DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)
Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10 (1924-1925)
A music student at the Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg) Conservatory, Dmitri Shostakovich composed his daring First Symphony as his graduation piece. It’s an amazing achievement for a 19 year old and made him an instant celebrity. Writing to a friend, he said: “In general, I am satisfied with the symphony. Not bad. A symphony like any others, although it really ought to be called a “symphony-grotesque.” When it was premiered in Moscow, students fought to get in to hear it. Its fame spread across the world, including the New York Philharmonic’s performance in 1931 under Arturo Toscanini. Its language is so different from what had come before—though there are occasional echoes of Shostakovich’s musical “ancestors”… Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. The First is cheeky, brash, vigorous, and exhibits the unmistakable traits that would characterize all 15 of his symphonic creations—wit, irony, satire, rhythmic drive, drama, and, humor, but also intense expressiveness, somber moods, and elements of the grotesque. And underneath it all, lurks an undercurrent of foreboding and danger. The first movement includes a fiendish march and pounding timpani. The piano plays a prominent role in the fleeting second movement Allegro. The Lento with its gorgeous, expansive themes is the heart of the symphony and contains some gorgeous if dark writing. The final movement begins without pause with the angry sound of a snare drum, and the timpani announces itself with great bravado. All comes to a brilliant conclusion in the finale of this remarkable work that heralds a bright new star in the firmament of classical music. With his 15 symphonies, composed over the span of nearly a half-century, Shostakovich came to be recognized as the greatest symphonic voice of the 20th century.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)
The Isle of the Dead (1909)
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s composed his first orchestral masterpiece, the symphonic poem Isle of the Dead, in 1909. It was inspired by a mysteriously evocative painting of the same name by the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). The composer had been spending time outside of Russia in the years after 1905, and found occasion to travel, attend concerts, and go to art galleries. While in Paris to perform his Piano Concerto No. 2, he encountered a black-and-white reproduction of the painting and later saw an original in color (Böcklin had painted several, each different from the others.) Central to the canvas is a white-shrouded figure (perhaps Charon, the ferryman from hell) rowing a coffin across the water to an island. Cypresses, the traditional symbols of mourning, and a monumental building hewn out of stone jut out of the dark waters. Rachmaninoff creates the sound of waves with undulating tones, which grow in intensity as the boat approaches the island. The central motif is the Dies irae (Day of Wrath), a fearsome description of the Day of Judgment, based on a medieval chant from the Mass for the Dead. It is a motif he would turn to again and again in later compositions, as had other composers before him, like Berlioz and Liszt, to suggest or represent death. The musical darkness prevails except for a passage Rachmaninoff called “the theme of life” that briefly enlivens the somber atmosphere, only to return to the quiet of the beginning.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17 (1909)
“In Erwartung the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour.” So said the composer, Arnold Schoenberg, about his 30-minute monodrama, Erwartung. He wrote it in just 17 days, on a text by Marie Pappenheim, a young physician who was also a poet. It took her just three weeks to complete the libretto for the one-act opera in four continuous scenes, consisting of a stream of consciousness monologue for soprano and large orchestra. Scholars have sought to connect the work to an actual case history, as recorded by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in their Studies on Hysteria of 1895, and some staged productions place the protagonist in an insane asylum. But perhaps it is only a dream. The plot depicts “The Woman” wandering in a forest, awaiting her lover; she is in a hysterical state of mind. She stumbles on what she first thinks is a body, but it is only a tree-trunk. She is frightened and becomes increasingly more anxious. Finally she finds the dead body of her lover, killed by her rival (or her?). She tries to revive him, all the while angrily accusing him of being unfaithful to her. Ultimately, she mourns him, distraught, wondering how to go on with her life without him. The declamatory text consists of sentence fragments, with the syntax disintegrating and flowing seamlessly without logic, as do dreams. Schoenberg composed Erwartung with the voice of Maria Gutheil-Schoder in mind (she had performed in another of his works). The composer tried in vain to get the opera produced, but obstacles seemed to arise at every turn, and negotiations with performance venues collapsed. Finally, in 1924, the German Opera House in Prague premiered the work, conducted by fellow composer Alexander Zemlinsky.

DAVID ROBERTSON, conductor, born in 1958 in Santa Monica, California
David Robertson is the twelfth music director of the 131-year-old Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, embarking on his sixth season there in the fall of 2010; he also continues as the principal guest conductor of London’s acclaimed BBC Symphony Orchestra, a post he has held since 2005. His popularity also makes him a welcome guest with orchestras throughout the world; in fact Musical America named him Conductor of the Year in 2000. “I have never looked at any of the musical positions I have held as stepping stones; I don’t look at life as a waiting-room experience. What I like to do is to really concentrate on what I’m doing at the moment. I let the rest of the stuff take care of itself.” His affinity for and expertise in 20th century repertoire led to his eight-year tenure as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain (in Lyons, France), which champions new music. And speaking in a Carnegie Hall interview about the “transformative” nature of a live concert, David Robertson said: “Everybody comes into the concert hall with different experiences. If you perform a well-known work, there are people who have perhaps done their doctoral thesis on that work, and they know it intimately. [Then] there are people who are hearing the work perhaps for the first time in a live performance…You can provide an open structure where, once people get inside, the layered richness of that type of human creativity is expressed in such a way that each person hears the things that only they can hear in the program.”

“He’s a brilliant musician and a master programmer.” The New Yorker

“Mr. Robertson makes everything seem fresh and startling.” The New York Times

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DEBORAH VOIGT, soprano, born in 1960 in Wheeling, Illinois
Possessing one of today’s most thrilling operatic voices, Deborah Voigt didn’t hear her first opera till she went to California State University at Fullerton. Though she’d been singing since childhood, joined her church choir, and took voice lessons in high school, she fully expected to become a choral conductor. She entered numerous vocal competitions (“to pay my American Express bill,” she told NPR), and came to international attention in 1988 when she won first prize at the Luciano Pavarotti Vocal Competition. Today she is recognized as one of the world’s greatest interpreters of Strauss and Wagner. She was named Vocalist of the Year 2003 by Musical America. Last season she performed in another Schoenberg work, the daunting soprano role in Gurrelieder. Deborah Voigt’s vocal skills aren’t restricted to operas, concert performances, and recitals (where she’s been known to join her accompanist at the piano); she also starred in an AIDS benefit on Broadway, about which Opera News said: “... this wasn’t an opera star condescending to her material, but a Broadway baby at heart…” She has sung three concerts with Barbara Cook and Dianne Reeves at the Hollywood Bowl and made an exciting debut in Lincoln Center’s long-running “American Songbook” series, singing Broadway and popular standards. Asked how one nurtures a voice for both Broadway and the opera stage, the soprano said: “You look at the words and you maybe make your voice a little bit leaner, lighter for some of the Broadway cabaret that I do, but being able to do that makes what I do in [operatic roles] more interesting as well.” She has also been a host of the popular international transmissions in the Met’s Live in HD transmissions on Saturday afternoons. She also won the Gold Medal in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition and an Opera News Award for distinguished achievement.

“Voigt’s resonant, glittering soprano was an ideal instrument for this hurtling, high-stakes journey. …. she was completely at home in Schoenberg’s frighteningly unstable universe. Veering between hysteria and comforting memories of past moments with her lover, she was the very image of a human being trying to make sense of the inexplicable. The final moments, with Voigt’s distracted song ending in mid-sentence and the orchestra seeming to trundle idly away into the mist, was a powerful portrait of coldly implacable fate.” Chicago Sun-Times

“Deborah Voigt had everything required to deliver a spellbinding vocal tour de force—laser-beam high notes, a rich, gleaming, voluminous soprano sound that easily cut through the densest textures, remarkably accurate pitch and fine German diction.” Chicago Tribune

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