Subscription Concert B Series

Subscription Concert No.996 B Series

This concert is over. Date: Wed. 3. April 2024 19:00 (18:00)

Venue: Suntory Hall Venue Info Seat

[Bruckner 200 / 60th Anniversary of death of Alma Mahler]

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Artists

Kazushi ONO, Conductor
Mihoko FUJIMURA, Mezzo-soprano

Profile

Kazushi ONO (Music Director)

Kazushi Ono is the definitive musical citizen of the world, having been born in Tokyo, studied in Munich and forged his early career in Zagreb, Karlsruhe and Tokyo. This variety of influences has shaped an inquiring and profound musical intellect and an ability to communicate meaning across languages and cultures, leading to longstanding relationships around the world.
Ono trained in Europe under Wolfgang Sawallisch and came to public attention winning first prize in the 1987 Toscanini Competition. Since his first appointment at Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1992 he has held continuous positions, including at Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, Karlsruhe Opera, La Monnaie, Opéra National de Lyon, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and currently, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, New National Theatre Tokyo and Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra.
A favourite of orchestral players, he has lasting friendships with orchestras around the world and regularly guest conducts groups such as London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
His passion and curiosity for repertoire takes him in different directions – to the standard classics but also to new music. He often commissions works and has collaborated several times with Mark-Anthony Turnage, including on Silent Cities, Hibiki (which won a Royal Philharmonic Society award) and Time Flies, which was originally commissioned for the 2020 Tokyo Olympiad. Recent commissions at NNTT include Asters by Akira Nishimura and Dai Fujikura’s A Dream of Armageddon. His programming there also includes Baroque, 20th-century and bel canto masterpieces.
In Europe he conducted the world premieres of Toshio Hosokawa’s Hanjyo in Aix-en-Provence, Arnulf Hermann’s Der Mieter at Oper Frankfurt and Kaija Saariaho’s Emilie at Opéra de Lyon, as well as new productions of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and L’Enfant et les sortilèges at Glyndebourne and Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher at Opéra de Lyon. He has worked closely with boundary-breaking directors such as Dmitri Tcherniakov, Romeo Castellucci, Pierre Audi, William Kentridge and Mariusz Treliński
Ono is a vocal advocate for the role of culture in all our lives. During his time in Lyon he took part in a programme bringing opera to prisons and at TMSO he leads the inclusive SaLaD Music Festival, as well as working with community organisations for people with disabilities. In his new role in Brussels he will be part of an integration scheme for refugees. During the initial stages of the pandemic, he led ground-breaking research into the transmission of particles and the use of ventilation that meant that orchestras could get back to playing for audiences safely.
In 2017 he was awarded ‘Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ by French cultural minister Françoise Nyssen, adding to the prestigious Asahi Prize in January 2015, for his contribution to the development and progress of Japanese society.
https://www.kazushiono.com/

Mihoko FUJIMURA (Mezzo-soprano)

Mihoko Fujimura is one of the most soughtafter singers performing internationally. She was the first Japanese singer, singing a major role, to debut at the prestigious Bayreuth Festival. She returned to the festival for nine consecutive years, earning acclaim as a rare talent over two decades in the world of Wagner music. Since then, she has appeared in world famous opera houses including Staatsoper Wien. She also has performed with distinguished conductors including Claudio Abbado, Zubin Mehta and leading orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic.

In Japan, Mihoko Fujimura made her debut at the New National Theatre Tokyo singing Fricka in Der Ring des Nibelungen. Her solo performance for Beethoven’s ninth symphony with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, as well as her numerous opera performances and recitals, have been highly acclaimed. www.MihokoFujimura.com

photo©R&G Photography

Program

Alma Mahler (arr. by D. Matthews & C. Matthews): Sieben Lieder [Japan premiere]

Program Notes
Bruckner: Symphony No.3 in D minor, WAB103 (Nowak:1877 version)

Program Notes

Alma Mahler (arr. by David and Colin Matthews): Seven Songs [Japan premiere]

1. Die stille Stadt (The Quiet Town) − Richard Dehmel
2. Laue Sommernacht (Mild Summerʼs Night) − Otto Julius Bierbaum
3. Licht in der Nacht (Light in the Night) − Otto Julius Bierbaum
4. Waldseligkeit (Forest Bliss) − Richard Dehmel
5. In meines Vaters Garten (In My Fatherʼs Garden) − Otto Erich Hartleben
6. Bei dir ist es traut (With You It is Pleasant) − Rainer Maria Rilke
7. Erntelied(Harvest Song) − Gustav Falke

Alma Mahler: Born in Vienna, August 31, 1879; died in New York City, December 11, 1964

　　Alma Mahler (or Alma Mahler-Werfel or Alma Schindler-Mahler or Alma Maria Mahler or Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel) is a recognized composer, but her fame lives on more for her marriages to and associations with a host of creative luminaries. She was born into an artistic family (her father was a landscape painter) as Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler. As a child and teenager she studied piano and composition, including with Alexander Zemlinsky with whom she maintained an on-and-off love affair for many years. She married Gustav Mahler, nearly twenty years her senior, in 1902, having promised to abandon her activity as a composer upon his insistence. Four years after he died in 1911, Alma married the famous architect Walter Gropius (their daughter Manon became the inspiration for Bergʼs Violin Concerto), a relationship that began even before Mahler had died. While still married to Gropius, Alma had an affair with the author Franz Werfel, whom she married in 1929. In 1938, in the face of encroaching Nazism, they fled to America, settling first in Los Angeles and later in New York City, where Alma died at the age of 84, having outlived her first husband by over half a century. In between marriages to Mahler and Gropius she had a torrid affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka. American satirist Tom Lehrer described her obituary as “the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read.”
　　As one measure of the prominence of this cultural icon, Israeli writer Joshua Sobol and Austrian director Paulus Manker created a stage show called simply Alma. It opened in Vienna in 1996 and ran for six successive seasons. It also toured to nearly a dozen cities on three continents in some four hundred performances. In 1997 the show was recast as a three-part television mini-series.
　　Alma Mahler began composing at the age of ten. By the time she met Gustav in 1901 she had composed most of her catalogue, which included approximately fifty songs. (Husband Gustav graciously allowed her to resume composing in the last year of his life.) Only seventeen songs survive, fourteen of which were published during Almaʼs lifetime in three collections (1910, 1915, 1924). The songs on this TMSO program come from the first two. Those seventeen songs that survive have all been orchestrated by later figures including British conductor Julian Reynolds and Finnish composer and conductor Jorma Panula. In 1995, the London-born Matthews brothers David (b. 1943) and Colin (b. 1946) orchestrated seven of them, which are being presented in their Japanese premiere at this concert. Colin orchestrated “In meines Vaters Garten” and “Erntelied,” David the other five.
　　David, like Gustav Mahler, has also composed ten symphonies. In addition he has arranged or orchestrated dozens of works from Beethoven and Brahms to Japanese folk songs and The Beach Boys, as well as nine early songs of Gustav Mahler. Colin too is a prolific arranger of other composersʼ music, including orchestrations of all 24 Debussy Preludes and both books of Images. The Matthews have a further significant Mahler connection − as editors of the published version of Deryck Cookeʼs “performing version” of the draft of Gustav Mahlerʼs Tenth Symphony.
　　Stylistically, Almaʼs songs grow from the same soil as Gustavʼs − rich in romantic imagery, intensely atmospheric, sensuous, profound, and often mysterious. Nature imagery, drooping lines, sighing gestures, and intimate sentiments pervade these songs. Composed about the same time, and spiritually akin to the shadowy, twilight world of Zemlinskyʼs Lyric Symphony and Schoenbergʼs early works like Verklärte Nacht, Pelleas und Melisande and Gurre-Lieder, every song is either about night or makes reference to it in some way. All are through-composed (continuous progression of music and words, without repetition) except “In meines Vaterʼs Garten.” All are tonal and all have key signatures. Although the orchestra is large, it is used with great discretion, and the vocal lines are always audible.

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

Bruckner: Symphony No.3 in D minor, WAB103 (Nowak:1877 version)

Ⅰ Gemäßgt, mehr bewegt, misterioso
Ⅱ Andante: Bewegt, feierlich, quasi Adagio
Ⅲ Scherzo: Ziemlich schnell
Ⅳ Finale: Allegro

Anton Bruckner: Born in Ansfelden, Austria, September 4, 1824; died in Vienna, October 11, 1896

　　The shadow of Beethoven and his canon of symphonies, especially the Ninth, loomed large over the nineteenth century. Two of Dvořák's nine symphonies are in the key of D minor (the key of Beethovenʼs Ninth), and no fewer than three of Brucknerʼs symphonies are in this key. The references to Beethoven in the symphony we hear at this TMSO concert are too obvious to overlook: the mysterious opening based on the D minor chord, which slowly takes shape as out of the void; the vast scale and scope of the symphony (its first movement may well be the longest first movement written up to that point); the awe-inspiring climaxes; and other points of reference.
　　But this is not the “Beethoven Symphony”; it is the “Wagner Symphony,” and the name comes from Bruckner himself. The story of how this came about is both touching and true. Bruckner had been a passionate devotee of Wagner since 1863 when he had heard Tannhäuser. In 1873, with his Second Symphony and the nearly-completed Third under his arm, Bruckner presented himself before the Master in Bayreuth, begging permission to dedicate one or the other symphony to Him. Wagner demurred over the Second, but he found much to admire (especially the opening trumpet call) in the Third. The fact that the Third incorporated several quotations from Die Walküre, Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde surely helped to dispose Wagner toward this symphony (all but one of these quotations were later expunged).
　　Bruckner was 48 when he produced his Third Symphony (actually the fifth – there also exist a “study symphony” in F minor from 1863 and a Symphony “No. 0” in D minor). After completing the Third in 1873, he revised it the following year, then again more substantially in 1876-77, and still again in 1888-1889. Kazushi Ono is conducting the 1877 version, which differs substantially from the original, not only for the cuts Bruckner made, but also with regard to details of orchestration, dynamics, articulation, and other matters. In this form Bruckner himself led the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance on December 16, 1877. (The 1873 original was not performed in Brucknerʼs lifetime.) The score was published in 1879 by Theodore Rättig and issued in a critical edition by Fritz Oeser in 1950. Leopold Nowak made further editorial changes in 1977. (Deremot Gault provides the full story in June 1996 issue of The Musical Times.)
　　For a work that impresses with its colossal power and cathedral-like blocks of sound, Brucknerʼs Third Symphony is scored for surprisingly modest forces. There is no piccolo, no English horn, no harp, not even a tuba. The only percussion is timpani. Except for an extra pair of horns and a third trumpet (and of course a larger string section), it might be the orchestra for Mozartʼs Magic Flute or Don Giovanni. But no one before 1873 had drawn such monumental, awesome sounds from an orchestra in a purely symphonic work – not Mozart, not Beethoven, not Berlioz, not even Bruckner himself. (Wagner certainly had in his operas, but not in symphonies.)
　　Like all Bruckner symphonies, the Third opens quietly in a mood of hushed mystery and expectancy. Over an ostinato pattern in the strings, the solo trumpet presents the initial idea of the first theme group. The music grows steadily, inexorably to a series of mighty outbursts for full orchestra interspersed with tenderly lyrical responses and pregnant pauses. The sense of breadth is astonishing. Eventually we hear the second subject, a radiant, flowing double theme for second violins and violas, each section playing a separate strand of the composite whole. The music seems to expand into space. Brucknerʼs favorite rhythmic motif − the interplay of duplets and triplets − comes to the fore here. There is a third subject consisting of varied repetitions of a four-note motif for unison brass.
　　In the Adagio movement there are again three subjects. The movement rises through successive episodes to its highest peak, though Bruckner has obviously not yet mastered the art of how to descend from the empyrean heights to which he brings his listeners. Biographer Gabriel Engel captures the mood of this movement when he observes that the music “reflects the decades which Bruckner spent in the baroque splendor of ancient cathedral surroundings. More overwhelming with each symphony grows this air of grandeur, suggestive of the mighty, domelike structures of the Houses of God which nurtured and mirrored Brucknerʼs lofty spiritual aspiration.”
　　The third movement is the typical Brucknerian scherzo derived from powerful rhythmic impulses and hurtling grimly towards its final cadence. Along the way, Bruckner does find room for music in a lighter vein, and the central Trio is a positively sunny episode in the spirit of a Ländler (an easy-flowing Austrian country dance, similar to the waltz) or folksong.
　　The complex finale is not without its structural problems, yet one cannot but be impressed by the colossal musical building blocks Bruckner assembles. At several points in the movement we hear episodes featuring an almost obsessive preoccupation with syncopation, which causes half the orchestra to sound like it is slightly behind. An apotheosis based on the symphonyʼs opening trumpet theme brings the symphony to a splendiferous conclusion.

Robert Markowʼs musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montrealʼs McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.

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