CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Cleveland Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Matthias Pintscher and Michael Beckerman, Professor of Music, New York University.

The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director and Conductor

DEBUSSY Ibéria, from Images, No. 2
MATTHIAS PINTSCHER Five Orchestral Pieces (NY Premiere)

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7

Program Notes:

The Concert At a Glance

The first two works on tonight’s program, from either end of the 20th century, express contrasting programmatic ideas. Debussy’s popular Ibéria is a lovely orchestral “painting” of warm Spanish nights, colors, and fragrances, all deftly crafted to evoke the settings (and smells and sounds), but without so much detail as to release our imaginations from being fully engaged. By contrast, Matthias Pintscher’s Five Orchestral Pieces make their musical expression less specific, but with just as great an emotional depth. This work, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1997, was Pintscher’s first work unconnected to a text. Its abstract contours nevertheless draw out a carefully designed musical perspective—and present the involved depth that this young composer has shown from his earliest works. After intermission, we journey back almost 200 years for Beethoven’s sparkling Symphony No. 7, full of effervescent dance rhythms, musical innovation, and irresistible good cheer.

Notes on the Program

CLAUDE DEBUSSY Ibéria, from three Images for orchestra
Born August 22, 1862, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.

Composed in 1905 as a piano piece and orchestrated in 1908, Ibéria was given its premiere performance on February 20, 1910, in Paris, conducted by Gabriel Pierné; it received its US premiere at Carnegie Hall on January 3, 1911, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Gustav Mahler.

Scoring: piccolo, 3 flutes (third doubling second piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (tambourine, side drum, castanets, xylophone, 3 bells), celesta, 2 harps, and strings.

Claude Debussy was a great lover of the visual arts and counted many painters among his friends. Thus it was quite natural for him to think in musical “images.” He wrote several works under the title Images (including two different sets of piano pieces) and, of course, also created such spectacularly imaged works as La mer (The Sea), in which he wields musical colors and textures as deftly as any of the great Impressionist painters.

But visual inspiration, for Debussy, was never as simple as writing music about a painting, or even about the subject of a favored artwork. The relationship was less direct. The musical “images” he created were seen or dreamed by his mind’s eye, and then realized in sound rather than in color. In a printed note at the premiere in 1910 of Rondes de printemps (Spring Rounds), the third of Debussy’s orchestral Images, French musicologist Charles Malherbe—very possibly after discussions with the composer—likened the piece’s melodies to the multiplicity of lines in a painting, with the differing instruments of the orchestra representing various colors that can be mixed together for a myriad of textures and effects.

Ibéria is the second—and by far the longest—of Debussy’s three orchestral Images. Written and premiered independently between 1905 and 1912, the Images were published together to be performed as a set. Ibéria, the most popular of the three, is frequently played separately. In each, Debussy’s visions are primarily about motion (as in La Mer), but also combine visual thoughts with impressions from the senses of hearing and smell. As Charles Baudelaire, one of Debussy’s favorite poets, put it: “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se respondent” (“The fragrances, the colors, and the sounds answer one another”).

As its name suggests, Ibéria is about the Iberian peninsula, which today comprises modern Portugal, Gibraltar, Andorra, and Spain (including the Basque regions and Catalonia). Interestingly, Debussy only made one short trip across the border to Spain in his entire lifetime.

The first movement of Ibéria is entitled Par les rues et par les chemins (In the Streets and Byways). A whole town is out in the streets for a warm summer evening. People are walking, talking, singing, and dancing. The evening progresses through several musical themes of contrasting character. Eventually, the noisy parade of people is over; everyone goes home for the night and this movement ends in gentle pianissimo.

The second movement is called Les parfums de la nuit (The Fragrances of the Night). Debussy uses a whole-tone scale extensively in this movement, giving each note of the scale equal importance (without the anchoring of a major or minor identity). Thus, the music seems to be hovering in the air, never touching the ground or reaching a clear closure.

The third movement of Ibéria is Le matin d’un jour de fête (The Morning of a Festival Day). It follows upon the night in the preceding movement without interruption, and depicts the town slowly awakening and preparing for (but not yet fully indulging in) a daytime celebration. It is about change, anticipation, and preparation.

—Peter Laki

Copyright © 2007 by The Cleveland Orchestra


MATTHIAS PINTSCHER Five Orchestral Pieces
Born January 29, 1971, in Marl, Germany; now living in Frankfurt and Paris.

Composed in 1997 on commission from the Salzburg Festival, with a generous grant from Betty Freeman of Los Angeles, the Five Orchestral Pieces were first performed on August 1, 1997, in Salzburg, with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London conducted by Kent Nagano. The US premiere performances were given by The Cleveland Orchestra in Cleveland on September 20, 22, and 23. This evening’s performance marks the work’s New York premiere.

Scoring: 3 flutes (first and second doubling piccolo, third doubling bass flute), 2 oboes, english horn, 2 clarinets (first doubling E-flat clarinet, second doubling contrabass clarinet), bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba; 2 harps, piano, and celesta (doubling synthesizer), five percussionists (playing vibraphones, xylophone, marimbaphone, crotales, bells, gongs, timpani, and a huge array of drums and other unpitched instruments including “lion’s roar”), and strings.

Matthias Pintscher is one of the leading European composers of his generation. Cleveland audiences have had a ringside seat for Matthias Pintscher’s meteoric rise over the past decade as both composer and conductor. He was The Cleveland Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow from 2000 to 2002.

Pintscher’s Fünf Orchesterstücke, or Five Orchestral Pieces, written at the age of 26, was the work that spectacularly announced his arrival on the European musical scene. The title is significant, and surely chosen deliberately; it is identical with that of Arnold Schoenberg’s Op. 16 from 1909. Schoenberg’s work is a masterpiece of Expressionism, the apparently spontaneous and unstructured expression of extreme emotional states. And, unlike his other works in this vein, it achieved its aim without recourse to a text or a literary stimulus (even the descriptive titles that Schoenberg was persuaded to add to each of the pieces were afterthoughts). Similarly, Pintscher has described his Five Orchestral Pieces as the first large-scale project in which he concentrated on the treatment of the material without the starting-point of a text. But in both cases the music is not abstract in the sense of being concerned only with its own processes. Instead it delineates emotions, often rapidly changing and sharply contrasting emotions, with great force.

The main difference is in the means. Although they are freely atonal (not in a key), Schoenberg’s pieces are still based principally on melody, passed from section to section or stacked up in contrapuntal textures; only the third piece, Colors, is a study in the constantly shifting instrumentation of an unchanging chord. Pintscher, on the other hand, is not very concerned with melody. His focus is on the interplay of textures, colors, registers, densities, and shapes. His stock-in-trade can best be classified as “gestures”—so much so that when late in the work there is a recognizable extended melody, it registers as another gesture, different in kind rather than in significance.

In these Five Pieces, Pintscher shows himself a master of the modern orchestra. The forces he uses are large, including wind instruments at extremes of the pitch-spectrum (piccolos, contrabass clarinet, contrabassoon, contrabass tuba), and five percussionists with a panoply of instruments spread wide across the back of the stage platform. When the full orchestra is playing, the effect is overwhelming. But the writing is meticulously detailed, including not only instructions for modes of playing but also numerous indications of slides and microtones (between the notes of the conventional chromatic scale). And for most of the time, Pintscher, like Mahler before him, splits the orchestra up into different-sized chamber ensembles, usually homogeneous in coloring. He describes himself as acutely conscious of the sense of perspective created by the dialogue of these ensembles.

One significant example of this spatial approach is the placement of the harps—one near the conductor alongside the front desks of the strings, the other much farther back. Their antiphonal dialog is picked up, augmented, and transformed by other instruments and groups, thus forming the primary impulse of the whole work. This can be heard clearly in the first piece, headed with the Italian direction “openly, breathing,” and a slow metronome marking.

The second piece is the only one in a fast tempo, marked “with violent and urgent vigor.” Pintscher characterizes this as “a shaft of light” between the first and third movements.

Pintscher says that the central piece, in “flexible tempo,” is the pivot of the whole work, sharing material with the first and last movements. It reverts to the generally sparse textures of the opening, increasingly suggesting a desolate landscape, and it is permeated by the figure of a single rebounding chord, perhaps funereal in character.

The short fourth piece has the subtitle of sequenza or “sequence,” used by the late Luciano Berio for his series of virtuoso-dramatic solos, coupled here with the adjectives “muffled, mournful.” In it, the orchestral perspectives dissolve into what Pintscher refers to as “tonelessness.”

The final piece, the slowest in tempo marking, is headed “suspended, very unreal, as if from a distance.” Beginning once more with the antiphonal harps, it re-enters the sound world of the first and third movements, and brings back the rebounding chords from the third in a strident full-orchestral tutti. Also derived from the third piece is a recurring chordal descent of a kind associated throughout musical history (for example, in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony No. 6) with despair and darkness. Towards the end of the movement there is a striking new element, a long, plangent melody for the english horn. As the bass clarinet echoes this, the lower strings begin the last of the descents—after which the generative harps and the answering percussion finally fall silent.

—Copyright © 2007 Anthony Burton


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna.

Composed in 1812, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 received its first performance on December 8, 1813, at a special concert at the University of Vienna, conducted by the composer. Beethoven dedicated the published score (1816) to Count Moritz von Fries, a Viennese nobleman and longtime patron. The symphony received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 13, 1891, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

I can distinctly remember the day I heard Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony for the first time. I was about 5 or 6 years old, and a recording with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony was being played on the radio. I was completely mesmerized by the performance, and when the fourth movement began, I jumped to my feet and started to dance.

A dozen years later, I learned about Richard Wagner’s description of this symphony as the “apotheosis of the dance,” and although I wasn’t sure what an apotheosis was, I could certainly agree that dance was at the center of what this symphony was all about. Even later, I became acquainted with other attempts by 19th-century writers to capture the work’s essence—invoking political revolutions, military parades, masquerade balls, Bacchic orgies, and more. Finally, about 25 years after my first encounter with the symphony, I read Maynard Solomon’s excellent book on Beethoven, in which this musicologist-author shows how all these fanciful interpretations are really variations on a single theme, that of the “carnival or festival, which, from time immemorial, has temporarily lifted the burden of perpetual subjugation to the prevailing social and natural order by periodically suspending all customary privileges, norms, and imperatives.”

In other words, generations of listeners have felt that Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is a wild celebration of life and freedom. While the Ninth Symphony is a fierce struggle with fate that is won only when the “Ode to Joy” is intoned, from the start the Seventh radiates joy and happiness that not even the second movement—which has come to be called a funeral march—can seriously compromise.

The dance feelings associated with this symphony find their explanation in the fact that each of the four movements is based on a single rhythmic figure that is present almost without interruption. (Only the third movement has two such figures, one for the initial Scherzo section and one for the central Trio.) In the first movement, we see how the predominant rhythm gradually comes to life during the transition from the lengthy slow introduction to the fast tempo.

Everyone who has ever heard rock music knows how intoxicating the constant repetition of simple rhythmic patterns can be. That’s part of what Beethoven did here, but he did much more—against a backdrop of continually repeated dance rhythms, he created an endless diversity of melodic and harmonic events. There is a strong sense of cohesion as the melodies flow from one another with inimitable spontaneity. At the same time, harmony, melody, dynamics, and orchestration are all full of the most delightful surprises. It is somewhat like riding in a car at a constant (and rather high) speed while watching an ever-changing, beautiful landscape pass by.

—Peter Laki

Copyright © 2007 The Cleveland Orchestra

The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director and Conductor
Franz Welser-Möst is in his sixth season as Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra. His long-term commitment to the Orchestra extends through the 2011–12 season.

Highlights of Mr. Welser-Möst’s concerts with The Cleveland Orchestra during his first five seasons have included many works new to the Orchestra’s repertoire that span four centuries, including nine world premieres and as many US premieres. His programming also has featured eagerly anticipated annual concert performances of opera. In Cleveland, Mr. Welser-Möst actively participates in community concerts and educational programs including the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and partnerships with area colleges and universities.

Under Franz Welser-Möst’s direction, the Orchestra has toured extensively, to critical acclaim. In addition to biennial residencies at the Musikverein in Vienna, the first of their kind by an American orchestra, the Orchestra continues its residencies at the Lucerne Festival featuring Roche Commissions, a collaboration between the Orchestra, the Festival, and Carnegie Hall. Domestically, the Orchestra and Mr. Welser-Möst have toured from coast to coast. In January 2007, the Orchestra began its ten-year residency project in Miami, Florida, at the new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts.

The first commercially available DVD featuring the Orchestra and Mr. Welser-Möst, of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5, was released worldwide by EuroArts in February 2007. The Orchestra’s first commercial CD with Mr. Welser-Möst, of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, will be released by Deutsche Grammophon during the fall of 2007.

In June 2007, Mr. Welser-Möst was named General Music Director of the Vienna State Opera beginning in 2010. His long partnership with the company features a new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle in the 2007–08 and 2008–09 seasons.

Mr. Welser-Möst became general music director of the Zurich Opera in 2005, having previously served as music director (1995 to 2002) and principal conductor (2002 to 2005). He regularly conducts leading European orchestras and opera companies, including those of Berlin and Vienna, and served as music director of the London Philharmonic from 1990 to 1996.

Among Mr. Welser-Möst’s honors are recognition from the Western Law Center for Disability Rights of his advocacy on behalf of people with disabilities; honorary membership in the Vienna Singverein; the 2003 Conductor of the Year Award from Musical America; honorary doctorates from Case Western Reserve University, Oberlin College, and the Cleveland Institute of Music; the Silver Medal of the Region of Upper Austria; and the appointment as an Academician of the Yutse European Academy Foundation.

THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

Long considered one of America’s great orchestras, The Cleveland Orchestra stands today among the world’s most-revered symphonic ensembles. In concerts at home in Severance Hall; at its summer home, Blossom Music Center; and on tour, The Cleveland Orchestra continues to set standards of performing excellence and imaginative programming that serve as models for audiences and performers alike.

The Cleveland Orchestra was founded in 1918, under the direction of Nikolai Sokoloff, who served until 1933. Succeeding music directors have included Artur Rodzinski (1933–1943), Erich Leinsdorf (1943–1946), George Szell (1946–1970), Lorin Maazel (1972–1982), and Christoph von Dohnányi (1984–2002). Franz Welser-Möst’s appointment as the seventh Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra was announced in June 1999, providing for a seamless transition in the artistic leadership of the Orchestra with the 2002–03 season.

Under Franz Welser-Möst’s direction, the Orchestra has toured extensively, to critical acclaim. Their European Tour following these Carnegie Hall appearances includes their third residency at the Musikverein in Vienna. In addition to these biennial residencies, the first of their kind by an American orchestra, the Orchestra continues its residencies at the Lucerne Festival featuring Roche Commissions, a collaboration between the Orchestra, the Festival, and Carnegie Hall. Domestically, the Orchestra and Mr. Welser-Möst have toured from coast to coast, and in January 2007 the Orchestra began its ten-year residency project in Miami, Florida, at the new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts.

The Cleveland Orchestra has a long and distinguished recording and broadcast history. Recent releases include the Orchestra’s first commercially available DVD recording, of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5, which was released worldwide by EuroArts last February. The next DVD by the Orchestra and Mr. Welser-Möst will be of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9, which will be recorded at the Musikverein this fall. Deutsche Grammophon has just released the Orchestra’s first commercial CD with Mr. Welser-Möst, of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Concerts by The Cleveland Orchestra are broadcast on radio stations throughout North America and Europe.

In 1931, the Orchestra moved to its permanent home, Severance Hall. In 2000, Severance Hall reopened following a $36 million restoration and renovation project, which included the construction of a new concert stage, enhanced technical capabilities, and the refurbishment and re-installation (in 2001) of the building’s original E.M. Skinner organ.

The Cleveland Orchestra is in a new era under Franz Welser-Möst’s guidance, while maintaining a steadfast commitment to its long-held traditions of artistic excellence, educational outreach, and community service.