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NASHVILLE SYMPHONY GIANCARLO GUERRERO, CONDUCTORBORIS GILTBURG, PIANO

JONATHAN LESHNOFFStarburst — Live Recording

SERGEI RACHMANINOFFConcerto No. 4 for Piano and Orchestra in G minor, Op. 40(1941 edition)

I. Allegro vivaceII. LargoIII. Allegro vivace

Boris Giltburg, piano INTERMISSION

AARON JAY KERNISColor Wheel (2001) — Live Recording

SERGEI RACHMANINOFFRhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43Boris Giltburg, piano

Jonathan Leshnoff’s Starburst and Aaron Jay Kernis’ Color Wheel will be recorded for future release on Naxos. To ensure the high-est-quality recording, please keep noise to a minimum.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, AT 7 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, AT 8 PMSATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, AT 8 PM

T H A N K YO U TO O U R S P O N S O R S

OFFICIAL PARTNER

RACHMANINOFF’S R H A P S O D Y & PIANO CONCERTO NO. 4

A E G I S

EST. 2013

FOUNDATIONS C I E N C E S

C L A S S I C A L S E R I E S

This weekend’s performances are underwritten in part by

Mr. & Mrs. James C. Seabury III

Boris Giltburg’s appearance made possible in part by

The Rev. & Mrs. Fred Dettwiller

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JONATHAN LESHNOFF

Composed: 2010First performance: April 30, 2010, with Marin Alsop conducing the Baltimore Symphony. First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the orchestra's first performances.Estimated length: 8 minutes

Starburst

Born on September 8, 1973, in New Brunswick, New Jersey; currently resides in Baltimore

Brief though it is, Starburst immediately gave Jonathan Leshnoff ’s career a meteoric boost

after its premiere in 2010. To date more than 20 orchestras have programmed the piece, and his works overall have been performed by more than 50 orchestras around the world. Other champions include the violinist Gil Shaham and the guitarist Manuel Barrueco. The Baltimore-based composer’s prolific and versatile catalogue encompasses symphonies, concertos, oratorios, and chamber works. The New York Times has described Leshnoff as “a leader of contemporary American lyricism.”

According to the Baltimore Symphony, which commissioned Starburst along with the Kansas City Symphony and Fundación Orquesta de Extremadura, Leshnoff is one of the top ten most-performed living composers. The Atlanta Symphony released a new recording of Leshnoff ’s music this month (Symphony No. 2 and the oratorio Zohar), and the Nashville Symphony and Giancarlo Guerrero are recording these performances of Starburst for future release.

Leshnoff remarks that a compact piece is more challenging to write than a longer-form

composition because the latter gives a composer “more time to develop, to amplify and present contrasts. With a concert opener you have to catch people’s attention right away.” Which is what Starburst sets out to do in its eight-minute span. A related challenge, he says, was to write a piece “with energy and excitement while exploring new corners and avenues.” In other words, Leshnoff wanted to avoid imitating other works based on a long-range crescendo — works such as Ravel’s Boléro, whose build-up is so familiar that it has become something of an orchestral cliché.

Starburst is designed, therefore, as a bipartite crescendo: a series of two build-ups divided by a solo. After an initial rush of energy that reaches a climax, the music cools down and a clarinet steps into the foreground. Leshnoff points out his special fondness for that instrument’s mellifluous character, as the clarinet is something of a signature in his work.

The second part is a longer-range crescendo that follows the clarinet solo. It begins at a lower point of intensity than the first crescendo, heightening the sense of drama through shifts in instrumental texture and in rhythmic activity, so that the final outburst feels inevitable. This strategy of postponing the “main event,” adds the composer, is one often found in Mahler.

Leshnoff says his process is to compose “from the outside in,” starting with a concept for the structure as a whole and then working out the details. With Starburst, he wanted to suggest an energy that was “continually changing” and that would culminate in “a big ending — an ending that incorporates everything up to that point.”

Starburst is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

WHAT TO LISTEN FORTONIGHT’S CONCERTAT A GLANCE

• With more than 50 works to his credit, Baltimore-based composer Leshnoff is earning an international reputation for his music. “My essential aesthetic has always been that I have to communicate and take people on a journey,” he says.

• To be recorded tonight for future release on Naxos, Starburst helped launch Leshnoff ’s career after it was premiered by the Baltimore Symphony in 2010. Though lasting only eight minutes, the piece is a dynamic orchestral showcase, building to a crescendo and then breaking down to feature a clarinet solo before building to an even more monumental finish.

AARON JAY KERNIS Color Wheel

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 4 | Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

• A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the prestigious Grawemeyer Award, Kernis is director of the Nashville Symphony’s Composer Lab and Workshop, an intensive weeklong session designed to help develop the next generation of American composers.

• Color Wheel was commissioned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2001. Written as a small-scale concerto for orchestra, the work treats the ensemble “as a large and dynamic body of sound and color,” according to the composer, and “features the virtuosity of the orchestra’s larger sections — winds, strings, brass, percussion.”

• Like Rimsky-Korsakov, Messaien and others before him, Kernis sometimes experiences music as color, a phenomenon known as synesthesia. True to its name, Color Wheel explores the contrast between “colors” produced by the instruments of the orchestra, and it also has a “spinning” quality — “full of tension, continuous energy, and drive,” as the composer describes it.

• Though celebrated today as one of the last great Romantic composers, Sergei Rachmaninoff was equally known during his lifetime as an astoundingly gifted and expressive pianist. Tonight’s concert features two of his later masterpieces, written in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced him to flee his native Russia in 1917 and live in exile for the remainder of his life.

• After resettling in New York City, Rachmaninoff stayed busy touring to earn an income, but in 1924 he decided to write his Piano Concerto No. 4. Though he’d experienced great success with his previous piano concertos, this one was panned by some critics, who felt that the composer’s style was behind the times. But the piece displays the evolution of his own style, which became more economical and also showcased the orchestra more prominently.

• Written a decade after his Piano Concerto No. 4, Rhapsody is Rachmaninoff ’s de-facto fifth piano concerto. By this time, the composer had built a summer retreat for his family in Switzerland, and it was there he wrote this work.

• The composer adapts a brief but well-known theme from Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, written more than a century before. Spinning out 24 variations, Rachmaninoff builds these into the framework of a concerto, with an opening fast movement, a slow middle movement and a triumphant finale. In one of the best-known variations, No. 18, he actually rearranges Paganini’s theme by turning the music upside-down.

LESHNOFF OBSERVES THAT A COMPACT PIECE IS MORE CHALLENGING TO WRITE THAN A LONGER-FORM COMPOSITION BECAUSE THE LATTER GIVES A COMPOSER “MORE TIME TO DEVELOP, TO AMPLIFY AND PRESENT CONTRASTS. WITH A CONCERT OPENER YOU HAVE TO CATCH PEOPLE’S ATTENTION RIGHT AWAY.”

JONATHAN LESHNOFF Starburst

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WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Through all of its versions, the Fourth Concerto reveals a newer approach to composition

that would characterize Rachmaninoff ’s other late works. While critics fell into the habit of hearing his familiar brand of Romanticism, in fact Rachmaninoff began paring down his language into what Harrison calls his “new ‘lean’ manner,” using briefer motivic ideas. Another characteristic of the piece is the extent to which the orchestra is part of the action. The orchestra is “almost never silent,” the composer wrote, which he considered to be “a big fault,” half-jokingly adding that “it is not a piano concerto, but a concerto for piano and orchestra.”

The Fourth Concerto begins with a brief and vivid orchestral passage, with the soloist immediately joining in the proceedings. Harrison points out that the “double-handed keyboard” texture at the very start marks a notable change

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

Composed: 1924-26, revised in 1927 and 1941 First performance: March 18, 1927, with the composer as the soloist and Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra First Nashville Symphony performance: November 9 & 10, 1990, with soloist Sequeira Costa and music director Kenneth Schermerhorn Estimated length: 24 minutes

Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40

Born on April 1, 1873, in Semyonovo, Russia; died on March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California

The piano was integral to Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s artistic identity. Had he never

published a single composition, Rachmaninoff would still be discussed in music history because of his achievements as one of the legendary pianists of the last century. Standing six feet, six inches, the tall, thin Russian made an imposing figure at the keyboard. According to fellow pianist Arthur Rubinstein, Rachmaninoff possessed “the secret of the golden, living tone which comes from the heart and which is inimitable.” Writes the pianist and educator Irene Peery-Fox: “With large hands, his technique was formidable — it was fluid, fast, and even. The sounds he produced were both rich and round, and his range of colors was enormous.”

So it’s not surprising that Rachmaninoff found his way out of the creative crises he periodically experienced as a composer via the keyboard. This was how he worked his way out of a long episode of depression as a young man, following the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in 1897. The harsh response to the work (occasioned by an ill-prepared performance) caused him to essentially stop composing for several years, even though Rachmaninoff did remain musically active with conducting engagements and with performances as a piano soloist. After seeking

treatment from a pioneering hypnotherapist around 1900, he returned to composition with his Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos and his Second Piano Concerto. The latter in particular scored a major success when Rachmaninoff played the premiere in 1901, and it would become one of his most beloved signatures.

Another dry spell resulted from the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. Rachmaninoff ’s estate was seized by the Bolsheviks, and in late 1917 he and his family fled his native country, famously crossing the Swedish border on an open sled. The composer would live in permanent exile until his death two-and-a-half decades later, and his output of new music dwindled considerably. The years following 1918 were particularly fallow, as Rachmaninoff — now resettled in a New York City apartment — struggled to make a living for his family by embarking on fresh concert tours.

The Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor — the last of his numbered piano concertos — marks Rachmaninoff ’s reawakening from his hibernation as a composer. He announced his intention to write the piece in 1924 but had to wait until a sabbatical in 1926 to focus on the new concerto. In fact, Rachmaninoff appears to have contemplated another concerto for some years, and he drew on material from at least a decade earlier. But unlike the Second Concerto, Rachmaninoff was not so fortunate with public reactions to the new work, which premiered in Philadelphia in 1927. One critic, Pitts Sanborn, wrote that it was “long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry.”

Some of the negative response had to do with this particular moment in music history. Rachmaninoff had made his name as a purveyor of Romanticism at a time when the modernist revolutions promoted by Schoenberg and by Stravinsky made his own style sound old-fashioned. Moreover, Rachmaninoff had expressed doubts of his own while composing the piece, worrying that the score was overlong. He made substantial cuts before he published the Fourth Concerto in 1928, and he went on to make even more cuts before reintroducing the work in 1941. As a result, the charge of being “long-winded” seems especially absurd, considering how compact the final version turned out to be.

AARON JAY KERNIS

Composed: 2001First performance: December 15, 2001, with Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the orchestra’s first performances. Estimated length: 22 minutes

Born on January 15, 1960, in Philadelphia; currently lives in New York City

Color Wheel

Aaron Jay Kernis ranks among today’s leading American composers, with accolades

that include the Pulitzer Prize in Music and the Grawemeyer Award, the top international music composition prize. Kernis has developed an especially close relationship with Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony, recently serving as director of the orchestra’s new Composer

in Rachmaninoff ’s method, since previously such writing “had served for climaxes.” Ideas are developed rather enigmatically, and the division of labor between piano and orchestra indeed tends to be more evenly distributed than might be expected in a concerto.

The Largo develops a very simple idea based on a falling cadence (re-mi-do), but from such sparse material Rachmaninoff evokes a moody, atmospheric soundscape. Into the energetic finale he packs more overtly virtuosic fireworks for the soloist, with episodic forays that showcase the composer’s lyrical gift as well. References to music from the first movement unify the Concerto in subtle ways, but the finale has a distinct flavor of its own.

In addition to the solo piano, the Piano Concerto No. 4 is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

Lab & Workshop, which seeks to support the next generation of American composers. Kernis has tackled weighty topics in his music: the experience of fatherhood in Newly Drawn Sky, his reactions to the 1991 Gulf War in his Second Symphony, and issues of Jewish spirituality in his choral Third Symphony (Symphony of Meditations). Color Wheel originated as a commission to celebrate the centenary of the Philadelphia Orchestra, his hometown orchestra. The commission also marked the ensemble’s inaugural season in Verizon Hall at Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in 2001.

The occasion of being the first music the Philadelphia Orchestra would perform in its new home suggested a “miniature” concerto for orchestra, according to the composer, “which treats [the ensemble] as a large and dynamic body of sound and color.” His score thus “features the virtuosity of the orchestra’s larger sections (winds, strings, brass, percussion) and to a great extent focuses on distinct groups of instruments separately and in combination.”

In addition, the composer draws inspiration from visual sources. Kernis defines color wheels as “tools used by artists and designers ‘that teach

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As mentioned above, Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s compositional output decreased markedly

after he left his native Russia. He produced a mere handful of completed compositions in his final two-and-a-half decades — among them the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which might be regarded as his unofficial Piano Concerto No. 5.

Rachmaninoff adhered to a brutally exhausting touring season to keep the cash flowing, which

IN THE COMPOSER’S WORDS

Kernis describes Color Wheel as follows:“Harmonically, it explores a wide gamut

of colors, [including] huge overtone-derived chords, strongly contrasting levels of consonance and dissonance, and occasional touches of jazz harmony and syncopation.

“The work opens with a brief, bold, chorale-like introduction which introduces many of the piece’s basic musical elements that will be varied later

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

Composed: 1934 First performance: November 7, 1934, with the composer as the soloist and Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia OrchestraFirst Nashville Symphony performance: December 14 & 15, 1970, with soloist Lucien Stark and music director Thor Johnson Estimated length: 24 minutes

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43

Born on April 1, 1873, in Semyonovo, Russia; died on March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Rachmaninoff reveals that he, too, has something original to say — even within the framework of an exceedingly well-known tune by another artist. His Rhapsody consists of 24 variations; the work as a whole, moreover, suggests a variation on the principle of variation. The progress of the Rhapsody traces the outlines of a bona fide piano concerto, complete with an opening fast movement that contains two themes, a slow middle movement, and a dramatically climactic finale. The sense of larger momentum creates a fascinating tension with the obsessive, boxed-in character of Paganini’s actual 16-bar theme in A minor, which lasts all of 20 seconds.

The piece teasingly starts with a variation before the theme is officially stated. (The violins — Paganini’s own instrument — are given the honors.) A few years after he composed the Rhapsody, Rachmaninoff suggested a scenario for choreographer Mikhail Fokine to use in Paganini, the ballet he created for this score in 1939. The scenario involves Paganini (represented by the theme/soloist) selling his soul to the devil “for perfection in his art and also for a woman.”

on. These opening harmonies and vital 4- and 8-note motives in the horns and trumpets will reappear later in many guises. The boldness of the opening chords is contrasted with the soft, liquid harmonies and rising lines in the strings. Color Wheel then changes character suddenly, beginning again with a contrastingly lighter tone as a scherzo in the winds. From then on, the work unfolds as a series of variations on the extremely malleable opening ideas.

“After reaching a climactic point in its spinning, a variation of the slower music returns, passing rising melodic lines between sections of the strings. The faster music returns gradually in a series of more compressed variations. The work builds to a whirling high point and closes with a return of the opening chorale idea in its grandest harmonic context and most fully realized melodic shape.”

Color Wheel is scored for piccolo, 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet and 3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano (celesta), harp, electric bass, and strings.

is one explanation for that sharp creative downturn post-1917. Another factor, surely, was his condition of permanent homesickness. Rachmaninoff sought to replicate the comfort and inspiration that had earlier surrounded him at his beloved Russian estate of Ivanovka. To that end, in the early 1930s he had an idyllic retreat designed for his family on property he had acquired near Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Featuring a villa, park, and garden, this was the refuge where the family spent summers until the

The love interlude is contained in the “slow movement,” introduced by a dreamy cadenza and veering into distant keys. Blissful apotheosis is reached in the Rhapsody’s most famous moment, Variation No. 18. A double irony here: Rachmaninoff channels the lush, Romantic sound of his Russian days via a gorgeous melody that sounds imported but is actually an upside-down rearrangement of a phrase from the theme.

Regardless of whether Rachmaninoff had the Paganini/devil narrative in mind while composing, he introduces another famous melody as a counter-theme: the medieval chant to the Dies irae sequence from the Requiem Mass, which crops up in several of this composer’s works as a personal signature. It appears first in Variation No. 7, where its dire associations mingle with scherzo-like mutations of the Paganini theme, and the tune is stated again with a kind of victorious bombast at the climax. But it is Rachmaninoff ’s own creative spirit that triumphs in the Rhapsody.

In addition to solo piano, the score calls for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com.

color relationships by organizing colors in a circle so you can visualize how they relate to each other.’ Most color wheels show primary colors and myriads of related hues. I feel that this piece concentrates on the bolder contrasts of basic primary colors.” The composer adds, “I sometimes see colors when I compose, and the qualities of certain chords do elicit specific sensations in me — for example, I see A major as bright yellow.”

A third strand involves Kernis’ fascination with the whirling dervishes of Sufism and their “ecstatic spinning.” He writes that Color Wheel “may have some ecstatic moments, but it is full of tension, continuous energy, and drive.”

war years. Rachmaninoff christened it “Senar” from the combination of his initials with those of his wife, Natalia.

After the disappointing reception of his Piano Concerto No. 4, the comforting atmosphere at Senar rekindled a desire to compose, resulting in two large-scale works over successive summers in the 1930s: the Rhapsody (composed in less than two months) and the Third Symphony. Of these, only the Rhapsody was immediately taken to heart by the public. Yet the often repeated notion that Rachmaninoff had somehow left his inspiration behind in Russia is by now largely acknowledged to be a myth.

Regarding the charge of his weakening inspiration, Rachmaninoff seems to have chosen his theme for the Rhapsody with a touch of irony. The theme itself — taken from the last of Niccolò Paganini’s Twenty-Four Caprices for Solo Violin published in 1820 — was, after all, a hackneyed affair by this time. It had been (and continues to be) used by numerous composers, including Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms.

RACHMANINOFF REVEALS THAT HE, TOO, HAS SOMETHING ORIGINAL TO SAY — EVEN

WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF AN EXCEEDINGLY WELL-KNOWN

TUNE BY ANOTHER ARTIST.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

BORIS GILTBURGpiano

Having taken the second (and audience) prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master

Competition in 2011, Boris Giltburg has appeared with many leading orchestras, including Philharmonia Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, DSO Berlin, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Swedish Radio Symphony, Danish Radio Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and Baltimore Symphony. He made his BBC Proms debut in 2010, has toured regularly to South America and China, and has also toured Germany with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse. He has played recitals in venues including the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Toppan Hall in Tokyo, the Bozar in Brussels, London’s Southbank Centre, The Louvre, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Giltburg’s highlights last season included

appearances at Rotterdam De Doelen (beginning with a return to the Rotterdam Philharmonic under Jukka-Pekka Saraste), his debut with Monte-Carlo Philharmonic, and chamber music with the Takács Quartet and Pavel Haas Quartet. In 2016/17, Giltburg appears for the first time with Oslo Philharmonic and Helsinki Philharmonic, and he makes his Australian debut with the Adelaide Symphony and Tasmanian Symphony. Recital highlights include Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, and Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall.

In 2012 Giltburg released an acclaimed CD of Prokofiev’s War Sonatas on Orchid Classics, earning him a place on the short list for the critics’ award at the Classical Brits. His Romantic Sonatas disc (including works by Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Grieg) followed in 2013. His first solo releases on Naxos (of works by Schumann and Beethoven) prompted enthusiastic reviews, and his latest Rachmaninoff CD was named Gramophone’s Disc of the Month.