Concert Series I
September 2011
Friday, September 23, SOU Recital Hall, Ashland, 7:30
pm
Saturday, September 24, Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater, Medford,
7:30 pm
Sunday, September 25, GPHS Performing Arts Center,Grants Pass, 3 pm
Jeffrey
Biegel,
piano Barber - Essay No. 1
Liszt - Piano Concerto No. 1
Haydn - Symphony No. 45, "Farewell
Symphony"
Emerson - Piano Concerto
All audience members are invited to a free pre-concert talk by Music Director Martin Majkut one hour before each performance.
Season Sponsor
Jim Collier
Concert I Sponsor
Anne C. Diller
Soloist Sponsors
Paul & Rebecca Smith
Music Sponsors
Colette & Jack Agresti
Students tickets $5. Find out more...
Program Notes
Jeffrey Biegel, piano
While he was still a student at The Juilllard School, pianist Jeffrey Biegel received high compliments from the highest of sources: Leonard Bernstein wrote, “[He] played some fantastic Liszt the other night ... [he] is a splendid musician and a brilliant performer.”
The rich body of work Mr. Biegel has created since confirms this early opinion. Totally engaged with music–all music–he has mastered the art of crossover, performing widely from the classical repertoire, while at the same time encouraging, commissioning, and collaborating with contemporary pop, rock, and classical artists.
Mr. Biegel first performed with the Rogue Valley Symphony in 1997 when he hopped a plane at the last possible moment to fill in for a guest artist who had come down with pneumonia. The audience loved the Rachmaninoff concerto he played and he returned in 1999 to perform another. In 2000 he included the Rogue Valley Symphony in the consortium of orchestras he organized for the composition and premieres of Ellen Taafe Zwillich’s Millenium Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. He has also brought us virtuoso performances of LeRoy Anderson’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Duke Ellington’s New World a-Comin’, and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. For this concert series he plays a pair of pyrotechnic concertos by composers whose lives are separated by two hundred years, Romantic Franz Liszt and Contemporary Keith Emerson.
Elsewhere this season Mr. Biegel will introduce his adaptation of pop star Neil Sedaka’s Manhattan Intermezzo for Piano and Orchestra. Last season he performed two world premieres, Mirrors for Piano and Orchestra by Richard Danielpour and Prometheus for Piano, Ochestra and Chorus by William Bolcom. In 2006 Lowell Liebermann composed his Piano Concerot No. 3 exclusively for Mr. Biegel, who introduced it nationwide.
He has just formed Trio 21 with violinist Kinga Augustyn and cellist Robert DeMaine, and Naxos will record their inaugural performance of a new work written for them by Kenneth Fuchs. Other recent recordings by Mr. Biegel include Bach on the Steinway, a piano adaptation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and the complete piano sonatas of Mozart.
He was unable to hear or speak until he was three, when surgery corrected the condition. Mr. Biegel believes that hearing only vibrations in his formative years, what he calls a “reverse Beethoven phenomenon,” may explain his life in music. His rich website includes video performances and an original short story.
Samuel Barber – United States, 1910-1987
First Essay for Orchestra, Op. 12 (1937)
His own popularity sometimes made Samuel Barber cringe; he often referred to himself as “a living dead” composer because his music joined the pantheon of tried-and-true favorites so smoothly that its newness was barely noticed. People immediately felt at home with his sound.
He began his first opera at the age of nine, and at fourteen enrolled in the brand new Curtis Institute in Philadelphia to study piano, composition, and conducting. There he met Gian-Carlo Menotti, with whom he would enjoy a long, profound personal and professional relationship. Their home became “the mecca of the art and intellectual world of Europe and America; to it came a legion of the great, the famous, the talented, and the rich ... anyone who had something to offer that was new, different, and original.”
Barber found his musical identity early, while he was still at Curtis. He went on to win the Prix de Rome and two Pulitzers. His favorite medium was vocal, but his most famous piece was Adagio for Strings. From the moment Toscanini premiered it, the commissions flowed in.
Barber said he created the essay form as something of a musical “argument” in which he could create an entire movement from a single thought, or melody. Essayist Paul Wittke says he was “a supersophisticate, imperious, ironic, one who did not suffer fools gladly ... but his heart was large, his wit hid his sensitivity, his melancholy was his response to the sadness of the world.” And that is what shows in his music, a very large heart in a sometimes very sad world.
Franz Liszt -- Hungary, 1811-1886
Piano Concerto No.1, E-flat Major (1849)
Liszt’s father was an official on the Esterhazy estate, the elaborate country home of the Hungarian princes who for several centuries patronized music on a scale we can scarcely imagine today. A “capable cellist” who played for both Beethoven and Haydn, he was his son’s first music teacher and was able to acquire backing from a group of court noblemen for Franz to tour Europe. By twelve the boy was a recognized concert pianist. By sixteen he was exhausted and talked of joining the church. When his father died that year, however, he decided to make Paris his headquarters and continue playing the piano.
In Paris he met the three men whose influence would propel him to superstardom. From Berlioz he learned about color in music and the power of big, visionary ideas. From Chopin he learned that music could be poetry. From Paganini he learned how to dazzle an audience.
And dazzle he did. Ladies swooned; gentlemen gasped. He quickly became one of the most famous pianists of all time, an influential composer, and a generous teacher. He was a man of many contradictions. His passions for religion and for married ladies persisted side by side for life. He was cynical, worldly, elegant, and liked to live well, but he taught more than four hundred piano students without accepting one penny of tuition. His intellect was restless, always in search of the new. The symphonic poem and solo recital were both his ideas. His stage persona was flamboyant, his technique pyrotechnic. He wanted to make his piano sound like a whole orchestra.
He wrote the first draft of Piano Concerto No. 1 in the early 1830s but fiddled with it until 1855 when he finally played the premiere with Berlioz conducting. The concerto has four recognizable sections, or movements, which play through without pause.
Josef Haydn -- Austria, 1732-1809
Symphony No. 45, F-sharp Minor, “Farewell” (1772)
Haydn wrote his Symphony No. 45 at Esterhazy thirty-nine years before Liszt was born. In 1772 he was in the midst of his long tenure as music director for the Hungarian court. It was more than a full-time job. As a contemporary account put it, “Every day at six o’clock there is a performance of an Italian opera seria or buffa or of a German comedy, always attended by the Prince ... When the music begins, its touching delicacy, the strength and force of the instruments penetrate the soul, for the great composer, Herr Haydn himself, is conducting.” In addition to these daily conducting chores, Haydn was also expected to write new symphonies, oratorios, operas, and chamber works to celebrate the arrival of distinguished guests. Esterhazy was a popular entertainment playground for the aristocracy of all Europe, so the need for festive new music was continuous
Haydn had at his disposal a large number of musicians for his day–eight or nine violins, two violas, one or two cellos, two string basses, two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, and percussion including kettledrums. Clarinets were added in 1776. Only Haydn was allowed to bring his family with him to Esterhazy. The rest of the men had to batch it for the season. Thus their frustration when the court lingered too long in the country, and thus the origin of the “Farewell” story--please let us go home.
Keith Emerson – England, 1944-
Piano Concerto (1977)
As Liszt tried to make his piano sound like a whole orchestra, Keith Emerson has tried to extract every last nuance of sound from his instruments. An extraordinary artist for any era, he is a rock ‘n roll legend in his own lifetime. In 1970 he founded the British supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP). Singly and together, in various combinations, its members have gone on to influence the sound of contemporary music ever since.
Classically trained, he and his cohorts have often orchestrated their shows with a full panoply of conventional instruments, and just as often, have based their pieces on the classics. They achieved instant fame with their debut at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, when they tore into a furious rock adaptation of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Their first single, Lucky Man, ended with a startling new sound, a lead solo from the Moog synthesizer. From then on Emerson was called the “God of Moog.”
In stage shows during ELPs’s heyday, Emerson inflicted what looked like cruel and unusual punishment on his keyboards, hacking at them or gyrating them (and himself) on giant turnwheels as he played. His motive was part outrageous showmanship and part experiment. What would happen to the sound? Is there a new sound to be found?
Emerson composed his Piano Concerto in 1977 and toured it with a hand-picked orchestra. Since then he has written scores for several movies, here and in Japan. In 2010 he received the prestigious Frankfurt Music Prize from the City of Frankfurt.
Soloist Jeffrey Biegel has long championed Emerson’s concerto, and the two have become close friends. Mr. Biegel tells us: “... Keith wrote the first two movements, and then there was a horrific fire which burned down the studio in which he wrote the concerto. He had to re-write the first two movements, and then, in his excitement over what had happened, he wrote the intensely exciting third movement. Most interesting is that the opening is atonal, using the twelve-tone row which is imitated throughout the orchestra. When the piano enters, that idea becomes melodic and quite lovely. There are moments which sound inspired by Elgar, Scriabin, Ginastera, Copland. Emerson provides a terrific solo piano cadenza with several jazz sections. The short second movement opens with a Gaelic style theme, followed by the piano entry in a dark and searching tone. It is almost like a Chopin 'Nocturne'! The piano then re-iterates the main theme. The finale is a tour-de-force and very rhythmically exciting along with jazz harmonies throughout.”
This last March, on the day the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, Emerson wrote a brief and lovely piano solo, dedicated to the people of Japan. Hear it on his website, www.keithemerson.com.
Program notes by Nancy Golden