CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
San Francisco Symphony

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
Katia and Marielle Labèque, Piano

LIGETI Lontano
POULENC Concerto in D Minor for Two Pianos
PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 5

Encores:
A. BERIO Polka
DELIBES "Cortège de Bacchus" from Sylvia

Sponsored by KPMG LLP

Program Notes:

GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923–2006)
Lontano, for large orchestra

Scoring: 4 flutes, 2 piccolos and alto flute, 4 oboes and English horn, 4 clarinets plus bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet, 3 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, and strings.

Lontano received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on October 31, 1970, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta.

György Ligeti survived internment in a labor camp and spent the years immediately following World War II studying at the Academy of Music in Budapest. He became part of the great Hungarian exodus of 1956 and settled in Germany, where he soaked up the thriving culture of contemporary music, attracting interest through pieces whose cloud-like textures wove vaguely through slowly evolving compositions.

He wrote Lontano (the Italian word for “far”) in 1967, the year he assumed Austrian citizenship, having settled in Vienna several years earlier. The critic Paul Griffiths had observed of this work: “Lontano is partly a salute, across a gulf of elapsed time, to the late Romantic symphony. In Lontano … Ligeti made his music of long, slow gestures, but there was another basic element in his world, that of rapid mechanical activity.”

The new-music community was watching Ligeti closely even before he was thrust to a sort of popular fame in 1968. That’s when, without the composer’s knowledge or permission and to his horror, Stanley Kubrick incorporated three of his compositions—Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem—into the soundtrack of the MGM film 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Ligeti was particularly offended by having his music placed in proximity to works by Johann Strauss II and Richard Strauss, as they were in 2001.) Kubrick would make further use of Ligeti, now with permission: in 1980 using Lontano (among other pieces) to help create the creepy background in The Shining (along with excerpts of works by Bartók, Penderecki, and Berlioz) and in 1999 employing his Musica Ricercata II in the film Eyes Wide Shut.

In Lontano each fleeting moment displays a distinct quality, a unique sound born of the interaction of the music’s strata. Ligeti offered this observation about the layered quality of the music in Lontano: “The crystallizations of harmonies have several layers: within the harmonies are enclosed interior harmonies, and more interior harmonies within those interior harmonies, and so on. There is not merely one process of harmonic transformation, but rather several simultaneous processes going on at different speeds, which shine through one another, overlain one upon the other, and by means of various refractions and reflections make perceptible an imaginary perspective. This process unfolds itself gradually on the listener, rather like what happens when you step from sharp sunlight into a dark room and gradually begin to notice colors and outlines become more and more perceptible.”

—James M. Keller

James M. Keller is the San Francisco Symphony’s Program Annotator.


FRANCIS POULENC (1899–1963)
Concerto in D Minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra

Scoring: Flute and piccolo, 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, small drum without snare, military drum without snare, military drum with snare, bass drum, castanets, tambourine, triangle, and strings.

The Concerto for Two Pianos was first performed at Carnegie Hall on November 25, 1937, with Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, piano, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by John Barbirolli.

Francis Poulenc’s sophistication, affability, talent, and birthright were his entrée into Paris’s avant-garde world. His father managed the huge Rhône-Poulenc manufacturing firm, and his mother was a cultured urban socialite. Both parents were music lovers.

Summers were spent with a maternal grandmother in Nogent-sur-Marne, a suburb of Paris, where the boy heard popular cafe tunes played in open-air music halls. His musical training began at age five with piano lessons from his mother, and later from a niece of César Franck. Poulenc decided in 1914 to study piano seriously, and he began lessons with the Spanish virtuoso Ricardo Viñes. Through Viñes, Poulenc met Satie, Cocteau, Stravinsky, and other figures in the Parisian artistic world. It was Viñes, too, who encouraged his young pupil to compose.

As a member of Les Six, a group of French composers united mainly in a common aversion to French Wagnerism and Impressionism, Poulenc became a society darling. In his works, he brashly juxtaposed music hall tunes with sections of wistful melancholy, and his frequent mimicry of other composers nevertheless resulted in a style all his own.

In the early 1920s, Poulenc made the acquaintance of the Prince and Princess de Polignac, who were (and I quote from Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale’s biography of Misia Sert) “an extraordinary couple whose marriage had been engineered by Robert de Montesquiou [Proust’s model for the Baron de Charlus]—and a fine arrangement it turned out to be. For while the prince liked men and the princess liked women, they were devoted to each other. The prince was a gifted amateur composer in the Satie style; the princess was an American, Winaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing machine fortune. Theirs was a union the French like to call a marriage of the sewing machine and the lyre. A great patroness of the arts, Princess Winnie, as she was affectionately called, commissioned many compositions.”

Poulenc had been one of the pianists at the private premiere in 1923 of Stravinsky’s Les noces, hosted by the Polignacs. In 1932, Princess Winnie commissioned Poulenc to write a concerto for two pianos.

“From childhood onwards,” Poulenc said, “I have associated cafe tunes with the Couperin suites in a common love without distinguishing them.” The Concerto for Two Pianos combines Maurice Chevalier with Mozart, music hall buffoonery with Balinese gamelan and lilting melodies. The work is cast in three movements: The outer two brim with unbridled exuberance, never lapsing into vulgarity or sentimentality; the slow movement is neoclassical in spirit, with a central section more Romantic in inspiration. Poulenc heard a Balinese gamelan at the Colonial Exposition of Paris in 1931, and he has incorporated bits of that music as well, most tellingly at the end of the first movement, where, after a pianissimo clack of the castanets, the two pianos commence an extraordinary passage of hypnotic reverie. A faster version of this Balinese-inspired music opens and closes the work; in doing so, it acts as a bracket for the surfeit of charming, infectious tunes within.
—Ronald Gallman

Ronald Gallman is the San Francisco Symphony’s Director of Education.


SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100

Scoring: 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 B-flat clarinets plus E-flat and bass clarinets, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass tuba, piano, harp, timpani, triangle, cymbals, tambourine, snare drum, wood block, bass drum, tam-tam, and strings.

The Fifth Symphony received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on November 14, 1945, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.

Many composers in the 19th and 20th centuries were baffled by how to confront the sonata style defined by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, of how to get at its substance and not just its shell. Here, in his Symphony No. 5, Prokofiev takes on the challenge with the skill of a master.

The work is in four movements, but they are not quite the conventional four of the Classical and Romantic symphony. What Prokofiev gives us is a slow/fast/slow/fast sequence familiar from Baroque music. He begins with an Andante in handsomely made sonata form. The first melody soars, but Prokofiev presents it, to begin with, in austere woodwind octaves and almost unharmonized. He picks up from Beethoven and Brahms the device of seeming to embark upon a formal repeat of the exposition, only to have a dramatic turn of harmony reveal that the development has begun. The sequence of events for the recapitulation is normal, but their unfolding is compressed. The coda, which twice attains a towering fortissimo, reflects at length on the first theme.

The second movement is a scherzo. With violins marking the time, the clarinet proposes an impertinent tune. Here is a touch of Prokofiev the wry humorist. A slower passage leads into the trio, which itself is actually a little faster than the main section of the movement. The repeat of the scherzo is twisted, and it ends with a bang.

Then comes a weighty slow movement, at once somber and lyric. The dense sound supports an expansive melody. The middle section is darker in character, suggesting a cortege. After an intensely emotional climax, the first theme returns, pianissimo.

The finale begins in a reflective mood, with woodwinds and strings engaged in quiet dialogue. This is followed by something surprising and extraordinarily beautiful, the return of the first movement’s opening theme, scored now for the cellos divided four ways. Abruptly, these moods are swept away. Except for a single brief interlude, the mood is joyous, the motion athletic. Throughout, Prokofiev keeps finding new ways of heightening the voltage until, after a dizzying swirl, he ends his symphony in a rush to a final bang.

—Michael Steinberg

Michael Steinberg, a contributing writer to the San Francisco Symphony’s program book, is former SFS Program Annotator.

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
The San Francisco Symphony gave its first concerts in 1911 and has grown in acclaim under a succession of music directors: Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Basil Cameron, Issay Dobrowen, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and, since 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas. The SFS has won such recording awards as France’s Grand Prix du Disque, Britain’s Gramophone Award, and the United States’s Grammy. For RCA Red Seal, Michael Tilson Thomas and the SFS have recorded music from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, two Copland collections, a Gershwin collection, Stravinsky ballets (Le sacre du printemps, The Firebird, and Perséphone), and Charles Ives: An American Journey. Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 inaugurated a Mahler cycle on the Symphony’s own label and in 2003 captured a Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance. In 2004, the MTT/SFS recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony captured the Grammy for Best Classical Album, and in 2007 their recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony won Grammys for Best Orchestral Performance and Best Classical Album. Some of the most important conductors of the past and recent years have been guests on the SFS podium, among them Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, and Sir Georg Solti, and the list of composers who have led the Orchestra includes Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and John Adams. The SFS Youth Orchestra, founded in 1980, has become known around the world, as has the SFS Chorus, heard on recordings and on the soundtracks of such films as Amadeus and Godfather III. For two decades, the SFS Adventures in Music program has brought music to every child in grades 1 through 5 in San Francisco’s public schools. SFS radio broadcasts, the first in the US to feature symphonic music when they began in 1926, today carry the Orchestra’s concerts across the country. In a multimedia program designed to make classical music accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds, the SFS has launched Keeping Score on PBS, DVD, the World Wide Web (keepingscore.org), and radio (The MTT Files). San Francisco Symphony recordings are available at shopsfsymphony.org.


Michael Tilson Thomas first conducted the San Francisco Symphony in 1974 and has been Music Director since 1995. A Los Angeles native, he studied with John Crown and Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California, becoming Music Director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra at 19 and working with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Copland at the famed Monday Evening Concerts. He was pianist and conductor for Piatigorsky and Heifetz master classes and, as a student of Friedelind Wagner, an assistant conductor at Bayreuth. In 1969, Mr. Tilson Thomas won the Koussevitzky Prize and was appointed Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ten days later he came to international recognition, replacing Music Director William Steinberg in mid-concert at Lincoln Center. He went on to become the BSO’s Associate Conductor, then Principal Guest Conductor. He has also served as Director of the Ojai Festival, Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, a Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Principal Conductor of the Great Woods Festival. He became Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988 and now serves as Principal Guest Conductor. For a decade he served as co-Artistic Director of Japan’s Pacific Music Festival, which he and Leonard Bernstein inaugurated in 1990, and he continues as Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, which he founded in 1988. Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings have won numerous international awards, and his recorded repertory reflects interests arising from work as conductor, composer, and pianist. His television credits include the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, and in 2004 he and the SFS launched Keeping Score on PBS. His compositions include From the Diary of Anne Frank, Shówa/Shoáh (commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing), Poems of Emily Dickinson, Urban Legend, Island Music, and Notturno. Among his honors are Columbia University’s Ditson Award for services to American music and Musical America’s 1995 Conductor of the Year award. He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gramophone named him its 2005 Artist of the Year.

Katia and Marielle Labèque, Piano
Katia and Marielle Labèque have a repertory ranging from Bach to the 21st century. Daughters of Ada Cecchi, a former student of Marguerite Long, they spent a childhood filled with music. They have been guests of ensembles around the world, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchesdtra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Dresden Staatskapelle, and Vienna Philharmonic, and they have performed often with the San Francisco Symphony since their debut with the Orchestra in 1985. They have also appeared with such early-music groups as the English Baroque Soloists, Il Giardino Armonico, Musica Antiqua Köln, Venice Baroque, and the Gabrieli Players. For the Bach Centennial, their concert at the Vienna Musikverein with Il Giardino Armonico was televised worldwide by ORF and recorded on DVD. Their first recording for Philips, of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, received a Gold Disc, and they have since made numerous recordings for Philips, Sony, and EMI. To encompass various aspects of contemporary creation, they have formed their own label, KML Recordings, whose purpose is to bring together the unexpected, associating sounds and images and going beyond classical music to rock, electronic, contemporary, improvisation, and video. The first releases include an all-Ravel program and a Stravinsky and Debussy CD and DVD directed by video artist Tal Rosner. In 2005 the Labèques launched the KML Foundation (fondazionekml.com), aimed at furthering research and developing awareness of the duo piano repertory through meetings between artists of all fields. One of their projects is a program for children under the auspices of the Berlin Philharmonic Foundation’s program Zukunft@BPhil. In addition to the Zukunft@BPhil association, Katia and Marielle Labèque recently performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker at their closing Gala Concert at the Waldbühne, playing to an audience of 33,000 in a concert telecast worldwide. Katia and Marielle Labèque may be heard on Philips Classics, Sony Classical, EMI, London, Dreyfus, and Unspeakable records. For more information, visit their websites: labeque.com, kmlrecordings.com, and katialabeque.com.