Program Information

Artist Bios

OLLI MUSTONEN conductor and pianist

Program Notes

Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8 pm | Richardson Auditorium in Princeton

Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 8 pm | State Theatre in New Brunswick

Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 3 pm | NJPAC in Newark

NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

OLLI MUSTONEN conductor and pianist

SCHUMANN Julius Caesar Overture, Op. 128                                      

MOZART Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491

Allegro
Larghetto
Allegretto          

OLLI MUSTONEN piano

~INTERMISSION~

SIBELIUS Symphony No. 6 in D Minor, Op. 104

Allegro molto moderato

Allegro moderato

Poco vivace

Allegro molto

Olli Mustonen has a unique place on today’s music scene. As a pianist, he has challenged and fascinated audiences throughout Europe and America with his brilliant technique and startling originality. As a conductor, he founded the Helsinki Festival Orchestra and is Artist in Association with the Tapiola Sinfonietta. As a composer, he forms part of a line of musicians whose vision is expressed as vividly in the art of recreative interpretation as it is in their own compositions.

Born in Helsinki, he began his studies in piano, harpsichord and composition at age 5. As a recitalist, he performs in the world’s musical capitals, including Amsterdam, Berlin, London, New York, Tokyo and Vienna. As a soloist, Mustonen has performed worldwide with orchestras including the Berlin, London and Los Angeles Philharmonics; Chicago Symphony and Cleveland, Philadelphia and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestras.

At the heart of both his piano playing and conducting is his life as a composer. Mustonen believes that each performance must have the freshness of a first performance, so that audience and performer alike encounter the composer as a living contemporary. This tenacious spirit of discovery leads him to explore many areas of repertoire beyond the established canon.

This season, he appears as a soloist with the New York, Malaysian and Warsaw Philharmonics and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. As a conductor, he leads the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra and Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, among others. He will appear in recital with cellist Steven Isserlis throughout Europe. The Festspielhaus Baden-Baden will feature him in its “Artist Portrait of the Year.”

His recording of Shostakovich and Alkan preludes on the Decca label received the Edison Award and Gramophone Award for the Best Instrumental Recording. His releases on the Ondine label include recordings of Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues, Sibelius piano works, Hindemith and Sibelius as player-conductor with the Helsinki Festival Orchestra, Mozart violin concertos with Pekka Kuusisto and Tapiola Sinfonietta, Prokofiev piano music, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 1 and Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons. He is currently recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos as soloist-director with Tapiola Sinfonietta.

BY LAURIE SHULMAN, ©2009

FIRST NORTH AMERICAN SERIAL RIGHTS ONLY

Overture to Julius Caesar, Op. 128

Robert Schumann

Born June 8, 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony, Germany

Died July 29, 1856 in Endenich, near Bonn

The bookseller’s son

The son of a publisher and bookseller, Robert Schumann was always interested in literature as well as music. For much of his career, he was better known as a writer and critic than as a composer. His literary taste was diverse, including British poets such as Byron and Burns. He read Shakespeare’s plays in translation. Although he only set one text by Shakespeare—Feste the clown’s song from Twelfth Night (1840)—the Bard surfaced periodically in his other music. Macbeth plays a role in the third Intermezzo of his Noveletten for solo piano, and we know that he considered The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet as topics for an opera.

Dramatic music that isn’t opera

Shortly after Robert and Clara Schumann moved their family to Düsseldorf in 1851, Robert immersed himself in literature. He reread plays by Schiller and Goethe and devoured a new German translation of Shakespeare that had just been published. With his imagination on fire, he rapidly composed three concert overtures: The Bride of Messina (after Schiller), Hermann and Dorothea (after Goethe) and Julius Caesar. These overtures provided a vessel for dramatic music, apparently channeling his urge to write for the stage.

The majestic slow introduction to the Julius Caesar overture evokes Caesar’s dignity. Schumann’s dark F minor tonality foreshadows Caesar’s demise at the hands of Brutus, Cassius and Casca. This introduction leads to a brisk allegro whose insistent themes, brass emphasis and affirmative close in major mode suggest the nobler aspects of the Roman empire.

Schumann was clearly inspired by Beethoven’s overtures to Egmont (based on Goethe’s drama and also in F Minor) and Coriolan (after Shakespeare’s Coriolanus). If his Julius Caesar overture does not rise to the heights of those two masterpieces, it still shows us Schumann in an experimental mode. His development section and combination of musical ideas in the slow introduction and allegro make the overture worth hearing.

The score calls for flute, piccolo, woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Timing: approximately 8 minutes.

Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria

Died December 5, 1791 in Vienna

Tormented genius?

Was Mozart a manic/depressive?

Musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon has suggested that all Mozart’s compositions in C minor are manifestations of depression and that Mozart may have been acutely depressed in the spring of 1786 when he composed the C minor piano concerto. Certainly K. 491 is a work of epic grandeur and symphonic scale.

Both this concerto and the celebrated Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466, anticipate Beethoven’s stormy emotional intensity. An expansive orchestral exposition to the opening Allegro establishes sobriety and drama that are sustained throughout the work. Mozart distributes his thematic material throughout the orchestra, allowing exquisitely balanced dialogue with the soloist.

In its pristine simplicity, the E-flat Larghetto is one of the most perfect creations in all Mozart. Using rich color resources—K. 491 is Mozart’s sole piano concerto calling for both oboes and clarinets—he transforms a simple A-B-A-C-A form into a sophisticated amalgam of rondo, woodwind serenade and variation. Each contrasting episode (the first in C minor, the second in A flat) occurs first in the woodwinds, and then the soloist embellishes.

The finale was Mozart’s last essay in variation form among the mature concertos. Only this and K. 453 in G conclude with variations, but the structure in K. 491 is more complex and lends greater weight to the finale, giving it a sense of importance that rivals that of the first movement. Simply stated, the movement consists of a theme, eight variations and a coda. But variations two through seven are double variations—the second half of each section introduces a different variation treatment. In the last variation, Mozart switches the meter to 6/8 and adds a brilliant coda. Brilliance does not necessarily mean the clouds lift, however.

K. 491 is scored for flute, woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani, solo piano and strings. Timing: approximately 31 minutes.

Symphony No. 6 in D Minor, Op. 104 (1923)

Jean Sibelius

Born December 8, 1865 in Tavastehus, Finland

Died September 20, 1957 in Järvenpää

Foreground and background

On the surface, Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony is a straightforward four movements. The outer two are larger scale; the inner two comprise a slower movement and a scherzo-like movement. Yet Sibelius plays games with our ears, deceiving us as to which are the important themes. He wants us listening to both foreground (the front-and-center musical themes or events) and background (the supporting musical fabric, including harmonic and rhythmic underpinning, subsidiary thematic ideas and the like).

An innovator who ignored the 20th century

The music is absolutely gorgeous. Biographer Guy Rickards calls it “the most beautiful of his symphonies,” and Sibelius’s music is indeed ravishing in many places. Considering the context, that in itself is remarkable. Most of the Sixth Symphony dates from 1918 to 1922. The premiere took place in Helsinki on February 19, 1923, with the composer conducting. That makes it contemporary with Schoenberg’s first 12-tone compositions, Hindemith’s most outrageous expressionist experiments and, in France, the iconoclasm of “Les Six.”

Sibelius might have resided on another planet. He was aware of Europe’s musical currents, but he had simply determined to follow his own path toward a style that distilled the spirit of Finland and his inner voice. In the seven symphonies that he composed between 1899 and 1924, Sibelius sought to integrate a new concept of form and to evolve the purest possible musical language.

‘Organic music’ and the frozen north

The usual term applied to Sibelius’s methods is “organic.” This concept is difficult to spell out. In technical terms, he is more concerned with musical line—that is, melody—than with harmonic foundations, yet the harmonies are quite lovely. We don’t emerge from this symphony with any clear theme that we will hum for days afterward, so much as we do with a sense that everything is related. Somehow, Sibelius composed in a way that makes everything sound logical and pulled together at the end.

This subtle unification of musical material occurs as an ongoing process throughout the four movements, which is a part of this “organic” approach. Sibelius has written a mood piece that encourages contemplation, rather than a dramatic narrative forcing crisis or confrontation. All the same, there is plenty of room for contrast.

A prominent harp role underscores a pastoral atmosphere in this work. Pedal points, a Sibelius signature, are much in evidence. What differs, particularly in the first movement, is an even-tempered character that throws more emphasis on the occasional dissonance. Predominantly stepwise motion in the melodies connects the music to Renaissance polyphony, as does the modal harmony.

While each movement has its own qualities, the overriding impressions of the Sixth Symphony are rich writing for strings and a peculiar sense of the Arctic light. Perhaps the air is thinner in Finland. “Breathing” this music certainly heightens the senses.

The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, harp and strings. Timing: approximately 27 minutes.

Finlandia (1900)

Jean Sibelius

Is there any expression of nationalist pride more beloved than Finlandia? This turn-of-the-century tone poem compresses centuries of Finnish folklore and the country’s fiercely independent spirit into eight minutes of music. Finlandia is as Finnish as Mussorgsky’s Prelude to Khovanshchina is Russian, Ravel’s Menuet Antique is French and Copland’s Rodeo is American. None of them, however, is as famous as Finlandia, nor so closely entwined with the composer’s homeland. This work could easily have deteriorated into something bombastic like the 1812 Overture. Instead, Sibelius produced an exciting symphonic showpiece that provides superb opportunities to all four of the orchestra’s instrumental groups.

By about 1900, after nearly a century of Russian rule, nationalism had become a strong force in Finland. Resentment of Russian overlords was strong. Russia forced conscription of Finnish youth into its military and censored the Finnish press. Today, Finland refers to this period as the “years of passive resistance.” In this politically charged environment, Sibelius composed Finlandia in 1899 as one of six Scènes historiques (“Historic Scenes” or “Tableaux from the Past”).

Raw emotionalism dominates this music. Sibelius’s decisive musical gestures contribute greatly to Finlandia’s dramatic impact. From the threatening low brass chords that open, through the rich hymn introduced by woodwinds and taken up by the strings, to the triumphant finale, Finlandia grabs both heart and gut, compelling the listener with its crisp fanfares and convincing musical rhetoric.

Sibelius scored Finlandia for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle and strings. Timing: approximately 8 minutes.