Details

About this Concert Since making her ESO debut in 2005, Karen Gomyo has been invited back to delight ESO audiences four more times, each to enthusiastic acclaim. She performs the mighty Beethoven Violin Concerto, while Mozart’s intricate and melodic “Jupiter” Symphony is also featured. Composer in Residence Robert Rival’s orchestral overture Scherzo will complete the program. Join us at 7:15 pm in the Upper Circle lobby for Symphony Prelude, hosted by D.T. Baker, to learn more about the composers and works featured on the evening's program. Featured Repertoire MOZART: Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter” BEETHOVEN: Violin Concerto RIVAL: Scherzo

Additional Performances Fri, September 30, 2011 Next Landmark Classic Masters October 15, 2011 Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto Thank you to our sponsors! Series Sponsor

Ticket Information $75 Dress Circle (A) $65 Terrace (B) $52 Orchestra (C) $38 Upper Circle (D) $28 Gallery (E) $20 Orchestra Front (F) Tickets subject to applicable service charges.

This performance is part of the Landmark Classic Masters series.

•  Add to my calendar

    Add this event (add only this event to your calendar)
   Add ESO Season Calendar (add all ESO events to your calendar)
    ESO Events RSS Feed (subscribe to our upcoming event RSS feed)
    ESO Events by Email (subscribe to our upcoming event feed by email)

Program Info

Program

RIVAL
Scherzo (7’)*

MOZART
Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551 “Jupiter” (30’)*
 Allegro vivace
 Andante cantabile
 Menuetto: Allegretto
 Molto allegro

INTERMISSION (20 minutes)

BEETHOVEN
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op.61 (45’)*
 Allegro ma non troppo
 Larghetto
 Rondo

Program subject to change.
*indicates approximate performance duration

Program Notes

Scherzo
Robert Rival (b. Calgary, 1975)

Haydn was famous for his musical wit. Mozart revelled in a silly tune. Even Beethoven found time for a good musical joke. None of this undermined their reputations. But somewhere on the journey into the twentieth-century, composers lost the inclination to have fun, perhaps because striking a non-serious pose meant getting marginalized. Look at the fate of poor Poulenc, one of the century’s most delightful musical comedians.

What I offer you with this Scherzo (Italian for “joke”) is my idea of fun. The piece begins and ends with the same frenetic music. Its spiky theme, introduced by the flute, consists of a handful of notes set against a swirling accompaniment. Other little “bits” flash by like nearby trees viewed from inside a speeding train. Eventually the music collapses from utter exhaustion and a waltz takes over. The tune is familiar because … well, it’s just the Scherzo’s aggressive theme now tamed (a device I borrowed from Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 119, No. 2). In its new garb the melody is extended and embellished until the waltz, too, implodes. Suddenly we are transported to a street corner in a faraway place in a time long ago where a lone musician awkwardly plays a fragment of—the theme.

I originally scored Scherzo for nonet (nine instruments). A listener who heard a reading of this version remarked that the piece made him think of a dessert—tiramisu, to be exact. I like the analogy. But I think it sounds more like crême brûlée: hard and crunchy on the outside, soft and creamy on the inside.


Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551 “Jupiter”
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (b. Salzburg, 1756 / d. Vienna, 1791)


Mozart both looks back to the past, and anticipates the future in his 41st Symphony. His use of counterpoint in the opening and final movements is certainly a tribute to composers such as Bach, while his ability to create towering musical structures from minimal musical building blocks is something Beethoven and others picked up on years later.

There are no less than three separate musical ideas in the very opening of the work – quite uncharacteristic of “proper” sonata-allegro form. Similarly, there are three thematic ideas in the Andante cantabile second movement – two serene ones separated by a tense, dramatic emotional one.

A slightly more conventional third movement balanaces a lyrical Minuet with two starkly contrasting trio subjects. The final movement, rather than a jovial trot to the finish line, is instead a towering musical structure, “…where contrasting themes are lined up, harnessed, and sent galloping down the final stretch in one of the most glorious, tingling, and overwhelming passages in music,” wrote longtime New York Times critic Harold C. Schoenberg.


Violin Concerto in D Major, Op.61
Ludwig van Beethoven (b. Bonn, 1770 / d. Vienna, 1827)


There is little doubt that Beethoven would write a violin concerto at some point in his career. A concerto was begun while he still lived in Bonn (WoO 5), and most scholars agree the two Romances for Violin, Opp.40 and 50, were workings-out of potential slow movements. But in the end, the D Major Concerto he finally produced came in great haste, scrabbled together in the latter months of 1806 in time for a concert that December 23. Rushing to put finishing touches to it, Beethoven barely had a legible score for the concerto’s soloist, the fine Viennese violinist Franz Clement (only 26 but already leader of the orchestra at the Theater an der Wien), in time for the premiere. Clement had to more or less read the score on sight, and it took a while for the concerto to take hold. In fact, it was really not until Joseph Joachim championed the work beginning in 1844 that Beethoven’s only concerto for violin was revealed as the masterpiece it is.

The colossal first movement (25 minutes of the concerto’s 45-minute duration) contains a surprising economy of thematic ideas, but a wealth of ways in presenting them. For example, the dramatic, and stark, timpani notes which begin the work show up throughout the movement as a linking idea, but also as an accompaniment to the second main theme. That’s only one example of the many unusual features of this movement. Listen also for how Beethoven uses trills in the solo violin. At the time, trills were almost always used to end long phrases; here, Beethoven uses them as integral parts of the piece – stretching one out and modulating it to an unexpected F Major. The three main musical ideas are presented many times throughout the movement, but in most cases they are presented quite differently upon each new repetition. This movement is a long, rhythmic, exquisitely crafted first movement, and it had no precedent for its scope prior to it.

It is often said of the beautiful second movement that not a lot actually happens in it (the ever quotable scholar Donald Tovey described it as “sublime inaction”). In reality, it is a beautiful theme with four long variations (with a second theme and its own variation as well). Here, the violin engages in dialog with spare musical forces and muted strings. Without a pause, we are pulled unexpectedly from this movement’s F Major into the concerto’s home key, and the Rondo finale enters without a pause. This movement is very much in the traditional Beethoven format for concerto finales, and also features perhaps the most virtuosic work for the soloist. It is cast in a favourite metre of Mozart’s for final movements: the gentle gallop of 6/8, and brings the work to a lively, happy and triumphant conclusion.

Program notes © 2011 by D.T. Baker, except as noted

Artist Info

William Eddins, conductor

William Eddins is in his seventh season as Music Director of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. During his tenure, he has made it a priority that he conduct performances in nearly every subscription series the orchestra has presented, as well as a wide variety of special concerts and galas.

Bill Eddins began playing the piano at age five, but was bitten by the conducting bug while in his sophomore year at the Eastman School of Music. In 1989, he decided to begin conducting studies with Daniel Lewis at the University of Southern California. Assistant Conductorships with both the Minnesota Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony (the latter under the leadership of Daniel Barenboim) honed his skills even further.

Mr. Eddins has many interests outside music. He is fond of biking, tennis, reading, pinball, and cooking. He recently completed building his own recording studio at his home in Minneapolis, where he lives with his wife Jen (a clarinetist), and their sons Raef and Riley. While conducting has been his principal pursuit, he continues to perform on piano in Edmonton and elsewhere. He accepts a limited number of guest appearances each year. In 2008, he conducted a rare full staging of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for Opéra de Lyon, which won him great acclaim, leading to a repeat engagement in Lyon in July and September 2010, as well as Edinburgh in August 2010, and in London in September 2010. During August 2009, Bill toured South Africa, conducting three gala concerts with soprano Renée Fleming and the kwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra.

---

Karen Gomyo, violin

In recital and chamber music, Karen Gomyo has performed at the Aspen, Ravinia, and Caramoor Festivals, Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center, Schloss Elmau, the Louvre in Paris, Festival Internacional Santander in Spain, Chanel Ginza, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. In 2008, Ms. Gomyo performed at the First Symposium for the Victims of Terrorism held at the headquarters of United Nations in New York. Born in Tokyo, Ms. Gomyo was raised in Montréal and began the violin at age five. At age 11, she started her studies with Dorothy DeLay at The Juilliard School in New York, continuing further with Mauricio Fuks at Indiana University, and with Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Karen Gomyo plays on a Stradivarus violin that was bought for her exclusive use by a private sponsor.

Ms. Gomyo last appeared with the ESO at Symphony Under the Sky 2010.