WSO ~ Premier Classics

Carl Maria von Weber
Overture & March from Turandot

Tan Dun
Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Overture from Magic Flute, K. 260

Saturday, February 9, 2008
8:00 p.m.
Chrysler Theatre
Instrumentally Speaking, pre-concert talk, inside the Chrysler Theatre
at 7:00 p.m.

Tickets: $56-$13

John Morris Russell, Conductor
Liu Fang, Pipa

Overture & March from Turandot, J. 75
Carl Maria von Weber
B. November 18, 1786, Eutin, Holstein, Germany
D. June 5, 1826, London

Premiered by the composer during the 1809 performance of the play Turandot in Stutgart, Germany.
(approx. 6 minutes).

By Dr. Ed Kovarik
These movements are part of the music that Weber wrote in 1809 for a production of Friedrich Schiller’s play Turandot (about a hard-hearted Chinese princess) which was later to be the source for Puccini’s opera of the same name.

The music was not entirely new: the main theme derives from an “Overtura chinesa” (Chinese overture) that Weber originally created some five years earlier, using a melody labelled “air chinois” that he found in Rousseau’s Dictionaire de musique. To the reworked overture Weber added six short pieces of incidental music, ending with the March, all based to some extent on the same exotic theme. This theme will be familiar to modern audiences as the source for Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on a theme of Carl Maria von Weber. For a concert performance of the overture in 1816, Weber provided the following brief note: “Drums and pipes introduce the strange, bizarre melody, which is then taken up by the orchestra and presented in various forms.”

Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa
Tan Dun
B. August 18, 1957, Simao, Changsha in the Hunan province of China
Composed in 1999 (approx. 20 minutes).

From G. Schirmer, Inc.
The conceptual and multifaceted composer/conductor Tan Dun has made an indelible mark on the world’s music scene with a creative repertoire that spans the boundaries of classical, multimedia, Eastern and Western musical systems. A winner of today’s most prestigious honors — the Grawemeyer Award for classical composition, Grammy Award, Academy Award, and Musical America’s “Composer of The Year” — Tan Dun’s music has been played throughout the world by the leading orchestras, opera houses, international festivals, and on radio and television.

Central to his body of work, Tan Dun has composed distinct series of works which reflect his individual compositional concepts and personal ideas. Among them are the Orchestral Theatre Series, bringing his childhood memories of shamanistic ritual into symphonic performances; Organic Music, consisting of works which incorporate elements from the natural world, such as the Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra, commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic, and Paper Concerto for Paper Instruments and Orchestra for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen for the openings of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in October 2003; and Concerto Multimedia, including the symbolic work The Map: Concerto for Cello, Video and Orchestra premiered by Boston Symphony Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma with the composer conducting. Other major and influential works are: Water Passion after St. Matthew, for the Internationale Bachakadamie in Stuttgart, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death; Eight Memories in Watercolor, performed internationally by pianist Lang Lang; the Oscar Award-winning original score for Ang Lee’s film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Ghost Opera, toured worldwide by the Kronos Quartet.

Based in New York, Tan Dun was born in Simao, China. Having served as a rice-planter and performer of Peking opera during the Cultural Revolution, he later studied at Beijing’s Central Conservatory. He holds a doctoral degree in musical arts from Columbia University of New York. Among the many international honors he has received, Tan Dun was elected by Toru Takemitsu for the Glenn Gould Prize in Music Communication, and by Hans Werner Henze for the Munich International Music Theatre Award. Tan Dun was the music director of the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival in 1999 and artistic director of the London
Barbican Centre’s international festival in 2000. Currently, he is the music director of a multimedia festival with the Orchestre de la Radio Flamande.

In Tan Dun’s Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa, a giddy merging of traditions and a leapfrogging through music history, cultural integration is effortless. The pipa may be exotic in Western music, but it is no longer alien. No single work exemplifies his range, which extends from uncompromising experimentalism to populism. The Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa adapts some of the music he wrote for the experimental Ghost Opera into a more traditional concerto format. The concerto with its theatrically virtuosic solo part is winning. At its heart is a slow movement in which Bach and Chinese melody seem to make elegant love to each other, and who could resist that?

Overture from Magic Flute, K. 260
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
B. January 27, 1756, Salzburg
D. December 5, 1791, Vienna

The opera was premiered in Vienna on September 30, 1791, at the suburban Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden. Mozart conducted the orchestra, Emanuel Schikaneder (author of the libretto) played Papageno, while the role of the Queen of the Night was sung by Mozart's sister-in-law Josepha Hofer (approx. 7 minutes).

By Dr. Ed Kovarik
The Magic Flute, Mozart’s last opera, was given its premiere performance at the end of September 1791. It was an instant hit and was still running to packed houses two months later, when Mozart died of the infectious fever then raging in Vienna.

Mozart and his librettist were both Freemasons, and they filled the opera—and its Overture—with Masonic symbolism, some of it having to do with the number three: three flats in the key signature; three solemn chords at the beginning (and again in the middle).

After a slow introduction the Overture unfolds as a learned fugue, each string section entering separately; soon after this, however, the music bubbles in the best Italian manner. Thus the Overture reflects what Mozart accomplished throughout the opera, a fusion of German scholasticism and Italian vivacity, or if you prefer, of the serious and the comic—as in life itself.

Symphony no. 4, op. 60 in B-flat major
Ludwig van Beethoven
Baptized December 17, 1770, Bonn, Germany
D. March 26, 1827

The Fourth was premiered at a private concert in the Lobkowitz Palace in Vienna, in March 1807, on a program that also included the first performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto (with the composer at the keyboard) and the Coriolan Overture (approx. 20 minutes).

By Dr. Ed Kovarik
The Fourth Symphony was commissioned by one of Beethoven’s aristocratic admirers, Count Franz von Oppersdorf, probably after he had heard the Third Symphony performed privately at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz. Beethoven had already begun work on what was to be the Fifth Symphony, but he put that aside to dash off the Fourth during the summer of 1806, when he was thirty-five years old.

Less often played than its monumental neighbors, the epic Third and noble Fifth, the Fourth Symphony stands (in the words of Schumann) like “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.” Sir George Grove found in it an “unceasing and irrespressible brightness and gaity.” Bright it certainly is: one gets the impression that four years after the despair of the Heiligenstadt testament Beethoven had finally come to terms with his growing deafness; he was now determined to accept and overcome it.

The work is Greek as well: it exhibits an almost Mozartian lightness and grace—a sense of balance and repose that is never disrupted even in its (very few) passionate outbursts.

And yet the work is filled with new sounds and new ideas. The long slow introduction to the first movement surrounds the opening tonic, B-flat, with passages in remote keys a half-step above and below the tonic before settling back to the proper level (and these distant keys will play a role in the further progress of the movement). The slow movement has a second theme (clarinet solo) of exotic beauty, and the Scherzo is an object lesson in how to expand a small dance form into a large-scale symphonic movement.

The finale is all bustle and no theme (which upset Carl Maria von Weber enormously), but Beethoven proceeds to demonstrate that this bustle can produce music of substance if the composer wills it so

Liu Fang

Montreal resident Liu Fang has achieved an international reputation for her masterful and deeply spirited pipa playing. Born in 1974 in Kunming in the Chinese province of Yunnan, Liu Fang began studying the pipa at the age of six and gave her first public performance as a pipa soloist when she was nine. In 1985, she played for Queen Elizabeth during Her Majesty’s visit to China. Honoured with several provincial and national prizes, Liu Fang graduated from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she also studied the guzheng, a Chinese zither. Since moving to Canada in 1996, Liu Fang has built a remarkable artistic profile by captivating audiences and critics with the richness and grace of her playing as well as her wide ranging repertoire.

Liu Fang is most well-known for her virtuosic and expressive interpretation of traditional pipa and guzheng music from the classical and folkloric traditions. Celebrated in the press as being “one of the greatest virtuosos”, “the empress of pipa” (L’actualité, 2001) is able to transmit in an erudite and significant way the beauty and the richness of this ancient music as well as the subtle sonorities of the instruments by the power and sensibility of her play.

Among the numerous solo recitals, concerto performances and concerts at festivals throughout Canada, the U.S., Europe and South America, Liu Fang has premiered new compositions by a number of accomplished composers. In fact, she has appeared in the spectacular world premier of R. Murray Schafer’s opera The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix, playing outstanding solos on both the pipa and the guzheng. She has also collaborated with traditional master musicians from various traditions. She performed two concerti for pipa and orchestra (the Ghost opera by celebrated Tan Dun and the King Chu Doffs his Armour by Zhou Long) with the Moravia Symphony Orchestra in Prague (999), and in November 2003 she performed with the orchestra des pays de Savoie in France improvised music in Gustav Mahler’s Liede der Erde (Song of the Earth) and was highly praised (in Le Monde de la Musique, No. 282). Recently Liu Fang performed with the renowned Nouvelle Ensemble Moderne and SMCQ in Montreal, the Alcan string quartet in Quebec, and the Quartetto Paul Klee Venezia and Xenia Ensemble in Italy, and the Spiegel String Quartet in Belgium. Since last year she has been collaborating with Malcolm Goldstein, an internationally renowned violin maestro, on new and improvised music

Liu Fang has also made numerous national and international radio recordings and television appearances, given performances recorded for films, and released seven CDs. Liu Fang has been invited as one of the featured artists (including also the world renowned Russian violinist – Vadim Repin) by BBC World Service for the concert on November 7, 2003 dedicated to World AIDS Day. The recording of this concert has been broadcasted in all of the 43 World Service Language Services with the current World Service audience across all platforms in the region of 150 million. On November 16, 2005, Liu Fang was invited to perform at the concert dedicated to the60th anniversary of UNESCO in Paris.

Liu Fang has been awarded a number of grants by the Canada Council for the Arts. On June 5th, 2001, she received the prestigious Future Generations Millennium Prize from the council. In the jury’s words: “Liu Fang’s mastery of the pipa and the guzheng has established her international reputation as a highly talented young interpreter of traditional Chinese music. She aspires to combine her knowledge and practice of eastern traditions with western classical music, contemporary music and improvisation, thereby creating new musical forms, uniting different cultures and discovering new audiences.”

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