Program Notes

David Robertson
Beofor Music Director and Conductor

A master of communication and an inspirational force both on and off the podium, American conductor David Robertson has been praised by the press as “that rare combination of passion and intellect that draws musicians and audiences.” In the fall of 2005, Mr. Robertson began his tenure as the 12th Music Director of the 126-year-old Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and also assumed the title of Principal Guest Conductor of London’s BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Of special note this season were six appearances at Carnegie Hall where David Robertson was a Perspectives artist. The Perspectives Series included four performances with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra: a November 18 Sound Insights concert “Seeing Debussy, Hearing Monet,” and a November 19 program featuring works by Mozart, Feldman, and Mahler, both of which took place in Stern Auditorium; a concert version of Jarrell’s Cassandre on March 31 in Zankel Hall, and an April 1 performance in Stern Auditorium with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus featuring John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls and Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem.

A recognized expert in 20th- and 21st-century music with extensive international conducting credits, Mr. Robertson has held several posts abroad. Prior to his Saint Louis Symphony appointment, Mr. Robertson was Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon and Artistic Director of that city’s auditorium, posts he held from 2000-04. His tenure there marked the first time that one artist held both musical posts in Lyon. From 1992-2000, he was Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, of which Pierre Boulez is Honorary President, and from 1985-87, he was resident conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Mr. Robertson was educated at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied French horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. Musical America named him Conductor of the Year for 2000. In 1997, Mr. Robertson was named a recipient of the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, the premier prize of its kind, given to exceptionally gifted American conductors. He has two teenage sons and is married to pianist Orli Shaham.

Emanuel Ax
Laura and Bill Orthwein Guest Artist

Emanuel Ax is renowned not only for his poetic temperament and unsurpassed virtuosity, but also for the exceptional breadth of his performing activity. Each season his distinguished career includes appearances with major symphony orchestras worldwide, recitals in the most celebrated concert halls, a variety of chamber music collaborations, and the commissioning and performance of new music.

During the 2005-06 season Emanuel Ax is "Pianist in Residence" with the Berlin Philharmonic, performing under Sir Simon Rattle in Berlin and New York and in four chamber concerts with members of the orchestra. Other highlights include recitals in London, Lucerne, Vienna, Prague and Carnegie Hall, and concertos with the Philharmonia, Suisse Romande, Danish Radio, Stockholm Philharmonic, Budapest Festival Orchestra in Budapest and Vienna, and with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Salzburg Mozartwoche.

He gave the world premiere of John Adams’s Century Rolls with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1997, the European premiere with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1998, and the New York premiere with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2000. Another concerto dedicated to him, Christopher Rouse’s Seeing, was premiered in 1999 with Leonard Slatkin and the New York Philharmonic (its European debut was at the BBC Proms in 2001). In 2000 Mr. Ax joined the Boston Symphony for the first performances of Bright Sheng’s Red Silk Dance, and in March 2003 he joined Yo-Yo Ma, David Zinman, and the New York Philharmonic to premiere Mr. Sheng’s The Song and Dance of Tears. Mr. Ax premiered Krzysztof Penderecki’s Resurrection with the Philadelphia Orchestra in May 2002, and in May 2003 he premiered a concerto written for him by Melinda Wagner, Extremity of Sky, with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony.

Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. His studies at the Juilliard School were greatly supported by the sponsorship of the Epstein Scholarship Program of the Boys Clubs of America, and he subsequently won the Young Concert Artists Award. His piano teacher was Mieczylaw Munz. Additionally, he attended Columbia University, where he majored in French.

Mr. Ax resides in New York City with his wife, the pianist Yoko Nozaki. They have two children together, Joseph and Sarah. For more information about Mr. Ax’s career, please visit www.EmanuelAx.com.

Emanuel Ax most recently performed with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in September 2004.

Sound Design
BY PAUL SCHIAVO

How do composers go about shaping their musical works? Let’s imagine that a composer hits upon a beautiful new melody. Is that enough to ensure a successful symphony or concerto or sonata? Hardly. An attractive theme helps, of course, but it is hardly necessary. (Think of the famous opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, the well-known four-note motto: da-da-da dummmm. Not much of a tune, though enough for Beethoven.) The fact is that with a distinctive theme in hand, the creative musician’s work has only begun. For even the best of melodies--think Schubert, or Tchaikovsky, or Gershwin, or Lennon and McCartney--span less than a minute. Once it has sounded… well, then what? One can repeat the tune, perhaps even two or three times. But that still yields only a few brief minutes of music, and even the finest melody can start to sound monotonous with unvaried repetition.

And so, nearly all composers resort to the venerable techniques of thematic development and variation; of juxtaposing different thematic ideas in interesting sequences; of combining two or more strands of music in counterpoint; and, at least in orchestral music, of coloring their ideas in varied instrumental hues. Over the centuries, these techniques have coalesced to produce a number of satisfying and commonly accepted compositional forms, the symphony and concerto being prime and, for us, particularly relevant, examples. During the last century or so, composers also have put a great deal of thought into creating new musical designs, ones suitable to the new sounds and aural gestures available to modern composers.

The four works that comprise our program show especially original and successful approaches to the perennial challenge of creating compositions that extend beyond the apparent range of their melodic material. These pieces span three centuries and include a compact symphony, a majestically large concerto, a Baroque organ piece, and a recent work using a novel compositional premise.

We begin with an oddity, at least in the context of an orchestral concert: a transcription of a piece originally written for organ, the Récit de tierce en taille, from the Livre d’orgue by Nicolas de Grigny. Born into a family of French organists, Grigny was active in his native Rheims during the years around 1700. His compositional output is not large, since he lived only to age 31, but it proved important in its ambitious use of pedal notes and its use of a wide range of organ colors.

The title Récit de tierce en taille indicates a species of organ piece written as a song-like solo using a particular organ stop. From its slow contrapuntal opening (note the echoic presentation of the theme at the start), the music grows increasingly ornate, with trills and scale runs creating fanciful melodic arabesques. In addition, unexpected harmonic inflections and dissonances between the melody and bass lines produce an almost modern effect at certain moments. These qualities, and the pungent aural colors typical of Baroque-period French organs, are preserved and even emphasized in the orchestral transcription we hear.

That transcription was made by George Benjamin, and the unusual orchestra he used in this arrangement deliberately approximates the scoring of the next work we hear, Palimpsests. Benjamin is one of the most prominent English composers of the present day. Born in 1960, he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire while still in his teens. Subsequently he attended Cambridge University, studying under the composer Alexander Goehr. At age 20, Mr. Benjamin garnered widespread attention when a performance of an orchestral work, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, at the London Promenade Concerts made him the youngest composer ever to have a piece played at that prestigious festival. Benjamin followed this with a series of works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and piano that established him as one of the foremost composers of his generation.

Although hardly programmatic in the usual sense of that term, Benjamin’s compositions often have their origins in extra‑musical ideas, either visual images or literary works. The aforementioned Ringed by the Flat Horizon, for example, was inspired by a picture of a thunderstorm in the New Mexico desert and verses by T. S. Eliot. At First Light, another orchestral score, was prompted by a painting of Turner, while A Mind of Winter is a setting for soprano and small orchestra of a Wallace Stevens poem “The Snowman,” Benjamin’s music evoking the bare, frozen landscape suggested by the verses.

Palimpsests also takes its title, inspiration, and something of its musical workings from a visual image. The title refers to a parchment or other old document that has been imperfectly erased and written over, perhaps more than once, so that different layers of text are visible, if not always decipherable. A palimpsest, therefore, entails various strands of thought--either writing, or, in the case of this composition, music--perceptible in varying degrees of clarity, and whose superimposition creates a larger composite pattern. In musical terms, this means a counterpoint of disparate sonic materials, which is exactly what we get in Palimpsests.

The composition unfolds in two movements linked by a conducted silence. (Benjamin initially wrote the piece as a single-movement work in 2000 but expanded it with a second Palimpsest in 2002.) The first begins with a gentle song sung by three clarinets entwining their voices in quiet counterpoint. It sounds vaguely medieval, vaguely Middle Eastern; but because it is, as Benjamin notes, harmonized in an idiosyncratic manner, it doesn’t quite conform to any familiar style of music. Soon other elements appear: sharp strokes, sinuous violin lines, jagged or tangled melodic fragments, volcanic outbursts. These new developments mostly obliterate the clarinet song, but that initial idea occasionally resurfaces, “expanded in harmony and inflated in scale at each appearance,” as the composer describes, and differently scored. Although the juxtaposition and layering of diverse ideas creates fairly complex aural textures, the sound, shape, and character of each event remains striking and vivid. “I wanted the music to sound absolutely crisp and clear,” Benjamin explained. This it does.

Palimpsest I builds to an almost terrifying climax, in which a majestic chorale-like theme for the brass is surrounded by swirling, frenetic figures. Almost immediately, the music subsides to spare quietude, a kind of delicate pointillism interrupted only by a transformed appearance of the clarinet song. And then, silence. Palimpsest II resumes the process its predecessor had begun. Soft tones of piccolos and violins, drawn taut in suspended counterpoint, collide with powerful interjections from the brass. This collision occurs repeatedly over the course of the movement. Again there is an energetic climax, with material from Palimpsest I appearing once more near the close.

The design of Palimpsests is original and unique. So, too, is that of Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7. This is the last, briefest, and most unusual of the works for which the composer’s admirers proclaim him the greatest symphonist of the 20th century. It is perhaps the most beautiful as well. Avoiding the grand gestures of some of Sibelius’s earlier works in this form, the Symphony No. 7 makes its effect through a compelling journey of thematic ideas, ideas whose recurrences and evolution seem dictated by a dynamic inner life of their own.

This work went through a long creative gestation, during which time it changed form considerably. In a letter written in 1918, Sibelius described the symphony, which he must have already begun composing, as being in three movements, though he added, “the plans may be altered according to the development of the musical ideas. As usual, I am a slave to my themes and submit to their demands.” By the time it was completed, some six years later, the piece had been transformed into a composition in one movement. Sibelius seems initially to have been reluctant to call this work a symphony, and in March 1924 he conducted its premiere under the title Fantasia sinfonica. But when the score was published, the following year, the composer had again changed his mind, admitting the work to the ranks of his symphonies.

Despite its compact single-movement form, the Symphony No. 7 offers a satisfying variety of themes, moods and textures. Its initial measures present a pair of important ideas: a scale rising quietly but firmly in the strings and, moments later, a brighter melodic figure in the woodwinds. These sounds give rise to a beautiful, prayer-like passage for the strings. As the music grows more confident and the winds rejoin the proceedings, a ringing call emerges from the first trombone, and we presently hear again the scale figure of the opening measures.

Its main thematic materials thus established, the symphony soon accelerates to a more lively scherzando section. But the genial character this music brings does not last long. Soon churning lines in the strings produce ominous echoes from the brass. The music presses to a climax, then briefly recalls the light figuration of the scherzando passage. Now Sibelius launches into a joyous section that functions as the work’s finale. Before this concludes, we hear again the rising scale figure, the stirring trombone call, and a reminiscence of the devout string melody of the work’s initial section. The music grows wonderfully quiet before swelling to its conclusion.

If Sibelius’s Seventh represents a compression of normal symphonic design, Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 gives us an expansion of standard concerto form. Ironically, Brahms announced the work’s completion by trying to downplay its size. In the summer of 1881, the composer wrote to his longtime friend and correspondent Elisabeth von Herzogenberg: “I don’t mind telling you that I have written a tiny little piano concerto with a tiny little wisp of a scherzo.” Such self‑effacing remarks were well known to Brahms’s friends and could reliably be taken to mean precisely the opposite of what they purported to convey. In this case, the “tiny little” work was one of nearly monumental scale.

Indeed, this concerto is striking in the grandeur of its proportions. Its length, scope of ideas, and great variety of moods and colors give the impression of an epic work, and the unusual inclusion of a scherzo movement enlarges its dimensions to those of a symphony. It is not true, however, that this concerto is simply a symphony with piano accompaniment, as early critics of the piece claimed. Indeed, the solo instrument establishes its importance from the start, echoing the opening call of the French horn.

That horn-call motif generates much of the material from which Brahms builds the first movement. The composer subjects this figure to constant variation, and there seems to be no limit to the uses he finds for its first three notes. Following an extended passage for the solo piano, a second, more restless theme is presented by the violins. Several subsidiary melodies also arise as the music unfolds. It is, though, the recurrence of the opening motif that accounts for much of the movement’s strong character. There is no cadenza. Its absence underscores Brahms’s serious, classical approach to form and his affinity with Beethoven, who had expressly forbidden such a solo passage in his “Emperor” Concerto. Evidently Brahms was similarly unwilling to jeopardize the architectural balance of this movement for a brief and quite possibly extraneous display of virtuosity.

In a letter written shortly after he completed the concerto, Brahms gave ironic justification for the inclusion of a scherzo movement, an unorthodox addition to the usual concerto format. The first movement, he said, was too simple, and the work required something robust before the intimate Andante. It is, of course, the scherzo which is simple, at least formally so. Its several sections are clearly articulated, and its stream of exuberant music sweeps the listener easily along. The central section, or “Trio,” conveys an open, rustic quality that marks the movement as a descendant of Beethoven’s symphonic scherzos.

By contrast, the ensuing Andante reveals a world of fragile beauty. Its opening, with a lyrical cello solo, is one of the most tender passages Brahms left us. The entrance of the piano proves uncommonly delicate, and the fluid rhythms in its ensuing soliloquy produce a Chopin‑like dreaminess. During the central development episode the music grows restless and impassioned, but soothed by sustained harmonies in the clarinets, it soon becomes calm again, allowing the movement to end as it began, in tranquil reverie.

The finale presents probably the most carefree movement in any of Brahms’s major works. Even the minor‑key episode suggests not sorrow but sultry Hungarian gypsy music such as the composer had known since boyhood. The soloist’s passagework is dazzling but always kept within the framework of classic rondo form and Brahms’s perfectly spun phrases.