CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Philadelphia Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Charles Dutoit, Conductor
Women of the Philadelphia Singers Chorale
David Hayes, Music Director

BARTÓK The Miraculous Mandarin Suite
DEBUSSY Nocturnes

HOLST The Planets, Op. 32

Program Notes:

BÉLA BARTÓK Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19
Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (Now Romania); died September 26, 1945, in New York City.

The Miraculous Mandarin was composed in the years 1918–23 and arranged as a suite in 1927. The Suite was first performed in Budapest on October 15, 1928, conducted by Ernõ Dohnányi; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 5, 1948, with The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy.

Scoring: 3 flutes (II and III doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (III doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (II doubling E-flat clarinet, III doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (III doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, large snare drum, soprano snare drum, tam-tam, triangle, xylophone), harp, piano, celesta, organ, and strings.

As World War I progressed, transforming the face of Europe beyond recognition, Béla Bartók and his colleague Zoltán Kodály found the countryside growing hostile to the sort of folk song collecting that had occupied them during the early years of the century. As a result, he became more productive as a composer. His ballet The Wooden Prince, composed from 1914 to 1916, was an enormous success at its Budapest premiere in 1917. With public interest aroused, the director of the production, Egisto Tango, presented Bartók’s earlier Bluebeard’s Castle in May 1918. Two months earlier the composer’s Second String Quartet had received a highly acclaimed premiere in Budapest.

In the fall of 1918, with the war virtually over, Bartók began work on the ballet-pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, spurred on by a commission. The composition was an arduous process, though, and the work was not completed until 1923. Yet despite the eagerness with which Tango and the Budapest public had awaited the new work, in the end the local censors were to prevent Mandarin from being performed in the city until after Bartók’s death many years later.

The problem lay not in the music but in the scenario, by the Hungarian dramatist and poet Menyhért Lengyel. The gruesome story, which draws both from myth and from fairy tale, tells of a young woman who is forced by three bandits to lure men into her room so the accomplices can rob them. The first victim is a shabby gentleman, whom they expel from the room. Then a shy young man appears and dances with the girl briefly, until the thieves throw him out, too. Finally a “mandarin” of frightening countenance appears, and becomes immediately fixated on the young woman. He is under a spell, and his lurid eyes continue to stare longingly at the woman while the thieves try to kill him—by smothering him, stabbing him, and hanging him. He will not die, or even bleed, and his horrible eyes continue to stare. The young girl takes pity, and as she draws the mandarin into her arms, his wounds begin to bleed, and he dies.

Initially Bartók intended to set part of Lengyel’s text to music, with singers, but he decided that the story was more convincing as textless pantomime. The score is rich in instrumental color and vivid in its programmatic depiction of stage action. The opening bars, meant to portray the sound of street traffic outside the girl’s window, introduce the ear to the two major musical elements of the score, a three-note chord and an augmented octave scale. The girl’s seductive charm is represented by a clarinet solo, heard each time she poses in the window to await her prey, while the mandarin’s appearance is marked by a pentatonic melody harmonized jarringly—a musical cliché of the Far East. The Suite ends with a passage depicting the mandarin’s first pursuit of the girl, as he chases her around the room briefly before the bandits attack him.

We have the Hungarian censors to thank that Bartók gave instructions for an orchestral suite of the Mandarin score; the story proved too heady for the Budapest stage, and the non-staged version was the only form in which it could be performed in the composer’s own country in October 1928. It had already received its fully staged premiere in Cologne on November 27, 1926.

—Paul J. Horsley


CLAUDE DEBUSSY Nocturnes
Born August 22, 1862, in Saint-Germain-En-Laye, France; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.

Composed from 1897 to 1899, the Nocturnes received their first complete Carnegie Hall performance on February 17, 1910, with the MacDowell Chorus and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Gustav Mahler. Nuages and Fêtes received their New York premieres at Carnegie Hall on January 8, 1905, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch; Sirènes received its first Carnegie Hall performance on February 8, 1910, with the Musical Art Society of New York and Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra.

Scoring: 3 flutes (III doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (cymbals, military drum), 2 harps, strings, and women’s chorus.

By 1880 Debussy, then in his late teens, abandoned his ambition to become a concert pianist. He was fired with a new interest—composition. Early studies with Ernest Guiraud and César Franck soon paid off: In 1884 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome in composition. But the stipulations of the prize—that the grantee reside for a year in Rome’s Villa Medici and submit four compositions as evidence of artistic progress—made this a less than celebratory occasion for Debussy. He loved Paris; it had always been his source of inspiration. The Eternal City’s burden of history weighed heavily on him. He called the aging villa “a prison.”

Nevertheless Debussy managed to write important works during this period and also furthered his exposure to a broad range of music through travel in Germany, Russia, and France. By the 1890s he was writing such masterpieces as the String Quartet and the revolutionary orchestral Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, works that announced a major new force in music.

Shortly after completing Faun in 1894, Debussy embarked on the first version of his equally potent Nocturnes, a work he originally conceived for solo violin and orchestra. The composer described the piece to the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (for whom it was intended) as “an experiment in the various textures that can be made with a single color,” comparing it to the equivalent of a painter’s study in grays.

Having apparently completed the work in 1894, Debussy was dissatisfied with the result, and he set about to revise it. From 1897 to 1899 he reworked the Nocturnes entirely, omitting the violin solo and employing, in the last movement, a textless chorus of 16 women to represent the Sirens, the sinister mythological bird-women who enchanted sailors with eerie song. The first two movements of the new version were first heard in December 1900 at the Concerts Lamoureux of Paris’s Société Nationale; the whole piece was not performed until October of the following year.

“The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense,” Debussy wrote in a preface to the score of the work. “Therefore, it is not meant to designate the usual form of the nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests.”

The three movements offer contrasting tempos and moods, although all end quietly. The opening Clouds is the most characteristically “impressionistic” with its statically shifting chords. The lively Festivals follows. The strings that had dominated the first movement yield to the brass instruments, notably trumpet fanfares that recall Tchaikovsky. (The two composers shared the same patron, the elusive Madame von Meck.) The concluding Sirens, with its evocative use of women’s wordless voices, is alluringly seductive and invokes the sea, a topic of another great work the composer would write a few years later. (The Philadelphians will perform La Mer later this season.)

Debussy’s note on the piece continues thus:

Nuages [Clouds] renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones tinged with white. Fêtes [Festivals] portrays the restless dancing rhythms of the atmosphere, interspersed with sudden flashes of light; the episode of the procession (a dazzling, fantastic vision) passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains persistently the same: the festival, its blending of music and luminous dust participating in cosmic rhythms. Sirènes [Sirens] depicts the sea and its innumerable rhythms: Presently, amid the waves silvered by the moon, the mysterious song of the Sirens is heard; it laughs and passes on.

—Paul J. Horsley / Christopher H. Gibbs


GUSTAV HOLST The Planets
Born September 21, 1874, in Cheltenham, England; died May 25, 1934, in London.

Composed in 1914–16, The Planets received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 29, 1921, with the Women’s Chorus from the Oratorio Society of New York and the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates.

Scoring: 4 flutes (III doubling piccolo I, IV doubling piccolo II and alto flute), 3 oboes (III doubling bass oboe), English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 2 tenor trombones, bass trombone, tenor and bass tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, gong, bells, glockenspiel, xylophone), celesta, two harps, organ, and strings.

During the first half of the 20th century, Great Britain was blessed with at least five marvelous composers, of whom Elgar and Vaughan Williams have become a regular part of our concert life—albeit through a mere handful of works—and Delius and Bax are perhaps not far behind in making inroads here. But no British master is known through fewer works than Gustav Holst (1874–1934), who despite a large and excellent output remains for most listeners the composer of a single composition: the popular and influential Planets, which continues to make its mark today in everything from television to Star Wars.

Born in Cheltenham, England, of Swedish, German, and English parentage, Gustavus “von Holst” received his schooling at the Royal College of Music, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Charles Villiers Stanford. A severe case of neuritis forced him to give up his ambition of becoming a pianist, and he subsequently became interested in composition. Later he studied trombone and played in the Carl Rosa Opera Company, which proved to be extremely valuable experience for his later experiments in orchestral composition. Some have cited his travels in the Far East as being partly responsible for Holst’s streak of mysticism, which colors a number of his works. He was an impressive scholar of languages, and learned enough Sanskrit to set parts of the Rig Veda to music.

In any case it appears that it was partly the astrological significance of heavenly bodies that first sparked the composer’s idea to forge a set of orchestral tone poems to reflect the character of each planet. He began the cycle that became The Planets in 1914, just moments before the first shots of World War I were sounding in Sarajevo.

The hardships of the war years slowed the work on this unprecedented composition—which took two years to complete—and appear to have influenced the outcome as well. The Planets was completed in 1916, and was first presented in a private performance in London in September 29, 1918, under Adrian Boult’s baton. The public premiere was not until after the war—on November 15, 1920, with Albert Coates.

There are seven movements, each with a distinctive musical character that seems to relate both to the god for which the planet is named—and to the quality, mood, or activity that this god has come to represent. (Earth is not represented in The Planets, and although Pluto’s existence had been “theorized” as early as 1919, it wasn’t actually discovered until 1930.) To the very end Holst insisted that his goal in this concert favorite was to represent “the character, ... the astrological significance of the planets,” and that the pieces had no further extramusical meaning. “There is no program music in them,” he said, “neither have they any connection with the deities of classical mythology bearing the same names. If any guide to the music is required, the subtitle to each piece will be found sufficient, especially if it be used in a broad sense.”

Partly, Holst’s insistence that these works were only “suggested” by astrological concepts was the composer’s way of keeping The Planets from becoming ludicrously sentimental or programmatic. Indeed, one can easily listen to this work as a marvelous symphony, without giving a thought to gods or heavenly bodies, and still derive meaning and pleasure from the music’s sheer sonic vitality.

But it’s more fun, perhaps, to listen for programmatic ties. Mars, the Bringer of War, for example, might well be about the god Mars—but since this god represents war anyway, there is really no way to separate the war-god Mars from the overtly “martial” character that the planet has come to embody. In fact Holst himself said, on another occasion, that he was seeking here to express “the stupidity of war.” The piece is not a “march” per se, but it does contain something of the relentless gunfire and violence of the battlefield. Its resemblance to John Williams’s Star Wars music is hardly coincidental, for music such as this plainly formed one of that composer’s most potent influences.

Holst’s daughter, Imogen, would later greet speculation about the work’s programmatic nature—especially the notion that it was some sort of statement on World War I—with a caveat, pointing out that Mars was completed in 1914, before the war had begun. “It would be easy to take it for granted that Mars had been commissioned as background music for a documentary film of a tank battle. But Holst had never heard a machine gun when he wrote it, and the tank had not yet been invented.”

In grave contrast, Venus, the Bringer of Peace is a lyric love song, not unlike the goddess for whom this most tranquil of planets was named. Mercury, the Winged Messenger is a fleet scherzo that conveys the volatile nature of both god and planet.

Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity is less about the imposing nature of this god—and this most mysterious of planets—than about what Holst called the spirit of “one of those jolly fat people who enjoy life.” Clearly this Jupiter is more Falstaff than Zeus. A contrasting middle section employs a broad-limbed and rather innocently constructed tune that was later adapted to a sentimental patriotic hymn “I Vow to Thee, My Country.”

Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age is a ghostly funeral march that reminds us of the forceful vision of old age and destiny. Uranus, the Magician, forceful but mystical (and more than a bit like Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice), stands as one of the most skillful uses of the modern orchestra of the era.

Neptune, the Mystic brings the work to a puzzling yet deliciously lyrical close; again the textures of more recent film scores seem to have been derived from this piece. Some have claimed also to hear the influence of Debussian evocations of “Neptune’s realm”—such as the “Sirènes” movement from Nocturnes (which also features a wordless women’s choir) and, of course, La mer, a work whose influence could hardly be avoided in the first half of the 20th century.

Program notes © 2008. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Charles Dutoit, Conductor
Since his debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1980, Charles Dutoit has been invited each season to conduct all the major orchestras of the United States, including those of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. He has also performed regularly with all the great orchestras of Europe, including the Berliner Philharmoniker and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, as well as the Israel Philharmonic and the major orchestras of Japan, South America, and Australia. Mr. Dutoit has recorded extensively for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips, CBS, Erato, and other labels with American, European, and Japanese orchestras. His more than 170 recordings, half of them with the Montreal Symphony, have garnered more than 40 awards and distinctions.

Mr. Dutoit will become chief conductor and artistic adviser of The Philadelphia Orchestra in September 2008. Since 1990 he has been artistic director and principal conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra’s summer festival at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Between 1990 and 1999, he also directed the Orchestra’s summer series at the Mann Center, and led them in a series of distinctive recordings. From 1991 to 2001, he was music director of the Orchestre National de France, with which he made a number of recordings and toured extensively. In 1996 he was appointed principal conductor, and in 1998 music director, of the NHK Symphony in Tokyo. For 25 years (1977 to 2002), Mr. Dutoit was artistic director of the Montreal Symphony.

When still in his early 20s, Mr. Dutoit was invited by Herbert von Karajan to lead the Vienna State Opera. Mr. Dutoit has since conducted regularly at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He also led productions at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.

In 1988 the government of France made Mr. Dutoit an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 1996 he was promoted to Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1991 he was made an Honorary Citizen of the City of Philadelphia. In 1995 the government of Québec named him Grand Officier de l’Ordre National du Québec. He has also been awarded the Canadian Music Council Medal as well as the Diploma of Honor by the Canadian Conference of the Arts. In 1998 he was invested as Honorary Officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest award of merit. Mr. Dutoit was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and his musical training took him to Geneva, Siena, Venice, and Tanglewood, where he worked with Charles Munch.

A globetrotter motivated by his passion for history and archaeology, political science, art, and architecture, Mr. Dutoit has traveled and visited so far 172 countries. He maintains residences in Switzerland, Paris, Montreal, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo.

Founded in 1900, The Philadelphia Orchestra has distinguished itself as one of the leading orchestras in the world through a century of acclaimed performances, historic international tours, best-selling recordings, and its unprecedented record of innovation in recording technologies and outreach. The Orchestra has maintained an unparalleled unity in artistic leadership with only six music directors piloting its first century: Fritz Scheel (1900–07), Carl Pohlig (1907–12), Leopold Stokowski (1912–41), Eugene Ormandy (1936–80), Riccardo Muti (1980–92), and Wolfgang Sawallisch (1993–2003).

This rich tradition is carried on by Christoph Eschenbach, who became music director in 2003. The 2006–07 season, Mr. Eschenbach’s fourth, highlights the music of Mozart and Shostakovich. In January 2007, Mr. Eschenbach leads the Orchestra in the Academy of Music 150th Anniversary Concert. During his tenure, he has conducted Beethoven’s nine symphonies paired with music of our time; led a four-week Late Great Works Festival; launched the Orchestra’s first-ever multiyear cycle of Mahler’s complete symphonies; and led tours of Europe and Asia, as well as Florida and Puerto Rico.

The Orchestra began a three-year partnership with Ondine Records in 2005, and has released five recordings taken from live concerts. As of April 2006, the Orchestra is broadcast regularly on NPR. Other recent highlights include a five-year, $125 million endowment campaign launched in 2003; the Orchestra’s move to The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in 2001; and the Orchestra’s 100th anniversary in 2000. The Philadelphia Orchestra annually touches the lives of more than one million music lovers worldwide through its performances, publications, recordings, and broadcasts. The Orchestra presents a subscription season in Philadelphia each year from September to May, in addition to education and community partnership programs, and appears annually at Carnegie Hall. Its summer schedule includes an outdoor series at Philadelphia’s Mann Center for the Performing Arts, free Neighborhood Concerts, a three-week residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, and an annual weeklong residency at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival beginning July 2007.

Women of the Philadelphia Singers Chorale
David Hayes, Music Director
The Philadelphia Singers is a unique chorus of professional singers who excel in solo as well as ensemble work. Founded in 1972 and now under the direction of David Hayes, the Philadelphia Singers performs regularly with leading national and local performing arts organizations, including The Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Mannes Orchestra, the Curtis Institute of Music, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and Astral Artistic Services.

The Philadelphia Singers Chorale was founded in 1991 as the symphonic chorus of the Philadelphia Singers. The Chorale is composed of professional singers and talented volunteers. In its role as resident chorus of The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chorale appears with the Orchestra in all its choral subscription concerts, as well as annual performances of Handel's Messiah. Past performances with The Philadelphia Orchestra have included Verdi’s Requiem, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé for the opening of the Kimmel Center, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Liszt’s Dante Symphony, Mahler’s Second and Third symphonies, Brahms’s Requiem, Haydn’s Seasons, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and “Choral” Fantasy, Adams’s Harmonium, Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, and Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible.

Members of the ensemble come from outstanding educational backgrounds, including Curtis, the Academy of Vocal Arts, the Juilliard School, the Peabody Conservatory, Westminster Choir College, the Eastman School of Music, and the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, as well as vocal institutes in Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.

David Hayes was appointed music director of the Philadelphia Singers in 1992. He studied conducting with Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School and with Otto-Werner Mueller at the Curtis Institute, where Mr. Hayes is a staff conductor; he is also director of orchestral and conducting studies at New York’s Mannes School of Music. He has performed as guest conductor with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Sinfonia Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Relâche Ensemble, the Springfield (MA) Symphony, the Louisiana and Warsaw philharmonics, the American Repertory Ballet, the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, and at the Verbier and Berkshire Choral festivals. Mr. Hayes is also a cover conductor for The Philadelphia Orchestra.