Subscription Concert B Series

Subscription Concert No.990 B Series

Date: Tue. 19. December 2023 19:00 (18:00)

Venue: Suntory Hall Venue Info Seat

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Artists

Antoni WIT, Conductor
Kyohei SORITA, Piano

Profile

Antoni WIT (Conductor)

Antoni Wit is one of the most highly regarded Polish conductors and a champion of Polish music. A top prize winner at the Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition in 1971 and an assistant to Herbert von Karajan at the Easter Festival in Salzburg he subsequently worked with all of the leading orchestras in Poland before he held the post of General and Artistic Director of the Warsaw Philharmonic for twelve years. Antoni Wit enjoys an international career with major orchestras around the world. Past highlights have comprised Berliner Philharmoniker, Dresden Staatskapelle, St Petersburg Philharmonic, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Teatro Colon Buenos Aires, Royal Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestras among others. Recent and future orchestral engagements include Warsaw Philharmonic, Prague Radio Symphony, Orchestre Nationale du Pays de la Loire, NOSPR Katowice, Dortmunder Philharmoniker, Norrkoping Symphony and Estonian National Symphony orchestras. Six times Grammy Award nominated, Antoni Wit has made over one hundred and fifty recordings for EMI, Sony and Naxos. He has sold close to 6 million records on Naxos including the complete works of Szymanowski, Karłowicz, Górecki and Lutosławski, as well as Krzysztof Penderecki.

Kyohei SORITA (Piano)

In 2021, Kyohei won the second prize at the 18th International Chopin Piano Competition, the first Japanese winner in half a century. Since his sensational debut recital in 2016, he has regularly given recitals and toured with orchestras in Japan and abroad every year. From 2018, he has collaborated in chamber music ensembles and founded and produced the Japan National Orchestra. In May 2021, he incorporated a new company for this orchestra to perform worldwide from his base in Nara. In 2019, he launched a new label as a joint venture with E-Plus and in 2020, he was one of the first artists to offer paid streaming of on-line concerts under the pandemic situation. He is also making efforts to promote classical music by serving as a radio personality. He runs "Solistiade," a music salon that serves as a platform for communication between young musicians and their fans. He is currently a student at the F. Chopin Conservatory of Music (formerly the Warsaw Conservatory). He is studying conducting in Vienna. He has recently published a book "A Life Without End" (Gentosha/released on July 21, 2022).

Program

Kilar: Prelude and Christmas Carol (1972)

Program Notes
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, op.18

Program Notes
Penderecki: Symphony No.2, “Christmas Symphony”

Program Notes

Kilar: Prelude and Christmas Carol (1972)

Kilar: Born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), July 17, 1932; died in Katowice, Poland, December 29, 2013

　Wojciech Kilar, who died almost exactly ten years ago (December 29, 2013), might well be remembered as the Polish equivalent of John Williams in America or of Erich Wolfgang Korngold in Vienna. His compositional career generously encompassed two worlds, those of film, for which he was the better known, and of classical concert music. In the latter category, he left five symphonies, numerous other orchestral works, and much choral music, some of it with orchestra. The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, among others, have played his works. During the 1960s, Kilar, along with the likes of Górecki and Penderecki, formed the vanguard of avant-garde Polish music. Kilar later abandoned his modernist approach in favor of inspiration from Polish folk music and from religious prayers and hymns. His most famous orchestral work is probably the symphonic poem Krzesany (1974). So prominent a figure was Kilar in his homeland that his funeral was attended by Polandʼs First Lady and its Culture Minister.
　Nevertheless, it is as the composer of over 130 film scores that Kilar will be most remembered. Over one hundred of these were for Polish films, yet those for which he won the greatest recognition were done abroad. Like Williams and Korngold, Kilar enjoyed a Hollywood connection. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola invited him to write music for the horror film Bram Stokerʼs Dracula, for which Kilar won an ASCAP Award. In 1994 he wrote music for Roman Polanskiʼs film Death and the Maiden, and a year later the score for Jane Campionʼs The Portrait of a Lady. In 1999 he was invited to compose music for The Lord of the Rings, an assignment he at first accepted but later rejected when he realized the amount of work involved. Also that year he again collaborated with Roman Polanski in music for the horror film The Ninth Gate, and still again with Polanski in 2002 for The Pianist, based on the 1946 autobiographical book The Pianist by the Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman, a Holocaust survivor.
　The Prelude and Christmas Carol dates from 1972, when Kilar was moving in the direction of a more folk and religious orientation. Scored for four oboes and strings, the ten-minute work was described by the composer as follows: “In this single-movement work one may distinguish something reminiscent of three sections, separated by longer pauses: the introductory section (the prelude); the central one, a quasi-canonical development of the traditional Polish carol Nastał nam jest dzień wesoły (A joyous day); and the final section, a sort of coda.”

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.

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, op.18

Ⅰ Moderato
Ⅱ Adagio sostenuto
Ⅲ Allegro scherzando

Sergei Rachmaninoff: Born at Oneg (an estate near Novgorod), April 1, 1873; died in Beverly Hills, California, March 28, 1943

　Rachmaninoffʼs Second Piano Concerto, one of the most beloved in the entire repertory, had a strange genesis. The harrowing experience of the utter failure of the composerʼs First Symphony (1897) had plunged him into deep melancholy, and he shunned both the social and musical worlds. He finally consented to see a Dr. Nicolai Dahl, who had acquired a reputation for successfully treating nervous disorders through hypnosis and auto-suggestion. By inducing Rachmaninoff to repeat over and over phrases such as “You will begin to write your concerto … You will work with great facility … The concerto will be of excellent quality …” while in a hypnotic daze, the young composerʼs creative impulses were recharged.
　The second and third movements were ready for performance on December 15, 1900, and the first complete performance took place on November 9 of the following year. On both occasions, Rachmaninoff was the soloist, and the conductor was his cousin and former teacher Alexander Siloti. The score bears a dedication to the man who had made it all possible, Dr. Dahl. Popular success was immediate, Rachmaninoffʼs spirits soared, and in his renewed mood of self-confidence, he married in 1902. In 1904, the concerto won him the first of two Glinka prizes (the other came in 1906 for his Second Symphony). Through its sweeping melodies, extravagant grandeur, melancholy, and passion, Rachmaninoffʼs Second Piano Concerto makes an unabashed appeal to the emotions, and justifiably qualifies as the most popular piano concerto of the twentieth century.
　The opening chords for the soloist have been described as a summation of all that is most noble in the piano, a sort of monument to the concert grand. The violins give forth the broadly flowing first theme with the piano as accompaniment. The piano presents the warmly lyrical second theme in E-flat major. Although the piano writing is overtly virtuosic, there are also numerous passages where the soloist assumes the role of accompanist.
　The second movement is in E major, a remote key from the concertoʼs basic tonality of C minor. However, the movement begins in the latter key, only later moving to E major. Following a few chords in the muted strings, the solo clarinet, accompanied by the piano, intones the movementʼs principal melodic idea, which surely ranks as one of the most ineffably beautiful ever written. The mood is one of midnight poetry and quiet reflection. During the thematic working out the pace quickens. After a brief cadenza, we hear once more that memorable theme in the violins. For a coda, the piano plays a new thematic idea in block chords, accompanied by left-hand arpeggios and triplets in the woodwinds. The movement closes in serene peace.
　The third movement, dramatic and colorful like the first, also has two themes, the first militaristic and noble, announced by the soloist; the second broadly lyrical, heard first in the violas and oboe. The movement incorporates a fugato based on the movementʼs main theme. First violins alone state the theme lightly and softly; the piano answers almost immediately and continues while other instruments take turns at the theme. Both themes are worked out in various additional ways and the concerto ends in a blaze of virtuosity.

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.
　

Penderecki: Symphony No.2, “Christmas Symphony”

(in one movement)

Krzysztof Penderecki: Born in Debiça, district of Kraków, Poland, November 23, 1933; died in Kraków, March 29, 2020

　Until his death three years ago, Krzysztof Penderecki ranked as Polandʼs most renowned living composer. He rose to prominence during the late 1950s and early ʼ60s with works like Anaklasis and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, in which his staunchly avant-garde sound world included such devices as tone clusters, micro-intervals and noise effects. In the mid-sixties, Penderecki began to look more to the past than to the future for his musical inspiration, and his style became what many referred to as neo-romantic. His First Violin Concerto, written for Isaac Stern in 1976, remains a model of this second-period style. Then, in the early eighties, Pendereckiʼs style changed once again into a synthesis that combined the expressivity of neo-romanticism with various experimental elements from his early works. Millions of people have unknowingly heard Pendereckiʼs music via the medium of film: The Exorcist (1973), The Shining (1980), Fearless (1993), Shutter Island (2010) and Twin Peaks (2017) are just some of the films that incorporate his scores. There is even an asteroid named after him (No. 21059)!
　Penderecki won many prestigious awards going back to 1964, the year he received the Commanderʼs Cross. In 1967 and 1968 came the Prix Italia, followed by five Grammy Awards (1987, 1998, 2001, 2013, and 2017). In 1992 he won the $U.S.150,000 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for the 33-minute Adagio movement from his Fourth Symphony.
　Pendereckiʼs catalogue leans heavily toward the orchestral (including eight symphonies) and the sacred choral repertories. In the latter category one notes the St. Luke Passion, the Psalms of David, Stabat Mater (later absorbed into the St. Luke Passion), Te Deum, Dies irae, the Polish Requiem, The Resurrection of Christ, and various shorter settings, all of which underscore the composerʼs deep and abiding concern for the human condition. There are also four operas (including one based on Miltonʼs Paradise Lost) and concerted works for nearly every instrument in the orchestra. His chamber music catalogue includes four string quartets spread over more than half a century, each written for a different prominent string quartet ensemble. The first two date from the 1960s, the latter two from the twenty-first century. There also exists a two-minute quartet composition entitled Der unterbrochene Gedank (The Interrupted Thought) from 1988.
　Penderecki dedicated his Symphony No. 2 to Zubin Mehta, who conducted the world premiere with the New York Philharmonic on May 1, 1980. Penderecki originally planned the symphony as a work in four or five movements, but later decided to connect all the composition sketches into a single, continuous, 35-minute movement. He made this decision on Christmas Eve, 1979, and for this reason, initially subtitled the work “Christmas Symphony.” Another reason for this designation was the incorporation of the first four notes of the carol “Silent Night.” However, the score was published without any subtitle. “Which is just as well,” writes Wolfram Schwinger in his biography of the composer. “The music … with its brooding, heavyweight chromaticism, continues the earnest strain of thought proposed in the Violin Concerto and Paradise Lost; it has nothing to do with rejoicing or festivity, or even any pastoral Christmas atmosphere. Amid the dark musical shadows, blazing storms and concentrated explosions, the beginning of ‘Silent Nightʼ is quoted three times ‘as from afar.ʼ For a few seconds, the quotations may suggest a ray of hope, but they are foreign bodies whose peaceful, meek, idyllic diatonicism does not fit the melancholy chromaticism of the symphonic action.”
　The single movement can be divided into the standard sonata-allegro form of exposition, development, and recapitulation, but rather than uniquely identifiable themes, melodic lines grow out of previously heard material and morph into episodes that vary in tempo, rhythmic activity, volume, texture, and instrumentation. Much of this thematic material creeps upwards or downwards by half-steps, hence reference to the pervasive “chromaticism” in this music.

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.
　

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