CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
San Francisco Symphony

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 8:00 PM

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
Christian Tetzlaff, Violin

VICTOR KISSINE Post-scriptum (NY Premiere)
TCHAIKOVSKY Violin Concerto
RAVEL Valses nobles et sentimentales
LISZT Tasso: lamento e trionfo

Sponsored by Deloitte LLP

Program Notes:

VICTOR KISSINE (b. 1953)
Post-scriptum

Victor Kissine’s music is part of a tradition of Russian expressionism that evolved out of Dmitri Shostakovich by way of such figures as Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Sofia Gubaidulina—composers whose works, however modern, maintain a core of Romantic expressiveness. Kissine’s music often displays an edgy, quivering quality, and it derives important aspects of its character from minute details of sound. At heart, his music seems infused by a cool objectivity born of ultra-precise notation—a meticulously defined text from which an interpreter may build. The Belgian musicologist Frans C. Lemaire has written: “Many experiences and emotions—friendship, admiration and affinity—lie beneath the surface of this reticent musical language, which prefers soft murmurings to loud pronouncements, and closely restricts the development of the melodic material … This music from the end of the 20th century does not celebrate vain and noisy human activity, but seeks to recapture a kind of lost harmony which—far removed from the real world—is borne up by the mysterious voices of silence.” One might call Kissine a hyper-refined composer; his music often makes its points through minuscule gestures, quiet utterances, and motifs deconstructed into evanescence—indeed, into quietude itself. “Silence,” says Kissine, “doesn’t stop the music. It’s part of the music. It’s the flip-side of sound. Sound without silence wouldn’t exist. Silence is a very important element of expression, equivalent to timbre, to duration … There are five sonic parameters, even if we often cite only four: duration, pitch level, intensity, and timbre. It is entirely legitimate to consider silence to be the fifth.”

The composer has provided this comment about Post-scriptum:

From a formal point of view, this piece is a variation on the theme of Ives’s The Unanswered Question. What we actually hear is a theme constructed out of a series of five sounds. But one can say that there are, in fact, six sounds, because every time the question is repeated, the last sound changes, forming with the preceding one an interval of either a minor or a major third. The idea, the subject, the form, the tonal order, and the orchestration of my Post-scriptum all stem precisely from this alternating sequence.

The work is dedicated to Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.

—James M. Keller



PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840–1893)
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35

By 1877, Tchaikovsky stood at the forefront of his generation of Russian composers thanks to such works as his first three symphonies, his Shakespearean symphonic poems Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, his Dante-inspired tone poem Francesca da Rimini, his Piano Concerto No. 1, his Variations on a Rococo Theme (for cello and orchestra), his ballet Swan Lake, and his three string quartets. That year, two things occurred that had a decisive influence on the direction his path would take. Both were fraught with problems.

The first was the consolidation of his relationship with Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck. Musically adept, immensely wealthy (thanks to the commercial success of her recently deceased husband, an engineer from Riga), and maternally productive (with 18 children to her credit), she had positioned herself in Moscow society as a patron of the arts and, specifically, as a collector of musicians. She had recently added to her entourage the alluring young violinist Yosif Yosifovich Kotek, a former pupil and sometime bedmate of Tchaikovsky’s. Using Kotek as an emissary, she made contact with Tchaikovsky, and in February 1877 she proposed to support him—insisting, however, that they must never meet in person. For the next 13 years they exchanged a flood of effusive correspondence, and she deposited 500 rubles in Tchaikovsky’s bank account every month, an act of benefaction that freed him up significantly to pursue his artistic goals without having to undertake “work for hire” to pay the bills.

Then a second bizarre thing happened. Tchaikovsky got married, quite on the spur of the moment. The explanation for this rash act is open to a broad range of speculation and interpretation. Perhaps it had to do with anxiety about his quite overt homosexuality; perhaps it was an exploit of filial devotion to an 81-year-old father who viewed marriage as the principal goal of a man’s life. Whatever the reason, Tchaikovsky fled in panic two weeks after the wedding, had a nervous breakdown, remained unconscious for two weeks, and woke up to a life that would not henceforth include his wife, though they were never divorced.

As part of his recovery, he took a trip to Switzerland with young Kotek at the outset of 1878. They played through a lot of music together, including Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, and it was that work that inspired Tchaikovsky to write a violin concerto himself. He composed it in a heat of inspiration, with Kotek offering technical advice. When Tchaikovsky sent the score to his patron von Meck, she wrote back that she didn’t like it; the composer defended his piece, although he did decide on his own to replace his original slow movement. Further objections came from the violinist Leopold Auer, to whom Tchaikovsky wanted to entrust the premiere: He declared it unplayable. The honor of the premiere instead went to Adolph Brodsky, who worked on the concerto for more than two years before he dared to play it, and for this he was rewarded with the concerto’s official dedication.

Another famous figure who failed to appreciate this concerto at first (and in this case he remained unrepentant) was the much-feared critic Eduard Hanslick. His review of the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, which appeared in Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse on December 5, 1881, concludes with one of the most famous denunciations in the history of music criticism:

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky is surely not an ordinary talent, but rather an inflated one, with a genius-obsession without discrimination or taste. Such is also his latest, long, and pretentious Violin Concerto. For a while it moves soberly, musically, and not without spirit. But soon vulgarity gains the upper hand and asserts itself to the end of the first movement. The violin is no longer played; it is pulled, torn, drubbed. The Adagio [sic] is again on its best behavior, to pacify and to win us over. But it soon breaks off to make way for a finale that transfers us to a brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian holiday. We see plainly the savage, vulgar faces, we hear the curses, we smell the booze. Friedrich Visser once observed, speaking of obscene pictures, that they stink to the eye. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.

Not everyone agreed, and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto wasted little time staking a place in the repertory. It is an overwhelmingly lyrical work that rarely ventures into the stormy outbursts that often characterize his symphonic pieces. The first movement, by turns balletically graceful and comparatively urgent, makes difficult technical demands, but the fireworks generally sparkle as counterpoint to the overall gentility. The slow movement is elegiac but not depressive, and the Finale emerges without a break, serving up a dazzling array of pyrotechnics.

—James. M. Keller

A different form of this note appeared in the programs of the New York Philharmonic, and is used with permission. © New York Philharmonic



MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)
Valses nobles et sentimentales

The title of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales comes from Schubert, who has a set of Valses nobles of uncertain dates and another of Valses sentimentales from 1823 or 1824. Quotation, allusion, and masks are never far away in the work of Ravel. He also loved dance music of all kinds—courtly and popular, homely and exotic, ancient and modern. About waltzes he once wrote to a friend, “You know of my deep sympathy for these wonderful rhythms and that I value the joie de vivre expressed by the dance far more deeply than Franckian puritanism.” The Valses nobles et sentimentales had their premiere in 1911 at a concert of the newly founded Société musicale indépendante. All the pieces were presented anonymously, the audience being invited to guess the composers. The guessing did not go well, though Ravel’s waltzes were among the few pieces correctly attributed (in spite of heavy voting for Satie and Kodály). It is music of sensuous delight and of nostalgia. Harmony and texture (both in the piano version and in the 1912 orchestration) are new, and they draw from Debussy the comment that Ravel’s ear “was the finest ever to have existed”; on the other hand, shape and a certain muted sweetness of feeling are as Schubertian as the title.

—Michael Steinberg



FRANZ LISZT (1811–1886)
Tasso: lamento e trionfo (Tasso: Lament and Triumph)

Liszt’s Tasso piece began as a prelude to a stage work—a five-act, five-character verse play that had premiered to mixed reviews in 1807, but whose reputation solidified in ensuing years. Derived from a pair of biographies about the 16th-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, its theme is the relationship between art and state, and particularly the precarious thread that connects creative artists to their means of support.

It was a good story for Romantic sensibilities. Goethe made free with Tasso’s life story, conflating various biographical episodes. The basic trajectory of his plot is that Tasso is adored by the Este nobles for his achievement with La Gerusalemme liberata; he draws a sword against a visiting dignitary who behaves rudely toward him, for which infraction he is arrested and detained; he accordingly views himself as unappreciated and persecuted; he realizes he has been discarded by the Ferrarese Court; and, aware of the precarious state of his career and livelihood, he imagines that his gifts may still earn him further glory.

In 1854, Liszt expanded a previous work on Tasso, his Ouvertüre de Tasso von Goethe, most noticeably by composing an entirely new section to insert in the middle. By the time the composer published it two years later, he had also crafted a lengthy prefatory text explaining the work’s program. There he revealed that his inspiration was not just Goethe’s play, but also a poem by Byron (“The Lament of Tasso”)—in fact, more the latter than the former. Liszt wrote:

Lamento e Trionfo: These are the two great contrasts in the destiny of poets, of whom it has been truly said that if fate curses them during life, blessing never fails them after death. In order to give to this idea not only the authority but also the splendor of reality, I have endeavored to borrow even its form from fact; and for this purpose have taken, as the theme of this musical poem, the melody to which, 300 years after the poet’s death, we have heard the gondoliers of Venice sing upon her waters the opening lines of his Jerusalem:

Canto l’armi pietose e’l Capitano,
Che’l gran Sepulcro libro di Cristo!

I sing the sacred armies, and their leader,
That the great sepulcher of Christ did free!

This melody is in itself plaintive, slow, and mournfully monotonous, but the gondoliers give it quite a special character by dragging certain notes and holding out their voices, which, heard from a distance, produce an effect similar to that of rays of light reflected from the ripple of the waves. This song had already so powerfully impressed me, that when the subject of Tasso was suggested to me for musical illustration, I could not but take for the text of my thoughts this enduring homage rendered by his nation to a genius of whom the court of Ferrara had proved itself unworthy. The Venetian melody breathes so gnawing a melancholy, so irremediable a sadness, that a mere reproduction of it seems sufficient to reveal the secret of Tasso’s sad emotions.

It’s not entirely clear how Tasso’s opening couplet scanned vis-à-vis Liszt’s opening citation of the gondoliers’ song; unfortunately, he stops short of inscribing the poet’s text above the instrumental line, as he would later do with verses from the Inferno in his Dante Symphony. But reading Liszt’s preface, it’s impossible to miss the importance he conferred on that theme. In fact, this melody dominates much of the 20 minutes that ensue, often altered through the Lisztian technique of thematic transformation but nonetheless discernable even in its new robes. As the piece finally stands, it is indeed anchored by the ideas of Lament and Triumph. The Byron-inspired lament of the opening section (Tasso in prison mourning his sad state) does eventually lead to pounding, emphatic Triumph (denoting the Pope’s recognition of Tasso’s achievements), but it arrives there via a middle section (Liszt marks it quasi Menuetto—“sort of like a minuet”) that portrays the happy times when the poet enjoyed the good graces of the court of Ferrara.

—James M. Keller

More Information:

Liszt paints sorrow and triumph in his symphonic poem about the poet Torquato Tasso, a 16th-century writer of epic verse. Tchaikovsky, too, expresses his sorrows and triumphs in this popular concerto. Victor Kissine is an underground composing hero from the repressive years of the Soviet Union who now makes him home in Belgium. And Ravel waltzes with a blend of enigmatic elegance and wistfulness.

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director and Conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas

Michael Tilson Thomas became the San Francisco Symphony’s Music Director in September 1995. A Los Angeles native, he studied piano with John Crown and composition and conducting with Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California. At age 19, he became music director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, and worked with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Copland on premieres of their compositions at the famed Monday Evening Concerts. He was pianist and conductor for master classes given by Piatigorsky and Heifetz and, as a student of Friedelind Wagner, an assistant conductor at Bayreuth. In 1969, at age 24, Mr. Tilson Thomas won the Koussevitzky Prize and was appointed assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ten days later, he came to international recognition, replacing music director William Steinberg in mid-concert at Lincoln Center. He went on to become the BSO’s associate conductor, then principal guest conductor; in addition, he has served as chief conductor and director of the Ojai Festival, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has toured the world with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he became principal conductor in 1988 and now serves as Principal Guest Conductor. Until 2000, he was co-artistic director of the Pacific Music Festival, and he continues as Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, which he founded in 1987. His compositions include From the Diary of Anne Frank, Shówa/Shoáh, Poems of Emily Dickinson, Urban Legend, Island Music, and Notturno.

Mr. Tilson Thomas’s recordings have won numerous awards, including Grammy Awards for SFS recordings of Mahler’s symphonies Nos. 3, 6, 7, and 8. In 2004, he and the SFS launched Keeping Score on PBS. Mr. Tilson Thomas’s honors include Columbia University’s Ditson Award for services to American music, the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction, and the President’s Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was named one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report, and was recently awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.


San Francisco Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony gave its first concerts in 1911, and has grown in acclaim under a succession of music directors: Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Basil Cameron, Issay Dobrowen, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and, since 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas. The SFS has won such recording awards as France’s Grand Prix du Disque and Britain’s Gramophone Award, and the Mahler cycle inaugurated in 2001 on the SFS’s own label has been honored with numerous Grammy Awards, including those for Best Classical Album (Mahler’s Third, Seventh, and Eighth symphonies), Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Classical Album (Mahler’s Eighth Symphony), and Best Orchestral Performance (Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies). A series of earlier recordings by Mr. Tilson Thomas and the orchestra for RCA Red Seal also won praise, and their collection of Stravinsky ballets for RCA (Le Sacre du printemps, The Firebird, and Perséphone) received three Grammys. Some of the most important conductors of the past and recent years have been guests on the SFS podium, among them Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, and Sir Georg Solti, and among the composers who have led the orchestra are Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and John Adams. The SFS Youth Orchestra, founded in 1980, has become known around the world, as has the SFS Chorus, heard on recordings and on the soundtracks of such films as Amadeus and Godfather III. Adventures in Music, the longest running education program among US orchestras, brings music to children in grades one through five in San Francisco’s public schools. SFS radio broadcasts, the first in the nation to feature symphonic music when they began in 1926, today carry the orchestra’s concerts across the country. In a multimedia program designed to make classical music accessible to all, the SFS has launched the second season of Keeping Score on PBS, DVD, keepingscore.org, and radio (The MTT Files). San Francisco Symphony recordings are available at sfsymphony.org/store.

Christian Tetzlaff, Violin
Christian Tetzlaff

Born in Hamburg in 1966, Christian Tetzlaff began playing the violin and piano at age six. At 14, just after making his concert debut performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto, he began intensive study on the violin with Uwe-Martin Haiberg at the conservatory in Lübeck. He came to the US in 1985 to work with Walter Levine at the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music, and he spent two summers at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont. Mr. Tetzlaff made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 1991, performing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. His most recent appearance with the SFS was in 2007, when he performed the Brahms Violin Concerto.

During the 2009–2010 season, Mr. Tetzlaff appears with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Chicago, Saint Louis, and Indianapolis symphonies. He makes his debut with the Montreal Symphony, and also performs all six of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas and partitas at Orchestra Hall in Chicago and at the 92nd Street Y. Mr. Tetzlaff’s recordings for Virgin Classics include concertos by Haydn and Bartók; an album of 20th-century sonatas by Janáček, Debussy, Ravel, and Nielsen with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes; a recording of Mozart’s complete works for violin and orchestra, in which he both performs as soloist and conducts the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie; a Grammy-nominated album of Bartók’s Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 with Leif Ove Andsnes as well as Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin; and a Diapason d’Or–winning recording of the complete works for violin and orchestra of Sibelius with the Danish National Radio Orchestra. Other recordings include the Brahms sonatas for piano and violin with Lars Vogt (EMI Classics) and the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Tonhalle Orchester (Arte Nova). Mr. Tetzlaff’s most recent releases are the Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin (Musical Heritage and Haenssler) and a recording of the Brahms and Joachim violin concertos with the Danish Radio Orchestra (Virgin Classics). In 2005, Mr. Tetzlaff was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America. He plays an instrument by Peter Greiner, modeled after a Guarnerius del Gesù.