17INCONCERT

NASHV I L L E SYMPHONY PERFORMS

ScheherazadeR IMSKY -KORSAKOV ’S Scheherazade

NASHVILLE SYMPHONY GILBERT VARGA, conductorANNE-MARIE MCDERMOTT, piano

C L A S S I C A L S E R I E S

T H A N K YO U TO O U R S P O N S O R S

A E G I S

EST. 2013

FOUNDATIONS C I E N C E S

MEDIA PARTNER

OFFICIAL PARTNER

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, AT 7 PM FRIDAY, APRIL 8, AT 8 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 9, AT 8 PM

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDNSymphony No. 1 in D major

PrestoAndantePresto

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 450

AllegroAndanteAllegro

Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

INTERMISSION

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherazade, Op. 35

Largo e maestoso - Allegro non troppoLento - Allegro moltoAndantino quasi allegrettoAllegro molto

Yamaha CFX concert grand piano provided by Yamaha Artist Services, New York, in association with Miller Piano Specialists in Franklin, TN.

This weekend's concerts made possible in part through the generosity of David and Diane Black.

18 APRIL 2016

TONIGHT’S CONCERTAT A GLANCE

JOSEPH HAYDN Symphony No. 1 in D major

• “The Father of the Symphony,” Austrian composer Joseph Haydn didn’t actually invent the symphony, but he did establish it as the quintessential classical music form. In his lifetime, he penned more than 100 symphonies — and these concerts mark the very first time that the Nashville Symphony has performed his Symphony No. 1. Written while the composer was in his mid-20s, the work already has the energy and sparkle of his later symphonies.

• A former boy soprano, Haydn struggled to make ends meet after his voice broke, and his job as Kapellmeister (musical director) for the court of the Austrian Count Morzin was his first full-time employment as a musician and composer. This piece must have reassured the Count that he made the right hire!

• Though we typically consider the symphony to be a four-movement form, in this piece, as with other early symphonies by Haydn, there are only three movements. The key is D major — also the key of his 104th and final symphony.

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherazade

• Rimsky-Korsakov was a member of the Russian composer collective known as “The Five,” who helped to establish a uniquely Russian musical identity in the 19th century. His best-known works — including Scheherazade — are for full orchestra, and he is remembered today for his especially vibrant and creative use of orchestral colors.

• Written in 1888, by which time he was well-established as a composer, Scheherazade is inspired by the tales from The Thousand and One Nights, with each of the movements titled after episodes from the collection. In spite of this, Rimsky-Korsakov didn’t want listeners to be too attached to the plot of the stories as they listened to the piece. In his autobiography, he wrote that the real reason he kept the title Scheherazade is for the way it evokes “the East and fairy-tale marvels.”

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Piano Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major

• The pairing of Haydn and Mozart on these concerts is a fitting combination, as the two became friends after Mozart — who was 24 years younger — relocated to Vienna in the 1780s. His Piano Concerto No. 15 dates from this era. It’s a beautiful example of the “grand concerto” style that he was exploring at the time. Listen for the winds in the first movement as they introduce the jaunty first theme in conversation with the strings.

• Although this piece is considered one of the most technically demanding of Mozart’s 27 piano concertos, the soloist is expected make it sound as elegant and effortless as possible. Guest pianist Anne-Marie McDermott is certainly up to the task. An accomplished performer, she gives over 100 concerts a year and recently released an album of three Mozart Piano Concertos performed with string quartet.

COUNT MORZIN

SCHEHERAZADE AND SHAHRYAR BY FERDINAND KELLER

VIENNA, 1700s

19INCONCERT

CL

AS

SIC

AL

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN

Composed: c. 1759First performance: date unknown; possibly 1759 at the estate of Haydn’s patron Count von Morzin First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the orchestra’s first performances. Estimated length: 12 minutes

Symphony No. 1 in D major, Hoboken I/1

Born on March 31, 1732 in Rohrau, Lower Austria; died on May 31, 1809 in Vienna

Through a happy coincidence, Franz Joseph Haydn was born just a month before George

Washington. Both, of course, are regarded as major founding figures. In Haydn’s case, this reputation stems from his role in establishing both the symphony and the string quartet as the most prestigious genres of classical instrumental music, elevating what had been entertainment to a lofty status that has endured up to the present.

Haydn didn’t invent these genres — a paternity test would reveal their complicated, multinational lineage, with roots going back to the overtures written for Italian opera. Moreover, the symphony was attracting interest from numerous contemporaries around the time he essayed his own official first works in the genre. Yet during the period of transition from the Baroque to what later became understood as “the Classical era,” no other figure did as much as Haydn to transform this form of music-making into a vehicle for cutting-edge creativity. This is the sense in which Haydn “invented” the symphony.

The first known mention of the Symphony No. 1 is from November 1759, when Haydn was in his mid-20s. It was in the late 1750s that he landed his first full-time job, a post as Kapellmeister — the person in charge of musical affairs — for the estate of Count Morzin, located in what is today the Czech Republic. The musicologist David Wyn Jones points out that the new responsibility was

a game-changer: “Becoming a Kapellmeister at a secular court must have been a challenge that was both new and unexpected. It signaled a turning point for Haydn and, ultimately, the whole course of music history.”

Haydn remained in that position for only three years (at the most — documentation of this period is sketchy) before running into the usual occupational hazard of the time: money problems forced the Count to downsize, which meant cutting his musical staff. But the excellent recommendation Haydn presumably received led to one of the greatest strokes of fortune in his long life: soon after, he was hired to join the staff of the Esterházy family.

Working for this noble Hungarian family, which commanded immense wealth and influence, gave Haydn the security that was essential to his temperament. At the Esterházy estate the composer had at his disposal a fine orchestra to serve as his laboratory for trying out different ideas in the symphonic format. He would eventually write 104 symphonies, including commissions he took up independently.

The widespread image of Haydn’s position as being the equivalent of a servant — working at something like a mid-18th-century Downton Abbey — turns out to be not quite accurate. According to the New Grove Dictionary, Haydn “was no servant, but a professional employee.”

The musicologist Daniel Heartz points out that the First Symphony’s home key of D major — “the most brilliant of orchestral keys” — is the same key Haydn chose to launch his symphonies under Prince Esterházy, as well as the key of his very final symphony (written for London in 1794, by which time the composer had become an international celebrity).

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Count Morzin’s house orchestra is believed to have numbered about 15 players, with

the bassoon as part of the basso continuo, laying out the harmonic foundation of the musical argument.

Limited as these means seem in comparison with the lush orchestration we’ll hear from Rimsky-Korsakov on the second half of our

20 APRIL 2016

CL

AS

SIC

AL

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Composed: 1784 First performance: March 24, 1784, with the composer as soloist First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the orchestra’s first performances.Estimated length: 25 minutes

Piano Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major, K. 450

Born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria; died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna

A generation younger than Haydn — with whom he became friends during the 1780s,

after moving to Vienna — Mozart left behind his own impressive catalogue of symphonies, totaling more than his 41 officially numbered symphonic works. His later symphonies explore still other areas of the genre’s potential, offering a parallel to the finest of those by Haydn. But his achievement with the piano concerto is on a par with what the elder composer did for the symphony: Mozart transformed an incipient genre into one of the quintessential statements of the Classical style.

For a long time, though, the majority of Mozart’s 27 piano concertos suffered neglect. It took the composer’s bicentennial in 1956 to spur renewed interest in these masterworks — along with a deeper appreciation of Mozart’s musical

program, the variety and dynamic texture Haydn manages to elicit is yet another facet of this composer’s innovative art.

The First Symphony is limited to three movements: Haydn is still working out the major parameters for what will he will burnish into the ideal of the mature Classical symphony, including large-scale architecture, presentation and development of thematic ideas, and how to balance individual instrumental voices with the full ensemble.

Heartz speculates that the piece’s brief proportions indicate that it “may have functioned as the curtain raiser” to a spoken play in Vienna, while at the same time doing double duty as music for the enjoyment of his patron, to be played by Morzin’s private musicians.

The first movement shows Haydn’s familiarity with current trends in court orchestras — particularly the elegant but energetic crescendo that launches the work and defines its mood. The buoyantly ascending first theme brims with confidence and seems well-suited, in hindsight, to Haydn’s meteoric career as a symphonist. For the not-really-slow middle movement Haydn restricts his instrumental palette still further to just strings and continuo, drawing on a dance-flavored idiom that would not have fazed listeners who hadn’t updated their music libraries scene the heyday of the Baroque. The finale is marked presto, like the first movement, and returns to the attitude of esprit and freshly discovered energy heard at the beginning of the Symphony.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 1 is scored for a small orchestra of flute, 2 oboes, bassoon, 2 horns, strings, and continuo.

21INCONCERT

CL

AS

SIC

AL

significance overall. This turnaround of opinion is an interesting case of how the work of illustrious performers (Clara Haskil and Edwin Fischer, for instance) can converge with the insights of scholars (and, dare one say, even program annotators — especially the legendary Donald Francis Tovey) to reawaken curiosity about music long assumed to be irretrievably “old-fashioned.”

Mozart did not share Haydn’s luck with the system of patronage. He searched in vain for a suitable permanent position after his post at the Prince-Archbishop’s court in Salzburg became unbearable. Picking up and moving to Vienna allowed Mozart a far greater measure of the creative freedom he yearned for, but he was forced to adapt to his new situation as a freelance artist.

As a result, he blazed the trail Beethoven would emulate of finding success as a performer-composer: a virtuoso who expanded his public following through concerts that he himself organized. In one letter to his father around the time he introduced the Piano Concerto No. 15, Mozart complained that “I’ve been feeling somewhat tired lately — from so much performing; and it’s not the least of my credits that my listeners never are.…” [Mozart’s emphasis]

In Vienna Mozart depended for his income on a combination of private teaching and these public events. The latter typically featured a fresh batch of piano concertos, ideal to shine the light on Mozart’s virtuosity at the keyboard — including his remarkable gift for improvisation. “The acts or professions of composing and performing,” observes the musicologist Richard Taruskin, “were [for Mozart] not nearly so separate as they have since become in the sphere of ‘classical’ music.”

Mozart didn’t write his piano concertos as pure “art for art’s sake,” but as market-driven commodities. Yet he did so while pushing the boundaries of that market. The Concerto No. 15 marks a significant departure in its prominent use of the woodwinds, for example. Moreover, observes concerto expert Simon P. Keefe, Mozart here embarks on a new vision of the genre with a perfect balance of “the grand, brilliant, and intimate,” referring not just to the composer’s new style of orchestration and orchestral participation in the argument, but also to the intensified virtuosity that is a signature of the Concerto No. 15.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Mozart was well aware of the new ground he was breaking — and eager to know what

his father and sister thought of these new works. In a letter from May 1784, he says he finds it “impossible to choose between the two Concertos [Nos. 15 and 16]. I think they are both concertos that make you sweat. — But as far as difficulty is concerned, the B-flat has the advantage over the D major.”

Note the composer’s choice to launch the orchestral introduction with the woodwinds, which are entrusted with the perky first theme. The soloist enters with a call to attention before deigning to take up the actual theme. What follows involves a fascinating give-and-take between the piano and orchestra.

For the middle movement, Mozart touches again on the more chamber-like style that had characterized his preceding piano concerto. His plan here is a theme with just two variations — but deliciously elaborated and decorated ones. The solo part requires a type of virtuosity different from that of the outer movements: the ability to make the keyboard breathe and sing in a mood of sustained rapture.

The piano sets the finale in motion by sounding its playful, rhythmically irresistible theme. But it’s a deceptively simple-sounding start. Mozart’s virtuosic demands include fearsome scales and rhythmic accents. Timing it all precisely and cleanly is a bit like skating on a thin crust of ice. The piano part gives a flavor of how thrilling it must have been to belong to those first audiences in Vienna.

In addition to the solo piano, the Concerto No. 15 is scored for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings.

It was with his preceding Concerto in E-flat major, K. 449 (composed less than two months before) that Mozart inaugurated a system of keeping track of his works with a dated catalogue. His entry for the B-flat Concerto is March 15, 1785, which was followed by two more similarly large-scaled concertos that spring: Nos. 16 and 17 (K. 451 and 453, respectively).

22 APRIL 2016

CL

AS

SIC

AL

NIKOLAI ANDREYEVICH RIMSKY-KORSAKOV

Composed: 1888 First performance: October 28, 1888, in Saint Petersburg, with Rimsky-Korsakov conductingFirst Nashville Symphony performance: January 30, 1951, at the Ryman Auditorium with guest conductor Virgil ThomsonEstimated length: 48 minutes

Born in Tikhvin, near the Russian city of Novgorod, on March 18, 1844; died in Saint Petersburg on June 21, 1908

It’s fun to speculate about what adventures Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov might

have encountered during his early years sailing around the world as midshipman aboard a Russian military clipper. That’s a temptation certainly indulged by the kitschy 1947 Hollywood film Song of Scheherazade. This cinematic spectacle includes a scene that shows Rimsky-Korsakov “dashing off the main themes to Scheherazade on the back of an art sketch hanging on the wall of a Moroccan bordello,” as Charles P. Mitchell describes it in The Great Composers Portrayed on Film. And there are episodes in the composer’s own life that might even be at home in The Arabian Nights, the collection of tales from across the Middle East and South Asia that first started spreading in Europe in the early 18th century.

But in real life Rimsky-Korsakov didn’t write Scheherazade until more than two decades after his sea voyage in the early 1860s (which included a stop in New York). He had long since been serving as an influential professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. In fact, the composer had learned early on to combine his passion for music with his career in the Imperial Russian Navy. In 1873

Scheherazade, Op. 35

he was able to resign his commission and take on the civilian post of Inspector of Naval Bands. On a trip the next year to southern Crimea, he became intrigued by the sound of “Oriental music in its natural state, so to speak,” as he later described it in his memoir.

It was while working to complete his friend Alexander Borodin’s exotically tinged opera Prince Igor — left unfinished when Borodin died in 1887 — that Rimsky-Korsakov’s interest in the fantastic world of The Arabian Nights was awakened, the composer notes in his memoir. Largely self-trained like Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin had been the senior member of the St. Petersburg composer collective dubbed “The Mighty Five,” who were bent on forging a national Russian style of art music. Rimsky-Korsakov was regarded by others in the group as a sell-out for believing in the importance of conservatory training, but he played a pivotal part in getting the word out on the creative breakthroughs of fellow members Borodin and Mussorgsky (a former roommate), investing huge amounts of effort in editing and preparing their manuscripts for performance.

By 1887-88, when he composed Scheherazade following a dry spell in his own creativity, Rimsky-Korsakov had established a reputation for his command of orchestration — a subject he taught at the Conservatory, eventually distilling his ideas into a textbook that is still in use, Principles of Orchestration. On one level Scheherazade can be enjoyed as a kind of concerto for orchestra, featuring especially prominent parts for solo violin and woodwinds. Even as Rimsky-Korsakov and his peers grappled with the question of how much their music should reflect an authentic Russian identity, his extraordinary gift for eliciting particular sonorities reminds us of another controversial issue composers confronted during this period: to what degree can (or even should) a composition tell a story that is known from realms outside music, such as literature or painting?

THERE ARE EPISODES IN RIMSKY-KORSAKOV’S OWN LIFE THAT MIGHT EVEN BE AT HOME IN THE ARABIAN NIGHTS.

CL

AS

SIC

AL

As the general dramatic framework for his orchestral suite, Rimsky-Korskav provided this scenario, borrowing the narrative structure that holds together the Arabian Nights collection: “The Sultan Shahriar, convinced of the deceitfulness and infidelity of all women, had sworn an oath to put each of his wives to death after their first night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by the expedient of arousing the Sultan’s interest in a series of tales she recounted over a period of 1,001 nights…. Driven by curiosity, the Sultan postponed the execution of his wife from day to day, and eventually renounced his bloody plan.”

Rimsky-Korsakov would later skirt the problem of programmatic orchestral music by devoting his attention to opera for the rest of his career. But Scheherazade manifests his own ambivalence toward this question. Though the composer began with a more abstract plan loosely involving the fairy-tale world he admired in The Arabian Nights, he went on to add suggestive titles to each of the suite’s four movements: The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship (I), The Kalendar Prince (II), The Young Prince and the Young Princess (III), and Festival at Baghdad. The Sea. The Ship Breaks

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Rimsky-Korsakov’s musical framework sets off the contrast between the cruel Sultan and

the masterful narrator Scheherazade from the beginning. The aggressive, brass-laden music we first hear is associated with the unyielding masculine energy of the Sultan. This is followed by a series of dreamy chords, curtain-raiser to a sweetly melancholy, lengthy violin solo — the voice of his new wife, teller of tales.

This dualism serves as a prelude but also returns, in transmogrified forms, throughout what follows. In fact, Rimsky-Korsakov uses Scheherazade’s violin music as a threading device between movements. The first movement includes one of the great musical depictions of the sea in the orchestral literature, while the second unfolds

Against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman (IV). Ultimately, Rimsky-Korsakov regretted the “crutch” such programmatic links might become, feeling that they would distract listeners from paying attention to the music itself.

24 APRIL 2016

CL

AS

SIC

AL

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

GILBERT VARGA, conductor

Gilbert Varga, son of celebrated

Hungarian violinist Tibor Varga, conducts with distinctive presence and flair. A commanding and

authoritative figure on the podium, Varga is repeatedly acclaimed for performances displaying a broad range of colors, exquisite textures, and subtle use of dynamics. Renowned for his elegant and exceptionally clear baton technique, he has guest-conducted and held positions with many major orchestras across the world.

Varga works extensively with the symphony orchestras of North America, enjoying regular relationships with the Minnesota Orchestra and St. Louis Symphony, among others. In Europe, he works regularly with orchestras including the Royal Scottish National Symphony, Frankfurt Museumgesellschaft, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. In the 2015/16 season, he looks forward to debuts with the Tonkünstler Orchestra at Vienna’s Musikverein and farther afield with the Macao Symphony. In May 2013 Varga was appointed principal conductor of the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, an appointment that comes

as a kind of theme and variations, interrupted by a faster section. The music glows with lyricism in the third movement, as an ironic meta-layer of ideal love implicitly contrasts with the Sultan’s cruelty — Rimsky-Korsakov’s references to princes and princesses here are not to specific tales, but to more generic scenarios.

In the widely varied final movement, Rimsky-Korsakov continues to dazzle through his flair for color and textural contrast. Dramatically, musically, and emotionally, he achieves the long-delayed closure. The critic Tim Ashley beautifully summarizes the process: “The wreck of Sinbad’s ship near the end coincides with the collapse of Shahriyar’s murderous resolutions and at the

close, his theme, now purged of all its intimidating violence, joins with Scheherazade’s in an ecstatic love duet.”

The score calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, tam-tam, harp, and strings.

— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com.

at an exciting time for the orchestra as it embarks upon a journey to build its own concert hall, a process in which Varga will be heavily involved as consultant.

Varga studied under three very different and distinctive maestros: Franco Ferrara, Sergiu Celibidache, and Charles Bruck. In the earlier part of his conducting career, he concentrated on work with chamber orchestras, particularly the Tibor Varga Chamber Orchestra, before developing a reputation as a symphonic conductor. He was chief conductor of the Hofer Symphoniker (1980-1985) and chief conductor of the Philharmonia Hungarica in Marl, Germany (1985-1990), conducting their debut tour to Hungary with Yehudi Menuhin. He was also permanent guest conductor of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (1991-1995) and principal guest conductor of the Malmö Symphony (1997-2000). In 1997 Varga became music director of the Basque National Symphony Orchestra, leading them through 10 seasons, including tours across the U.K., Germany, Spain, and South America.

Varga’s discography includes recordings with various labels, including ASV, Koch International, and Claves Records. His latest recording, released in January 2011, of concertos by Ravel and Prokofiev with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Anna Vinnitskaya on Naïve Records, was given five stars by BBC Music Magazine.

CL

AS

SIC

AL

ANNE MARIE MCDERMOTT, piano

For over 25 years Anne-Marie

McDermott has played concertos, recitals, and chamber music in hundreds of cities

throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. In addition to performing, she also serves as artistic director of the Bravo! Vail and Ocean Reef music festivals, as well as curator for chamber music for the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego.

The breadth of McDermott’s repertoire reaches from Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Scriabin, to works by today’s most influential composers. In the 2015/16 season she will premiere a concerto written by Poul Ruders. Charles Wuorinen’s last solo piano sonata, which she has recorded, was written for her and premiered at New York’s Town Hall.

McDermott has recorded the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas, Bach’s English Suites and Partitas (Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine), solo works by Chopin, and Gershwin’s Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra with the Dallas Symphony (also Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine). Most recently, she recorded five Haydn piano sonatas and two Haydn concertos with the Odense

Philharmonic in Denmark, including two cadenzas written by Charles Wuorinen.

Other recent international highlights include a performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the São Paulo Symphony at the Cartagena Festival and an all-Haydn recital tour of China. McDermott gave special performances of works by Charles Wuorinen in New York and at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in celebration of the composer’s 75th birthday.

McDermott has performed with many other leading orchestras, including the Minnesota Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the orchestras of San Diego, Dallas, Columbus, Seattle, Houston, Colorado, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Atlanta, New Jersey, and Baltimore, among others. She is a longtime member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, with whom she performs and tours extensively each season.

McDermott enjoys touring as a member of OPUS ONE, a chamber group with Ida Kavafian, Steven Tenenbom, and Peter Wiley. Together, they have commissioned more than 15 new works. She also tours annually with violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and performs as part of a trio with sisters Kerry and Maureen McDermott. She studied at the Manhattan School of Music and was winner of both the Young Concert Artists auditions and an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Gift-A-Tag vouchers can be purchased online for Arts Plates, other Tennessee Specialty Plates or the personalization of a regular or specialty plate. They make great gifts for family, friends, colleagues and volunteers.

Tennessee Specialty Plates represent colleges and universities, sports, wildlife, arts, for children and many others. Most of these plates are available at your local County Clerk’s office and can be purchased anytime. They are easy to get. Simply take your current plate and registration to your County Clerk and swap it for a Specialty License Plate (remember to bring along a screwdriver). Your yearly tag fees will be due at that time, but will be prorated.

For more information about Tennessee Specialty Plates, visit tnspecialtyplates.org

GIVE THE GIFT OF A SPECIALTY LICENSE PLATE AND SUPPORT THE ARTS IN TENNESSEE WITH GIFT-A-TAG