Yoav Talmi, conductor
The 2008-2009 season marks the tenth anniversary of Maestro Talmi as artistic director of the Orchestre symphonique de Québec (OSQ) as well as the fortieth year of his calling as a conductor. During the season, Yoav Talmi has been continuing his impressive international career, leading a variety of ensembles in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Rochester and Puerto Rico in North America, as well as in Korea, Israel and Spain.
To conclude the last big weekend of the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham, last August 25 Maestro Talmi led his orchestra in a powerful program of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Orff’s Carmina Burana before 60,000 people. Participating in the concert were soloists Aline Kutan, Nathaniel Watson and Matthew White, the OSQ musicians and Chorus, the choir Les Rhapsodes and the young people’s choir La Maîtrise des Petits chanteurs de Québec, in addition to the brass and percussion of the band La Musique du 22e Régiment du Canada. The 5e Régiment d’Artillerie légère du Canada also contributed to the event.
At the grand-scale concert, Maestro Talmi was decorated with the official medallion of the 400th anniversary of Quebec City in recognition of his efforts and his great generosity during the celebrations. He was involved in Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” in March, the multimedia project The Bird Clan, a show in early July with singer-cellist Jorane at the Agora, as well as this performance on the Plains. The medallion was presented to eminent personalities like Paul McCartney, Robert Lepage, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and Québec premier Jean Charest.
Maestro Talmi is regularly invited to conduct orchestras that rank with the finest on the planet. He has led the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the philharmonic orchestras of Saint Petersburg, Oslo, Stockholm, Warsaw and Israel, the symphony orchestras of Prague, Hamburg and Vienna, the Orchestre National de France, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra and the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, in addition to the greatest orchestras of London. In North America, Yoav Talmi has led the orchestras of Pittsburgh, Detroit, Saint Louis, Houston, Montreal, Indianapolis, Dallas, Vancouver and Seattle. On a number of occasions he has conducted Japan’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.
Bedrich Smetana
Born in Litomyšl, Bohemia, March 2, 1824
Died in Prague, May 12, 1884
The Moldau
Smetana is generally regarded not only as the first Czech composer of international stature but as the musical personification of his country’s national spirit. In the words of Paul Stefan, “his music sings to us today of the Bohemia of old - its woods and cultivated plains, its villages, its romantic hills and old legends, its great past and even its future. It is all one great pageant of song and dance - dancing to native rhythms of astounding variety, singing to melodies of a unique beauty.”
Smetana poured his patriotism, loyalty and love for his country into a cycle of six symphonic poems collectively known as Má Vlast (My Fatherland). Outside the Czech Republic, only the second, Vltava (The Moldau), is heard with any frequency, but within those borders, Má Vlast has become something of a national treasure, an epic enshrined in tone. Its importance is such that a tradition has been established in which the cycle is performed at the opening of each annual Prague Spring Music Festival. The music speaks directly and fervently to the Czechs; in it they find a vivid musical manifesto of their countryside, their legends, traditions, history, dances, folksongs and hope for a noble future of freedom and glory. This last point was as important in Smetana’s lifetime as it remains today, for during the 1870s, when Má Vlast was written, the region was still under Hapsburg rule and was beset by numerous internal disputes as well.
Smetana provided his own verbal description for The Moldau: “Two springs burst forth in the shade of the Bohemian forest, one warm and gushing, the other cool and tranquil [undulating flutes]. Their waves, joyously rushing down over the rocky beds, unite and glisten in the rays of the morning sun. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Vltava [a warm, rich melody in E minor, played by violins]. Coursing through Bohemia’s valleys, it grows into a mighty stream. Through thick woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dance. At night wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves [flutes, accompanied by muted strings, horns, clarinets and harp]. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles - witnesses of bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John’s Rapids the stream rushes ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad river bed in which it flows on in majestic peace toward Prague and is welcomed by time-honored Vysehrad [a castle perched on a high rock], whereupon it vanishes in the far distance beyond the poet’s gaze.”
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born in Bonn, December 16, 1770
Died in Vienna, March 26, 1827
Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, Op. 15
Beethoven made his first venture into the concerto genre in 1784 at the age of 14 with a Piano Concerto in E-flat (WoO 4), which survives as a complete solo part with piano reduction of the orchestral preludes and interludes. Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti recently reconstructed and orchestrated this material and gave the world premiere with the McGill Chamber Orchestra on May 29, 2006. Beethoven’s first completed piano concerto was the one we now call No. 2 in B-flat, written in 1795, but due to order of publication, the Concerto in C major was called No. 1. Beethoven himself, known at the time more as a pianist than as a composer, gave the first performance, probably in Prague in 1798 (history is sketchy on this point; some sources indicate the premiere took place in 1795). Already possessing the magnetic personality that riveted attention at every performance, he was described by the contemporary Czech composer Vaclav Tomasek, who attended the Concerto’s premiere, as follows: “His magnificent playing and particularly the daring flights in his improvisation stirred me to the depths of my soul; indeed, I found myself so profoundly shaken that for several days I could not bring myself to touch the piano.”
The C-major Concerto is a Janus-faced work, looking both backwards to the Classical era and forward to the Romantic. Compared to the Concerto in B-flat (written earlier, remember), it is a bigger work - larger in scale, fuller in its sonorities, broader in emotional range. The score calls for additional instruments absent in the B-flat concerto - pairs of clarinets, trumpets and timpani - and contains the longest slow movement of any Beethoven piano concerto. At the same time, Beethoven adheres to the Mozartian principle of the soloist as primus inter pares (first among equals) in its relation with the orchestra - a balanced opposition of forces (in contradistinction to soloist and accompaniment).
The Concerto opens quietly with the first movement’s main theme, which corresponds closely to Alfred Einstein’s characterization of the “ideal march” in the opening movements of Mozart’s piano concertos. Soon this is expanded to presentation in full orchestral garb, its grandeur revealing a composer already straining at the shackles of classicism. A contrasting, lyrical theme soon presents itself in the violins, but this too has its unorthodox element, for it is heard sequentially in three different keys (E-flat major, F minor, G minor), none of them the tonic key of C major that a more traditional composer would almost certainly have employed here. An additional idea in the form of a military fanfare for horns, trumpets and drums brings the orchestral exposition to a close. The wide range of contrasts found in this exposition serves as the catalyst for a wide-ranging drama that now unfolds. Among the more memorable events are the sunny, smiling manner in which the soloist gently makes his entrance and the tension-laden dialogue for horns and piano leading into the recapitulation.
The second movement explores a mood of sustained expressiveness and emotional depth. The principal theme is a Beethoven trademark: a bare, simple, but sublimely beautiful hymn-like melody. The key is A-flat major, the key Beethoven used also for the slow movement of the Pathétique Sonata, written about the same time. Beethoven proceeds to decorate this theme with the finest pianistic filigree.
The rollicking third movement, a rondo, is full of folk-like melodies, rhythmic syncopations, irregular phrases and other musical surprises, including an episode of “Turkish” music in A minor.
Antonín Dvorák
Born in Mühlhausen (near Prague), Bohemia (today Nelahozeves, the Czech Republic), September 8, 1841
Died in Prague, May 1, 1904
Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70
The New World may be the most famous of Antonín Dvorák’s nine symphonies, but many musicians consider the Seventh in D minor to be his greatest. The composer himself had no small opinion of this symphony and succeeded in doubling the initial price offered for it by his publisher Simrock. It is hardly surprising that the symphony turned out so well, for Dvo?ák was spurred on by several important factors.
In 1884, an honorary membership was conferred on him by the London Philharmonic Society. In conjunction with this came a commission to write a new symphony. His fame and international stature were by now considerable, and wanting to maintain this standing, he put his best effort into the work. He even stated that his intention was to write a symphony “which must be such as to shock the world.” London figured prominently in Dvorák’s travels (1884 marked his third visit there), but he was a Bohemian nationalist at heart and wanted his music to bring fame and glory to his homeland. (The jaunty rhythmic pattern of the third movement is a splendid manifestation of the native blood coursing through his veins.) His ambition to do his absolute best was also stimulated by the Third Symphony of Brahms, which Dvorák had heard at its premiere in December of 1883, and which the considered the finest symphony of recent years. Dvo?ák’s new symphony was written in Prague in the short space of three months. The world premiere was given by the London Philharmonic on April 22, 1885 with the composer conducting. Dvorák wrote to Simrock that “it had an exceptionally brilliant success,” a view upheld in the press.
The confused numbering of Dvorák’s symphonies is now largely a thing of the past. Suffice it to mention here that the symphony we hear tonight was long listed as “No. 2” since it was the second to be published. (The one we now call No. 6 in D major was the first). Note that there also exists another Dvo?ák symphony in D minor, No. 4.
The Seventh is the darkest, most intense and most serious of Dvorák’s symphonies. A sense of inner tragedy and reserved strength pervades throughout, a quality perceived right in the ominous opening theme in the lower range of the violas and cellos. This theme almost immediately shows its capacity for spawning new material; following a quiet echo in the clarinets, the theme almost continually transforms itself, metamorphosing into a jagged twisting affair, then into a lyrically sweeping motif for the solo horn before culminating in a magnificent outburst for the full orchestra. All this may be considered the first theme group, which is contrasted with the more pastoral second, a gracefully flowing theme in B-flat major presented by the woodwinds. From these ideas Dvorák then continues to weave a tautly constructed movement, arranging the fragments and pieces in a mosaic of superb symphonic logic.
The slow movement opens with an exquisite passage of idyllic charm, scored for woodwind quartet and harmonized like a Bach chorale. The mood of other-worldly serenity pervades much of the movement, though there are occasional emotional disturbances. Donald Francis Tovey found passages of this movement to equal those of some slow movements in Beethoven and Bruckner symphonies in their profound and lofty thought.
The Scherzo is propelled by an irresistible dance rhythm, which manages to be simultaneously graceful and powerful. As an added attraction to this intriguing rhythmic impetus, a flowing counterpoint in the lower strings is often present as well (it is first heard in the opening bars). The relentless momentum and dramatic intensity are temporarily checked during the Trio, which is marked by a relaxed, playful and folksy character.
Unlike Beethoven’s Fifth or Brahms’s First, this symphony does not trace the journey from a dark, turbulent beginning to a triumphant conclusion. The mood of dark tragedy and restless defiance continues to the end. Along the way the finale encompasses moments of passionate lyricism, fearsome resolve and darkly burnished sonorities. Otakar Šourek described this symphony as “a composition of monumental proportions, unified in all its parts, bold in design, of material without flaw or fracture, a composition which is one of the greatest and most significant symphonic compositions since Beethoven.”
Robert Markow |
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