UMS Concert Program, February 14, 1993: University Musical Society -- The Leipzig Chamber Orchestra

Season: 114TH
Concert: TWENTY-NINTH
Rackham Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan

University Musical Society
The Leipzig Chamber Orchestra
Georg Moosdorf Music Director and Conductor
Sunday Afternoon, February 14, 1993, at 5:00 Rackham Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan
PROGRAM
Sinfonia Concertante for Oboe, Cello, and Orchestra in F major . . J. C. Bach Allegro Andante Tempo di Menuetto
Jiirgen Dietze, oboist Matthias Moosdorf, cellist
Symphony No. 3 in G major.................. Haydn
Allegro
Andante moderato Menuetto Trio Finale: Presto
Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra in B-flat major, K. 191.....Mozart
Allegro
Andante ma adagio
Rondo: Tempo di menuetto
Thomas Reinhardt, bassoonist
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485 ...........Schubert
Allegro
Andante con moto Menuetto: Allegro molto Allegro vivace
The Leipzig Chamber Orchestra is represented by Shaw Attractions, Inc., New York The Orchestra can be heard on Eterna Records
TWENTY-NINTH CONCERT OF THE 114TH SEASON 30TH ANNUAL CHAMBER ARTS SERIES
Program Notes
Sinfonia Concertante for Oboe, Cello, and Orchestra in F major
]ohann Christian Bach (1735-1782)
Johann Christian Bach was the elev?enth and last surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach. His music is entirely unlike his father's, for it belongs to a modern style that he learned in Italy and practiced in England. After his father's death in 1750, young Christian left Leipzig for Berlin, where he lived and studied with his famous older brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel. From 1754 to 1762 he was in Italy, acquiring the new operatic style of Naples, studying the Italian instrumental forms of sonata and symphony, and even serving for two years as organist at the Milan Cathedral. In 1762 he saw opportunities in England and moved to London, where he soon launched a splendid career as a composer. His Italian operas were popular there; he gave con?certs; Gainsborough painted his portrait, and the Queen appointed him her Master of Music.
His most important contribution to the history of music perhaps resulted from the encouragement and advice he gave to the eight-year-old Mozart, who visited London in 1764. In 1778 Mozart was still modeling major works after this Bach's, and in 1782 he wrote home to his father from Vienna, in a letter about his collection of fugues by Sebastian, Emanuel, and Friedemann Bach, "I suppose you have heard that the English Bach is dead What a loss to the musical world!" His influence lasted as long as 1788, when Mozart wrote his last sym?phonies.
The sinfonia concertante is a hybrid form that flourished briefly in the eighteenth century, and the best known now are the two by Mozart. It was essentially a sym?phony with a group of solo instruments, as in the old concerto grosso that had been popular a generation or two earlier.
This Sinfonia Concertante, which was published for the first time in 1973, is the second one of a set of twelve that has
survived the centuries in a manuscript that is now in the British Library. It may have been widely known during the composer's lifetime, for there is slightly different copy in the old German State Library in Berlin. It is thought to have been written for performance at the concerts that Bach gave late in life, around 1779, with his child?hood friend, Carl Friedrich Abel, whose father had been a colleague of the great Johann Sebastian. Abel was a virtuoso performer on the viola da gamba, which was by then almost obsolete. It is possible that he was the string soloist in the first performance of the work.
Although most of Bach's orchestral works are in three movements, this one, like many of his sonatas, has only two -Allegro and Tempo di Menuetto with no central slow movement. The standard or?chestra of the time is used: just two oboes, two horns, and strings. The second oboe sometimes joins in duets with the first, and a solo viola occasionally plays with the solo cello.
Symphony No. 3 in G major
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Haydn wrote his first symphonies when the form and the very idea of the symphony were new. Symphonies and overtures were interchangeable, and, moreover, the mod?ern distinction between orchestral and chamber music was of little significance. Haydn wrote more than a hundred sympho?nies, and they earned him the right to be called "the father of the symphony," for he, more than any other composer, inspired Mozart and Beethoven to invest symphonic composition with beauty and power.
The chronology of Haydn's early works is very uncertain, but it is believed that he wrote his first before 1759, the year in which he turned twenty-seven. Haydn had recently entered the service of a Bohemian nobleman, Count von Morzin, as the music director of his orchestra of sixteen musi?cians. He was expected to compose for it
too. A distinguished and rich Hungarian nobleman, Prince Anton Esterhazy, heard Haydn's first symphony and soon engaged the gifted young musician. Haydn began with the Esterhazys on May 1, 1761, and stayed with them for thirty years. He be?came Europe's most famous and honored musician, and the Esterhazys were forever proud of having discovered him.
When modern musicologists first strug?gled with the problem of authenticating and dating the hundreds of symphonies attributed to Haydn, the earlier works were not easily found and listed, but they were recognized fairly soon as works Haydn wrote around 1762. The early symphonies were often scored for two oboes, two horns, strings, and continue What distinguished Haydn's music from that of the many composers who were then working in this "modern" form is the vigor with which he carried out the new ideas of symphonic writing stating and analyzing and even discussing them as he did with matchless imagination.
Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra in B-flat major, K. 191
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
"As regards Mozart's concertos for wind instruments," writes Alfred Einstein in his classic biography, "we can deal with them in short order. They are for the most part occasional works in the narrower sense, intended to make a pleasant impres?sion ... all these works are simpler in structure, and the character of their me?lodic invention is determined by the limi?tations of the instruments. Not that Mozart himself felt in any way cramped. He always moved comfortably and freely within any limitations, and turned them into positive advantages. . . . [A]ll these concertos have something special about them, and when one hears them in a concert hall, which is seldom enough, one has the feeling that the windows have suddenly been opened and a breath of fresh air been let in."
. The B-flat major Bassoon Concerto was written in June of 1774, in Salzburg. There is apparently no mention of this work in Mozart's letters. W. J. Turner, in his fine Mozart: The Man and His Works,
indicates that this work "was succeeded by two other concertos for bassoon composed a few months later (spring 1775) for a rich amateur, Baron Diirnitz, which are, unfor?tunately, lost." This Baron Thaddeus von Diirnitz was a well-known patron of music and was accomplished on clavier and bas?soon. Mozart composed several other works for him, on commission including the so-called Diirnitz sonata for clavier, K. 284
but there seems to be some doubt about his willingness to pay for them, and the correspondence from Mozart's father is full of questions about this.
Einstein describes the B-flat concerto as "a work unmistakably conceived for a wind instrument, a real bassoon concerto, which could not be arranged, say, for violoncello . . . The solo portions are full of leaps, runs, and singing passages com?pletely suited to the instrument. The work was written con amore from beginning to end, as is particularly evident in the lively participation of the orchestra."
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D.
485
Fran Schubert (1797-1828)
It is sometimes difficult to believe that Franz Schubert lived less than thirty-two years. He wrote about 600 songs and almost 1000 more compositions tsymphonies, sonatas, string quartets, operas, masses -music in almost every form that existed in his time. We even divide them into periods
early, middle, and late works. Schubert lived an extraordinarily full, long life in a short time. Mozart and Mendelssohn, in their thirty-six years, had important public careers, though very different ones, and were well-known figures in the musical world. Schubert was not altogether un?known, but he never really had a place in concert life. There is no record of a public performance of any of his symphonies until after his death.
Although Beethoven and Schubert were contemporaries, they inhabited differ?ent Viennas. Schubert had few connec?tions with the wealthy and noble families who were for several generations involved in the careers of Haydn, Mozart, and Bee?thoven. Some of his friends were people of
"quality," and he even spent two summers in Hungary as a music teacher of the Esterhazys, but for the most part he con?ducted his life as a Viennese of the lower classes, son of a schoolmaster and for sev?eral years one himself. It was a simple life of the kind that might later be called "Bohemian," lived with a group of friends of his own age, many of them talented and some of them from families of means, compared with Schubert's. They attended public musical events when they could, admired the great musicians of their time and adored Beethoven from afar.
Schubert wrote his B-flat Symphony during a few weeks in the autumn of 1816, when he was nineteen years old. It was played soon afterward by a sort of training orchestra his father had organized, at the home of a friend. The light scoring one flute, two oboes, two bassoons and two horns, with strings probably tells us exactly what instruments were on hand.
The music was put aside and forgotten until some fifty years later, when George Grove, the original editor of the famous Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Ar?thur Sullivan, the musician of the Gilbert-and-Sullivan team, went to Vienna to search for the lost manuscripts of the un?published works of Schubert. Among the treasures they took home to London were this and three other symphonies.
The four movements of the Fifth Sym?phony follow the classical models that young Schubert had before him: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The first is a gracious Allegro movement and the second, a smooth and expressive Andante con moto. The Minuet, Allegro moito, is patterned directly after that of Mozart's great G-minor Symphony, and the finale, Allegro vivace, is richly melodic. All but the Minuet are in variants of sonata form.
Notes by Leonard Burkat
About The Artists
In the nearly two decades since its inception, the Leipzig Chamber Orchestra has achieved international renown for its innovative programming and musical excellence. Formed in 1971 by members of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra as the "Collegium Instrumentale Lipsiense," the ensemble's artistic challenge was to illuminate the rich heritage of neglected masterworks and encourage new composition.
Under Music Director Georg Moosdorf, the orchestra initially focused on works by Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel, and the Bachs. Today it offers many concerts dedicated to the music of the Viennese classical period: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and their contempo?raries. Renamed the Leipzig Chamber Orchestra in 1982, the ensemble prides itself on strict adherence to the articulation, dynamics, and agogics found in the original scores. In addition, it has offered several premieres of twentieth-century works. All told, the orchestra's repertoire traces three centuries of European musical development.
Beyond its regular concerts arranged with the Leipzig Gewandhaus series, the ensemble has appeared at nearly all of the major German music centers, several Bach Festivals, the Dresden, Ludwigsburg and Brighton Festivals. In 1991 and 1992 it was orchestra-in-residence at Hanover's prestigious Theatre and Music Festival. Its successful tours have included Poland and Great Britain. This season features its first Japanese and North American tours -the latter including New York's Carnegie Hall and a return to Great Britain. Already well-represented on Eterna Records, the Leipzig Chamber Orchestra begins recording early Haydn symphonies for the Danish "Steeple Chase" label this year.
After attending music schools in Querfurt and Potsdam, Georg Moosdorf studied at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Conservatory in Leipzig. In 1958 he founded the Leipzig String Quartet, which went on to win international competitions in Budapest (1962) and Liege (1964). He has been first violinist of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra since 1960 and resigned from the Leipzig String Quartet in 1967. His private conducting studies with Arvid Jansons and Vaclav Neumann followed, and in 1971 he founded the Collegium Instrumentale Lipsiense, which became the Leipzig Chamber Orchestra in 1982. Maestro Moosdorf is regularly invited to guest-conduct several other German orchestras.
The Leipzig Chamber Orchestra Georg Moosdorf, Music Director and Conductor
First Violins Andreas Seidel Stefan Arzberger Heinz-Peter Piischel Uwe Boge Rudolf Conrad
Second Violins Peter Gerlach Tilmann Biining Kathrin Pantzier LudolfKahler Udo Hannewald
Violas Ivo Bauer Norbert Tunze Katharina Dargel
Cellos
Matthias Moosdorf
Heiko Schumann
Double Bass Eberhard Spree
Flute
Christian Sprenger
Oboes
Thomas Hipper Holger Landmann
Bassoons David Peterson Gottfried Kronfeld
Horns
Jorg Bruckner
Eckhard Runge
Stage Manager Joachim Giinther
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The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra James Levine, conductor Itzhak Perlman, violinist Renie Fleming, soprano
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wilhjim Miller Barbara Cook with Wally Harper
Eartha Kill Bess Bonnier Trio
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Kallen Esperian, soprano
Florence Quivar, mezzo-soprano
Jonathan Welch, tenor
James Morris, bass
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Celebrate the 100th May Festival, May 6-9, 1993 with Concerts, Cabaret, Dancing, Dining, and a 100th May Festival Birthday Party!