Program Notes: Jan Vogler Plays with the Seattle Symphony

SAMUEL BARBER 
Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5 
BORN: March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania 
DIED: January 23, 1981, in New York City 
WORK COMPOSED: 1931 
WORLD PREMIERE: August 30, 1933, with the Philadelphia Orchestra 

What to Listen For:  

• The busy energy of the opening music that captures the spirit of Sheridan’s satirical play and the contrasting lyricism of the second theme in the oboe.  

• The rapid changes in tempo and dynamics throughout this short but brilliant tour de force, Barber’s first work for full orchestra.  

Samuel Barber was born on the outskirts of Philadelphia to a distinguished family that was steeped in music: his aunt was a famous contralto who sung at the Metropolitan Opera and his uncle was a prolific composer of American art songs. Under such influence, Barber began writing music at the age of 7 and entered the youth program at the Curtis Institute of Music when he was 14. He remained at Curtis for college, where he met the Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti. The two became lifelong companions and eventually bought a house together outside of New York City, naming the residence Capricorn. For many years, the home served as a retreat where Barber composed the majority of his work and where the duo hosted legendary gatherings for celebrities and artists of the day.  

The Overture to The School for Scandal was Barber’s first work for full orchestra, written while he was still a student at Curtis. An avid reader, he was inspired by the 18th-century Irish poet and satirist Richard Sheridan, whose play The School for Scandal was premiered in 1777. The play was an immediate hit, with multiple film adaptations and new productions being mounted to this day. The rollicking comedy of manners pokes fun at the idly rich, with characters like Lady Sneerwell, the Teazels, Snake and Sir Backbite caught in a web of gossip and plotting of their own making. Unlike a typical overture that serves as an introduction to a large-scale work, this piece was written to stand alone as a musical reflection of the play’s spirit.  

Barber’s success in capturing the comedic essence of Sheridan’s play is evident from the first measures as the orchestra breaks out into a jeering fanfare and quickly moves to a busy, scampering theme that is full of intrigue. The second theme is a sweet melody first heard in the oboe that represents the innocent character of Maria, a virtuous heiress. The two themes are then developed, gathering into a climax of swirling sound and impetuous brass chords before the recapitulation restates each theme and scurries to a noisy finish.

NICO MUHLY, SVEN HELBIG & ZHOU LONG 
Three Continents Cello Concerto 
BORN: 1981 (Muhly), 1968 (Helbig), 1953 (Zhou) 
WORK COMPOSED: 2019 
WORLD PREMIERE: May 18, 2019, in Dresden, Jan Vogler, soloist 

What to Listen For:  

• How the three distinct voices within each movement come together to form a broader theme of cross-cultural globalization. 

How the three distinct voices within each movement come together to form a broader theme of cross-cultural globalization. 

Three Continents Cello Concerto is a multicultural endeavor that cuts across borders to bring together three composers, each with a unique background and musical style, and a soloist who serves as the unifying voice between the contrasting movements. 

The first movement, Cello Cycles, is by American composer Nico Muhly, who has received commissions from the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is a sought-after collaborator for choreographers, filmmakers and pop artists. The opening measures leap into action as though a dormant organism has burst to life. From there, the cello and orchestra unfurl in a continuous motion that glimmers with pulsing energy.  

The second movement belongs to German composer Sven Helbig and focuses on the cello’s lyricism and deep emotional capacity. Helbig is a multi-instrumentalist and self-taught composer who regularly works with British pop icons Pet Shop Boys. His Aria, however, is rooted in classical elements of the late Romantic era, with sweeping gestures and rich melodies that soar above the orchestral texture.  

Beijing-born Zhou Long came of age during China’s Cultural Revolution and was sent to work on a rural state farm, where the bleak landscape made a profound and lasting impression on the young composer. His pioneering style brings idiomatic sounds of ancient Chinese music traditions to Western instruments and pushes the boundaries between musical elements of the East and West. His movement, Tipsy Poet, is based on an ancient Chinese poem and is a striking departure from the previous movement in its atonality and driving rhythms.  

Within the creativity and storytelling of each composer’s voice, cellist Jan Vogler, who commissioned the concerto with the Dresden Music Festival and performs the U.S. premiere during these Seattle concerts, hopes that listeners will be “inspired by the crossroads of Europe, America and Asia.”  

BÉLA BARTÓK 
Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116, BB 123 
BORN: March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary  
DIED: September 26, 1945, New York City 
WORK COMPOSED: 1943 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 1, 1944, with Boston Symphony Orchestra 

What to Listen For:  

• Bartók’s lifelong research of Hungarian folk music and rhythms are absorbed into a classical framework of brilliant orchestration, culminating in his most popular work.  

• The jocular duets of the second movement, the harsh interruption in the fourth and the complex fugue in the finale are just a few of the many highlights from this imaginative and virtuosic work. 

Bela Bartók’s innate musical talent was evident early in life: before he could speak in complete sentences, he could pick out different rhythms that his mother, a piano teacher, would play for him. Though he studied the classics — his early compositions were heavily influenced by Strauss and Brahms — his true style emerged alongside his growing interest in the traditional folk songs of his country. National pride in the cultural heritage of Hungary was in the air, and in 1908, Bartók set off for the countryside with his friend and fellow student at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, Zoltán Kodály, to record and document songs from the remote villages in Hungary, Romania and Transylvania. Using a cylinder phonograph, the pair of pioneering ethnomusicologists collected around 14,000 musical archives over the course of 30 years, a project that inevitably seeped into Bartók’s original compositions and impacted the course of modern music.  

In 1940, with Hitler’s Nazi regime taking hold of Hungary, Bartók and his wife, Ditta, fled to the U.S. and settled in New York City. Bartók struggled to gain a foothold in American musical life — his music was deemed difficult and hard to understand — and suffered financially and physically, growing increasingly despondent from undiagnosed leukemia. In an effort to buoy the composer’s spirit during a hospital stay in 1943, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky, visited Bartók and commissioned a work from him. Unaware of his diagnosis, the composer regained strength and, in a fit of inspiration, produced his Concerto for Orchestra. It was finished within two months while Bartók was on retreat at a health resort in upstate New York.  

The overarching structure of the Concerto resembles a palindrome, with the heart being the central Elegia, surrounded on either side by shorter playful movements, followed by the imposing and dramatic first and fifth movements. As Bartók himself described it, “the general mood of the work represents — apart from the jesting second movement — a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.” His highlighting of the different instrument groups throughout the work harkens back to the baroque concerto grosso tradition, a style that featured musical ideas passing between small groups of soloists and the larger orchestra. Bartók also blends his reverence for folk idioms and rhythms into his thorough understanding of classical symphonic forms to create a work of dazzling orchestration that came to symbolize the pinnacle of his career.  

The work opens mysteriously with haunting low strings and wispy woodwind fragments that fade into nothing. The energy slowly builds, bursting forth in an impassioned theme in the strings. Lilting melodies in the oboe and clarinet follow, with brass fanfares adding to the drama.  

The title of the second movement translates to “Game of Pairs.” Woodwind and brass duos take turns in the spotlight, playing jaunty melodies in varying intervals apart from each other and accompanied by the snare drum.  

The Elegia evokes atmospheric night sounds before the yearning folk recitative breaks through the haze with a fierce intensity. The gentle folk dance of the Intermezzo interrotto, featuring off-kilter rhythms, is rudely interrupted by a mocking reference to the “invasion” theme of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony followed by cackling brass and woodwinds and a comical trombone glissando.  

The raucous Finale whips into a frenzy of perpetual motion and virtuosic optimism. The flurries subside in a moment of calm before the folk-like strings and overlapping trumpets crescendo to a second climax that ends abruptly in a gentle harp solo. An intricately complex fugue leads to an exuberant conclusion of this vividly imagined and transcendent work.  

All notes by Catherine Case © 2023