From the glittering waters of the Nile to the majestic Golden Gate of Kiev, NWS presents the grand and exotic in this exclusive evening at the Adrienne Arsht Center. One of the world’s premier pianists, Jean-Yves Thibaudet radiates brilliance in Camille Saint-Saëns’ evocative and alluring Egyptian Concerto—a work never before performed by the orchestra. This performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition will be unforgettable with breathtaking animations specially designed for NWS and one of the most extraordinary finales of all time. Leading the Fellows from its Old Castle to haunting caverns is Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena. NWS Conducting Fellow Chad Goodman will begin the evening with Hector Berlioz’ Tuscan treasure of an Overture.

NWS DOWNTOWN: The theme for this evening's pre-concert festivities is "Egyptian," which is the nickname of Saint-Saens' piano concerto being performed by the inimitable Jean-Yves Thibaudet.  Camille Saint-Saens composed the work while in the city of Luxor, a glorious city on the banks of the Nile River and the site of Ancient Thebes. Experience a taste of the rich musical and dance heritage of this region throughout the evening. Click here to read all about NWS Downtown -- a series of new benefits to your Arsht Center experience!

The animations presented in this performance were commissioned by the New World Symphony. Developed in collaboration with Michael Tilson Thomas, they were created by a team of 13 student, alumni and faculty artists at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. The single-screen version was made possible by Scott Winters and Ion Concert Media. 

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Program

Hector Berlioz

Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, Op. 23 (1838)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

Hector Berlioz was an unlikely musical revolutionary who only began dabbling in composition and teaching himself harmony at the age of 12. His father, a physician, disapproved of these musical pursuits, so the young Berlioz never took lessons or mastered an instrument. At 18 he moved to Paris to study medicine, and he waited another five years before finally enrolling at the Paris Conservatory in 1826. He rocked the establishment with his Symphonie fantastique in 1830, and yet he showed enough technique and restraint in his entry to that year’s Prix de Rome competition that he won the coveted fellowship.

Berlioz left Paris, reluctantly, in 1831. For someone with such a dim view of the Eternal City—he later wrote, “Rome is the most stupid and prosaic city I know: it is no place for anyone with head or heart”—he developed quite a fascination with Italy, one based more on romanticized literature than actual experience.

For his first opera since an unfinished student effort, Berlioz dramatized the memoirs of an artist from the Italian Renaissance, the title character Benvenuto Cellini. The Paris Opera mounted that work in 1838, but the audience hissed through the premiere, and it closed after only three more performances. Although the opera remains a rarity onstage, its Overture and other extracted segments (including the Roman Carnival Overture) have found a lasting place in the orchestral repertoire.

The Overture to Benvenuto Cellini begins on a confident note, in a tempo marked “fast, decisive, with impetus,” establishing the central theme of this curtain raiser. It soon retreats into a slow introduction rooted in a plucked line from the cellos and basses, which serves as a preview of the climactic aria of forgiveness delivered by the Pope in the final act.

Camille Saint-Saëns

Concerto No. 5 in F major for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 103, "Egyptian" (1896)
Approximate duration: 30 minutes

Camille Saint-Saëns was just 10 years old when he made his public debut at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, playing a program from memory that included piano concertos by Beethoven and Mozart (for which he wrote his own cadenza). He went on to study piano, organ and composition at the Paris Conservatory, and he excelled in all those pursuits during his long career at the forefront of French music. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of his storied debut, Saint-Saëns returned to the Salle Pleyel with a star-studded program centered on the premiere of a new piano concerto—the fifth he wrote for himself, in addition to several smaller piano showpieces with orchestra.

Saint-Saëns traveled extensively for both work and pleasure, and his contact with many far-flung parts of the globe made a lasting impact on his composing. He wrote the Fifth Piano Concerto while enjoying the winter warmth in Luxor, Egypt, and those origins as well as certain exotic details in the music earned this Concerto its nickname as the “Egyptian.” There is no trace of that foreign aspect in the first movement, with its elegant balancing of themes, nor does it sway the effervescent finale that captures Saint-Saëns’ glittering sense of keyboard coloration; those “Egyptian” elements are limited to the central movement, including a tender melody that Saint-Saëns described as a “Nubian love song” that he heard while traveling down the Nile by boat. Other details have a more Mediterranean flavor, recalling the Flamenco tropes of southern Spain or the related Arabic music of northern Africa—a place Saint-Saëns knew well from his many visits to Algeria, where he eventually died at the age of 86. He lived long enough to give a farewell performance on the 75th anniversary of that boyhood debut, and he kept writing vital music to the very end, but he left the “Egyptian” Concerto as his last contribution to the repertoire for piano and orchestra.

Modest Mussorgsky

Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)
Approximate duration: 30 minutes

Modest Mussorgsky was a military cadet with a knack for the piano when, at age 19, he dedicated himself to composition and took his first serious lessons. The highpoint of his short career came in 1874, with the successful premiere of his opera Boris Godunov. That same year, a memorial retrospective of paintings by Viktor Hartmann, who had recently died from an aneurysm at age 39, inspired his good friend Mussorgsky to compose Pictures at an Exhibition. The suite for solo piano adopted a novel form in which a recurring promenade represents the composer strolling through the exhibit, linking the movements inspired by specific images.

Five years after Mussorgsky’s alcohol-fueled death at the age of 41, his friend and fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov arranged for a posthumous publication of the original piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition, and one of his students soon made the first symphonic adaptation. The music is best known through the orchestral version heard here, created in 1922 by Maurice Ravel.

The iconic Promenade struts to an irregular gait, grouped into five- and six-beat segments. This theme represents the ambling composer, and the slightly imbalanced heft of the music seems a good match for the outsized Mussorgsky. The next movement, The Gnome, celebrates Hartmann’s design for a gnome-shamed nutcracker, depicted with halting phrases and brittle ensemble effects.

A gentle restatement of the Promenade prepares The Old Castle, evoking an image of a troubadour singing before a medieval castle, represented by the dreamy buzz of a solo alto saxophone. Another fragment of Promenade ushers in Tuileries, based on Hartmann’s painting of children in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. The recurring motive of a descending minor third captures the universal musical gesture with which children tease and call each other.

Cattle recalls a painting of an ox-drawn cart, casting the tuba’s sullen melody over plodding accompaniment. An interlude of Promenade material links into the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, inspired by Hartmann’s sketch for a costume in which only the dancer’s head, arms and legs emerge from an eggshell. The music uses flitting grace notes and bright treble instruments to maximize the chirping playfulness.

Two Polish Jews represents two separate portraits of Jewish men, one rich and one poor. The first theme in octaves rings with Semitic intervals and inflections, while a second chorale-like passage, peppered with muted trumpet, offsets the initial incantation.

The Market at Limoges transports the animated chatter of female shoppers engaged in frenetic crosstalk. At the climax, it breaks off into the deep, slow resonance of The Catacombs, drawn from a self-portrait of Hartmann in the depths of Paris.

The next section, With the Dead in a Dead Language, brings the composer into the picture through a spectral recollection of the Promenade theme. As Mussorgsky wrote in the margin of his score, “The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me towards the skulls, invokes them; the skulls begin to glow softly from within.”

From that most hallowed place, the exhibition proceeds to the most outlandish movement, The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga). Hartmann’s design for a clock modeled after the bird-legged house of the witch Baba Yaga inspired Mussorgsky to depict another component of the folk tale, where the witch flies around in the mortar she uses to grind up the human bones she eats. That whirlwind music pivots in an instant to the most grand and majestic passage in the piece, The Great Gate of Kiev, reflecting Hartmann’s winning design for a ceremonial gate for the Ukrainian capital.

-- © 2020 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.

Welcome to Keynotes, NWS's new program-based podcast! NWS audiences can now soak up musical clips and commentary for an upcoming performance while on the road, in the kitchen or at work -- wherever life takes you! Keynotes will be available for select concerts throughout the season. Let us set the stage for your concert experience by sharing noteworthy moments guided by NWS’s program note annotator Aaron Grad and select Fellows. Audio clips provided by Naxos of America, Inc. 

For Aaron's full program notes, click here.