Overture Magazine: 2017-2018 Season FINAL_BSO_Overture_May_June | Page 22

MOZART AND BRAHMS
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OV E R T U R E / BSOmusic.org
makes his conducting debut in Handel’s
Theodora with the NDR Chorus.
This season, Alexej Gerassimez
and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin
premiered Armstrong’s Concerto
for Percussion and Orchestra. BASF
Ludwigshafen commissioned Armstrong
to compose a clarinet quintet, which
receives its premiere by Matthias
Schorn and the Armida Quartet.
Other commissioners include the
Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Volkswagen
Autostadt Movimentos Festival and the
Philharmonic Orchestra Kiel.
Armstrong’s solo albums include Liszt:
Symphonic Scenes (“handsomely
demonstrates the startling rich context
given to the Mephisto Waltz when
heard after the multi-dimensional
Procession by Night”— Gramophone)
and Bach, Ligeti, Armstrong (“one of
the very few CDs that the world was
waiting for”— Kulturradio RBB), both
released by Sony Classical.
Armstrong transformed the Eglise
Sainte-Thérèse, a decommissioned
Art Deco church in northeast France,
into the home of imaginative concerts
and art exhibitions. The 2017 festival
featured Renaud Capuçon, with
whom Armstrong regularly plays, and
the film director Bruno Monsaingeon.
The 2018 festival features Alfred
Brendel, who, along with Armstrong,
engages in a Conversation between
Words and Music.
Born in 1992, Armstrong studied at
the Curtis Institute of Music and at the
Royal Academy of Music in London.
At seven, he began studying science at
universities including the University
of Pennsylvania and Imperial College
London. He earned a master’s degree in
pure maths at the University of Paris VI.
Brendel, who has guided Armstrong as
teacher and mentor since 2005, ascribes
to him “an understanding of the great
piano works that combines freshness
and subtlety, emotion and intellect.”
Their relationship was captured in
the film Set the Piano Stool on Fire by
Mark Kidel.
Kit Armstrong makes his BSO debut.
About the Concert
LES PRÉLUDES
Franz Liszt
Born in Raiding, Hungary, October 22, 1811;
died in Bayreuth, Germany, July 31, 1886
Franz Liszt’s career as the greatest keyboard
virtuoso of the 19 th century began when
he was only in his teens. By the time he’d
reached his mid-30s, he had nothing left
to prove as a performer and was growing
weary of endless tours of the musical
capitals of Europe. In 1848, he decided to
settle in Weimar, the cultured German city
that had nurtured Goethe, and devote his
energies to composition. Soon, his mistress
Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein left
her Russian husband to join him there.
The Weimar years (1848–61) were
a prolific creative period during which
Liszt wrote not only piano and vocal
works but also turned his radical
musical ideas loose on the orchestra.
He produced two large programmatic
symphonies, Faust and Dante, and
12 “symphonic poems,” of which Les
Préludes is the third and most popular.
A true Romantic artist, Liszt saw
literature and music as intertwined.
A poem, a play or a novel could inspire
a musical work, and music could carry
the emotions expressed by words to
deeper levels. Liszt’s symphonic poems,
however, do not tell detailed stories in
music. All he really needed was a broad
emotional scenario to set his music in
motion, and in the case of Les Préludes,
there seem to have been two.
When this music was first written
in 1848–49, it was an overture to Les
Quatres Éléments (The Four Elements):
choral settings of four poems with a
Mediterranean maritime theme by
the Provençal writer Joseph Autan. By
1854, Liszt had become intrigued with
the Nouvelles Méditations poétiques by
the French Romantic poet Alphonse
de Lamartine. Sensing an expressive
relationship, he returned to his old
overture, sheered off its choruses and
reworked it to match Larmartine’s themes
of love and war with pastoral interludes.
Prefacing the score, he — or more likely