THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2024

ROTTERDAM PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

KNIGHT CONCERT HALL

LAHAV SHANI, CONDUCTOR
DANIIL TRIFONOV, PIANO

ARVO PÄRT
Swansong

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Concerto No. 9 in Eb Major, K. 271 (“Jeunehomme”)

I. Allegro

II. Andantino

III. Rondo (Presto)

 

— INTERMISSION —

 

SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Selections From Romeo & Juliet, op. 64

I. The Montagues and the Capulets

II. The Young Girl Juliet

III. A Scene

IV. Dance

V. Masks

VI. Romeo and Juliet (Balcony Scene)

VII. The Death of Tybalt

VIII. Dance of the Antillian Girls

IX. Romeo and Juliet before Parting

X. Romeo at the Tomb of Juliet

The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra would like to express its gratitude to KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and the City of Rotterdam as the main sponsors of this concert tour.

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM

SWANSONG
ARVO PÄRT (BORN 1935)

Ten years have passed since Arvo Pärt’s “Swansong” received its first performance, courtesy of the Vienna Philharmonic at the Mozartwoche Festival in Salzburg, Austria. Pärt had written the piece just months before, when the Estonian composer was in his late 70s, but the origins of the warm, prayerful music are far older.

Pärt adapted “Swansong” from “Littlemore Tractus,” his choral-and-organ composition inspired by a sermon written by 19th century British cardinal John Henry Newman. Both pieces, like much of Pärt’s work, reach for the divine, with numinous voices and supplicating instruments forming cathedral atmospheres that seem to expand even when the music is at its most still. These compositions, to be sure, are heavy with reverence, and even sound a bit ritualistic at times, but the demands they make upon a listener are light: They only ask to carry you away.

In 1999, Pärt was commissioned to write “Littlemore Tractus” by Bernhard Schünemann, the vicar of Littlemore, a district in Oxford, England where Newman lived and worked and where in 1843 the then Anglican priest delivered his most famous sermon, titled “Wisdom and Innocence.” Born in 1801, Newman was the leader of the Oxford movement, which aimed to return the Church of England to its Catholic roots. In 1845, he converted to Catholicism and became one of the church’s most influential thinkers. Pope Francis canonized him in 2019. Last year, Pärt included “Littlemore Tractus” on Tractus, an album recorded by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and conductor Tõnu Kaljuste.

For Pärt, whose large body of work includes politically daring and even avant-garde efforts, religious belief and music are inseparable. “Religion and life — it is all the same,” he told The New York Times in 2010, adding: “The old music, when it was written, the focus of this music was the Holy Scripture for composers for centuries. It was the reality for every artist. Through one, you can understand the other.”

Of his commission, timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Newman’s birth, Schünemann wrote, “Arvo Pärt, with his mold-breaking new style of composing, which I would like to call ‘holy minimalism,’ has uniquely engaged a new generation of listeners, crossing the boundaries of the classical, popular and the spiritual.”

One of Pärt’s most vocal fans, R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, told The New York Times, “I was attracted to the unbelievable calm and brilliance of his music, and a seeming simplicity. As a musician and an artist, you realize that within its simplicity, it’s incredibly complex. It brings one to a total meditative state. It’s amazing, amazing music.”

 

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 9 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, K. 271 (“JEUNEHOMME”)
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

Mozart wrote Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat Major when he was 21 years old. It is “considered his first masterpiece” (The New Yorker) and “one of Mozart’s most revolutionary” concertos (The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Concert Library). Nonetheless, for more than 100 years, we have been calling it by the wrong name.

In 1912, two French music critics published a biography of Mozart in which they misidentified the woman who had commissioned the Austrian composer to write the concerto. Although Mozart told his father in a letter that he had written it for someone named “Jenomy,” his biographers, after failing to identify a woman by that name, reportedly assumed that young Wolfgang had simply butchered the French spelling of “young man” — “jeune homme.” Subsequent biographers and music scholars accepted their conclusion, and the concerto has been stuck with the “Jeunehomme” nickname ever since.

As Viennese musicologist Michael Lorenz discovered in 2004, however, Mozart had no trouble telling the difference between a young man and the person for whom he’d written the concerto. If anything, he had a vowel problem. Victoire Jenamy was the daughter of Mozart’s good friend Jean-George Noverre, a well-known French dancer and choreographer with whom the composer had collaborated on a ballet. Jenamy was also, in fact, an accomplished pianist who hired Mozart to write the concerto in 1776.

After Lorenz made public the results of his sleuthing, the classical music world and publications such as The New York Times — “A Mozart mystery has been solved at last,” the paper’s Lawrence Van Gelder wrote — took notice.

“It is amazing that for almost a hundred years nobody made this connection,” Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt wrote in the liner notes to her 2011 album Mozart: Piano Concertos Vol. 1, which includes the “Jeunehomme” Concerto.

Still, enough people continued to promote the bogus claims of Mozart’s French biographers that Jenamy admirers such as Lorenz could be forgiven for flipping their powdered wigs.

“Very soon, after on 9 May 2003 I had discovered the truth about K. 271 and Madame Jenamy,” Lorenz wrote in a 2014 blog post titled “The Continuing ‘Jeunehomme’ Nonsense,” “I decided not to become the ‘Jenamy police’ who would call out all the uninformed musicians and recording producers who refuse to accept the historical facts. After all, I have more important things to do than to pursue this kind of propaganda work. But as time went by, I had to realize that the continuing use of the nonsensical fantasy name ‘Jeunehomme’ is a grave injustice towards the artist who paid Mozart good money for composing one of the greatest masterpieces of classical music. We simply owe it to Victoire Jenamy to give her name together with the concerto that she commissioned.”

 

SELECTIONS FROM ROMEO & JULIET, OP. 64
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

“Like all music that’s written for dance, it has too much music for some things and not enough for other things.” In a 2008 New Yorker article by the late, great dance critic Joan Acocella, choreographer Mark Morris addressed the difficulty of presenting Sergei Prokofiev’s 1930s ballet Romeo and Juliet. “Everything happens a thousand times,” he said of the score’s infamous repetitions.

A decade later, in a New York Times interview, conductor Stéphane Denève admitted to being mystified by some of the Russian composer’s artistic decisions. “I wish I could call Prokofiev and ask him what is the exact purpose of his three suites [in Romeo and Juliet],” said Denève, today the artistic director of Arsht Center resident company New World Symphony. “With all my respect, of course, for Prokofiev, I can’t understand his logic.”

The challenge in interpreting Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet may be a reflection of its history, which the Times in that same article described as “tortured.” In 1935, Prokofiev finished his initial version of the ballet, a commission from Russia’s Kirov Theater (now known as the Miriinsky Theater). When the full score premiered in 1940, after years of cancellations and political interference by Stalin’s government, it was markedly different from what Prokofiev had originally written. Most significant, Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers once again were dead at the end of the story.

As Acocella reported, “In the original libretto, which Prokofiev wrote in collaboration with the theater director Sergei Radlov, the lovers do not die. Juliet wakes up in time; she and Romeo escape.”

“For Prokofiev and Radlov to discard Shakespeare’s ending was a bold step — accordingly, the ballet was retitled Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare,” Acocella wrote, “but both men considered themselves experimental artists, and the change probably seemed to them refreshingly iconoclastic.”

Prokofiev, of course, was by no means the first or the last person to reimagine Shakespeare. Like its source material, his score endures through the singular brilliance and superior artistry of its creator.

— Jake Cline

Conductor

  • Lahav Shani

ROTTERDAM PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA 2024

Adrienne Arsht Center