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zeitouniconductsbrahms
SEASON SPON SOR
zeitouni conducts brahms
April 22 I 8 PM River Run Centre, Guelph
April 23 & 24 I 8 PM Centre In The Square, Kitchener
Jean-Marie Zeitouni, conductor
Stephen Sitarski, violin
Thomas Wiebe, violoncello
Pierre Mercure (1927 - 1966)
Kaleidoscope
11’
Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)
Concerto in A minor for Violin, Violoncello & Orchestra, op.102, Double Concerto
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Vivace non troppo
Stephen Sitarski, violin
Thomas Wiebe, cello
32’
Intermission
Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)
Symphony No.4 in E minor, op.98
I. Allegro non troppo
II. Andante moderato
III. Allegro giocoso
IV. Allegro energico e passionato
39’
P ODIUM S P ONS OR
8 I 2009/10 Season
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biographies
Jean Marie Zeitouni
conductor
Jean-Marie Zeitouni has emerged as one of
Canada’s brightest young conductors whose
eloquent yet fiery style in repertoire ranging
from Baroque to contemporary music results
in regular re-engagements across Canada and
the United States. His association with Les
Violons du Roy goes back seven years, first
as conductor-in-residence and since 2004 as
associate conductor. Over the years, he has
led the ensemble in over 100 performances
in the province of Québec, across Canada
and in Mexico. He was also music director of
their Young Artist Opera Program at the Banff
Centre. His recent CD with the ensemble, titled
“Piazzola,” garnered him a JUNO Award for
Classical Album Of The Year in the category Solo
or Chamber Ensemble in 2007. He made his
US-orchestra debut with the Oregon Symphony
in the Spring of 2005.
This season is another landmark year for
the conductor with a long list of subscription
debuts and return engagements. In Canada,
he returns for no less than three separate
engagements with the Edmonton Symphony,
appears for the first time with the Toronto
Symphony (conducting The Messiah), and
makes debuts with the Vancouver Symphony,
Winnipeg Symphony and Kitchener-Waterloo
Symphony. In the United States, he makes his
debut with the Omaha Symphony, and returns
to the San Antonio Symphony and Columbus
Symphony.
2008/09 was one of Zeitouni’s most
impressive seasons yet. He made his debut
with numerous major orchestras, including
the Houston Symphony, Vancouver Symphony
and the symphonies of San Antonio, Oregon,
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and Omaha, as well as debuts at the Round
Top Festival, Grant Park, and the Handel &
Haydn Society in Boston. After his success the
previous season, he returned to the Honolulu
Symphony and made his annual appearances
at the Lanaudière Festival, Canada’s most
prestigious music festival. He also led several
opera productions from the pit, among them
Lucia de Lammermoor by Donizetti at the
Cincinnati Opera in its first staging of that work
ever, Faust at Calgary Opera and Mozart’s Il re
pastore with Opera Theatre of St. Louis.
During the 2007/08 season, Zeitouni debuted
with the Edmonton Opera in a production of
Carmen. Equally in demand on the symphonic
stage, he guest-conducted the Honolulu
Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Huntsville
Symphony and, on two separate occasions, the
Monterey Symphony. In Canada, he gave his
debut with the National Arts Centre Orchestra,
returned to the Festival Lanaudière with both
the Montreal Symphony and Les Violons du
Roy, and the Edmonton Symphony.
As part of his 2006/07 season, he conducted
the highly anticipated world premiere of John
Estacio and John Murrell’s Frobisher at the
Calgary Opera in a co-production with The
Banff Centre. He also led Gounod’s Roméo et
Juliette at Opéra de Québec and the Vancouver
Cantata Singers in a Messiah performance,
and he made his long-awaited debut with
Glimmerglass Opera to lead Orpheus in the
Underworld by Offenbach.
In 2005-06, Zeitouni returned to the
Montreal Symphony and l’Opéra de Montreal
for productions of L’Étoile and The Turn of the
Screw. Other operatic productions included
Cincinnati Opera (l’Étoile), Banff Centre of
the Arts Festival (Die Zauberflöte), Opéra
de Montréal (Suor Angelica and Il Tabarro)
and Atelier lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal (Il
Mondo della Luna). He also led the Edmonton
Symphony and appeared at the Festival
International de Lanaudière.
Prior to his commitments with Les Violons
du Roy and l’Opera de Montréal, he was music
director of a wide array of smaller ensembles and
choirs, among them the choir Contrapunctus,
le Théâtre d’art lyrique de la Montérégie, le
Chœur de Laval and l’Orchestre des Jeunes de
l’Ontario Français. He was also director of the
orchestra and opera workshop of the Faculty
of Music at Laval University, the choir director
of the Québec Symphony Orchestra and the
chorus master at l’Opéra de Québec. In the
summer of 2004, Zeitouni acted as assistant
conductor at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New
York City for the Jonathan Miller production of
Così fan tutte.
Jean-Marie
Zeitouni
graduated
from
the Montreal Conservatory in conducting,
percussion and theory. He studied with Maestro
Raffi Armenian.
musicians.
Routinely heard throughout Canada on disc
and on live radio broadcasts, Sitarski has also
performed countless television and film scores
(including the violin solos for the Hollywood film
“Being Julia”). In addition, he has arranged
music for the Emperor Quartet, Quartetto Gelato
and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.
He is a member of the faculty of Wilfrid
Laurier University, Toronto’s Glenn Gould
Professional School and the National Youth
Orchestra of Canada.
In recognition of his outstanding artistic
contribution
to
the
Kitchener-Waterloo
community, he was awarded the 2002
Kitchener-Waterloo Arts Award for Music.
Stephen Sitarski
violin
“If you didn’t know that Sitarski was a brilliant
violinist before, now there would be no doubt
whatsoever.”
“Sitarski finds the inner truth and beauty of the
music, and this is what he communicates.”
An Oakville, Ontario native, Stephen Sitarski
enjoys an incredibly varied career as a violinist
and musician. Acclaimed in performances
of Baroque music through to contemporary
and jazz, he is also a recognized conductor,
adjudicator, teacher and music administrator.
Currently Concertmaster of the KitchenerWaterloo Symphony (since 1997), he has led
many other Canadian orchestras such as the
Vancouver Symphony and Ottawa’s National
Arts Centre Orchestra, as well as orchestras in
the United States and Europe.
He frequently appears as soloist with
orchestra and, along with much of the standard
repertoire, performs concertos written especially
for him by Canadian composers Glenn Buhr and
Kelly-Marie Murphy.
He is a member of Toronto’s Art of Time
Ensemble, a founding member of Trio Laurier,
and is a regular participant in diverse chamber
groups and festival events both nationally and
internationally with many of Canada’s finest
Thomas Wiebe
violoncello
Thomas is well-known to Canadian audiences
as a soloist and chamber musician. He has
performed as guest soloist with the Winnipeg
and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestras,
Orchestra London Canada and the Juilliard
Orchestra at Lincoln Center in New York. Along
with violinist Mark Fewer and pianist Peter
Longworth, he is a founding member of the
Duke Trio, which is heard in concert and on
radio broadcasts throughout Canada. Mr. Wiebe
also performs frequently with the Art of Time
Ensemble in Toronto.
Highlights of the 2009-10 season for Mr.
Wiebe include a guest solo appearance with
the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra at
Kitchener’s Centre-in-the-Square and Guelph’s
River Run Centre, and solo and chamber
performances in Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver,
Ottawa, the Banff Centre, the Domaine Forget
Summer Music Festival in St.-Irénée, Québec,
and London, Ontario.
Thomas Wiebe studied cello in his native
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biographies
programnotes
Winnipeg with the late Julie Banton. He
continued at the Eastman School of Music with
Robert Sylvester and Steven Doane. Later, he
studied with Aldo Parisot at Yale University and
the Juilliard School. He holds a Doctor of Musical
Arts degree from Yale.
Mr. Wiebe is Associate Professor of Violoncello
at the Don Wright Faculty of Music at University
of Western Ontario in London. He also teaches
at Domaine Forget Summer Music Academy in
St.-Irenee, Quebec.
PIERRE MERCURE (1927-1966)
Kaléidoscope (1947-8, rev. 1949)
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In the six decades since its début on a
shortwave broadcast to Europe in March
1948, Kaléidoscope, Quebec composer Pierre
Mercure’s earliest orchestral work and first
major composition, has become something of
a Canadian classic. The 21 year-old composer
revised the piece the following year and conducted
the concert première with the orchestra now
known as the Montreal Symphony, with whom
he was already playing bassoon. Kaléidoscope
has been in the repertoire of the orchestra ever
since and has been performed by many Canadian
orchestras. The symphonic fantasy is in a free
ternary form which evolves from the fanfarelike gestures and slow, chorale-like introduction
with which the piece opens. The main theme
for strings is upbeat and rhythmically driven,
coloured by bright, crystalline orchestrations
and a kaleidoscope of textures. Mercure’s music
is distinctive rather than derivative, though,
as a child of its time, Kaléidoscope shows the
influence of Stravinsky’s driving rhythms, echoes
of the crisp sounds of Honegger and Les Six and
even a taste of the Glenn Miller whose music he
admired.
Brahms had prepared the way with his previous
three compositions – his final cello sonata, the
A major Violin Sonata and final piano trio, in C
minor. The cellist for both the sonata and the
new concerto was Robert Hausmann of the
Joachim Quartet. Now Hausmann, his favourite
cellist and Joachim, his favourite violinist,
were to be featured in the new concerto. In it,
the cello takes the lead – perhaps in a role as
mediator between violinist and composer – as
both instruments are introduced with cadenzas.
But almost immediately the cello joins the violin
and, as partners, they perform throughout an
extended opening movement which is as long as
second and third movements together. The solo
music is challenging but not in a showy, virtuoso
way. The entire movement is a brilliant synthesis
of symphonic and concerto writing which,
paradoxically, demands a chamber-music-like
intimacy of approach to succeed.
The slow movement is a beautifully sustained
song within a broad ABA structure, inhabiting
a dreamy sound-world where it’s often hard
to pinpoint a downbeat. Like the three earlier
concertos, the finale has a Hungarian flavour,
with writing that is both fiery and introverted.
It is music of haunting beauty, Brahms’s final
orchestral work preceding a decade of late
chamber music and song.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Concerto in A minor for Violin, Violoncello, &
Orchestra, op.102, Double Concerto (1887)
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, op.98 (1884-5)
“This concerto is a work of reconciliation—
Joachim and Brahms have spoken to one another
again after many years,” Clara Schumann wrote
in her journal in September 1887. Joachim, the
great Hungarian violinist for whom Brahms had
written his Violin Concerto a decade earlier, had
distanced himself from his long-time colleague
ever since a letter of support from Brahms to
Joachim’s wife had been dragged into the courts
during the couple’s messy divorce proceedings.
Now the musicians were reunited with a new
concerto that Brahms had completed over the
summer months. They began rehearsals at Clara’s
home in the resort town of Baden-Baden. "Surely
this wonderful combination has never been tried
before," Clara wrote of the Double Concerto. As
a 19th century Romantic concerto, it is hard to
find a precedent for a similar double concerto –
and certainly not a double concerto in which the
protagonists are at once virtuoso soloists and an
integral part of the symphonic texture.
“It’s a few entr’actes which together form
what is called a symphony,” Brahms said of his
new symphony in front of a famous conductor.
“Don’t spend a penny on it,” he advised his
publisher. “It’s a bunch of polkas and waltzes,”
he told a music critic. Brahms, in other words,
was being Brahms and deflecting criticism before
it arrived, building a protective shell around
a work which was near and dear to his heart.
The E minor Symphony is his greatest essay
in symphonic writing, a monumental drawing
together of the architecture of the Baroque with
the Romanticism of the world around him. It is
his final word on the subject. It is also a tragic
work, his darkest symphony and, as Hans von
Bülow the conductor to whom Brahms made the
quip about “entr’actes” reported after rehearsals:
“[It is] gigantic, altogether a law unto itself, quite
new, steely individuality. Exudes unparalled
energy from first note to last.”
Outwardly, the Fourth follows the familiar
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programnotes
road map of the traditional classical-romantic
symphony: a quick first movement, slow second,
contrasting lively third and conclusive finale. Its
instrumentation similarly stays on track. But the
work is more tightly written than other Brahms
symphony and the cross references across its
four movements are complex and intellectually
challenging. Brahms’s close musical friends
thought he was being too academic in the piece.
After hearing it played on two pianos, Edward
Hanslick, the critic, said: “All through, I felt I
was being thrashed by two terribly clever men.”
Today, in performance, many of these subtleties
are more sensed than heard and a century of
harsher, more confrontational sounds by way
of new music have immunized our ears against
sonorities that Brahms’s friends found initially
unpalatable.
The first movement has a yearning, wistful,
often restless character and, just as its sighing
main theme is reprised, the music alludes to the
third of Brahms’s Four Serious Songs – “O Death,
O Death, how bitter you are” are the words of
carminaburana
the song at this point. The preoccupation with
mortality continues in the slow movement which
Richard Strauss heard as “a funeral procession
moving in silence across moonlit heights.”
Brahms composed his third movement, a scherzo,
last and carefully calculated its contrasting mood.
“Three kettledrums, triangle, and a piccolo will,
naturally, make something of a show,” he said,
dryly. For the finale, still confronting Death,
Brahms incorporates a brief eight-bar theme from
Bach’s Cantata No. 150: “My soul longs for thee,
O God.” Around it, turning to the Baroque musical
form of the passacaglia, he builds an imposing
series of 32 variations. He’d done a similar thing
in his Haydn Variations. But this was the first
time that a composer – any composer - had done
this in a symphony (and it set a precedent that
others were soon to follow in the new century).
Firmly anchored in E minor yet magnificently
contrasted, the variations build with cumulative
power to a monumental conclusion.
— Notes © 2010 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed:
[email protected]
SEASON SPON SOR
carmina burana
May 28 & 29 I 8 PM
Centre In The Square, Kitchener
Edwin Outwater, conductor
Grand Philharmonic Children’s Chorus
Grand Philharmonic Choir
Brian Asawa, countertenor
Carla Huhtanen, soprano
Hugh Russell, baritone
Colin McPhee (1900 - 1964)
Tabuh-Tabuhan
I. Ostinatos
II. Nocturne
III. Finale
19’
Intermission
Carl Orff (1895 - 1982)
Carmina burana
FORTUNA IMPERATRIX MUNDI
O Fortuna
Fortune plango vulnera
I. PRIMO VERE
Veris leta facies
Omnia Sol temperat
Ecce gratum
UF DEM ANGER
Tanz
Floret silva
Chramer, gip die varwe mir
Reie
Were diu werlt alle min
II. IN TABERNA
Estuans interius
Olim lacus colueram
Ego sum abbas
In taberna quando sumus
1:05’
III. COUR D’AMOURS
Amor volat undique
Dies, nox et omnia
Stetit puella
Circa mea pectora
Si puer com puellula
Veni, veni, venias
In trutina
Tempus est iocundum
Dulcissime
BLANZIFLOR ET HELENA
Ave formosissima
FORTUNA IMPERATRIX MUNDI
O Fortuna
Grand Philharmonic Choir
Grand Philharmonic Children’s Chorus
Carla Huhtanen, soprano
Brian Asawa, countertenor
Hugh Russell, baritone
Please see page 4 for Edwin Outwater’s biography.
PODI U M S P ONS OR
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C ONC E RT S P ONS OR
C ONC E RT S P ONS OR
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