Overture Magazine 2019-20 BSO_Overture_Nov_Dec | Page 14

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