Season Concert 2: Resilience
Sunday, January 29, 2023
3:00 pm @ Penn State Recital Hall
Jonathan Leshnoff - Elegy (2021)
Fazil Say - Concerto for Cello and Orchestra "Never Give Up" (2017) US Premiere
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21
Concert Sponsor: Nancy Eaton
ELEGY
Jonathan Leshnoff was born in 1973, in New Brunswick, New Jersey to Susan Leshnoff, an artist, and Stephen Leshnoff, an engineer. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Conservatory concurrently, earning bachelor's degrees in anthropology and music. A Grammy-nominated composer, Jonathan Leshnoff is renowned for his music's striking harmonies, structural complexity, and powerful themes. Ranked among the most performed living composers by American orchestras in recent seasons, the Baltimore-based composer’s works have been performed by over a hundred orchestras worldwide.
Elegy is a 10-minute composition co-commissioned by the Bellingham Symphony Orchestra and the Tennessee Holocaust Commission. The commission derived from Music Director Yaniv Attar’s long friendship with Leshnoff. Attar approached Leshnoff in 2018 about writing a work for BSO’s Harmony from Discord initiative, which celebrates music that transcends oppression. Elegy is a work that is written especially for this initiative.
Leshnoff writes: “Elegy is written in memory of the thousands of nameless people who suffered under oppression.
“Writing a new composition for the Harmony from Discord series, I chose to musically depict these two contrasting moods with two contrasting ideas: a somber, dark theme that dominates the beginning of the work and a hopeful, brighter theme that is heard in the middle. Elegy starts with this lonely and contemplative theme first played by the violins and then slowly spreading throughout the string section, with the harp offering a haunting echo. After a brooding cadence, the hopeful theme is introduced in the horns.
“Full of moving lines and sweeping harmonies the music builds to a resounding climax, accompanied by the timpani grounding the ensemble in successive strikes. After a cascading cadence, the dark opening theme again returns, but this time, the hopeful theme intertwines itself with the darker theme, symbolic of the hope that has emerged through the dark, discordant eras of history. The piece notably ends on a major chord.”
Maestro Attar presents the work in a version re-imagined for the PCO by composer Jonathan Leshnoff himself.
Never Give Up
Fazıl Say was born in 1970 in Angora, Turkey. His father, Ahmet Say was an author and musicologist. His mother, Gürgün Say was a pharmacist. Fazil was a child prodigy, who was able to do basic arithmetic with 4-digit numbers at the age of two. His father, having found out that he was playing the melody of "Daha Dün Annemizin" (Turkish version of Ah! vous dirai-je, maman a popular children’s song in France) on a makeshift flute with no prior training, enlisted the advice of Ali Kemal Kaya, an oboist and family friend. At the age of three, Say started his piano lessons under the tutelage of pianist Mithat Fenmen who asked the boy to improvise every day on themes to do with his daily life before going on to complete his essential piano exercises and studies. This contact with free creative processes and forms are seen as the source of the immense improvisatory talent and the aesthetic outlook that make Fazıl Say the pianist and composer he is today. He has been commissioned to write music for, among others, the Salzburger Festspiele, the WDR and the Schleswig- Holstein Musik Festival, the Festspiele Mecklenburg- Vorpommern, the Konzerthaus Wien, the Dresdner Philharmonie, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the BBC. His works includes four symphonies, two oratorios, various solo concertos and numerous works for piano and chamber music.
As he did in his Gezi Park series, Fazıl Say makes reference to current political events in this new cello concerto. According to the composer, Never give up is an “outcry for freedom and peace,” focusing on the “harrowing terror attacks in Europe and Turkey.”
"My cello concerto was composed in 2016 and 2017 for Camille Thomas, a young French cellist, whose playing I find truly beautiful with incredibly emotional [effect] ... Back in 2015, 2016 and 2017 there were many terrorist attacks in Europe, particularly in Turkey and in my hometown of Istanbul ... airports, concert halls, football stadiums and in the streets ... it seems like it was almost every day and it was a really dark time in our lives ..." the 53-year-old composer has said. "When writing this concerto amid all this turbulence, I was determined to show resilience that we will never give up - and that there will always be hope for a beautiful and peaceful world."
Symphony in C
Beethoven's first two symphonies grew from the world of Haydn and Mozart. Admittedly, they push the boundaries, but it is not until his third symphony, the Eroica, that he bursts into a new world of his own. However, for those who first heard these symphonies they were brilliant, passionate and surprising symphonies by a young genius.
The First Symphony received its premiere on April 2, 1800 at the Burgtheater in Vienna in a concert which Beethoven put on for his own benefit. The program also included works by Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven appears to have worked on ideas for this symphony for several years, but the main task of composing it took place during the six months before the premiere. The dedication is to the Baron van Swieten, the patron and connoisseur who had helped introduce Beethoven to Vienna society and the man who had introduced Haydn and Mozart to the music of Bach and Handel. The premiere was a great success with both the public and critics and considerably boosted Beethoven's reputation. In Leipzig, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung wrote, ". . . this was truly the most interesting concert we have heard for a long time. . . [The symphony] contained much art, many new things and a wealth of ideas."
The first movement takes the expected sonata form, with a slow introduction the opening chords of which do not begin in the tonic key of C major, perhaps influenced by recent Haydn examples. The pizzicati from the strings and the dynamic, opening wind chords remind one of Mozart. Once we reach the Allegro con brio, the sprightly energy of the first theme is what we expect of a symphony in the Viennese tradition.
The Andante cantabile con moto is by no means a “slow movement,” but rather what in German is called a Spaziergang—a stroll along the lane or wood that is gentle (the “cantabile”) but still moves along continuously (the “con moto”).
The minuet and trio, like all the other movements, manages to avoid banality with lightning quick shifts of mood, and forceful, elegant, and boisterous turns of phrase. Beethoven’s finale is slightly unusual with its slow introduction, beginning with a single stentorian chord, followed by a tentative, searching series of motives from the violins. The vigorous Allegro molto e vivace, on the other hand, is clearly inspired by folk music.
Program notes by Conductor Laureate, Douglas Meyer.