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Season 20102010- 2011
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Thursday, March 24,
24, at 8:00
Friday, March 25,
25, at 2:00
Saturday,
Saturday, March 26,
26, at 8:00
Stéphane Denève Conductor
Imogen Cooper Piano
Dutilleux Métaboles
I. Incantatoire—
II. Linéaire—
III. Obsessionel—
IV. Torpide—
V. Flamboyant
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major, K. 271 (“Jenamy”)
I. Allegro
II. Andantino
III. Rondeau (Presto)—Menuetto (Cantabile)—Tempo primo
Intermission
Debussy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Roussel Symphony No. 3 in G minor, Op. 42
I. Allegro vivo
II. Adagio—Più mosso—Adagio
III. Vivace
IV. Allegro con spirito
This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes.
The March 24 concert is sponsored by
MEDCOMP.
Stéphane Denève is chief conductor designate of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony (SWR),
and takes up the position in September 2011. He is also music director of the Royal
Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), a post he has held since 2005. With that ensemble he
has performed at the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh International Festival, and Festival
Présences, and at venues throughout Europe, including Vienna’s Konzerthaus, Amsterdam’s
Concertgebouw, and Paris’ Théatre des Champs-Élysées. Mr. Denève and the RSNO have
made a number of acclaimed recordings together, including an ongoing survey of the works
of Albert Roussel for Naxos. In 2007 they won a Diapason d'Or award for the first disc in the
series.
Highlights for Mr. Denève in the current season include a concert at the BBC Proms with
the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and pianist Paul Lewis; his debut with the Bavarian
Radio Symphony; return visits to the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Deutsches
Symphonieorchester Berlin, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony, the New
World Symphony, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic; and his debut at the Gran Teatre de
Liceu in Barcelona, conducting Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue.
Mr. Denève’s recent engagements have included a European tour with the Royal Scottish
National Orchestra and violinist Hilary Hahn; debuts with the NDR Symphony Hamburg,
Maggio Musicale Florence, and the London, San Francisco, Barcelona, BBC, and Danish
National symphonies; return visits to the Philharmonia and Cleveland orchestras and the Los
Angeles, Royal Stockholm, and Rotterdam philharmonics; and his debut at La Scala
conducting Gounod's Faust.
A graduate of the Paris Conservatory, where he was awarded a unanimous First Prize in
1995, Mr. Denève began his career as Georg Solti's assistant with the Orchestre de Paris
and the Paris National Opera. He also assisted Georges Prêtre at the Paris National Opera
and Seiji Ozawa at the Saito Kinen Festival. Mr. Denève made his Philadelphia Orchestra
debut in 2007.
Stéphane Denève’s appearance on March 25 is generously underwritten by Frank and Mollie
Slattery.
In the 2010-11 season pianist Imogen Cooper’s
Cooper engagements include an appearance with
the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; performances of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet with the
Takacs Quartet in London, Spain, and Germany; and three concerts as part of the Mozart
Unwrapped series at Kings Place in London.
Last season Ms. Cooper performed with the Toronto and Cincinnati symphonies and made
appearances playing with and directing the Northern and Britten sinfonias. During 2008 and
2009 she performed Schubert’s late solo piano works as part of the International Piano
Series in London, which she also recorded and released on the Avie label.
Ms. Cooper has appeared with the New York, London, and Vienna philharmonics; the
Gothenburg, London, and NHK symphonies; and the Philharmonia, Royal Concertgebouw,
and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras. She has also undertaken tours with the Camerata
Salzburg and the Australian and Orpheus chamber orchestras. She made her Philadelphia
Orchestra debut in 2009. Ms. Cooper has premiered works by Thomas Adès and Deirdre
Gribbin at the Cheltenham International Festival, and she has also collaborated with
members of the Berlin Philharmonic for the premiere of Brett Dean’s Voices for Angels.
Ms. Cooper is a committed chamber musician and performs regularly with the Belcea
Quartet. She has had a long collaboration with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, which included
recitals in venues throughout Europe and several recordings for the Philips label. She also
performs frequently with the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton; their recordings include a CD
set of Brahms sonatas and works by Bach on the RCA label. Mr. Holzmair and Ms. WiederAtherton both feature in the box set Imogen Cooper and Friends on Philips. Ms. Cooper has
recorded four Mozart piano concertos with the Northern Sinfonia for the Avie label and a
solo recital at Wigmore Hall on the Wigmore Live label.
Ms. Cooper received a CBE in the Queen’s New Year Honors in 2007 and was the
recipient of an award from the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2008.
FRAMING THE PROGRAM
The program today explores a musical “French Connection” with works by three native
composers and by one admiring visitor.
Mozart spent a considerable amount of time in Paris between 1763 and 1766 and again in
1778. His Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major was long known by the nickname
“Jeunehomme” (young man), which it turns out was a mistaken version of the name
“Jenamy.” Victoire Jenamy, for whom Mozart wrote the Concerto, was the daughter of his
good friend Jean-Georges Noverre, a well-known French dancer and choreographer.
The concert opens with Métaboles by the eminent French composer Henri Dutilleux, who
turned 95 two months ago. After intermission comes Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of
a Faun, one of the earliest and most influential essays in musical Impressionism. Closing the
program is Albert Roussel’s exhilarating Third Symphony, a work notable for its marvelously
inventive use of the orchestra, especially of percussion and harps that give a distinctive
flavor.
Parallel Events
1777
Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 9
Music
Haydn
Symphony No. 63
Literature
Sheridan
The School for Scandal
Art
Gainsborough
The Watering Place
History
Revolutionary War
1894
Debussy
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Music
Dvořák
Cello Concerto
Literature
Kipling
The Jungle Book
Art
Munch
Vampire
History
Bureau of Immigration created
1964
Dutilleux
Métaboles
Music
Stockhausen
Plus/Minus
Literature
Pinter
Homecoming
Art
Magritte
The Son of Man
History
His tory
Alaska earthquake
Métaboles
Henri Dutilleux
Born in Angers, January 22, 1916
Now living in Paris
Henri Dutilleux is widely regarded as one of the leading composers of our time, securely
ensconced in the pantheon of 20th- and early-21st-century composers alongside Debussy,
Ravel, Roussel, Poulenc, Messiaen, Boulez, and others. Yet for much of his life, musical
politics kept him largely out of the international public eye. Some have cited the exaggerated
influence of his countryman Pierre Boulez, whose at times dogmatic serialist outlook scoffed
at music that emulated Britten, Bartók, or Stravinsky more than it did Schoenberg. But
Boulez is in his mid-80s now, and Dutilleux turned 95 earlier this year; any hard feelings from
the past have mellowed as both have achieved near-legendary status. “Our relations are
now very good, très chaleureux,” Dutilleux told a British journalist in 2005.
Today we can rejoice that Dutilleux’s music has found its way to American concert halls with
increasing frequency, for no picture of French music is complete without it. His music is
constructed with an uncanny intuition for rhetorical discourse and is painted with vivid
colors; it often finds comparison to literature or to the visual arts. Dutilleux has said that
Marcel Proust’s novels and Baudelaire’s poetry, for example, encouraged him to venture
beyond traditional forms. Other works pay homage to visual arts, such as Timbres, espace,
mouvement, inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
The Composer But whereas the paternal side of Dutilleux’s family boasted painters,
lithographers, and printers, it was the musical ancestry on his mother’s side that had the
deepest impact on Henri’s artistic development. The youngest of four children in an intensely
musical home, he advanced quickly on the piano and enrolled in the Douai Conservatory at
the age of eight—composing from his early teens and landing in the prestigious composition
class of Henri Büsser. He also studied counterpoint and fugue with Noël Gallon, harmony
with Jean Gallon, and orchestral conducting with Philippe Gaubert. He won the Prix de
Rome in 1938 (for his cantata L’Anneau du roi) but spent only a few months in Rome before
World War II forced him to return home.
He worked as a medical orderly during the war, then as pianist, conductor and arranger. He
was choral director at the Opéra de Paris in 1942-43 and served as director of music
productions for Radio France from 1945 to 1963. Although he composed numerous works
during the 1930s and ’40s, he called his Piano Sonata No. 1 (1948) his first mature work
and suppressed the earlier ones. He was professor of composition at the Ècole Normale in
Paris (1961-70) and from 1971, at the Paris Conservatory. He also taught at the
Tanglewood Music Festival during the 1990s.
Dutilleux’s earlier works tended to bear conventional titles (Symphony No. 1) but by the
1960s he was moving toward more descriptive, poetic titles (Tout un monde lointain …, for
cello and orchestra). By the 1970s he was receiving major commissions from the
Koussevitzky Foundation and Mstislav Rostropovich, and he has subsequently written for
Isaac Stern, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Renée Fleming.
Dutilleux has published relatively few works, and to each he brings an exceptionally high level
of polish—at times returning to alter a work or to add a movement. In 2010, for example, he
added a third movement to his chamber work Les Citations for oboe, harpsichord, double
bass, and percussion, begun in 1985 with an additional movement appended in 1991.
A Closer
Clos er Look Dutilleux’s music favors pitch centers but is rarely outright tonal, with shortbreathed, folk-like melodies and strongly etched motivic material. Despite an extreme
attention to structure and symmetry, the works often possess a dreamlike quality. Métaboles,
completed in 1964, was first performed by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra on
January 14, 1965. This 16-minute gem—a sort of miniature concerto for orchestra—consists
of five sections performed without pause, emphasizing each of the sections of the orchestra
and then melding them all. This musical “metamorphosis” evolves from the initial
Incan
Incantatoire—Rite
tatoire
of Spring-like in its piercing polytonal opening—to the low, sustained
string chords of Linéaire,
Linéaire, which features a slower version of the motif. Brass explosions form
the wild Obsessionnel, tom-tom taps provide a tender “night music” (Torpide
Torpide),
Torpide and snarling
snare drums signal the final Flamboyant.
—Paul J. Horsley
Dutilleux composed Métaboles from 1959 to 1964.
Eugene Ormandy was on the podium for the first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of
Métaboles, in February 1975. The work has been heard here only one time since: in 1985,
with Charles Dutoit conducting.
The score calls for four flutes (III and IV doubling piccolo), three oboes, English horn, two
clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, Chinese cymbal, cowbell,
cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, small suspended cymbal, tam-tams, temple blocks, tomtoms, triangle, xylophone), harp, celesta, and strings.
Performance time is approximately 16 minutes.
Piano Concerto No. 9 (“Jenamy”)
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756
Died in Vienna, December 5, 1791
As with the numbering of Mozart’s symphonies, those of his piano concertos have no
authority with the composer and were a later 19th-century invention. The number 9 for the
Concerto in E-flat obscures the fact that his first concertos were arrangements of piano
sonatas by C.P.E. Bach, J.C. Bach, and lesser lights, possibly an assignment given to the
young composer by his father, Leopold. The Concerto No. 5 in D major, K. 175, is Mozart’s
first independent piano concerto, which he wrote at age 17. Three more followed in early
1776 (K. 238, 242, 246), before he wrote his “Ninth” in Salzburg in January 1777, the
month of his 21st birthday. It has long been recognized as his first great piano concerto, and
an effort that Mozart would not surpass until he moved to Vienna some four years later.
What’s in a Name? Countless beloved pieces of music have a nickname, although often
one not given by the composer. Mozart would have no idea what the “Jupiter” Symphony is,
Beethoven the “Emperor” Concerto or “Moonlight” Sonata, or Schubert the “Unfinished”
Symphony. The names sometimes come from savvy publishers who know they can improve
sales, or from impresarios, critics, or performers. The case of the Concerto we hear today is
particularly interesting, and only recently explained. Little is known concerning the genesis or
first performance of the E-flat Concerto. Twentieth-century accounts usually stated that
Mozart composed it for a French keyboard virtuoso named Mademoiselle Jeunehomme, who
visited Salzburg in the winter of 1777. Nothing else was known, not even the woman’s first
name.
In 2003 the Viennese musicologist Michael Lorenz, a specialist in the music of Mozart’s time
and a brilliant archival detective, figured out the mystery. The nickname was coined by the
French scholars Théodore de Wyzewa and Georges de Saint-Foix in their classic early20th-century study of the composer. As Lorenz explains, “Since one of their favorite names
for Mozart was ‘jeune homme’ (young man), they presented this person as ‘Mademoiselle
Jeunehomme.’”
In a September 1778 letter Mozart wrote to his father, he referred to three recent concertos,
“one for the jenomy [K. 271], litzau [K. 246], and one in B-flat [K. 238]” that he was selling to
a publisher. Leopold later called the first pianist “Madame genomai.” (Spellings were often
variable and phonetic at the time.) Lorenz has identified her as Victoire Jenamy, born in
Strasbourg in 1749 and married to a rich merchant, Joseph Jenamy, in 1768. Victoire was
the daughter of the celebrated dancer and choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre (17271810), who was a good friend of Mozart’s. He had choreographed a 1772 Milan production
of Mozart’s opera Lucio Silla and later commissioned the ballet Les Petits Riens for Paris.
We know little about Victoire Jenamy. She does not appear to have been a professional
musician, although clearly Mozart admired her playing. His first great piano concerto can
now rightly be called by its proper name: “Jenamy.”
A Closer Look When Mozart performed his own concertos, he would usually improvise
cadenzas—the flashy solo sections that occur near the end of some movements—and
therefore had no need to write them down. But because the Concerto we hear today was
written for someone else, Mozart felt called upon to provide them. He apparently retained
affection for the piece as he was still playing it years later in Vienna; it may have been the
first of his concertos to be published. (The lack of distinguishing numbers or keys often
makes it difficult to know exactly which of so many possible works are referred to in letters,
reviews, advertisements, and programs—which usually just called a piece “new.”)
The Concerto uses a modest orchestra of two oboes, two horns, and strings. The
manuscript specifies harpsichord, still in common use at the time even as the piano was
replacing it; nonetheless Mozart probably performed it most often on the piano. The opening
of the piece is particularly noteworthy for the immediate presence of the keyboard in answer
to a short orchestral fanfare. Equally unexpected is that within the breathless final movement
rondo Mozart inserts a minuet section, which momentarily slows the pace. (Lorenz
speculates that this unusual feature might have been “an allusion to Noverre the dancer.”)
Even at such a young age Mozart was breaking with traditions at the same time as he sought
to perpetuate them.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Mozart composed his Piano Concerto No. 9 in 1777.
Riccardo Muti conducted the first complete Philadelphia Orchestra performances of
Mozart’s Ninth Concerto, in October 1972, with Philippe Entremont as soloist (the third
movement only was performed on a Children’s Concert in January 1970 and the first
movement only was performed on a Children’s Concert in July 1972). The most recent
performances on subscription were in March 2005, with André Watts and Andreas Delfs on
the podium.
The work is scored for an orchestra of solo piano, two oboes, two horns, and strings.
The “Jenamy” runs approximately 30 minutes in performance.
Prelude to t he Afternoon of a Faun
Claude Debussy
Born in SaintSaint- GermainGermain- enen- Laye, France, August 22, 1862
Died in Paris, March 25, 1918
The Symbolists were artists and poets of the late 19th century who tried to convey
meanings through suggestion—symbols, fragments, evocations—rather than specific
narrative expression. Debussy’s revolutionary Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to
the Afternoon of a Faun), composed between 1892 and 1894, was based on an important
Symbolist poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. “The music of this prelude,” Debussy wrote, “is a
very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a
synthesis of it. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and
dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of
nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep, in which he can finally realize his
dreams of possession in universal Nature.” Faun was choreographed in 1912 for Sergei
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with Vaslav Nijinsky as the oversexed faun, and it has remained a
favorite of dancers and choreographers ever since. But it was originally conceived as a tone
poem for concert performance, and it still has the power to astonish.
A New Musical Style The concerns of the Symbolists were ideal for the musical style that
Debussy was developing around 1890. When he composed Faun he had just broken out of
the narrow confines of the Paris Conservatory and the Prix de Rome’s compulsory stay at
the Villa Medici. Having experienced Wagner’s operas during the 1880s—which
overwhelmed him—he yearned for a way to respond to the challenge of Tristan and Isolde
and Parsifal. He conceived the Prelude as the initial part of a larger work on Mallarmé’s
poem (Prelude, Interludes, and Final Summary), but he realized upon completing the Prelude
that it must stand alone. Indeed it is a self-contained miniature masterpiece; in a single
stroke the composer set the scene for all manner of 20th-century musical exploration.
(Stravinsky, for example, was bowled over by Afternoon of a Faun, and its influence on works
such as The Firebird and The Nightingale are not to be underestimated.) At the work’s first
performance in Paris in December 1894, with conductor Gustave Doret and the Societé
Nationale Orchestre, even the press—which had not always been sympathetic to the
composer’s early works—realized that something startlingly new had come to pass.
Mallarmé, who was present in the first Paris audience, was delighted with Debussy’s gloss
on his poem. “I was not expecting anything like this!” he said. “The music creates no
dissonance with my text, except that it even extends the emotion of the poem, exploring
more deeply the nostalgia and the atmosphere of light and color.”
“Modern music was awakened by The Afternoon of a Faun,” writes the conductor and
composer Pierre Boulez. Taking the operas of Wagner as its departure, Debussy’s piece
contains the color and ambiguity of Wagner’s harmony but avoids its emotional tension. The
piece begins with the extraordinary flute solo, builds to a descending melody in the winds
(with a descending bass line built from the outer “tritone” interval of the flute solo), and
concludes with a return of the flute.
—Paul J. Horsley
The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was composed from 1892 to 1894.
Fritz Scheel conducted the first Philadelphia Orchestra performances of the Prelude, in
January 1907. Most recently on subscription concerts, it appeared in February 2008, with
Charles Dutoit.
The Orchestra has recorded the piece six times: in 1924, 1927, and 1940 with Leopold
Stokowski for RCA; in 1947 and 1959 with Eugene Ormandy for CBS; and in 1971 with
Ormandy for RCA. The work can also be found in The Philadelphia Orchestra: The
Centennial Collection (Historic Broadcasts and Recordings from 1917-1998), in a
performance led by Bruno Walter from March 1947.
The score calls for three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four
horns, antique cymbals, two harps, and strings.
The Prelude runs approximately 10 minutes in performance.
Symphony No. 3
Albert Roussel
Born i n Tourcoing, France, April 5, 1869
Died i n Royan, August 23, 1937
Albert Roussel was born in 1869 into a family of industrialists in Tourcoing, a town in
northern France. Between his fifth and seventh years, Roussel became an orphan, enduring
the deaths of both his parents and his paternal grandparents. He was sent to live with his
maternal grandfather, the mayor of Tourcoing, who himself died three years later. Roussel
was finally given a measure of stability when his maternal aunt took him in and provided
something like a normal home.
Roussel was a serious, self-contained boy and a diligent student who, however, harbored
dreams beyond the confines of provincial France. Although he had been given music lessons
by a series of teachers who recognized his innate ability, upon completing his studies at the
Collège Stanislas in Paris, Roussel entered into the École Navale in 1887 and embarked on
his first great oceanic voyage as a midshipman. By 1893, when he attained the rank of
lieutenant, he had sailed to the Middle and Far East several times. He loved naval life,
especially the camaraderie among his fellow officers; for a man who had grown up as a
lonely boy in dark, heavy, death-haunted houses, the vivacity of his comrades and the lure of
exotic locales was enlivening and even, at times, intoxicating.
Encouraged by a series of chance encounters with musicians who praised the compositions
that he had completed at sea, Roussel resigned, somewhat reluctantly, from the navy and
began music lessons in earnest. Too old to enter the Paris Conservatory, he studied at the
Schola Cantorum with its austere director, Vincent d’Indy, who worshipped at the shrines of
Beethoven and of his own teacher, César Franck. D’Indy recognized Roussel’s astonishing
aptitude for counterpoint by appointing his pupil as professor of that discipline at the Schola;
among Roussel’s more improbable students was Erik Satie, who praised his teacher in
unusually sincere and enthusiastic terms.
During the first decade of the 20th century, Roussel began to attract the fascinated attention
of the Parisian musical world, especially after the enormous success in 1906 of his ravishing
impressionistic First Symphony, subtitled “Poem of the Forest.” In 1908 Roussel married
Blanche Preisach, a Parisian of Alsatian heritage; this was a wonderfully happy marriage, as
Madame Roussel was an enterprising, supportive spouse who loved travel as much as her
husband. In the fall of 1909 the Roussels embarked on an extended journey to the East,
including India and Cambodia, which inspired one of the composer’s greatest works, the
opera-ballet Padmâvatî (1918).
The Cezanne of Music
Mus ic Upon the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the middle-aged
composer initially volunteered for service as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Later he
was accepted into the army at his old rank of lieutenant. Despite uncertain health, Roussel
was a gallant officer, seeing active service in Champagne, the Somme, and Verdun. In a
moving letter to his wife written from the battlefield, he mused on what he might compose if
he survived the war: “One will have to begin living again, on a new basis, which does not
mean to say that all that was done before the war will be forgotten, but rather that everything
done after it ought to be done differently.” Eventually Roussel’s health deteriorated to the
point that he left the service in January 1918. He immediately returned to work, revising and
completing the orchestration of Padmâvatî, which was premiered to great acclaim in 1923.
True to his words Roussel reinvented his compositional style after the war, his music
becoming more linear, contrapuntal, and rhythmic. He embraced modernity with
characteristic thoughtfulness, gravity, and integrity. His Second Symphony (1921) displays
his penchant for poised forms, propulsive energy, bounding themes, polyphonic mastery,
and coruscating orchestration. At the same time, the slow movement displays a new and
searching inwardness. The apogee of Roussel’s postwar style is found in the magnificent
Third Symphony (1929-30), which was commissioned by the conductor Serge Koussevitsky
to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony.
After the highly successful premiere of that work in Boston, Roussel completed a masterful
ballet, Bacchus and Ariadne (1930); a droll opéra-bouffe, The Last Will and Testament of
Aunt Caroline (1933); and a delightful Fourth Symphony (1934). In 1937 his health began
to falter, however, and he barely completed a final piece, a string trio, just before a massive
heart attack brought his work to an end that August. In the time allotted to him after the war,
Roussel had refashioned himself into an even greater composer than before. His music
combines rigorous form, unsentimental emotion, and brilliant color: He is the Cezanne of
music.
A Closer Look While the British music critic Geoffrey Norris has described Roussel’s Third
Symphony as “neo-classicism with a heart,” this score is far from the neo-classical scores of
Stavinsky, Hindemith, or even Roussel’s own student Bohuslav Martinů. Roussel was less
interested in reinventing Baroque models—no “back to Bach” for him—than he was in
revitalizing the clarity, probity, and balanced sensibility of Beethovenian classicism.
The Symphony commences with a hurtling ostinato (Allegro
Allegro vivo)
vivo that is too important an
idea to remain in the background; this repeated figure will constitute one of the basic
materials of this tightly-constructed movement, just as an angular five-note “motto theme”
will reappear in various transformations over the course of the entire score. The second
movement (Adagio
Adagio)
Adagio begins with a pensive transformation of the five-note “motto theme,” but
the tenderness of this introspective music is interrupted by a febrile, extroverted fugue; after
a stunning climax, the forward motion ebbs gradually back into the elegiac mood of the
opening. The scherzo (Vivace
Vivace)
Vivace is a winsome rustic dance that is at once elegantly buoyant
and appealingly earthy. The joyousness of the scherzo is carried over into the scintillating
finale (Allegro
Allegro con spirito),
spirito the ebullience of which is interrupted by a mysterious statement
of the five-note “motto theme,” on the solo violin. The “motto theme” returns in the final
measures of the Symphony with overwhelming grandeur.
—Byron Adams
Roussel composed his Third Symphony from 1929 to 1930.
The first Philadelphia Orchestra performances were in March 1957, with Charles Munch
conducting. The work was most recently heard in October 1984, with Christopher Keene.
Roussel scored the Symphony for three flutes (II and III doubling piccolo), two oboes,
English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum,
tam-tam, tambourine, triangle), two harps, celesta, and strings.
Performance time is approximately 24 minutes.
Program notes © 2011. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written
permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or Byron Adams.
GENERAL TERMS
Cadenza: A passage or section in a style of brilliant improvisation, usually inserted near the
end of a movement or composition
Chord: The simultaneous sounding of three or more tones
Contrapuntal: See counterpoint
Counterpoint:
Counterpoint: A term that describes the combination of simultaneously sounding musical
lines
Dissonance: A combination of two or more tones requiring resolution
Fugue: A piece of music in which a short melody is stated by one voice and then imitated by
the other voices in succession, reappearing throughout the entire piece in all the voices at
different places
Legato: Smooth, even, without any break between notes
Minuet: A dance in triple time commonly used up to the beginning of the 19th century as the
lightest movement of a symphony
Op.: Abbreviation for opus, a term used to indicate the chronological position of a
composition within a composer’s output. Opus numbers are not always reliable because
they are often applied in the order of publication rather than composition.
Ostinato: A steady bass accompaniment, repeated over and over
Polyphony: A term used to designate music in more than one part and the style in which all
or several of the musical parts move to some extent independently
Polytonal: The simultaneous use of multiple keys or tonalities in different parts of the musical
fabric
Rondo: A form frequently used in symphonies and concertos for the final movement. It
consists of a main section that alternates with a variety of contrasting sections (A-B-A-C-A
etc.).
Scherzo: Literally “a joke.” Usually the third movement of symphonies and quartets that was
introduced by Beethoven to replace the minuet. The scherzo is followed by a gentler section
called a trio, after which the scherzo is repeated. Its characteristics are a rapid tempo in
triple time, vigorous rhythm, and humorous contrasts.
Serialism: Music constructed according to the principle pioneered by Schoenberg in the
early 1920s, whereby the 12 notes of the scale are arranged in a particular order, forming a
series of pitches that serves as the basis of the composition and a source from which the
musical material is derived
Sonata form: The form in which the first movements (and sometimes others) of symphonies
are usually cast. The sections are exposition, development, and recapitulation, the last
sometimes followed by a coda. The exposition is the introduction of the musical ideas, which
are then “developed.” In the recapitulation, the exposition is repeated with modifications.
Tonality: The orientation of melodies and harmonies towards a specific pitch or pitches
Tonic: The keynote of a scale
Tritone: The interval of three whole tones
Trio: See scherzo
THE SPEED OF MUSIC (Tempo)
Adagio: Leisurely, slow
Allegro: Bright, fast
Andantino: Slightly quicker than walking speed
Cantabile: In a singing style, lyrical, melodious, flowing
Con spirito: With spirit
Presto: Very fast
Vivace: Lively
Vivo: Lively, intense