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Vänskä Conducts Schubert
Minnesota Orchestra
Osmo Vänskä, conductor | Alban Gerhardt, cello
Susie Park, violin | Greg Milliren, flute | Wendy Williams, flute
Thursday, April 6, 2017, 11 am
Friday, April 7, 2017, 8 pm
Sunday, April 9, 2017, 2 pm
Orchestra Hall
Orchestra Hall
Orchestra Hall
With these concerts we gratefully recognize
Paula and Cy DeCosse for their generous contribution to
the Minnesota Orchestra’s Investing in Inspiration campaign.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G major, BWV 1049
ca. 17’
Allegro
Andante
Presto
Susie Park, violin | Greg Milliren, flute | Wendy Williams, flute
Edward Elgar
Concerto in E minor for Cello and Orchestra, Opus 85
Adagio
Lento – Allegro molto
Adagio
Allegro
Alban Gerhardt, cello
ca. 26’
I
ca. 20’
Franz Schubert
Chamber Music
Serenade
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S
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Symphony in C major, D. 944, The Great
Andante – Allegro, ma non troppo
Andante con moto
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Allegro vivace
ca. 50’
Chamber Music Serenade: Vänskä and Schubert
Schubert: Octet in F Major for Winds and Strings
Sunday, April 9, 2017, 4:30 p.m., Target Atrium; separate ticket required.
Complete information is provided in a program insert at this performance.
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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Artists
Symphony, Tonhalle Orchestra Zrich,
and the Cleveland, Philadelphia and
Chicago Symphony orchestras. More:
harrisonparrott.comalbangerhardt.com
Osmo Vänskä, conductor
Susie Park, violin
Profile appears on page 6.
Alban Gerhardt, cello
Alban Gerhardt, now welcomed for his
first performances with the Minnesota
Orchestra, has made a unique impact on
audiences worldwide with his intense
musicality, compelling stage presence
and limitless artistic curiosity. Highlights
of his current season include
engagements with the Saint Louis
Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra and
Seoul Philharmonic; performances in
Hong Kong, Melbourne and Perth; and
recitals in London, Montreal and
Vancouver. Following his early success at
competitions, Gerhardt launched his
international career by debuting with the
Berlin Philharmonic in 1991. His other
notable collaborations include concerts
with the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra, London Philharmonic, NHK
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MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA
Nielsen’s Wind Quintet with Orchestra
colleagues at a NightCap performance in
February 2017. He has been honored to
serve as a guest performer with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle, Chicago,
Boston, San Francisco, National, Detroit
and Colorado Symphonies. More:
minnesotaorchestra.org
Susie Park was appointed the Minnesota
Orchestra’s first associate concertmaster
in September 2015. In February 2016 she
was the violin soloist in the Orchestra’s
performances of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg
Concerto. She is a founding member of
the East Coast Chamber Orchestra and
was the violinist of the Eroica Trio from
2006 to 2012. She has performed
worldwide and has won top honors in
the International Violin Competition,
Wieniawski Competition and Yehudi
Menuhin International Competition.
More: minnesotaorchestra.org
Greg Milliren, flute
Greg Milliren, who joined the Minnesota
Orchestra in 2009 as associate principal
flute, was a soloist at Sommerfest 2015
in Bizet’s Carmen Fantasy for Two Flutes
and Orchestra. He recently performed
SHOWCASE
Wendy Williams, flute
Wendy Williams joined the Minnesota
Orchestra in 1992 after playing flute
with the Houston Symphony Orchestra
and Houston Grand Opera, and serving
as principal flute with the Houston
Ballet. In 2010 she and Principal Harp
Kathy Kienzle were soloists in
performances of Mozart’s Concerto for
Flute and Harp. In January 2017, she
and her flute section colleagues each
performed a Bach flute sonata as part of
the Orchestra’s chamber music series.
More: minnesotaorchestra.org
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Program Notes
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one-minute notes
Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 4
The fourth in Bach’s set of Brandenburg Concertos features a different voice in each of its three movements: first a solo violin, then two
flutes, and finally the full orchestra.
Elgar: Cello Concerto
This masterpiece, beloved of cellists and audiences alike, seems to show two sides of the composer; now strong and confident, now wistful
and melancholy. Yet despite the contradictions, this most personal statement is utterly beautiful, exuding a quiet power over listeners.
Schubert: Symphony in C major, The Great
Schubert casts his Great C-major Symphony, the last he completed, on a grand Beethovenian scale. A sylvan horn theme frames the
energetic first movement. Spirited oboe is featured in the wintry Andante. The expansive Scherzo is a sublime version of a country dance;
the finale, propelled by four repeated horn notes, whirls to a powerful close.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Born: March 21, 1685,
Eisenbach, Germany
Died: July 28, 1750,
Leipzig, Germany
Brandenburg Concerto No.
4 in G major, BWV 1049
Premiered: c. 1720
hen Bach assumed the post of Capellmeister to His Most
Serene Highness Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen, in
1717, he made the move in the hopes of spending the rest of his
life there. The court was Calvinist and thus required no church
music, and Bach enjoyed the change of not being primarily an
organist and the challenge of providing great quantities of solo,
chamber and orchestral music.
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His new patron, just 23, loved music and played the violin, viola
da gamba and keyboards skillfully. But the idyll was spoiled when
Bach’s wife died suddenly in the summer of 1720, and the next
year the professional scene darkened when the Prince married.
His musical interests, Bach recalled later, became “somewhat
lukewarm, the more so since the new Princess seemed to be alien
to the muses.” In fact the Amusa, as Bach called her, soon died,
and Leopold’s second wife was a sympathetic and sensitive
patron. But by then Bach was restless and determined to leave.
In 1723 he moved to Leipzig, where he was the City Council’s
reluctant third choice as Director of Music at the churches of
Saint Thomas and Saint Nicholas, and there he remained until
his death in 1750.
Bach was looking around for greener pastures as early as March
1721, when, along with a suitably servile letter, he sent the
Margrave of Brandenburg a handsome presentation copy of six
concertos he had composed over the last year or so for
performance at Cöthen. Bach had met the margrave and played
for him in 1719 when he went to Berlin to collect a new
harpsichord. (Brandenburg is the Prussian province immediately
south and west of Berlin.) The margrave never replied to Bach,
nor did he ever use or perhaps even open the score. We are lucky
that he at least kept it, because his copy is our only source for
these forever vernal concertos, which have been called “the most
entertaining music in the world.”
Whenever Bach assembled a collection of pieces, he took pains to
make it as diverse as possible, and musicians have always delighted
in the wonderful timbral variety of the Brandenburgs. Variety for
the sake of entertainment and charm must have been at the
forefront of Bach’s mind, but as he worked he must have become
more and more fascinated with the compositional possibilities his
varied instrumentations suggested. He constantly defines and
articulates the succession of musical events by textural-timbral
means: the Brandenburg Concertos are, so to speak, about their
textures and their color.
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Program Notes
the fourth Brandenburg concerto
This concerto has interesting solo-tutti combinations. In the first
movement, the solo violin dominates, and the recorders (whose
parts are played on flutes in most performances in large halls) are
secondary. In the Andante, the flutes dominate, while the violin
provides their bass in a vigorous dialogue with full orchestra,
which is used in only this one of the Brandenburg slow movements.
The orchestra then plays its largest role in the fugal finale,
though no violinist negotiating Bach’s scales at about a dozen
notes per second will feel that the composer has neglected his
soloists.
Instrumentation: solo violin and 2 flutes, with harpsichord
and string orchestra
Program note excerpted from the late Michael Steinberg’s The
Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 1998),
used with permission.
Edward Elgar
Born: June 2, 1857,
Broadheath, England
Died: February 23, 1934,
Worcester, England
Concerto in E minor for Cello
and Orchestra, Opus 85
Premiered: October 26, 1919
he Cello Concerto was Elgar’s last important work,
completed in the summer of 1919. Into this masterpiece he
poured his most personal utterances, underscored by a sense of
resignation brought on by the traumas of war. Although he would
live another 15 years, this work is from the autumn of his life: his
health was already in decline.
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The cello’s poignant tone seems to emphasize Elgar’s mood of
resignation, which is heightened further by his restraint in use of
the orchestra. Yet despite the seeming melancholy of the music,
the Cello Concerto has rightfully gained a place not only as one
of Elgar’s best-known compositions, but as one of the most
exalted works for the solo instrument, a concerto deeply loved by
cellists and audiences alike.
The first performance took place in Queen’s Hall, London, on
October 26, 1919, with the composer conducting the London
Symphony and Felix Salmond as soloist.
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SHOWCASE
a balance of opposites
The Cello Concerto is a work of great beauty and great
contradiction. Elgar scores the concerto for a large orchestra,
but gives a chamber-like delicacy to much of the music. Moods
can change abruptly, from a touching intimacy one moment to
extroverted style the next. We almost sense two completely
different composers behind the concerto. One is the public Elgar—
strong, confident, declarative—while the other is the private Elgar,
torn by age and doubt. This strange division lies at the heart of
this quietly powerful work.
adagio. We seem to hear the old confident Elgar in the cello’s
sturdy opening recitative, marked nobilmente, yet at the main
body of the movement things change completely. Without any
accompaniment, violas lay out the movement’s haunting main
theme, which rocks along wistfully on its 9/8 meter. This somber
idea sets the mood for the entire opening movement. Even the
second subject, announced by pairs of woodwinds, is derived
from this theme. Throughout, Elgar reminds the soloist to play
dolcissimo and espressivo.
lento–allegro molto. The first movement is joined to the second by
a brief pizzicato reminiscence of the opening recitative, and the
solo cello tentatively outlines what will become the main theme
of the second movement, a scherzo. Once this movement takes
wing, it really flies—it is a sort of perpetual-motion movement,
and Elgar marks the cello’s part leggierissimo: “as light as possible.”
Tuneful interludes intrude momentarily on the busy progress,
but the cello’s breathless rush always returns, and the movement
races to a sudden—and pleasing—close.
adagio. The music returns to the mood of the opening movement.
Metric units are short here (the marking is 3/8), but Elgar writes
long, lyric lines for the soloist, who plays virtually without pause.
There is a dreamy, almost disembodied quality to this music, and
Donald Francis Tovey caught its mood perfectly when he
described the Adagio as “a fairy tale.”
allegro. The finale, cast in rondo form, has an extended introduction,
combining orchestral flourishes, bits of the opening recitative and
a cadenza for the soloist, before plunging into the main part of the
movement, marked Allegro, ma non troppo. This is launched with
some of the old Elgarian swagger, and the music at first seems full
of enough confidence to knit up the troubled edges of what has
gone before.
But this is only a first impression. Gone is the confident energy,
and we sense that in place of the music Elgar wanted to write he is
giving us the music he had to write. Finally a vigorous recurrence
of the bold, swaggering theme sweeps away the memory of
things past, and the work concludes on a grand flourish.
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Program Notes
Instrumentation: solo cello with orchestra comprising
2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani and strings
Program note by Robert Markow.
Franz Schubert
Born: January 31, 1797,
Vienna, Austria
Died: November 19, 1828,
Vienna, Austria
Symphony in C major,
D. 944, The Great
Premiered: March 21, 1839
he origins of Franz Schubert’s Great C-major symphony are
the stuff of legend. The symphony’s manuscript is dated
March 1828, mere months before the composer’s death at age 31.
And, as the legend has it, Schubert never heard a note of it: the
manuscript was consigned to dusty shelves upon his death, and it
was years before the music was performed, much longer before it
was understood. Not until 10 years after Schubert’s death did
Robert Schumann discover the manuscript of the symphony in
Vienna and send it off to Leipzig, where Felix Mendelssohn led the
premiere on March 21, 1839. That dramatic beginning established
it as one of the masterpieces of the symphonic literature.
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the symphony’s true story
This has always made a terrific story, even though much of it is
untrue. Recent research, which includes dating the manuscript
paper that Schubert used in different years, has shown that he
actually composed this symphony during the summer of 1825. He
had recently recovered from a serious illness, and now he went
on a walking tour of Upper Austria. In the town of Gmunden,
mid-way between Salzburg and Linz, Schubert began to sketch a
symphony. He worked on it all that summer and over the next
two years. (The date “March 1828” on the manuscript may be
the date of final revisions.) And Schubert did hear at least some
of this music. Orchestral parts were copied, and the orchestra of
the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde played through it in the
composer’s presence before rejecting it as too difficult.
Far from being welcomed into the repertory following
Mendelssohn’s premiere, the symphony actually made its way
very slowly. Attempts to perform it in London and Paris in the
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1840s foundered when players jeered the music and refused to
continue because of its difficulty; the American premiere had
occurred, in 1851, before this symphony was heard in those
two cities.
a transformative addition
Schubert scores the symphony for Classical orchestra (pairs of
winds, plus timpani and strings), but he makes one addition that
transforms everything: to Mozart’s orchestra he adds three
trombones, which are given important roles thematically. It is
part of the originality of this symphony that Schubert is willing,
for the first time, to treat the trombone as a thematic—rather
than a supportive—instrument. Their tonal heft dictates a greatly
increased string section and occasional doubling of the woodwind
parts, and everything about this music—its sonority and range of
expression—suggests that Schubert envisioned its performance by
a large orchestra.
Very early this symphony acquired the nickname Great, a
description that needs to be understood carefully. It was originally called The Great C-major to distinguish it from Schubert’s
brief Symphony No. 6 in C major, inevitably called The Little
C-major. And so in its original sense, Great was an indication only
of relative size. But that description has stuck to this music,
and if ever a symphony deserved to be called Great, this is it.
the music
andante—allegro, ma non troppo. The symphony has a magic
beginning. In unison, two horns sound a long call that seems to
come from a great distance. In the classical symphony form, the
slow introduction usually had nothing to do thematically with the
sonata-form first movement that followed but served only to call
matters to order and prepare the way for the Allegro. It is one
more mark of Schubert’s new vision that this slow introduction
would have important functions in the main body of the
movement. Schubert repeats this opening melody in various
guises before the music rushes into the Allegro, ma non troppo.
Strings surge ahead on sturdy dotted rhythms while woodwinds
respond with chattering triplets—Schubert will fully exploit the
energizing contrast between these two rhythms. The second
subject, a lilting tune for woodwinds, arrives in the “wrong” key
of E minor. (Schubert deftly nudges it into the “correct” key of
G major.) All seems set for a proper exposition, when Schubert
springs one of his best surprises: very softly, trombones intone
the horn theme from the very beginning, their dark color giving
that noble tune an ominous power. That theme now begins to
penetrate this movement, and the rhythm of its second measure
takes on a thematic importance of its own. The development is
brief, but the recapitulation is full, and Schubert drives the
movement to a thrilling conclusion; trombones push the music
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Program Notes
forward powerfully, and the opening horn call is shouted out in
all its glory as the movement hammers to its close.
allegro con moto. The slow movement is marked Andante con
moto, and the walking tempo implied in that title makes itself felt
in the music’s steady tread. Solo oboe sings the sprightly main
theme, while the peaceful second subject arrives in the strings.
There is no development, but Schubert creates another moment
of pure magic: over softly-pulsing string chords, a solo horn (once
again sounding as if from far away) leads the way into the
recapitulation. Schumann’s description of this passage, often
quoted, is worth hearing again: “Here everyone is hushed and
listening, as though some heavenly visitant were quietly stealing
through the orchestra.” The recapitulation itself is not literal, and
Schubert drives to a great climax where the music is suddenly
ripped into a moment of silence, the only point in the entire
movement where the steady opening tread is not heard. Only
gradually does the orchestra recover as the cellos lead to a luminous
restatement of the second subject, now richly embellished.
scherzo: allegro vivace. The Allegro vivace is the expected scherzo
and trio form, but again Schubert surprises us: the movement is
in sonata form and develops over such a generous span that if all
repeats are taken, it can approach the length of the two opening
movements. Strings stamp out the powerful opening, and violins
soar and plunge as it begins to develop. Part of the pleasure here
lies in the way Schubert transforms the sledgehammer power of
the opening into a series of terraced, needle-sharp entrances in
the course of the development. By contrast, the trio sings with a
rollicking charm before horns lead the way back to a literal
reprise of the scherzo.
allegro vivace. The finale, also marked Allegro vivace, opens with a
salvo of bright fanfares. So quickly do these whip past that one
does not at first recognize that they make the same contrast
between dotted and triplet rhythms that powered the first
movement—now these return to drive the finale along a shaft of
white-hot energy. This is the movement that caused early
orchestras to balk, and it remains very difficult, particularly for
the strings. It is in sonata form with two subjects, the first
growing smoothly out of the flying triplets and a second that
rides along the energy of four pounding chords. The first theme
provides the speed—those showers of triplets almost seem to
throw sparks through the hall—while the second subject and its
pounding chords take on a menacing strength as Schubert builds
to the climax. Along the way, attentive listeners will hear a whiff
of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Schubert’s own
close is as powerful as those of the master he so much admired.
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SHOWCASE
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets,
2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones,
timpani and strings
Program note by Eric Bromberger.
c da
The Minnesota Orchestra gave its initial performance of Bach’s
Fourth Brandenburg Concerto on December 11, 1924, at the
St. Paul Auditorium Theater, with Henri Verbrugghen
conducting. Earlier that year the Orchestra initiated its
illustrious recording history by visiting a New York City studio
to make four phonographs for the Brunswick-Balke-Collender
Company.
The Orchestra first performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto on
February 21, 1969, at Northrop Memorial Auditorium, with
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and the young, world-renowned
cellist Jacqueline du Pré—the subject of the 1998 film Hilary
and Jackie—as soloist. Just four years after that performance,
du Pré’s career was cut short by multiple sclerosis, which
forced her to stop performing at the age of 27.
The Orchestra introduced Schubert’s Great Symphony to its
repertoire on January 20, 1911, at the Minneapolis
Auditorium, with Emil Oberhoffer conducting. Two months
later, the ensemble traveled for the first time to Chicago, the
largest city it had ever visited, and performed at Chicago’s
Orchestra Hall. During this concert, a large explosion at a
powder mill in southern Wisconsin blew out windows all over
the Windy City and shook Orchestra Hall—but didn’t interrupt
the Orchestra as it continued to perform a Beethoven overture.