{ program notes
Marco Borggreve
Vadim Gluzman
Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman collaborates regularly with leading conductors including Semyon Bychkov, Sir Andrew Davis, Neeme Jarvi, Paavo Jarvi, Hannu Lintu, Peter Oundjian, Michael Tilson Thomas, Jukka-Pekka Sarasate and Christoph von Dohnanyi. He has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic, London Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and other major symphony orchestras. Mr. Gluzman’ s festival appearances include performances at Tanglewood, Verbier, Ravinia, Lockenhaus and the North Shore Chamber Music Festival in Illinois, which was founded by Gluzman and pianist Angela Yoffe, his wife and recital partner.
Highlights of the 2016 – 2017 season include appearances in London at The Proms with the BBC Symphony, with the Chicago Symphony, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and with the Orchestre de Paris. Mr. Gluzman appears in New York’ s Carnegie Hall with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and leads performances of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra in Columbus, OH, where he continues his third year as creative partner and principal guest artist.
This season, Mr. Gluzman also gives world premieres of concertos by Sofia Gubaidulina with the NDR Radio Philhamonic in Hannover, and by Elena Firsova with Deutsches Symphonie- Orchester Berlin.
Accolades for his extensive discography for the BIS label include the Diapason d’ Or of the Year, Gramophone’ s Editor’ s Choice, Classica Magazine’ s esteemed Choc de Classica award, and Disc of the Month by The Strad, BBC Music Magazine, ClassicFM and others.
Vadim Gluzman plays on the legendary 1690“ ex-Leopold Auer” Stradivarius on extended loan to him through the generosity of the Stradivari Society of Chicago.
Vadim Gluzman is making his BSO debut.
About the concert:
Le Tombeau de Couperin
Maurice Ravel
Born in Ciboure, France, March 7, 1875; died in Paris, December 28, 1937
During the 16 th century in France, a literary tradition developed of creating poetic tributes to deceased luminaries that were known as tombeaux or“ tombstones.” By the 17 th century, composers had adopted the concept as well. So when Maurice Ravel decided to compose his own tombeau in honor of the French Baroque composer François Couperin( 1668-1733), whose music he admired, he was reaching back to a very old form.
Emphasizing woodwinds and especially solo oboe, the Menuet has a lovely rustic charm evoking an idealized past.
However, by 1917, when Ravel created his first version of Le Tombeau de Couperin— a suite of six short piano pieces based on Baroque dance forms— he was thinking of tombeau in a much broader sense. The First World War had been an agonizing time for him. Too small to be a soldier, he enlisted as a frontline ambulance driver and medic, and he was now literally surrounded by tombstones. Ravel decided to dedicate each movement to a different friend who had been killed in the war. He also stated that his suite was not so much a tribute to Couperin“ as to 18th-century French music in general.” All his life, Ravel saw the 18 th century as an aesthetic ideal, and the period seemed particularly precious to him at this time of death and destruction. When he decided to orchestrate four of Le Tombeau’ s movements in 1919, he chose a small ensemble that, except for the addition of a harp and an English horn, closely resembled the standard 18 th-century court orchestra.
Rather than being the stately processional of the Baroque era, the opening Prélude is all high-speed lightness: like a breeze of fresh air blowing through a window. The whirling theme introduced by the oboe dominates the music, as does that instrument’ s spicy color.
In the Forlane, formerly an elegant court dance, the top note of the upwardbounding idea that serves as a refrain is always marvelously colored by mysterioussounding harmonies. In the intervening episodes, Ravel devises some extraordinary woodwind combinations, especially a pungently bright ensemble of oboe, English horn and clarinets— later joined by flutes— over the magical chiming of the harp.
Emphasizing woodwinds and especially solo oboe, the Menuet has a lovely rustic charm evoking an idealized past. But its middle trio section— in the style of a peasant musette dance with the strings mimicking the bagpipe drone— becomes something darker, almost threatening. Then the Menuet music returns, now made more lush by strings and ending in a tremulous discord.
The small brass section of trumpet and two horns jumps into the foreground to fuel the brilliance of the lively closing Rigaudon. But this movement, too, contains something more serious: a pensively melancholy middle section featuring a lovely oboe solo over delicate pizzicato strings that speaks of beauty that can never be recovered.
Instrumentation: Two flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, strings.
Violin Concerto No. 2
Sergei Prokofiev
Born in Sontsovka, Ukraine, April 23, 1891; died in Moscow, U. S. S. R., March 5, 1953
“ I have become simpler and more melodic. We want a simpler and more melodic style for music, a simple, less complicated emotional state, and dissonance again relegated to its proper place as one element of music … I think we have gone as far as
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