Subscription Concert A Series

【Sold out】Subscription Concert No.980 A Series

This concert is over. Date: Sun. 3. September 2023 14:00 (13:00)

Venue: Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Venue Info Seat

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Artists

Sascha GOETZEL, Conductor
Nemanja RADULOVIĆ, Violin

Profile

Sascha GOETZEL (Conductor)

Music Director of the Orchestra National des Pays de la Loire beginning on September 1, 2022, for a four-year term. Currently Principal Guest Conductor of the Sofia Philharmonic, and Music Director of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.
Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra since the 2008 season. Maestro Goetzel has previously held titles with the Kuopio Symphony in Finland, Bretagne Symphony Orchestra and Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra. Goetzel is also highly regarded as an opera conductor and has appeared at the Wiener Staatsoper. His 2014 direction of Le Nozze di Figaro at Wiener Staatsoper garnered high praise and re-engagement to conduct six more operas. He has also conducted numerous operas by Mozart at the Mariinsky Theatre and the Zurich Opera House. In Japan, he recently conducted highly successful performances of Der Rosenkavalier at the New National Theatre Tokyo (in April 2022).
Maestro Goetzel’s conducting recent guest engagements include the Israel Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Orchestre National de France, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony, Kioi Sinfonietta, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra.
At 19 he was a member of the Vienna State Opera, where he was given decisive impulses by great conductors such as Zubin Mehta, Mariss Jansons and Seiji Ozawa.
Ozawa also became his teacher and invited him with a conducting fellowship to the Tanglewood Festival. Further conducting studies followed with Jorma Panula.

Nemanja Radulović (Violin)

Born in Serbia, Nemanja Radulović studied at the Saarlandes Hochschule für Musik und Theater, the University of Arts in Belgrade, the Conservatoire de Paris with P.Fontanarosa, and in Cremona with S.Accardo. Radulović won several international competitions including Joseph Joachim International Violin Competition, Hannover. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Arts in Niš, Serbia.

As a soloist Radulović has performed with many of the world’s leading orchestras. He has an equal passion for the intimacy of chamber music, as he regularly undertakes a play/direct role with his ensemble The Devil’s Trills and with Double Sens, and is also an increasingly active recitalist on the international circuit. He has performed at such notable venues as Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and Vienna Konzerthaus.

Radulović released several CDs from Deutsche Grammophon. In 2021 he signed an exclusive recording contract with Warner Classics and the first album Roots was released in 2022.

photo:©Hiromichi Nozawa

Program

Liadov: Polonaise, op.49 (In Memory of Pushkin)

Program Notes
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major, op.35

Program Notes
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.5 in E minor, op.64

Program Notes

Liadov: Polonaise in C Major, op.49 (In Memory of Pushkin)

Anatoly Liadov: Born in St. Petersburg, May 11, 1855; died in Polinovka, district of Novgorod, August 28, 1914

　The music of Anatoly Liadov rarely turns up on symphony concerts. Part of this is his own fault. He has gone down in musical history as one of the laziest and most dilatory of composers, character traits he presumably inherited from his father. His teacher Rimsky-Korsakov noted that Anatolyʼs father, himself a composer as well as conductor of the Imperial Opera, possessed “brilliant gifts [which were] stifled in continuous reveling and carousing. He frittered away his activity as composer on mere nothings, composing dance music and pieces to order.” Liadovʼs output consists mostly of short pieces, many of them for piano or voice and piano, plus a handful of choral, chamber and orchestral miniatures. Liadov very likely missed his biggest opportunity for world fame in his endless procrastination (or lack of acceptance, according to some sources) to Diaghilev's request for a ballet score for the Firebird, a commission that ultimately made Stravinsky famous. Three brief but enchanting works, all based on Russian folk tales, keep his name tenuously before the public today: Baba Yaga, The Enchanted Lake and Kikimora.
　The Polonaise on this program just barely escapes being called “twentieth-century music.” It was written in 1899, but there also exists another Polonaise composed three years later, in D major. The 1899 work was composed in the centenary year of the birth of one of Russiaʼs greatest authors: poet, dramatist and novelist Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), generally regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature. Aside from Shakespeare, there have probably been more operas written to Pushkinʼs works than by any other author: Mussorgskyʼs Boris Godounov, Dargomyzhskyʼs Rusalka and The Stone Guest, Tchaikovskyʼs Mazeppa and Eugene Onegin, Rachmaninoffʼs Aleko (based on The Gypsies) and The Miserly Knight, Stravinskyʼs Mavra, and Rimsky-Korsakovʼs Mozart and Salieri, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and The Golden Cockerel, just to mention the most famous.
　The polonaise originated in late-sixteenth century Poland as a stately processional dance in triple meter and with a characteristic rhythmic pattern. It was the polonaise that served as processional music for the lords and ladies to parade past the newly enthroned King of Poland in 1574 (Henry III of Anjou). Composers, Polish and otherwise, enjoyed writing polonaises, none more so than Chopin. The Russians especially took the polonaise to heart. Liadovʼs seven-minute Polonaise in C major is infused with all the dignified grandeur inherent in most works of its kind.
　Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major, op.35

Ⅰ Allegro moderato - Moderato assai
Ⅱ Canzonetta: Andante
Ⅲ Finale: Allegro vivacissimo

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Born in Votkinsk, May 7, 1840; died in St. Petersburg, November 6, 1893

　“The Russian composer Tchaikovsky is surely not an ordinary talent, but rather an inflated one, with a genius-obsession without discrimination or taste. Such is also his latest, long and pretentious Violin Concerto. For a while it moves soberly, musically, and not without spirit. But soon vulgarity gains the upper hand … Friedrich Vischer once observed, speaking of obscene pictures, that they stink to the eye. Tchaikovskyʼs Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.”
　Incredible as it may seem today, these were the words that greeted the world premiere of Tchaikovskyʼs Violin Concerto in Vienna in December of 1881. The quotation is by the notorious critic Eduard Hanslick, but eight of the ten reviews that appeared in Vienna voiced much the same sentiment.
　The circumstances leading to the concertoʼs first performance were hardly auspicious. Tchaikovsky composed the work during March and April of 1878 while staying at Clarens, on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. There he was visiting his composition student, Yosif Yosifovich Kotek, who was at the time undertaking a cure for tuberculosis, and who was the one responsible for introducing Tchaikovsky to the wealthy patroness Nadejda von Meck. But Kotek expressed dissatisfaction with the second movement, and Tchaikovsky replaced it with an entirely different one.
　Madame von Meck was not entirely pleased by the concerto either. But the biggest blow was probably the rejection from the celebrated virtuoso and teacher Leopold Auer, to whom the work was originally dedicated. Auer pronounced it unplayable. Not until nearly four years after its completion did Adolf Brodsky take up its cause, giving the first performance not in Russia but in Vienna. He was daunted neither by its technical difficulties nor by the dismal critical reception. Tchaikovsky rewrote the dedication to Brodsky, who went on to perform the concerto in London, and then in Moscow, eventually winning public support for it. Even Auer, in his old age, finally saw its merits; the concerto would become one of the mainstays in the repertories of his prodigies, including Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist. Todayʼs students readily master yesterdayʼs most fiendish difficulties, and Tchaikovskyʼs Violin Concerto is now one of the two or three most popular works in the genre.
　Although full of bravura passage work, the concerto also contains a wealth of pure romantic lyricism for which Tchaikovsky is so noted. The first movement boasts both a lyrical first and second theme, and even the cadenza emphasizes the expressive over the virtuosic. The second movement, subtitled “Canzonetta,” has a certain melancholic wistfulness to it − soulful though not mournful. The muted solo violin presents the first folklike theme. This brief movement is followed without pause by the exhilarating Finale, whose themes suggest Russian dance tunes and rhythms, especially the trepak.

　Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.5 in E minor, op.64

Ⅰ Andante - Allegro con anima
Ⅱ Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza
Ⅲ Valse: Allegro moderato
Ⅳ Finale: Andante maestoso - Allegro vivace

　The late 1870s were traumatic years for Tchaikovsky. It was then that he became involved with a neurotic young music student named Antonina Milyukova, made the disastrous mistake of marrying her, attempted suicide, entered into that extraordinary epistolary relationship with his benefactress Nadezhda von Meck, struggled with highly-charged fears over his homosexuality, and created his fate-laden Fourth Symphony. The years following were a period of recovery from this stressed existence, and the period between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies constituted a longer interval between symphonies than any other in his canon of such works – over a decade.
　It was only in May of 1888 that Tchaikovsky again set out on a symphonic journey, albeit tentatively. But thereafter, work progressed with amazing rapidity. In just six weeks, he had written the short score, by late August it was completely orchestrated, and the first performance took place on November 17 in St. Petersburg, conducted by the composer.
　The motto invariably described as the “Fate” motif is heard in the symphonyʼs opening bars in the somber tones of low clarinets. To an even greater extent than in the Fourth Symphony, this “Fate” motto pervades the work. Twice it abrasively intrudes in the slow movement; it makes a shadowy, menacing appearance near the end of the Waltz; and it serves as the material that introduces and closes the Finale in a mood of exultant joy.
　The first movement is laid out in traditional sonata form, though with an untraditional wealth of melodic ideas. Notable orchestral details abound, including the lilting first theme of the Allegro section for clarinet and bassoon in octaves; the horn quartet fanfares, which are at one time or another echoed by every wind instrument of the orchestra, including the tuba; and the murky growls that bring the movement to a close.
　The second movement represents Tchaikovsky at the peak of his lyrical and romantic fervor. It also contains one of the great glories of the solo horn repertory – that long, long first theme of infinite yearning and nostalgia. The theme is marked dolce con molto espressione (sweetly, with great expression). Even more than in the first movement, Tchaikovsky the melodist comes to the fore in both the number and richness of his themes, which take on a wide range of moods from tender consolation to the heights of passion. Felicitous contrapuntal treatment also provides much interest in this movement, as in the intertwining of solo oboe and violins following the first return of the Fate motif.
　The emotional peaks scaled in the first two movements are absent in the third, an elegant waltz. Its tune is based on a song Tchaikovsky heard sung by a boy in the streets of Florence. The central trio section enters the world of Mendelssohnian deftness and elfin enchantment, a reminder of just how much respect Tchaikovsky accorded his predecessor.
　There can be little doubt that the finale portrays triumph over adversity. The Fate motif is stated immediately in grand, ceremonial tones, now in the major tonality. Analysts have criticized the “victory” as one too quickly and too easily won to be convincing from the standpoint of musical argument. Perhaps they are right, but that has not prevented countless listeners from responding enthusiastically to the pomp of this now-familiar theme in new colors, and to the thrilling Allegro vivace that follows. Hammering (martellato) strings initiate the main body of the movement, which seldom pauses for breath in its relentless drive to what is surely the most deceptive pause in all music: audiences the world over have erupted into spontaneous applause at the famous silence (poised on the dominant chord – B major) that precedes the re-entry of the home key and the final, expansive proclamation of the symphonyʼs motto, now blazing triumphantly in E major.

　Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

【Soloist Encore】（9/3up）
Paganini（arr．A.Sedlar）：24 Caprices
　（Nemanja RADULOVIĆ, Violin）

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