× Podcast Photos Upcoming Events Videos Articles and Reviews Radio Broadcast Schedule History of the EPO Mission and Values Board of Directors 2024-2025 Sponsors 2024-2025 Philharmonic Gives Back Donors 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024 Thoughtful Tributes 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024 Past Events
Home Podcast Photos Upcoming Events Videos Articles and Reviews Radio Broadcast Schedule History of the EPO Mission and Values Board of Directors 2024-2025 Sponsors 2024-2025 Philharmonic Gives Back Donors 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024 Thoughtful Tributes 1/17/2023 - 1/17/2024
Program Notes
Written by Bill Hemminger

Johann Sebastian Bach
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Duration: 10 minutes

Arguably the greatest of Baroque composers, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) came from a line of musicians.  Orphaned at the age of 10, Bach moved in with an elder brother, who was a church organist.  His musical connections allowed the younger Bach to learn organ, harpsichord, and violin; his lovely singing voice got the young man positions in church choirs.  By the time he was 18, Bach got his first job—at a church where he provided music for services while maintaining a class of students. Thereafter he was never away from service to one patron or another or from providing organ music (he soon became one of the greatest of organ soloists in Europe) as well as liturgical works for churches.  His catalog of sacred compositions is staggering in its length and quality and includes hundreds of cantatas as well as the profoundly moving Mass in B-minor (1733),  the Christmas Oratorio (1734)’ and the Saint Matthew Passion (1729), all pillars in the development of western art and culture.

But Bach also wrote much secular music, including tonight’s Brandenburg Concerto, one of six written “for various instruments.”  This list is no less impressive:  two volumes of keyboard pieces—preludes and fugues—known as the Well-tempered Clavier; concertos for various instruments; the Goldberg Variations; and his unfinished Art of the Fugue, among many other works.  

All six Brandenburg concertos were published in 1721, ostensibly as a job application to the court of Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg.  At that time, musicians worked at the behest of some duke or other member of the aristocracy; one could only hope that his employer had some appreciation of music in addition to money.  In applying for a position in the court, Bach wrote in his cover letter:  

I had the good fortune. . .to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness’s commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music. . .Your highness deigned to honor me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition.

Bach evidently knew his audience, but the fawning tone of his letter was apparently not enough to secure him the job.  

Happily, the musical score survived, squirreled away somewhere within the palace until retrieved years later.  Bach seems to have been enamored of the number 3:  this, the third concerto, consists of three groups of strings, three players each, with basso continuo; there are three movements.  The number also figures nicely in our program tonight—three of the greatest German composers, all bearing a name beginning with B.   

Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C-minor
Duration: 34 minutes

Certainly one of the most well-known musicians of any era, Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827.  Stories of his youth are pretty much the stuff of legend.  He had a nasty alcoholic father who beat his son so that he would practice piano more (Dad had hoped he might benefit financially from a successor to Mozart).  While the young Beethoven did practice and become perhaps the finest piano player in the Europe of his time, Beethoven also inherited much of his father’s character—sullen and impulsive at times, choleric at others.  Beethoven’s appearance—short and stocky, with a great shock of unruly hair, and a pock-marked complexion—did not endear him to women (or anyone else, probably), and though he had love interests throughout his life, he was never to get close to a particular woman.  He lived up to the image of the outsider, brooding and misunderstood.

Yet this man created a library of beautiful music, one that stylistically spans Classical and Romantic eras.  Among the 700+ compositions he wrote there are nine symphonies (of which the ninth might be the clarion call of the Romantic century); 32 piano sonatas (almost all of them de rigueur for aspiring pianists today), nine string quartets, five piano concertos, a violin concerto, overtures and incidental music, much chamber music, as well as a host of songs, choral works, even an opera.  In much of his work Beethoven was a great innovator, extending the scope of string quartets, sonatas, and concertos not to mention symphonies.  Despite the difficulties of his daily life, Beethoven lived out the implications of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, the text of the ninth symphony.  In Schiller’s poem the recognition of a shared humanity can stir people everywhere to be better, to be more sympathetic, and to aspire to a better world.  Beethoven left the world a better place for his having lived and created art.

Much as Beethoven figures in the transition from Classical to Romantic periods, his Piano Concerto No. 3 (much like his third symphony, the “Eroica”) marks a transition in his own musical idiom.  The first two concertos might have been written in the notebook of Haydn or Mozart, but in this work Beethoven experiments with tricky modulations and a denser texture throughout.  Beethoven himself performed the solo part at the premiere (a concert program that included an oratorio and his second symphony for good measure) in 1803, inventing a cadenza for the first movement on the spot.  In fact the score was not complete at the time either.  The concerto consists of three movements, beginning with a fast section where the solo piano outlines a C-minor chord.  A charming “Largo” follows (one reviewer calls this an “oasis of calm”) which the composer set in the key of E-major.  Then a final, spirited “Rondo” that finishes with ferocious runs and pianistic flourish in surprising C-major.

Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 4 in E-minor
Duration: 40 minutes

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1833; he died in 1897 in Vienna.  Born into an impoverished but musical family, Brahms started piano studies when he was seven and spent adolescent years earning money by playing piano in bars around the waterfront of Hamburg.  For a time he accompanied a Roma violinist, whose powerful influence on the young man showed up years later (1869) in Brahms’ immensely popular Hungarian Dances, for piano four hands.

In 1853 Brahms met celebrity violinist Joseph Joachim, who, recognizing the young man’s remarkable talent, introduced the young pianist-composer to Robert Schumann.  Schumann was similarly struck by Brahms’ ability; the two became close friends for the remainder of Schumann’s life.  When Schumann first experienced mental illness in 1854, Brahms went to the aid of Schumann’s wife Clara.  Brahms was much taken by Clara (who wouldn’t be?—devoted spouse and mother, concert pianist, accomplished composer), and she and Brahms remained close friends after Robert’s death in 1856.  Were the two romantically involved?  In her poem The Romantics, Lisel Mueller (University of Evansville graduate and Pulitzer Prize laureate) finds that to be a “rude, irrelevant question.”  Her poem on the topic of Clara and Johannes concludes with this imagined observation:  “Each time I hear / the Intermezzi, sad and lavish / I imagine the two of them sitting in a garden / letting the landscape speak for them, / leaving us nothing to overhear”  (from her 1996 volume Alive Together).
 
The music of Schumann and Brahms fits clearly in the classical tradition of Beethoven and others who valued and practiced traditional musical forms.  At the time a newer, more self-consciously Romantic school—whose major practitioners were Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner—had its enthusiastic followers.  But if Brahms’ work follows firmly in the tradition of Bach and Beethoven, it is also true that Brahms’ music in many ways anticipates the century that is to follow.  For example, his impressionistic 1892 piano composition Intermezzo, Opus 117 No. 1, sounds as if it could have been written by Debussy (whose influential Suite bergamasque had already been conceived earlier, in 1890). Perhaps it would be more appropriate to judge a composer’s work on its own qualities rather than as an expression of a particular school or style.

With his Symphony No.1 in C-minor (1876), which garnered kudos in Vienna, Brahms had finally “arrived” on the forefront of European composers.  He had already written his most famous choral work, A German Requiem (1869), as well as a host of songs and other choral works.  More formidable orchestral works followed:  the Violin Concerto in D-major (1878), the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major (1881).  Brahms, finishing his days in Vienna as a virtual hero, spent much of what compositional energy he had left on chamber music:  a pair of remarkable string quintets, a piano trio, and a number of pieces for clarinet and other instruments.  Days before his death from liver cancer, the composer last appeared at an 1897 performance of his Symphony No. 4 in E-minor.  To a thunderous ovation in that Vienna venue Brahms stood up, tears running down his cheeks.  A biographer notes that “through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that [Brahms] was saying farewell.”

The fourth of his symphonies (1884-85) was written in bucolic circumstances in the mountains of Austria where Brahms often went in order to work undisturbed on a significant composition.  At the same time, he read through a recent German translation of Sophocles, not the most upbeat of Greek dramatists, as he put together his musical thoughts.  Though a professed lover of “children and animals” (apologies to W. C. Fields) and a composer capable of humor in his music, Brahms was likely dysthymic and characteristically a loner; the fourth symphony certainly suggests a dour view of life even with its potentially resuscitating art.  

The first movement opens with a melody of descending thirds, scarcely what one might typically identify as a melody yet remarkably memorable.  A fanfare follows—first of woodwinds, then several times of horns—and the emotional roller coaster begins.  The movement hurries toward a frantic conclusion.  The nocturnal second movement, the only one in a major key, opens with a lovely horn call.  This is the quietus of the symphonic storm.  The third movement is marked Allegro giocoso (fast and joyous); there are playful episodes throughout this movement where Brahms’ sparkling sense of rhythm can be heard.  The final movement begins with a dark chorale of trombone voices.  Towards the middle of the movement, a fragile flute solo sings above the turmoil—until the unsettling sound of the opening chorale returns.  From then on, the movement grows in intensity and in anguish.  This musical statement of implacable fate surely strikes a blow to the prevailing Romantic notion of triumphant individualism.

Program Notes
Written by Bill Hemminger

Johann Sebastian Bach
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Duration: 10 minutes

Arguably the greatest of Baroque composers, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) came from a line of musicians.  Orphaned at the age of 10, Bach moved in with an elder brother, who was a church organist.  His musical connections allowed the younger Bach to learn organ, harpsichord, and violin; his lovely singing voice got the young man positions in church choirs.  By the time he was 18, Bach got his first job—at a church where he provided music for services while maintaining a class of students. Thereafter he was never away from service to one patron or another or from providing organ music (he soon became one of the greatest of organ soloists in Europe) as well as liturgical works for churches.  His catalog of sacred compositions is staggering in its length and quality and includes hundreds of cantatas as well as the profoundly moving Mass in B-minor (1733),  the Christmas Oratorio (1734)’ and the Saint Matthew Passion (1729), all pillars in the development of western art and culture.

But Bach also wrote much secular music, including tonight’s Brandenburg Concerto, one of six written “for various instruments.”  This list is no less impressive:  two volumes of keyboard pieces—preludes and fugues—known as the Well-tempered Clavier; concertos for various instruments; the Goldberg Variations; and his unfinished Art of the Fugue, among many other works.  

All six Brandenburg concertos were published in 1721, ostensibly as a job application to the court of Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg.  At that time, musicians worked at the behest of some duke or other member of the aristocracy; one could only hope that his employer had some appreciation of music in addition to money.  In applying for a position in the court, Bach wrote in his cover letter:  

I had the good fortune. . .to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness’s commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music. . .Your highness deigned to honor me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition.

Bach evidently knew his audience, but the fawning tone of his letter was apparently not enough to secure him the job.  

Happily, the musical score survived, squirreled away somewhere within the palace until retrieved years later.  Bach seems to have been enamored of the number 3:  this, the third concerto, consists of three groups of strings, three players each, with basso continuo; there are three movements.  The number also figures nicely in our program tonight—three of the greatest German composers, all bearing a name beginning with B.   

Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C-minor
Duration: 34 minutes

Certainly one of the most well-known musicians of any era, Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827.  Stories of his youth are pretty much the stuff of legend.  He had a nasty alcoholic father who beat his son so that he would practice piano more (Dad had hoped he might benefit financially from a successor to Mozart).  While the young Beethoven did practice and become perhaps the finest piano player in the Europe of his time, Beethoven also inherited much of his father’s character—sullen and impulsive at times, choleric at others.  Beethoven’s appearance—short and stocky, with a great shock of unruly hair, and a pock-marked complexion—did not endear him to women (or anyone else, probably), and though he had love interests throughout his life, he was never to get close to a particular woman.  He lived up to the image of the outsider, brooding and misunderstood.

Yet this man created a library of beautiful music, one that stylistically spans Classical and Romantic eras.  Among the 700+ compositions he wrote there are nine symphonies (of which the ninth might be the clarion call of the Romantic century); 32 piano sonatas (almost all of them de rigueur for aspiring pianists today), nine string quartets, five piano concertos, a violin concerto, overtures and incidental music, much chamber music, as well as a host of songs, choral works, even an opera.  In much of his work Beethoven was a great innovator, extending the scope of string quartets, sonatas, and concertos not to mention symphonies.  Despite the difficulties of his daily life, Beethoven lived out the implications of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, the text of the ninth symphony.  In Schiller’s poem the recognition of a shared humanity can stir people everywhere to be better, to be more sympathetic, and to aspire to a better world.  Beethoven left the world a better place for his having lived and created art.

Much as Beethoven figures in the transition from Classical to Romantic periods, his Piano Concerto No. 3 (much like his third symphony, the “Eroica”) marks a transition in his own musical idiom.  The first two concertos might have been written in the notebook of Haydn or Mozart, but in this work Beethoven experiments with tricky modulations and a denser texture throughout.  Beethoven himself performed the solo part at the premiere (a concert program that included an oratorio and his second symphony for good measure) in 1803, inventing a cadenza for the first movement on the spot.  In fact the score was not complete at the time either.  The concerto consists of three movements, beginning with a fast section where the solo piano outlines a C-minor chord.  A charming “Largo” follows (one reviewer calls this an “oasis of calm”) which the composer set in the key of E-major.  Then a final, spirited “Rondo” that finishes with ferocious runs and pianistic flourish in surprising C-major.

Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 4 in E-minor
Duration: 40 minutes

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1833; he died in 1897 in Vienna.  Born into an impoverished but musical family, Brahms started piano studies when he was seven and spent adolescent years earning money by playing piano in bars around the waterfront of Hamburg.  For a time he accompanied a Roma violinist, whose powerful influence on the young man showed up years later (1869) in Brahms’ immensely popular Hungarian Dances, for piano four hands.

In 1853 Brahms met celebrity violinist Joseph Joachim, who, recognizing the young man’s remarkable talent, introduced the young pianist-composer to Robert Schumann.  Schumann was similarly struck by Brahms’ ability; the two became close friends for the remainder of Schumann’s life.  When Schumann first experienced mental illness in 1854, Brahms went to the aid of Schumann’s wife Clara.  Brahms was much taken by Clara (who wouldn’t be?—devoted spouse and mother, concert pianist, accomplished composer), and she and Brahms remained close friends after Robert’s death in 1856.  Were the two romantically involved?  In her poem The Romantics, Lisel Mueller (University of Evansville graduate and Pulitzer Prize laureate) finds that to be a “rude, irrelevant question.”  Her poem on the topic of Clara and Johannes concludes with this imagined observation:  “Each time I hear / the Intermezzi, sad and lavish / I imagine the two of them sitting in a garden / letting the landscape speak for them, / leaving us nothing to overhear”  (from her 1996 volume Alive Together).
 
The music of Schumann and Brahms fits clearly in the classical tradition of Beethoven and others who valued and practiced traditional musical forms.  At the time a newer, more self-consciously Romantic school—whose major practitioners were Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner—had its enthusiastic followers.  But if Brahms’ work follows firmly in the tradition of Bach and Beethoven, it is also true that Brahms’ music in many ways anticipates the century that is to follow.  For example, his impressionistic 1892 piano composition Intermezzo, Opus 117 No. 1, sounds as if it could have been written by Debussy (whose influential Suite bergamasque had already been conceived earlier, in 1890). Perhaps it would be more appropriate to judge a composer’s work on its own qualities rather than as an expression of a particular school or style.

With his Symphony No.1 in C-minor (1876), which garnered kudos in Vienna, Brahms had finally “arrived” on the forefront of European composers.  He had already written his most famous choral work, A German Requiem (1869), as well as a host of songs and other choral works.  More formidable orchestral works followed:  the Violin Concerto in D-major (1878), the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major (1881).  Brahms, finishing his days in Vienna as a virtual hero, spent much of what compositional energy he had left on chamber music:  a pair of remarkable string quintets, a piano trio, and a number of pieces for clarinet and other instruments.  Days before his death from liver cancer, the composer last appeared at an 1897 performance of his Symphony No. 4 in E-minor.  To a thunderous ovation in that Vienna venue Brahms stood up, tears running down his cheeks.  A biographer notes that “through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that [Brahms] was saying farewell.”

The fourth of his symphonies (1884-85) was written in bucolic circumstances in the mountains of Austria where Brahms often went in order to work undisturbed on a significant composition.  At the same time, he read through a recent German translation of Sophocles, not the most upbeat of Greek dramatists, as he put together his musical thoughts.  Though a professed lover of “children and animals” (apologies to W. C. Fields) and a composer capable of humor in his music, Brahms was likely dysthymic and characteristically a loner; the fourth symphony certainly suggests a dour view of life even with its potentially resuscitating art.  

The first movement opens with a melody of descending thirds, scarcely what one might typically identify as a melody yet remarkably memorable.  A fanfare follows—first of woodwinds, then several times of horns—and the emotional roller coaster begins.  The movement hurries toward a frantic conclusion.  The nocturnal second movement, the only one in a major key, opens with a lovely horn call.  This is the quietus of the symphonic storm.  The third movement is marked Allegro giocoso (fast and joyous); there are playful episodes throughout this movement where Brahms’ sparkling sense of rhythm can be heard.  The final movement begins with a dark chorale of trombone voices.  Towards the middle of the movement, a fragile flute solo sings above the turmoil—until the unsettling sound of the opening chorale returns.  From then on, the movement grows in intensity and in anguish.  This musical statement of implacable fate surely strikes a blow to the prevailing Romantic notion of triumphant individualism.