SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Edo de Waart, conductor. October 6-7, 2018

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1 SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Edo de Waart, conductor October 6-7, 2018 MICHAEL IPPOLITO Nocturne EDVARD GRIEG Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 Allegro molto moderato Adagio Allegro moderato molto e marcato Joyce Yang, piano INTERMISSION LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 Poco sostenuto Vivace Allegretto Presto Allegro con brio

2 Nocturne MICHAEL IPPOLITO Born 1985, Tampa, Florida Michael Ippolito grew up in Florida, where he learned to play the cello as a boy. He also began composing while still a boy, and this led him to the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Joel Hoffman and Michael Friday, and eventually to Juilliard, where he studied with John Corigliano. Ippolito has composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles (including four string quartets), wind ensembles, keyboard and voice, and his music has been performed by such orchestras as the Chicago Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra and the Juilliard Orchestra. Ippolito, who has served as a composer fellow at the Aspen Music Festival, currently teaches composition at Texas State University. Ippolito s Nocturne was premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra on February 27, 2012, under the direction of Jeffrey Milarsky. On his website, the composer has furnished a program note: My Nocturne was originally inspired by Joan Miro s 1940 painting of the same name. I was first drawn to the pure visual appeal of Miro s fantastical figures and swirling lines, but I was also intrigued by the idea of a nocturne with so much energy and whimsy. As I thought about the tension between the title and the image, the other approaches to the nocturne came to my mind from the Whistler paintings and the dreamy world of Chopin and Field that inspired him, to the colorful and diverse Debussy pieces, to the creaking and sliding night music of Bartók. In the end, my piece is about the different connotations of the title as much as it is about an imagined nocturnal scene. Nocturne is in three large sections. The opening evokes a hazy world, with allusions to familiar nocturnal imagery floating in and out of focus. The middle section is a wild scherzo inspired by Miro s bizarre nocturne. At the end, the music from the opening section returns, with a brief nod to Chopin before the music evaporates to nothing. The original version of this piece was scored for flute, violin and piano, written in The version for orchestra was completed almost a year later. -Michael Ippolito

3 Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 EDVARD GRIEG Born June 15, 1843, Bergen, Norway Died September 4, 1907, Bergen In June 1867, Edvard Grieg a struggling 24-year-old composer married his first cousin, Nina Hagerup, a soprano. It would be a long and happy marriage, and the following April the couple had their only child, a daughter they named Alexandra. That summer, the Griegs wished to take a break from the busy musical life of Norway, and they went to Denmark, where they hoped the milder climate would benefit the composer s often frail health. They rented a two-room garden cottage in the village of Søllerød, a few miles outside Copenhagen, and there in June 1868 Grieg began his Piano Concerto in A minor. He completed the score early the following year, and Edmund Neupert gave the first performance in Copenhagen on April 3, The concerto was a great success from that moment and was soon published, but Grieg continued to revise it across the rest of his life: he made the final revisions in 1907, only a few months before his death. Several years after the premiere, the Griegs traveled to Rome, where they visited Franz Liszt in his villa. Liszt sat down at his piano and sight-read this difficult concerto from Grieg s manuscript. Grieg reported that while Liszt played the first movement too fast, his playing of the cadenza was magnificent, and the older master was so taken with the music at one point that he got up and strolled away from the piano with his arms upraised, literally roaring out the theme. Best of all, Liszt recognized how Grieg had amended one of the principal themes of the finale when it comes back for a triumphant reappearance at the end, and he shouted out: G-natural! G-natural! Not G-sharp! Splendid! Liszt went back and played that ending one more time, then told Grieg: Keep on, I tell you. You have what is needed, and don t let them frighten you. Liszt s judgment was sound: the Grieg Piano Concerto has become one of the most popular ever written. Its combination of good tunes alternating with stormy, dramatic gestures, all of it stitched together with some brilliant writing for piano, has made it almost irresistible to audiences. To some extent, this music has become a victim of its own success: by the middle of the last century it had become almost too popular, and over the last generation or so it has virtually disappeared from the concert hall. Which makes a fresh performance all the more

4 welcome. Grieg greatly admired the music of Robert Schumann, and the similarity between the beginnings of their respective piano concertos is striking: each opens with a great orchestral chord followed by a brilliant passage for the solo piano that eases gently into the movement s main theme. Grieg makes his opening even more dramatic by beginning with a long timpani roll: that roll flares up like a peal of thunder, then the piano s entrance flashes downward like a streak of lightning. The movement s march-like main theme, shared on its first appearance by winds and strings, is only the first of many attractive ideas; one observer has counted seven different themes in this movement, and these range from a melting lyricism to heaven-storming violence. That cadenza that Liszt sight-read so well is particularly effective; though it begins quietly, Grieg soon unleashes great torrents of sound from hammered octaves and brilliant runs. It is altogether typical of this movement that Grieg should introduce a new theme after the cadenza. The mood changes completely in the Adagio. Grieg mutes the strings here and moves to the key of D-flat Major, which feels soft and warm after the powerful opening movement. A long orchestral introduction leads to the entrance of the piano, which sounds utterly fresh after the dark, muted strings. But this entrance is deceiving, for soon the piano part turns dramatic and drives to its own climax; the music subsides and continues without a break into the finale, marked Allegro marcato. After an opening flourish, the piano introduces the main theme, a dancing 2/4 idea that sounds as if it must have its roots in Norwegian folk music. Once again, this movement is built on a wealth of ideas, and at the coda Grieg moves into A Major and ingeniously recasts his main theme in 3/4. Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna Beethoven turned 40 in December can be a difficult age for anyone, but for Beethoven things were going very well. True, his hearing had deteriorated to the point where he was virtually deaf, but he was still riding that white-hot explosion of creativity that has become known, for better or worse, as his Heroic Style. Over the decade-long span of that style ( ) Beethoven essentially re-imagined music and its possibilities. The works that

5 crystalized the Heroic Style the Eroica Symphony and the Fifth Symphony unleased a level of violence and darkness previously unknown in music (forces that Beethoven s biographer Maynard Solomon has described as hostile energy ) and then triumphed over them. In these violent symphonies, music became not a matter of polite discourse but of conflict, struggle and resolution. In the fall of 1811, Beethoven began a new symphony it would be his Seventh and it would differ sharply from those two famous predecessors. Gone is the sense of cataclysmic struggle and hard-won victory that had driven those earlier symphonies. There are no battles fought and won in the Seventh Symphony instead, this music is infused from its first instant with a mood of pure celebration. Such a spirit has inevitably produced a number of interpretations as to what this symphony is about : Berlioz heard a peasants dance in it, Wagner called it the apotheosis of the dance, and more recently Maynard Solomon has suggested that the Seventh is the musical representation of a festival, a brief moment of pure spiritual liberation. But it may be safest to leave the issue of meaning aside and instead listen to the Seventh simply as music. There had never been music like this before, nor has there been since Beethoven s Seventh Symphony contains more energy than any other piece of music ever written. Much has been made (correctly) of Beethoven s ability to transform small bits of theme into massive symphonic structures, but in the Seventh he begins not so much with theme as with rhythm: he builds the entire symphony from what are almost scraps of rhythm tiny figures that seem unpromising, even uninteresting, in themselves. Gradually he unleashes the energy locked up in these small figures and from them builds one of the mightiest symphonies ever written. The first movement opens with a slow introduction so long that it almost becomes a separate movement of its own. Tremendous chords punctuate the slow beginning, which gives way to a poised duet for oboes. The real effect of this long Poco sostenuto, however, is to coil the energy that will be unleashed in the true first movement, and Beethoven conveys this rhythmically: the meter of the introduction is a rock-solid (even square) 4/4, but the main body of the movement, marked Vivace, transforms this into a light-footed 6/8. This Vivace begins in what seems a most unpromising manner, however, as woodwinds toot out a simple dotted 6/8 rhythm and the solo flute announces the first theme, a graceful melody on this same rhythm. Beethoven builds the entire first movement from this simple dotted rhythm, which saturates

6 virtually every measure. As theme, as accompaniment, as motor rhythm, it is always present, hammering into our consciousness. At the climax, horns sail majestically to the close as the orchestra thunders out that rhythm one final time. The second movement, in A minor, is one of Beethoven s most famous slow movements, but the debate continues as to whether it really is a slow movement. Beethoven could not decide whether to mark it Andante (a walking tempo) or Allegretto (a moderately fast pace). He finally decided on Allegretto, though the actual pulse is somewhere between those two. This movement too is built on a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the first five notes: long-short-short-long-long and this pattern repeats here almost as obsessively as the pattern of the first movement. The opening sounds like a series of static chords the theme itself occurs quietly inside those chords and Beethoven simply repeats this theme, varying it as it proceeds. The central episode in A Major moves gracefully along smoothly-flowing triplets before a little fugato on the opening rhythms builds to a great climax. Beethoven winds the movement down on the woodwinds almost skeletal reprise of the fundamental rhythm. The Scherzo explodes to life on a theme full of grace notes, powerful accents, flying staccatos and timpani explosions. This alternates with a trio section for winds reportedly based on an old pilgrims hymn, though no one, it seems, has been able to identify that exact hymn. Beethoven offers a second repeat of the trio, then seems about to offer a third before five powerful chords cut the movement off abruptly. These chords set the stage for the Allegro con brio, again built on the near-obsessive treatment of a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the movement s opening four-note fanfare. This four-note pattern punctuates the entire movement: it shapes the beginning of the main theme, and its stinging accents thrust the music forward continuously as this movement almost boils over with energy. The ending is remarkable: above growling cellos and basses (which rock along on a two-note ostinato for 28 measures), the opening theme drives to a climax that Beethoven marks fff, a dynamic marking he almost never used. This conclusion is virtually Bacchanalian in its wild power no matter how many times one has heard it, the ending of the Seventh Symphony remains one of the most exciting moments in all of music. The first performance of the Seventh Symphony took place in the Great Hall of the University in Vienna on December 8, Though nearly deaf at this point, Beethoven led the performance, and the orchestra was able to compensate for any of his conducting failings, so that

7 the premiere was a huge success. On that occasion and at three subsequent performances over the next few months the audience demanded that the second movement be repeated. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger Performance History by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist At these concerts, the Noctourne by Michael Ippolito is being given its initial San Diego hearing. In contrast, the ever-popular A minor Piano Concerto by Edvard Grieg is being played for its twelfth presentation by the San Diego Symphony. Fabien Sevitzky introduced the work to San Diego audiences in the summer of 1951 when he conducted the orchestra and Amparo Iturbi was the soloist. Its most recent presentation here was during the season when David Robertson led the orchestra and Orli Shaham was the soloist. Sevitzky also conducted the San Diego Symphony's first performance of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony in the summer of The present performance by the orchestra of this brilliant audience favorite marks its nineteenth outing at San Diego Symphony concerts. David Danzmayr conducted the most recent San Diego performance during the season.