MASTER SERiES10

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SebaStian Lang-LeSSing Chief Conductor & Artistic Director

MONDAY 29 NOVEMBER 8PM

Federation Concert Hall, Hobart

TUESDAY 30 NOVEMBER 8PM

Albert Hall, Launceston

Sebastian Lang-Lessing conductor Bernd Glemser piano

BRAHMS

Piano Concerto No 2Allegro non troppoAllegro appassionatoAndanteAllegretto grazioso – Un poco più prestoDuration 46 mins

INTERVALDuration 20 mins

DVORÁK

Symphony No 9, From the New WorldAdagio – Allegro moltoLargoScherzo (Molto vivace)Allegro con fuocoDuration 40 mins

This concert will end at approximately 10 pm.

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3AbouT ThE MuSic2 ARTiST pRofilES

BERND GLEMSER

Bernd Glemser is a rare breed of pianist both in his phenomenally broad and eclectic repertory and in his seemingly

ubiquitous presence on the concert stage. Indeed, so much about his career appears worthy of the record books. Since 1981 he has won outright or captured a prize in seventeen consecutive international competitions (including the People’s Choice Award in the 1985 Sydney International Piano Competition). In 1989 he became the youngest professor to teach at a German university when he took up a position at the Musikhochschule in Saarbrücken, and in 1996 he was invited to become the first Western musician to perform live on Chinese television. He has made 33 recordings, the first appearing only in 1994, and has performed with major orchestras and conductors throughout Europe, Canada, the United States, South America, China, Japan, Australia and elsewhere. His repertory encompasses most major composers from J S Bach to the moderns and takes in large chunks of Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. In addition to many awards, he received the Andor Foldes Prize in 1992 and the European Pianist’s Prize in 1993 in Zurich. In 2003 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

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SEBASTIAN LANG-LESSING

Sebastian Lang-Lessing is Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra since 2004. Awarded the Ferenc Fricsay

Prize in Berlin at the age of 24, he subsequently took up a conducting post at the Hamburg State Opera, was appointed resident conductor at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and later Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique de Nancy. Under his direction, the Opéra de Nancy was elevated to national status becoming the Opéra national de Lorraine. His international career started at the Paris Opera, followed by engagements at Los Angeles Opera, San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Washington National Opera and the Opera houses in Oslo and Stockholm. He conducted a highly regarded new production of Wagner’s Rienzi at Deutsche Oper Berlin in January 2010 and a new production of Rosenkavalier at Cape Town Opera during the World Cup. Concert engagements include performances with Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Tokyo Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, major German Radio Orchestras and major Australian orchestras. He inaugurated the TSO’s annual Sydney season and led his orchestra on a tour of Japan. His discography includes music by the French composer Guy Ropartz, and his CDs with the TSO include the recently released complete symphonies of Mendelssohn with DVD, the complete Schumann symphonies, Romantic Overtures, music of Brett Dean, Mozart Arias with Sara Macliver, and works by Saint-Saëns, Franck, Ravel. Forthcoming TSO recordings include Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suites, Mozart symphonies, Mendelssohn and Ravel piano concertos with soloist Kirill Gerstein. Sebastian Lang-Lessing has been appointed Music Director of the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra.

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)

Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat Op 83

Allegro non troppo Allegro appassionato Andante Allegretto grazioso – Un poco più prestoBrahms might have felt some trepidation in writing a second piano concerto. But by the time he turned his attention to the Piano Concerto No 2 he had finally conquered the two major instrumental forms which had always given him the most trouble: the string quartet and the symphony. Now, with the Violin Concerto and German Requiem also behind him, it was time to revisit the piano concerto with newfound confidence and a proven virtuoso compositional technique.

The expansive first movement begins romantically with a horn call. The piano enters immediately, embroidering the melody and soon indulging in the closest thing to a cadenza to be found in the concerto. From here an orchestral tutti introduces the main thematic material. Rather than restating the main themes, the piano enters into a free, organically-developing dialogue with the orchestra, often becoming impassioned and occasionally visiting distant keys like B minor. There is a particularly elaborate preparation for the recapitulation with one of the main themes being played by the orchestra while the piano weaves arpeggio figures around it: one of the more majestic moments in a memorable opening movement.

As self-deprecating as ever, Brahms described the first movement as ‘innocuous’, which is why, he said, he took the bold step of inserting the fiery Allegro appassionato as the second of the four movements. Here the drama is increased still further in a D minor movement originally intended for the Violin Concerto. The ‘trio’ of the movement

is in D major, featuring sotto voce octaves in the piano, and in typical Brahmsian fashion it serves more as a development section than a simple contrasting episode.

The tonic key of B flat is re-established at the beginning of the slow movement, where a solo cello introduces one of Brahms’ most sublime melodies. The soloist enters in an improvisatory style, leading into a passionate middle section where tremolo figures on the strings accompany virtuoso trills and fanfares on the piano. Towards the recapitulation, the key of F sharp is established as the melody takes wide leaps, before the original key returns and the cello and piano lead the movement into a final duet.

The mood lightens in the final rondo, where the spirit of Mozart is invoked. At the opening, the tripping Hungarian-style tune sets the prevailing mood, then in quick succession new ideas emerge: a more restrained melody on woodwinds and then strings, a stately theme for piano followed by clarinets, and a cheeky one for piano with pizzicato strings. There are no trumpets and drums in this movement, and the soloist is left to shine through some extraordinarily difficult and surprisingly elaborate passages, even, at the transition to the coda in a section marked Un poco più presto, pre-empting the kind of metrical modulation which was to become synonymous with much 20th-century music. But nothing can hold back the sway of the gypsy dance rhythms and the music drives on to its emphatic conclusion.

Abridged from a note by Martin Buzacott, Symphony Australia © 2001

The TSO last performed this work in Hobart on 21 June 2002 with conductor Arvo Volmer and soloist Boris Berman.

54 AbouT ThE MuSic AbouT ThE MuSic

ANTONÍN DVORÁK (1841-1904)

Symphony No 9 in E minor Op 95, From the New World

Adagio – Allegro molto Largo Scherzo (Molto vivace) Allegro con fuocoCzech composer Antonín Dvorák arrived in New York with his wife and two of his six children on 26 September 1892. At the invitation of the wealthy and visionary philanthropist Mrs Jeanette Thurber, Dvorák had come to the New World to become Director of the National Conservatory of Music in Manhattan.

At the Conservatory, Dvorák struck up a friendship with a young African-American singing major from Pennsylvania, Harry T Burleigh. Although not far enough advanced to be a member of Dvorák's classes, Burleigh was invited on many occasions to sing the spirituals and worksongs of his people, music that caused Dvorák to write:

In these Negro melodies, I have discovered all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will… There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.

By early January 1893, Dvorák began to jot down sketches for a new symphony. By 24 May, it was complete. (Confusingly, he called this E minor symphony his ‘eighth’, but crossed that out, calling it his ‘seventh’. Initially published as his ‘fifth’, today we recognise it in its rightful chronological place as his ‘ninth’ – a fateful number for symphonic composers, post-Beethoven!) As the score was rushed out of the house, Dvorák hastily scrawled the famous moniker on its title

page: From the New World. With this New World Symphony, Dvorák sent greetings to his friends and colleagues in the Old World.

Its first performance occurred on 16 December that year, with Anton Seidl conducting the New York Philharmonic Society in Carnegie Hall. The response was rapturous. Dvorák wrote to his publisher that ‘newspapers say no composer has ever before had such a triumph… I had to thank [the audience] from the box like a king!’

The debate over the work’s ‘American’ credentials began almost immediately.

Dvorák was at pains to repeat to his friends that the New World was ‘essentially different from my earlier things – perhaps a little American – and it would never have been written just “so” had I never seen America.’ He dismissed as ‘nonsense’ the notion that he had introduced Native American or Negro melodies. Even so, many commentators hear echoes of the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot in the main theme of the first movement; others hear snippets of Yankee Doodle in the finale.

The haunting melody in the second movement poses many problems of identity. Miss Alice Fletcher, a prominent collector of Native American music, said that in 1893 Dvorák told her it sprang from an Osage Indian song he had heard during the several summer weeks he spent in the Bohemian village of Spillville, in north-east Iowa. (The argument was further muddied some years later, when William Arms Fisher, one of his Conservatory students, penned a text to the melody. From that moment, Goin’ Home became a favourite ‘spiritual’ on Paul Robeson’s recitals and in the 1941 movie It Started with Eve, sung by Deanna Durbin. Thus a melody possibly inspired by spirituals itself became a ‘spiritual’.) It was also quoted by Charles Ives in his Second Symphony, written between 1896 and 1902.

Harry T Burleigh, who had helped copy parts for the new symphony, had no doubts about its origin. ‘It was my privilege to sing repeatedly some of the old plantation songs for Dvorák in his house,’ he recalled. ‘One in particular, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, greatly pleased him, and part of this old spiritual will be found in the second theme of the first movement.’ Indeed, Dvorák changed his orchestration of the Largo; he felt that the cor anglais, not the clarinet he originally used, ‘most closely resembled the quality of Burleigh’s voice.’

Other aspects of Dvorák’s so-called ‘American identity’ need to be mentioned.

Dvorák arrived in America at the outset of a welter of celebrations commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ so-called ‘discovery of the New World’. For the Columbus Celebration Concert in Carnegie Hall on 21 October 1892, Dvorák conducted his new Te Deum, Op 103. For ‘Czech Day’at the Chicago Columbian Exhibition, 12 August 1893, he conducted some Slavonic Dances and his Symphony No 8, for an audience which included 30,000 Czechs and Moravians. For that same Exhibition he was also commissioned to compose music for a pageant celebrating Columbus; the project was scrapped, but the ever-resourceful Dvorák may have recycled some of its music in his new symphony. One can almost envisage the ‘heroic’ Columbus in the fanfare outbursts of the first and last movements.

In the tiny, desolate village of Spillville, where he composed his String Quartet, Op 97 (The American) and the piano miniatures Humoresques, Dvorák saw several performances of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in which the ‘Kickapoo Indians’ danced and sang. He read Theodore Baker’s dissertation on the music of the North American Indian. On a side trip to Minnesota, he stood in awe at the beautiful Horseshoe Falls of Minnehaha in St Paul. Without any paper, he wrote on his sleeve cuff the theme of the Larghetto movement of his Violin Sonatina, Op 100.

Perhaps the oddest of Dvorák’s manifold Americanisms is his arrangement of Stephen Foster’s song Old Folks at Home, written for a benefit concert sponsored by the New York Herald in 1894, in which Harry Burleigh sang one of the vocal solo parts.

Dvorák and his wife set sail from New York on 16 April 1895. He was due to return but decided to remain in his comfort-zone of Bohemia for the sake of his family and close-knit circle of friends. On 17 August, he sent his letter of resignation to Mrs Thurber.

In inviting Dvorák to New York, Mrs Thurber had hoped he would not only help reverse the brain-drain to Europe but sow the seeds of a national school of composition in America. A decade later, Gustav Mahler was to arrive in New York to conduct. But no other European symphonic work was to imprint its American outlook and origins in the history of music as Dvorák’s New World.

Indirectly, Mrs Thurber got her wish and her memorial to boot.

Abridged from a note by Vincent Plush © 2002

The TSO first performed this work in Hobart on 11 April 1951 with conductor Joseph Post. The most recent performance was in Hobart on 1 December 2007 with conductor Nicholas Milton.

Antonín Dvorák

7chAiR SponSoRS And pATRonS

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YOUR CHRISTMAS

8 TASMAniAn SYMphonY oRchESTRA

9TSo pARTnERS

VIOLINJun Yi Ma ConcertmasterElinor Levy Associate ConcertmasterDaniel Kossov Principal SecondRobert John Principal FirstJessica BellRohana BrownMiranda CarsonYue-Hong ChaFrances DaviesCherelle GadgeMichael JohnstonChristine LawsonAlison Lazaroff-SomssichSusannah NgChristopher Nicholas James SteendamLaura ThomsonGeorge Vi

VIOLA Janet Rutherford*Rodney McDonaldWilliam NewberyAnna RoachJosephine St LeonLuke Spicer

CELLO Sue-Ellen Paulsen*Dale BrownIvan JamesMartin PenickaBrett Rutherford

DOUBLE BASS Stuart Thomson*Robin BrawleyMichael FortescuePhillipa Strickland

FLUTE Douglas Mackie*Lloyd Hudson PiccoloFiona Perrin

OBOEDavid Nuttall*Dinah Woods Cor Anglais

CLARINETDuncan Abercromby*Andrew Seymour E-flat ClarinetChris Waller Bass Clarinet

BASSOON Lisa Storchheim*John Panckridge ContrabassoonJack Schiller

HORN Wendy Page*Heath Parkinson*Jules EvansRoger JacksonGreg Stephens

TRUMPET Yoram Levy*Matt DempseyJoshua Rogan

TROMBONE Donald Bate*Liam O’Malley

BASS TROMBONERobert Clark*

TUBATimothy Jones*

TIMPANIMatthew Goddard*

PERCUSSION Gary Wain*Stephen MarskellCalvin McClayTracey Patten

HARPBronwyn Wallis#

PIANO/CELESTEStephanie Abercromby#

*principal player #guest principal

Jun Yi Ma plays a violin attributed to Guarneri on loan from Nathan Waks.

Chief Conductor & Artistic DirectorSebastian Lang-Lessing

Managing DirectorNicholas Heyward

Australian Music Program DirectorLyndon Terracini

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TSo cAlEndAR of concERTS

Saturday 11 december 6pm Christmas with the TSOFEDERATION CONCERT HALL, HOBART Welcome the festive season

with the TSO! Hear all your Christmas favourites and sing along too! A fun-filled event for all the family, Christmas with the TSO is a concert you won’t want to miss.

Brett Weymark conductorJames Clayton baritoneChristopher Lawrence compereTSO Chorus

Program includes:HANDEL Messiah (excerpts)TCHAIKOVSKY Nutcracker (excerpts)CORELLI Christmas ConcertoANDERSON Sleigh Ride Silent Night, O Come all Ye Faithful, The First Nowell

FrIday 4 marcH 7.30pm Starry, Starry NightFEDERATION CONCERT HALL, HOBART Join Sebastian Lang-Lessing

and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra for this starry season opener. Enjoy black-tie style, complimentary bubbles at interval and a sparkling program of orchestral showpieces including Rimsky-Korsakov’s brilliantly colourful Scheherazade and Ravel’s glittering Piano Concerto in G.

Saturday 5 marcH 7.30pm

ALBERT HALL, LAUNCESTON

Sebastian Lang-Lessing conductor Ewa Kupiec piano

LISZT Les Préludes RAVEL Piano Concerto in G RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherazade

Saturday 12 marcH 7pm Discover ChopinFEDERATION CONCERT HALL, HOBART Popularly known as the “poet

of the piano”, Frederic Chopin composed some of the most beautiful keyboard music ever written. His Piano Concerto No 2 has long been enjoyed by pianists and audiences. Find out what makes this work tick as conductor Sebastian Lang-Lessing and pianist Ewa Kupiec explore its intricacies and breathe fresh life into an old favourite.

Sebastian Lang-Lessing conductor Ewa Kupiec piano

CHOPIN Piano Concerto No 2