Piano Concerto No 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 “Emperor” – Ludwig van Beethoven
BORN: 1770, Bonn, Germany
DIED: 1827, Vienna, Austria
COMPOSED: 1809
INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings, & solo piano
PROGRAM NOTES: Beethoven’s last piano concerto dates from the beginning of May 1809, when, with Napoleon’s army besieging Vienna, the Austrian Imperial family and all of the court, including Beethoven’s pupil, friend, and benefactor, Archduke Rudolph, fled the city. On May 11 the French artillery, which commanded the heights of the surrounding countryside, was activated. Beethoven’s house stood perilously close to the line of fire.
Those who could not – or, like Beethoven, would not – leave sought shelter underground. Beethoven found a temporary haven in the cellar of his brother’s house. Imagine the composer crouching there, with heaven knows how many other frightened souls, trying to shield his already irreparably damaged ears from the din of volley after volley.
Once the bombardment had ceased and the Austrian forces had surrendered, the occupiers imposed a “residence tax” on the Viennese. The composer, on whom a sufficiently heavy financial burden had been placed by the departure of those who would guarantee his income, described “a city filled with nothing but drums, cannon, marching men, and misery of all sorts.”
After the summer, Beethoven was able to get away from the city and return to composing, producing back-to-back masterpieces in the “heroic” key of E-flat, the present Piano Concerto and the “Harp” Quartet, Op. 74. The grim experiences of the preceding months had not diminished his creative powers.
With many of his circle back in Vienna at the beginning of 1810, by which time a general armistice had been signed, life was returning to a semblance of normalcy, the French uniforms and the sound of the French language in the streets notwithstanding. There was, however, no opportunity to present the new concerto. That had to wait until the following year, and then not in Vienna but in Leipzig, with one Friedrich Schneider as soloist. Beethoven, who had written his four previous piano concertos for his own performance, was by now too deaf to perform with orchestra.
For the occasion of the Vienna premiere in February 1812, the soloist was Beethoven’s prize pupil, Carl Czerny. Interestingly, the concerto itself failed to make much of an impression, largely, it would seem, because of the nature of the audience, the Society of Noble Ladies of Charity, more receptive to the historic tableaux vivants that shared the bill with Beethoven.
Nonetheless, it was at that same concert that one connoisseur, a French army officer, supposedly called this work “an emperor among concertos” (aloud, in the auditorium?). Although this is often cited as a source of the nickname, verification is lacking. It is more likely that “Emperor” was the brainchild of an early publisher. Whatever its origin, the sobriquet seems apt for music of such imperious grandeur.
Here, Beethoven is no longer writing up to his own lofty standards as a performer, but for the super virtuoso of the following generation – personified by Czerny. Yet while the projection of power is among the composer’s aims, overt display is not, with nothing resembling a solo cadenza in sight. With the “Emperor”, Beethoven created a truly symphonic concerto.
The first movement opens with a grandiose E-flat chord for the full orchestra, interrupted by a series of equally commanding arpeggios for the solo, suggesting an early cadenza. But instead, Beethoven alternates mighty pronouncements for the orchestra and the piano. The introduction ended, the piano offers a broad, swaggering theme of which (and of the ensuing, more subdued, second theme) Donald Francis Tovey wrote: “The orchestra is not only symphonic, but is enabled by the very necessity of accompanying the solo lightly to produce ethereal orchestral effects that are in quite a different category from anything in the symphonies. On the other hand, the solo part develops the technique of its instrument with a freedom and brilliance for which Beethoven has no leisure in sonatas and chamber music.”
The second movement is one of the composer’s sublime inspirations. The muted strings play a theme of incomparable beauty and sad tenderness, the piano responding in hushed, descending triplets, creating a subtle tension until the theme is fully exposed. The nocturne-like character of the movement is furthered by a delicate balance of soft woodwinds, strings, and the solo, as the music mysteriously fades away. Then, over a sustained horn note, the piano introduces, softly and still andante, the theme of the rondo finale. Suddenly, dramatically, the piano lunges into the final theme, a grandly exuberant allegro.
– Program note by Herbert Glass
Michelle Cann
Lauded as “exquisite” by The Philadelphia Inquirer and “a pianist of sterling artistry” by Gramophone, Michelle Cann has become one of the most sought-after pianists of her generation. She made her debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 2021 and has recently performed concertos with The Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfônica Municipal de São Paulo, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, and Cincinnati.
Highlights of Cann’s 2023-24 season include appearances with the Charlotte, Hawaii, Indianapolis, Québec, Sarasota, and Winnipeg symphony orchestras, and recitals in New York City, Portland, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, and Denver. She also has teaching and performance residencies at the University of Indiana South Bend and Meany Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Washington.
Recognized as a leading interpreter of the piano music of Florence Price, Cann performed the New York City premiere of Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with The Dream Unfinished Orchestra in July 2016 and the Philadelphia premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin in February 2021. Her recording of the concerto with the New York Youth Symphony won a Grammy Award in 2023 for Best Orchestral Performance. Her acclaimed debut solo album Revival, featuring music by Price and Margaret Bonds, was released in May 2023 on the Curtis Studio label. She has also recorded two Price piano quintets with the Catalyst Quartet.
Cann was the recipient of the 2022 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization. She also received the Cleveland Institute of Music’s 2022 Alumni Achievement Award and the 2022 Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award.
A celebrated chamber musician, Cann has collaborated with leading artists including the Catalyst, Dover, and Juilliard string quartets, violinists Timothy and Nikki Chooi, and cellist Thomas Mesa. She has appeared as co-host and collaborative pianist with NPR’s From The Top, collaborating with actor/conductor Damon Gupton, violinist Leila Josefowicz, and violinist and MacArthur Fellow Vijay Gupta. Cann’s numerous media appearances include PBS Great Performances’ Now Hear This hosted by Scott Yoo and Living the Classical Life with host Zsolt Bognár.
Embracing a dual role as performer and pedagogue, Cann is frequently invited to teach master classes, give lecture-demonstrations, and lead teaching residencies. Recent residencies include the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and the National Conference of the Music Teachers National Association. She has recorded lessons for tonebase, the popular piano lesson platform. She has also served on the juries of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, the Kauffman Music Center International Youth Piano Competition, and the piano competition of the Music Academy of the West.
A staunch believer in community-building through music, Cann has served as the director of two children’s choruses in the El Sistema-inspired program Play On Philly and was part of the inaugural class of ArtistYear fellows at the Curtis Institute of Music. Through ArtistYear, she worked with community partners City Year, Teach for America, and AmeriCorps to provide arts education and access to underserved communities in Philadelphia.
Cann holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Paul Schenly and Dr. Daniel Shapiro, and an Artist’s Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Robert McDonald. She joined the Curtis piano faculty in 2020 as the inaugural Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies. She joined the piano faculty of the Manhattan School of Music in 2023.
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Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 – Jean Sibelius
BORN: December 8, 1865. Hämeenlinna, Finland
DIED: September 20, 1957. Järvenpää, Finland
COMPOSED: 1901-02, though relevant sketches date back to as early as 1899. The work is dedicated to Baron Axel Carpelan.
WORLD PREMIERE: March 8, 1902. The composer conducted the Helsinki Philharmonic in Helsinki
INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings
PROGRAM NOTES:
THE BACKSTORY Listening to Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, which is now more than a century old and has long been a classic, we may not find the piece terribly shocking. But to ears not yet inured to its contours, it was daring indeed—a work that departed from the conventions of its genre not less than did symphonies by, say, Gustav Mahler, whose Fifth Symphony is its exact contemporary. It was, furthermore, a rarity of the most heartening sort: a brave work that nonetheless pleased audiences from the outset.
Finland was undergoing its share of turmoil at the turn of the twentieth century, beginning to buckle with nationalistic fervor against the yoke of its Russian occupiers. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Finns were fired with excitement over homegrown culture—collecting traditional music and dance, delving into ancient Finnish legends, and returning to use the Finnish language. Sibelius was caught up with the artists and writers and musicians who were plying their trades in support of an independent Finland, and he turned out a hearty diet of patriotic and propagandistic compositions. A few of his successes from this nationalist period—the tone poems The Swan of Tuonela, Lemminkäinen’s Return, and Finlandia among them—began to earn him a reputation beyond Finnish borders.
Actually, not all of this famous symphony emanated literally from Finland; some of the composition was carried out in Italy. Thanks to benefactions arranged by Axel Carpelan, a Finnish man-about-the-arts and the eventual dedicatee of this symphony, Sibelius and his family were able to travel to Italy between February and April 1901, and much of the Symphony No. 2 was sketched in Florence and, especially, Rapallo, where the composer rented a studio. Aspects of the piece had already begun to take form in his mind almost two years earlier, although at that point Sibelius seems to have assumed his sketches would end up in various separate compositions rather than in a single unified symphony. Even in Rapallo he still seemed focused on writing a tone poem. He reported that on February 11, 1901, he entertained a fantasy that the villa in which his studio was located was the fanciful palace of Don Juan and that he himself was the amorous, amoral protagonist of that legend. He jotted in his diary the thoughts that accosted him at midnight: “Don Juan. I was sitting in the dark in my castle when a stranger entered. I asked who he could be again and again—but there was no answer. I tried to make him laugh but he remained silent. At last the stranger began to sing—then Don Juan knew who it was. It was death.” Then follow the notes that stand as the principal theme of the second movement of the Second Symphony.
As his work evolved, he seems to have sacrificed the Don Juan idea in favor a very different concept: a series of four tone poems based on characters from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But, following his return to Finland in June, Sibelius began to recognize that what was forming out of his sketches was not a set of tone poems, but rather a full-fledged symphony—one that would exhibit an extraordinary degree of unity among its sections. With his goal now clarified, Sibelius worked assiduously through the summer and fall and completed his symphony in November 1901. Then he revised the piece profoundly, at last concluding work in January 1902.
The symphony’s premiere, two months later, marked a signal success (as did three further sold-out performances that week). The conductor Robert Kajanus, who would become a distinguished Sibelius interpreter, insisted that the Helsinki audiences had understood the new symphony to be an overt expression of the political conflict then reigning over Finland. “The Andante,” he wrote, “strikes one as the most broken-hearted protest against all the injustice that threatens at the present time to deprive the sun of its light and our flowers of their scent. . . . The Finale develops toward a triumphant conclusion intended to rouse in the listener a picture of lighter and confident prospects for the future.” Sibelius objected to this interpretation, preferring that no programmatic implications be attached to this work. Nonetheless, this symphony does seem to express something specific to the Finnish imagination. The composer Sulho Ranta (1901-60) spoke on behalf of his fellow Finns when he declared, “There is something about this music—at least for us—that leads us to ecstasy; almost like a shaman with his magic drum.”
THE MUSIC A critic covering the work’s premiere expressed the opinion that Sibelius’s Second was “one of the few symphonic creations of our time that point in the same direction as Beethoven’s symphonies.” Some commentators have underscored the piece’s affinity with the symphonies of Brahms (particularly his Second, also in D major), while others find that especially the finale evokes something of Tchaikovsky. There’s truth in all of this, but in the end, Sibelius marches to his own drummer. Stravinsky once heard Sibelius’s Second Symphony in the company of his teacher, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and reported that Rimsky offered a solitary comment after the performance: “Well, I suppose that’s possible, too.”
Defining Rimsky-Korsakov’s “that” is not so easy. Perhaps he was referring to the restless sense of duality seeming to govern this score. The pastoral sunshine bathing the first movement’s opening is soon swept away by icy winds; perhaps the opposite happens in the third movement, where what one might take as a flurry of snow yields to a shepherd’s call on the oboe—meteorological metaphors are practically de rigueur when discussing Sibelius. Bucolic sections are interrupted by passages that evoke grave concern, or even by terrible outbursts; and these, in turn, are confronted by suggestions of proud defiance and resolute confidence. Perhaps Rimsky was thinking of Sibelius’s distinctive orchestration. Some listeners find it thick and claustrophobic, but Sibelius was particular about its details, and it adds up to his musical thumbprint. Take his very typical use of the massed brass section, which often erupts in snarling crescendos, as it does prominently in the second movement. A report survives of a rehearsal of the Second Symphony conducted by Kajanus, at which only two of the three trumpets were in attendance, the third having come down with the flu. Sibelius stayed only briefly and then interrupted the rehearsal to take his leave, explaining to Kajanus, “I can only hear the trumpet which isn’t there and I can’t stand it any longer.”
But it seems more likely that Rimsky-Korsakov was struck by the elemental process of Sibelius’s musical architecture, which Burnett James describes succinctly in his book The Music of Jean Sibelius (1983): “Though a natural melodist, Sibelius does not invariably begin with broad melodic statements, at least in his larger and more complex designs. . . . More often he works from handfuls of thematic nuclei which by a subsequent process of organic growth and fusion evolve into complete structures. And this, of course, is virtually a reversal of the standard classical procedure where a theme or group of themes is first stated (exposition), then subjected to some form of extension or analysis (development), finally to be restated in their original form or a variant of it (recapitulation) within a general pattern of tonal and harmonic evolution. . . . But with Sibelius the whole does not exist until its basic parts, its active nuclei, have been brought together and placed in a new and unexpected relationship.”
This concept of parts and patterns is illustrated at the symphony’s outset, with the strings’ gentle riffs of repeated notes seeming to be mere accompaniment waiting for a theme to start above. That’s exactly what does happen; but as the movement progresses, we understand that the seemingly insignificant string figures were actually fragments that would later fall into larger formation. Some of these seeds may take the entire symphony to germinate and blossom: Those opening sounds of the first movement, tracing three rising notes of a scale, will come to full fruition in the grandly Romantic theme of the Finale.
– Program note by James M. Keller