CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Boston Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director, Conductor, and Piano
Daniel Barenboim, Piano

SCHUBERT Fantasie in F Minor for Piano Four Hands, D.940
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3
ELLIOTT CARTER Interventions for Piano and Orchestra (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Staatskapelle Berlin)
STRAVINSKY Le sacre du printemps

Perspectives: Daniel Barenboim

Program Notes:

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828)
Fantasy in F Minor, D. 940

Schubert’s F-Minor Fantasy received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on October 23, 1949, with Anita Sixfin and Sidney Gelber, pianos.

The piano duet is a delightful social institution. Many a friendship—and more—has been cemented over hand-crossings, pedal gropings, and the hot competition for the middle octave; and Schubert, who had a keen sense for such matters, contributed generously to the genre. It was a relatively marketable commodity too, and from nearly the beginning of his career to the last months of his life, Schubert wrote easy duets and demanding ones, intimate confessions and public addresses, entertainments as well as music that puts the heart in peril, long works and little ones. For a long time—probably up to the time of World War II—the piano duet was also the way to become acquainted with the orchestra, chamber, and even operatic repertory. Virtually everything was arranged for duet, sometimes by the composers themselves, sometimes by other musicians of distinction (Max Reger, for example, was the arranger of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos). And beyond this, many musicians still have no idea that there is a rich literature of original music for piano duet by Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Brahms, Dvoøák, Grieg, Debussy, Ravel, Hindemith, and Poulenc, to cite just some of the most famous names.

The F-Minor Fantasy stands absolutely at the summit of Schubert’s achievement as a composer of instrumental music: It makes one ache for the promise it holds out for what should have been yet to come. He composed it in the first part of 1828, dedicating it to Karoline, Countess Esterházy of Galantha, who had been an occasional student of his earlier in the 1820s. In February 1828 he tried to sell it to the Mainz publisher Schott, but Schott turned it down. Diabelli in Vienna brought it out in March 1829, four months after Schubert’s death, six weeks after what would have been his 32nd birthday. As for the dedication, the report is that Schubert was in love with his young and of course socially unreachable student. We don’t know, of course; but that he dedicated so personal and so emotionally laden a work to her, that he gave her the manuscript of his great Piano Trio in E-flat, that Moritz von Schwind placed her portrait into the very center of his famous drawing of a “Schubertiade” at the house of Josef von Spaun—all of this suggests that she was a person of more than ordinary importance in Schubert’s life.

In some ways the Fantasy resembles a four-movement sonata. But as he does in the “Wanderer” Fantasy for solo piano and the C-Major Fantasy with violin (another almost unknown treasure), Schubert proceeds from one movement to the next without break, making of each of these links a spectacular coup de théâtre. And where we expect a finale, Schubert surprises us—and brings many of us close to tears—by bringing back the Fantasy’s beginning, that poignant, ever-so-slightly hesitant, delicately tzigane-flavored F-minor melody with its heavenly turn, at last, to the major mode. Then, however, the movement expands hugely, and the double fugue reaches one of the most thrilling climaxes in all of Schubert. Three afterthoughts entered between the completion of the Fantasy in February and the preparation of a fair copy in April are worth noting: the exquisite shape of the F major variant of the opening melody, Schubert’s progressive slowing of the tempo marks for the second movement from Andante molto to Andante and finally to Largo, and, wonderfully, his adding the intensely dissonant, pathos-filled sequence of chords with which the work now comes to its close.

—Michael Steinberg

Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979 and then of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic.


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 received its Carnegie Hall premiere on December 12, 1894, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch; Bernhard Stavenhagen was the soloist.


Why are some early Beethoven works bold and distinctive in voice, and others, like the first three concertos, more traditional? Part of the reason has to do with medium and genre. In those years Beethoven composed with an intense awareness of the past, not only as inspiration but as competition. The past that concerned him most was the immediate—Haydn and Mozart, both of whom he knew personally. In genres where those masters were supreme (e.g., Haydn with string quartets and Mozart with piano concertos), Beethoven tended to enter the arena cautiously. With genres in which his predecessors had left him more room—say, piano sonata and cello sonata—he was bold from the beginning.

Another thing bearing on his piano concertos was that for virtuoso performer-composers like him, concertos were designed as personal showpieces, for which reason the dynamic of performance and publication for concertos was different from other genres. A string quartet, symphony, or sonata was a work to finish, get premiered, perhaps polish a bit more, then get published as soon and as profitably as possible. In contrast, Beethoven would write a concerto and play it around, revising as he went (the solo part evolving, the cadenzas left for improvisation). Only when a concerto had been heard enough to become familiar to audiences did he publish it and write a new one. This explains the deceptively late opus number for the Third Concerto, which was finished around late 1802 into 1803 but not published until 1804 (though this was considerably quicker than the earlier concertos).

In fact, when the Third was premiered, the solo part had not been written down at all, as a well-known story relates. Everybody nominally played from music in those days, so at the performance Beethoven carefully placed the solo part on the piano’s music stand. He was flanked by a young page-turner, who discovered that the pages were mostly blank, with only occasional “hieroglyphics” as reminders. The young man spent the performance anxiously watching Beethoven, waiting for his solemn nods to turn the empty pages. At a dinner afterward, Beethoven was roaring with laughter over the youth’s distress.

Though much of the Third Concerto is audibly indebted to Mozart, in his handling of color and material Beethoven is playing sophisticated games of his own. The quiet unison opening in C minor recalls Mozart’s great C-Minor concerto, K. 491. Still, even in relatively backward-looking works like this one, Beethoven possesses a mature mastery of form and conception. The beginning sets a tone dark and dramatic, with a certain military-march aspect; the entire concerto will turn around a few ideas from the beginning. The first measure is a rising figure, the second measure a down-striding scale, the third measure a martial drumbeat, which turns out to be the most important of these figures. The opening string phrase is echoed a step higher by the winds, who add another fundamental idea: a line that rises up to a piercing dissonance on A-flat. That A-flat will resonate throughout the piece and find its resolution only at the end.

The lyrical second theme of the opening movement brings us to the piano’s entrance on an explosive up-rushing scale. The soloist takes up the main theme, establishing a commanding personality in the dialogue with the orchestra. With piano and orchestra in close cooperation, the effect is rather more symphonic than concerto-like. Much of the music is dominated by the drumbeat figure in constantly new forms—but never, so far, played by an actual drum. After the piano’s concluding cadenza, however, the rhythmic motif finally turns up in the timpani in a duet with the piano. That moment of piano and timpani together appears to be the first idea Beethoven jotted down for the concerto, in 1796: “For the Concerto in C minor, kettledrum at the cadenza.”

The second movement is in a striking E major, about as far from C minor as a key can be. But the first note in its solemnly beautiful opening theme is G-sharp, the same pitch as A-flat. The form is a simple A-B-A, the piano still the commanding presence, now with an air of rapturous improvisation. The final chord of the movement places G-sharp on the top in strings. The piano picks up that note and turns it back into A-flat to begin what will be a lively and playful rondo, despite the C-minor tonality. A couple of times the piano interrupts with mini-cadenzas before the middle section in A-flat major. As a kind of musical joke, Beethoven turns the A-flat back into G-sharp and on that pivot shoves us for a moment into E major, the key of the slow movement. Another mini-cadenza from the piano brings in the expansive and surprising coda, where the 2/4 main theme is transformed into a presto 6/8, driving to the end in pealing C-major high spirits.

—Jan Swafford

Author of biographies of Johannes Brahms and Charles Ives, the award-winning composer and author Jan Swafford is currently working on a biography of Beethoven for Houghton Mifflin.


ELLIOTT CARTER (b. 1908)
Interventions for Piano and Orchestra

Tonight’s performance marks the New York premiere of Interventions. James Levine conducted and Daniel Barenboim was soloist in the world premiere performances last week, on December 4 and 5 in Symphony Hall, Boston. The piece was written on commission from the Carnegie Hall Corporation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, Music Director, and the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, General Music Director.

This evening’s Boston Symphony concert is a continuation and culmination, on the composer’s actual 100th birthday, of a year-long celebration of Elliott Carter’s centenary. For the occasion, Carter has provided a medium (baking his own cake, as it were) for that celebration in his Interventions for piano and orchestra, written for two of his warmest admirers:

Tailoring a piece to the particular individual who requested it has long been Carter’s practice, particularly in the recent concertos for oboe, violin, clarinet, cello, and horn (the latter written for BSO principal horn James Sommerville). When Carter wrote the piano and orchestra piece Soundings for Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony, he created a piece that required both of Barenboim’s hats (pianist and conductor), writing an orchestra work that begins and ends with an extended unaccompanied piano solo. It was Barenboim who, as general music director of Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter-den-Linden, invited Elliott Carter, then in his late 80s, finally to write an opera, giving him strong assurances that it would be staged. Barenboim led the premiere performances of Carter’s What Next? in Berlin in September 1999 and its American premiere the following year in concert performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he was also music director. It was James Levine who in summer 2006 conducted the American stage premiere of What Next? with Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.

Including Interventions, first performed in Boston last week, Levine and Barenboim have been responsible individually for the premieres of eight different Elliott Carter works and for the creation of several more. So far Levine has led three premieres (Interventions, Three Illusions, and the Horn Concerto) with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the BSO previously gave the premieres of the Piano Concerto in 1967 and the Boston Concerto in 2003. Moreover, Carter has been a frequent presence at the BSO’s summer festival, Tanglewood, where this past summer the Tanglewood Music Center’s Festival of Contemporary Music was dedicated to celebrating his centennial with performances of 47 Carter pieces (including two more world premieres) and featuring the first all-Carter concert by the BSO. The 2008 FCM was conceived and curated by James Levine, a first for a BSO music director.

So it was with these (past and future) performances of his own music in mind, as well as the music from Mozart to modern that Carter has heard these two great musicians perform in various venues, that Carter conceived Interventions:

When both Daniel Barenboim and James Levine suggested a work for both of them to perform on my 100th birthday, delighted and also hoping that I could write something worthy of these two great performers, I soon realized that it could not be a regular piano concerto because it would not give equal prevalence to both performers. So I decided to write a work that had one long line, mostly for the strings, interrupted by the piano which also had its developing part interrupted by the orchestra. Each intervening in the other’s part, sometimes humorously.

The work was completed on April 16, 2007.

—Elliott Carter
October 27, 2008

Carter’s solo piano music is scarce and could be performed easily on one concert—the Piano Sonata (1946), Night Fantasies (1980), and 90+, plus Matribute (2007) and a couple of other smaller pieces. But he was a pianist himself when he was younger, and his piano writing is extremely idiomatic for the instrument. The Sonata and Night Fantasies are not only hefty works but watersheds in Carter’s output, furthering particular refinements and explorations in style in their respective periods within his career.

In fact, these two pieces bookend a stretch of three-plus decades during which every new Carter work was a watershed. Two of the big works of the 1960s featured keyboard(s) with ensemble, the Double Concerto for Piano, Harpsichord, and Two Chamber Orchestras (1961) and the monumental Piano Concerto (1965). Here Carter further explored the possibilities of opposing musical arguments, an approach already manifest strongly in the Second String Quartet (1959). (The concerto, of course, has historically been the traditional genre for this approach.) The keyboard writing in these works is masterful, brilliant, and dense, as it is in the concertante piano part of the Concerto for Orchestra a few years later. Carter’s most recent concerted work with piano prior to Interventions is the quicksilver Dialogues (2003), written for the pianist Nicolas Hodges and the London Sinfonietta with Oliver Knussen conducting. In that piece, the pianist trades off in “dialogues” with the virtuoso individual players of the Sinfonietta, whose playing Carter knew from previous encounters.

As with Dialogues and Barenboim’s Soundings, Interventions offers a new and special case for a piece combining solo piano with orchestra. Its very form was conceived for the present “social” circumstance, having two equally eminent musicians whose talents must, in Carter’s view, be featured equally. (One could even imagine an inversion of the present situation, with Barenboim leading the orchestra and Levine at the keyboard—surely this crossed Carter’s mind?) Therefore we have, immediately, a musical narrative that throws orchestra and piano into strongly established and contrasting sound-worlds, and both forces carrying lengthy passages without the other’s participation. The piano is aided and abetted by two instrumental trios that become the liaisons for whatever unification does occur. (The presence of these two trios echoes a concertino septet addition to the large orchestra of the much earlier Piano Concerto.)

The opening measures may come as a shock for those familiar with Carter’s music—a unison A in the orchestra, the same pitch used to tune before the piece begins. The piano immediately counters this with a B-flat, insistently, echoed by instruments from both of the solo trios. The orchestra follows with a wash of sound, a nearly diatonic (mostly within the C major scale) collection of pitches, countered by crunchier harmonies in the trios. The strings’ ensuing sedate melody is cut off by the intervention of the highly contrasting “impetuoso” lengthy solo passage in the piano. And so it goes, each force seeming to cut into the narrative of the other, but with some element of its argument leavening, and being in turn affected by, its rival. The piano tends toward continuing impetuosity, the orchestra—with some excursions into passages of aggressive power—toward more sustained, lyrical music. The closing moments recall the start of the discussion—the piano renews its insistence on B-flat, the orchestra tersely reminds the soloist of its original position of A. In a loud conclusion highly unusual for Carter, the two sides blend finally in a B-flat–A tremolo for a big, fortissimo finish. Quite the birthday bash!

—Robert Kirzinger
Composer Robert Kirzinger is Publications Associate of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.


IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)
Le sacre du printemps, Pictures from pagan Russia

Le sacre du printemps received its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 31, 1924, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteux.

Stravinsky first thought of the visual image that would become the basis of his ballet Le sacre du printemps—a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death—while he was working on The Firebird. Although Serge Diaghilev, who commissioned the work for his own Ballet Russes, liked the idea and suggested Stravinsky go ahead with it, the composer was temporarily sidetracked by another musical idea that turned into Petrushka, which got written first. Then, in July 1911, Stravinsky met with the designer Nicholas Roerich on the estate of the Princess Tenichev in Smolensk; there, in the space of a few days, they laid out the entire plan of action and the titles of the dances. Roerich began designing his backdrops and costumes after some originals in the Princess’s collection.

In the fall of 1911, Stravinsky went to Clarens, Switzerland, where he rented an apartment that included a tiny eight‑by‑eight‑foot room containing a small upright piano (which he kept muted) for composing. There he began to work, starting with the “Auguries of spring,” the section immediately following the slow introduction with that wonderfully crunchy polychord (consisting of an F‑flat chord on the bottom and an E‑flat seventh chord on top) reiterated in eighth-note rhythms with carefully unpredictable stresses. The music of Part I went quickly; by January 7, 1912, he had finished it, including most of the orchestration. Then he began serious work on Part II at the beginning of March.

Rehearsals began nearly six months before the performance, sandwiched in between the tour commitments of the company. The choreography had been entrusted to Nijinsky, who had made a sensation dancing the title role of Petrushka, but whose talents as a choreographer were untested. Most atypically, Stravinsky attended very few rehearsals until just before the premiere, which took place on May 29, 1913. The premiere, of course, was one of the greatest scandals in the history of music. There had been little hint of it beforehand; at the dress rehearsal, attended by a large crowd of invited musicians (including Debussy and Ravel) and critics, everything had gone smoothly. But at the performance, the noise in the audience began almost as soon as the music started—a few catcalls, then more and more. Stravinsky left the hall early, in a rage, though he never forgot the imperturbability of the conductor, Pierre Monteux, who continued “apparently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile ... through to the end.”

Things were no calmer backstage. Diaghilev was having the house lights flipped on and off, in an attempt to quiet the audience. Nijinsky stood just offstage shouting numbers to the dancers in an attempt to keep everything together. After the performance, Stravinsky related, they were “excited, angry, disgusted and ... happy.” Diaghilev recognized, with the impresario’s instinct for publicity, that the evening’s events, however frustrating they may have been for the performers and the composer, were worth any amount of advertising. Though opening night did not constitute a real setback for the ballet, the real success came almost a year later, when Monteux conducted the first concert performance of the score outside of Russia (Koussevitzky had given a performance in Moscow in February). This time the triumph was total, and the composer was carried from the hall on the shoulders of the crowd and borne through the Place de la Trinité.

Probably no single work written in the 20th century has exercised so profound and far‑reaching an effect on the art of music as Le sacre du printemps. Despite the trappings of 19th-century romanticism—a huge orchestra and the scenery and costumes of a classical ballet company—the piece was a breakthrough in harmony, rhythm, and texture. Though Stravinsky’s advanced, dissonant harmonies probably attracted the most attention at first, it is the rhythms of Le sacre that continue to challenge and inspire. Critics once railed that this incomprehensible composition signified the destruction of all that the word “music” had meant. Composers were overwhelmed, and had to come to grips with it. Stravinsky himself never wrote another piece remotely like it; the grandeur, the color, the energy of Le sacre have never been surpassed. Despite various attempts to analyze the score, Stravinsky himself was not interested in theorizing. Of course he didn’t need to—he had composed the piece. As he put it: “I was guided by no system whatever in Le sacre du printemps. When I think of the other composers of that time who interest me—Berg, who is synthetic (in the best sense), Webern, who is analytic, and Schoenberg, who is both—how much more theoretical the music seems than Le sacre; and these composers were supported by a great tradition, whereas very little immediate tradition lies behind Le sacre du printemps. I had only my ear to help me. I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.”

—Steven Ledbetter

Steven Ledbetter, who was musicologist and program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, writes and lectures widely on many aspects of classical music.

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