LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Tempest in C Minor

Inon Barnatan - Piano

Augustine Hadelich - Violin

Matthew Lupman - Viola

Clive Greesmith - Cello

Calidore String Quartet
Jeffrey Myers - Violin

Ryan Meehan - Violin

Jeremy Berry - Viola

Estelle Choi - Cello

Beethoven - Trio in C minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 1, No. 3 (1794-95)
Brahms - Quartet in C minor for Strings, Op. 51, No. 1 (1873)
Fauré - Quartet No. 1 in C minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 15 (1876-79)

"The 24 keys in music mysteriously possess unmistakable personalities. Like human beings, some are more suited to one occasion than another. For whatever reason, C minor (the dark side of C major) has often been the key of choice for composers in stormy moods. Join us for Beethoven, Brahms, and Fauré at their turbulent best."

"The concert you are about to hear is the first we have ever programmed intentionally in entirely the same key: C minor. Assuming that now is the time for an explanation, we’ll attempt one.

The first aspect of this idea worth noting is the number of works, throughout music history and in many genres, composed in this special key. They all strikingly bear the same emotional content, whether written in the Baroque era or today. From Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue, to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, to Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, to Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, to Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, the key of C minor provides a realm within which so many composers have created their most intense and memorable works.

But why C minor? There is no proven reason, only guesses based on instinct. It certainly seems that each key center in music—and there are 24 of them—has its own personality. How and why a composer chooses a key for a work is certainly a question worth asking if given the opportunity. But for now, from a listener’s point of view, it’s obvious to point out that C minor is the dark side of the world’s most accessible and friendly key: C major. Anyone can play a C major scale by walking up to a piano and running one’s finger up and down the white keys. It’s the first orderly thing that a baby does on a piano once past the random banging stage. The note-naming concept of do-re-mi is based on the C major scale. So if C major is arguably humankind’s happiest and most familiar key, then possibly its polar opposite is music’s most traumatic transformation.

In any case, with all the storm and stress on its way to the stage, we are happy and very excited to experience this immersion. Please keep in mind that not every moment of this concert is in C minor! These great works do indeed find their ways through multiple keys, which act as foils for each piece’s defining tonality."

RECITAL

Merkin Hall
Tuesday Matinees

Nikki Choo - Violin
Sejoon Park - Piano

Beethoven – Sonata No.3 in E Flat
Chausson - Poeme in E flat
oan Tower - String Force
Franck - Sonata

"Soloist Nikki Chooi made it the musical equivalent of a book that you can't put down.”
— New Zealand Herald

"Canadian violinist Nikki Chooi has been described as “richly expressive and technically assured” (Calgary Herald) and “vigorous and colorful” (New York Times). He is a First Prize Winner of the 2013 Michael Hill International Violin Competition and the 2009 Klein International Competition, a Laureate of the 2012 Queen Elisabeth Violin Competition, and a winner of the 2013 Astral Artists' Auditions. Chooi served as Concertmaster of New York's Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for the 2016-17 season."

Watch a video of the artist...

LINCOLN CENTER

Lincoln Center Great Performers
The London Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle - Conductor

Mahler - Symphony No. 10 (completed by Deryck Cooke)

Mahler’s Tenth Symphony remained incomplete at his death, with the exception of a soaring Adagio first movement and sketches for an imaginatively scored remainder. Some 64 years later, musicologist Deryck Cooke finished weaving this extraordinarily rich tapestry. The completed work, as presented by Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra, is simply earth-shattering.

RECITAL

Marble Collegiate Church
Lunchtime Organ Recital Series

CONCERT

Carnegie Hall
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

International Festival of Orchestras

Mahler - Symphony No. 7

"Mahler’s five-movement Symphony No. 7 has its share of shadows, especially in its two mysterious “night music” movements, but all is not gloom. The massively scored symphony—it includes cowbells, mandolin, and guitar—culminates in a wildly exuberant finale where snippets of operetta, a reference to the opening of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, and a Turkish march joyously swirl together."

GUSTAV MAHLER 
Symphony No. 7 in E Minor

A Unique Doubleness

In Carnegie Hall’s 2009 traversal of the complete Mahler symphonies, Pierre Boulez commented in these pages on this composer’s unique doubleness: Mahler walks a treacherous border between “sentimentality and irony,” “nostalgia and criticism,” “meticulousness of detail,” and “grandeur of design,” demanding that we listen in a “manner more varied, more ambiguous, and richer” than we ordinarily do. No Mahler symphony makes this demand more emphatically than the Seventh, in many ways the most daring of his nine symphonies. It is meticulous but grandiose, parodic but sentimental, constantly shifting and re-shifting ideas and tonal centers. Mahler believed the Seventh to be his “best work,” but it is his least performed and understood.

Even more than other Mahler symphonies, the Seventh juxtaposes wildly disparate materials, from cartoonish ditties to Wagnerian eruptions. His need to do this was deeply rooted in childhood experience. One of the earliest artists to take advantage of psychotherapy, he told Sigmund Freud that after escaping into the street from a traumatic fight between his parents, he heard a hurdy-gurdy playing a popular Viennese tune; forever afterward, tragedy and banality were fused in his imagination, forging an aesthetic he could not escape. The high and the low were inextricably united. This conjunction was perhaps more shocking to Mahler’s contemporaries—who regarded it as a basic lack of taste—than any aspect of his work. To 21st-century audiences, accustomed to “post-modern” mash-ups, it is one of his most attractive signatures.

The Death of Tonality?

Arnold Schoenberg seized upon the harmonic instability of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony as proof that the tonal system was finally dead. His timing was perfect: The symphony was premiered to a baffled audience by Mahler and the Czech Philharmonic in 1908, the year of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, a signal work in Schoenberg’s atonal revolution. Yet, one can argue that rather than abolishing tonality, Mahler’s constant shifting to new keys affirms and reaffirms it. The Seventh Symphony is not so much atonal as multi-tonal.

About the Work

With its massive tutti, idiosyncratic timbres, and delicate chamber combinations, the Seventh Symphony is a sensational orchestral showpiece. The instrumentation is inventive even for Mahler, and some of the complex percussion sounds, including guitar, mandolin, piano, gongs, cowbells, and much else.

Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is not a forbidding work—not a “tragic” symphony like the Sixth (which also had a hard time entering the repertory), nor a death-haunted piece like the Ninth. Like the Fifth, it is a comedy, moving from darkness to light, from a lugubrious funeral march through the nachtmusik episodes toward the mischievous wit of the Rondo-Finale. Mahler himself called the finale “bright day” bursting in after “night music,” declaring that the symphony was “predominantly of a cheerful character.” The Seventh also resembles the Fifth in having a major theme from the first movement appear in the chaotic skirmish of the finale, providing a semblance of classical symmetry.

A Closer Listen

The epic first movement opens with a pensive funeral march (a “song of nature,” in Mahler’s description) that seems to start in the middle. This languid procession alternates with a frantic Allegro driven by the harmonic disintegration that caught Schoenberg’s ear. The development section offers a lyrical episode full of harps, birdcalls, and strings—a moment of innocence recalling earlier Mahler. Coming out of nowhere, it vanishes as quickly as it appears, with a lonely trombone dragging us back into the world of shadowy marches and anxious gallops.The Scherzo and two “night music” movements sustain a remarkable unity of mood. Normally, Mahler would disperse his ghostlike nocturnes and slithery scherzos throughout a symphony, not put them on top of each other. Hearing three of them in a row creates a uniquely spectral ambiance, earning the work’s popular subtitle, “Song of the Night.” The swinging main tune in the Nachtmusik I has a street-music ambiance. Mahler plays with its possibilities—tugging and pulling before dissipating with a harp ping. The Scherzo, labeled Schattenhaft (“like a shadow”), combines diablerie and jauntiness. Most vivid of all is the Andante amoroso, a ghostly serenade where mandolin, guitar, solo violin, and other soloists produce dreamlike sounds.

The spell is broken by orgiastic timpani pounding in for the finale, bringing dazzling sunlight, but also a constant shuffling of moods and styles. The movement continually reinvents itself, constructing and deconstructing ideas, from folk and Wagnerian motifs to variations on the symphony’s opening march, until it unleashes a surprise ending that emerges from a short diminuendo rather than a Mahlerian crescendo. It’s an effect that Haydn, music’s supreme jokester, might have created had he lived in the 20th century.

LINCOLN CENTER

David Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

ALL ROBBINS NO. 1: THE BERNSTEIN COLLABORATIONS

"Two American masters converge in these high-energy story ballets. Fancy Free follows three soldiers on shore leave in the Big City, while Dybbuk delves into a mystical world with dreadful consequences. Renewing their international hit, West Side Story Suite brings audiences to the feuding streets of 1950s New York City with heart-rending poignancy.

Fancy Free
Music by: Leonard Bernstein
Choreography by: Jerome Robbins
Principal Casting:  Roman Mejia*, Harrison Coll*, Sebastian Villarini-Velez*, Alexa Maxwell*, Tiler Peck, Miriam Miller, Giovanni Villalobos (*NYC debut)

"Evoking the Great White Way, Fancy Free is the precursor to Broadway’s On the Town, presenting three sailors and their escapades on shore leave in Manhattan."





Dybbuk
Music by: Leonard Bernstein
Choreography by: Jerome Robbins
Principal Casting: Sterling Hyltin*, Anthony Huxley* (*first time in role)

Harkening to ancient Russian-Jewish folklore, Bernstein and Robbins' Dybbuk explores a mystical world of dreadful consequences and enduring passion.

West Side Story Suite

Music by: Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Choreography by: Jerome Robbins; Co-choreographed by Peter Gennaro
Principal Casting: Peter Walker*, Zachary Catazaro*, Andrew Veyette, Jacqueline Bologna*, Meaghan Dutton-O'Hara*, Indiana Woodward (*first time in role)

A modern love story based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story Suite brings audiences to the feuding streets of 1950s New York City with its crackling energy and heart-rending poignancy.

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
Young Concert Artists

Gala 2018

A bonus from our terrace following the concert.