Program Notes

Profiles

David Zinman

David Zinman is in his 11th season as Music Director of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, having taken up that post in 1995 after many years as a regular guest conductor there. In 1998 he completed a highly successful 13-year tenure as Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Also in 1998, he became Music Director of the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he is also Program Director of the recently formed American Academy of Conducting at Aspen.

Mr. Zinman’s tenures, first in Baltimore and now in Zurich, have been distinguished by his programming of an extraordinarily broad repertoire, his strong commitment to the performance of contemporary music, and his introduction of historically informed performance practice. He has also toured widely with both orchestras in Europe, North America, and the Far East, winning consistent critical accolades. Mr. Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra have also performed regularly throughout Europe in such music centers as Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt, London, Munich, Paris, and Milan.

Mr. Zinman made his American conducting debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1967, and has since led many of the world’s leading orchestras. In addition to leading the Tonhalle Orchestra in a tour of Europe, Mr. Zinman’s guest-conducting schedule in 2005-06 includes appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Bayerische Rundfunk, and Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Highlights of the 2004-05 season included returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Montreal, and National Symphony Orchestras; appearances abroad with the Stockholm and Munich philharmonics; and an appearance with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall with Dawn Upshaw.

Born in 1936, David Zinman graduated from Oberlin Conservatory and pursued advanced work in composition at the University of Minnesota. Conducting studies at the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center brought him to the attention of Pierre Monteux, who guided his musical development. Mr. Monteux also gave Mr. Zinman his first important conducting opportunities with the London Symphony Orchestra and at the 1963 Holland Festival, where critics hailed Mr. Zinman as a major conducting discovery. He was awarded the City of Zurich Art Prize in 2002 for outstanding artistic efforts, becoming the first conductor and the first recipient not originally from Switzerland. He has also recently received the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

David Zinman most recently conducted the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in March 2002.

Gil Shaham
Carolyn and Jay Henges Guest Artist

Violinist Gil Shaham is internationally recognized by audiences and many noted critics as one of today’s most virtuosic and engaging classical artists. He is sought after throughout the world for concerto appearances with celebrated orchestras as well as for recital and ensemble appearances on the great concert stages and at the most prestigious festivals.

During the 2003-04 season Mr. Shaham toured Europe with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach, performed with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas (both at Davies Hall and Carnegie Hall), and with the Philharmonia and Bavarian Radio orchestras, among other ensembles. His recital schedule features performances in Paris, Milan, Brussels, Madrid, and New York (Avery Fisher Hall), as well as performances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Mr. Shaham was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1971. In 1973 he moved with his parents to Israel, where at the age of 7 he began violin studies with Samuel Bernstein of the Rubin Academy of Music and was immediately granted annual scholarships by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. In 1981, while studying with Haim Taub in Jerusalem, he made debuts with the Jerusalem Symphony and the Israel Philharmonic. That same year he began his studies with Dorothy DeLay and Jens Ellerman at Aspen. In 1982, after taking first prize in Israel’s Claremont Competition, he became a scholarship student at Juilliard, where he has worked with Ms. DeLay and Hyo Kang. He has also studied at Columbia University.

Gil Shaham was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius and lives in New York City with his wife, the violinist Adele Anthony, their son, Elijah, and their daughter, Ella Mei.

Mr. Shaham most recently played with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in March 2001.

The Gentleman and the Romantic

BY PAUL SCHIAVO

Appearances, we all know, can be deceptive. So, too, are the popular perceptions of composers: the reductive notions by which we pigeonhole musical artists whose lives and work often prove, on closer examination, complex and laden with paradox. Beethoven the titan, heroically struggling against fate; Chopin the delicate poet of the piano; Mozart the divinely gifted man-child, effortlessly spinning glorious melodies--these and similar ideas are not wrong, exactly, but they hardly convey a complete or adequate picture of those musicians. Beethoven, after all, wrote much music marked by delicacy or humor; Chopin’s keyboard works attained a sometimes volcanic energy; and Mozart’s fluency came as much through diligent study and effort as through native ability and inspiration.

Or consider the two composers represented on our program. The prevailing notion of Edward Elgar is that of a proper Victorian and, later, Edwardian gentleman composer. True, he was born nearly at the mid-point of the 19th century, and this chronology made inevitable a Romantic outlook. But while it produced some deeply expressive music, Elgar’s Romanticism might seem, to those unfamiliar with the composer’s life and work, tempered by an English reserve and propriety. Elgar’s well-known devotion to his wife of many years, as well as some formal-appearing photographs of him, only strengthens this impression.

Robert Schumann, by contrast, would appear a Romantic through and through. And to some degree, this assessment is accurate. Born in 1810, Schumann came of age with the flood tide of Romanticism in music, and much of his work seems shaped by Romantic currents. Surging melodies, intensely expressive harmonies, an affinity for poetic verse and a knack for matching this to a distilled musical essence--these are characteristics of early Romantic music and of Schumann’s compositional style.

And yet, the full picture is not so simple. Elgar may have appeared a proper English gentleman, but his Violin Concerto, op. 61, suggests an unusually passionate personality. Schumann, for all his Romantic tendencies, cast some of his finest music in that decidedly classical form, the symphony. And his Symphony in C major--also designated, coincidentally, op. 61--is perhaps the most classically shaped of his four essays in this genre.

Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto endured a long and difficult genesis. Although the composer had played the violin during his younger years and made sketches for a concerto featuring the instrument in 1890, he had written no significant solo music for the instrument by 1905. In the autumn of that year, the renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler visited England and publicly planted in Elgar’s mind the seed that would eventually produce his Violin Concerto. In a newspaper interview, Kreisler stated:

If you want to know whom I consider to be the greatest living composer, I say without hesitation, Elgar. Russia, Scandinavia, my own Fatherland [Austria], or any other nation can produce nothing like him. I say this to please no one; it is my own conviction. . . . I wish Elgar would write something for the violin. He could do so, and it would be certainly something effective.

Elgar could hardly have ignored such an invitation, and shortly afterward he noted in a sketchbook several themes for a violin concerto. But he did little with these ideas during the next several years. Not until the spring of 1909 did Elgar begin to work seriously on the concerto for Kreisler, and even then the piece took shape slowly. Only in August 1910 did it reach completion. Kreisler gave the concerto’s premiere in November of that year and received from Elgar the score’s dedication. But the composer also prefaced the work with an enigmatic motto in Spanish. Translated, it reads: “Here is enshrined the soul of . . . . .”

Those five dots obviously posed a mystery, and not for the first time in one of Elgar’s orchestral works. The composer had already admitted to a secret theme and “dark saying” at the heart of his famous Enigma Variations, provoking reams of speculation about what these might be. With the Violin Concerto, though, there is more evidence as to Elgar’s cryptic meaning, and it points convincingly to the composer’s close friend Alice Stuart‑Wortley as the unnamed soul invoked in the preface.

The daughter of painter John Everett Millais and wife of a music-loving member of Parliament, Mrs. Stuart-Wortley met Elgar in 1902. Over the next seven years she and her husband occasionally visited and corresponded with the Elgars. By 1909, their letters had become frequent and warm in tone. Their visits also grew more frequent at this time, and in June of that year Elgar dedicated his choral song Angelus to Alice Stuart-Wortley. This was the time when Elgar was beginning to concentrate on writing the Violin Concerto, which now developed in tandem with his friendship with Alice Stuart‑Wortley. Indeed, she seems to have played a crucial role in inspiring the work.

Some evidence for this lies in Elgar’s letters to her, which repeatedly discuss the concerto, solicit her opinions about it, and urge her to visit and hear new passages as he completed them. Even more significant, however, is the fact that Elgar expressly identified some of its themes by the nickname he used for her. Early in 1910 the composer took to calling Alice “Windflower” and began to refer to several of the concerto’s melodies by the same term. In April 1910, for example, in a letter addressed to “My dear Windflower,” he wrote her: “I have been working hard at the Windflower themes, but all stands still until you come & approve!”

But if it is Alice Stuart‑Wortley’s soul that the Violin Concerto enshrines, just what were Elgar’s feelings for her? Here the clues are less certain. Upon completing the score, the composer wrote to a friend that “The Concerto is full of romantic feeling,” but, not surprisingly, declined to say for whom. It is striking, though, that the melodies Elgar designated as “Windflower themes” are among the most ardent ideas in the work, and that he made a present of his original sketches for these themes to Alice Stuart‑Wortley. That Alice and Elgar were romantically involved must therefore be counted as a possibility, one that the unexplained disappearance of many of their letters makes no less likely. Still, there is no firm evidence to support that assumption, and both parties were known to have been devoted to their respective spouses. Ultimately, this matter, like so much else about Elgar, must remain unsettled, the truth perhaps encoded safely in the music of the Violin Concerto.

In form and character, Elgar’s score recalls the great Romantic violin concertos of the 19th century, particularly those of Beethoven and Brahms. It is an expansive composition and, as its author described, “awfully emotional, too emotional[,] but I love it.” Adhering to tradition, Elgar opens the work with an orchestral exposition. This passage begins straightway with the melody that forms the principal subject of the concerto’s first movement. Soon a timpani roll supports the statement of the first “Windflower theme.” Elgar only hints at a serene third subject during this orchestral statement, leaving its full presentation to the solo instrument, which presently takes the lead in expanding these various thematic ideas.

The central Andante opens with a reverent melody of distinctly English character. Beginning calmly, the music grows increasingly impassioned, climaxing in a passage bearing one of Elgar’s favored character indications: “Nobilmente.” The composer closes the movement by returning to the mood and material of its opening measures, at one point combining the two principal melodies of the Andante in counterpoint. Years later, he confided to a friend: “This is where two souls merge and melt into one another.”

From a formal standpoint, the finale is quite unusual. It begins as a spirited (and technically dazzling) romp through a series of thematic ideas. Elgar will eventually reprise these themes, as often happens in an orchestral allegro. But the central development passage never comes. Instead, it is given over to an unusual cadenza--unusual because the solo instrument receives accompaniment from the orchestra, and because it is built upon themes from the concerto’s opening movement. Elsewhere, the orchestra also makes reference to the Andante, making this a thoroughly retrospective finale.

Unlike Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 took shape quickly and, it seems, easily. Toward the end of September 1845, Schumann wrote to his friend Felix Mendelssohn: “For several days drums and trumpets in the key of C have been sounding in my mind. I have no idea what will come of it.” Schumann did not wait long to find out. On December 12 of the same year, the diary he kept with his wife tells that he began composing a symphony, one in C major, with drums and trumpets playing conspicuous roles.

Once embarked on a composition, Schumann often worked with great speed. In this case, it took only five days to draft the new symphony’s initial movement and less than two weeks for the remainder of the work. But having made this rapid start, the composer fretted over orchestrating his piano draft, this task ultimately costing him much of the ensuing year. He finally completed the work in October 1846, less than a month before its scheduled premiere.

Shortly after its initial performance, several reviews extolled the symphony, and not just for its purely musical merits. More than one critic heard a lofty spiritual quality in the music, an aspiring toward almost religious expression. This is not entirely fanciful. Three of the symphony’s four movements use chorale-like melodies, and its signature theme seems nothing so much as a call from on high. There are, to be sure, no references to actual hymns, such as we find in Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony. But in its own abstract terms, this symphony seems a kind of psalm, a song of praise and rejoicing.

Schumann begins the first movement with an introduction in moderate tempo. Its initial measures present two ideas set against each other in counterpoint: a flowing line for the strings and a solemn fanfare in the brass. The latter figure will prove a “motto” theme, one that recurs at important junctures throughout the symphony. (Listeners familiar with Haydn’s last symphony, the “London,” will note a resemblance between its opening fanfare and the one Schumann uses here.) Soon the music grows more active, its rhythms more animated, and the motto figure sounds again before the tempo accelerates into the Allegro that forms the main body of the movement. Here Schumann fashions his themes using the buoyant rhythms introduced in the latter part of the introduction, and he revisits the motto again during the accelerated coda that brings this first portion of the symphony to a close.

The second movement seems an attempt to write a scherzo after Mendelssohn’s style, with light, running passagework in the violins. Yet the result is still distinctly Schumannesque, thanks chiefly to the restless harmonies the violin lines trace. Balancing this fleet music are two contrasting episodes, the second very like a hymn. The final statement of the scherzo includes another recollection of the motto idea.

Schumann builds the ensuing Adagio on a wide-stepping melody that seems more operatic than symphonic in character. It gives rise to the most beautiful slow movement among his orchestral compositions, a poetic romance intimating deep and tender reverie.

From the rocketing scale of its initial measure, the finale strikes a triumphal note, and Schumann maintains this for practically the full length of the movement. As in the Elgar Violin Concerto, there is a late recollection of themes heard earlier in the composition. Schumann weaves reminiscences of the aria-like melody of the slow movement into his development of the main subject, as well as reference to the motto theme. A more explicit recollection of the motto comes during the movement’s closing minutes.