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AEGIS
SCIENCES
FOUNDATION
EST. 2013
Classical
C L ASS ICAL
Thursday, April 30, at 7 pm
Friday & Saturday, May 1 & 2, at 8 pm
Series
S ERIES
’
Nashville Symphony
Carl St. Clair, conductor
Ingrid Fliter, piano
FRANK TICHELI
Radiant Voices FELIX MENDELSSOHN Concerto No. 1 in G minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 25
Molto allegro con fuoco
Andante
Presto - Molto allegro e vivace
Ingrid Fliter, piano
INTERMISSION
PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”
Adagio - Allegro non troppo
Allegro con grazia
Allegro molto vivace
Finale: Adagio lamentoso Grants from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Flora Family Foundation support the Nashville Symphony’s
efforts to preserve, promote and expand American orchestral music.
Media Partner
Official Partner
InConcert
15
tonight’s concert at a glance
C L ASS ICAL
FRANK TICHELI — RADIANT VOICES
• Los Angeles-based composer Frank Ticheli wrote Radiant Voices in 1992, shortly after the
beating of Rodney King by L.A.P.D. officers. He says he “was guided by a strong personal wish
to express through music feelings of hope and joy, to compose an optimistic fantasy — a
sounding of ‘radiant voices’ amid the turmoil.” The music includes sonic effects that hint at
chaos and violence, but the composer affirms that the piece is about “celebrating life.”
S ERIES
FELIX MENDELSSOHN — PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN G MINOR, Op. 25
• Felix Mendelssohn is one of music’s most celebrated prodigies: By age 14, he’d already started
composing string symphonies; by 17, he’d written his Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture;
and by age 21, he’d started work on his First Piano Concerto.
• Mendelssohn wrote the work while visiting Munich, where he met and flirted with another
young musical talent, Delphine von Schauroth. Even though their elders encouraged the two
to get serious, Mendelssohn chose not to pursue a relationship with Delphine— but he did
dedicate the concerto to her.
• Mendelssohn’s musical style straddles the Classical era of Mozart and the Romantic era
of Beethoven. One of his great innovations here is to link all three movements into one
unbroken piece. Listen for the fanfares that connect each of the movements. Likewise, you
won’t be able to miss the impressive arpeggio runs played by the soloist as the work winds
to a thrilling finish.
• The concerto gained massive popularity thanks to Franz Lizst, who played it often. Ironically,
Mendelssohn later admitted that he didn’t even like the work. “I composed it in just a few
days and almost carelessly,’’ he wrote.
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY — SYMPHONY NO. 6 IN B MINOR, OP. 74 (“PATHÉTIQUE”)
• Tchaikovsky called his Sixth Symphony “the best thing I ever composed or ever shall
compose.” Ever since its premiere, the work has been shrouded in mystery. The composer
hinted at an underlying narrative or theme, but he never acknowledged what it was.
• As the story goes, his brother Modest — himself a playwright and librettist — proposed
the subtitle “Pathetique,” which remains to this day. In Russian, this word means something
closer to “passionate” and “emotional,” though as the music suggests, it has an element of
suffering as well.
• The symphony was the last piece Tchaikovsky would ever perform. He conducted the
premiere in October 1893; a week later, he died after contracting cholera from a glass of
contaminated water.
• The work was performed for the second time a week after Tchaikovsky’s death. In the
audience was Igor Stravinsky, only 11 at the time. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was a baritone
who had performed in some of Tchaikovsky’s operas.
• Tchaikovsky transforms the conventional Romantic symphony of triumph and transcendence
into a work of tragedy and lamentation. This artistic decision would have a great impact on
composers who came after him, including Gustav Mahler.
• The drama here comes not only from the intensity of the music — listen in particular for a
descending scale that represents the idea of fate — but also from the moments of silence
that punctuate the music.
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M AY 2 0 1 5
F RA N K T I C HE L I
Born on January 21, 1958, in Monroe, Louisiana;
currently resides in Los Angeles
C L ASS ICAL
Radiant Voices
“I
t’s a process in which the head and the heart
are constantly keeping each other in check,”
Frank Ticheli says about the art of composing.
“The tension between those two forces is what
creates a piece of music. And it’s a real mystery, a
hall of mirrors: the more you learn, the more you
realize you don’t know.”
Ticheli is also a highly respected teacher
and mentor who has taught at the Thornton
School of Music at the University of Southern
California since the early 1990s. He studied
composition with William Bolcom and others
at the University of Michigan and has won such
accolades as the Charles Ives Scholarship, the
2012 Arts and Letters Award, and the Goddard
Lieberson Fellowship. His catalogue of orchestral,
choral and chamber works includes pieces
commissioned by Chamber Music America, the
American Music Center and the Orange County,
California-based Pacific Symphony, for which he
wrote Radiant Voices while serving as composer-inresidence there. Ticheli has also built a reputation
as a composer for concert band and as a guest
conductor.
Radiant Voices has received performances by
numerous other orchestras since its premiere.
Following an account given by the Philadelphia
Orchestra, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin
praised Radiant Voices for striking “a balance
S ERIES
Composed: 1992-93
First performance: February 3, 1993, with
Carl St. Clair conducting the Pacific
Symphony Orchestra
First Nashville Symphony performance:
January 14 & 15, 1994, with guest conductor
Carl St. Clair
Estimated length: 19 minutes
between substance and accessibility, something
few modern symphonists have been able to
manage.”
I N T H E COMPOS E R’S WO R DS
“Radiant Voices, begun one week after the
outbreak of the Los Angeles civil unrest in May
of 1992, was completed the following January. Its
creation was guided by a strong personal wish to
express through music feelings of hope and joy, to
compose an optimistic fantasy — a sounding of
‘radiant voices.’
“The piece is divided into four clearly
delineated sections (slow/fast/slow/fast), with
the second section being the longest and most
elaborate. The slower sections are private in
nature, marked by intimate solo passages and
poignantly lyrical melodic lines. The fast sections
are extremely gregarious, characterized by wild
color contrasts, driving rhythms and a palpable
sense of urgency. The energy becomes barely
containable, a pressure cooker of excitement and
urgency that bursts out in the work’s conclusion.”
Radiant Voices is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2
oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4
horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings.
Radiant Voices, Ticheli says, “was guided by a strong personal
wish to express through music feelings of hope and joy,
to compose an optimistic fantasy.”
InConcert
17
FEL I X M E N D E L SSO HN
Born on February 3, 1809, in Hamburg,
Germany; died on November 4, 1847,
in Leipzig, Germany
C L ASS ICAL
Concerto No. 1 in G minor for Piano and
Orchestra, Op. 25
S ERIES
Composed: 1830-31
First performance: October 17, 1831, in Munich,
with the composer as the soloist
First Nashville Symphony performance: April
18 & 19, 1986, with Music Director Kenneth
Schermerhorn and soloist David Bar-Illan
Estimated length: 20 minutes
I
n addition to his gifts as a composer, Felix
Mendelssohn led an active musical life as a
conductor and pianist. In fact, both Felix and
his sister Fanny were piano virtuosos. The First
Piano Concerto originated in his happy years
of travel across Europe, drawing on sketches he
jotted down while in Rome — though, according
to biographer R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn
composed the bulk of the score and orchestrated
it while in Munich. The German city beckoned
not only with professional promise, but also
as the residence of the talented young pianist
Delphine von Schauroth (1814-1887), to whom
Felix apparently felt some attraction. Various
matchmakers (including even King Ludwig I of
Bavaria) encouraged a union between the two
gifted young artists, but the composer resisted
their efforts. Even so, Mendelssohn did dedicate
his First Concerto to the beautifully named
Delphine.
The work was well received at its premiere,
and Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt, leading
keyboard stars of the era, also championed it. The
highly self-critical Mendelssohn claimed he had
written it “almost carelessly” within a few days,
adding, “It always pleased people the most, but me
very little.”
W HAT TO LISTE N F OR
The Classical-Romantic balance that is a key
to Mendelssohn’s music is already apparent in his
mixture here of poise and innovative structural
ideas. The most obvious of his innovations is
the linkage of all three movements into a single
interconnected span. Similarly, Mendelssohn
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M AY 2 0 1 5
opens the Concerto by giving the soloist a
sudden early entrance after a mere few bars of
fiery dramatics from the orchestra. This gambit
adds to the sense of urgency and reinforces the
agitated, driving emotions of the first movement.
Like Mozart, Mendelssohn knew that the piano
could allure with simple, restrained poetry (as in
the second theme), just as much as it could with
rocketing octaves and rippling scales. Near the
end of the first movement, the conspicuous dotted
rhythm of the main theme gives way to a repeatednote fanfare from the trumpets and horns.
This fanfare is used as a linking device
between the movements. It clears the space for
a piano solo that leads to a placid Andante in E
major. This movement features reduced, pastellike scoring to enhance the intimate rapport
between piano and ensemble. As a unifying device,
Mendelssohn alludes to the dotted-rhythm pattern
of the first movement’s main theme.
The fanfare returns after a long, hushed pause
to launch the finale — now in the major, with
a theme of bounding joy first stated in staunch
octaves, to counterbalance the opening theme’s
G-minor turmoil. Mendelssohn once again alludes
to the same dotted-rhythm pattern in the two
main themes here. In another unifying device near
the end, the soloist also briefly alludes to the first
movement’s lyrical second theme, as if she had
chanced upon it while improvising. An exuberant
coda draws out the dazzling virtuosity that
characterizes this movement.
In addition to solo piano, the Piano Concerto No. 1
is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons,
horns, and trumpets, timpani and strings.
PYOT R I LY IC H
TC H A I KOV SKY
Composed: 1893
First performance: October 28, 1893, in Saint
Petersburg, with the composer conducting
First Nashville Symphony performance:
February 21, 1956, with Music Director Guy Taylor
Estimated length: 45 minutes
T
he arresting emotional turbulence of
Tchaikovsky’s mature masterpieces often
evokes a confessional character. As the composer
himself wrote of the Symphony No. 6, his final
work in the genre, “Without exaggeration, I have
put my entire soul into this symphony.”
Thus it can be tempting to construct an
explanatory narrative around his late work. Quite
possibly for that reason, Tchaikovsky became
ambivalent about program music, which had
been championed by his early mentors and the
Russian nationalists as an antidote to the sterile
“formalism” of Western music. The composer
had written his share of narrative-driven pieces:
At one extreme are the Fourth Symphony, for
which Tchaikovsky supplied an elaborate program
centered on the idea of Fate, and his unnumbered
Manfred Symphony of 1885, a treatment of Lord
Byron’s poetic drama and its Faustian hero.
Something more subtle happens in the
Symphony No. 6. For this work Tchaikovsky
developed a “private,” unpublished program and
did without the recurrent cyclic themes of the
InConcert
19
S ERIES
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74,
“Pathétique”
C L ASS ICAL
Born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia; died on
November 6, 1893, in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Fifth and Manfred Symphonies. At the same time,
he drew attention to the existence of some extramusical dimension by adopting the provocative
working subtitle “Program Symphony.” According
to one of the many legends that surround the
work, Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest suggested
the French title Pathétique — which connotes
“impassioned suffering” in its Russian context.
The composer’s sudden death just a little over
a week after he had led the world premiere in
October 1893 made that title seem uncannily wellsuited to the devastating psychological drama the
Sixth encompasses.
The circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death
have further enshrouded the Pathétique in mystery.
As with the early death of the genius cryptanalyst
Alan Turing (recently dramatized in the film The
Imitation Game), questions continue to proliferate
about the cause. Did an accidental drink of
cholera-contaminated water kill Tchaikovsky, or
did the “scandal” of his same-sex affairs result in
the composer’s submitting to a kind of Socratic
suicide to preserve a code of “honor” among his
associates? (This sensationalist interpretation
has generally been debunked.) The debate about
the potential “encoded” meaning of this work —
much like the debate surrounding Shostakovich
and his attitude toward Communist control —
rages on unresolved, ensuring that the Pathétique
remains one of the symphonic repertoire’s mostdebated works.
The Israeli musicologist Marina Ritzarev
proposes another provocative argument in her
new book, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique and Russian
Culture. In Ritzarev’s analysis, the conventional
view of the Sixth as a personal, subjective
lamentation clashes with the composer’s aesthetic
and ethical sensibility. The actual “program,”
she insists, has to do with a more traditional,
religious sense of “Passion” (and compassion)
from European culture. “The image that might
have served as the source of inspiration for
Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece,” she writes, “was that
of Jesus Christ, his life and death, transformed
into a general imagery of the Passion.”
Mendelssohn, incidentally, plays a role
here on account of his culturally pivotal revival
of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1830 (just a
few years before his First Piano Concerto). The
impact of that revival, notes Ritzarev, “with its
emotionally powerful presentation of gospel
scenes, [may have] influenced young [theologian]
David Strauss, a pioneer in the de-consecration of
Christ’s image, which eventually made Christ the
most popular cultural hero of the 19th century.”
C L ASS ICAL
W HAT TO LISTE N F OR
S ERIES
The extensive first movement immediately
ushers us into a world of bleak despair that
acquires crushing intensity. Tchaikovsky employs
his orchestral mastery and technical acumen to
give resilient shape to these passions. He manages
this with relatively traditional orchestral forces:
brass chorales evoke apocalypse, while caressing
memories are wrought by delicately sprung
woodwind solos. Tempestuous string scales
possess a shattering, nervous energy we cannot
soon forget. But the climaxes evade predictability:
in the middle of the movement, an exaggerated
silence (marked pppppp in the score for emphasis)
shocks even more than an explosion of sound
would.
Two inner movements of contrasting
character turn out to be interludes rather than
long-range shifts of direction. The second
movement’s flowing, dance-like charm is given a
subtle displacement through the use of 5/4 meter
(which manages to sound graceful rather than
hobbled, though it gives the familiar pattern of
the waltz an uneasy edge). In the third movement,
Tchaikovsky presents a blazing but hollowly
triumphant, brass-reinforced march that revels in
aggressive, swaggering rhythm.
It has often been pointed out that if
Tchaikovsky had simply switched the order of the
final two movements, he would have preserved the
optimistic, Beethovenian model of light winning
out over darkness. Yet by reversing that model
and ending with the nihilistic, dying fall of a
“lamenting” Adagio (the same tempo with which
the Symphony began), he introduces a radically
new concept of the symphonic journey. (Mahler’s
Ninth would adopt a similar strategy.) The
valedictory plunge into silence from a sustained B
minor chord deep in the strings sets the stage for a
new century of bleak requie Tchaikovsky’s genius
is to generate compassion in those listeners who
follow his journey into the psyche.
The Symphony No. 6 is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2
bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals and tamtam) and strings.
— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program
annotator, is a writer and translator who covers
classical and contemporary music. He blogs at
memeteria.com.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
CARL ST. CLAIR,
conductor
Music Director of
the Pacific Symphony for
more than two decades,
Carl St. Clair has become
widely recognized for his
musically distinguished
performances, innovative
approaches to programming, and commitment
to outstanding educational programs. The largest
ensemble formed in the United States during the
last 40 years, the Pacific Symphony owes its rapid
artistic growth to St. Clair’s astute leadership.
Influenced by his close association with Leonard
Bernstein, his commitment to the development
and performance of new works by American
composers is evident in the wealth of the Pacific
Symphony’s commissions and recordings.
20
M AY 2 0 1 5
Most recently, St. Clair has been named
Music Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica
Nacional de Costa Rica. Now in its 73rd season,
the orchestra is a well-established regional and
national orchestra serving the entire country.
In the U.S., St. Clair has conducted the Boston
Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New
York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra and
the symphonies of Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth,
Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Montreal,
San Francisco, Sarasota, Seattle, Toronto
and Vancouver, to name a few. Worldwide
engagements include numerous orchestras in
Europe, South America, Israel, Australia, New
Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan.
St. Clair has been general music director
and chief conductor of the German National
Theater and Staatskapelle in Weimar, Germany,
making him the first non-European to hold this
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Nashville’s
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adapted by
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based on the
motion picture by
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Nov. 30 - Dec. 22
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A PR I L 2 0 1 5
InConcert
21
S ERIES
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