THE PASADENA SYMPHONY GETS INTO THE SPIRIT OF APRIL FOOL’S DAY WITH A PROGRAM THAT TRICKS…AND TREATS
Entertainment Desk
March 13, 2006
PASADENA, Calif. The Pasadena Symphony will celebrate the spirit of April Fools Day when it presents three works that – borrowing a phrase from another, equally mischievous holiday – ‘trick’ music lovers while treating them to an evening of glorious sound on April 1 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena.
The orchestra will perform the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the story of a Cornish knight and Irish princess ‘tricked’ into falling in love by a love potion; continue with Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work written in four movements that sound like one, since Liszt called for them to be performed without pause (hint: the finale begins with a solo…on the triangle!); then conclude the evening with Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, a celebration of life in which a funeral chant plays a leading role.
The ultimate trick is that we programmed the works, never realizing that each fit so well into an April Fools Day context,” says Tom O’Connor, Executive Director of The Pasadena Symphony. “The joke was on us.”
The Pasadena Symphony’s performance on April 1 will open with a two-part, purely orchestral sequence joining the opening and closing moments – the Prelude and Liebestod – of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Today’s audiences are not the only, however, to hear these excerpts performed in this manner; music lovers in Wagner’s day were introduced to the Prelude and Liebestod two full years before the actual opera premiered at the Munich Court Opera in 1865. Nor was this a rare occurrence – the Prelude to Die Meistersinger received the same treatment – because Wagner put so much effort into refining his operas before he would allow them to be staged.
Based on a Medieval English legend, Tristan und Isolde is “not so much a love story as a depiction of the all-consuming nature of passion,” says Jorge Mester, Music Director of The Pasadena Symphony. “With every bar of music, we enter more deeply into the lovers’ world of yearning, passion and despair.”
Wagner echoed this statement in the program notes for an 1860 performance of the Prelude. “Only one thing remains,” he wrote. “Longing, longing, longing…insatiable longing…Death, their only deliverance.”
The Liebestod, the “love death” – a designation never used, incidentally, by Wagner – depicts “Isolde, mourning over the body of her beloved, and literally willing herself to death through a cosmic connection to universal Eros,” says composer Byron Adams, Chairman of Composition at the University of California Riverside.
Nevertheless, despite its gloomy subject matter, the Liebestod, “is music so sublimely beautiful,” says O’Connor, “that many consider it the masterpiece of the opera.”
Like Tristan und Isolde – which Wagner’s contemporaries often decried for its “lack of melody” – Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 broke new ground. Liszt abandoned the musical dictates of the Classical period to embrace the expressiveness of the Romantic.
He began composing the concerto in his twenties, but it was not published until years later, when he was 38 years old. There are at least six complete drafts of the work, many entitled Concerto symphonique, revealing Liszt’s determination to have the orchestra play as vital a role as the soloist.
Adds Andrew Clements of The Guardian, “But in a high voltage performance, the niceties of this…unity become irrelevant; it’s the sheer physicality of the virtuoso piano part that is so dazzling, as well as the parade of brightly colored orchestral writing that counterpoints it.”
Pianist Lise de la Salle was born in France in 1988 and was surrounded by music from her earliest childhood. She began studying the piano at the age of four and gave her first concert at nine, in a live broadcast on Radio-France. At 13, de la Salle made her concerto debut under Andreas Stoehr in Avignon and her Paris recital debut at the Louvre before going on tour with the Orchestre National d’Ile de France playing Haydn’s Concerto in D Major.
Young as she is, de la Salle has already won an impressive number of awards: First Prize in both the 2004 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York and the 2003 European Young Concert Artists Auditions in Paris; the Rhoda Walker Teagle Prize; the Mary Van Nes Prize; the Miriam Brody Aronson Prize; the Mortimer Levitt Career Award for Women Artists; The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle Prize; the Slomovic Orchestra Soloist Prize; the John Browning Memorial Prize; and the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival Prize.
Having recently completed her first tour of Japan, de la Salle will soon participate in several European Summer Festivals, including performances as soloist with the the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra in Mozart’s Concerto No. 20 (K. 466), as well as in the St. Riquier Festival, Festival du Haut Limousin, and the Roque d’Anthéron Festival in France.
the exhilaration didn’t let up for a second until her hands came off the keyboard,” said the Washington Post of a recent performance.
De la Salle’s first recording on the Naïve label is devoted to Ravel and Rachmaninov.
All his life Rachmaninoff was fascinated by ecclesiastical chants, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his last complete work, the Symphonic Dances. Resounding in particular throughout the Dances, especially in the finale, is the Dies Irae, sung in memory of the dead.
Yet the Symphonic Dances, originally composed for two pianos, are not all doom and gloom.
As in many of his works, Rachmaninoff uses the ‘Dies Irae,’ the Latin chant for the dead,” explains Adams. “But, ultimately, the ‘Dies Irae’ is defeated by a quotation of a fragment of an ‘Alleluia,’ which prophesies the victory of the light.”
Much like Mozart,” adds Jorge Mester, “within just a few seconds, Rachmaninoff goes from lushness to sadness and longing to triumph and exhilaration, and it all makes sense.”
Rachmaninoff himself agreed, although legend has it that he was surprised by just how good the orchestrated version was when he attended its premiere in 1942.
I don’t know how it happened,” the composer told friends. “It must have been my last spark.”
Fittingly, this last great work is being performed on April 1, Rachmaninoff’s birthday.
Over 60 years later, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances have sparked the artistry and imagination of several students at Art Center College of Design. As participants in The Pasadena Symphony’s annual Juried Exhibition program, Concertos on Canvas, they were asked to create a work that reflected their response to the music. Winning entries, selected by Andrea Fiuczynski, President of Christie’s in Beverly Hills, will be on display in the lobby of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on concert night.
Our audience will be able to see the music as well as hear it,” says O’Connor.
The performance of The Pasadena Symphony on March 11 is made possible by the generosity of Major Concert Sponsor, the Women’s Committee of The Pasadena Symphony. Special thanks are also due to Bolton and Company, for underwriting the performance of Lise de la Salle, and K-Mozart for sponsoring that evening’s Gold Room post-concert reception for major donors and musicians.
Established in 1928, The Pasadena Symphony is committed to providing orchestral performances of the highest quality and to benefiting the community through its music, education and outreach programs. The Pasadena Symphony performs monthly, October through May, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, located at 300 East Green Street in Pasadena. Concerts begin promptly at 8 p.m., with a free pre-concert lecture series “Insights” taking place in the auditorium at 7 p.m.
Individual ticket prices range from $15 to $72, with discounts available for groups of ten or more. Student and senior rush tickets will also be available on the day of the concert for $12. To purchase tickets to any performances of The Pasadena Symphony, call the box office at 626.584.8833. To learn more about The Pasadena Symphony, call The Pasadena Symphony’s offices at 626.793.7172 or visit the orchestra’s website at www.pasadenasymphony.org.
The orchestra will perform the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the story of a Cornish knight and Irish princess ‘tricked’ into falling in love by a love potion; continue with Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work written in four movements that sound like one, since Liszt called for them to be performed without pause (hint: the finale begins with a solo…on the triangle!); then conclude the evening with Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, a celebration of life in which a funeral chant plays a leading role.
The ultimate trick is that we programmed the works, never realizing that each fit so well into an April Fools Day context,” says Tom O’Connor, Executive Director of The Pasadena Symphony. “The joke was on us.”
The Pasadena Symphony’s performance on April 1 will open with a two-part, purely orchestral sequence joining the opening and closing moments – the Prelude and Liebestod – of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Today’s audiences are not the only, however, to hear these excerpts performed in this manner; music lovers in Wagner’s day were introduced to the Prelude and Liebestod two full years before the actual opera premiered at the Munich Court Opera in 1865. Nor was this a rare occurrence – the Prelude to Die Meistersinger received the same treatment – because Wagner put so much effort into refining his operas before he would allow them to be staged.
Based on a Medieval English legend, Tristan und Isolde is “not so much a love story as a depiction of the all-consuming nature of passion,” says Jorge Mester, Music Director of The Pasadena Symphony. “With every bar of music, we enter more deeply into the lovers’ world of yearning, passion and despair.”
Wagner echoed this statement in the program notes for an 1860 performance of the Prelude. “Only one thing remains,” he wrote. “Longing, longing, longing…insatiable longing…Death, their only deliverance.”
The Liebestod, the “love death” – a designation never used, incidentally, by Wagner – depicts “Isolde, mourning over the body of her beloved, and literally willing herself to death through a cosmic connection to universal Eros,” says composer Byron Adams, Chairman of Composition at the University of California Riverside.
Nevertheless, despite its gloomy subject matter, the Liebestod, “is music so sublimely beautiful,” says O’Connor, “that many consider it the masterpiece of the opera.”
Like Tristan und Isolde – which Wagner’s contemporaries often decried for its “lack of melody” – Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 broke new ground. Liszt abandoned the musical dictates of the Classical period to embrace the expressiveness of the Romantic.
He began composing the concerto in his twenties, but it was not published until years later, when he was 38 years old. There are at least six complete drafts of the work, many entitled Concerto symphonique, revealing Liszt’s determination to have the orchestra play as vital a role as the soloist.
Adds Andrew Clements of The Guardian, “But in a high voltage performance, the niceties of this…unity become irrelevant; it’s the sheer physicality of the virtuoso piano part that is so dazzling, as well as the parade of brightly colored orchestral writing that counterpoints it.”
Pianist Lise de la Salle was born in France in 1988 and was surrounded by music from her earliest childhood. She began studying the piano at the age of four and gave her first concert at nine, in a live broadcast on Radio-France. At 13, de la Salle made her concerto debut under Andreas Stoehr in Avignon and her Paris recital debut at the Louvre before going on tour with the Orchestre National d’Ile de France playing Haydn’s Concerto in D Major.
Young as she is, de la Salle has already won an impressive number of awards: First Prize in both the 2004 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York and the 2003 European Young Concert Artists Auditions in Paris; the Rhoda Walker Teagle Prize; the Mary Van Nes Prize; the Miriam Brody Aronson Prize; the Mortimer Levitt Career Award for Women Artists; The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle Prize; the Slomovic Orchestra Soloist Prize; the John Browning Memorial Prize; and the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival Prize.
Having recently completed her first tour of Japan, de la Salle will soon participate in several European Summer Festivals, including performances as soloist with the the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra in Mozart’s Concerto No. 20 (K. 466), as well as in the St. Riquier Festival, Festival du Haut Limousin, and the Roque d’Anthéron Festival in France.
the exhilaration didn’t let up for a second until her hands came off the keyboard,” said the Washington Post of a recent performance.
De la Salle’s first recording on the Naïve label is devoted to Ravel and Rachmaninov.
All his life Rachmaninoff was fascinated by ecclesiastical chants, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his last complete work, the Symphonic Dances. Resounding in particular throughout the Dances, especially in the finale, is the Dies Irae, sung in memory of the dead.
Yet the Symphonic Dances, originally composed for two pianos, are not all doom and gloom.
As in many of his works, Rachmaninoff uses the ‘Dies Irae,’ the Latin chant for the dead,” explains Adams. “But, ultimately, the ‘Dies Irae’ is defeated by a quotation of a fragment of an ‘Alleluia,’ which prophesies the victory of the light.”
Much like Mozart,” adds Jorge Mester, “within just a few seconds, Rachmaninoff goes from lushness to sadness and longing to triumph and exhilaration, and it all makes sense.”
Rachmaninoff himself agreed, although legend has it that he was surprised by just how good the orchestrated version was when he attended its premiere in 1942.
I don’t know how it happened,” the composer told friends. “It must have been my last spark.”
Fittingly, this last great work is being performed on April 1, Rachmaninoff’s birthday.
Over 60 years later, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances have sparked the artistry and imagination of several students at Art Center College of Design. As participants in The Pasadena Symphony’s annual Juried Exhibition program, Concertos on Canvas, they were asked to create a work that reflected their response to the music. Winning entries, selected by Andrea Fiuczynski, President of Christie’s in Beverly Hills, will be on display in the lobby of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on concert night.
Our audience will be able to see the music as well as hear it,” says O’Connor.
The performance of The Pasadena Symphony on March 11 is made possible by the generosity of Major Concert Sponsor, the Women’s Committee of The Pasadena Symphony. Special thanks are also due to Bolton and Company, for underwriting the performance of Lise de la Salle, and K-Mozart for sponsoring that evening’s Gold Room post-concert reception for major donors and musicians.
Established in 1928, The Pasadena Symphony is committed to providing orchestral performances of the highest quality and to benefiting the community through its music, education and outreach programs. The Pasadena Symphony performs monthly, October through May, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, located at 300 East Green Street in Pasadena. Concerts begin promptly at 8 p.m., with a free pre-concert lecture series “Insights” taking place in the auditorium at 7 p.m.
Individual ticket prices range from $15 to $72, with discounts available for groups of ten or more. Student and senior rush tickets will also be available on the day of the concert for $12. To purchase tickets to any performances of The Pasadena Symphony, call the box office at 626.584.8833. To learn more about The Pasadena Symphony, call The Pasadena Symphony’s offices at 626.793.7172 or visit the orchestra’s website at www.pasadenasymphony.org.
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