CONCERT PROGRAM

January 10-11, 2014

Andrey Boreyko, conductor Adele Anthony, violin

STEPHANIE BERG Ravish and Mayhem (2012) (b. 1986)

NIELSEN Violin Concerto, op. 33 (1911) (1865-1931)

Praeludium: Largo Allegro cavalleresco Poco adagio Rondo: Allegretto scherzando

Adele Anthony, violin INTERMISSION

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92 (1811-12) (1770-1827) Poco sostenuto; Vivace Allegretto Presto; Assai meno presto Allegro con brio

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Andrey Boreyko is the Stanley J. Goodman Guest Artist. Adele Anthony is the Sid and Jean Grossman Guest Artist. The concert of Friday, January 10, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Ms. Phoebe D. Weil. The concert of Saturday, January 11, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Mr. Stuart and Ms. Susan Keck. Pre-Concert Conversations are sponsored by Washington University Physicians. Large print program notes are available through the generosity of Delmar Gardens and are located at the Customer Service table in the foyer. These concerts are part of the Wells Fargo Advisors series.

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FROM THE STAGE

Chris Carson, Assistant Principal Double Bass, on Beethovens Symphony No. 7: If you look at Beethovens nine symphonies, you see that all are extremely individual, all are identifiable as separate pieces. The Seventh is known for being a dance symphony. Its a very kinetic piece, with a lot of toe-tapping rhythm. Its a justifiably popular symphony, but also physically taxing to play. By the last movement there is a lot of playing that just keeps on going. A danger of the piece if finding it too easy to start the tempo. There can be a monotony to it. The challenge is finding a way to make the rhythmic repetition interestingto create a tension you can sustain.

SCOTT FERGUsON

Chris Carson

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MAKING IT NEW
BY RE N S P E N C E R S AL L E R

TIMELINKS
1811-12 BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92 Napoleons forces invade Russia 1911 NIELSEN Violin Concerto, op. 33 Gustav Mahler dies in Vienna 2012 STEPHANIE BERG Ravish and Mayhem President Barack Obama wins re-election

Symphony orchestras are often accused of worshipping long-dead composers while shunning the breathing ones. Yet programs that feature unfamiliar music created by unknowns seldom do well at the box office. As a species, we gravitate to the tuneful and recognizable. The structure of classical music shapes our listening experience. Conventional sonata form, for example, allows us to make certain predictions about the direction of a movement and then feel satisfied when our expectations are fulfilled, or pleasantly surprised when our expectations are subtly subverted. Form means that we arent simply being led around dark woods by our ears. But if concert music is to remain vital, we need to clear some space in the concert schedule for living composers and their unfamiliar, unpredictable, expectation-defying work. Tonights program offers three perspectives on the new: a very recent overture by a woman who is not yet 30; a 100-year-old violin concerto that tests the boundaries of neoclassicism; and one of the most popular symphonies by a composer whose works so dominate the repertory that at least one critic has proposed banning him from concert programs until we can hear him anew. STEPHANIE BERG Ravish and Mayhem CONTRAST AND UNITY Modernism is olda century old, at least. Is it still possible to pater la bourgeoisie? On a purely pragmatic level, offending the patrons seems unwise. Few living composers are lucky enough to hear their work performed by a major orchestra. Should they alienate audiences of today in the hopes of impressing music historians of the future? Achieving relevance is a careful balancing act: challenging listeners without annoying them, acknowledging the past without slavishly repeating it, being original without being off-putting. As Stephanie Berg succinctly explains on the home page of her website,
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Composition, I find, is much like cooking: its all about proportion, balance, and the interplay of contrast and unity. But at the end of the day, no matter how complex your ideas are, how innovative your dish is, it still has to taste good. With its wide-eyed, almost Coplandesque harmonies and hectic rhythms, Ravish and Mayhem neatly encapsulates Bergs approach. Dramatic brass vies with whimsical woodwinds; grand gestures are interrupted by playful passages; ceremony succumbs to chaos. The sonorities are at once American and exotic. According to Berg, Im always a bit hesitant to cite specific regions of the world to avoid the risk of stereotyping music, but my mind kept going to the scene of an ancient Middle Eastern street festival of sorts as I wrote it. I wouldnt call the music Arabic, but the melodies involve a lot of trills and flourishes, which seem to be a feature of music from that region. I think the passion and energy of the piece suggest something a little more raw than traditional Western literature. Plus there are elephants in there. (Youll understand what she means when you hear the finale). MISSOURI MAESTRO Originally from Kansas City, Berg holds a masters degree in composition from the University of Missouri, where she also earned her bachelors degree in clarinet performance. In 2012 she was selected as a resident composer for the Mizzou International Composers Festival; an earlier version of Ravish and Mayhem was premiered that summer by the new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound. Berg lives in Columbia, Missouri, and plays clarinet with the New Music Ensemble. Ive only been formally composing for about four years, though Ive dabbled in it all my life, she notes. I really have Jeanne Sinquefield and the Mizzou New Music Initiative to thank for turning it into a career path. After I won the Sinquefield Prize in 2009, and with some encouragement from the composition faculty, I realized that composition was something that I wanted to pursue formally. Everything that has happened since then has only reaffirmed that feeling.

Born 1986, in Parkville, Missouri First Performance July 28, 2012, Alarm Will Sound performed the work at the Mizzou International Composers Festival in Columbia, Missouri STL Symphony Premiere This week Scoring ute piccolo 2 oboes clarinet E-at clarinet 2 bassoons 2 horns 2 trumpets 2 trombones tuba percussion piano strings Performance Time approximately 7 minutes

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CARL NIELSEN Violin Concerto, op. 33 A HIGHER UNITY In the summer of 1911, when Carl Nielsen began writing his Violin Concerto, he accepted an invitation from Nina Grieg, widow of Edvard, to stay in the lakeside cabin retreat where the late Norwegian composer had written much of his lifes work. The great Dane did not take the task of writing his first concerto lightly. He was himself an accomplished violinist, if no virtuoso; he played second violin in the orchestra of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen from 1889 to 1905. In a letter he wrote during the concertos composition, he laid out his exacting standards: It has to be good music and yet always show regard for the development of the solo instrument, putting it in the best possible light. The piece must have substance and be popular and showy without being superficial. These contrasts can and must meet and form a higher unity. He did not finish the piece until the middle of December, several months after he returned to Copenhagen. DAZED AND CONFUSED Although he is a national hero in Denmark, renowned for his six symphonies as well as his operas, choral works, and chamber music, Nielsen is not a fixture in the American repertory. As Alex Ross has noted, his habit of writing furiously fast figures and then passing them from one section to another, relay style, can make even an ensemble of virtuosos sound like a mess. Audiences, for their part, often go away from Nielsen performances pleased but a little dazed, not sure what hit them. The Violin Concerto, for all its Neoclassical trappings, is similarly weird, not to mention unusually long and difficult to play. Notes ring out shrilly; harmonies collapse into dissonances; themes collide and implode. Its beauty is severe and gleams like a glacier. CUTTING AND EASY TO GRASP The Violin Concerto comprises four movements: first slow, then quick, then slow, then quick. Unlike his work from just a few years later, it is firmly Neoclassical and strongly melodic. The opening Praeludium is tranquil and undeniably pretty
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Born June 9, 1865, Sortelung, on the Danish island of Funen Died October 3, 1931, Copenhagen First Performance February 28, 1912, Peder Mller was soloist, with the composer conducting the Royal Danish Orchestra in Copenhagen STL Symphony Premiere January 5, 2001, Kurt Nikkanen was soloist, with Hans Vonk conducting Most Recent STL Symphony Performance October 27, 2002, Yang Liu was soloist, with Robert Spano conducting Scoring 2 utes piccolo 2 oboes 2 clarinets 2 bassoons 4 horns 2 trumpets 3 trombones timpani strings Performance Time approximately 34 minutes

in places. But there is a sharpness beneath the sweetness, a keen Scandinavian rigor that resists the urge toward the sentimental. My ideal is to be able to write music like a clean and sharp sword, he wrote, cutting and easy to grasp. The Allegro cavalleresco that follows is an exuberant romp for full orchestra; the solo violin jousts and parries with the other instruments, culminating in a brilliant if somewhat acidulous cadenza. The dark Adagio is a meditation on mutability, as earlier themes shift and reveal themselves from different angles. With the concluding Scherzo, a lightly mocking rondo, the Concerto has shaken off any vestiges of virtuosity and, in Nielsens own words, renounces everything that might dazzle or impress. LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92 LOST IN THE CANON According to the most recent Orchestra Repertoire Report, which covers in exhaustive statistical detail the offerings of 137 American orchestras from 2009 to 2010, Ludwig van Beethoven was performed more often than any other composer: 457 times, to be precise. Of the top twenty most performed works, his Ninth, Seventh, and Fifth symphonies were ranked first, second, and third, respectively. The 457 scheduled performances represent a staggering 7 percent of the total works performed. (By way of contrast, just 0.7 percent were works by female composers.) Beethovens ubiquity not only crowds out space on the program for other worthies; it threatens to make the great man disappear, his essential strangeness obscured by the fog of the familiar. Repeated listening desensitizes us to the daring experiments that typify even his seemingly straightforward works. RESTLESS ICONOCLAST The Seventh may seem like a spontaneous expression of joy, a universally beloved celebration of love and freedom, but it is also a groundbreaking, iconoclastic work. Although audiences went wild at its premiere, in 1813, more than a year after Beethoven finished the symphony, it shocked many of his
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Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna First Performance December 8, 1813, in Vienna, under the composers direction STL Symphony Premiere December 3, 1908, Max Zach conducting Most Recent STL Symphony Performance January 30, 2011, Semyon Bychkov conducting Performance Time approximately 36 minutes

contemporaries. The piano seller, teacher, and critic Friedrich Wieck, who attended the rehearsals, reported that all those present believed that Beethoven must have composed it while drunk. For Carl Maria von Weber the incessant droning bass line in the first movements coda suggested that the composer was ripe for the madhouse. Even today, scholars marvel over his innovative approach to key relationships, the way the work shifts from its home key of A major to the far-flung C major and F major, rather than the expected dominant (E major). As Phillip Huscher writes, We dont need a course in harmony to recognize that Beethoven has taken us through the looking glass, and that everything is turned on its head. The first movement starts slowly and majestically, a much longer introduction than was usual for Beethoven or any of his predecessors. This Poco sostenuto interlude maps out the tonal terrain, preparing us for the aforementioned shifts in key. After 61 repeated E notes, it transitions to Vivace, and its relentless driving rhythms, reminiscent of peasant dances, generate a flurry of swift dynamic changes and sudden modulations. The second movement, in A minor, is marked Allegretto, but it is slow compared with the pell-mell rush of the other movements. The most famous part of the symphony, it begins with an unsettling chord carried by the woodwinds and horns, which ushers in a solemn march led by the violas, cellos, and double basses. The third movement, which borrows a theme from an Austrian folk song, contrasts a lively scherzo with a trio section that starts off deceptively placid and gradually becomes more emphatic. The finale opens with two fortissimo chords and reestablishes the home key of A major in a frenzy of forward momentum.
Program notes 2014 by Ren Spencer Saller

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ANDREY BOREYKO
STANLEY J. GOODMAN GUEST ARTIST

Andrey Boreyko holds the position of Music Director of the Orchestre National de Belgique and the Dsseldorfer Symphoniker. With the Orchestre National de Belgique, he ended the 2012-13 season with a highly successful concert at Amsterdams Concertgebouw with pianist Nikolai Lugansky, and this season sees the orchestra tour Germany with pianist Boris Berezovsky, presenting a Dvok Festival in May 2014 and completing the tour at the Concertgebouw. In North America, Boreyko is also Music Director Designate of the Naples Philharmonic (his inaugural concert was a gala with Sarah Chang in November 2013) and he additionally holds the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Orquesta Sinfnica de Euskadi. Highlights of the 2013-14 season include performances with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and London Philharmonic, and with the Toronto and Houston symphony orchestras. Further ahead he will work with WDR Sinfonieorchester Kln and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Boreykos previous positions include Chief Conductor of the Jenaer Philharmonie (where he is now Honorary Conductor) and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Berner Symphonieorchester, Hamburger Symphoniker, and the Pozna Philharmonic Orchestra. He was also Principal Guest Conductor of the Vancouver Symphony and Music Director of the Ural State Philharmonic Orchestra. Andrey Boreyko was born in St. Petersburg where, at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, he studied conducting and composition with Elisabeta Kudriavtseva and Alexander Dmitriev, graduating summa cum laude. While with the Jenaer Philharmonie, Boreyko received awards for the most innovative concert programming in three consecutive seasons from the German Music Critics Association.

Andrey Boreyko most recently conducted the St. Louis Symphony in November 2012.

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ARCHIV KUNsTLER

ADELE ANTHONY
SID AND JEAN GROSSMAN GUEST ARTIST

Adele Anthony makes her St. Louis Symphony debut with these concerts.

Since her triumph at Denmarks 1996 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition, Adele Anthony has enjoyed an acclaimed and expanding international career. Performing as a soloist with orchestra and in recital, as well as being active in chamber music, Anthonys career spans the continents of North America, Europe, Australia, India, and Asia. Highlights from recent seasons have included performances with the symphony orchestras of Houston, San Diego, Seattle, Buffalo, Dayton, Ft. Worth, Indianapolis, Long Beach, Milwaukee, Virginia, Wichita, and the IRIS Chamber Orchestra. Being an avid chamber music player, Anthony appears regularly at La Jolla SummerFest and Aspen Music Festival and School. Abroad, she has performed with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, Denmarks Aalborg and Aarhus Symphony Orchestras, Finlands Kuopio Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, NDR Orchestra Hannover, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. Anthonys wide-ranging orchestral repertoire extends from the Baroque of Bach and Vivaldi to all the classical war horses including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Sibelius to contemporary composers Ross Edwards, Arvo Prt, and Phillip Glass. Anthony studied at the Conservatory of the University of Adelaide with Beryl Kimber until 1987, and continued her studies at New Yorks Juilliard School, where she worked with the eminent teachers Dorothy DeLay, Felix Galimir, and Hyo Kang. She made her Australian debut with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in 1983, and since then has appeared with all six symphonies of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, West Australian, Tasmanian, and Adelaide). Adele Anthony performs on an Antonio Stradivarius violin, crafted in 1728.

MaRIa CIRIELLO

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A BRIEF EXPLANATION
You dont need to know what andante means or what a glockenspiel is to enjoy a St. Louis Symphony concert, but its always fun to know stuff. For example, what is Allegro cavalleresco? Allegro cavalleresco: cavalleresco is an Italian word meaning knightly, chivalrous, or noble, so Carl Nielsens tempo for the second movement of his Violin Concerto calls for the musicians to play fast, but in a noble manner

MY INSTRUMENT:

CHRIS CARSON, ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL DOUBLE BASS

When I was 12 I was in junior high in South Bend, Indiana. This was 1960. Back then there was so much support for the arts in the South Bend Public Schools that there were three levels of string orchestras. C orchestra was beginners. A was most advanced. There was a girl in the A orchestra who was an accomplished violinist. I wanted to be in A where she was. I asked my friends the best way to get into the advanced orchestra. They said there was always a need for basses. Playing bass was a good path for getting from C to A orchestra. Then she wasnt all that into me, but I kept playing the bass.

Chris Carson

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DaN DREYfUs

YOU TAKE IT FROM HERE

If these concerts have inspired you to learn more, here are suggested source materials with which to continue your explorations. sjbvc7.wix.com/stephanieberg Visit the website of composer/ clarinetist Stephanie Berg mizzounewmusic.missouri.edu New music is happening at Mizzou, learn about the Mizzou New Music Initiative, supported by the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation carlnielsen.dk/pages/biography.php The Carl Nielsen Society provides lots of information and resources John Suchet, Beethoven: The Man Revealed Atlantic Monthly Press A recent bio by host of popular Classic FM radio show in the U.K.

Read the program notes online at stlsymphony.org/planyourvisit/programnotes Keep up with the backstage life of the St. Louis Symphony, as chronicled by Symphony staffer Eddie Silva, via stlsymphony.org/blog The St. Louis Symphony is on

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DONOR SPOTLIGHT

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART

The Saint Louis University Museum of Art (SLUMA) enhances the cultural opportunities of a SLU education by displaying diverse works and by sponsoring educational programs related to the arts. In addition, the museum presents historical art and artifacts and exhibits work by students, faculty, staff, alumni, benefactors, and friends of the University. It has also hosted special collaborations, such as chamber concerts with the St. Louis Symphony. A new exhibition at SLUMA, No Place Like Home: American Scene Painting in the Sinquefield Collection, includes paintings, drawings, and lithographs from the private collection of Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield. The exhibit features acclaimed works by Thomas Hart Benton, Joe Jones, Grant Wood, John Rogers Cox, and other prominent artists of the American Scene Painting movement. Rex Sinquefield grew up in St. Louis and attended Saint Louis University, where he earned an undergraduate business degree. Today, he is one of the regions most important civic leaders, serving on numerous boards including those of SLU and the St. Louis Symphony. Sinquefield met his wife, Jeanne, at the University of Chicago, where he pursued an MBA as she was completing her doctorate in demography. Today, Jeanne Sinquefield is widely noted for her long history of supporting organizations that enhance music, art, and education, especially for children. For many years, the successful couple lived in California. Their first foray into art collecting began with European post-impressionist artists. However, as the Sinquefields began to re-identify with their Midwestern roots, they began building a collection that celebrates the city of St. Louis, the state of Missouri, and the importance of the Midwest region in the national story of American art. The collection will be on display through Sunday, Feb. 2. Visit sluma.slu. edu for more information.

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COMMUNITY & EDUCATION:

SYMPHONY IN THE CITY SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART

Helen Kim

Ann Fink

Nathan Schram

David Kim

JANUARY 21 7:30 p.m. Free Join Helen Kim and Ann Fink, violins, Nathan Schram, viola, and David Kim, cello, for a string quartet concert that celebrates American music against the backdrop of the current SLUMA exhibition No Place Like Home: American Scene Painting in the Sinquefield Collection.

Presented by Commerce Bank

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