Ludovic Morlot, Conductor
Ludovic Morlot has quickly established a strong reputation as one of the leading conductors of his generation. In great demand in North America and Europe, he has been recognized as “a leader with a clear beat and a precise ear” by New Yorker critic Alex Ross, acclaimed author of the book and blog The Rest Is Noise.
Highlights of the 2009-10 season in North America include return engagements with the Chicago Symphony and Boston Symphony as well as debuts with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the National Symphony (Washington DC) and the symphony orchestras of Cincinnati and Atlanta. In Europe he returns to the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which he conducts regularly. He also makes his debut with the Oslo Philharmonic and the Danish National Radio Symphony. Other highlights of the season include his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in London and on tour in Germany with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, as well as an engagement with the Tokyo Philharmonic.
Committed to working with young people, Mr. Morlot leads the Netherlands Youth Orchestra on a European tour, stopping in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. Future engagements include debuts with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Opéra National de Lyon and the Opéra Comique in Paris.
Trained as a violinist, Mr. Morlot studied conducting with the late Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School in Hancock, Maine. He furthered his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London under Sir Colin Davis, and later at the Royal College of Music as a recipient of the Norman del Mar Conducting Fellowship. From 2004-2006 he served as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under James Levine.
Yuja Wang, Piano
Yuja Wang is recognized for the fearless imagination of youth combined with the discipline and precision of a mature artist in her playing. She has been praised for her authority in the most complex technical demands of the repertoire, the depth of her musical insight, her fresh interpretations, and graceful, charismatic stage presence.
Ms. Wang has performed with many leading orchestras, including the Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, National, and San Francisco symphonies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra in the U.S., and, abroad, the Tonhalle Orchestra, the China, London and Nagoya philharmonics, the NHK Symphony and Orchestra Mozart. She has given recitals in major cities worldwide, makes regular appearances at festivals, and is a dedicated performer of chamber music.
This season, Ms. Wang made her Carnegie Hall orchestral debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Charles Dutoit, performed the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s piano concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra, and toured with the Shanghai Symphony and Russian National orchestras. During the season she also performs with the Indianapolis, New World and San Francisco symphonies, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and gives recitals in San Francisco, Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, among other cities.
Yuja Wang is an exclusive recording artist for Deutsche Grammophon. Her debut album Sonatas & Etudes, nominated for a Grammy Award, “suggests a combination of blazing technique and a rare instinct for poetry” wrote Gramophone, which named her the Classic FM Gramophone Awards 2009 Young Artist of the Year. Her second album, Transformation, will be released in April 2010.
Born in Beijing in 1987, Ms. Wang began learning piano at age six, and later studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. After attending three Morningside Music summer programs at Calgary’s Mount Royal College, from 1999-2001, she moved to Canada to study at the Mount Royal College Conservatory. She moved to the U.S. at 15 to study with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she graduated in 2008. In 2006 Yuja Wang received the Gilmore Young Artist Award.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Nocturnes (1897-1899)
I. Nuages
II. Fêtes
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Piano Concerto in G major (1929-1931)
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (1940)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
La Valse, choreographic poem (1919-1920)
In the name of a certain French cachet of sound not far removed from those simplistic and naïve depictions of traditional French life known as images d’Épinal, commentators have often compared the orchestration methods of Debussy with those of Ravel, though the evidence does not really bear this out. Because if the delicacy of the textures and the fugitive and diaphanous aspect of certain scores by the two composers have a certain baggage in common, the orchestral stamp of Ravel is at heart very different from that of the author of La Mer.
Whereas Debussy most often seeks to obscure the outlines (muted strings and brass, subtle distinctions), Ravel is more likely to insist on pure, natural and dazzling colors, with tuttis more protracted in duration and a sense of razzle-dazzle, of saturation frankly Iberian in inspiration, with his predecessor preferring the paler Île-de-France hues from the banks of the Marne.
Variations in intensity of light were one of the major preoccupations of Debussy the symphonist. Like Monet, who painted the façade of Rouen Cathedral at all hours of the day to capture its different aspects, Debussy seems in his Nocturnes to have taken the time to lie down on the grass and contemplate the sky and its ballet of clouds. We’re fortunate to have the composer’s own remarks: “The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted here in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense. It is not meant to designate the usual form of the nocturne, in other words, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests.”
Nuages (Clouds), more than any other opus by Debussy, is a true impressionist manifesto. There is nothing chopped off, square or rigid in this atmospheric piece seeming to evolve at the pleasure of the wind’s moods. “Nuages conveys the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in gray tones lightly tinged with white,” he explained. We can hear in this a foreshadowing of the chromatic agitations of Messiaen.
Divided strings, parallel chords in the woodwinds, the distant intervention of an English horn – the musicologist Harry Halbreich sees in Nuages “a veritable Turner in sound,” one where the rocking motion distills a feeling of both immobility and barely perceptible movement. At the turn of the twentieth century, Debussy is mastering the blurring of the notions of time and space.
In contrast, Fêtes (Festivals) is an apologia for the dance, but in a way that never hammers the point home, never surrenders its finesse or the roundness of outline typical of Debussy. “Fêtes,” the composer writes, “gives us movement, the dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision), which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged with it.”
This central episode, with its unchanging beat and traveling platform on muted brass in a great crescendo-decrescendo, is a model of painting in sound, just like the piece’s conclusion, where the material breaks up in snippets and minuscule touches, depicting the famous “luminous dust” that the composer, as clear-sighted as it is possible to be on the subject of his own art, saw “participating in the cosmic rhythm.”
With Ravel, we at once plunge into a style located more at a crossroads of influences, into a workmanship of effectiveness and mastery of effect of sound that are radically different from the esthetic standpoint. At the end of 1929, preparing for a big promotional tour, the author of Boléro wrote for pianist Marguerite Long the first of his two piano concertos, the one “in G.”
Success was immediate. Adhering to the classic three-movement cast, the composer indulged in a high-wire exercise both pianistically and orchestrally in what remains a model to this day, one of the most played concertos in the twentieth-century repertoire. There are many elements to admire: the rhythmic trepidations and jazzy atmospheres of the first movement, the sublime cantilena of the Adagio, and the frenzied virtuosity and exhilarating eruptions of the Finale.
A few years earlier, the First World War barely over, in a completely different register, Ravel thought to pay tribute to the conquered, and more precisely to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the process of demolition, through the very special genre of the waltz, emblematic like nothing else of the glory days of Franz-Joseph’s Vienna. And so he set off, alongside the Ballets Russes founder, Serge Diaghilev, on a “choreographic poem” designed as “a species of homage to the memory of the great Strauss: not Richard, the other one, Johann.”
Of course, the French composer wasn’t going to be seduced by the sirens of pastiche or plagiary. He impressed his mark on this concise masterpiece as much in terms of the dark initial stirrings as of the decadent great outbursts at the end, of a modernity, of a jerky, dislocated way of proceeding that have much to say about the abyss into which the Empire, in its frivolousness and deafness to the conflicts taking shape, had leapt with both feet into the trenches of the Great War. Here, in any case, is a much darker and more anguished waltz than anything the Strauss dynasty ever produced.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a few decades later, an inconsolable exile continued to bewail the distance between him and his native land, with a romantic lyricism that seemed anachronistic in light of both the outburst of a new world conflict and the various revolutions in musical language carried out in the first half of the century. But so it was that in 1940 Sergei Rachmaninov wrote his last work, the Symphonic Dances, which has been a regular on concert programs since its premiere in Philadelphia, in January 1941.
The first one, Non allegro, consists of two lively, rhythmic episodes, the piano integrated into the orchestra as one instrument among so many others, with repeated motifs, and accents more assertive and grinding than is customary with the composer, wrapped around a meditative and wonderfully melancholic episode, in which a solo saxophone pours out in a more familiar lyricism.
A Tempo di valse follows, all hesitations, curiously daring to plunge ahead before shrinking back over a number of attempts. Noteworthy here are harmonies, clearly Ravelian in inspiration, in an overall rather capricious and unstable climate.
The last dance, Allegro vivace, more jagged and violent, sees a religious element shine through by way of the Gregorian theme of the Dies irae, something that haunted Rachmaninov’s output, and also by way of an Orthodox choral, the two elements combining in the end to bring about a final powerful and massive apotheosis, rather Slavic in taste.
Yannick Millon
Translated by Ron Rosenthall
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