Mozart and Schumann

Featured as part of the Classic Series

Friday February 6, 2009 8:00PM
Saturday February 7, 2009 8:00PM

The Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle
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Stefan Sanderling, conductor

Cornelia Hermann, Piano

Description:

"To compose music, all you have to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of."
-Robert Schumann

Popularly known as the Jeunehomme Concerto, Mozart’s Ninth Piano Concerto has been singled out as the “first unequivocal masterpiece of the Classical era” by musicologist Charles Rosen. Though indeed written when Mozart was a ‘young man (jeune homme, translated into English)’ of twenty-one, the sobriquet is supposed to be the last name of the pianist to whom Mozart dedicated the work. Recently, musicologist Michael Lorenz has argued that the dedicatee was a young woman named Victoire Jenamy. The piece is noteworthy from its dramatic treatment of the piano soloist, almost in the mode of an opera singer. The second movement is especially powerful, with effective use of dissonance to convey a sense of emotional anxiety and heartbreak.

Robert Schumann’s struggles with anxiety and depression had reached their peak in 1845. Within that context, the high spirits that govern much of his Second Symphony are all the more remarkable, including a finale that draws inspiration from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

The program begins with the Dreamwaltzes, by American composer Steven Stucky. The piece is based on three waltz fragments, two by Brahms and one by Richard Strauss. Ultimately, Stucky feels that the piece has a strongly nostalgic element, for, in his words, “a composer from the late twentieth century can admire the waltz from a distance, but he cannot make it his own.”

Points of interest:

· Robert Schumann had a gift for pithy quotations, including this one: “If we were all determined to play first violin, we should never have an ensemble.” Keep this quote in mind as you watch the first violins attack the demoniacally difficult Scherzo from the Second Symphony.

· The young German pianist Cornelia Herrmann makes her American orchestral debut with these performances. She last worked with Stefan Sanderling in Japan, performing Mozart’s Concerto K. 467 with the NHK Symphony.

· Steven Stucky was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Second Concerto for Orchestra. With characteristic humor, he mused on this award: “At some time, most of us have cast a jaundiced eye on the Pulitzer Prize in music, muttering in one April or another (if only to ourselves) that the jury must have been crazy, that it's all "politics" anyway (meaning, I guess, that human beings are involved), and that, anyway, you can't compare works of art as if they were heifers at the county fair. So what to think if, suddenly, you win?”

Memorial concert in honor of Caroline Jobst Reimann

Program:

Stucky Dreamwaltzes*

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major
"Jeunehomme" 32'

INTERMISSION

Schumann Symphony No. 2 in C Major 39'

*TSO Premiere

Toledo Symphony