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Season 20102010- 2011
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Thursday, January 13,
13, at 8:00
Saturday, January 15,
15, at 8:00
Gianandrea Noseda Conductor
David Kim Violin
Juliette Kang Violin
Respighi Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 3
I. Italiana
II. Arie di corte
III. Siciliana
IV. Passacaglia
Bach Concerto in D minor for Two Violins and String Orchestra, BWV 1043
I. Vivace
II. Largo, ma non tanto
III. Allegro
Intermission
Dvořák Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88
I. Allegro con brio
II. Adagio—Poco più animato—Tempo I. Meno mosso
III. Allegretto grazioso—Coda: Molto vivace
IV. Allegro, ma non troppo
This program runs approximately 1 hour, 35 minutes.
Gianandrea Noseda currently serves as music director of the Teatro Regio in Turin, chief
conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, Victor de Sabata Guest Conductor of the Pittsburgh
Symphony, principal conductor of the Orquesta de Cadaqués, and artistic director of the
Stresa Festival. Formerly principal guest conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic from
1999 to 2003 and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI from 2003 to 2006, he
became the first foreign principal guest conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg
in 1997 and later was co-founder and principal conductor of the Mariinsky Young
Philharmonic.
Born in Milan, Mr. Noseda appears all over the world with orchestras such as the New York,
Oslo, and Israel philharmonics, and the Chicago, Boston, London, and NHK symphonies. In
Italy he regularly conducts the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, the Filarmonica della
Scala, and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra. Future engagements include his debuts with the
National Symphony in Washington and the Orchestre de Paris. He made his Philadelphia
Orchestra debut this past December.
Mr. Noseda is an exclusive Chandos recording artist and his extensive discography includes
music by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Karlowitz, Dvořák, Smetana, Shostakovich, and Mahler.
He has also made recordings of works by such Italian composers as Respighi, Dallapiccola,
Wolf-Ferrari, and Casella, in addition to a complete cycle of Liszt’s symphonic works. Mr.
Noseda’s recordings with the BBC Philharmonic on Chandos include live performances of
Beethoven’s complete symphonies as well as the complete symphonies of Tchaikovsky,
Schumann, and Brahms.
Mr. Noseda works closely with youth orchestras worldwide, including the Joven Orquesta
Nacional de España, the Orchestra of the Royal College of Music in London, the National
Youth Orchestra of the United Kingdom, the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana of Fiesole, and the
European Union Youth Orchestra. For his activity in Italy and abroad, Mr. Noseda has
received the honor of Cavaliere Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.
Mr. Noseda’s appearances are made possible by the kind permission of the Metropolitan
Opera.
Violinist David Kim was named concertmaster of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1999. Born in
Carbondale, Illinois, in 1963, he started playing the violin at the age of three, began studies with
the famed pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the age of eight, and later received his bachelor's and
master's degrees from the Juilliard School. In 1986 he was the only American violinist to win a
prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
Mr. Kim was founder and, for 20 years ending in 2008, artistic director of the Kingston
Chamber Music Festival at the University of Rhode Island, from which he also was awarded the
honorary degree of Doctor of Arts in 2001. In conjunction with the Kingston Chamber Music
Festival, he founded an annual outreach program that took him to elementary schools,
performing and speaking about classical music in an effort to cultivate future audiences. In the
State of Rhode Island alone, he performed for well over 12,000 young people during his tenure
there. He continues to devote a portion of his schedule each year to bringing classical music to
children and visits numerous schools in the Philadelphia area.
Mr. Kim appears as soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra each season, as well as with
numerous orchestras around the world. Conductors with whom he has performed include
Myung-Whun Chung, Christoph von Dohnányi, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Rafael
Frühbeck de Burgos, Vladimir Jurowski, Peter Oundjian, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. Mr. Kim also
appears internationally at festivals such as MasterWorks (USA) and Pacific (Japan), and he is a
member of the Kumho Art Hall Chamber Music Society in Seoul, Korea.
The latest additions to Mr. Kim’s discography are The Lord Is My Shepherd, a collection of
sacred works for violin and piano with pianist and composer Paul S. Jones, and Encore, a
collection of recital favorites with pianist Gail Niwa.
Mr. Kim’s instrument is a J.B. Guadagnini from Milan, Italy, ca. 1757 on loan from The
Philadelphia Orchestra. He resides in a suburb of Philadelphia with his wife, Jane, and his
daughters, Natalie and Maggie. For more information, please visit www.davidkimviolin.com.
A native of Edmonton, Canada, Juliette Kang came to Philadelphia as first associate
concertmaster from the Boston Symphony, where she served as assistant concertmaster
from 2003 to 2005. Prior to that, she was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
from 2001 to 2003. During the 1999-2000 season, she was principal second violin with the
Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra.
Ms. Kang was the gold medalist in the 1994 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis.
In 1989, at age 13, she was a Young Concert Artists Audition winner, leading to recitals at
New York City’s 92nd Street Y and at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in Washington,
D.C. She won the Grand Prize at the Menuhin Violin Competition in Paris in 1992. Ms. Kang
has been awarded numerous Canadian prizes and grants, including the Sylva Gelber Award
of the Canada Council for the Arts, given annually to the most talented Canadian artist under
age 30. In 1994 she was profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine as one of 30
people under 30 “most likely to change the culture over the next 30 years.” Ms. Kang holds
a Master of Music degree from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Dorothy DeLay
and Robert Mann. She began violin studies at the age of four, and six years later she entered
the Curtis Institute of Music as a student of Jascha Brodsky.
Ms. Kang has performed chamber music at numerous summer festivals and her solo
engagements have included appearances with the orchestras of Philadelphia, San
Francisco, Toronto, Baltimore, Montreal, Detroit, Indianapolis, Calgary, and Edmonton, as
well as with the Boston Pops, the Hong Kong and Czech philharmonics, the Vienna
Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, and the National Arts Centre
Orchestra.
An accomplished recitalist, Ms. Kang has performed in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in
Tokyo at Suntory Hall, in Boston at the Gardner Museum, and in New York at the Frick
Museum. In 1996 her recital at Carnegie Hall was recorded and released on the
Samsung/Nices label. She has also recorded on the CBC label.
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Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 3
Ottorino Respighi
Born in Bologna, July 9, 1879
Died in Rome, April 18, 1936
Respighi’s work as a composer often overlapped with his interest in earlier music. He
composed a Piano Concerto employing the ancient mixolydian mode, wrote a ballet suite for
Diaghilev (The Fantastic Toyshop) based on melodies borrowed from Rossini, and penned a
suite of pieces called The Birds that utilized Baroque compositions imitative of birds. But
chief among Respighi’s compositions that mined the past were three suites based largely on
lute and guitar pieces from the Renaissance. He composed the first of these—Ancient Airs
and Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 1—in 1917, at the height of his popularity as a
composer, and the second a few years later.
The last of them, Suite No. 3, came in 1931 and was the final composition of Respighi’s to
achieve repertoire status. Unlike the others, it is scored for strings alone, and more than one
commentator has noted that both the tunes Respighi chose and the manner in which he
arranged them reflect a kind of honeyed melancholy not found in the earlier suites. The Third
Suite is in four movements. The first, Italiana, is a slim piece in moderate three. The tune
comes from an anonymous 16th-century lute song, or vocal work accompanied by the lute.
The second movement, Arie di corte (Airs of the Court), is a suite within the Suite. In a
movement nearly as long as all the others combined, six lute songs of Jean-Baptiste Besard,
French court composer of the late 16th century, are treated to a string of brief settings. The
whole is framed by one of them, the plaintive “It is sad to be in love with you.” This opens
and closes the movement in a doleful mood. Between, in the order they are heard, are:
“Farewell forever, shepherdess,” a rather gleeful goodbye, filled with promises of future
amorous meetings; “Lovely eyes that see clearly,” which follows immediately and closes
quickly and wistfully; “The skiff of love,” a warm meditation in the strings’ lower register;
“What divinity touches my soul,” a very short, rapid back-and-forth of pizzicato statements
and bowed answers; and “It is for my innocence that you love me,” an exuberant piece in a
broad six-four.
The third movement is a stately Siciliana from an anonymous source, slower and more
sedate than the Italiana, though at length it rises to the first true dramatic peak of the entire
Suite. The early guitar music of 17th-century Italian Ludovico Roncalli forms the basis of the
closing Passacaglia, made by Respighi into a real post-Romantic composition, as close to
Jean Sibelius as it is to the Renaissance.
—Kenneth LaFave
The Third Suite of the Ancient Airs and Dances for Lute was composed in 1931.
The first complete Philadelphia Orchestra performances of Respighi’s Ancient Airs and
Dances for the Lute, Suite No. 3, were in April 1971, conducted by Roberto Benzi. Eugene
Ormandy led the second movement alone in November and December 1945. The complete
Suite was last performed on the Orchestra’s Glorious Sound of Christmas Concerts in
December 2007, led by Rossen Milanov.
The Philadelphians recorded the Arie di corte only in 1946 with Ormandy for CBS.
Respighi scored the work for strings alone.
Performance time is approximately 18 minutes.
Concerto in D minor for Two Violins
Johann Sebastian Bach
Born i n Eisenach, March 21, 1685
Died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750
Bach’s preeminence as a composer of sacred music has long invited mystified accounts of
his musical career. He has often been cast as a “Fifth Evangelist,” taking divine dictation
from God. Notwithstanding his deep faith, Bach was a practical, practicing musician, who
hailed from a long line of musicians. He had to please both secular and religious employers
at different phases of his life. Most of his organ music, for example, came early in his career,
when he was employed as a church organist in Weimar. Beginning in 1717, when he was
appointed Kapellmeister (court conductor) in Cöthen, he created a large quantity of
instrumental music, including his famous Brandenburg Concertos.
Instrument
Instrumental Offerings Bach moved in 1723 to Leipzig, where his principal duties shifted
once again to producing religious music, although he continued composing a great amount
of secular music. Many instrumental pieces were written for the Collegium Musicum, a group
Georg Philipp Telemann had founded in 1702 and which Bach took over in 1729.
Throughout his maturity he wrote keyboard pieces for his many children and also explored
more purely compositional issues in large-scale projects such as the two books of the WellTempered Clavier, A Musical Offering, and The Art of the Fugue.
Despite his commanding position in music history since the 19th century, Bach was
relatively unrecognized in his own time and for more than a half century after his death. It is
not surprising therefore that many of his works were lost, and that little background
information is known about many of his surviving pieces. Dating his output has proved a
formidable problem that has occupied generations of scholars. Although the Concerto
performed on tonight’s concert is traditionally viewed as dating from Bach’s Cöthen years,
musicologist Christoph Wolff has recently made a compelling case, based both on
manuscript evidence and stylistic considerations, that the work was in fact written in Leipzig,
perhaps around 1730.
One of the ways that Bach arrived at the forms and styles for his concertos was by looking
to earlier models, mainly Italian and specifically those by the celebrated Venetian Antonio
Vivaldi (1678-1741). Indeed, some of Bach’s concertos were arrangements of pieces by
Vivaldi that he adapted for different instruments. Likewise, Bach on occasion transformed his
own violin concertos into ones for keyboard. He arranged the Concerto we hear tonight for
two harpsichords, transposing the piece down a whole-step (Concerto in C minor, BWV
1062).
A Closer Look The work is popularly known as the “Double Violin Concerto,” although
Bach’s own title page reads “Concerto à 6, 2 Violini Concertini, 2 Violini e 1 Viola Ripieni,
Violoncello e Continuo.” This is, in fact, chamber music, most likely originally performed by
just eight musicians, with two of the four violins featured with and against the rest of the
ensemble.
Baroque concertos are typically based on so-called ritornello form. As the name suggests—
“a little thing that returns”— relatively short passages of music played by the entire ensemble
alternate with sections dominated by the soloists. Bach particularly admired Vivaldi’s
handling of this form and learned from the older Italian composer. The Double Concerto is in
three movements, with a lyrical slow movement framed by two fast ones.
As befits a double concerto pairing the same instrument, the opening movement Vivace
begins fugally and sustains its relentless energy throughout. The heart-rending Largo, ma
non troppo is in a contrasting major key and 12/8 meter, featuring the two violin soloists in
continuing dialogue. The Concerto concludes with an intense Allegro,
Allegro, somewhat different
from Bach’s usual approach in that it does not have a dance-like character.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
The Concerto in D minor for Two Violins was probably composed around 1730.
Fritz Scheel led the first Philadelphia Orchestra performance of the Concerto, on March 21,
1902, with Elkan Kosman and Cornelius Franke. The work has been performed by the
Orchestra fewer than a dozen times since then. The last subscription performances were in
April 1953, with violinists Jacob Krachmalnick and David Madison and Eugene Ormandy
on the podium. More recently, the piece was heard at the Mann Center in July 1977 with
violinists Henryk Szeryng (who also conducted) and David Arben.
The score calls for harpsichord, strings, and two solo violins.
The Concerto runs approximately 15 minutes in performance.
Symphony No. 8
Antonín Dvořák
Born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, September 8, 1841
Died in Prague, May 1, 1904
The late 1880s constituted a sort of golden era in Dvořák’s career, a period in which he
solidified his position as Bohemia’s preeminent composer and at the same time made
essential strides toward establishing himself as a musician of international significance. Some
of his works, such as the Slavonic Dances (which were considered charming and quaint by
non-Czechs), were selling briskly throughout Europe, in German editions by the publisher
Simrock. And although the Vienna Opera had rejected his stage works The Cunning Peasant
and Dimitrij, the celebrated conductor Hans Richter (a friend and champion of the music of
Brahms as well) had enthusiastically promoted works such as the Symphonic Variations. Most
important, Dvořák’s music had sparked the imagination of the English concert public—and the
commissions, performances, and conducting engagements in England did much toward
furthering his international reputation.
A “Summery” and Cheerful Work Dvořák’s stormy, Brahmsian D-minor Symphony (No. 7)
had created a stir in 1885, both at home and abroad. Inspired immeasurably by the reaction
to it, in 1889 the composer set about sketching the symphony that in many ways
represented the pinnacle of his Czech years—the last major orchestral work he was to
complete before embarking for New York in 1892. The Eighth is very unlike either the
Seventh or the Ninth (the “New World”): It is cheerful in the manner of Brahms’s Second
Symphony, yet in many ways is Dvořák’s most self-consciously “Czech” symphony. It was
begun at Vysoká, the family’s Bohemian summer home, in September 1889, shortly after the
finishing touches had been put on the E-flat Piano Quartet. The idyllic setting of Vysoká has
caused many writers to comment on a sort of “summery” quality in the Eighth; it indeed
contains some of Dvořák’s most uncomplicatedly joyous music.
The Symphony was performed the following February in Prague’s Rudolfinum, under the
composer’s baton. The acclaim, both critical and popular, was hearty and vigorous. Richter
was so taken with the piece that he took it up and performed it in London and in Vienna in
1890 and ’91. “My dear, bad friend,” he wrote to Dvořák in Prague after one of these concerts.
“You certainly would have been happy with this performance. We all felt that this was a
splendid work, and thus we were all very enthusiastic. Brahms dined with me after the
performance and we drank to the health of the unfortunately absent ‘father’ of the ‘Symphony
No. 4.’ … The success was warm and sincere.” (Because the Eighth was the fourth of
Dvořák’s symphonies to be published, it was called “No. 4” for many years.)
The Eighth was printed in 1892—not by Simrock of Berlin, with whom Dvořák had quarreled in
recent years, but by Novello in London. The degree of the composer’s satisfaction with the
piece can be gauged by his submission of the work for—as he writes on the title page—
“acceptance into the Czech Academy of Emperor Franz Joseph, for Science, Literature, and
the Arts.” In 1890 Dvořák was elected to the prestigious Academy, membership in which
functioned as a sort of conclusive badge of “arrival” for artistic and literary professionals in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.
A Closer Look The flute plays a prominent role in the Eighth, which some have suggested is
an echo of a bird song Dvořák might have heard that summer at Vysoká. After an introductory
subject by clarinet, bassoon, and cello, the solo flute presents the lilting principal theme of the
opening movement (Allegro
Allegro con brio),
brio which is taken up by the whole orchestra. The
discursive transition ensues, somewhat apart from the theme, until an assertive theme in B
minor is introduce by flutes and clarinets. The plaintive introduction returns to usher in the
elaborate development section, and then yet again (fortissimo) at the beginning of the
recapitulation. The flute comes to the fore again in the Adagio, a reflective movement that one
could easily construe as an evocation of the Bohemian countryside. Likewise the Allegretto
grazioso is a quiet country dance, whose placement in the key of G minor comes to us as only
vaguely disquieting.
The finale (Allegretto,
Allegretto, ma non troppo),
troppo announced by two trumpets, is a set of variations on a
theme (presented by cellos) that grows directly from the first movement’s opening flute
subject. The theme undergoes a variety of configurations, with the length of each variation
determined by the nature of the developing material; even the introductory trumpet call is
woven into the fabric at one point. Dvořák’s conclusive working-out of the simple theme, which
has lingered in the ear since the opening movement, makes this one of his most satisfyingly
“organic” finales.
—Paul J. Horsley
Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony was composed in 1889.
The first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of the Eighth Symphony took place in January
1955, with Thor Johnson on the podium. Most recently on subscription it was played in
March 2009, under the baton of Neeme Järvi.
The Orchestra has recorded the Eighth twice: in 1977 with Eugene Ormandy for RCA and in
1989 with Wolfgang Sawallisch for EMI.
The Symphony is scored for two flutes (II doubling piccolo), two oboes (II doubling English
horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani,
and strings.
The Eighth runs approximately 35 minutes in performance.
Program notes © 2011. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written
permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.