Conductor
Bruno Ferrandis

featuring
Gilles Apap, violin

LIGETI: Lontano                      
BERG: Violin Concerto
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 9

Discovery, November 8, 2008 - 2pm

November 8, 2008 - 8pm

November 9, 2008 - 3pm

November 10, 2008 - 8pm
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

Berg’s poignant concerto, among the greatest in the violin repertoire, exhibits the best of old Vienna: daring, cosmopolitan and avant-garde. No one could play it with more genius and eloquence than virtuosic iconoclast Gilles Apap. Schubert’s mammoth 9th Symphony proves worthy of its nickname “The Great.”

Set underwritten by Louise and Don Johnston

GYÖRGY LIGETI
Lontano for Orchestra
György Ligeti was born in Dicsöszentmárton, Transylvania (Rumania), on May 28, 1923, and died in Vienna on June 12, 2006. He composed Lontano (“Far Away”) in May 1967. Ernest Bour conducted the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra in the premiere, which took place at Donaueschingen on October 22, 1967. The score calls for four flutes (second and third doubling piccolo, fourth doubling alto flute), four oboes (fourth doubling English horn), four clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet, fourth doubling optional contrabass clarinet), three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, and strings. Duration is about 11 minutes.

Ligeti (the name is accented on the first syllable) studied composition with leading composers in his native Hungary, starting with Ferenc Farkas at the Kolzsvár Conservatory in his late teens (1941‑43) and Pál Kadosa in Budapest during the summers of those same years. After the end of the war he continued studying in Budapest, at the Academy of Music, with Farkas and Sándor Veress, graduating in 1949.  Hungarian music was, at that time, largely cut off from the more advanced developments of western Europe. Ligeti was very interested in the latest musical techniques, but he found it difficult to learn about the newest music being composed elsewhere and deemed it prudent to suppress his own most advanced works. He pursued research in Romanian folk music, which strongly influenced the simpler pieces he allowed to be published in the early 1950s. He was appointed professor of harmony, counterpoint, and analysis at the Academy of Music in 1950, retaining that position until his decision to leave Hungary in 1956.

Settling in Vienna, Ligeti rapidly formed ties with the leading avant-garde composers, including Stockhausen, and worked for a time at the electronic studios of the West German Radio in Cologne, an experience that was surely to have an effect on the kind of music he soon began creating for traditional instruments, particularly on Atmosphères, a title that he had originally intended to give to an electronic work left unfinished. In 1960 the ISCM (International Society of Contemporary Music) held its quadrennial festival in Cologne, where Ligeti's Apparitions was performed, creating a sensation. Overnight he was catapulted into a position of leadership among contemporary composers. Since 1960, Ligeti has taught all over the world and become one of the most honored composers of our day, culminating in the 1986 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, a $150,000 prize endowed by a Louisville philanthropist, the largest such prize in the world. Contemporary composers today rarely reach an audience of millions, but Ligeti did—unwittingly, to be sure, and in a way he did not approve—when his music was used in the soundtrack of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Critic Paul Griffiths maintains that Ligeti’s music developed more and more “in terms of simple rules out of which the music arises almost automatically.” He points to Ligeti’s fascination with fractal images (computerized graphical realizations of quite simple mathematical formulas that achieve results of astonishing, even “lifelike” complexity) and his discovery of the player-piano works of Conlon Nancarrow, built up out of highly elaborate canonic structures. At the same time, Ligeti still honors the Hungarian master who had most strongly shaped his early style: Béla Bartók.

The title Lontano is an Italian word meaning “distant, far away,” and the composer has explained that this refers to a spatial distance in which each layer of music has another layer behind it. When an interviewer, Péter Várnai, asked him if this meant distance in time—as perhaps with references to past composers—Ligeti replied:

No, that was not the idea. I rather imagined a vast space of sound in gradual transformation, not through dense chromaticism but through a constantly changing pattern of color like a moiré fabric. Although Lontano encompasses the entire chromatic scale, strictly speaking, it is based on a diatonic scale...

The work employs a super-dense use of canon—the strict imitation of a melodic line in another part—but far, far more closely and intricately than would be found in the traditional canonic writing of a Johannes Ockeghem or a J.S. Bach. To provide only the simplest illustration from the first page of the score: Ligeti starts at the outset with four flutes, four clarinets, and three bassoons sounding the pitch A-flat, but entering gradually, one after the other (there is also a solo cello sustaining an artificial harmonic on A-flat). At first this sounds like a simple device of gradually reinforcing the single opening pitch and changing its color slowly as more instruments take part. These first instruments re-attack the A-flat, again echoing one another at a distance in the same order. Then, one by one, in the same order, they begin to shift to G, producing a complex sonority of two pitches (meanwhile four horns and an oboe have begun to make staggered entrances on A-flat). With the space of two 4/4 measures, the flutes, clarinets, and bassoons all move to G, but before the last bassoon arrives, the first flute has already moved back to A-flat, and the other instruments have begun following suit.  Thus, each line is unfolding the simple melodic gesture A-flat, G, A-flat, but they appear so closely spaced that the ear hears them not as melodic lines in imitation, but as harmony, sonority, and color. As Ligeti explained in his interview with Várnai:

Technically speaking, I have always approached musical texture through part-writing. Both Atmosphères and Lontano have a dense canonic structure. But you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very closely woven cobweb. I have retained melodic lines in the process of composition, they are governed by rules as strict as Palestrina’s or those of the Flemish school, but the rules of this polyphony are worked out by me.
--György Ligeti

ALBAN BERG
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “To the Memory of an Angel” 
Albano Maria Joannes Berg was born in Vienna on February 9, 1885, and died there on December 23, 1935. He began work on the concerto in April 1935, had completed a short score by July, and the full score on August 11. Louis Krasner, the American violinist who commissioned the score, gave the first performance on April 19, 1936, as the opening item on the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music ( in Barcelona that year). Hermann Scherchen conducted. The score is dedicated to Louis Krasner and also “To the Memory of an Angel.” In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for two flutes (both doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling alto saxophone) and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, one tenor and one bass trombone, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, low tam-tam, high gong, triangle, and strings. Duration is about 30 minutes.

In February 1935, when the American violinist Louis Krasner approached Berg with a request for a violin concerto, the fifty-year old composer temporized, largely because he was concerned about completing his opera Lulu. He told Krasner that he was not the sort of composer to follow in the footsteps of such writers of virtuosic showpieces as Wieniaski and Vieuxtemps. Krasner had the good sense to point out that Mozart and Beethoven had also written violin concertos, and he could be following in their footsteps.

Much as he wanted to devote himself to Lulu, Berg was in financial straits. He had been quite well off for a number of years after the success of Wozzeck had provided him with a stream of royalties. But the takeover of German politics by the National Socialists (which had driven his teacher Schoenberg out of Berlin) and the ensuing move that labeled Wozzeck as “degenerate,” banning it from performances in Germany, had ended that particular stream of income, and there was little else to be had. Not only was Germany off-limits to his music now, even his native Austria was moving dramatically to the right, echoing the political changes in Germany.

Then, in April, an event occurred that moved Berg to accept Krasner’s $1500 offer. Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler (the composer’s widow) and the architect Walter Gropius, suddenly died at eighteen. She had been a beautiful, lively talented girl who was just about to be part of the cast of a Salzburg production of Everyman when she took ill. She was to play the role of an angel.

Suddenly Berg accepted the commission. That June, Krasner visited the composer, who wanted to hear him play the violin in order to get a sense of the kind of musician he was. I knew Krasner in the last decades of his long life, and he described that day to me. He offered to play any of the concertos that were in his tour repertory at the time. “The Beethoven?” he suggested. Berg hastily shot back, “Nur keine Konzerte! Nur spielen!” (“No concertos at all—just play.”)  So Krasner simply, as he put it, “noodled” on the violin for an extended period, while Berg listened. I would love to think that he began—as violinists commonly do—by checking the tuning of his instrument, running the bow over each of the strings, from lowest to highest, then back again. It would be delightful to imagine this scenario, because in fact, that is exactly how the violin part of Berg’s concerto begins!

In any case, Berg set to work. Generally he was a composer who worked slowly and painstakingly. But in this case he seemed like a man possessed, as if he somehow knew his time was short. (That was, in fact, the case, but he can hardly have known in June or July that a wasp would sting him on August 11 (he had developed an allergy from another sting in 1909) and that he would develop a septicemia that carried him off two days before Christmas.

Whatever was in his mind as he composed, it clearly involved the ultra-romantic complications that he managed to create for himself in his real life, and he composed out in the music elements that symbolized his own life and loves. He wrote the concerto with a gold pen that was ostensibly a gift from the author Franz Werfel, but in fact it was from his sister, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, with whom Berg had fallen madly in love in 1925—a passionate relationship on both sides that lasted until the end of his life, though (according to Hanna’s daughter) it was never consummated. Another, earlier love affair is also recalled during the course of the work—Berg’s youthful relationship with a chambermaid in his family’s home in Carinthia which resulted in the birth of a daughter.

In any case, Berg finished the concerto at white heat, and the result is, in the minds of many listeners, the most intense and moving composition ever written by a composer who wrote in the twelve-tone style.

Berg laid out the work in two movements, each of which is subdivided into two parts of contrasting moods.  The first starts rather slowly, then gets faster. The second half moves in the opposite direction, beginning rather quickly, but ending in a very slow second part. As with many of his other works, Berg lays out phrases and sections in groups of bars according to a number theory—a kind of symbolic mysticism—that he followed consistently. He had read a book by one Wilhelm Fleiss that maintained that the natural rhythms of a man’s life—supposedly discovered in nature—related to the number 23, while the feminine number was 28 (presumably linked to days in the menstrual cycle). Somehow (we don’t know how they arrived at it) he and Hanna considered 10 to be “their” number. These numbers are worked out all through the concerto—though that is a fact of greater interest to musical analysts than to concert listeners.

The solo violin begins by running quietly up over the four open strings of the instrument, then down again, in an introduction that Berg identifies as “10 measures”—in other words, a private message to Hanna. After the introduction is over, the soloist plays out the entire 12-note row that forms the basis of the piece. Berg made a point of building it up with four overlapping triads (G minor, D major, A minor, E major) making up the first nine notes. Then, beginning with the ninth, he presents four notes moving up in whole steps: B, C-sharp, E-flat, F. The significance of these four notes will appear later in the piece.

This very carefully shaped tone-row provides the raw material for the movement, and it indicates from the beginning that traditional harmonies may be admitted to this very new theoretical world. He thought of this beginning as a kind of prelude. When it moves into the Allegretto, it does so with characteristically “Viennese” sonorities (thirds in the violin, for example, or the suggestion of a yodel).  In the middle of this music there appears a folk-like tune in 3/8 time that Berg identified in the score as a “Carinthian folk melody,” evidently a reference to the daughter that he did not officially acknowledge.

Up until now, the work has been surprisingly sweet in character (at least for those with little experience of atonal music, who expect the worst). The second movement begins with a much more violent explosion of dissonance, a stormy, rhythmically driven passage that only gradually quiets down for the last phase of the concerto.

I mentioned earlier the last four notes of the tone-row comprising part of a whole-tone scale. This is rarely found in tonal music, but it does occur in one very significant place—as the opening of the melody of a chorale tune that Bach had harmonized in his Cantata No. 60 two-hundred years earlier, with a 17th-century text that represents a farewell to life:

Berg knew that he wanted to quote the chorale melody here, and he cleverly made the last four notes of the row correspond to the opening of the tune. He quotes Bach’s own harmonization, too, though quietly adds his own comments. As is so often the case in his music, he intertwines the ongoing musical idea with private symbols, including his own “signature” (made up of the letters of his name that are also the names of musical pitches), and repeating ten (!) times the term “amoroso” in the score—surely another reference to Hanna.

The more we have learned about Berg and his passion for puzzles and hidden messages in recent years, the more it is possible to “decode” passages from the Violin Concerto. But in listening to a performance, that completely misses the point. Even before anything was known beyond the dedication to Manon Gropius, audiences who heard the work were gripped by the expressive power of the music, as they still are today.

Franz Schubert
Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944, “The Great”
Franz Peter Schubert was born in Liechtental, a suburb of Vienna, on January 31, 1797, and died in Vienna on November 19, 1828. He began this symphony in the summer of 1825 and completed it by October 1826. As some point between the summer of 1827 and Schubert’s death in November 1828, the symphony received at least one reading at a rehearsal of the orchestra of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde). The first fully authenticated (and first public) performance, heavily cut, took place on March 21, 1839, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy conducting the orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets; also three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 48 minutes.

Schubert composed no fewer than six symphonies between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. Then he ran into trouble; though he was to live ten years longer, he only finished one more symphony. Yet it was not for want of trying! Extensive sketches survive for other symphonies, not to mention the two completed movements of the “Unfinished” Symphony in B minor, one of his most magical works. Only the “Great” C major symphony was fully finished—and even it remained unknown and unperformed for more than a decade after Schubert’s early death.

About 1818 something undermined his confidence. He started leaving large works unfinished. Emotional maturing, a desire to express deeper and more intense feelings in his music, and uncertainty as to the means no doubt played a part. So did the overwhelming example of Beethoven, who had redefined the character of the symphony during Schubert’s lifetime. No longer could the symphony be music for entertainment, even of the supremely witty and accomplished kind that Haydn had perfected. His attempts simply did not meet his new standards, so they remained sketches or incomplete torsos.

Going by the numbering in the chronological Deutsch catalogue of Schubert’s works, the “Great” C major symphony (so called to distinguish it from the Symphony No. 6 in the same key) was one of the prolific composer’s final compositions. Indeed, the manuscript bears the date “March 1828,” only eight months before Schubert’s death.

But there is a mystery here. Schubert composed a symphony in the summer of 1825, during a vacation trip to Gmunden and Gastein; the following year he submitted a symphony to the Vienna Philharmonic Society, though it was never publicly performed. Scholars looked everywhere for a “missing” Schubert symphony. Reconsideration of the evidence brings convincing arguments that the Great C major Symphony is, in fact, the work Schubert composed in Gastein. It was never “lost.”
Studies of the paper on which Schubert wrote his music provide physical evidence for the argument. The “Great” C major Symphony was mostly written on paper of a distinctive type that Schubert also used for five dated compositions—all of them written in the summer of 1825. Moreover, his idol, Beethoven, used the same paper for his Opus 132 String Quartet, from the same summer. The lengthy manuscript of the symphony contains, here and there, four other types of paper, but they occur in passages that he was extending or revising later. The reworking probably took place months or even years after the original work of composition. It seems most likely, then, that Schubert added the date “March 1828” to the autograph when he undertook the final revision of a work that had long since been completed.

After Schubert’s death in 1828, the work was “lost”—unknown and unperformed—until 1839, when it was seen by a musician, Robert Schumann, who truly valued its significance and arranged for a performance in Leipzig, the first public hearing of this enormous score. In 1840 the symphony had a great success there, but other orchestras long regarded it as “too long and difficult.” Gradually audiences and performers came to recognize the truth of Schumann’s ecstatic reaction to this music: “It transports us into a world where we cannot recall ever having been before.”

The first movement begins with a horn theme that might be the typical “slow introduction.” But Schubert welds it to the body of the movement, making it a cornerstone of the entire symphony. The first three notes (C-D-E) cover the interval of a major third, which is heard, either rising or falling, throughout the score. The lengthy lyrical opening eventually turns into the Allegro ma non troppo, with a little fanfare theme (C-G-C-D in a dotted rhythm, repeated) in the strings. Schubert originally composed the entire first movement using an even simpler motive (C-G-C-G). Well after completing the full score (possibly in March 1828), he decided to rework the motive, which meant rewriting all the hundreds of times it occurs in the first movement. He scratched out the changed note at each occurrence with a penknife and replaced it.

The second movement, in A minor, is laid out on the simplest of musical plans, ABAB, with the B sections appearing in contrasting keys, first F, then A major. Yet the flow of ideas is so lavish and imaginative that one scarcely notices the straightforwardness of the design in the poetry of the elaboration.

The scherzo, too, is elaborated in extenso as a full-scale sonata form, a far cry from the binary dance movement of earlier symphonies. In several places Schubert introduces themes that truly waltz, lilting in the style that became the hallmark of Vienna (we tend to forget Schubert as a pioneer of the waltz).

The last movement is nothing short of colossal in time span, energy, or imaginative power. Two separate motives—one dotted, one in triplet rhythm—stand at the outset as a call to attention and a forecast of things to come. Both play a role in the opening theme, which grows with fierce energy to the dominant cadence. After a pause, a brilliantly simple new idea--four repeated notes in the unison horns--generates an independent marchlike theme that shows off its possibilities later on as it dominates the extended development. The opening dotted motive prepares the recapitulation with increasing intensity, though when it arrives, Schubert arranges matters so as to bring it back in the completely unexpected key of E-flat! The first section of the recapitulation is abridged, but it works around to C major for the more lyric march of the secondary theme. This closes quietly on a tremolo C in the cellos; they sink down two steps to A, starting the massive coda, which reworks the materials nearly as extensively as the development section in the middle of the movement. The mood passes from mystery and darkness to the glorious sunshine of C major as the symphony ends in a blaze of glory.