f e l i x m e n d e l s s o h nOverture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 21

Paolo Bortolameolli, conductor

j o h a n n e s b r a h m sPiano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15I. MaestosoII. Adagio III. Rondo: Allegro non troppo

Lindsay Garritson, piano

Intermission

s e r g e i r a c h m a n i n o f fSymphonic Dances, Op. 45I. Non allegroII. Andante con moto (Tempo di valse)III. Lento assai – Allegro vivace – Lento assai. Come prima – Allegro vivace

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T H E

P H I L H A R M O N I A

O R C H E S T R A O F

Y A L E

Robert Blocker, Dean

november 17, 2011 · thursday, 8 pm · woolsey hall

Shinik Hahm conductor

Felix Mendelssohn » 1809–1847Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21

In the history of Western classical music, there has probably been no greater child prodigy than Felix Mendelssohn. While the young Mozart was celebrated throughout Europe for his prodigious musical skill, no less an artistic figure than Goethe told Mendelssohn’s music teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, “What this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age…. What your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.”

What Mendelssohn accomplished as a com-poser before the age of eighteen is remarkable. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, he wrote a dozen string symphonies. These show the depth of his training, particularly in the contrapuntal style of Bach. He wrote his first published works, a set of piano quartets, by the time he was thirteen. At fifteen, his first orchestral symphony appeared. Yet even these brilliant works pale in comparison with the two masterpieces of Mendelssohn’s youth, the gargantuan Octet for Strings in E-flat major, written while Mendelssohn was only sixteen, and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Overture, composed a year after the Octet in 1826, was described by musicologist Charles Grove as “the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music.” It is perhaps the first example of a concert overture — a work composed to evoke a literary theme, rather than to introduce a staged per-formance. Cast in an extended sonata form, the piece is also noted for its descriptive instru-mental effects, which often seem to bring Shakespeare’s characters to life. Listen parti-cularly for the emulation of scampering fairies at the beginning and the braying of Bottom as an ass. The lightness of the opening of the overture is striking. Mendelssohn’s biographer, Heinrich Eduard Jacob, said that Mendelssohn had scribbled the chords after hearing an evening breeze rustle the leaves in the family garden.

–Jordan Kuspa

Johannes Brahms » 1833–1897Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15

Brahms may not have been a true prodigy like Mendelssohn, but he was recognized as a major talent early in his life. A meeting with the eminent violinist Joseph Joachim in 1853 led to an introduction to Robert Schumann, who was so impressed with the twenty-year-old Brahms that he felt compelled to publish an article in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which sang the praises of the young man. Schumann claimed Brahms was “destined to give ideal expression to the times.”

Soon after Schumann’s attempted suicide in February 1854, Brahms began sketching a large-scale orchestral work, which he had hoped would become an epic symphony in D minor. Brahms, a notorious perfectionist, worked on the composition for several years, morphing his original material from a planned sym-phony, to a sonata for two pianos, and finally into what would become his First Piano Con-certo. Brahms felt that he did not yet posses the skill in writing for the orchestra that he would require to sustain interest throughout a symphony, so he instead relied on his prodigious talent as a pianist and composer for the piano to reshape the work into a concerto.

As the form of the work developed, Brahms only kept the original material from the work’s first movement. He discarded all of his other sketches and composed two entirely new movements. The first movement bears the clear influence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, not only in its D minor tonality, but also in its gigantic scope and dramatic gestures. Walter Frisch notes, “The first theme of the concerto recalls Beethoven’s Ninth in its angularity, rhythmic energy, and use of a throbbing tim-pani pedal point. Brahms also explored the tonal relationship between D minor and B major characteristic of the Ninth.” Brahms called the second movement a “gentle portrait” of Schumann’s wife, Clara. The new finale Brahms composed has a strong resemblance to the third movement of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, particularly in its formal design.

After its completion in 1856, the First Piano Concerto was premiered on January 22, 1859, in Hanover, Germany, with the now 25-year-old composer as soloist. When the work was performed in Leipzig five days later, the audience hissed at the concerto and critics

program notes

artist profiles

Shinik Hahm conductor

A dynamic and innovative conductor, Shinik Hahm is also the chief conductor of the KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) Symphony Orchestra. Concurrently, he is a professor of conducting at the Yale School of Music, where he leads the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale. Maestro Hahm has led the KBS Symphony on tour with concerts at the General Assembly of the United Nations, Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center. His extensive work in China includes collaborations with the China Phil-harmonic Orchestra, Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, Shenzhen Symphony, and Shanghai Opera. He is an honorary professor of Hwa Gong University.

In 2006 he successfully completed his tenure as the artistic director and principal conductor of the Daejeon (Korea) Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he toured the United States and Japan. Hahm served as music director of the Abilene Philharmonic Orchestra from 1993 to 2003 and was profiled on ABC’s World News Tonight for his role in rejuvenating the Abilene community. His leadership has been similarly vital to the Tuscaloosa Symphony, where he has been music director for ten years. Hahm has led the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale at Carnegie Hall and in Boston, Seoul, Beijing, and Shanghai. His students at Yale have won top prizes at the Besançon, Pedrotti, and Toscanini conducting competitions.

Shinik Hahm has won the Gregor Fitelberg Competition for Conductors, the Walter Hagen Conducting Prize from the Eastman School of Music, and the Shepherd Society Award from Rice University. In 1995 he was decora-ted by the Korean government with the Arts & Culture Medal.

savaged it, calling the piece “perfectly unor-thodox, banal, and horrid.” In a letter to Joachim, Brahms sadly related, “I am only experimenting and feeling my way…. All the same, the hissing was rather too much.” Today the work is seen as one of the greatest and most powerful masterpieces of the entire piano concerto literature.

–Jordan Kuspa

Sergei Rachmaninoff » 1873–1943Symphonic Dances, Op. 45

The years 1918–1934 found Rachmaninoff largely occupied with appearances in the U.S. and Europe as a conductor and pianist. In a letter he bemoaned the division of his atten-tion which left him little time for composing, and he compared himself to a hunter chasing after three hares.

This creative dry period was broken in the years 1934–1940, when the composer created his three important late works: the Third Symphony, the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, and the Symphonic Dances. In his earlier works Rachmaninoff unapologetically adhered to a Russian Romantic tradition repre-sented primarily by Tchaikovsky, long after it was popular to do so. His later works continue in this vein but also take on some new char-acteristics. His instrumentation discards some of its lushness in favor of emphasizing individual tone qualities. Rachmaninoff adds to his palette harmonies that are at times pungent, wry, or even grotesque.

The first movement of the Symphonic Dances provides a telling example of Rachmaninoff ’s later style. Its outer two sections are set as an ironic march that is accompanied at its outset by a stark repeating pattern of open fifths. The middle section dispenses with irony and gives instead an intimate melody first in a solo alto saxophone, then in unison strings. The second movement is a ghostly waltz that further explores the composer’s more experi-mental harmonies. The final movement quotes two religious themes, the Dies irae and a Russian hymn of praise, “Blessed be the Lord.”

–David Heetderks

artist profiles

Paolo Bortolameolli assistant conductor

Paolo Bortolameolli is a graduate both of the Arts Faculty of Universidad de Chile, where he studied conducting with David del Pino Klinge, and from Pontificia Universidad Católica, where he studied piano with Frida Conn. He is now in his first year of the Master of Music degree program in orchestral conducting at the Yale School of Music, under the guidance of Shinik Hahm.

In Chile, Paolo was the principal conductor of a youth orchestra for the last three years and assistant conductor of Orquesta USACH. Recently he performed with the Orquesta de la Universidad de Concepción and the National Symphonic Orchestra of Perú.

As a pianist, Paolo won first prize in the National Chopin Competition in 2003. In 2005, he won the National Competition for Young Soloists, playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor with the National Sym-phonic Orchestra of Chile.

Lindsay Garritson piano

As pianist and violinist, Lindsay Garritson has been touring the country and abroad since the age of four. Her piano teachers include Boris Berman, Luiz de Moura Castro, Zena Ilyashov, Emilio Del Rosario, the late Jane Allen, and Jennifer Lim. As winner of several concerto competitions, Lindsay has performed with the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra, University City Symphony, Belleville Phil-harmonic, and the European Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Most recently, she was awarded second prize in the 2011 Montreal International Piano Competition and first prize at the 2010 Mozarteum International Chopin Competition in Salzburg. She has participated in numerous music festivals including the Aspen, Innsbrook, Orford (Canada), and the International Holland Music Sessions.

As a violinist, Lindsay was concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2003 to 2006. She has had the honor of per-forming for such dignitaries as Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell, and she has participated in master classes with Leonidas Kavakos and Lewis Kaplan. Her teachers have included John Kendall, the founder of the Suzuki movement in the United States, and she currently studies with Kyung Yu at Yale.

Lindsay received her B.A. in music from Principia College, her M.M. in piano per-formance from Yale School of Music in 2010, and the Artist Diploma from Yale as a student of Boris Berman in 2011.

about yale philharmonia

The Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale is one of America’s fore- most music school ensembles. The largest performing group at the Yale School of Music, the Philharmonia offers superb training in orchestral playing and repertoire.

Performances include an annual series of concerts in Woolsey Hall, as well as Yale Opera productions in the Shubert Performing Arts Center. The Yale Philharmonia has also performed on numerous occasions in Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York City and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The orchestra undertook its first tour of Asia in 2008, with acclaimed performances in the Seoul Arts Center, the Forbidden City Concert Hall and National Center for the Performing Arts (Beijing), and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.

violin 1Victor Fournelle-Blain, concertmaster Hye Jin KohSung Mao LiangHen Shuo ChangYuan MaShawn MooreEdward TanJi Hyun KimYoon Won SongJiin YangTammy WangKi Won KimEun-Young JungChristian SitzmannJiwon KwarkSeok Jung Lee

violin 2Laura Keller, principalHyun Sun SulDavid RadzynskiBrian BakGeoffrey HerdTao ZhangNayeon KimJacob AshworthMinhye Helena ChoiPiotr FilochowskiKayla MoffettEdson Scheid

violaMinjung Chun, principalLeonard ChiangHeejin ChangDashiel NesbittJessica LiColin BrookesDan ZhangJane MitchellSara RossiTimothy LacrosseOn You Kim

celloSun Chan Chang, principalJoonhwan KimShinae KimSoo Jin ChungJia Cao

Bo ZhangElisa Rodriquez SadabaWeipeng LiuAndrew HayhurstChristopher HwangQizhen LiuJames Jeonghwan Kim

bassJonathan McWilliams, principalNicholas JonesMichael LevinMatthew RosenthalNaHee SongAndrew SmallPaul NemethAsa Maynard

flute & piccoloCho-Long Kang 2, 3 piccoloAnouvong Liensavanh 1, 3*Ginevra Petrucci 1*, 2*, 3

oboeHsuan-Fong Chen 1, 2*, 3Kristin Kall 3*Ji Hyun Kim 1*, 2, 3 English horn

clarinetGleb Kanasevich 1*, 3 bass clarinetIgal Levin 2*, 3David Perry 1, 2, 3*

alto saxophoneVincent Oneppo 3

bassoonElisabeth Garrett 1, 2Helena Kranjc 3*Meryl Summers 1*, 2*, 3Scott Switzer 3 contrabassoon

hornCraig Hubbard 3*Lauren Hunt 2, 3Jessica Lascoe 1, 2*Jamin Morden 2, 3 Mimi Zhang 1*, 2, 3

trumpetJohn Ehrenburg 1*, 2

Jean Laurenz 3* Gerado Mata 1, 2*, 3Gerald Villella 3

tromboneJeffery Arredondo 3Hana Beloglavec 3*Benjamin Firer 3

tubaLandres Bryant 1, 3

timpaniMichael Compitello 2Leonardo Gorosito 1, 3

percussionJonathan Allen 3 Victor Caccese 3Michael Compitello 3Cristobal Gajardo-Benitez 3Adam Rosenblatt 3

HarpYue Guo 3

pianoHwa Young An 3

1 Player in Mendelssohn2 Player in Brahms3 Player in Rachmaninoff* Principal player

assistantBenjamin Firer

music librarians Cristobal Gajardo-BenitezTimothy Hilgert • Wai Lau Holly Piccoli • Matthew Rosenthal Kathryn Salfelder • Kaitlin Taylor

stage crewJohn Allen • Jonathan AllenLandres Bryant • Colin BrookesTimothy Hilgert • Michael LevinMatthew Rosenthal • Aaron SorensenGerald Villella

The Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale

shinik hahmMusic Director

krista johnsonManaging Director

roberta senatoreLibrarian kate gonzalesProduction Assistant

yang jiaoAssistant Conductor

paolo bortolameolli Assistant Conductor

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