Bach, Adams & Mozart
Saturday, November 10, 2012 • 7:30 p.m.
First Free Methodist Church
Orchestra Seattle
Seattle Chamber Singers
Paul Polivnick, conductor
Catherine Haight, soprano
Kathryn Weld, mezzo-soprano
Stephen Wall, tenor
Charles Robert Stephens, baritone
Program
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068
John Adams (*1945)
The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)
—intermission—
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (1756–1791)
Mass in C minor, K. 427/417a
About the Concert
The second concert of the 2012–2013 season welcomes another of our six candidates for OSSCS music director to the podium: Paul Polivnick, music director emeritus of the New Hampshire Music Festival and former music director of the Alabama Symphony and Oberlin Conservatory Orchestras. The program opens with a suite of dances by Bach (featuring the famous “Air on the G String”) and continues with John Adams’ The Chairman Dances, a “foxtrot for orchestra” inspired by his opera Nixon in China. The concert concludes with a great, unfinished, minor-key choral work by Mozart—no, not the Requiem, but his other masterpiece fitting that description, the Mass in C Minor.
About the Conductor
Guest conductor Paul Polivnick is currently conductor laureate of the New Hampshire Music Festival, having served as its music director from 1993 to 2009. He previously held posts as music director of the Oberlin Conservatory orchestras, music director of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, principal conductor of Harmonia Classica of Vienna, and associate principal conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony. A prominent figure on the world stage, he has conducted the London Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Austrian Radio Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, National Orchestra of Lille, France, Orchestral Ensemble of Paris, Luxembourg Philharmonic, Barcelona Symphony, Russian Philharmonic of Moscow, Kiev Camerata, Brno Philharmonic, Edmonton Symphony, Orchestra London (Ontario), UNAM Symphony Orchestra of Mexico City, Puerto Rico Symphony and all of the leading orchestras in Korea.
In the USA, Mr. Polivnick has guest-conducted over 40 orchestras and opera companies, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Symphony Silicon Valley, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Utah Symphony, San Diego Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, Fort Worth Symphony, New Mexico Symphony, Central City Opera, Santa Barbara Grand Opera and Charleston Opera.
In the recording studio, Mr. Polivnick has made numerous commercial recordings in the United States and Europe for such labels as Naxos, Harmonia Mundi, Albany, Nonesuch, Universal Music France, Harmonia Classica, Centaur, Christal and Accord, including a live recording of Thierry Escaich’s Mirror of Shadows with soloists Renaud and Gautier Capuçon and the National Orchestra of Lille. Mr. Polivnick began his professional career in Los Angeles, where he played viola with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Sir Neville Marriner, founded the LA Radio Orchestra, and took his first conducting post with the Debut Orchestra of the Young Musicians Foundation, succeeding Michael Tilson Thomas. Born in Atlantic City, he studied at the Juilliard School with Oscar Shumsky and Jean Morel, earning a degree in orchestral conducting, and at Tanglewood—both as a violinist and as a conducting student of Leonard Bernstein.
About the Soloists
Soprano Catherine Haight appears frequently with the region’s most prestigious musical organizations, regularly performing in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Carmina Burana and The Nutcracker. Reviewing PNB’s world premiere of Christopher Stowell’s Zaïs, The Seattle Times called her singing “flawless.’ She appears as soprano soloist on the OSSCS recording on Handel’s Messiah, the Seattle Choral Company recording of Carmina Burana, and on many movie and video game soundtracks, including Pirates of the Caribbean, Ghost Rider and World of Warcraft. This spring she will sing Strauss’ Four Last Songs with the orchestra of Seattle Pacific University, where she has served on the voice faculty since 1992.
Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Weld has performed extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. Her expertise extends from Baroque ornamentation to bel canto opera, from Mahler song cycles to world premieres. She has made two solo appearances with the New York Philharmonic, under the direction of Charles Dutoit (de Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat) and Kurt Masur (Grieg’s Peer Gynt). She made her Carnegie Hall debut to critical acclaim in a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor with Musica Sacra. The Seattle P-I praised her performance of Alexander Nevsky with the Seattle Symphony for “beauty of tone, a long line and a handsome shaping of Prokofiev’s phrases.” Learn more: northwestartists.org
Tenor Stephen Wall has appeared frequently with Orchestra Seattle and the Seattle Chamber Singers since 1985 and can be heard on the OSSCS recording of Handel’s Messiah conducted by George Shangrow. During that time he has also been featured in leading and supporting roles with Seattle Opera, in addition to roles with Portland Opera, Utah Festival Opera and Tacoma Opera, and appearances with the symphonies of Seattle, Vancouver, Spokane, Everett, Bellevue, Yakima, Pendleton, Great Falls and Sapporo (Japan). Mr. Wall has also served as the director for many musical theater productions in western Washington and maintains an active voice studio in Seattle.
Baritone Charles Robert Stephens has enjoyed a career spanning a wide variety of roles and styles in opera and concert music, with Opera News praising him for “committed characterization and a voice of considerable beauty.” At New York City Opera, he sang the role of Prof. Friedrich Bhaer in the New York premiere of Mark Adamo’s Little Women, and was hailed by The New York Times as a “baritone of smooth distinction.” He has sung on numerous occasions at Carnegie Hall in a variety of roles with Opera Orchestra of New York, the Oratorio Society of New York, the Masterworks Chorus and Musica Sacra, as well as with ensembles throughout the Pacific Northwest. Learn more: seidelartistsmgmt.com
Program Notes
Johann Sebastian Bach
Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major, BWV 1068
Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany, on March 21, 1685, and died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750. He likely composed this orchestral suite in Leipzig around 1730, scoring it for 2 oboes, 3 trumpets, timpani, strings and continuo.
Bach composed at least four works that we today call “orchestral suites,” but which he dubbed ouvertures after the style of their expansive opening movements, although he likely wrote other pieces in this form that have not survived. He may have created early versions of these works during his time at Anhalt-Köthen, where from 1717 through 1723 he concentrated on producing instrumental music and other secular pieces for Prince Leopold. The small number of musicians available to Bach at Köthen leads most musical historians to conclude that the surviving versions of his four orchestral suites—three of which call for relatively large forces—must date from Bach’s time in Leipzig, where in 1723 he took up a post that he held until his death.
When the director of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, an organization devoted to the performance of secular music, vacated his post in 1729, Bach took on that responsibility— on top of his myriad responsibilities to provide music for the city’s church services and teach at St. Thomas’ School. The Collegium gave concerts each Friday evening at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffeehouse and Bach sometimes produced new music for these occasions, as well as adapting works he had originally written in Köthen. The surviving instrumental parts for his Orchestral Suite No. 3 are in his own hand, as well as those of C.P.E. Bach (who began copying music for his father in 1729) and Johann Ludwig Krebs (who also worked for J.S. Bach around this time), which leads modern scholars to conclude that he composed the work in 1730 or 1731.
During the first decades of the 18th century, German composers such as Johann Christoph Graupner, Johann Friedrich Fasch and Georg Philipp Telemann (who had founded the Collegium Musicum about 20 years before Bach arrived in Leipzig) wrote dozens of such orchestral suites. Collections of instrumental dances had flourished in Germany throughout much of the previous century, but these originally employed a rather free-form opening movement. The Germans eventually fell under the influence of the French- Italian composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), credited with the creation of the
The brilliant opening of Bach’s third orchestral suite stands at the pinnacle of the ouverture form. When, in 1830, Felix Mendelssohn (who the previous year had revived Bach’s St. Matthew Passion) played this movement on the piano for Johann Goethe, the German poet told Mendelssohn he could visualize “a procession of elegantly dressed people proceeding down a great staircase.” There follows one of Bach’s most sublime creations, an Italianate instrumental aria—the only such Air that survives from the composer— that rightfully holds a special position among his most popular music. (Most listeners know it as the “Air on the G String,” due to an 1871 arrangement for violin and piano by August Wilhelmj, who transposed it into a key that allowed performance on the violin’s lowest string.) The remainder of the work consists of lively dances: a pair of gavottes, a bourrée and a gigue.
John Adams
The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)
_John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1947, and now lives in Berkeley, California. He composed _The Chairman Dances in 1985 in conjunction with work on his opera Nixon in China, and in response to a National Endowment for the Arts commission from the Milwaukee Symphony. Lukas Foss conducted the first performance with that orchestra on January 31, 1986. The work calls for pairs of flutes (both doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet) and bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, a large percussion battery, piano, harp and strings.
John Adams holds an unrivaled position as the pre-eminent American composer of the late 20th and early 21st century. Raised in New England, he moved to California in 1971 after earning undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard. After a brief stint as a forklift operator, he joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory, where he became immersed in the music of John Cage and other members of the West coast avant-garde, as well as the “minimalist” school personified by Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. He absorbed elements of minimalism—its “throbbing pulses” and repetitive musical figures—into his own idiom, but described himself in 1980 as “a minimalist bored with minimalism.” In Adams’ musical language, minimalist techniques co-exist with long-lined romantic melodies adorned with rich harmonies, explosive accents, implied meters that overlap and collide with one another, and a brilliant orchestral palette that in many of his works includes inventive use of percussion, saxophones and synthesizers.
Adams burst onto the national scene in April 1981 with Harmonium, an epic 35-minute work for chorus and orchestra commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for the opening season of Davies Hall. During the 1980s he also produced Harmonielehre (essentially a three-movement symphony, which the composer himself conducts at Benaroya Hall this evening, in a program to be repeated tomorrow afternoon), Short Ride in a Fast Machine (which quickly became a quintessential concert-opener) and Nixon in China (widely regarded as the most important opera of the last half-century). Other compositions of note include a witty Chamber Symphony, a violin concerto, City Noir (a brilliant symphonic work composed for Gustavo Dudamel’s first concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), the oratorio El Niño, and the operas The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic and The Flowering Tree. His most recent works, both premiered last season, are Absolute Jest, a Beethoven-inspired orchestral work for the San Francisco Symphony, and The Gospel According to the Other Mary, an oratorio for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The composer describes The Chairman Dances as “an ‘out-take’ of Act III of Nixon in China” rather than an “excerpt” or “fantasy on themes from” that opera, which concerns President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.
“At the time, 1985,” Adams writes, “I was obliged to fulfill a long-delayed commission for the Milwaukee Symphony, but having already seen the scenario to Act III of Nixon in China, I couldn’t wait to begin work on that piece. So The Chairman Dances began as a ‘foxtrot’ for Chairman Mao and his bride, Chiang Ch’ing, the fabled ‘Madame Mao,’ firebrand, revolutionary executioner, architect of China’s calamitous Cultural Revolution, and (a fact not universally realized) a former Shanghai movie actress. In the surreal final scene of the opera, she interrupts the tired formalities of a state banquet, disrupts the slow moving protocol and invites the Chairman, who is present only as a gigantic 40-foot portrait on the wall, to ‘come down, old man, and dance.’ The music takes full cognizance of her past as a movie actress. Themes, sometimes slinky and sentimental, at other times bravura and bounding, ride above in [a] bustling fabric of energized motives.”
Adams subsequently incorporated material from The Chairman Dances into the opera’s third act.
—Jeff Eldridge
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Mass in C Minor, K. 427/417a
Joannes Chrisostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, and died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna. He started calling himself Wolfgango Amadeo around 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777. He began work on his Mass in C Minor after his August 1782 wedding and premiered portions of it at St. Peter’s Benedictine Abbey Church in Salzburg on October 26, 1783. In addition to double chorus, the version performed this evening requires SSTB vocal soloists, flute (in one movement only), pairs of oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, organ and strings.
Mozart spent most of the years from 1774 through 1781 in his hometown of Salzburg, where he became increasingly discontented because of his inability to find a rewarding musical position. His relationship with his patron, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, was stormy, and in 1781 he resigned his post and relocated to Vienna, where he hoped that his musical fortunes would improve. Mozart made his living during the following years by teaching, publishing his music, playing at patrons’ houses or in public, and composing on commission (particularly operas). He finally obtained a minor court post in 1787—it provided him with a reasonable salary, but did not take advantage of his astounding musical genius, requiring nothing beyond the writing of dances for court balls.
In August 1782, three and a half years after a young soprano, Aloysia Weber, had refused Mozart’s marriage proposal, the 26-year-old composer married her younger sister, 20-year-old Constanze. Between June 1783 and July 1791, the couple welcomed six children, but suffered the loss of four. Their first child died at the age of two months, their third lived less than a month, their fourth lived six months, and their fifth survived only one hour. Mozart had precious little time to get to know his two surviving sons, seven years old and four months old at the time of their father’s death. Mozart spent his last years in Vienna in growing financial distress, even though—by musicians’ standards—he earned a good income. Through lavish spending and poor management he found it increasingly difficult to maintain the living standard to which his family had become accustomed. He incurred considerable debt, which caused him much anxiety and even feelings of despair. Late in November 1791, Mozart became seriously ill and remained bedridden for the last two weeks of his life. Death came about two months short of his 36th birthday.
Like the events surrounding the composition of Mozart’s famous Requiem and the concurrent death of its composer, the reasons for the composition of the Mass in C Minor—one of Mozart’s most masterful works—and the circumstances that conspired to leave the work unfinished, continue to be subjects of conjecture. This very long, highly dramatic, elaborately structured and lavishly orchestrated cantata-style mass (whose texts are set as individual, often startlingly contrasting, sections) violated every one of the rules for the composition of sacred music set forth by Austria’s Catholic emperor and by Salzburg’s archbishop (whom Mozart detested).
The Mass was not the result of a commission. Mozart’s letters suggest that he began composing it during late 1782, continuing into early 1783, partly as a way to develop his contrapuntal muscles after being amazed by the works of Bach and Handel. He likely conceived the work as a gift for Constanze (a lover of fugues, which Mozart seems to have found difficult to write) out of the composer’s gratitude for his marriage in 1782 and the birth of their first child in June 1783. Mozart may also have viewed the Mass as an expression of piety, and as a “peace offering” that the composer hoped might contribute to a reconciliation with his alienated father and sister and their acceptance of his wife (of whom Mozart’s father Leopold disapproved mightily).
In a letter dating from January 1783, Mozart mentions “the score of half a mass, which is still lying here waiting to be finished.” That summer, he and Constanze visited Leopold in Salzburg, attempting in vain to thaw icy family relationships (their new baby, left in Vienna with a wet nurse, died of an intestinal infection—the infant’s parents seem not to have learned of this until their return home). The Mass in C Minor, probably with sections from some of Mozart’s other masses or various plainchants substituting for not-yet-composed portions of the work, did receive a performance but apparently failed to impress Mozart’s father and sister. The dejected composer and his wife left Salzburg the day after the October 26 performance.
Mozart would never return to his birthplace, and he never finished the Mass in C Minor, but in 1785 did use music from the Kyrie and Gloria movements for a relatively poor-quality Lenten cantata, Davidde penitente. Not until 1840 did the “father of Mozart research,” Johann Anton André, publish the first edition of the Mass, having found the fragmentary autograph score, together with incomplete performance parts, in a Bavarian monastery. This evening’s performance uses a 1956 edition by H.C. Robbins Landon, with the Sanctus and Osanna set for double chorus as indicated in Mozart’s surviving instrumental parts.
Regarding the Mass in C Minor, Brady Russell Allred states that, despite its remaining unfinished, “from an artistic point of view, the work stands before us complete— somewhat in the manner of Bach’s Art of Fugue or Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony—despite the omission of major portions of the mass text. And it was despite the pressure of time that Mozart obtained a perfect musical structure.” Scholars view the work as one of the three greatest masses ever composed, one that forms a worthy “bridge” between Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, as it skilfully combines characteristics of older Baroque forms with the operatic and symphonic elements of the Classical style of which Mozart was a master.
The work opens with a strongly contrapuntal “Kyrie” that begins in shadowed solemnity—it is the only section of the work actually in C minor! The dotted rhythms introduced in the orchestral bass reappear throughout the Mass. Initial petitions for mercy give way to a brighter “Christe eleison” for soprano solo (presumably Constanze) and interspersed choral exclamations before the Kyrie’s darker music returns. The first phrase of “Gloria in excelsis deo,” a movement cast in an ABAB form, is set to ascending fanfare-like arpeggiated figures that burst exuberantly into the silence left by the Kyrie’s stark concluding section, and Handelian “hallelujahs” soon come to mind. The Earth rests in peace, shining angels suddenly interrupt with the opening musical figures, and peace again descends before, in the “Laudamus te,” a scintillating soprano solo lauds and blesses God in bravura Italian operatic style. In contrast, a brief, gravely grand SSATB chorus, undergirded by persistent dotted rhythms in the orchestra (like those in Handel’s “Surely He Hath Borne our Griefs”) gives thanks for God’s great glory (“Gratias agimus tibi”) and appears to prefigure Mozart’s Requiem.
In the “Domine deus” duet that follows, solo soprano voices intertwine above the orchestral strings. In the lengthy succeeding section (“Qui tollis peccata mundi”), reminiscent of the “Crucifixus” in Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a jagged rhythmic figure that descends chromatically over the interval of a fourth is repeated by the orchestra while the double chorus paints an agonizing picture of the Savior staggering and sometimes falling under the lash and the weight of the world’s sins during his march to the cross. Imitation and syncopations characterize the following elaborate, contrapuntal, concerto-like trio (“Quoniam tu solus”), in which sopranos and tenor alternate with winds and strings as they describe as holy the Lord Most High, Jesus Christ, who is presented in six measures of majestic splendor (the “prelude” to the following movement’s intricate fugal counterpoint) by the chorus and full orchestra. “Cum sancto spiritu” repeatedly sounds the stately, ascending theme of the Holy Spirit in long notes surrounded by the glory of God the Father that pours forth in rushes of eighth notes as this movement concludes.
The Credo opens with the appearance of the galloping rhythmic figure with which the orchestra accompanies the five-part chorus throughout this portion of the Creed. The chorus often declaims a large amount of text in a homophonic chant-like manner, with polyphonic sections providing contrast. The “Et incarnatus est” section is an emotional, extended, highly decorative soprano solo in the leisurely, graceful 6/8 meter of the siciliana (an Italian dance) accompanied by—and actually forming a quartet with—a “pastoral” trio of flute, oboe and bassoon. Written for Constanze, Mozart hoped that, upon hearing her sing this aria, his father and sister might appreciate her musical abilities and at last confirm Mozart’s choice of a bride. It might also have celebrated the safe arrival of the couple’s son in June 1783, contemplating the miracle of God-made-human as well as that of the baby’s birth.
Extant instrumental parts indicate that Mozart intended the triumphant, primarily chordal “Sanctus” and the effervescent, polyphonic “Osanna” to be performed by full orchestra and double choir in the manner of a Baroque prelude and fugue. In the skilfully constructed, imitative “Benedictus,” all four soloists combine to bless the One who comes in the Lord’s name. The final portion of the Osanna returns to frame the preceding quartet and conclude this section of the Mass in a blaze of glorious praise.
—Lorelette Knowles