JUNE 26, 2018 @ 7:30 PM
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21/61, (1826-43), (arr. Andreas Tarkmann)
Ouvertüre
Scherzo
Elfenmarsch
Elfenlied
Intermezzo
Notturno
Hochzeitsmarsch
Trauermarsch
Tanz der Rüpel (Clowns)
Finale
Intermission
Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) Summer Night, Pastoral Intermezzo for Strings, Op. 58, (1945)
Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827) String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 “Serioso” (1810), (arr. Gustav Mahler)
1. Allegro con brio
2. Allegretto ma non troppo
3. Allegro assai vivace ma serioso
4. Larghetto espressivo
**The New York premiere of Schoeck’s Sommernacht, (Summer Night), an astonishingly beautiful piece. See below.**
WQXR HOST: Jeff Spurgeon
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
A standard-bearer of innovation and artistic excellence, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is one of the world’s foremost chamber orchestras. Julian Fifer and a group of like-minded young musicians determined to combine the intimacy and warmth of a chamber ensemble to the richness of an orchestra founded Orpheus in 1972. With 71 albums, including the Grammy Award-winning Shadow Dances: Stravinsky Miniatures, and 42 commissioned and premiered original works, Orpheus rotates musical leadership roles for each work and strives to perform diverse repertoire through collaboration and open dialogue.
Performing without a conductor, Orpheus presents an annual series at Carnegie Hall and tours extensively to major national and international venues. For the 2017-18 Season at Carnegie Hall Orpheus welcomes back Grammy-winning pianist André Watts for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9. The Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk makes his long-awaited Orpheus debut with Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, a fascinating product of Soviet Russia that embeds a core of yearning and struggle within a facade of whimsy and humor. In February, Orpheus welcomes Norway’s young trumpet sensation Tine Thing Helseth, featuring concertos by Vivaldi and Albinoni, as well as Mozart’s popular Symphony No. 40. The season closes with Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili performing Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, a powerful yet vulnerable work created while the composer teetered between his life of exile in Europe and a return to his transformed homeland.
Orpheus has trademarked its signature mode of operation, the Orpheus Process™, an original method that places democracy at the center of artistic execution. It has been the focus of studies at Harvard and of leadership seminars at Morgan Stanley and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, among others. Two unique education and engagement programs, Access Orpheus and Orpheus Institute, aim to bring this approach to students of all ages.
Access Orpheus, Orpheus’ educational initiative, shares the orchestra’s collaborative music-making process with public school students from all five boroughs in New York City. Because of declining resources for arts education, many public schools do not have access to fulltime arts teachers to provide music instruction and exposure to art and culture. Access Orpheus helps to bridge this gap with in-class visits, attendance at working rehearsals, and free tickets for performances at Carnegie Hall.
Orpheus Institute brings the Orpheus Process™ and the orchestra’s musicians to select colleges, universities, conservatories, and businesses to work directly with leaders of tomorrow. Corporate employees and students in all fields of study learn from Orpheus’ creative process and in areas of collaboration, communication, creative problem solving, and shared leadership. In the coming seasons, Orpheus will continue to share its leadership methods and performance practices as the ensemble provides audiences with the highest level of musicianship and programming.
Sommernacht
The musical work Sommernacht, is also the title of a poem by Gottfried Keller. The composer, Schoeck, took a section of this poem and summarized it in his own words, adding that to the score.
Schoeck doesn’t specify precisely that this action needs to be shared with the audience. However, at the very least it is thought appropriate to make the listener aware of it, and Alexander Scheirle has provided the German text and added the English translation below.
“In sternheller Sommernacht ernten junge Landleute von dankbaren Empfindungen bewegt, das reife Kornfeld einer Waise oder Witwe, welche für diese Arbeitkeine Hilfe weiss. Sichelrauschen, Jauchzen und Harmonikaklang verraten das fröhliche Treiben des alten, schönen Brauches, bis Morgenhähne, erwachende Vogelstimmen und Frühglocken die wackern, heimlichen Helfer zur eigenen, schweren Arbeit rufen.”
In a bright summer night, young peasants reap, moved by grateful sensations, the ripe grain of an orphan or widow, who knows no help for this work. Crescent noises, cheers and harmonica sound betray the cheerful activity of the old, beautiful custom, until morning cocks, awakening bird calls and early bells call the brave, secret helpers to their own, heavy work.
PROGRAM NOTES
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opp. 21 and 61 [1826-43]
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany
Died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig, Germany
In the prosperous Mendelssohn household, support for young Felix went beyond just nurturing his musical ambitions. The family socialized with the likes of Goethe and Hegel, and the bookshelves were stacked with the world’s finest literature, including a new German translation of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1825. At age 17, Mendelssohn used A Midsummer Night’s Dream as inspiration for a concert overture, making reference in the music to the comedy’s magical elements and bawdy humor.
Mendelssohn returned to the same inspiration seventeen years later when he contributed incidental music for a new production of that Shakespeare comedy in Potsdam. The selections included the earlier Overture (published as Opus 21) as well as thirteen new sections using chorus, vocal soloists and orchestra (published separately as Opus 61). The movements for orchestra alone—the Scherzo, Intermezzo, Nocturne and Wedding March—originally served as entr’actes interspersed among the plays five acts. They have all joined the Overture as concert hall staples, while the Wedding March has earned a special recognition as the recessional of choice in many wedding ceremonies.
This suite for chamber orchestra, created in 2014 by the German composer Andreas Tarkmann, features those beloved orchestral interludes, as well as instrumental versions of some of the lesser-known excerpts. The Elfenmarsch (March of the Fairies) and Elfenlied (Song of the Fairies) come from Act II, when Titania, the fairy queen, enters with her retinue and bids them to sing a fanciful incantation.
The Funeral March accompanies the play within a play in Act V, when the bumbling acting troupe presents the tragedy Pyramus and Thisbe. The Dance of the Clowns returns to the braying, donkey-like theme first introduced in the Overture as a nod to one of those hapless actors, Nick Bottom, whom the mischievous Puck transforms into an ass. The Finale revives more music from the Overture, including the mystical opening chords and the scampering violin motives.
Sommernacht, Op. 58 [1945]
OTHMAR SCHOECK
Born September 1, 1886 in Brunnen, Switzerland
Died March 8, 1957 in Zürich, Switzerland
The Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck formed his worldview in a picturesque village on Lake Lucerne, where his father was a landscape painter. After his own brief stint in art school, Schoeck studied music in Zürich, and he matured into a respected composer of songs and operas. He flirted with some of the avant-garde developments of the twenties and thirties, and his music made some inroads into Germany, but ultimately he retreated to a modest career in Switzerland and a musical language rooted in the melodious tonality of his early years, especially after a heart attack in 1944.
When composing this “pastoral intermezzo” for strings in 1945, Schoeck took his title and inspiration from the famous poem Sommernacht (Summer Night) by the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller (1819-1890). The poem describes a custom in which young men spend their night working by starlight, graciously harvesting the grain for widows and orphans, until the new day dawns and they head off to their own labors. Schoeck’s tone poem evokes the languid calm of the summer night, the gallant efforts of the men, and the merriment of their singing and dancing.
String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 (“Serioso”) [1810] Arranged for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 1770 in Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827 in Vienna, Austria
When the young Ludwig van Beethoven published his first six string quartets in 1800, he was still working under the long shadow of Joseph Haydn—known as the “Father of the String Quartet” for good reason. After those early years spent mastering the established style, Beethoven attained a new level of refinement and independence with the works from his “middle period,” including Opus 95 from 1810.
The hallmark of Beethoven’s mature style is the extent to which musical ideas compress down to the bare essentials that can be developed, manipulated and examined from all angles. Nowhere is this process taken further than in the work that goes by the nickname “Serioso,” Italian for “serious.” The opening Allegro con brio movement distills a muscular sonata form into four minutes of uncompromising intensity, all growing out of the first unison exhortation.
The arrangement for string orchestra heard here, created by Gustav Mahler during his first season as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1899, amplifies and exaggerates the sharp contrasts of the quartet, an endeavor that Mahler knew would be a magnet for criticism, given Beethoven’s godlike stature in the German-speaking world. He even felt the need to explain his rationale in an open letter to the local newspaper. “In a large space the four voices are lost and do not speak to the listener with the power that the composer wanted to give them,” Mahler wrote. “I give them this power by strengthening the voices. I unravel the expansion that is dormant in the voices and give the sounds wings.”
After the unremitting severity of the first movement, the not-so-slow slow movement, marked Allegretto ma non troppo, provides only a modicum of solace, even with its key setting of D major. Austere counterpoint and harmonies borrowed from minor keys contribute to the somber tone.
The quartet’s nickname comes from the tempo marking for the scherzo, which translates as “Fast and rather lively, but serious.” Echoing the stabbing gestures and pregnant pauses of the opening movement, this scherzo lurches fitfully in a galloping stride. Two contrasting passages offer brief relief, until the final section storms out at an even faster pace.
The finale delays the mysterious, agitated body of the movement by prefacing it with a haunting introduction—the only music that is truly slow in this forward-leaning quartet. Just when the minor-key angst seems that it could not sink any deeper, a confounding coda scampers off to a final resolution in F major.
Notes on the Program
By Aaron Grad
© 2018 Aaron Grad