PROGRAM NOTES FOR NOVEMBER 19 & 20 Concert Românesc [Romanian Concerto] György Ligeti Born 28 May 1923 in Dicsoszentmárton, Transylvania [Romania] Died 12 June, 2006 in Vienna Approximate duration 12 minutes If you’ve heard of Ligeti, it might be because of his Lux Aeterna,, which Stanley Kubrick used for the soundtrack of the iconic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A few years ago, in 2010, the New York Philharmonic made national cultural news by programming Ligeti’s Le grand macabre in concert – but his is still hardly a household name. About the composer Arguably the most distinguished Hungarian composer since Bartók, Ligeti is best known for his textural shifts and masses of sound. In his later works, he often merged radical techniques with traditional approaches to form. Always, he sought unusual sonorities. From 1959 on, his compositions featured exotic, sometimes bizarre, sonic effects and unusual approaches to organization of time. He withdrew most of his youthful compositions. The Concert Românesc is one of the few early works he did not suppress. Ligeti was born in a Hungarian-speaking part of Transylvania to Jewish parents. His father and brother died in Nazi camps, and he barely survived the war himself, working with high explosives near the front line as a Nazi slave laborer. Postwar life in Communist Romania was not much better, but poor health kept Ligeti out of mandatory military service and he managed to graduate from the Budapest Academy of Music in 1949. He served on its faculty until he fled Hungary for Vienna after the unsuccessful Hungarian uprising in 1956. He became active with the European avant-garde and was closely associated with the Darmstadt-Cologne school. He adopted Austrian citizenship in 1967. In the composer’s words This concerto predates all that. It is firmly rooted in the indigenous music of the region where Ligeti grew up. The composer later wrote: In 1949, when I was 26, I learned how to transcribe folk songs from wax cylinders at the Folklore Institute in Bucharest. Many of these melodies stuck in my memory and led in 1951 to the composition of my Romanian Concerto; however, not

everything in it is genuinely Romanian as I also invented elements in the spirit of the village bands. I was later able to hear the piece at an orchestral rehearsal in Budapest – a public performance had been forbidden. Under Stalin’s dictatorship, even folk music was allowed only in a ‘politically correct’ form, in other words, if forced into the straitjacket of the norms of socialist realism: major/minor harmonizations were welcome and even modal orientalisms in the style of Khachaturian were still permitted, but Stravinsky was excommunicated. The peculiar way in which village bands harmonized their music, often full of dissonances and ‘against the grain,’ was regarded as incorrect. In the fourth movement of my Concert Românesc there is a passage in which an F-sharp is heard in the context of F major. This was reason enough for the apparatchiks responsible for the arts to ban the entire piece. An abundance of solos with an accent on folk music This piece is not a conventional concerto, but more like a concerto for orchestra, with cameo roles for the woodwinds and more prominent solos for horn and violin. The four movements are played without pause. Each has a distinct character, inflected with the modal harmonies and irregular rhythms of Romanian folk music. If you know Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, you will identify immediately with the first two movements. The spirit of Kodály’s Háry János hovers over the Adagio, while George Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsodies clearly influence the finale. Ligeti learned well from these models, capturing the individual charm and character of Romanian music. In the third movement, solo horn plays natural harmonics, so the pitches sound slightly out of tune. It makes a surprise return appearance at the end of the fourth movement. Most of the finale is a wild romp, crossing a frenetic tarantella with demonic Gypsy-style fiddling. The score calls for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, tambourine, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, bass drum, solo violin and strings. Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 Wolfgang Amadè Mozart Born 27 January, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria Died 5 December, 1791 in Vienna Approximate duration 31 minutes Most music-lovers know that the keys of G minor and D minor have special significance in Mozart's music, calling forth works of epic tragedy that plumb the innermost depths of the composer's soul. In fact, any work in minor mode was unusual in the late eighteenth century. Mozart’s compositions in darker keys have attracted more attention not only because they contain music of such extraordinarily high quality, but also because he himself was highly sensitive to

nuances of tonality. No key was chosen lightly for any of his works, and there are decided similarities in the character of many works sharing key signature and mode. Among the Mozart compositions in C minor, a series dating from the 1780s stands out. Notable among them are the Wind Serenade, K.388 (1782), a Fugue for two pianos, K.426 (1783), and the wonderful C minor Piano Sonata and Fantasy, K.457 and K.475 (1784 and 1785, respectively). The piano concerto we hear this weekend was completed in March 1786. What common thread unites these works beyond the key in which they are written? Musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon has suggested that all of them are manifestations of depression, and that Mozart may have been acutely depressed in spring 1786, when he wrote his C minor Piano Concerto. Certainly K.491 is a work of epic grandeur and symphonic scale. Mozart employs his largest concerto orchestra in this piece; it is the sole piano concerto calling for both oboes and clarinets. Both this concerto and the well-loved Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K.466, anticipate Beethoven’s stormy emotional intensity. If the C minor concerto does not seethe with the unbridled romantic abandon of K.466, it joins that work by peering into the nineteenth century. The primary difference is perhaps method: in this later work Mozart applies his technique with more restraint and subtlety. Indeed, a more illustrative comparison among the piano concerti may be with the transparent Concerto No. 23 in A, K.488, completed only three weeks prior to the C minor work in March 1786. Mozart's intense expressivity and exquisitely balanced dialogue between soloist and orchestra are mirrored in these two works of strongly divergent temperament. Arthur Hutchings has called K.491's opening Allegro Mozart's greatest concerto movement. An expansive orchestral exposition establishes dignity, grandeur and drama that are sustained throughout the work. Mozart distributes his thematic material liberally among the orchestra, with masterly interplay between instrumental ensemble and soloist. One of the performance problems presented throughout this concerto is that the manuscript to K.491 is one of Mozart’s sketchiest. The soloist must fill in some passages that Mozart only indicated in a kind of musical shorthand. For these performances, Mr. Gewirtzman plays a cadenza based on one by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, which he has edited extensively. In its pristine simplicity, the E-flat Larghetto is one of the most perfect creations in all Mozart; a couple of years later, he emulated it closely in the lovely slow movement (also in E-flat) to the B-flat Piano Sonata, K.570. Here, given the rich color resources of the orchestra, he turns a simple A-B-A-C-A form into a sophisticated amalgam of rondo, woodwind serenade and variation. Each of the contrasting episodes (the first in C-minor, the second in A-flat) is stated first by the woodwinds, then varied by the soloist. With the finale, Mozart produced his last essay in variation form among the mature concertos. Only this and K.453 in G conclude with variations, but the structure in K.491 is more complex and lends greater weight to the finale, lending it a sense of importance that rivals that of the first movement. Simply stated, the movement consists of a theme, eight variations and a coda. But variations two through seven are double variations (like the popular A-major piano sonata, in which the second half of each section introduces a different variation treatment). Mozart sustains interest by making the first variation almost exclusively a pianistic endeavor; whereas in the last he

switches the meter to 6/8 and adds a brilliant coda. Brilliance does not necessarily mean the clouds lift, however. This is the only Mozart keyboard concerto to sustain its mood of tragedy by ending in minor mode. K. 491 is scored for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani, solo piano and strings. Prelude to L'après-midi d'un faune Claude Debussy Born 22 August, 1862 in St-Germain-en-Laye, France Died 25 March, 1918 in Paris Approximate duration 10 minutes L'après-midi d'un faune ("Afternoon of a Faun") is not technically the name of Claude Debussy's well-known orchestral piece, but rather the title of a poem written by the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). Debussy's music, though often mistakenly referred to by the name of the poem, is actually a prelude to the poem. The distinction is important, for as the composer himself noted, he intended his music to be "a very free illustration and in no way a synthesis of the poem." Written between 1865 and 1876, Mallarmé's poem is subtitled "Eclogue." He conceived it for the stage, intending that it be recited by an actor as a monologue. One of its early titles was "Monologue d'un faune." In it, a faun dreams about the conquest of nymphs on a languorous summer afternoon. The subtle eroticism of Mallarmé's powerful symbolist imagery inspired young Debussy, who was a highly literate musician and had, by 1890, become a member of Mallarmé's inner circle. The composer apparently planned a musical triptych as incidental music for the poem. When the piece was announced in March 1894, it consisted of a Prélude, Interludes et Paraphrase Finale. Debussy either abandoned the later movements or compressed his ideas into the single ten-minute work that has survived. In that essential form, it received its first performance in December 1894, two years after he began work on it. The Prélude is atmospheric, an evocation of the poem's lyrical spirit rather than a lyrical representation. Relying heavily on whole tone scales and an avoidance of a defined tonal center, the music has two principal themes. The first, stated by the flute, is sinuous, lyrical, sensual. The second, which belongs primarily to the other winds, is more concrete. Throughout the Prélude, Debussy's effect is fragmentary. No real development of the themes occurs. With muted strings and horns, he captures the shimmering beauty of the summer's day. No brasses other than mellow French horns mar the subtle delicacy of the orchestration, whose rainbow of pastels beguiles our ears so seductively. Debussy's score calls for three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, four horns, two harps and strings.

Suite from L'oiseau de feu [The Firebird], 1919 Revised Version Igor Stravinsky Born 17 June, 1882 in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia Died 6 April, 1971 in New York City Approximate duration 23 minutes Handsome prince, captive princess, evil ogre, magic bird Firebird is adapted from a Russian fairy tale in which a handsome prince is drawn into an enchanted garden and palace by the exotic bird of the title, who is a sort of good fairy. He falls in love with a beautiful captive princess, but must break the spell of the evil ogre Kashchei (who presides over the palace) before he may claim his bride. Stravinsky was young when he composed Firebird, and drew heavily on Tchaikovskyan ballet models, which were essentially derived from French principles. He took great care to bind the music closely to the action on stage. If one listens carefully, even the Suite follows the chronological events and essential outline of the story. Remarkably, Firebird was Stravinsky's first ballet, and the first of the trio of ballets that established him as a composer of international stature. The new work was an instant success, placing Stravinsky on the musical map virtually overnight. Behind the scenes: the first rehearsals Tamara Karsavina, the ballerina who created the title role in the 1910 production of Firebird, wrote an article in 1948 recalling the young composer's participation and demeanor as the new ballet went into rehearsal: Often he came early to the theatre before a rehearsal began, in order to play for me, over and over again, some specially difficult passage. I felt grateful, not only for the help he gave me, but for the manner in which he gave it. For there was no impatience in him with my slow understanding; no condescension of a master of his craft towards the slender equipment of my musical education. It was interesting to watch him at the piano. His body seemed to vibrate with his own rhythm; punctuating staccatos with his head, he made the pattern of his music forcibly clear to me, more so than the counting of bars would have done. Embracing Mother Russia With Firebird’s brilliant and lush orchestration, Stravinsky proved how well he had learned from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. Relying heavily on Russian folk tunes, he also acknowledged some debt to all the "Russian Five." The Ronde des princesses shares the exotic orientalism of Borodin's lyrical Polovetsian Dances; Stravinsky's grandiose and triumphant finale is surely related to Mussorgsky's "Great Gate of Kiev" in Pictures at an Exhibition.

In a sense, though, Firebird also marked Stravinsky's break with his homeland. Thereafter he was a citizen of the world, living largely in France and Switzerland, and eventually in the United States. The ballet is at once a traditional work and a turning point, marking both the end of an era and the beginning of a brilliant, lengthy career. Firebird was premiered by the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev's Ballets russes in Paris in 1910. The following year, Stravinsky derived a Suite from the ballet, concluding with Kashchei's "Infernal Dance." He re-orchestrated the Suite in 1919 for a somewhat smaller orchestra, using the Finale of the complete ballet for his conclusion; that is the version we hear. For a third version in 1945, he composed some additional connective music. Stravinsky's 1919 score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbal, triangle, xylophone, harp, piano and strings. IN THE COMPOSER’S WORDS In his 1936 autobiography, Stravinsky described the circumstances that led to his composing Firebird. In the summer of 1909 I returned to [my opera Le Rossignol] with the firm intention of finishing it. . . . But a telegram then arrived to upset all my plans. Diaghilev, who had just reached St. Petersburg, asked me to write the music for L'Oiseau de feu for the Russian Ballet season at the Paris Opera House in the spring of 1910. Only 27, Stravinsky was keenly aware of both the learning experience and prestige he would gain by accepting the assignment. It was highly flattering to be chosen from among the musicians of my generation, and to be allowed to collaborate in so important an enterprise side by side with personages who were generally recognized as masters in their own spheres. With the instinct for theatre and sense for life's adventure that served him admirably for the next six decades, he embraced his new colleagues, dizzy with ideas. At the moment when I received Diaghilev's commission, the ballet had just undergone a great transformation owing to the advent of a young ballet master, Fokine, and the flowering of a whole bouquet of artists full of talent and originality: Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky. Notwithstanding all my admiration for the classical ballet and its great master, Marius Petipa, I could not resist the intoxication produced by such ballets as Les Danses du Prince Igor or Carnaval, the only two of Fokine's productions that I had so far seen. All this greatly tempted me, and impelled me to break through the pale and eagerly seize this opportunity of making

close contact with that group of advanced and active artists of which Diaghilev was the soul, and which had long attracted me.  This information is provided as a benefit to Charlottesville Symphony patrons. Reproduction or reuse in any form is expressly prohibited without written permission from the author. by Laurie Shulman © 2016