JACQUES IBERT (1890-1962)
Hommage à Mozart (1956)
Though rarely performed, Jacques Ibert’s music is known for its charm and accessibility. He composed several operas, ballets, flute and saxophone concertos, chamber music, and several orchestral works. His most well-known and most frequently performed scores are his impressionist Escales (“Ports of Call”) of 1922, based on his World War I service in the French navy, and his crazy 1928 Divertissement, drawn from his incidental music for the play The Italian Straw Hat. He even composed music for Orson Wells’s film Macbeth. A delightful 5-minute curtain raiser, Hommage was commissioned in 1956 by the French government’s radio network RDF to honor the bicentennial of Mozart’s birth. Emulating the great composer he so admired, Ibert composed it in a neoclassical idiom—something he was naturally drawn to already. A sort of pastiche of Mozart’s style, this charming rondo reflects other characteristics of Ibert’s music as well—humor, wit, and lyricism.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Piano Concerto in G Major (1929-31)
Ravel had just returned to France from his successful 1928 concert tour of America when he began composing his one-movement Piano Concerto in G, and simultaneously working on his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand; both works carry the imprint of the jazz craze then sweeping this country and Europe. He had had an introduction to America’s indigenous music from none other than George Gershwin, with whom he visited Harlem jazz clubs. Though he had originally planned to be the soloist for the new concerto, Ravel found himself too pressed for time. He wrote to a friend: “In the midst of my pregnancy with the concerto (I am at the stage of throwing up) I am suddenly called to Biarritz,” where he was attending a festival organized in his honor. That, combined with the commission from Paul Wittgenstein for the Left Hand Piano Concerto, and the debilitating effects of the brain tumor that would lead his death, left him unable to prepare adequately for a performance. Though he was on the podium, he asked his long-time interpreter Marguerite Long to take over the solo role at the 1932 premiere. A bracing whack (made by a “slap stick” or “whip” in the percussion section) sends piano and orchestra off on an effervescent romp that includes both jazzy, bluesy riffs and sensuous, lyrical passages. The slightly offbeat main theme of the opening Allegramente is played first by the piccolo and then echoed by the trumpet, with the piano all the while showing off with glissandos and arpeggios. Ravel himself was astonished at what he accomplished in the gorgeous pages of the second section, saying that it “flowed so easily, so easily!...yet I put it together bar by bar and it nearly killed me.” The final Presto is a veritable whirlwind of sound, again drawing on jazz. You’ll hear shrieks from the woodwinds, slides on the trombone, and muted trumpets all in a breathless dash to the finish.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)
Symphony No. 4 (1935-1936)
Dateline Leningrad, December 11, 1936: “Composer Shostakovich appealed to the Leningrad Philharmonic with the request to withdraw his Fourth Symphony from performance on the grounds that it in no way corresponds to his current creative convictions and represents for him a long outdated phase.” That’s the last that would be heard of the Fourth until 1961, when it would finally be premiered by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra under Kiril Kondrashin. The creation of the Symphony No. 4, begun in 1935, came upon the heels of Shostakovich’s popular opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was selling out the opera houses of Moscow and Leningrad. Then, in January 1936, without warning, Pravda published an official condemnation of the opera, under the title “Chaos Instead of Music.” It seems Stalin had attended a performance and found it not to his liking. The opera was withdrawn. And while Shostakovich waited for the other shoe to drop, he completed his Fourth Symphony and planned for its premiere under Fritz Stiedry, chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic (and for the US premiere under Otto Klemperer). Then, mysteriously, Shostakovich announced the withdrawal of his work in December 1936. Explanations vary as to what really happened, but it seems unlikely that Shostakovich would voluntarily have withdrawn his nearly- completed symphony. According to Isaak Glikman, a friend of the composer’s, during one of the rehearsals, there was a visit from “the Secretary of the Composer’s Union, V. E. Iokhelson, accompanied by another important figure from the local Party HQ. Shortly afterwards, the director of the Philharmonic, I. M. Renzin, politely invited Dmitri Dmitryevich to his office. On the way home, Shostakovich was silent for a long while, finally saying in an even but toneless voice that the symphony would not be performed; it had been withdrawn on Renzin’s recommendation.” Rumors had been flying that Shostakovich was flouting his critics and writing a symphony full of the vilified “formalisms” that were the enemy of good Soviet music. The fact is that the Fourth is a product of the time of the Great Terror—the purges of hundreds of thousands of citizens—and the dark, ominous score reflect this terror. The required orchestral forces of more than 100 musicians, as well as its length and some content make it reminiscent of Mahler’s vast symphonies. Its three movements encompass everything from “Ländler-like” dance melodies to a funeral march, to blistering fffff blasts by all players, to the shattering coda, when the lone celesta dies away into a bleak abyss.

ANDREY BOREYKO, conductor, born in 1957 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia
Andrey Boreyko is one of the most exciting and dynamic conductors to emerge from Eastern Europe in recent years. His strong interest in music of the first half of the 20th century, as well as that of more recent years, has led him to collaborations with composers such as Henryk Górecki, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Arvo Pärt, among many others, and his discography includes the music of Ginastera, Takemitsu, and Pärt. Studying new scores, or scores new to him, is an important part of his life. This dedication to music of our time was recognized by the German Music Critics Union while he was chief conductor of the Jenaer Philharmonie between 1998 and 2003: he received the prize for most innovative concert programming in three consecutive seasons—an unprecedented achievement in the history of this award. He is currently Chief Conductor of the Berner Symphonie Orchester as well as Principal Guest Conductor of the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Euskadi, and General Music Director of the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker. He has guest-conducted the great orchestras of Europe and Australia, as well as the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. His discography includes Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate and Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 6, both recorded with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2006 Hänssler Classic released a live recording, again with Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 and the world premiere recording of his original version of the Suite Op. 29a from the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Despite his busy schedule, he finds time for other activities: “I enjoying reading, researching, finding and listening to all types of music that I have not previously encountered. I spend time thinking about new programs and am always keeping in touch with people by e-mail.”

“Mr. Boreyko seemed intent on … playing the work for all its breadth and passion. The Philharmonic responded with dazzling and often ferocious brass and woodwind playing, full-throttle percussion and a plangent, flexible string sound that could evoke a howling wind one moment and dark-hued smoldering the next.” The New York Times

“The music seemed to spring from his quivering fingertips in tiny electric arcs.” The Chicago Tribune

“He leads with an easy flair and natural musicianship.” Cincinnati Enquirer

“Maestro Boreyko gave his orchestra the chance to give a brilliant performance in all aspects. Boreyko certainly set a new benchmark. Standing ovations and stamping for him and his absolutely splendid orchestra.” Hamburger Abendblatt

Find additional upcoming performances with Andrey Boreyko

HÉLÈNE GRIMAUD
Piano, born in 1969 in Aix-en-Provence, France
Though born in France, Hélène Grimaud’s ancestry is North African, Corsican, and Italian Jewish. “As a child I had a huge surplus of energy...My parents tried to channel this in many directions, but music was the one that grabbed me.” So at age nine, she started playing piano, and by a year later had mastered some impressive works. At the Paris Conservatory, where at age 13 she was the youngest student at the time, she was not content to follow the prescribed pace of learning the repertoire. The evidence? Sixteen- year-old Hélène Grimaud’s recording of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2, which garnered a Grand Prix du Disque. Outside of music, Hélène Grimaud champions the cause of wolves, and divides her career between music and the Wolf Conservation Center in upstate New York, which she co-founded with photographer J. Henry Fair in 1999 (the same year she made her Philharmonic debut with Kurt Masur). At one point in her life she wanted to be a zoo veterinarian, and later a biologist, and even earned a degree in animal behavior (just in case her music career didn’t work out). The Center is a non-profit organization that promotes wolf conservation by teaching about wolves, their relationship to the environment, and the human role in protecting their future in their natural habitat. In her first encounter with a dog-wolf hybrid, she recounts in her 2003 memoir, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves, “I merely stretched out my fingers and, all by herself, she slid her head and then her shoulders under my palm. I felt a shooting spark, a shock, which ran through my entire body. The single point of contact radiated throughout my arm and chest, and filled me with gentleness ... a most compelling gentleness, which awakened in me a mysterious singing, the call of an unknown, primeval force…I had fallen in love with this she-wolf.” But her work with wolves also affected her life as an artist and how she plays. “In the end, being around my wolves is an extension of my artistic life. It’s an original enrichment that resounds, I’m sure, in the way I interpret the works I choose.” Hélène Grimaud is left-handed—something that was frowned upon in regimented French schools. But when she played Chopin, whose compositions freed the left hand, she learned that being left-handed was an asset to her as an artist: “The right hand stands for normality and order, and the left for fantasy. I am very happy to be gauchère.” She has also written a second book, Leçons particulières, which, along with her memoir, continue to be runaway successes on France’s best-seller lists. Her latest recording is Reflection, the music of Brahms, and Robert and Clara Schumann. In 2007 she plans to record a Bach CD and release a DVD A Letter from Clara [Schumann]. In January 2002 she was appointed an Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

“…an ebullient Hélène Grimaud (another familiar face in Lucerne) brought on storms of applause with a passionate performance of Ravel’s G Major Concerto.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Her Chopin and Rachmaninov are volcanic, a force of nature. The playing, like her eyes, is persuasive, insistent, mesmeric.” Standard (London)

“Strength and style, artistry and technique, sensitivity and power…” St. Louis Post-Dispatch