{ program notes
Mr. Denk has toured frequently with violinist Joshua Bell, and their Sony Classical album, French Impressions, won the 2012 Echo Klassik award. He also collaborates regularly with cellist Steven Isserlis.
Mr. Denk graduated from Oberlin College, Indiana University, and the Juilliard School.
Jeremy Denk last appeared with the BSO in January 2014, performing Mozart ' s Piano Concerto No. 25, Nicholas McGegan, conductor.
About the concert:
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major,“ Emperor”
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born in Bonn, Germany, December 16, 1770; died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827
There is a certain irony in the subtitle,“ Emperor,” never used by the composer himself. By the spring of 1809, when Beethoven was creating this concerto, the last person he would have wanted to honor was the emperor of the day, Napoleon Bonaparte.
In May of that year, Napoleon’ s armies were actually besieging the city of Vienna. Beethoven’ s home was in the French cannons’ line of fire, and he was forced to flee to his brother’ s house, where he holed up in the cellar with a pillow pressed to his still sensitive ears. But his work on his new concerto did not cease.
And yet taken in a more generic sense,“ Emperor” is an appropriate title for this concerto. It is a work of imperial size and scope— particularly in its huge first movement— and its virile, martial tone that reflects a war-riven era. The E-flat Major key was one of Beethoven’ s favorites and one he associated with heroic thoughts; it is also the key of the“ Eroica.” Sadly, Beethoven was never able to display his own powers as a pianist with this work. Although he had introduced all his other keyboard concertos to the public, his deafness was too far advanced for him to risk playing the 1810 premiere in Leipzig.
The length and complexity of the sonata-form first movement demonstrate Beethoven’ s new symphonic conception of the concerto form. The opening is boldly innovative: first we hear the pianist sweeping over the keyboard in grand, toccatalike arpeggios and scales, punctuated by loud chords from the orchestra. Then the soloist allows the orchestra to present its traditional exposition of themes. The first theme, with its distinctive turn ornament, is introduced immediately. The second, a quirky little march, appears first in halting minor-mode form in the strings, then is immediately smoothed out and shifted to the major by the horns. Over the course of the movement, Beethoven will transform both these themes in a wondrous range of keys, moods and figurations.
After its long absence, the piano begins its version of the exposition with an ascending chromatic scale ending with a long, high trill. Throughout, Beethoven uses this scale as an elegant call to attention; whenever we hear it, we are being given notice that a new section of the movement is beginning. It will mark the opening of the development section and later the closing coda after the recapitulation.
The usual moment for the soloist’ s big cadenza comes just before that coda. But here Beethoven has quashed the soloist’ s customary right to improvise his or her own virtuosity. Fearing the jarring improvisations other soloists might make, the composer wrote in the score:“ Don’ t play a cadenza, but attack the following immediately”. He then carefully wrote out a brief series of variants on both his principal themes, the piano soon joined by the horns to blend the cadenza smoothly into the movement’ s flow.
A complete contrast to the extroverted first movement, movement two is a sublime inward elegy in B Major, a remote key from the home tonality of E-flat. Two themes receive a quasi-variations treatment. The first and most important is the strings’ grave, almost religious theme heard at the opening. The second theme is the downward cascading music with which the piano enters.
At the close of the movement, the pianist experiments hesitantly with a new melodic / rhythmic idea. Suddenly, the spark is struck, and the theme explodes into the exuberant rondo finale. Beethoven stresses the weak beats of the dancing 6 / 8-meter, giving his theme an eccentric, hobbling gait. An important element is the crisp dotted rhythm first heard in the horns; this martial, drum-like motive returns us to the wartime world of the concerto’ s birth. Near the end, Beethoven gives this to the timpani, in eerie duet with the soloist, before the concerto’ s triumphant finish.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Harmonielehre
John Adams
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, February 15, 1947; now living in Berkeley, California
After creating such attention-grabbing works in the Minimalist style as Shaker Loops, Grand Pianola Music, and Harmonium, John Adams suddenly found himself in the mid-1980s mired in an artistic dry spell. Though commissions were piling up— notably a major orchestral work for the San Francisco Symphony, where he had been appointed composer-in-residence— he could write nothing for 18 months. The issue seemed to revolve around his dissatisfaction with Minimalism— the stripped-down style of music pioneered by Steve Reich and Philip Glass that uses much repetition of clear, consonant harmonies driven by propulsive rhythmic patterns— and his uncertainty about the way forward. He described himself as“ a Minimalist who is bored with Minimalism.”
Finally, a dream broke his creative block.“ I’ d had a vivid dream in which I was crossing the San Francisco Bay Bridge. In that dream, I looked out to see a huge oil tanker sitting in the water. As I watched, it slowly rose up like a Saturn Rocket and blasted out of the bay and into the sky. I could see the rust-colored metal oxide of its hull as it took off. Shortly after … I sat down in my studio to find, almost
18 Overture | www. bsomusic. org