Barbara, Orange County, Washington
D.C., Las Vegas and Colorado Springs.
With orchestras he can be heard in
Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, San
Diego, San Francisco, LA, New York,
Montreal, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and
Indianapolis. In Europe he can be heard
with orchestras in London, Frankfurt,
Berlin, Rome, Zurich, Rotterdam and
Tel Aviv.
Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive
recording artist since 1987. He has
received Grammy Awards for the second
and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s
Piano Sonatas. With Yo-Yo Ma, he has
also made a series of Grammy-winning
recordings of the Beethoven and Brahms
sonatas for cello and piano. In the
2004– 05 season Ax contributed to an
International Emmy Award-Winning
BBC documentary commemorating
the Holocaust. In 2013, Ax’s recording
Variations received the Echo Klassik Award
for Solo Recording of the Year.
Ax is a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds
honorary doctorates of music from
Skidmore College, Yale University and
Columbia University.
Emanuel Ax last appeared with the BSO
in June 2011, performing Brahms Piano
Concerto No. 1, Marin Alsop, conductor.
About the Concert
HAVA
Lotta Wennäkoski
Born in Helsinki, Finland, February 8, 1970
“Music is the only place where we get
away from the noise that surrounds
us,” declares Finnish composer Lotta
Wennäkoski. “I’m talking specifically
about live performances, in concert
halls. Everything else is just saturated
with various kinds of background noise
from machines.”
Following in the great tradition of
Finnish composers—her teachers at
Helsinki’s revered Sibelius Academy
included the extraordinary Kaija
Saariaho—Lotta Wennäkowski is
building her own international reputation
12
OV E R T U R E / BSOmusic.org
Lotta Wennäkoski
EMANUEL AX PERFORMS BRAHMS
very busy percussionist!), Wennäkoski
mingles a rainbow of colors, noise effects
and dramatically placed silences in Hava.
Author of Inventing Finnish Music Kimmo
Korhonen expresses it beautifully: “The
scherzo character is apparent particularly
in the first half of the piece, with lively
rippling figures.…The flurrying gestures
and sparkling textures stemmed from
‘an idea of falling, like leaves floating to
the ground.’ Toward the end, the music
decelerates into calmer…moments, fragile
as glass—until a sudden moment of
‘alertness’ concludes the piece.”
Instrumentation: Two flutes including piccolo
and alto flute, two oboes, clarinet, bass clarinet,
as a composer who revels in imaginative
colors and stunningly original evocations
of emotional moods. The renowned
composer Esa-Pekka Salonen has
commissioned an orchestral work from
her, and her recent Flounce was premiered
in 2017 at London’s legendary Last Night
at the Proms.
“The genesis of my music can proceed
in many ways,” Wennäkowski comments.
“But there has to be an all-encompassing
idea, one that will generate a name, a
sound and perhaps even harmonies. I am
inspired not just by music for its own sake;
I like to take impulses from the outside
world, too.” Often, she knows what the
title of a new work will be, even before she
has written it.
A major source of inspiration is
literature, especially contemporary
poetry. “I envy poets,” she says. “When
I am in my studio, I sometimes open up
a book of poems and simply marvel at
the silence in which these perfect words
exist on the page.”
For her Hava, Wennäkoski wanted
to explore how music could illuminate
a topic or subject “like a novel does,
in contrasting lighting and using a
language of its own.” She also wanted to
create a “fast texture piece.” The word
“hava” means “snow” in Hungarian (she
also studied in Budapest), but she was
thinking here more of the Finnish word
meaning “rustling” or “becoming alert.”
Creating maximum color with a
smallish chamber orchestra (but with a
two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets,
percussion and strings.
SYMPHONY NO. 6 IN C MAJOR
Franz Schubert
Born in Vienna, Austria, January 31, 1797;
died in Vienna, Austria, November 19, 1828
Schubert’s Sixth Symphony is often
referred to now as the “Little C Major”
to distinguish it from his imposing last
symphony, No. 9, the “Great C Major.”
But certainly the composer didn’t think of
it as “little” in any way when he completed
it in February 1818. In fact, he wrote
“Grand Symphony” at the top of the score
and intended it to be a symphony on a
more ambitious and expansive scale than
his first five.
Then 21, Schubert was in an awkward
transitional stage between adolescence
and adulthood. After several months
living at the home of his well-to-do
friend Franz von Schober and tasting
the heady freedom of being a full-time
composer, he was now back in his father’s
house, teaching the 3 Rs to the young
children enrolled in the Schubert family
grammar school. His composing had
to be confined to after-school hours on
evenings and Sundays.
Both Beethoven and Rossini are
godfathers to the Sixth—a very strange
pairing because Beethoven detested
Rossini’s wildly popular operas as falling
below the high moral purpose he believed