{ program notes
San Francisco and Lahti symphonies, KBS and Bournemouth symphony orchestras, Swedish and Finnish radio symphonies, Danish National Symphony and the Philharmonia Orchestra. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall and the Auditorium du Louvre. He has also appeared in a number of renowned festivals including Lucerne Piano, Bergen, Grant Park, Aspen and Sibelius.
Mr. Pohjonen frequently collaborates with musicians such as Karen Gomyo, Yura Lee, Christian Poltéra and Osmo Vänskä. Selected for the CMS Two Residency Program for Outstanding Young Artists, he appears regularly with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Highlights of this season include debut performances with the Cleveland Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Antalya State Symphony Orchestra. Chamber highlights include concerts at the Library of Congress, Wigmore Hall, Opera de Limoges and the Suvisoitto Festival.
Mr. Pohjonen released his debut CD under the Dacapo label in 2009 with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra under Ed Spanjaard. His recital at Music @ Menlo’ s 2010 Festival led to a recording of works by Mozart, Grieg, Handel and Brahms.
Mr. Pohjonen began piano studies in 1989 at the Junior Academy of the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and completed his master’ s degree at the Sibelius Academy. Winner of numerous Scandinavian piano competitions including First Prize at the 2004 Nordic Piano Competition in Nyborg, Denmark, he was selected by Sir András Schiff as winner of the Klavier Festival Ruhr Scholarship in 2009.
Juho Pohjonen is making his BSO debut.
About the concert:
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
Felix Mendelssohn
Born in Hamburg, Germany, February 3, 1809; died in Leipzig, Germany, November 4, 1847
Felix Mendelssohn had a remarkable childhood and adolescence. Grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, he was precocious both musically and intellectually, and his wealthy banker father saw to it that he received the best education available. Mendelssohn’ s musical gifts manifested very early; by his teens, he was already a superb pianist and organist and a budding conductor. At 16, with his Octet for string instruments, he revealed himself to be a composer with a unique, fully mature voice, and the next year, 1826, brought another work of genius: the Overture to A Midsummer Night’ s Dream.
As the ship nears its port, pounding timpani mimic the harbor cannon saluting its arrival.
When he was 12, Mendelssohn’ s composition teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter brought the precocious child to meet Goethe, the grand old man of German literature. Goethe was charmed by the boy’ s keen mind and musical talent, and, despite some 60 years’ difference in their ages, a friendship was struck up that lasted until Goethe’ s death in 1832. The poet-philosopher became, along with Shakespeare, one of Mendelssohn’ s early creative inspirations. In 1828, Mendelssohn wrote the beautiful concert overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage as an instrumental setting of two short Goethe poems of the same name.
Mendelssohn described this piece as being in two“ tableaux” or pictures. The first is a slow, static Adagio that expresses the text of the first poem,“ Meeresstille” or“ Calm Sea.” In Mendelssohn and Goethe’ s era of sail-powered travel, a flat, windless sea was not a desirable condition. In Goethe’ s poem, the sailor is“ troubled” by the“ dreadful, deathly stillness” all around, and in the music we hear his apprehension in the uneasy clashing of two flutes. Mendelssohn portrays the“ enormous breadth of ocean” in broadly spaced string chords and the motionless waters by harmonies becalmed in the home key of D Major.
At last as a solo flute gusts upward, we hear the first stirrings of a breeze. The tempo accelerates to Allegro, and rolling figures in the strings portray the billowing waves while upward-snapping violins describe the wind tugging at and filling the sails. Now to a buoyant woodwind tune, the ship leaps forward on its“ Prosperous Voyage.” As the ship nears its port, pounding timpani mimic the harbor cannon saluting its arrival, and to trumpet fanfares, the ship sails triumphantly toward the dock. But Mendelssohn saves one bit of poetic magic for the music’ s close: a luminous soft ending.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, two horns, three trumpets, timpani, strings.
Piano Concerto in G Major
Maurice Ravel
Born in Ciboure, France, March 7, 1875; died in Paris, December 28, 1937
Maurice Ravel was a masterful composer for both the orchestra and the piano. Strangely, he did not combine these two sonorities until quite late in his career when he wrote two remarkable concertos, the Concerto for the Left Hand and the Concerto in G Major.
The impetus for the Concerto in G was Ravel’ s need for a work to show off his performing skills during a North American tour in 1928, but this painstakingly slow creator did not manage to launch the concerto before his boat left. It was finally written between 1929 and 1931, simultaneously with the Concerto for the Left Hand, created for the disabled Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, and like that work, was spiced with jazz touches. Opposed to the heavy Teutonic approaches of Beethoven and Brahms, Ravel stated that for him, a concerto should be more of a“ divertissement,” written“ in the same spirit of those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. The music of a concerto should, in my opinion, be light-hearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or at dramatic effects.”
14 Overture | bsomusic. org