BSO Program Notes

Berkeley Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
Tuesday and Wedensday, January 22 and 23, 2002 - 8PM
Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison Street, Berkeley
(Berkeley Repertory Theatre's new stage)
Kent Nagano, Conductor
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was born in the Himmelpfortgrund district, just outside Vienna, on January 31, 1797; among the great composers of the Viennese “classical” era (sometimes called “The First Viennese School”), he was the only one native to the city. He died on November 19, 1828, in Neue Wieden, another suburb of Vienna. Schubert composed the Symphony No. 5 in 1816, beginning sometime in September, and completing the score on October 3. The instrumentation is modest, calling only for a single flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons and horns in B-flat, and the usual body of strings. The work was played in a private house concert at the home of Otto Hatwig soon after its completion. Its first public performance would have to wait until October 17, 1841, in the Theater in der Josefstadt, in Vienna, under the direction of Michael Letiermayer. The symphony was first published in the original Complete Works of Schubert in 1885.
In 1804, at the age of seven, Franz Schubert sang an audition before the man who bore the august title of “Royal and Imperial Court Music Director,” Antonio Salieri. Salieri was impressed with what he heard and added Schubert’s name to the list of singers worthy of substituting in the Imperial Hofkapelle, or Court Chapel. Four years later, in 1808, when several positions in the chapel choir opened up, young Franz sailed through the more formal and highly competitive audition process, earning a regular spot in the choir.
An important side benefit of Court Chapel membership was automatic admission, free of charge, into the Kaiserlich-königliches Stadtkonvikt (Imperial and Royal City College). This boarding school was operated by Piarist monks and provided to impoverished students an education equivalent to that which children of the upper classes received. Music was an important part of the curriculum, and the school boasted an excellent orchestra. While at the school, Schubert had the opportunity to take composition lessons from Salieri and was also encouraged to play with the second violins. Here, he became intimately familiar with the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and the early works of Beethoven. Moreover, he also had a ready-made workshop for his own efforts: the school orchestra played his first symphony soon after its completion in October 1813.
At about the same time, the young Schubert moved back into his father’s house, and began a teacher-certification course. In August 1814 he passed his exams and joined the teaching staff of the school his father operated in the family dwelling. He obviously saw teaching as merely a “day job,” for by this point he had committed himself to the art of music but as yet had not figured out how to make a living at it. Fortunately, he did not lack for an orchestra with which to try out new compositions-the Schuberts had long maintained a string quartet en famille, which could be augmented from time to time by the collaboration of friends playing other instruments. In the autumn of 1814, the conductor, bassoonist and violinist Otto Hatwig took over direction of this ad hoc ensemble and moved the performances into his own home. It was at one of these private concerts that Schubert’s Symphony
in B-flat had its premiere.
Long a favorite of concertgoers, Schubert’s fifth symphony projects an air of youthful freshness. Its tunes beguile the ear effortlessly, and its structure is crystal-clear. Schubert had written more adventurous symphonies before this; but in this work the young composer seems to sum up the legacy he had received from his Viennese forebears, Haydn and Mozart. (Beethoven’s mature symphonies, still “modern music” at this time, have left no mark-yet.) The orchestration is small-scale, recalling symphonies of the 1770s, lacking clarinets, trumpets and drums. Astonishing harmonic excursions, one of Schubert’s hallmarks, are almost absent except as momentary passing harmonies. Echoes of the works Schubert played as a student at the Stadtkonvikt resound: the theme of the minuet bears a strong resemblance to that of Mozart’s symphony in G minor, K. 550 (a work that made an impression on Schubert, according to one of his school friends); the melody of the last movement could be the theme from a Haydn finale, including the characteristic addition of the flute doubling at the tune’s repetition. Original touches can be found as well-the delightful four-bar introduction, in tempo, to the opening movement, for example, and the setting of the minuet in G minor (perhaps a further reference to its model), rather than in the key of the outer movements, as was customary. Perhaps the most Schubertian feature of the work is its masterful balance between irrepressible melodiousness and a solid sense of formal structure-a synthesis that would reach fruition in Schubert’s late works, including his final two symphonic masterpieces: the “Unfinished” symphony in B minor and the “Great” symphony in C major.
Nocturne in A Minor (1993)
Karen Lakey Buckwalter
Sonos Handbell Ensemble
Jim Meredith, Conductor
The Sonos Handbell Ensemble has provided the following information on the group and composer Karen Lakey Buckwalter:
The 12 members of the Sonos Handbell Ensemble handle 68 chromatically tuned bells covering over five octaves. This considerable acrobatic effort involves ringing, slamming, plucking, malleting, shaking, damping, bouncing and a host of other virtuosic techniques. With up to three bells in each hand, the individual Sonos musicians synchronize their motions, creating the musical effect of a single soloist.
Their CDs have gained them the acclaim of critics and the admiration of classical radio listeners around the world. Regular appearances on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion and Performance Today have made bells familiar sounds to National Public Radio audiences. Their CD Sonos Handbell Ensemble: Spirituals and Folk Songs was named “Disc of the Month” by Gramophone magazine.
By playing the best transcriptions and commissioning noted composers such as Karen Lakey Buckwalter to write original material for them, Sonos has helped move this centuries-old art into the 21st-century musical mainstream. Their solo and orchestral performances across the country mesmerize listeners with a repertoire ranging from baroque to modern, covering styles from classical to ragtime.
Bay Area collaborations have included the Oakland East Bay Symphony, San Jose Symphony, and Vance George and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. San Jose Taiko and Gamelan Pusaka Sunda joined Sonos in Navigator Tree, written for the nationwide commissioning project Continental Harmony by composer and computer futurist Jaron Lanier. This collaboration was filmed by PBS for a documentary that aired nationwide in the fall of 2001. Last summer, mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade appeared with Sonos in two concerts of Spanish and Latin American music, featuring a new commissioned work by Libby Larsen entitled Hell’s Belles.
Organist, pianist and composer Karen Lakey Buckwalter is minister of music at Trinity United Church of Christ in Hanover, Pennsylvania, where she coordinates a program of six singing choirs and four handbell choirs. Mrs. Buckwalter is a 1974 graduate of Westminster Choir College, where she earned her Bachelor of Music Education degree, and a 1977 graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she studied organ with John Weaver and earned the prestigious Artists Diploma in Organ Performance. Internationally known in the field of handbell composition, Mrs. Buckwalter composed her first published work, Danza, in 1982. With 31 handbell compositions now in print, she has earned enthusiastic praise for her creative compositions, whose colorful harmonies and chromatics have raised the musicality in handbell music as a genre. Her works are frequently selected at area and national handbell conferences throughout the country and have been recorded in the United States and Japan. When Mrs. Buckwalter heard Sonos play in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1992, she immediately knew that a newly written work had to be dedicated to them. Nocturne in A Minor has gone on to become one of the most frequently performed compositions by handbell groups around the world.
Irish composer John Field is credited with creating the genre of the nocturne, with a significant boost given by the great romantic Frédéric Chopin. This work follows the outline of many nocturnes by beginning quietly, building over several pages to a large and intense climax, and eventually retreating to the opening material. It paints a cool and transparent picture of a winter night.
Different Worlds of Sound
David Sheinfeld
(world premiere)
Ward Spangler, percussion soloist
David Sheinfeld was born on September 20, 1906, in St. Louis to an immigrant family recently arrived from the Ukraine. He died in San Francisco on June 9, 2001. He composed Different Worlds of Sound in response to a commission from Kent Nagano, who wanted a concerto to feature percussionist Ward Spangler. Sheinfeld completed it early in 2001 after more than a year of work. Movement II and the Interlude-Cadenza were first heard at one of the Berkeley Symphony’s Under Construction events, on February 4, 2001, and the outer movements were played at the April 8 Under Construction event. The performances at these concerts marks the work’s official premiere. Different Worlds of Sound is scored for a very large orchestra, including 3 flutes (2nd and 3rd doubling on piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling on English horn), 2 B-flat clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (3rd doubling on contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano (doubling on celesta), harp, strings and solo percussionist.
”Twenty-three years ago,” said Kent Nagano to the audience at the Berkeley Symphony’s Under Construction event in February of last year, “I met the most amazing percussionist.” The musician in question was Ward Spangler, now the Symphony’s principal percussionist. Nagano has long been interested in commissioning a concerto that would feature Spangler as soloist. Various projects were considered, but none came to fruition until Bay Area composer David Sheinfeld agreed to write one. The work heard tonight is the result of that commission. The composer insisted that Different Worlds of Sound is not really a concerto, but a work for orchestra and percussion soloist, although he did concede (begrudgingly, perhaps) that he was fighting a losing battle:
“I’ll just give up on that.” As he explained to the audience in February: To me, remember, the name of this work is Different Worlds of Sound, and percussion may indeed be the single most principal voice, or certainly one of the most principal voices. The reason I don’t consider it a concerto is that I’m not just showing off, in a sense, the percussionist. [As] I said to you already, this piece I call Different Worlds of Sound and the percussionist is one of the different worlds. That’s the way I think of it. This is a typical statement from Sheinfeld, who went about his art in an utterly individual way. If a standard form, like the concerto, was not useful to him, he had no compunction about setting it aside. His attitude toward harmony was similar:
[T]he way I think, I’m no longer primarily (I emphasize the word “primarily”) concerned with whether a work is consonant, or dissonant, or tonal, or atonal. I work with different voices who do different things at the same time. . . . This is what “polyphony” means.
Different Worlds of Sound is the crowning achievement of a composing career spanning many decades. David Sheinfeld began violin lessons at the age of seven, and after his family moved to Chicago in 1919 he started to study harmony and counterpoint. Largely self-taught, he earned a spot in Ottorino Respighi’s composition seminar through sheer moxie: when Respighi (composer of grandly scaled symphonic poems, such as The Pines of Rome) was conducting in Chicago, Sheinfeld approached Signora Respighi in the lobby of their hotel and asked her to show copies of his compositions to the composer (she spoke English, while Signor Respighi did not). His audacity paid off-Respighi accepted him into his class of only six students.
After his two years at the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome with Respighi (1929-1931), Sheinfeld returned to Chicago, only to discover that a promised position as violinist with the Chicago Opera had evaporated; the company had dissolved, a victim of the Great Depression. He made a living playing for broadcast shows and ballets and composing and arranging for theatrical ensembles. Eventually, he was hired by Pierre Monteux to play in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and moved west in 1945. He remained a prominent member of the orchestra, becoming assistant concertmaster along the way, until his retirement in 1971.
It was Monteux who commissioned Sheinfeld’s first orchestral work, Adagio and Allegro, performed by the orchestra in 1947. This was followed by the Concerto for Orchestra in 1950. Later, further works were premiered by the San Francisco Symphony under Seiji Ozawa and Edo de Waart. During the 1950s, he began to receive commissions from other ensembles; his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was premiered by Anshel Brusilow and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1955. In recent years, he has written for the Kronos Quartet (two string quartets); the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players (Dear Theo, for baritone and chamber ensemble, text taken from the letters of Vincent van Gogh) and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. Aside from tonight’s work, the BSO under the direction of Kent Nagano has premiered The Earth Is a Sounding Board (originally commissioned by Maestro Ozawa for the San Francisco Symphony and composed in 1978, but not performed until 1993) and the two symphonies Polarities (composed 1990, premiered 1997) and E=MC2 (for orchestra and string quartet, premiered in 1998 with the BSO and the
Alexander Quartet).
When Sheinfeld first began work on Different Worlds of Sound, he went to Ward Spangler’s studio to discuss which percussion instruments to use, and was particularly intrigued by the steel coil-it’s first heard about halfway through the first movement. In the finished piece, Sheinfeld employed several instruments not suggested by Spangler, including the xylophone and chimes. Spangler suggested to Sheinfeld that he might include passages where the percussion soloist could improvise. The composer chose not to adopt this idea, but the completed composition, says Spangler, is “like a work that’s being improvised by a group of really good improvisers.” Sheinfeld described the first movement to Spangler as a duet between percussion soloist and orchestra, that dies away to nothing toward the end. The soloist leads off, playing the roto-toms, with a quintuplet within a restricted melodic range acting as an upbeat to one further note. This concise gesture sets the tone for the rest of the work. Different instruments state brief motives, sometimes joined by other instruments playing similar (but not exactly so) motives, either synchronized or starting at slightly different times. In fact, Sheinfeld invented a specific notation for the first notes of motives that are out of synch with the overriding meter of the piece: he calls them “quasi downbeats” and they are marked in the score as “QDB.” The motives usually consist of repeated notes (often grouped in fives), which draws our attention to their rhythmic character-appropriate to a composition built around the percussion department.
After the first movement has died away, the slow movement slowly emerges out of the silence. Sheinfeld remarked to Spangler that the second movement begins dark and gloomy, then opens up to light, returning to darkness in the end. To produce this murky atmosphere, Sheinfeld scores the opening of the movement only for the cellar-dwellers of the orchestra: tuba, contrabassoon and contrabass. Only gradually do brighter members of the ensemble begin to speak-the violins do not enter until about a third of the way into the movement. This movement, too, melts away into silence.
The brief Interlude is dominated by the soloist, with only minimal contributions from the rest of the orchestra, and leads into the Cadenza. Probably the only concession to traditional concerto practice in the work, the Cadenza not only demands of the soloist virtuosity in terms of playing many notes in complex patterns, but requires that the soloist switch from one instrument to another at a dizzying rate. This movement begins to fade away like the previous ones, but at the last second it regains its strength and begins to accelerate in speed and intensity, leading without pause into the finale.
In conversation with Spangler, Sheinfeld characterized the last movement as starting fast, getting faster, and ending up frenzied. It takes up all the tiny motives from the first two movements and develops them “in a (seemingly) more orderly fashion,” as Kent Nagano has noted. The movement proceeds in waves, each one starting with a few instruments presenting the seeds of musical ideas, building to great climaxes as more instruments join in, then subsiding as the instruments regroup to explore new ideas. The work ’s conclusion is heralded by the return of the quintuplet percussion motive from the opening of the first movement, and the piece ends in a grand apotheosis of the five+one rhythm.
Kammerkonzert, Chamber Concerto for piano and violin with thirteen wind instruments
Alban Berg
Stuart Canin, violin soloist
Markus Pawlik, piano soloist
Alban Berg was born in Vienna on February 9, 1885, and died in Vienna on December 23/24, 1935. Kammerkonzert (Chamber Concerto), dedicated “To Arnold Schoenberg, on his Fiftieth Birthday,” was begun in 1923, and not completed until some time after the older composer’s birthday (September 13, 1924), on February 9, 1925 (Berg’s fortieth birthday), though the printed score bears the date “23.7.25.” The scoring is for piccolo (doubling on second flute), flute, oboe, English horn, clarinets in E-flat and A, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, trumpet in F, two horns in F and trombone, with solo piano and solo violin. The work’s first performance was directed by Hermann Scherchen in Berlin, on March 27, 1927.
“I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music-should there be any left-would go mad with joy.”
-Alban Berg to Arnold Schoenberg, February 9, 1925
It is fascinating to note that the Vienna of Schoenberg and his students was also the Vienna of Sigmund Freud and the birthplace of psychoanalysis. What would Freud have made of the tendency of Alban Berg to construct his larger compositions around elaborate, secret stories, using musical codes to represent the people in his life and relying on numerological legerdemain to dictate formal structures? Indeed, some of his works recount intimate episodes from his life in greater detail than he ever revealed to anyone in the normal mode of discourse.
In some of Berg’s works, of course, the program is not hidden, but overt. His last completed composition, the Violin Concerto, was a memorial to the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, who died at the age of 18. In it, Berg paints a portrait of the departed “Angel,” and in its finale quotes a melody from a Bach cantata on the subject of death (the chorale tune Es ist genug). But secrecy was by far the norm. Only after Berg’s widow, Helene, died in 1976 did many of his previously private papers become available to scholars, and the full extent of Berg’s secret programs started to become clear. It turned out, for example, that his Lyric Suite for string quartet (1925-26) was a “latent opera,” telling the story of Berg’s extramarital affair with the wife of a friend.
The Chamber Concerto falls somewhere between these extremes. There is a public program for the work, announced by Berg in an open letter to Schoenberg, published in the Viennese musical journal Pult und Taktstock in February 1925. In this letter, Berg dedicates the work to Schoenberg as a 50th birthday present (although he’s several months late), and describes how the melodic material of the work is derived from the names of Schoenberg, Anton von Webern (Schoenberg’s other notable pupil) and himself; moreover, the form of the work as a whole is dictated by the idea of “trinity,” or multiples of three: the work is in three movements, there are three performing units (piano, violin and wind ensemble) and three combinations thereof (piano and winds, violin and winds, both soloists and winds); the first movement consists of a theme and five variations (making six sections altogether); the number of measures in each movement is a multiple of three; the slow movement is in ternary form; etc. Berg knows this may be a bit much, and jokes about it: “I realize that-insofar as I make this generally known-my reputation as a mathematician will grow in proportion (. . . to the square of the distance) as my reputation as a composer sinks” (from Willi Reich, The Life and Work of Alban Berg, tr. Cornelius Cardew, London, 1965). Nevertheless, posthumous research among Berg’s sketches for the work reveal layers upon layers of meaning. The three movements have secret titles:
“Friendship,” “Love” and “The World”-to which Berg made an oblique reference in his letter, quoted at the head of this article. Also, each of the variations in the first movement is a portrait of a different member of the Schoenberg circle. More deeply hidden yet, the Adagio is inspired by a sad episode in Schoenberg’s life: his first wife, Mathilde, had an affair with the painter, Richard Gerstl; the movement depicts her declining health after she left Gerstl and her eventual return to Schoenberg. Since Mathilde had died in 1923, and supposedly part of Berg’s reason for presenting the Chamber Concerto to Schoenberg was to cheer him up, this may seem like an odd story to include-it is no wonder that Berg kept it secret. To quote Douglas Jarman (“Secret programmes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed.
Anthony Pople, Cambridge, 1997): “Moreover, as we know from sketches, letters and a variety of internal evidence, the Chamber Concerto also contains a host of other personal allusions, some of which we recognize and understand, some of which we know about without fully understanding their significance, and some of which will perhaps always remain a secret.” The three movements of the Concerto are played without break (although Berg did create alternative endings for the first two movements, to allow them to be performed individually). At the head of the work stands a five-bar musical motto, which itself is headed “All Good Things . . .” (“Aller guten Dinge . . .”), referring to Berg’s wishes for Schoenberg’s birthday-but notice also that it contains three words and three dots. The motto itself (which bears the indication “These five measures must not be conducted, but must be played”) contains the names of the three composers, translated into musical notation. In German notation, B is our B-flat, H is our B, and Es (rendered here simply as S) is our E-flat. Thus we have ArnolD SCHoenBErG, played on the piano; Anton wEBErn, played on the solo violin; and AlBAn BerG, played on the horn.
The first movement remains strictly in triple meter throughout, and, as is the case with so much Viennese music from the last hundred years or so, can’ t resist slipping into waltz tempo now and again. The second movement is in ternary “song” form: A1-B-A2, in which the music of A2 is more or less the music of A1 flipped upside down. Immediately after A2 ends, the entire ternary structure is repeated, in reverse: A2-B-A1. Berg loved large-scale palindromes like this; almost all of his mature works employ such a structure. In this case, the palindrome represents Mathilde’s return to Schoenberg after her time away. The exact pivot point where the palindrome reverses direction is marked by an extraordinary gesture: the piano, which is silent throughout the rest of the movement, plays a low C-sharp twelve times, like an ominous timepiece striking midnight.
A compositional tour de force, the final Rondo ritmico combines the materialof the first two movements, but casts it in a different formal scheme. It is introduced by an elaborate cadenza for both soloists-the first time in the piece they play together-in which the violin’s first statement lays out a rhythmic motive (on repeated notes) that will dominate the entire movement. Berg’s love of symmetrical structures soon comes to the fore again when, just before the movement’s exact midpoint, the piano pounds out the rhythm on D-flat. After a moment’s silence, the contrabassoon plays the rhythm on C-sharp (the same pitch as D-flat)-only in reverse.
©2001 Victor Gavinda