WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
Overture to The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492 (1786)
While in its day Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro was favorably received in Vienna, its popularity in Prague was legendary. The people went wild for it, and its tunes were on the lips of the public. Mozart happily wrote in a letter from Prague: “…here they talk about nothing but ‘Figaro.’ Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but ‘Figaro.’ No opera is drawing like ‘Figaro.’ Nothing, nothing but ‘Figaro.’” Based on the notorious 1781 Beaumarchais’ play which poked nervy fun at the aristocracy (and had been prohibited by Louis XVI and later in Austria for that very reason), Mozart’s turned to Lorenzo da Ponte for a libretto. Da Ponte described in his Memoirs how writer and composer collaborated and managed to get the emperor’s approval: “As fast as I wrote the words, Mozart wrote the music, and it was all finished in six weeks. The lucky star of Mozart willed an opportune moment and permitted me to carry the manuscript directly to the Emperor. ‘What’s this?’ said Joseph to me. ‘I have already forbidden the German company to give this play, Figaro.’ ‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but in turning it into an opera, I have cut out whole scenes, shortened others, and been careful everywhere to omit anything that might shock the conventionalities and good taste. In a word, I have made a work worthy of the theater honored by His Majesty’s protection. As far as I can judge, it seems to me a masterpiece.’ ‘Very well,’ said the Emperor. I trust your taste and prudence. Send the score to the copyists.’” This sparkling, spirited overture perfectly raises the curtain on Mozart’s operatic hit.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major (1795, rev. 1800)
When Beethoven gave the first public performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1 (actually the second to be composed, but published first) in Prague in 1798, a fellow composer, Johann Tomášek, was deeply affected by the hearing of it, saying: “Beethoven’s grand style of playing, and especially his bold improvisation, stirred me strangely to the depths of my soul; indeed I found myself so profoundly shaken that I did not touch my piano for several days.” Beethoven was already lionized as a superstar of the piano in the best salons of Vienna—not easy, considering that there were some 300 other professional pianists in the city, all vying for fame and fortune. Beethoven’s advantage enabled him to perform his own music, which might have been thought of as too daring or fanciful. He was inspired by Mozart (the first of the great pianist/composers, with 27 concertos to his name), whom he met once in Vienna and with whom he had wanted to study. After “auditioning” the 17-year-old Beethoven, Mozart predicted: “Watch out for him; he will have something to say.” Beethoven left us no fewer than three cadenzas for the first movement alone—a reminder that he was aware of his prodigious abilities as a pianist and of how these would translate into income-producing performances. Additional things to note include the very long orchestral introduction to the first movement, an introspective and deeply felt, poetic slow movement, and a delightful concluding rondo.

SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873-1943)
Symphonic Dances (1940)
Rachmaninoff dedicated his last—and for many his greatest— orchestral work to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra who premiered it in 1941. Though many years had elapsed since he and his family were forced to flee Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the trauma of that experience marked him forever as a melancholy man. He eventually settled in the United States, but having to support his family as a professional pianist left him unable to compose as much as he wanted. He was also a latter-day Romantic who stuck to his harmonic language while the winds of modernism swirled around him. “In my own composition, no conscious effort has been made to be original, or Romantic, or Nationalist, or anything else. I write down on paper the music I hear within me, as naturally as possible…to say simply and directly what is in my heart…” In the three-part first dance, a three-note falling motif, varied and passed around the orchestra, is the source from which the movement evolves; in the middle section an alto saxophone plays a haunting, lyrical theme; and pulsating percussion lends an exciting urgency to the music. The second dance, with its tempo marking of Tempo di Valse, resembles Tchaikovskian rather than Straussian waltzes, but also the darker, more eerie harmonies of Ravel’s La valse (also performed at these concerts). And in the last movement Rachmaninoff evokes Russian Orthodox chants, his own astonishing choral work, Vespers, and the Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead. And there is the marvelous mysterious sound of tubular bells. After he completed Symphonic Dances he told a friend: “I don’t know how it happened. It must have been my last spark.” And at the end of the score he wrote: “I thank thee, Lord.”

MAURICE RAVEL (1875- 1937)
La valse, poème choréographique pour orchestre (1920)
In 1906 Maurice Ravel quipped to his friend the French critic Jean Marnold that he wanted to compose “a grand waltz, a sort of homage to the memory of the Great Strauss, not Richard, the other one—Johann. You know how much I love those wonderful rhythms.” He had already paid homage to Franz Schubert in his Valses nobles et sentimentales. Ravel was going to call his tribute to the Viennese waltz Wien (Vienna) . But when the work finally took shape in 1920, World War I had intervened, and Austria was the enemy of France. And so Ravel renamed it La valse with an ending probably different from what he might have written otherwise. Ravel provides a description of this magnificent piece: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees an immense hall filled with a swirling throng. The stage is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers reaches its peak at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855. …It is a dancing, whirling, almost hallucinatory ecstasy, an increasingly passionate and exhausting whirlwind of dancers, who are overcome and exhilarated by nothing but ‘the waltz.’ Some people have said that it represented the end of the Second Empire, others said that it was postwar Vienna. They are wrong…it is a fatal spinning around, the expression of vertigo and of the voluptuousness of the dance to the point of paroxysm.” The piece begins softly, and different instruments play snippets of a melody. Before long, the waltz has become forceful and all-embracing. Variations on the tune soon follow, with orchestral sonorities changing in wild profusion. But as the waltz progresses, it’s as if the whirling dancers are confused and stumbling. The scene begins to take on a sinister aspect, and the wild apotheosis ends in an explosive, shattering climax.

Charles Dutoit was recently appointed chief conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra as well as artistic director and principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 1990 he has served as artistic director and principal conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra’s summer festival at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. He regularly conducts other major American orchestras, including those of Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh. He also has performed regularly with all the great orchestras of Europe — including the Berlin Philharmonic and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra as well as with all the London orchestras — the major orchestras of Japan, South America, and Australia. From 1977 to 2002 he was artistic director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and he is currently artistic director of the Miyazaki International Music Festival in Japan as well as artistic director of the Canton International Summer Music Academy (CISMA) in Guangzhou (Canton), China, which he founded in 2005. In July 2009 he will become music director of the Verbier Festival Orchestra in his native Switzerland.

From 1991 to 2001 Charles Dutoit was music director of the Orchestre National de France with which he made a number of critically lauded recordings, and toured extensively on five continents. In 1998 he was appointed music director of the NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo) with which he toured Europe, the U.S., China, and Southeast Asia, and of which is music director emeritus. He has recorded extensively for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips, CBS, and Erato, among other labels with American, European, and Japanese orchestras. His more than 170 recordings, half of them with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, have garnered more than 40 awards and distinctions around the world.

Charles Dutoit regularly conducts at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; The Metropolitan Opera; and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin. He also led a highly acclaimed production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera. In 2003, he began a series of Wagner operas — Der fliegende Holländer and the complete Ring Cycle — at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Mr. Dutoit last conducted the New York Philharmonic in April 2008.

ANDRÉ WATTS
Piano
André Watts burst upon the music scene in 1963, at the age of 16, when Leonard Bernstein chose him to make his debut with the New York Philharmonic in its Young People’s Concerts, broadcast nationwide on CBS-TV. Only two weeks later, Bernstein asked him to substitute at the last minute for an ailing Glenn Gould in the Philharmonic’s performances of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, thus launching his career.

Last season’s celebrations of Mr. Watts’s 60th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his debut (with The Philadelphia Orchestra) included an induction into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame, and performances with leading American orchestras including The Philadelphia Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His 2007–08 season includes an 11-city East Coast tour with the Bergen Philharmonic (including a Carnegie Hall performance) and a recital tour to Japan.

Mr. Watts is a regular guest at the major summer music festivals, from Mostly Mozart to the Hollywood Bowl. Recent engagements include appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, and the Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Houston, Dallas, and Cincinnati symphony orchestras; the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s U.S. tour; and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s European tour. He last appeared with the New York Philharmonic in December 2005, performing Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2, led by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.

André Watts has appeared on numerous television programs produced by PBS, the BBC, and the Arts & Entertainment Network. His 1976 New York recital, aired on Live From Lincoln Center, was the first full-length recital to be televised; his performance at the 38th Casals Festival in Puerto Rico was nominated for an Emmy Award. Mr. Watts’s extensive discography includes recordings on the CBS Masterworks, Angel/EMI, Telarc, and Philips labels. Among his honors are the Avery Fisher Prize and honorary doctorates from Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Brandeis University, Trinity College, The Juilliard School of Music, and his alma mater, the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. Previously artist-in-residence at the University of Maryland, Mr. Watts now holds the Jack I. and Dora B. Hamlin Endowed Chair in Music at Indiana University.

"Mr. Watts was in fine form, showing off crisp, fleet-fingered keyboard work and a nice light touch throughout." (The New York Times)

"Andre Watts still has his virtuosic, swashbuckling magic,and the audience showered him with applause." (The New York Sun)