AUGUST 21, 2013 @ 7:30 PM

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91)
Quartet in D major for Flute, Violin, Viola & Cello, K. 285, (1778)

1. Allegro

2. Adagio

3. Rondo: Allegro

O’CONNOR, S. LEE, PHILLIPS, FINCKEL

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Serenade in D major for Flute, Violin, & Viola, Opus 25, (1801)

1. Entrata. Allegro

2. Tempo ordinario d’un minuetto

3. Molto allegro

4. Andante con variazioni

5. Allegro, scherzando e vivace

6. Adagio

7. Allegro, vivace e disinvolto – Presto

O’CONNOR, K. LEE, PHILLIPS

INTERMISSION

Antonin Dvorák (1841-1904)
Quintet in A major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola & Cello, B. 155, Opus 81, (1887)

1. Allegro ma non tanto

2. Dumka. Andante con moto

3. Scherzo (Furiant). Molto vivace

4. Finale. Allegro

WU HAN, K. LEE, S. LEE, PHILLIPS, FINCKEL

WQXR HOST: Elliott Forrest

While we regret that, due to technical difficulties, WQXR will not be able to broadcast tonight’s concert live, we are delighted to confirm that WQXR will record it for broadcast on 105.9 FM and streaming on www.wqxr.org on Monday, September 2 at 9pm with host Elliott Forrest.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) is one of eleven constituents of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the largest performing arts complex in the world. CMS presents chamber music of every instrumentation, style, and historical period in its extensive concert season in New York, its national tours, its many recordings and national radio broadcasts, its broad commissioning program, its online event streaming, and its multi-faceted educational programs. The Chamber Music Society’s performance venue, Alice Tully Hall, has received international acclaim as one of the world’s most exciting venues for chamber music.

CMS produces its own recordings on the CMS Studio Recordings label, which has been highly praised for both the artistry and the recorded sound of the eclectic range of repertoire it has released. The newest media innovation, CMS Live!, offers recordings available only by download of extraordinary live performances, chosen by CMS Artistic Directors David Finckel and Wu Han from among each season’s many concerts.

Visit the Chamber Music Society online at www.chambermusicsociety.org

Co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society, cellist David Finckel, named Musical America’s 2012 Musician of the Year, leads a multifaceted career as a concert performer, recording artist, educator, administrator, and cultural entrepreneur. He has been hailed as “one of the top ten, if not top five, cellists in the world today” (Nordwest Zeitung, Germany). As a chamber musician, he appears extensively with duo partner pianist Wu Han and in a piano trio alongside Emerson Quartet violinist Philip Setzer. David Finckel served as cellist of the Grammy Award-winning Emerson String Quartet for 34 seasons.

Violinist Kristin Lee enjoys a vibrant career as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. She has performed at Ravinia’s Rising Stars Series, the Salon de Virtuosi at Steinway Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre in Paris, the Kumho Art Gallery in her native Seoul, and throughout northern Italy. A winner of Juilliard’s Concerto Competition and the Aspen Music Festival’s Violin Competition, she was a top prize winner of the 2012 Naumburg Competition, Astral Artists Auditions in 2010, and Italy’s Premio di Trieste Competition in 2011. She is an Artist of the Chamber Music Society and a former member of CMS Two.

With performances described by The New York Times as “breathtakingly beautiful,” violinist Sean Lee is quickly gaining recognition as one of today’s most talented rising artists, having received prizes in the Premio Paganini International Violin Competition and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. His debut album featuring the Strauss Violin Sonata was released by EMI Classics exclusively for iTunes in February 2012 and reached the Top 20 of the iTunes “Top Classical Albums” list. He is a member of Chamber Music Society Two and performs on a 1799 Nicolas Lupot violin.

Flutist Tara Helen O’Connor is a charismatic performer sought after for her unusual artistic depth, brilliant technique, and colorful tone. She has appeared at Zankel Hall, Symphony Space, Music@Menlo, Spoleto USA, Chamber Music Northwest, Music from Angel Fire, and the Banff Centre. She is a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning New Millennium Ensemble and a member of the woodwind quintet Windscape. Winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a two-time Grammy nominee, she was the first wind player to participate in the CMS Two program and is now an Artist of the Chamber Music Society.

Violinist/violist Daniel Phillips enjoys a versatile career as an established chamber musician, solo artist, and teacher. He is a founding member of the 25-year-old Orion String Quartet, which is in residence at Mannes College of Music and is a longtime Artist of the Chamber Music Society. Mr. Phillips has performed as a soloist with the Pittsburgh, Houston, New Jersey, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Yakima symphonies. He appears regularly at the Spoleto USA Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, Chesapeake Music Festival, and the International Musicians Seminar in Cornwall, England.

Co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society, pianist Wu Han, named Musical America’s 2012 Musician of the Year, ranks among the most esteemed and influential classical musicians in the world today. She has risen to international prominence through her wide-ranging activities as a concert performer, recording artist, educator, arts administrator, and cultural entrepreneur. In high demand as a recitalist, concerto soloist, and chamber musician, Wu Han has appeared at many of the world’s most prestigious venues, and performs extensively as duo pianist with cellist David Finckel and in a piano trio with David Finckel and Emerson Quartet violinist Philip Setzer.

Elliott Forrest is currently the mid-day host on WQXR. Since his return to WQXR in 2002, he has hosted and produced live events from Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl and The Jerome L. Greene Space, among others. Forrest is the recipient of a George Foster Peabody Award, and two Excellence in Broadcasting Awards from the New York State Broadcasters Association.

After starting his radio career at KNFM, in his hometown of Midland, Texas, Forrest became Program Director of KXTR-FM in Kansas City. In New York he worked at WEVD, WKJY and WNCN. Forrest is a regular guest host of multiple shows on WQXR’s sister station, WNYC, including The Leonard Lopate Show and Soundcheck.

Forrest has been heard nationally as the radio host for concerts by: The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Seattle Symphony, the Jerusalem Symphony and Spring For Music, and host and producer of the award-winning podcasts for the New York Philharmonic.

JULY 30, 2013 @ 7:30 PM

The Knights
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Nicholas Phan, tenor
Michael P. Atkinson, French horn
Adam Hollander, oboe
Johnny Gandelsman, violin

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88)
Sinfonia in C Major, Wq. 182, No.3, (1773)

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Concerto in D, (1946)

1. Vivace Arioso

2. AndantinoRondo

3. Allegro

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Concerto for Oboe & Violin in C minor, Bwv. 1060, (1733)

1. Allegro

2. Adagio

3. Allegro

INTERMISSION

Benjamin Britten (1913-76)
Serenade for Tenor, Horn, & Strings, Op. 31, (1943)
(Nicholas Phan-tenor, Michael P. Atkinson-French horn
Adam Hollander-oboe, Johnny Gandelsman-violin)

1. “Prologue” (horn solo)

2. “Pastoral”, a setting of The Evening Quatrains by Charles Cotton (1630–1687)

3. “Nocturne”, Blow, bugle, blow by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

4. “Elegy”, The Sick Rose by William Blake (1757–1827)

5. “Dirge”, the anonymous Lyke-Wake Dirge (fifteenth century)

6. “Hymn”, Hymn to Diana by Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

7. “Sonnet”, To Sleep by John Keats (1795–1821)

8. “Epilogue” (horn solo; reprise of Prologue, played offstage)

The Knights – …the ground beneath our feet, (World Premiere)

WQXR HOST: Naomi Lewin

JULY 9, 2013 @ 7:30 PM

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Eric Wyrick, violin

Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)
Overture to Cambiale di matrimonio, (1810)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Romance for Violin & Orchestra No. 2, in F major, Op. 50, (1798)

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No. 44 in E minor, ‘Trauer’, Hob. 1:44, (1770-71)

1. Allegro con brio

2. Menuetto (Allegretto) & Trio

3. Adagio

4. Finale: Presto

INTERMISSION

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93)
Serenade for Strings in C major, Op. 48, (1880)

1. Pezzo in forma di sonatina: Andante non troppo—Allegro moderato

2. Valse: Moderato — Tempo di valse

3. Élégie: Larghetto elegiaco

4. Finale (Tema russo): Andante — Allegro con spirito

WQXR HOST: Terrance McKnight

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Program Notes for 9 July 2013 Naumburg Orchestral Concert

GIOACCHINO ROSSINI

Overture to La Camdiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Market)

Born February 29, 1792, in Pesaro, Italy

Died November 13, 1868, in Paris

Duration: approximately 6 minutes

Composed: 1810

First Performance: November 3, 1810

Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog #445569 (1985) and #47750123 (1994)

The astonishing career of Gioacchino Rossini was launched on November 3, 1810, when his opera La Cambiale di matrimonio, which he called “a comic farce,” was performed for the first time. He had actually composed another opera when he was only about sixteen, but that one was not to reach the stage until 1812. This one act opera was commissioned for production in Venice in a simple commercial theater where an inexperienced composer, he said, “could show his inborn imagination (if heaven had granted it to him) and technique (if he had mastered it).” Rossini at eighteen clearly had a good supply of both imagination and technique, which he went on to exercise by composing some three dozen more operas during the next nineteen years. After that he retired from the theater, and during the remaining thirty-nine years of his life, he composed only a few religious pieces and a large number of sophisticated, tiny trifles.

The plot of La Cambiale di matrimonio is a more or less stock love triangle, with two suitors—one young and handsome and the other old but rich—vying for a young girl’s hand in marriage. As has often been the case in the theater, the overture was the last thing to be composed, and when he ran out of time in which to write it, Rossini simply took one that he had composed as a student exercise in 1809 and used that as his curtain raiser. It is a slight piece, perhaps, but it is an astonishing one for a sixteen-year-old boy to have written, and in 1817 he used this Overture again, to open his twenty-third opera, the serious and dramatic Adelaide di Borgogna.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Romance No. 2 in F Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 50

Born December 1770, in Bonn

Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna

Duration: approximately 9 minutes

Composed: 1798

First Performance: November 1798

Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog #44992328 (1996)

Beethoven attempted a violin concerto in C major in the early 1790s, while still living in Bonn. He abandoned that concerto midway through the first movement, but he might have gotten far enough to plan a slow movement in F major. He completed just such a movement—a Romance—in 1798, and secured a performance that November. By the time his publisher accepted it in 1805, Beethoven had already issued a Romance in G major (Opus 40), so this earlier work became the Romance No. 2 with a higher opus number.

The year of its publication was the same in which Beethoven completed his second symphony, saw the premiere of his only opera Fidelio, and wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he outlines his increasing frustration at his growing deafness. But that despair is not heard in this slightly earlier and extremely lyrical work in which the “singing” quality of the solo violin is reinforced by the Adagio cantabile tempo marking. One of Beethoven’s most popular works, it contains a rich harmonic vocabulary and an expressive ballad-like melodious style.

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN

Symphony No. 44 in E Minor, Trauer

Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Lower Austria

Died May 31, 1809, in Vienna

Duration: approximately 22 minutes

Composed: c. 1772

Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog #41536525 (1985)

The German literary and artistic movement called Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) came to fruition in the early 1770s. It was identified with an urgent, exaggerated, highly emotional manner of expression. Though the movement was most readily associated with poetry, literature, and painting, it is generally thought to have been the source of numerous stormy, minor-key works that also cropped up in the more abstract field of music.

During this period, Haydn composed several dark, turbulent minor-key symphonies that are credited as being “storm and stress” symphonies. His Symphony No. 44 in E Minor is often considered one of the finest among them. Haydn allegedly gave the work its subtitle, Trauer (Mourning), and scholar H.C. Robbins-Landon recalls the apocryphal tale that the composer wished to have its treasured slow movement played at his funeral. (If so, the request was duly ignored and Mozart’s Requiem was sung at a major memorial service held two weeks after the composer’s death in Vienna.)

In various ways, the E-Minor Symphony also blends symphonic form with traditions in music associated with the bygone Baroque era. Influences from Baroque music live on in the steady underlying pulse so characteristic of Haydn’s music and in the thematic economy and tight formal design of all four movements. For the most part, one or two thematic ideas dominate each movement, progressing to a halfway point, where they are further developed and then brought back in their original state.

The opening sonata form is energized by a power, leaping unison theme and much passagework involving running-scale patterns. A plaintive minuet carries the label “canon at the octave,” indicating that the bass line chases the melody, imitating its tune like a round. In the lovely ornamental slow movement the winds are mostly silent, entering mainly to bring the closing phrase of each section to a cadence. Thus the strings have free reign to spin out most of Haydn’s silken melody line. And the ravishing interlude created by this movement is abruptly ended by the Symphony’s urgent, intense finale, which largely concentrates on a single theme.

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48

Born May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia

Died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg

Duration: approximately 25 minutes

Composed: 1880

First Performance: October 30, 1881, in St. Petersburg

Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog # 4230602 (1990)

Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings was composed concurrently with the most unlikely of bedfellows: the 1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky wrote of the two works, “The overture will be very showy and noisy, but will have no artistic merit because I wrote it without warmth and without love. But the Serenade, on the contrary, I wrote from inner compulsion. This is a piece from the heart.” The Serenade is indeed one of the most introspective and sublime works from the composer’s output, and it owes much of its character to the influence of Mozart and other early idols. The title Serenade, the instrumentation, and the nature of the material (especially the first movement) all recall a simple, elegant Classicism.

The first movement’s chorale introduction is the most overtly “antique” feature of the piece, establishing a theme starting with the descending notes C-B-A. The Sonatina suggested by the movement title commences with a homophonic theme in C major, although it is the later secondary theme in G major that steals the spotlight with its scampering 16th notes. The movement concludes with a return to the initial chorale material. The following waltz is a delightful palette-cleanser after the austere chorale, with Tchaikovsky showing off that musical facet that confirms him one of the pre-eminent dance composers of all time. The Élégie returns to the “antique” aesthetic with another chorale introduction and parallel motion between the outer voices, although a heartbreaking melody is introduced that is more native to Tchaikovsky’s own Romantic style. The Finale offers yet again a slow introduction, this time cleverly arriving at a theme of C-B-A, transformed now into the seed of a rollicking “Russian” theme. A final coda quotes the initial chorale, driving home the thematic unity of the piece, and then concludes with a last look at the fast version of the theme.

Notes on the Rossini by Leonard Burkat.

Notes on the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky by Aaron Grad.

Notes on the Haydn by Carl Cunningham.

JUNE 25, 2013 @ 7:30

The Knights
Eric Jacobsen, conductor

Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
Sinfonia, No. 6, ‘La Casa del Diavolo’ for orchestra in D minor, Op. 12, No. 4, (1771)

1. Andante sostenuto – Allegro assai

2. Andantino con moto

3. Andante sostenuto – Allegro con molto

Philip Glass (1937- )
Suite from Orphee (World Premiere), 2013

INTERMISSION

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)
Selections from Tierkreis (1974-75)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91)
Symphony No. 41, ‘Jupiter’, in C major, K.551, (1788)

1. Allegro vivace

2. Andante cantabile

3. Menuetto: Allegretto – Trio

4. Molto allegro

WQXR HOST: Jeff Spurgeon