...
Overview, GUTIÉRREZ PLAYS RACHMANINOFF
A Jacobs Masterworks Concert
May 25, 26, 27
Jahja Ling, conductor
Horacio Gutiérrez, piano
BRUBECK: Ansel Adams: America
SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 105
RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
On this season finale concert, the San Diego Symphony welcomes back pianist Horacio Gutiérrez performing the ultimate Romantic piano concerto, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second. The concert opens with a jazzy tribute to photography legend Ansel Adams written by living American Jazz master Dave Brubeck and his son, and then maestro Ling leads a one-movement final symphonic work from the colorful Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.
LISTEN NOW
Hear Music Director Jahja Ling talk about his personal connection to Sibelius' Seventh Symphony and Brubeck's Ansel Adams: America!
LISTEN NOW
In this interview with XLNC-FM 104.9, pianist Horacio Gutiérrez discusses Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony.
Notes, Ansel Adams: America
DAVE BRUBECK
Born December 6, 1920, Concord, California
CHRIS BRUBECK
Born March 15, 1952, Los Angeles
Dave and Chris Brubeck’s Ansel Adams: America offers a fusion of the work of some of America’s greatest artists, and it also offers a fusion of two quite different art-forms: music and photography. Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was one of the greatest American photographers (some would say the greatest), and his black-and-white images of the American West have contributed to our sense of national identity. Dave Brubeck, who turned 90 in 2010, has always been one of America’s great jazz musicians, and perhaps that should be sharpened to say that he is one of America’s great musicians, a continually-innovative pianist and composer. In Ansel Adams: America Brubeck and his son Chris–also a distinguished musician–have written a symphonic work to be performed as a musical counterpart to a selection of Adams’ photos of the West.
Dave Brubeck, who like Adams grew up in Northern California and visited Yosemite as a young man, was strongly attracted to Adams’ work throughout his life, and he found the opportunity to express that admiration when the Stockton Symphony commissioned a work from him. Though his reputation is as a jazz pianist, Brubeck had a solid classical training: his mother was a classical pianist, and one of his principal teachers was Darius Milhaud. For the Stockton commission, Brubeck conceived a symphonic work that would offer a musical counterpoint to a showing of Adams’ photos, which would be projected on a screen behind the orchestra as it played. In an interview with National Public Radio, Brubeck explained how he and his son Chris created the work: “We got a book of 400 photographs of Ansel Adams. We’d look at the photos and try to think about the music that would go with the photograph: Half Dome in Yosemite, Merced River, Great Falls coming down, Quiet Meadows. I didn’t stop writing for one month, mostly at night; I’d still be writing, very little sleep.” The father and son had to do much of their work long-distance, for Chris was often on tour and far away. Dave would compose the music first for the piano, Chris would orchestrate it, and then the two would confer and refine. The Stockton Symphony, which had led the consortium that commissioned the work, gave the first performance in April 2009. Since that time, Ansel Adams: America has been widely performed, always to critical and popular acclaim.
The piece was very carefully composed to fit the exact sequence and timing of the photos: the music lasts 22 minutes, and over that span 102 of Adams’ photographs are projected behind the orchestra (this is the first time the Ansel Adams Trust has authorized an exhibition of his photographs with music). Musically, the Brubecks’ work may be thought of as a series of evolving variations. The piece begins with a brass chorale that will serve as the seminal theme, and this theme is then varied to match the images as they change. Because the photos are of such different subjects, this basic theme will evolve through quite different musical styles to match those images.
Ansel Adams: America offers the work of two great American artists. It shows us how one artist can respond to the work of another, and in the process it lets us see and hear in entirely new ways.
Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Opus 105
JEAN SIBELIUS
Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland
Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland
In 1915, while at work on his Fifth Symphony, Jean Sibelius looked ahead and described how he envisioned his next two symphonies. He described his Seventh-to-be as: “Joy of life and vitality, with appassionato passages. In three movements–the last an ‘Hellenic rondo.’” And then he offered a caveat: “All this with due reservation.” It was a good thing he did, because when the Seventh Symphony appeared nine years later, it bore almost no resemblance to his earlier description. Instead of being in three movements with a “Hellenic rondo” as its finale, the Seventh is in only one movement, lasting just over twenty minutes. It is an entirely original form, yet that one-movement structure manages to preserve much of the emotional effect of the four-movement classical symphony: we come away from Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony feeling that we have embarked on – and made – a satisfying symphonic journey.
Many have commented on the originality of Sibelius’ design, but in fact others had done the same thing before him. Arnold Schoenberg, in his Chamber Symphony No. 1 of 1906, and Franz Schreker, in his Chamber Symphony of 1916, had made the same effort to compress the massive four-movement symphonic structure of the late nineteenth-century symphony into a concise one-movement form: both those composers pared the symphony down mercilessly, recasting it for a chamber ensemble and limiting it to a twenty-minute span. Sibelius, who probably did not know the Schoenberg and Schreker chamber symphonies, set out to achieve the same structural compression in his Seventh Symphony, but he did it with a full symphony orchestra. For all its compression, however, for all its paring-down and its economy, Sibelius’ Seventh is expressive and heartfelt music.
A good symphonist presents his material immediately, and Sibelius gives us his three fundamental themes in the first minutes. The Seventh Symphony opens with a soft timpani salvo, and lower strings climb a C-Major scale that somehow ends up in the unexpected key of A-flat minor. Here (and throughout) the syncopated statement of themes contributes to the subtlety of Sibelius’ presentation. Almost instantly we hear pairs of woodwinds weaving about, followed by an intense string chorale that makes its way on a nine-part division of the strings. These will be the basic themes of the symphony, but now Sibelius introduces one further element: a solo trombone cuts through these textures with a ringing, heroic solo that will return twice at climactic moments in the symphony.
Over the next twenty minutes, these themes will re-appear, evolve, and interweave. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Seventh Symphony lies in its subtle changes of tempo, which are achieved with a mastery so assured that we cannot tell where one tempo ends and another begins: a moderate tempo is established, and before we are aware of it the pulse of that tempo has become fast, and just as suddenly it has relaxed again. Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony may mirror the general approach of the Schoenberg and Schreker chamber symphonies, but Sibelius integrates tempos, sections, and moods with a subtlety and assurance that those earlier composers never dreamed of. Eventually the Seventh Symphony builds to an icy rip in C Major that Sibelius marks Largamente, then falls away and gradually re-groups to build to the powerful close, where – at virtually the final second – the symphony claws its way back into C major.
As was his habit, Sibelius worked on this symphony almost to the last minute. He completed it on March 2, 1924, barely in time to get the parts copied and the music rehearsed before the premiere three weeks later, when Sibelius led the first performance on March 24, 1924, with the Stockholm Philharmonic. At that concert, the program book listed this piece as a Fantasia Sinfonica – Sibelius was so concerned about his radical structure that he was reluctant to call this music a symphony. But after hearing it, he was convinced that it was a true symphony and that it should be numbered among his works in that form.
After the Seventh Symphony, Sibelius wrote only one more large-scale work, the tone poem Tapiola in 1926. And then he stopped composing–the final 31 years of his life were spent in silence. Apparently he tried to write an Eighth Symphony, and evidence suggests that he made some sketches for it, but he abandoned that effort, and his sketches have disappeared. With the Seventh, an entire symphonic journey compressed into a concise one-movement arc, Sibelius had gone as far as he could with the symphony.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Opus 18
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Born April 1, 1873, Oneg, Novgorod
Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills
The most catastrophic moment in the life of young Rachmaninoff was the premiere of his First Symphony in Moscow in 1897. Sensing disaster, he could not bring himself to enter the hall but sat hunched in a stairwell of the auditorium. Inside, it was just as bad as he feared: conductor Alexander Glazunov was unprepared, the orchestra played badly, and the audience and critics hated the music, one of them describing it as a “program symphony on the Seven Plagues of Egypt.” Rachmaninoff plunged into a deep depression – he destroyed the score to the symphony (it was later reassembled from the orchestra parts) and wrote no music for three years.
Alarmed, the composer’s friends arranged for him to see Dr. Nicholas Dahl, an internal medicine specialist who sometimes treated patients through hypnosis. Dahl was also an extremely cultured man – he was an amateur cellist – and Rachmaninoff’s friends were hopeful that contact with such a man would improve the composer’s spirits. During a lengthy series of visits, the composer heard a steady message of encouragement from the doctor: “You will begin to write your concerto . . . You will work with great facility . . . The concerto will be of excellent quality.” To the composer’s great surprise, the treatment worked. He later said: “Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me. By the beginning of summer I again began to compose. The material grew in bulk, and new musical ideas began to stir within me–more than enough for my concerto.” Across the summer of 1900, Rachmaninoff composed what became the second and third movements of his Second Piano Concerto. These were performed successfully in December, and Rachmaninoff quickly composed the opening movement. The first performance of the complete concerto, in Moscow on October 14, 1901, was a triumph. Not surprisingly, Rachmaninoff dedicated the concerto to Dr. Dahl.
The Moderato begins with solo piano in its deepest register playing quiet chords that have reminded many of the tolling of Russian church bells, one of Rachmaninoff’s favorite sounds. The movement’s impassioned main theme, sung by the strings, is one of those powerful Slavic melodies that haunt the mind, while the yearning second subject is introduced by the piano alone. This music demands a pianist of extraordinary ability (this is one of the most difficult concertos in the literature), and after a sweeping, soaring development of the opening ideas, a quiet restatement of the second subject leads to an emphatic close.
Muted strings introduce the Adagio sostenuto, but–in a wonderful touch–the solo flute sings the main theme as the pianist accompanies. The theme is repeated, first by the clarinet and then the strings, growing more elaborate as it proceeds; a brief but spectacular cadenza leads to a recall of the tolling bells from the very beginning and a quiet close. The Allegro scherzando begins quietly as well, but this opening is full of suppressed rhythmic energy, which quickly erupts. The second theme, announced by the violas, has become one of those Big Tunes, an inspiration for countless Hollywood composers and – many years later – set to the words “Full moon and empty arms.” If one can escape those associations, this remains lovely music, proof of Rachmaninoff’s considerable melodic gift. Obviously recovered from his depression and creative drought, Rachmaninoff drives the concerto to a knockout close.
- Program notes by Eric Bromberger
WHY THIS PROGRAM?
Jahja Ling mused, “My hobby has always been photography. I would carry around my Hasselblads and my Leica wherever I went. I have no idea how many pictures I have taken or how many I have at home. So, when Dave Brubeck wrote this piece, incorporating some of the photos of my idol, Ansel Adams, I became intrigued.
The Brubeck family has had a long relationship with San Diego County, and it is a privilege to introduce this piece here.”
Continuing, our conductor said, “To me, the Sibelius Seventh is his masterpiece. Sibelius condensed a complete, very complex, four-movement symphony into a continuous work of about 20 minutes or so. All the elements are clearly defined within it, with impeccable transitions between theme and movements. It’s amazing and wonderful. Then, with the Rachmaninoff concerto after the intermission, there is a perfect match with Horacio Gutiérrez. The second time I conducted him in this piece, some years back, I was deeply impressed with his insight that made for a much more personal concept of the work. He continued to impress me with that on the several following occasions I conducted him in it.”
Dave Brubeck’s Ansel Adams: America is being heard for the first time at these concerts. The Sibelius Seventh Symphony was performed initially here under the direction of David Atherton during the 1981-82 season and has not been repeated until these concerts. In contrast, the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto is among the concerto literature’s most popular works here at Symphony Hall. Most recently, Lang Lang played it here during his cycle of three concerts last season. That was the twelfth time it was programmed at these concerts since its initial hearing here in the summer season of 1957 when Robert Shaw conducted. George Sementovsky was the soloist on that occasion.
- Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist
Artists, 
Considered one of the great pianists of our time, Horacio Gutiérrez is consistently praised by critics and audiences alike for the poetic insight and technical mastery he brings to a diverse repertoire. Since his professional debut in 1970 with Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mr. Gutiérrez has appeared regularly with the world’s greatest orchestras and on its major recital series.
In past seasons, Mr. Gutiérrez has given recitals at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Berlin’s Philharmonie, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and New York’s Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, as well as in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Cleveland. Since 2009, he has performed on subscription and on tour with the Cleveland Orchestra twice, among many other concerts.
His 2011-2012 engagements include returns to the Symphony Orchestras of Baltimore, Atlanta, St. Louis, San Francisco and Winnipeg, plus opening the new Soka Arts Center in Orange County performing the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2 with the Pacific Symphony. A favorite of New York concertgoers, Mr. Gutiérrez has performed on numerous occasions at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie Hall in recital and with orchestra. He has been a frequent soloist at the Mostly Mozart Festival and has appeared on its season-opening Live from Lincoln Center telecast. As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with the Guarnieri, Tokyo and Cleveland Quartets as well as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 1982, he was the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize.
Mr. Gutiérrez is a strong advocate of contemporary American composers. Of special importance has been his performance of William Schuman’s Piano Concerto in honor of the composer’s 75th birthday at New York’s 92nd Street Y and of Andre Previn’s Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic with Mr. Previn conducting. He frequently includes George Perle’s Phantasyplay on his recital programs, and Mr. Perle wrote a set of nine bagatelles dedicated to Mr. Gutiérrez.
Mr. Gutiérrez’s Telarc recordings include Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3 with Lorin Maazel and the Pittsburgh Symphony, nominated for a Grammy® Award. Also available on that label are separate discs of the two Brahms Concertos, both with Andre Previn and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini with David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony. For the Chandos label he has recorded Prokofiev’s Concertos No. 2 and 3 with Neeme Jarvi and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. His most recent recording, George Perle: A Retrospective, was named one of the ten best recordings of 2006 by The New Yorker. His television performances in Great Britain, the United States and France have been widely acclaimed, and won him an Emmy® Award for his fourth appearance with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He was welcomed three times by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. A great film and theater fan, he has performed in recital with
Irene Worth and Mariette Hartley.
Born in Havana, Cuba, Horacio Gutiérrez appeared at the age of 11 as guest soloist with the Havana Symphony. He became an American citizen in 1967. A graduate of the Juilliard School, he is married to pianist Patricia Asher and resides in New York City.
Watch & Listen, CLICK HERE for XLNC 104.9FM's "Gala Concert Preview" presentation for our Season Finale concert featuring Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto!
Have you heard Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concert before? Sure you have! Here is a short clip of pianist Evgeny Kissin playing the beginning of the concerto, accompanied by Sir Andrew Davis, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra:
