CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Opening Night Gala

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 7:00 PM

Lucerne Festival Orchestra
David Robertson, Conductor
Murray Perahia, Piano
Melanie Diener, Soprano
Anna Larsson, Contralto
Jonas Kaufmann, Tenor
Reinhard Hagen, Bass
Westminster Symphonic Choir
Joe Miller, Conductor

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 4
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9

Opening Night Gala Sponsor: PricewaterhouseCoopers

Program Notes:

By Bernard Jacobson

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1805–06, the Fourth Piano Concerto was first performed in March 1807 at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace in Vienna, with the composer as soloist. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 4, 1892, with pianist Franz Rummel and the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: solo piano; flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Despite the intense inward drama of its second movement and the brilliance of its fleet finale, the fundamental impression left by the least aggressive of Beethoven’s piano concertos is one of lyricism, depth, and a winning grace. The stage does not look very Beethovenish when the Fourth Piano Concerto is to be played. The orchestra—with only one flute, à la Mozart and Haydn—is among the smallest Beethoven ever used. In the slow movement, moreover, the piano is partnered only by the strings; and the trumpets and drums do not appear at all until the finale. Of Beethoven the thundering revolutionary there is no trace. Yet it was in the modest setting of this quietly strong, mysteriously gentle composition that the composer finally solved the structural problems of one of music’s greatest and most frequently misunderstood forms.

The concerto is in essence a dramatic genre. Evolving from the canzone and other forms of earlier polyphonic music, it has strong links with vocal forms, particularly the aria, and its point lies in the possibilities opened up by the powerfully human opposition of the individual to the mass. True, instrumental virtuosity is one of the means a soloist can adopt to establish his dominance over an orchestral mass that could obviously, in terms of sheer noise-making ability, overwhelm him with ease. But far more important means are those gifts of character, sentiment, poetry, imagination, and wit—essentially individual gifts—whose exercise gives a good concerto performance its special fascination.

Building on the foundation laid by Vivaldi, Bach, and others, the great masters of the classical concerto—Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms—based their first movements on the principle of the ritornello, a recurring orchestral passage that began the proceedings and returned, complete or abridged, after the various excursions of the soloist. It was in his deployment of this delicate principle in the first three piano concertos, attractive though they are, that Beethoven showed he had not yet fully plumbed the significance and potential of Mozart’s work in the field: all three first movements behave a little too much like the first movements of symphonies to give proper weight to the special character of the solo instrument when it finally enters the scene.

With the Fourth Concerto, all tentativeness is banished. The listener should not be misled by the fact that the piano, in a hushed, arresting five-measure phrase, is here heard at the very outset. Beethoven is not abandoning the principle of an orchestral first exposition. On the contrary, this gesture shows merely how confident he had now become in his ability to handle the complex solo-tutti relations of a spacious ritornello-style movement, which is exactly what the Allegro moderato turns out to be.

Most classical concertos, having safely established the balance of power in the course of their first movements, take things more easily thereafter. In the Fourth Concerto, Beethoven still has vital matters to address. The Andante con moto, tiny in size but vast in expressive scope, is a gripping drama that presents a gradual self-assertion on the part of the piano and a corresponding capitulation by its orchestral colleagues. The movement (which, incidentally, also begins with an artfully fashioned five-measure phrase) has often been described—and there is evidence to suggest that Beethoven himself may have seen it this way—as an evocation of Orpheus taming the monsters and furies in Hades with his immortal lyre.

Relaxation, on the dramatic level, does come in the final Rondo, but without any diminution of harmonic subtlety or rhythmic freedom. The main theme steals in, most unconventionally, on the pivotal note E (the sixth note of the G-Major scale, and the keynote of the Andante), and its first limb is ten measures long. Nor is there any lack of enterprise in this movement’s handling of orchestral tone: when the piano enters in the 11th measure, it is supported by a single cello—a novel coloristic touch that Beethoven used with evident relish in this concerto and its successor.

For the last time, Beethoven leaves the soloist with the traditional option of inserting an improvised cadenza in two places, near the ends of the first and last movements. (In the Fifth Piano Concerto he explicitly instructs the pianist, at the usual juncture, not to play a cadenza but to go on with the written text.) The composer himself, however, left cadenzas of his own for the Fourth Concerto, and these will be used by Mr. Perahia on this occasion.

Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125
Composed between 1811 and 1824, the Ninth Symphony was first performed on May 7, 1824, at the Kärtnerthor Theater in Vienna under the direction of Michael Umlauf. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 16, 1894, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: solo soprano, alto, tenor, and bass; chorus; piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (triangle, cymbals, bass drum), and strings.

The least facile of the great composers, Beethoven hammered out even some of his simplest works through a tortuous process of sketching and recasting that often involved as many as a dozen preliminary attempts before he arrived at a final version of quite deceptive inevitability. The Ninth Symphony was the product of one of the most laborious among such processes, or rather two of them.

Plans for a D-mnor symphony were already in his mind by 1811, and he sketched an early version of the Adagio theme in 1815. It was in 1817 that sustained work on the composition began, and the score was not completed until February 1824. Through much of this arduous preparation, the symphony had not yet acquired its vocal element. Jottings dating from 1818 show the emergence of the idea of introducing voices into a symphony, but it is not yet clear that this D-minor work is to be their destination. As late as 1823 Beethoven was making sketches for an instrumental finale, and these in the event were used for the last movement of the A-Minor String Quartet, Op. 132.

At some point, however, the idea of the symphony became fused with another project of even longer standing. Beethoven had wanted to make a musical setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy at least since 1793. When he decided to incorporate the ode in the planned Ninth Symphony, he determined also to set only about a third of the text, adding a 12-word introduction of his own to effect the transition from instruments to voices.

Both in length and in forces used, the Ninth is Beethoven’s biggest symphony. Yet in it he dispenses, for the first time in a symphonic first movement, with the traditional repeat of the exposition. Evidently it was not mere length he was aiming for, but breadth of scale and perfection of proportion. And as soon as we realize that the “size” of the Ninth Symphony is as much metaphysical as physical, all of its apparent anomalies fall into place.

Physically, the heightening of tension in the first movement, the reordering of the inner movements, and the vast expansion of the finale are natural consequences of Beethoven’s shift of emphasis from first movement to last in the Fifth Symphony (prefigured in turn by Mozart in his “Jupiter”). Metaphysically, the finale’s use of Schiller’s ode grows equally naturally out of the trend toward extra-musical content shown in the Third and Sixth symphonies. What is new in the context of comparison with the “Eroica” and the “Pastoral” is that Beethoven now turns from the more-or-less sublimated picturesque to a proclamation of humanist sentiment at once more explicit and more universal. (Observe, though, that the version of brotherhood put forward here is not quite universal: if you haven’t found a single soul to call your own on the earth’s globe, says Schiller, stay away!)

It is the composer’s recourse to a sung text that has led to the most voluminous comment on the work, and inevitably to the most confusion. In Wagner’s view Beethoven, realizing that instrumental music had reached the limit of its resources, acknowledged by turning to the human voice that only in this medium lay the extra dimension of sublimity he was seeking. It is a pretty theory if you want to prove that music-drama is the only thing worth writing. But it will hardly stand up to an examination of the symphony itself—and in any case Beethoven’s own last string quartets surely disprove that he was thinking on such lines.

The forms of the three instrumental movements, for all their subtlety and breadth, are eminently lucid. The first is a sonata allegro. The second is a scherzo in full sonata form, repeated after a contrasting trio and then—like the third movement of the Seventh Symphony—passing to a witty envoi. The third is a slow movement with two alternating themes in different meters and slightly different tempos. After varying each theme once, Beethoven expands into a long free variation of the first theme, including a remarkable solo for the fourth horn (written for a player who possessed a pioneer valved instrument), and a long, peaceful coda. Into the dying fall of this tranquil reverie the last movement rudely breaks.

The finale, completing Beethoven’s symphonic journey away from sonata methods, is built from interpenetrating elements of variation and fugue. Once the voices have entered, abstract structural principles take second place to the dictates of the text: attend to the words, and the form will be crystal clear.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Bernard Jacobson writes frequently about classical music and is the author of A Polish Renaissance, part of the 20th-Century Composers series published by Phaidon Press.


Beethoven’s Introduction
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne, sondern
Lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen,
Und freudenvollere!

Ode: An die Freude
Text: Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten, feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund.

Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben,
Und der Cherub steht vor Gott.

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels prächtgen Plan,
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

Seid umschlungen Millionen.
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Brüder! überm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.

Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such ihn überm Sternenzelt,
Über Sternen muss er wohnen.

Ode to Joy
Translation: Bernard Jacobson

O friends, not these sounds, rather
Let us strike up pleasanter
And more joyful ones!

Joy, fair offshoot of the gods,
Daughter from Elysium,
We step drunk with fire,
Heavenly one, into your sanctuary.
Your spells reunite
What convention rigorously parted;
All men become brothers
Where your gentle wing tarries.

He who has had the great fortune
To be friend to a friend,
He who has won a lovely wife,
Let him join his exultation with ours!
Yes, whoever has even one soul
To call his own on the earth’s globe!
And he who has never succeeded in that,
May he take himself off,
Weeping, from this fellowship.

All beings drink of joy
At Nature’s breasts;
All the good, all the bad,
Follow in her rosy path.
Kisses she gave us, and vines,
And a friend tested unto death;
Voluptuousness was given to the worm,
And the cherub stands before God.

Happily, as his suns fly
Across the heavens’ splendid expanse,
Run, brothers, your course,
Joyfully, like a hero toward victory.

Be embraced, O millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers! Beyond the canopy of the stars
A loving Father must dwell.

Do you fall to your knees, millions?
Do you sense the Creator, world?
Look for him beyond the canopy of the stars,
Beyond stars he must dwell.

English translation © 2007 by Bernard Jacobson

Lucerne Festival Orchestra
David Robertson, Conductor
The birth of Lucerne Festival dates from the gala concert with Arturo Toscanini conducting élite musicians in front of Richard Wagner’s former home in Tribschen in 1938. With this historic concert the idea of a Festival Orchestra was conceived. Besides Toscanini, other conductors in the Festival’s “early days” included Bruno Walter, Ernest Ansermet, and Vittorio de Sabata. The year 1943 witnessed the formation of the Swiss Festival Orchestra, with top musicians from all over Switzerland. This ensemble, which played under such commanding figures as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Otto Klemperer, contributed to the Festival’s rapidly growing prestige, holding concerts on an annual basis until 1993.

It was this tradition that inspired Claudio Abbado and executive director Michael Haefliger to establish a new and unique ensemble in 2003: The Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Soloists of international repute sit on its front desks, while the main body of the ensemble is drawn from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. A number of its members appear in various combinations in chamber recitals and chamber orchestra concerts during the opening weeks of the Festival.

The first guest performance took the Lucerne Festival Orchestra to Rome in 2005, followed by a residency in Tokyo in 2006. In August 2007 the Orchestra will its debut concert at the BBC Proms—all concerts under the baton of Claudio Abbado. Besides the traditional Lucerne Summer Festival, since 1988 the Easter Festival has taken place on an annual basis, as has the Piano Festival, held each November since 1998. Pierre Boulez is the artistic and conceptual director of the Lucerne Festival Academy for contemporary music. This forward-looking training workshop was designed in 2004 with the aim of instructing gifted young musicians to perform the music of our time.

Murray Perahia, Piano
In the more than 30 years that he has been performing on the concert stage, American pianist Murray Perahia has become one of the most sought-after and cherished artists of our time. On March 8, 2004, he was awarded an honorary KBE by Her Majesty the Queen of England, in recognition of his outstanding service to music.

Murray Perahia performs in all of the major international music centers and with every leading orchestra. He is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with whom he has recorded Bach concertos and toured as conductor and pianist throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and South East Asia. Recently, Mr. Perahia embarked on an ambitious project to edit the complete Beethoven sonatas for the Henle Urtext Edition. He also produced and edited numerous hours of recordings of recently discovered master classes by the legendary pianist Alfred Cortot, which resulted in the highly acclaimed Sony CD release, Alfred Cortot: The Master Classes.

Mr. Perahia has a wide and varied discography. His most recent solo recording features Franz Schubert’s late piano sonatas (D. 958, 959, and 960). His recording of Frédéric Chopin’s complete Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25, garnered him both the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance and Gramophone’s 2003 award for Best Instrumental Recording. His recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations received two Grammy nominations and won the 2001 Gramophone Award for Best Instrumental Recording.

Mr. Perahia is an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Leeds University.

Melanie Diener, Soprano
Born at Schenefeld near Hamburg, Melanie Diener trained as a soprano with Sylvia Geszty and Rudolf Piernay, as well as at Indiana University, taking master classes with Sena Jurinac and Brigitte Fassbaender. She was a prizewinner in the Salzburg Mozart Competition and was awarded the Kirsten Flagstad prize at the Queen Sonja International Music Competition in Oslo. The year 1996 marked her stage debut in Idomeneo at the Garsington Opera Festival, followed by a successful debut at the 1999 Bayreuth Festival in Lohengrin. She was then invited to perform at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and in Munich, Dresden, and Zurich. She has appeared in operas by Richard Strauss. In 2005, she took the title role in Kát’a Kabanová at the Berlin State Opera, and 2006 saw her Japanese debut as Donna Elvira in guest performance by the Met. She has made concert appearances with top orchestras throughout Europe and the US (in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, and New York). Key works in her repertoire include Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, the Lyrical Symphony by Zemlinsky and Britten’s War Requiem. She has performed with conductors such as Boulez, Chailly, Gielen, Levine, Maazel, and Muti.

Anna Larsson, Contralto
A native of Stockholm, Anna Larsson completed her musical training there at the University College of Opera. Her operatic repertoire includes roles in Das Rheingold and Siegfried (with the Munich State Opera), the First Norn in Götterdämmerung (Berlin State Opera), Waltraute in Götterdämmerung (Finnish National Opera), Orfeo in Orfeo ed Euridice (Royal Opera Copenhagen), Ottone in L’incoronazione di Poppea (at Aix-en-Provence) and Andronico in Handel’s Tamerlano (Drottningholm Court Theater, Stockholm). Her richly varied concert repertoire includes Mahler’s Second and Third symphonies, the St. Matthew Passion, the Messiah, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Das Lied von der Erde, Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony, Brahms’s Alt-Rhapsodie, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, and the Verdi Requiem. She has also appeared with orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the London Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, working with conductors such as Rattle, Haitink, Masur, Abbado, Harding, Ozawa, and Maazel. Her performances have also taken her to the festivals of Lucerne and Edinburgh.

Jonas Kaufmann, Tenor
Born in Munich, Jonas Kaufmann studied singing at the city’s College of Music, graduating with distinction in his concert and opera examinations in 1994. He participated in master classes with Hans Hotter, James King, and Josef Metternich, and was a prizewinner at the 1993 Mastersingers Competition in Nuremberg. From 1994 to 1996, he was a member of the ensemble at the Saarbrücken State Theater, where he sang the major parts in the lyrical tenor repertoire. The year 1999 saw his debut in Busoni’s Doktor Faust at the Salzburg Festival. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Zurich Opera House, where he sings parts such as Tamino, Titus, Idomeneo, Nerone, Fierrabras, Faust, Florestan, Bacchus, the Duke (in Rigoletto), Rodolfo, Hoffmann, Don José, and Parsifal. He is a regular guest artist at the opera houses of Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris, London, Madrid, and Chicago. Beethoven’s Ninth with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2004. In 2006 he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Alfredo in La traviata and his first Don José in London. He works regularly with conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Kent Nagano, Franz Welser-Möst, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Ivor Bolton, Antonio Pappano, Simon Rattle, and Claudio Abbado, and has presented many lied recitals with Helmut Deutsch at the piano.

Reinhard Hagen, Bass
Reinhard Hagen trained at the State School of Music in Karlsruhe and has won prizes at numerous international competitions. His stage career was launched at the Dortmund Theater. In 1994–95, he was engaged by the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he has interpreted the major parts in the serious bass repertoire ever since. Concert appearances as Raphael in Haydn’s Creation at Munich with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Georg Solti, and with the same orchestra at concerts featuring works by Penderecki in Jerusalem (in 1997), under the baton of Lorin Maazel. In 1998–99 he gave concerts in Berlin (Beethoven’s Ninth), followed by his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker under James Levine, appearances with the Boston Symphony, concerts with the Dresden Staatskapelle under Giuseppe Sinopoli, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Lorin Maazel. Kurt Masur engaged him for concerts with the New York Philharmonic and Wolfgang Sawallisch invited him to Rome (where he performed in Haydn’s Seasons). He sang in Die Walküre under Simon Rattle in 2005 and in Schumann’s Manfred under Claudio Abbado in 2006. His CD recordings include the role of Sarastro in The Magic Flute conducted by William Christie, and Bach cantatas conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.

Westminster Symphonic Choir
Joe Miller, Conductor
Dr. Joe Miller is the conductor of two of America’s most renowned choral ensembles—the 40-voice Westminster Choir and the 150-voice Westminster Symphonic Choir. As director of choral activities at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, he oversees an extensive choral program that includes eight ensembles.

His 2006–07 inaugural season at Westminster included performances at Princeton and at the Spoleto Festival USA, as well as a concert tour of the southern United States. He also collaborated with Harry Bicket in preparing the Westminster Symphonic Choir for a series of performances of Handel’s Messiah with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Maestro Bicket.

Before his appointment at Westminster, Dr. Miller was director of choral studies, professor of music, and voice area chair at Western Michigan University School of Music. With the Western Michigan Chorale he received a number of awards, including the Silver Medal at the 2005 European Grand Prix for Choral Singing in Varna, Bulgaria, and the Grand Prize at the 2002 Robert Schumann International Choral Competition in Zwickau, Germany. He has also served as director of choral and vocal activities at California State University, artistic director/conductor of the Stockton Chorale, and music director of the Mother Lode Music Festival.

He has conducted choirs in both national and international festivals, and he has served as guest conductor for numerous all-state and honors choirs. A respected solo artist, he has performed with orchestras and in recital throughout the Midwest and in California. In addition, he has served as music director at churches in Ohio and Tennessee.

Dr. Miller earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in choral conducting from the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music education and voice from the University of Tennessee.

WESTMINSTER SYMPHONIC CHOIR

Composed of juniors, seniors, and graduate students, the Westminster Symphonic Choir has recorded and performed with major orchestras under virtually every internationally known conductor of the last 75 years. Recognized as one of the world’s leading choral ensembles, the choir is prepared by its conductor, Joe Miller, to perform with some of the world’s leading orchestras.