideals was impossible. Lutosławski’s good
friend Andrzej Panufnik fled to the West in 1954 and made his
career in England, but Lutosławski chose to remain in Warsaw,
where he found his options limited: he was free to compose film
scores, patriotic choruses and children’s songs. A further
possibility was music based on folk songs, and here Lutosławski
turned to the model of a composer he greatly admired, Béla
Bartók (though ironically, Bartók’s music was banned by the
Soviets for its “formalism”).
a suite from folk tunes
In 1950, two years after the debacle of his First Symphony,
Lutosławski had a request from Warsaw Radio for a piece based
on folklore. For that commission he composed his Little Suite,
and it was premiered the same year by what the official catalog of
his works describes as “a light-music chamber orchestra.” The
Little Suite proved a success, and the following year Lutosławski
arranged it for full symphony orchestra. This version was
successfully premiered by the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra
under Grzegorz Fitelberg on April 20, 1951.
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MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA
SHOWCASE
Lutosławski’s model for the Little Suite may well have been
Bartók’s charming Romanian Folk Dances of 1915, in which
Bartók orchestrated and briefly extended folk dance tunes.
Lutosławski chose folk tunes from around the village of Máchow
in the far southeastern corner of Poland and used them to
compose his Little Suite, whose four movements span barely ten
minutes. Fajurka (that title translates as “fife”) opens
appropriately with the bright sound of piccolo stamping out the
principal theme; this is developed energetically, and the opening
melody returns to close out the movement. The curious thing
about the Hurra Polka (Hurray Polka) is that it dances in a triple
meter rather than the duple meter we expect of the polka. A
melancholy clarinet solo opens Piosenka (Song), but this quiet
opening quickly builds to a strident climax before the music
subsides to its quiet close. The vivacious concluding Taniec
(Dance) does indeed dance brightly before giving way to a
singing, surging central episode; the opening material returns,
but Lutosławski rounds off the Little Suite with a brisk and
emphatic coda.
What are we to make of this gentle and apparently well-behaved
piece of music? Is it the work of an obedient servant intent on
satisfying repressive authorities? Or is it perhaps something more
significant? When he wrote the Little Suite, Lutosławski was
working within tight strictures, but he recognized—just as Bartók
had before him—that there were possibilities within folk music.
In Little Suite he refines his technique carefully: he presents the
folk tunes, develops them crisply and subtly, and orchestrates
them cleanly and brightly. Lutosławski’s use of folk material
would culminate in his Concerto for Orchestra of 1954, in which
folk tunes are broken down into component intervals and bits
and used as the basis for a brilliant orchestral work. The Concerto
for Orchestra was a sort of break-out work for Lutosławski. Its
success, and gradually relaxing government control, allowed him
to compose serial music and later music based in part on chance.
By the time he reached an authentic voice as a composer,
Lutosławski had left his early folk-inspired pieces far behind.
But the Little Suite remains one of the most popular of his
early works.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes,
2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets,
3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum and strings
Program note by Eric Bromberger
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Program Notes
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Born: January 17, 1756,
Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791,
Vienna, Austria
Sinfonia concertante in
E-flat major for Violin,
Viola and Orchestra,
K. 320d [K. 364]
Composed: ca. 1779
n 1778-79, Mozart became intensely interested in the possibilities
of concertos with more than one solo instrument. Earlier,
in May 1774, he had written what he called a Concertone,
literally “a big concerto,” for two solo violins and an almost
equally prominent oboe part, but now there suddenly appeared
a whole run of such works.
i
More precisely, we have three completed works—the Concerto
for Flute and Harp from April 1778, agreeably Rococo but a bit
perfunctory; the delightful Concerto for Two Pianos, written in
the early part of April 1779; and the present Sinfonia concertante;
also two that were abandoned part way through (the concerts for
which they were intended were canceled) and one puzzle, one
which has not come down to us in any form that can be
authenticated as being by Mozart.
may 11, 12, 13
In the middle of these experiments and accomplishments, the
Sinfonia concertante for Violin and Viola stands out as one of
Mozart’s most seductively rich works and surely as the finest of
his string concertos. He probably wrote this work in the summer
of 1779.
Mozart and the viola
Excellent violinist though he was, when Mozart played chamber
music he liked best to take up the viola. He enjoyed being in the
middle of the texture, besides which there is surely an affinity
between the viola’s dark and somehow pent-up sonority and the
element of melancholy that tends to invade even the most festive
of Mozart’s compositions. The viola is the Mozartian sound par
excellence. Mozart’s chamber music attains its highest point in
those quintets where he adds a second viola to the standard
string quartet.
Here, in this Sinfonia concertante—the title suggests a symphony
that behaves like a concerto—he stresses that characteristic color
by dividing the violas into two sections. As for the two solo
instruments, Mozart is more interested in the distinction of color
than in the difference of range. He sends the viola clear up to the
high E-flat above the treble staff, an altitude it never comes near
approaching in his chamber music. To allow the viola to be more
penetrating, Mozart writes the part not in E-flat but in D, a more
sonorous and brilliant key for the instrument because it takes
better advantage of the open strings and their overtones.
Minnesota Orchestra Music Director Osmo Vänskä awarding violist Matthew Lipman the Grand Prize in the
2012 Friends of the Minnesota Orchestra Young Artist Competition—the honor that led to his performances
with the Orchestra this week. Photo: Greg Helgeson.
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Program Notes
Indeed, everything about the sheer sound of the Sinfonia
concertante attests to the richness of Mozart’s aural fantasy: the
piquant wind writing, the delightful and serenade-like pizzicatos
in the orchestra, the subtle interaction of solo and orchestral
strings beginning with the very first emergence of the two soloists
from the tutti, and, not least, the way so sumptuous and varied a
sonority is drawn from so modest a complement.
Paul Hindemith
Born: November 16, 1895,
Hanau, Germany
Died: December 28, 1963,
Frankfurt, Germany
Mathis der Maler, Symphony
Premiered: March 12, 1934
the music: opening doors we didn’t know existed
The splendid and majestic first movement, Allegro maestoso,
is followed by an operatic Andante of deep pathos: one can
almost hear the Italian words as the two singers vie in passionate
protestation. In Symphonie concertante, the ballet George
Balanchine created in 1947 for Tanaquil Le Clercq and Maria
Tallchief, Balanchine rendered these conversations visible, the
gay and spirited ones of the first and last movements no less
than the darkly impassioned ones of the Andante.
The way this Andante begins is a glorious instance of how Mozart
can surprise us by opening doors whose very existence we never
suspected. The music begins with regular questions and answers,
but the third time—I always think of Tamino finding the right
door—something opens, the barriers come down, formality and
symmetry are gone, and we witness and share in raw pain.
The finale, after that, is all high spirits and virtuosic brilliance.
Mozart includes cadenzas in the score.
Instrumentation: solo violin and solo viola,
with orchestra comprising 2 oboes, 2 horns and strings
Program note excerpted from the late Michael Steinberg’s The
Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 1998),
used with permission.
n 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Paul Hindemith
set to work on an opera based on the life of the German painter
Matthias Grünewald (c. 1475-1528), whose masterpiece is the
altarpiece he painted for St. Anthony’s Church in Isenheim from
1515 to 1518. The events of Grünewald’s life are almost
unknown (even his last name appears to be an invention by a
later biographer), so Hindemith, who wrote his own libretto,
was free to imagine the details of Grünewald’s participation in
the Peasants’ War in Mainz in 1524.
i
artist or activist?
The actions of Hindemith’s hero are curiously ambiguous.
At work on his altarpiece, he is swept up in the peasants’ cause
and throws aside his painting to become a man of action, in the
process falling in love with Regina, daughter of Schwalb, leader
of the revolt. The peasants suffer a disastrous defeat, Schwalb is
killed, Regina dies, and Matthias is left to reassess his
commitment to the cause. At the climax of the opera, he has a
nightmare in which he imagines himself undergoing the
temptations of St. Anthony (one of the principal paintings of his
altarpiece) and concludes that he must remain true to his
individual talents. He sets aside his activism and returns
to painting.
The moral meaning of such a story is unclear. Is Hindemith’s
painter a symbol of heroic artistic resistance to tyranny—or is
he the symbol of artistic disengagement?
The new Nazi government was quite certain where it stood on
the subject of a popular revolt against a government in power.
When Hindemith drew a three-movement symphony from the
music of the opera (premiered by Wilhelm Furtwängler in Berlin
on March 12, 1934), it came under prompt attack. Joseph
Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public
Enlightenment (how suffocating, how deadly that title sounds!),
wrote an article denouncing the “Cultural Bolshevism” of
Hindemith’s music, which was labeled “degenerate.” Furtwängler,
who had planned to lead the premiere of the opera and who now
defended Hindemith, was forced to resign temporarily as director
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Program Notes
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of the Berlin Philharmonic, and the opera was not produced until
1938, when it was given in Zúrich. By that time, Hindemith,
perhaps more committed to action than his hero, had already left
Germany.
close as brass blaze out the concluding Alleluia.
the symphony
Program note by Eric Bromberger
The opera Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter) is rarely
produced today, but the symphony that Hindemith drew from it
has become his most popular work. The symphony was assembled before the opera was completed, and listeners should not
expect it to be an instrumental précis of the opera or even to
present its excerpts in the order in which they occur in the opera.
All three movements are named after specific panels in the
Isenheim altarpiece, and Hindemith consciously creates an
“archaic” quality in much of this music by quoting old German
folksongs and chorales.
angel concert. The first movement is the overture to the opera and
is based on the painting that depicts a heavenly consort
serenading the Virgin and Child. A slow introduction built on
broadly-spaced chords creates an impression of great space,
and out of this the old German song Es sungen drei Engeln (There
Sang Three Angels) is announced by all three trombones in
unison over gently-rocking string accompaniment. The main body
of the movement is based on busy thematic material (Hindemith
marks it Ziemlich lebhaft Halbe: “Rather lively half-notes”) and is
generally in sonata form. At the climax, Es sungen returns, singing
in 3/2 as the rest of the orchestra continues in 4/4, and the
movement drives to a resounding close.
entombment. In the second movement, just 45 measures long,
muted strings lay out the halting main theme, which in the opera
accompanies the burial of Regina, the hero’s love. Solo oboe sings
the jagged second subject; the music rises to a climax and falls
away on a coda that treats both themes.
the temptation of St. Anthony. For the final movement Hindemith
selected the music that accompanies Mathis’ climactic nightmare,
during which he imagines himself undergoing the hideous
torments depicted in the Isenheim altarpiece. In the score,
Hindemith prefaces the finale with the line Mathis sings during
this nightmare, which also appears on Grünewaldt altarpiece:
“Ubi eras bone Jhesu / ubi eras, quare non affuisti / ut sanares
vulnera mea?” (Where were you, good Jesus? Why have you not
come to heal my wounds?) The movement opens with a free
recitative for strings that leads to the main body of the
movement, marked Very lively, and this drives ahead on music
appropriate to torment. A quiet and beautiful central section
leads to a fugal coda, where—over all the busy contrapuntal
activity—the old Gregorian chant Lauda Sion Salvatorem is
intoned by the winds. The symphony drives to a triumphant
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes,
2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones,
tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals,
triangle, glockenspiel and strings
c da
The Minnesota Orchestra first performed Lutosławski’s Little
Suite on October 10, 1979, at Orchestra Hall, with Sir Neville
Marriner conducting just his fourth program after becoming
the Orchestra’s seventh music director. Marriner’s predecessor,
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, had frequently programmed the
works of Lutosławski—a fellow native of Poland—but never
the Little Suite. This week’s performances of the work are the
Orchestra’s first since 1980.
The Orchestra introduced Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for
Violin and Viola to its repertoire on November 30, 1917,
at the Minneapolis Auditorium. Emil Oberhoffer, the Orchestra’s
founding music director, conducted and violinist Richard
Czerwonky and violist karl Scheurer served as the soloists.
Both Czerwonky and Scheurer (who also played violin) were
among the Orchestra’s earliest concertmasters. In February
1998, the Orchestra and Eiji Oue performed the work on the
Orchestra’s first-ever European Tour, with Gil Shaham and
Nobuko Imai in the solo roles.
Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony was first heard by
Minnesota Orchestra audiences on March 31, 1939, at
Northrop Memorial Auditorium, under the baton of the
Orchestra’s fourth music director, Dimitri Mitropoulos. That
summer, Mitropoulos was in his native Greece for a series of
guest conducting engagements when the Nazis invaded Poland,
starting World War II; Mitropoulos swiftly departed back to
America on an overcrowded boat.
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