BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936)
Commissioned by Paul Sacher to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his Basel Chamber Orchestra, Bartók’s exuberant orchestral masterpiece engages your ears and eyes. The composer’s “seating plan” calls for two string orchestras placed on opposite sides of the stage, with harp, celesta, piano and a percussion battery (bass drum, cymbals, side drums with and without snares, tam tam, timpani, and xylophone) in between. Many consider this complex and demanding score to be Bartók’s finest. For example, the first movement is a fugue that increases in force as it progresses to its midpoint climax, then goes backwards, like a mirror reflection, with the various voices retreating and calm being restored. (Attention, mathematicians who can read a score: you will note that the sections of the first movement correspond to the Fibonacci number sequence.) The antiphonal exchanges between the two string complements create the driving energy of the second movement, punctuated by staccato rhythms from the piano and timpani. A change of mood ensues with the third movement, which offers the listener some typical Bartókian “night music”—atmospheric, evocative, and eerie with insistent xylophone notes and timpani slides (a pop culture note: this movement figures prominently in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic, The Shining); and in the finale, the sounding out of a brilliant whirlwind of folk dances, mad strumming, and changing meters brings this tour de force of orchestral writing to a stunning conclusion.

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.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
La mer (The Sea) , Three Symphonic Sketches (1905)
“You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life,” Debussy told a friend. “It was only quite by chance that fate led me in another direction. But I have always held a passionate love for the sea.” Nowhere is that love of the sea more insightfully expressed than in La mer. Though contemporary critics hurled epithets at the work—“rubbish,” “symphonic pictures of seasickness,” “cacophonous”—today it is acknowledged as an early 20th century masterpiece, a complex, richly layered seascape of glistening sound. Debussy shows us the peaceful as well as the turbulent sea, from shimmering light dancing on calm waters, to the drama of crashing waves. The evocative titles of the three “movements” chart the course for the listener: in “From Dawn to Midday on the Sea,” gentle mists give way to a bright sunrise and depict the awakening sea. (Composer Erik Satie famously quipped: “There’s a moment between half past ten and quarter to eleven that I particularly liked!”). “Play of the Waves” follows with delicate, fleeting scoring suggesting colors seen though a watery prism. The concluding “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea” depicts more dangerous waters and provides a reminder of the elemental power and mystery of the sea, which Debussy once called “that great blue Sphinx.”

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN, conductor, born in 1958 in Helsinki, Finland
Esa-Pekka Salonen is one of a very few musicians today who has something unique to communicate to audiences as both conductor and composer. After 16 seasons as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he ended his tenure in 2009 (and was named the orchestra’s Conductor Laureate in April of that year) to devote himself more fully to composing and special projects. An example is his City of Dreams, an exploration over a nine-month period of the music and culture of Vienna between 1900 and 1935, undertaken with the Philharmonia Orchestra, whose principal conductor and artistic advisor he became in 2008. He is the only child of nurturing parents—a banker and a homemaker, who encouraged him without domineering. Though his mother started him on piano when he was just four, he was not interested in the instrument and instead tried the recorder at age nine and French horn at 15. Eventually he gave the piano another try. He studied at Finland’s Sibelius Academy, made his conducting debut with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1979, and his American debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1984. Among the many highlights of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s career with that orchestra have been world premieres of works by composers like John Adams, Magnus Lindberg, Witold Lutosławski, and Kaija Saariaho, the film soundtrack for The Red Violin by John Corigliano, with violinist Joshua Bell, as well as his own pieces. In October 2003, he and the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, and in 2006 they recorded their first CD together: the first live recording from the new hall. Musical America named Salonen as its “Musician of the Year 2006.”

“a mesmerizing conductor with catlike moves on the podium; a crowd pleaser with looks, charisma and flair; and a musician’s musician who enjoys a profound rapport with his orchestra.... He’s experimental, flexible, creative, approachable and understanding of his role [in LA] as head cheerleader, top fund raiser and reluctant matinee idol. Most of all, perhaps, he possesses that rare ability to pack ’em in no matter what’s on the program.” Los Angeles Magazine

DAVID FRAY
Piano, born in 1981 in Tarbes, France
Though born in France, David Fray doesn’t think of himself as a French pianist. His repertoire includes little French music. “I am a living melting pot,” he told BBC Music Magazine, referring to his Czech, Polish, Spanish, French, Jewish, and Finnish roots. Moreover, his parents’ love for Germanic culture inculcated the German repertoire in him from a young age. And by the time he graduated from the Conservatoire National Supérior de Musique de Paris (where he was awarded honors for his diploma recital), his artistic vision was firmly in place. “If, over my life, I can play all the works of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Brahms, and Schumann, then I shall be very happy.” David Fray says he was most influenced by the legendary Wilhelm Kempff: “What I love about his playing is that he makes the piano sing and speak. That is my ultimate goal.” He has had the opportunity to study and work with such luminaries as Paul Badura-Skoda, Menahem Pressler, and Christoph Eschenbach (from the latter he learned about time and interpretation); he elaborates, “Music is the art of time, and interpretation can completely change just because you take a little bit more time at one moment. That suspension of a voice is very interesting. It’s linked to breath, sensibility and connection, because interpretation for me is not only active, it is also receiving something the audience is giving you.” In 2008 the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon made a DVD Swing, Sing & Think - David Fray records J. S. Bach about the pianist’s encounter with the great Bach (in conjunction with a studio recording of the same music).

“Occupying a place of prominence among the top tier of emerging young pianists, Fray has the right stuff for an important career: poetry and passion, showmanship, innovation, and the humility to put himself at the service of the music.” (Playbill Arts)