PROGRAM NOTES
BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO . 7
FROM THE PODIUM by Ryan Bancroft
I was told from a very early age that if I wanted to pursue classical music , a good idea would be to move to Europe . Unfortunately ( or maybe fortunately ), I came from a family with extremely limited means , and traveling was never an option for us . So , I went to school in California , where I ’ m from . When conducting finally entered my life , I ended up moving to Scotland , and then the Netherlands . And now I ’ m in London , and at this moment I ’ m in Iceland . I ’ m incredibly fortunate to be able to go to all these different places .
What really is home ? Is it a physical place , or is it the ones that you love ? Is it the bakery that you visit ? Is it your coffee place that you go to every day ? For me , it ’ s the people that I ’ m with , and the music that I get to make . I ’ m very proud of being from California , but I ’ m happy most places as long as I have a good cup of coffee and some music with me .
When I think of Beethoven ’ s Seventh Symphony , there is something incredibly physical about it . It is the salt of the earth . Think of the opening of the symphony , where you have these incredibly shocking chords come out of nowhere . What is that ? Is it simply a beautiful A-major chord , or is it a hammer going into a stone ?
In Ligeti ’ s Concert Românesc and Adams ’ Dharma at Big Sur , the physical sense of place is right there in the titles . Those are pieces that had me hooked within the first thirty seconds . The Ligeti is filled with spice and spunk , and the Adams has a very quiet , poetic nature to it .
I ’ ve never been to Baltimore , but it was one of the only places my father ever went on a vacation before he passed away , and he talked about it so fondly . I remember hearing all these stories about the food , and how cold it was when he was there ! I ’ m excited to see for myself how colorful and vibrant it is , and how intense the music making is .
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
BY AARON GRAD
György Ligeti
Born May 28 , 1923 in Dicsőszentmárton , Romania Died June 12 , 2006 in Vienna , Austria
CONCERT ROMÂNESC [ 1951 ]
After studying at Budapest ’ s Academy of Music from 1945 to 1949 , György Ligeti began his career writing in a style indebted to his Hungarian predecessors Bartók and Kodály . In the same way those pioneers of ethnomusicology mined their raw musical materials from field research and recordings of local folk music , Ligeti drew upon the archives at the Folklore Institute in Bucharest as well as his own field visits to Romanian villages to compose the Concert Românesc in 1951 .
Coming in a period of especially tight control of the arts in Hungary , this “ Romanian Concerto ” was banned after its first rehearsal . As Ligeti recalled , “ The piece turned out to be ‘ politically incorrect ’ as a result of some forbidden dissonances .… For today ’ s listeners , it is hardly comprehensible that such mild tonal jokes were declared as dangerous to the state .” The work was not performed publicly until 1971 .
The Concert Românesc begins with a slow and smooth Andantino movement . The music tends to settle on open-fifth intervals , a stark and raw sound that stays closer to the authentic folk tradition than sanitized triads . The fast and lively second movement comes out of a tradition of Romanian folk dancing , with passages for solo instruments that shape this work into a “ concerto for orchestra ,” another construct borrowed from Bartók .
In the third movement , Ligeti tapped into his early childhood memories of the alpine horn by calling for the orchestral horns to play only natural harmonics . With this technique , he explained , “ the fifth and seventh partials — the major third and the minor seventh — sound ‘ wrong ’, flatter than , for instance , on the piano . This wrong sound — which is actually the right one , as it corresponds to acoustic purity — is what is so wonderful about the sound of the horn .” The fast finale returns to dancelike elements , but it also builds up swirling layers of fine-grained counterpoint and other experimental sounds , hinting at Ligeti ’ s daring future on the other side of the Iron Curtain .
Instrumentation Two flutes including piccolo , two oboes including English horn , two clarinets , two bassoons , three horns , two trumpets , percussion and strings .
John Adams
Born February 15 , 1947 in Worcester , MA Currently resides in Berkeley , CA
Maximilian Franz
THE DHARMA AT BIG SUR [ 2003 ]
John Adams , a Harvard-educated California transplant , first made his mark writing in a minimalist vein indebted to Steve Reich and
14 OVERTURE / BSOmusic . org