Subscription Concert B Series

Subscription Concert No.981 B Series

This concert is over. Date: Fri. 8. September 2023 19:00 (18:00)

Venue: Suntory Hall 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

Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major, op.61

Program Notes
Korngold: Sinfonietta in B major, op.5

Program Notes

Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major, op.61

Ⅰ Allegro ma non troppo
Ⅱ Larghetto
Ⅲ Rondo: Allegro

Ludwig van Beethoven: Born in Bonn, December l6, 1770; died in Vienna, March 26, 1827

　Violin concertos had been written for nearly a century before Beethoven turned to the genre, but his only contribution to this repertory proved to be a landmark. Not only was it longer and more complex than any previous work of its kind, but in symphonic thought and expansiveness it eclipsed all predecessors. It is still considered one of the most exalted of all concertos for any instrument; its only peer in the pantheon of violin concertos is the Brahms concerto (also in D major).
　Beethoven wrote the concerto in late 1806, the year he worked on or completed such other masterpieces as the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Rasumovsky Quartets, the first revision of Fidelio and the 32 Variations in C minor for piano. As was common in that era, Beethoven wrote for a specific soloist, the virtuoso Franz Clement (1780-1842). Clement was, by all accounts, one of the most gifted musicians in all Vienna, with a musical memory that rivaled Mozartʼs. His stellar career began when he was still a child, performing at the Imperial Opera House in Vienna and under the direction of Haydn in London. In his adult years he became concertmaster and conductor of the Vienna Opera. Beethovenʼs concerto resulted from a request from Clement for a concerto to play at his benefit concert scheduled for December 23, 1806 at the Theater an der Wien. The deeply lyrical quality of this concerto, the finesse of its phrases, and its poetry all reflect the attributes of Clementʼs playing, which according to contemporary accounts was marked by perfect intonation, suppleness of bow control, “gracefulness and tenderness of expression,” and “indescribable delicacy, neatness, and elegance.”
　Five soft beats on the timpani usher in the concerto. These even, repeated notes become one of the movementʼs great unifying devices, occurring in many contexts and moods. The inner tension of this movement is heightened by the contrast of this five-beat throb and the gracious lyricism of its melodies. The two principal themes are both, as it happens, introduced by a woodwind group, both are built exclusively on scale patterns of D major, and both are sublimely lyrical and reposed in spirit.
　The soloist finally enters in an entirely original and imaginative way, with a quasi-cadenza passage that sustains the music in a single harmonic region (the dominant), as if time had stopped. Eventually the soloist lands on the principal theme in the uppermost range of the instrument where intonation is most difficult to control. This is but one example of the customized writing Beethoven conceived for his first soloist, Clement, as well as a further indication of the leisurely unfolding of the long movement.
　The Larghetto is one of Beethovenʼs most sublimely beautiful, hymn-like slow movements. Little “happens” here in the traditional sense; a mood of deep peace, contemplation and introspection prevails while three themes, all in G major, weave their way through a series of free-form variations.
　A brief cadenza leads directly into the rollicking Finale − a rondo with a memorable recurring principal theme, numerous horn flourishes suggestive of the hunt, and many humorous touches.

　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.
　

Korngold: Sinfonietta in B major, op.5

Ⅰ Fliessend, mit heiterem Schwunge (Flowing, with cheerful motion)
Ⅱ Scherzo: Molto agitato, rasch und feuerig (Highy agitated, fast and fiery)
Ⅲ Molto andante: träumerisch (Very leisurely: dreamlike)
Ⅳ Finale: Patetico - Allegro giocoso

Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Born in Brünn, Moravia (today Brno, Czech Republic), May 29, 1897; died in Hollywood, California, November 29, 1957

　No composer has more deserved the moniker Wunderkind than Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He was already an accomplished pianist by the age of five. He composed a cantata at nine, a piano sonata at eleven, and a ballet at thirteen, which was performed by the Austrian Imperial Ballet by command of the Emperor Franz Joseph. By his mid teens he was producing orchestral works of lasting substance. The Schauspiel-Ouvertüre was commissioned and premiered by Arthur Nikisch. Bruno Walter conducted a pair of short operas the lad had finished at sixteen. Before he was twenty, the likes of Schnabel, Cortot and Kreisler were programming his music on their recitals. Then there was the full-length opera Die tote Stadt, first performed when Korngold was just 23, and was so successful that it played in over eighty theaters in its first season alone.
　As if all this werenʼt enough to send Korngold on a dizzying career in Europe, beginning in 1935 he opened a new career for himself writing film scores for Hollywood and became something of a film star himself as the first composer of international stature to hold a contract with a movie studio (Warner). The decade from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties saw him turning out scores to such classics as The Adventures of Robin Hood, Anthony Adverse, Of Human Bondage, Kings Row, Captain Blood, and The Sea Hawk, among many others. Millions of movie-goers have thrilled to his brash, swashbuckling themes, to sumptuously scored love music, and to grandly heroic evocations of historical pageantry. As musicologist David Wright has noted, Korngold “is clearly the link between the vivid, quasi-cinematic tone poems of Richard Strauss and todayʼs film scores in the grand manner by John Williams.” The Sinfonietta provides the first unmistakable link in this musical landscape.
　“Sinfonietta” is a misnomer if there ever was one. The term implies a composition too slight to deserve the title “symphony” (a “little symphony”), but Korngoldʼs Sinfonietta lasts about 45 minutes − longer than most full-length symphonies. Musicologist Harold Truscott surmises that Korngold chose the title to reflect the musicʼs “light-hearted, youthfully uplifting character.” Indeed, the composer himself described the exuberant theme that opens and permeates the entire score as the “Motif of the Cheerful Heart.”
　Difficult as it is to imagine, the Sinfonietta was written by a boy of fifteen (yes − fifteen!), yet bears all the hallmarks of a fully mature composer. It is scored for full orchestra including celesta, piano (in one of its earliest uses in a symphonic work) and two harps, which play on nearly every page of the score. The music is imbued with romantic opulence, dazzling orchestration, and brilliant effects throughout. It is probably safe to say that no other composer-prodigy in history − and that includes Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saëns − has ever written as complex, sophisticated, and densely-scored a work at the age of fifteen as Korngold did in his Sinfonietta. Critic Royal Brown wrote that “throughout the Sinfonietta, but most notably in the scherzo second movement, the constant shifts in mood remarkably foreshadow the type of music-dramatic style demanded by the cinema. It is as if, all the way back in 1912, the young Korngold had celluloid flowing through his body at 24 frames a second.” Even the key is special: aside from Haydnʼs No. 46, how many symphonies can you name in B major?
　The Sinfonietta was first performed on November 30, 1913 by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Felix Weingartner, to whom it is dedicated. In less than two years, Artur Nikisch, Richard Strauss, Fritz Busch, Hermann Abendroth, Frederick Stock, Arthur Bodansky, Ferdinand Loewe, Josef Stransky (in New York), Karl Muck (in Boston), and many others had also conducted it.

　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】（9/8up）
Jadranka Stojaković ：Što te nema
　（Nemanja RADULOVIĆ, Violin）

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