Listen

Thursday, April 9, 8pm
Friday, April 10, 8pm | SPONSORED BY HEMENWAY & BARNES, LLP
(UnderScore Friday concert, including introductory comments from the stage by BSO violinist Jennie
Shames)
Saturday, April 11, 8pm | THE BROOKS AND LINDA ZUG CONCERT
Tuesday, April 14, 8pm | THE TRAYNOR FAMILY CONCERT
ANDRIS NELSONS
conducting
SCHULLER
“DREAMSCAPE” (2012)
I. Scherzo umoristico e curioso
II. Nocturne
III. Birth—Evolution—Culmination
MOZART
PIANO CONCERTO NO. 27 IN B-FLAT, K.595
Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro
RICHARD GOODE
{INTERMISSION}
STRAUSS
“EIN HELDENLEBEN” (“A HEROIC LIFE”), TONE POEM, OPUS 40
The Hero—The Hero’s Adversaries—
The Hero’s Companion—The Hero’s Battlefield—
The Hero’s Works of Peace—The Hero’s
Escape From the World and Fulfillment
MALCOLM LOWE, solo violin
THURSDAY EVENING’S PERFORMANCE OF MOZART’S PIANO CONCERTO NO. 27 IN B-FLAT, K.595, IS SUPPORTED
BY A GIFT FROM WILLIAM AND HELEN POUNDS.
BANK OF AMERICA AND EMC CORPORATION ARE PROUD TO SPONSOR THE BSO’S 2014-2015 SEASON.
The Thursday, Saturday, and Tuesday concerts will end about 10:10, the Friday concert about 10:15.
Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe performs on a Stradivarius violin, known as the “Lafont,” generously donated
to the Boston Symphony Orchestra by the O’Block Family.
Steinway and Sons Pianos, selected exclusively for Symphony Hall.
Special thanks to Fairmont Copley Plaza and Commonwealth Worldwide Chauffeured Transportation.
Broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra are heard on 99.5 WCRB.
In consideration of the performers and those around you, please turn off all electronic devices during the
concert, including tablets, cellular phones, pagers, watch alarms, and messaging devices of any kind. Thank
you for your cooperation.
Please note that taking pictures of the orchestra—whether photographs or videos—is prohibited during
concerts.
The Program in Brief...
The American composer Gunther Schuller, who celebrates his ninetieth birthday this year, has an association
with the BSO going back more than fifty years, since his appointment to the Tanglewood faculty by Erich
Leinsdorf in 1963. A dozen of his works have been performed by the orchestra, including his Where the Word
Ends, a BSO 125th Anniversary Commission premiered under James Levine’s direction in February 2009.
Schuller’s eleven-minute Dreamscape was commissioned by the BSO for the 75th anniversary of
Tanglewood, and was premiered by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra under the composer’s direction
in July 2012. The title comes from its origin: the composer writes that the three contrasting movements came
to him in a dream of remarkable clarity and detail. Schuller’s use of the orchestra is characteristically nuanced
and colorful.
In the first half of the 1780s, after his move to Vienna, Mozart composed several concertos a year, each
unique, and each adding to his reputation and to the foundation of the concerto as a Classical-era form. But
this run of works was several years behind him when he completed his final piano concerto, No. 27 in B-flat, a
few weeks before his thirty-fifth birthday in January 1791. In spite of some success in the field of opera, his
fortunes and overall outlook seem to have declined steadily, and the March 1791 concert at which he played
this work was his final concert appearance. The concerto’s mood is broad and open, but with shades of
melancholy in its frequent chromatic turns and brief changes to the minor mode. As ever with Mozart, the
delight is in the details, such as the way the concerto opens with a quiet measure in the strings, or the little
fanfare-like figures in the woodwinds that interrupt the strings’ melody, also throwing off the symmetry of the
phrasing.
In the decade between 1888—when he was just twenty-four years old—and 1898, the young Richard Strauss
composed the extraordinary series of six orchestral tone poems that have become staples of the orchestral
repertoire: Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra,
Don Quixote, and Ein Heldenleben. In Ein Heldenleben—which can be translated as “A Hero’s Life” or
perhaps even more meaningfully as “A Heroic Life”—Strauss created what he himself acknowledged to be a
musical self-portrait, beginning with a dramatically heroic theme—in the same key as Beethoven’s Eroica
Symphony—and moving in its forty-five minute course through a series of episodes that finds him combating
his critics, enjoying the companionship of his wife (represented by an extended and virtuosic part for solo
violin), quoting earlier musical works of his own, and finding, at the end, a peaceful escape from the world’s
difficulties—all while exploiting the colors and dynamic range of the late-19th-century orchestra to the fullest.
Robert Kirzinger/Marc Mandel
Mozart’s Piano Concertos as Self-Portrait
by Thomas May
Already this season, BSO audiences have heard Mozart piano concertos performed by Christian Zacharias
(No. 17 in G, K.453, last October), Lars Vogt (No. 24 in C minor, K.491, in January), and Emanuel Ax (No.
14 in E-flat, K.449, in March). The season’s final weeks offer two more of Mozart’s great works in the genre,
his last piano concerto, No. 27 in B-flat, K.595, being played by Richard Goode, and No. 23 in A, K.488,
which brings the return of Maria João Pires to Symphony Hall after a long absence. Thomas May here looks at
how the inexhaustible riches of Mozart’s piano concertos reflect his life, work, and times.
Though Mozart himself is to be credited with elevating the genre of the solo concerto to its lofty status,
varying concepts of the concerto would predominate in later times—with the virtuosity that contributes only
one layer in Mozart’s mature concertos later taking on an inflated significance in the heyday of Romanticism,
for example. Such relatively superficial associations would in turn dampen interest in Mozart’s concerto
legacy. Indeed, the piano concertos now guaranteed to attract listeners were for a long time largely neglected,
and only came back into favor in the period approaching the composer’s bicentennial, along with a deeper
appreciation of his musical significance overall.
Even a composer as beholden to Mozart’s piano concerto masterpieces as Beethoven—who particularly
admired the two minor-mode concertos, nos. 20 in D minor and 24 in C minor—chose to develop a fairly
narrow spectrum of the facets Mozart explored in his concertos. In his landmark study Mozart: The Man, the
Music (1945), one of the books that helped turn the tide of Mozart appreciation, Alfred Einstein observes that
Mozart got there first, even if Beethoven is often credited with what Einstein famously refers to as “The
Synthesis” of symphonic and concertante (i.e., “concerto-like”) aspects in the keyboard concerto: “a fusion
resulting in a higher unity beyond which no progress was possible, because perfection is imperfectible.”
As for Beethoven, “at bottom he developed only one type among Mozart’s concertos...the ‘military’ or
‘martial’ type,” with its emphasis on the dramatic juxtaposition of the soloist and orchestra (another way of
thinking about the “symphonic-concertante” dichotomy). Mozart’s approach to concerto form, on the other
hand, “is a vessel of far richer, finer, and more sublime content.” Einstein adds: “It is one of the perfections of
Mozart’s music that its dramatic element remains latent, and that it contains more profound depths than the
struggle between opposing forces.”
It’s all the more astonishing, then, to recall the context in which Mozart came to accomplish this
transformation of a genre he had inherited from German and Italian predecessors, most significantly Johann
Christian Bach (whom, while still a touring prodigy, Mozart had met in London). J.S. Bach, J.C.’s father, is
sometimes regarded as the “inventor” of the keyboard concerto, though his harpsichord concertos were likely
unknown to Mozart. (Those works themselves show a debt to Italian models and are in some cases outright
transcriptions of concertos by Vivaldi.) In his thought-provoking study of the evolution of form in the first
movements of Mozart’s concertos (1971), Denis Forman describes the concertos of Bach’s sons J.C. and Carl
Philipp Emanuel as supplying “the missing link between the age of polyphony and the Classical period of
Mozart.”
Thanks to the biases of traditional music-history writing, our collective image of the Classical period—and of
Mozart’s piano concertos in particular— tends to conjure such associations as rationally agreed-upon rules for
composition and formal principles crystallized into unchanging aesthetic ideals. The irony is that the works we
now so revere for conveying a sense of timelessness originated in a period of rapid change. Along with the
revolutionary political and economic developments in society at large, music-making, which had continued
bursting through its traditional ecclesiastical confines earlier in the 18th century, was also spreading beyond
courts into venues for an emerging middle class. And technological developments made possible the
development of a fortepiano with a wider range.
Mozart’s own career as a freelance artist during his final decade (1781-91), when he produced almost all of
the piano concertos we prize as masterpieces today, exemplifies a radical change in lifestyle and attitudes
toward the composer’s role in society. Once again, Mozart in a sense got there before Beethoven, even blazing
the trail his successor would follow as a performer-composer: a virtuoso who expanded his following through
performances, thus encouraging interest in what he was up to in his latest compositions. Shortly after he
moved to Vienna—which he once hailed as “the land of the clavier”—Mozart depended for his income on
performances at aristocratic gatherings and at “academies,” as the subscription concerts he organized were
called. These typically featured his latest piano concertos, which he would perform with a good deal of
improvisation extending even beyond the cadenzas. The musicologist Richard Taruskin observes that for
Mozart, “the acts or professions of composing and performing were not nearly so separate as they have since
become in the sphere of ‘classical’ music.”
The older system of patronage was swiftly dying out—the system his Vienna friend Haydn had depended on,
and which made him independently wealthy before he set out on his own—and Mozart had been forced to
adapt as he searched for a permanent position. But the freelance life subjected him to the vagaries of his
Viennese public: his independence from his hated former employer in Salzburg came at a heavy price.
Changes in taste, as Handel had discovered with regard to opera earlier in the century in London, necessitated
a change in compositional focus. Mozart didn’t create the piano concertos as “art for art’s sake” but as marketdriven commodities, even while testing the furthest boundaries of that market. Within a few years the novelty
factor of Mozart as a captivating pianist may have worn off—the days of his prodigy feats were only a distant
memory—and in any case a terrible recession and the social anxiety of revolution to the west killed off the
enthusiasm from Mozart’s supporters for this sort of undertaking.
This accounts for the uneven distribution of the nineteen piano concertos Mozart composed in Vienna:
seventeen date from his early years there (between 1782 and 1786), but then only two more followed in the
second half of the Vienna decade, and these were written under different circumstances (No. 26 in 1788 and
No. 27 in his final year, 1791). Back in Salzburg, Mozart had crafted his first four concertos and an
unnumbered one in 1767 simply by transcribing music by other composers (apparently an assignment from his
father); the remaining seven from the Salzburg years are also unevenly spread out, with No. 9 in E-flat, from
1777, marking a watershed in Mozart’s overall command of instrumental form.
While Mozart’s stock as a concerto soloist remained high, his gigs could earn impressive takings. The scholar
Neal Zaslaw points out that for the composer’s contemporaries, “his concertos were not ‘classics’ but ‘popular
music,’ to be enjoyed, used up, and replaced by newer works.” This, Zaslaw believes, helps account for the
curious fact that the press ignored this phenomenon as it was actually happening, so we have no contemporary
reviews to reference: the concertos were simply taken for granted as part of the business of making music,
here today, gone tomorrow.
As for the typical makeup of the audiences, Zaslaw categorizes Mozart’s patrons as “Viennese high society”
(whose homes he also played in), with only 8% from the subscription lists of his concerts in 1784 coming
from the bourgeoisie. Zaslaw also cites a figure of 83% of the subscribers being men, “in striking contrast with
Parisian salon concerts of the period, which were dominated by women.” Where would they have gathered to
listen? In addition to the court theater, one of the venues Mozart rented out for academy concerts was the
grand hall of a casino, which saw the premieres of three concertos in 1784. This is where the Concerto No. 14
in E-flat was first unveiled, though Mozart wrote it to be used exclusively by one of his pupils, Barbara von
Ployer. It was for Ployer that he also composed the Concerto No. 17 in G major, which Richard Taruskin
selects as “a plausible candidate” for the “representative” Mozart concerto.
With No. 14, Mozart wrote to his father that he had earned “extraordinary applause” and that he had written
on a more intimate scale, “in an entirely different style.” The final one, No. 27, which was introduced at a
benefit concert for a musician friend, explores another kind of intimacy. Charles Rosen observes that No. 27
and its close cousin, the Clarinet Concerto, are “private statements” in which “the form is never exploited for
exterior effect.” The Concerto No. 23 in A major goes in still another entirely different direction, with its
unusual marking of Adagio for the slow movement. In this concerto, writes Einstein, “Mozart again succeeded
in meeting his public half-way without sacrificing anything of his own individuality.”
Indeed, the variety of solutions Mozart employs to handle the unique challenges posed by the piano-orchestra
dichotomy underscores how essential this genre was to his creative thinking. “Each [concerto] sets its own
problems,” observes Rosen, “and resolves them without using a pre-established pattern, although always with
a Classical feeling for proportion and drama.” The significance of the piano concerto for Mozart is matched
only by that of opera, and the concertos include many passages and even movements that seem to borrow
directly from Mozart’s operatic sensibility. Taruskin notes that the finales, whether in rondo or variation form,
often aim “to put a fetchingly contrasted set of characters on stage and finally submerge their differences in
conviviality.”
And Mozart was certainly aware of turning the piano concerto into a “happy medium” (his own term)
comprising multiple layers of meaning and enjoyment. “They are brilliant—pleasing to the ear—natural
without becoming vacuous,” he wrote to his father describing the very first set of Viennese concertos he had
prepared, while at the same time containing “passages here and there that only connoisseurs can fully
appreciate” even while “the common listener will find them satisfying as well, although without knowing
why.” In this sense, as Einstein remarks, “Listeners who can really appreciate Mozart’s piano concertos are
the best audience there is.”
THOMAS MAY writes about the arts, lectures about music and theater, and blogs at memeteria.com.
Gunther Schuller
“Dreamscape” (2012)
GUNTHER SCHULLER was born in New York City on November 22, 1925, and lives in Newton,
Massachusetts. He composed “Dreamscape” at the start of 2012 on a Boston Symphony Orchestra
commission for the 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival. The score is dedicated to the director of the
Tanglewood Music Center, Ellen Highstein. Schuller himself conducted the Tanglewood Music Center
Orchestra in the work’s premiere on July 8, 2012, in Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood; the TMCO performed it
again later that summer, this time led by Schuller’s former student Oliver Knussen, as part of the Festival of
Contemporary Music. These are the first performances of “Dreamscape” by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
On April 15 the BSO performs the piece at Carnegie Hall, along with the Mozart and Strauss works also on
this program.
THE SCORE OF “DREAMSCAPE” calls for a large orchestra of four flutes (with four piccolos and alto
flute), four oboes and English horn, three clarinets in B-flat (with two clarinets in A), two bass clarinets, four
bassoons (with contrabassoon), six horns, four trumpets in B-flat (with optional piccolo trumpet), four
trombones, tuba, percussion (six players: two large sleigh bells, four tom-toms, slapstick, four Chinese gongs,
bass drum, marimba, two woodblocks, temple block, ratchet, triangle, timpani, vibraphone, glockenspiel,
xylophone, two chimes, bell tree, ride cymbal, sizzle cymbal, almglocken, lion’s roar, medium cowbell, shell
chime, suspended cymbal, brake drum, finger cymbals, two snare drums), two harps, piano, celesta, and
strings. The duration of the piece is about eleven minutes.
A resident of the Boston area for nearly fifty years, Gunther Schuller was born in New York, the son of a New
York Philharmonic violinist. He was a phenomenal and precocious horn player, joining the Cincinnati
Symphony as principal horn at age seventeen. By that time he was also an accomplished, self-taught
composer; at eighteen he was soloist in his own horn concerto with the orchestra. Returning to New York, he
joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1945, a position he retained until 1959, when he stopped playing
horn regularly in order to concentrate on composition. Meanwhile, he also became part of the city’s
progressive jazz scene, playing with Miles Davis and Gil Evans. In the later 1950s—parallel with producing
orchestral scores for the New York Philharmonic (Spectra), the Minneapolis Symphony (Seven Studies on
Themes of Paul Klee), and other orchestras—he collaborated with the Modern Jazz Quartet and John Lewis
and coined the phrase “Third Stream,” a melding of mainstream jazz and modern classical music that
expanded the perspectives of both of its parent styles and has influenced generations of musicians.
Schuller’s association with the BSO and Tanglewood began in 1963, when he was invited by recently
appointed BSO Music Director Erich Leinsdorf to join the composition faculty of the Berkshire Music Center
(as the Tanglewood Music Center was then called). Schuller was one of four curators for that summer’s
Fromm Concerts of contemporary music, along with Copland, Lukas Foss, and Iannis Xenakis, and was
appointed Supervisor of Contemporary Music Activities. In 1964, to give Copland a rest, he was also Acting
Head of the Composition Department. In 1966 he became Director of the Composition Department, a title he
held, with a couple of one-year breaks, until 1984. He was also the overall Director of the Berkshire Music
Center from 1975 until 1984, and has participated in the festival as a faculty member and conductor on several
occasions since. He was co-director of the 2010 Festival of Contemporary Music with John Harbison and
Oliver Knussen.
In addition to Tanglewood, Schuller’s educational activities included a ten-year stint as president of the New
England Conservatory in Boston; during his tenure there he was the first to introduce jazz into the curriculum
of a major conservatory, and nearly singlehandedly lit the fuse of the ragtime revival in the early 1970s. He
has also been a music publisher, a record-label producer, and author; his Early Jazz and The Swing Era are
significant entries to the written history of jazz. In 2011 the 650-page first volume of his autobiography,
Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, was published by the University of Rochester Press.
(This volume takes the reader up to the early 1960s; the second volume is in progress.) He has been an
important conductor, not only of his own works but of the whole range of the Western classical repertoire. He
has led the BSO on numerous occasions, and, as noted above, conducted the first performance of Dreamscape
in 2012 with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.
Schuller’s catalogue of works leaves few stones unturned and amounts to more than two hundred works in
every genre; he has written for many of the world’s great ensembles. In 1994 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize
for his Of Reminiscences and Reflections, composed for the Louisville Orchestra. In the past couple of years
the octogenarian (whose 90th birthday falls on November 22, 2015) has fulfilled twenty new commissions. In
addition to Dreamscape, orchestral works include Symphonic Images for the Munich Philharmonic and
Symphonic Triptych for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (where he started as a horn player over seventy
years ago), the latter scheduled for premiere in January 2016. His Games, composed on commission from the
BSO for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, was premiered in Jordan Hall in February 2014, and he has
also written a new work for the 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Music Center, Magical Trumpets for
twelve trumpets, to be premiered this summer. Through the years, beginning with Erich Leinsdorf’s leading
Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee in 1964, the BSO has played a dozen of the composer’s works, three of
which were world premieres: in 1970 William Steinberg conducted the first performances of Museum Piece,
composed for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts centennial; in 1978 Seiji Ozawa and Schuller led the premiere of
Deaï, featuring the BSO and the Toho Gakuen School Orchestra, in Tokyo during the orchestra’s Far Eastern
tour (this was repeated at Tanglewood with the BSO and the Berkshire [Tanglewood] Music Center Orchestra
in summer 1979); and Where the Word Ends, a BSO 125th Anniversary Commission, was premiered under
James Levine’s direction in February 2009.
Clearly the symphony orchestra, which accounts for some eighty of his pieces, including concertos, is
Schuller’s preferred medium. He has thought of most of his larger orchestral works as “symphonies”—
although only one of his works is designated as such—frequently casting his pieces in traditional symphonylike, multi-movement forms. Writing about Where the Word Ends, he said “This symphonic form invented by
Haydn and expanded by Beethoven is not just a classic, it’s an eternal form that is inexhaustible in its
potential.” In spite of its brevity, Dreamscape nonetheless has a symphonic trajectory and breadth, and makes
full use of the large orchestra. This intricate piece, as the composer relates in his own note, written for the
premiere in 2012 (see page 36), was the result of a remarkable mental process, the subconscious result perhaps
of an accretion of eighty years of a life of musical immersion. He began the piece in January 2012 and
finished it (as is his wont) in short order. Schuller’s use of the ensemble is characteristically detailed, nuanced,
and, in places, lush, the sections of the orchestra working organically to create shimmering sonic textures and
its three contrasting moods.
Robert Kirzinger
ROBERT KIRZINGER, a composer and annotator, is Assistant Director of Program Publications of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra.
Gunther Schuller on “Dreamscape”
The following program note by the composer is reprinted from the program for the premiere of “Dreamscape”
in July 2012.
Dreamscape was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for Tanglewood’s 75th-anniversary
celebration, to be performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. I was offered a very generous
instrumentation (woodwinds and brass in fours, six percussionists, two harps, and a sizable string section).
The one specific requirement was that the piece should be no longer than ten or eleven minutes.
P.S. I now must reveal that virtually the entire work—yes, the entire work—was presented to me in a dream,
not just little bits of it but ranging from its overall form and conception to an amazing amount of specific
detail. Even more astonishing to me was that my dream forced me to write/compose some things that I had
never done before and would in all likelihood never do on my own, so to speak, without my dream. These
were particular rhythmic/technical/structural matters as well as for me never previously attempted unusual
multi-polyphonic layerings.
The dream also determined that there shall be three movements, and one of these shall be humorous (à la
Ives’s “take-offs,” “cartoons”); thus the Scherzo Umoristico e Curioso. By contrast, another movement would
have to be dark and somber, i.e., Nocturne. For the third movement it decided that it should deal in some way
with the concept of evolution; it called it Genesis.
Even more startling was the amount of detail the dream gave me, utilizing all the tools of our musical craft
(pitches, rhythms, dynamics, specific harmonic and melodic decisions, etc.).
We all know that dreams vanish instantly after we’ve awakened. And I had learned from previous musical
dream experiences that if you want to retain some of what you dreamt you had better get out of bed right
away, and start writing down as quickly as possible as much as you can recapture. Alas, in most previous
dream experiences it was very little, too short. But this time I was able to write down, in both verbal and
musical notation and all kinds of short cuts and abbreviations a whole ten minutes of vivid precise
information—even as I could feel other parts of the dream disappearing.
It was, as I say above, virtually the whole piece. All I had to do now was to flesh out and finalize all that
immense amount of detail. So, what you will hear tonight is what the dream composed for me, what it made
me compose.
Gunther Schuller
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat, K.595
JOANNES CHRISOSTOMUS WOLFGANG GOTTLIEB MOZART—who began calling himself Wolfgango
Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè about 1777 (he used “Amadeus” only in jest)—was born in
Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He completed this, his final
piano concerto, on January 5, 1791, and gave the first performance on March 4 that year in Vienna, in a
concert given by the clarinetist Joseph Bähr.
IN ADDITION TO THE SOLO PIANO, the score calls for an orchestra of one flute, two oboes, two bassoons,
two horns, and strings. Mozart left cadenzas for the first and third movements; Richard Goode plays those
cadenzas in these performances.
In 1791, when Mozart’s short span of years came to its untimely end, he was remembered in memorial tributes
with a warmth that was far more than conventionally laudatory. Clearly his genius stood out at the time,
ranked only with the other great Viennese master, Haydn. Yet to the general public his music was often
difficult to understand—daring, highly flavored, complex—so that Mozart had all but given up concertizing in
the normal way, which was to assemble the performers for a program that would consist largely of his own
music (with himself as piano soloist), rent a hall, sell the tickets, and reap such profits as there may have been.
Audiences apparently had stopped coming to Mozart’s “academies,” as such concerts were called. It was a far
cry from the heady days of 1784 when he might appear a dozen times a month; even his last three symphonies,
composed in the summer of 1788, probably for an intended series of academies, were hardly performed in his
remaining three years of life. Thus it was that his final contribution to the piano concerto, a genre he had made
uniquely his own six or seven years earlier, received its first performance not in an academy given by the
composer himself, but rather one given by the distinguished and popular clarinetist Joseph Bähr on March 4,
1791, some two months after the completion of the work. How it was received is unknown.
In this beautifully autumnal concerto, Mozart avoids the glitter of virtuosity for its own sake, to such an extent
that it seems even subdued when compared with some earlier examples. But its expressive qualities are
correspondingly richer, and the concerto shares many elements with the other works of his last year: a direct
simplicity of melody, an interest in harmonic exploration, and a universality that transcends the passions of the
past and enters into a newly tranquil world.
The Allegro presents a wealth of tuneful ideas linked together with the utmost ease and naturalness, even
when a little dotted fanfare in the woodwinds interrupts the melody in the strings and threatens to upset the
parsing of its phrases. The music oscillates between major and minor, hinting at expressive depths, and the
solo instrument picks up much of its figuration from the orchestral introduction, tying everything together
most ingeniously. The beginning of the development is designed purposely to disorient the ear, taking off from
the extraordinarily distant key of B minor and moving rapidly through a bewildering succession of keys before
returning home with Mozart’s usual felicity.
The Larghetto opens with the unaccompanied piano singing an expressive song in a mood of tranquil
resignation, though the orchestra responds with achingly poignant chromaticisms later on. The finale is lighter,
though not so extroverted as some of the earlier concerto rondos. The main tune is a chipper one that Mozart
adapted almost immediately after finishing the concerto into a little spring song, “Komm, lieber Mai” (“Come,
dear May”), K.596. For the rest, the rondo is graceful and vivacious, but its lack of the normal keyboard
fireworks suggests that Mozart, at the end of his life, had found an entirely new relation to the audiences that
he had courted so assiduously in the earlier years. They no longer had to be compelled to admiration; they
could now be wooed by the richness of the music and not only the flash of the performance. And if, as the
evidence seems to suggest, they were not attracted by either, then the composer was perfectly willing to go his
own way, to write his music as he wanted it to go. Beethoven managed to do that a generation later and still
find the means of support; Mozart tried it just a little too soon, as the penury of his last years demonstrates.
Still, his late style recalls Winckelmann’s famous epigram on the inherent character of classical art—“edle
Einfalt und stille Grösse” (“noble simplicity and quiet greatness”)—which could be applied just as
appropriately to this, the capstone on the edifice of Mozart’s piano concertos.
Steven Ledbetter
STEVEN LEDBETTER was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.
THE FIRST BOSTON SYMPHONY PERFORMANCE OF MOZART’S B-FLAT PIANO CONCERTO,
K.595, was on July 26, 1963, with soloist Rudolf Serkin under the direction of Erich Leinsdorf. BSO
performances since then have featured Claude Frank (with Leinsdorf), Vladimir Ashkenazy (Seiji Ozawa),
Christoph Eschenbach as soloist/conductor, Murray Perahia (Sir Colin Davis), Alicia de Larrocha (Adám
Fischer), Vladimir Feltsman (Charles Dutoit), Evgeny Kissin (Ozawa), Richard Goode (Marek Janowski),
Radu Lupu (Roberto Abbado), Joseph Kalichstein (the most recent subscription performances, in
October/November 2001 with Federico Cortese conducting), Emanuel Ax (Ingo Metzmacher), Goode again
(James Levine), and Garrick Ohlsson (the most recent Tanglewood performance, on July 26, 2013, with Edo
de Waart conducting).
Richard Strauss
“Ein Heldenleben” (“A Heroic Life”), Tone poem, Opus 40
RICHARD GEORG STRAUSS was born in Munich, Germany, on June 11, 1864, and died in GarmischPartenkirchen, Bavaria, on September 8, 1949. He began sketching “Ein Heldenleben” in the spring of 1897
and completed the score on December 1, 1898. On December 23 he began to rewrite the ending and composed
what are now the final twenty-five measures, the date of definite completion being December 27, 1898.
Strauss himself conducted the first performance on March 3, 1899, at one of the Frankfurt Museum concerts.
The score is dedicated to Willem Mengelberg and the Orchestra of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.
THE SCORE OF “EIN HELDENLEBEN” calls for three flutes and piccolo, four oboes (fourth doubling
English horn), high clarinet in E-flat, two clarinets in B-flat, and bass clarinet, three bassoons and
contrabassoon, eight horns, five trumpets, three trombones, tenor tuba, bass tuba, timpani, tam-tam, cymbals,
snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum, two harps, and strings, including a prominent part for solo violin.
Seventy-eight years separate Strauss’s first composition and his last. The first was a Schneider-Polka, a
Tailors’ Polka, which the six-and-a-half-year-old boy could play at the piano—he had after all been taking
lessons for two years—but which his father had to write down for him. Until the unearthing of the song
Malven (Mallows) for soprano and piano, dating from November 1948 and written for Maria Jeritza, the last
was taken to be a setting completed September that year for soprano and orchestra of Hermann Hesse’s poem
September, one of the Four Last Songs, music in which inspiration was as intensely present as ever in his life.
He did not write many more polkas, though September and Malven were the last in a long series of songs. For
almost forty years, Strauss devoted most of his energies to opera, though he was a man of forty-one at the
premiere of Salome, his first success in that risky world. He had completed an opera called Guntram as early
as 1893, but it disappeared from the stage almost immediately. Altogether, the Guntram experience cost
Strauss a lot of headaches, both in Weimar, where he was conductor from 1889 to 1894, and later in Munich,
his next way-station. His happiest association was his engagement during the rehearsal period and his
marriage four months later to his pupil Pauline de Ahna, who took the principal female role. Pauline plays an
important part in Ein Heldenleben as well as in such works as the Symphonia domestica and the opera
Intermezzo; the sound and the memory of her luminous soprano inform countless pages in his opera scores and
songs; and in another of the 1948 songs, the setting of Eichendorff’s Im Abendrot (In the Sunset Glow),
Strauss built a wondrously moving monument to their enduring devotion.
After Guntram, at any rate, he returned to a path he had already explored for a half-dozen years, that of the
orchestral tone poem. Reared in a conservative, classical tradition, having just arrived at Brahms by way of
Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann, the twenty-one-year-old Strauss had fallen under the thrall of a much
older composer and violinist, Alexander Ritter, who made it his task to convert his young friend to the “music
of the future” of Liszt and Wagner. Strauss’s first and still somewhat tentative compositional response was the
pictorial symphonic fantasy Aus Italien (From Italy), which he performed with considerable success in
Munich in March 1888. But if Aus Italien was still tied to the old tradition to at least some degree, the next
work, Don Juan, completed in September 1888, represented total commitment to the “future.” Moreover,
Strauss spent the following summer as coach and general dogsbody at Bayreuth. Still only twenty-four,
Strauss had made, in Don Juan, a work of astonishing verve, assurance, and originality, and, even allowing for
the interruption to complete Guntram, the series of tone poems was continued at high speed and with the most
vigorous invention: Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) in 1889, the revised and definitive
edition of Macbeth in 1891, Till Eulenspiegel in 1895, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in
1896, Don Quixote in 1897, and Ein Heldenleben in 1898. Two postscripts follow at some distance—the
Symphonia domestica in 1904 and the Alpensinfonie (Alpine Symphony) in 1914—but the period of intense
concentration on the genre comes to an end with Heldenleben.
All this time, Strauss had been making a name for himself as a conductor. He had made his debut in 1884,
leading his Suite for Winds, Opus 4, without benefit of a rehearsal. A valuable apprenticeship at Meiningen
with Hans von Bülow was followed by an appointment as third conductor at the Munich Opera. From there he
had gone to Weimar and then back to Munich, where he now shared the number-one spot with Hermann Levi.
Each time, Strauss had ended up frustrated, bored, in some way dissatisfied. The year 1898 at last brought
liberation from a trying situation in Munich in the form of a ten-year contract as principal conductor at the
Court Opera in Berlin. He had had a previous and unhappy experience in the Prussian and Imperial capital,
when after only one season with the Berlin Philharmonic he had been replaced by a former Boston Symphony
conductor, Arthur Nikisch. This time he shared the principal conductorship with a future Boston Symphony
conductor, Karl Muck. But now Strauss faced Berlin with confidence—rightly so, as it turned out—and most
of the score of Ein Heldenleben, begun in Munich, continued in the country at Marquartstein, and completed
in Berlin, was written in sky-high spirits.
Early in 1897, Strauss was busy conducting Wagner and Mozart in Munich and taking his melodrama Enoch
Arden on tour with the actor Ernst von Possart. He was composing choruses on texts by Rückert and Schiller,
but on April 16 he was able to note that the symphonic poem Held und Welt (Hero and World) was beginning
to take shape. “And with it,” he adds, “Don Quixote as satyr-play,” that is to say, as comic pendant. The two
works remained associated in his mind: he worked the two scores simultaneously for several months and
always felt that together they made a superb concert program. By summer’s end, however, he found himself
concentrating exclusively on Don Quixote, and he brought that score to completion on December 29, 1897, at
11:42 a.m. The other project variously referred to as Heldenleben, Held und Welt, Heroische Sinfonie, and
even Eroica, was completed in short score on July 30, 1898—the date, Strauss registered in his journal, of “the
great Bismarck’s” dismissal by the young Kaiser Wilhelm. Three days later, Strauss began work on the full
score, and this, as already noted, he finished on December 1, subjecting the end to a striking revision in the
last days of that month.
“Ein Heldenleben” is usually, and not incorrectly, translated as “A Hero’s Life”; argument, however, could be
made that “A Heroic Life” comes even closer. That, in any event, brings us to the troublesome question of
extramusical meaning or content. First of all, Strauss was—obviously—aware of the Eroica connection and of
its dangers. On July 23, 1898, we find him writing to a friend: “Since Beethoven’s Eroica is so unpopular with
conductors and thus rarely performed nowadays, I am now, in order to meet what is clearly an urgent need,
composing a big tone poem with the title Heldenleben (to be sure, without a funeral march, but still in E-flat
major and with very many horns, which are, after all, stamped with heroism).”
But who is the hero? Two details point to Strauss himself. He authorized his old school friend Friedrich Rösch
and the critic Wilhelm Klatte to supply, for the premiere, a detailed scenario in six sections. One of these is
called “The Hero’s Companion” and it is, by the composer’s admission to Romain Rolland and others, a
portrait of Pauline Strauss; another is called “The Hero’s Works of Peace” and it is woven from quotations of
earlier Strauss scores. “Of course I haven’t taken part in any battles,” wrote Strauss to his publisher half a
century later, “but the only way I could express works of peace was through themes of my own.” He was and
remained ambivalent on this subject, being irritated by requests for “programs” but supplying them anyway
(or allowing someone else to); insisting that music’s business was to say only those things that music could
uniquely say, but also that art with no human content was no art; and often—as in the case of Heldenleben—
making elaborate verbal sketches before he was ready to jot down musical ideas. “Why,” he asked in one of
his last notebook entries, “why does no one see the new element in my compositions, how in them—as
otherwise only in Beethoven—the man is visible in the work?” A passage from a letter to Romain Rolland at
the time of the Paris premiere of the Domestica in 1906 seems to sum up his feelings (at least to the extent that
they allow themselves to be summed up):
For me, the poetic program is nothing more than the formative stimulus both for the expression and the
purely musical development of my feelings, not, as you think, a mere musical description of certain of life’s
events. That, after all, would be completely against the spirit of music. But, for music not to lose itself in
total arbitrariness or dissolve somehow into the boundless, it has need of certain boundaries, and a program
can provide such bounds. An analytical program isn’t meant to be more than a kind of handhold for the
listener. Whoever is interested in it, let him use it. Anyone who really knows how to listen to music
probably doesn’t need it anyway. I’ll be glad to follow your advice and supply no program for Paris. But do
you really think that the Paris audience is ready to listen without signposts to a forty-five-minute symphony?
The first large section of the work, swaggering, sweet, impassioned, grandiloquent, sumptuously scored,
depicts The Hero in his changing aspects and moods.
A grand preparatory gesture, followed by expectant silence, leads to a drastically different music, sharp,
prickly, disjunct, dissonant. The directions to the performers say things like “cutting and pointed,” “snarling”
(the oboe), “hissing” (the pianissimo cymbals). Underneath all this nastiness, the tubas make a stubborn and
pedantic pronouncement on the subject of that grammatic solecism in music called “parallel fifths.” This is the
scene of The Hero’s Adversaries, the grudgers and the fault-finders. Strauss was convinced that some of the
Berlin critics recognized themselves as the target of this portrait and the composer as The Hero, which, he
remarked, was “only partially applicable.” The Hero’s theme, on its next appearance, is much darkened.
One violin detaches itself from the others to unfold the vivid portrait of Pauline. “She is very complicated,”
Strauss told Romain Rolland, “très femme, a little perverse, a bit of a coquette, never the same twice, different
each minute from what she was a minute earlier. At the beginning, the hero follows her lead, picking up the
pitch she has just sung, but she escapes farther and farther. Finally he says, ‘All right, go. I’m staying here,’
and he withdraws into his thoughts, his own key. But then she goes after him.” Gay, flippant, tender, a little
sentimental, exuberantly playful, gracious, emotional, angry, nagging, loving—these are some of the
directions to the violinist in this scene of The Hero’s Companion.
The single violin is again absorbed into the orchestral mass and we hear love music, as lush as only Strauss
could make it. Briefly, the adversaries disturb the idyll, but their cackling is heard as though from a distance.
But the hero must go into battle to vanquish them. Trumpets summon him, introducing that immense canvas,
The Hero’s Battlefield. The hero returns in triumph, or, in musical terms, there is a recapitulation as clear and
as formal as the most ardent classicist could wish.
The music becomes more quiet and we have arrived at one of the most remarkable sections of the score, The
Hero’s Works of Peace. Alfred Orel recalled how Strauss, when accompanying song recitals, used to build
bridges from one song to the next by playing—almost inaudibly—passages from his operas, passages that
would turn out to be closely related to the song they prepared. Here Strauss weaves a texture both dense and
delicate as he combines music from Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, Tod und Verklärung, Don Quixote,
Macbeth, and the song “Traum durch die Dämmerung” (“Dreaming at Twilight”). Where Charles Ives
delighted in the stubborn unblendingness of his tissues of quotations, Strauss’s pleasure is to form all these
diverse materials into one coherent whole. The episode is one of Strauss’s orchestral miracles, richly blended,
yet a constantly astonishing, shifting kaleidoscopic play of luminescent textures and colors.
Even now, the adversaries are not silenced. The hero rages, but his passion gives way to renunciation (and this
is very unlike the real Richard Strauss indeed). The final section is called The Hero’s Escape From the World
and Fulfillment. The hero retires—to Switzerland, on the evidence of the English horn—and, after final
recollections of his battling and his loving self, the music subsides in profound serenity. This, in the original
version, was undisturbed through the pianissimo close with violins, timpani, and a single horn. Strauss’s friend
Rösch, so the story goes, protested: “Richard, another pianissimo ending! People won’t believe that you even
know how to end forte!!” So he called for pen and paper and...The dates and other details of that charming
story unfortunately don’t quite mesh; we do know, however, that Strauss did reconsider and that in the few
days between Christmas and the New Year he composed the present ending with its rich mystery and
fascinating ambiguity, an ending of marvelously individual sonority and one that at least touches fortissimo.
Michael Steinberg
was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after
that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published
three compilations of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and the great works for chorus
and orchestra.
THE FIRST AMERICAN PERFORMANCE of Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” took place on March 10, 1900,
with Theodore Thomas conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
THE FIRST BOSTON SYMPHONY PERFORMANCE of “Ein Heldenleben” was given by Wilhelm Gericke
on December 7, 1901, with a further performance in New York the following week. Later BSO performances
were conducted by Max Fiedler, Serge Koussevitzky, Thomas Beecham, Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch,
Erich Leinsdorf, Jean Martinon, Bernard Haitink, Eugene Ormandy, Seiji Ozawa, Andrew Davis, Michael
Tilson Thomas, Carl St. Clair, David Robertson, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (including the most recent
Tanglewood performance on July 11, 2010), and Stéphane Denève (the most recent subscription
performances, in October 2013).
MICHAEL STEINBERG
To Read and Hear More...
The article on Gunther Schuller in the 2001 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is by Richard
Dyer (with a works-list by Norbert Carnovale). The article in the 1980 Grove is by Austin Clarkson. Much
useful information can also be found on the website of Schuller’s publisher, G. Schirmer (schirmer.com).
Schuller himself is the author of several books, all of which are available in paperback from Oxford University
Press. Most useful from a standpoint of learning about his musical interests is the collection of essays entitled
Musings. His The Compleat Conductor is a thesis on the primacy of the composer’s intentions as revealed in
the score and a critique of conducting styles. He has written two volumes of jazz history: Early Jazz: Its Roots
and Development (winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 1969) and The Swing Era: The
Development of Jazz 1930-1945. The first volume of his memoirs, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of
Music and Beauty, was published in 2011 (University of Rochester Press).
Although it’s just scratching the surface given the number of works Schuller has written, there are quite a few
good recordings of his orchestral pieces available on CD. Among readily available recordings of Schuller’s
orchestral music are his An Arc Ascending, Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, Vertige d’Eros, and
Meditation with the composer conducting the Hannover Radio Philharmonic Orchestra (GM Recordings).
There is also his Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral work, Of Reminiscences and Reflections, on a disc with the
Concerto for Organ and The Past is the Present, all works from the early 1990s, with the North German Radio
Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer (New World Records). James Levine recorded Schuller’s
Spectra with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon, with music of Carter, Cage, and
Babbitt). Three of Schuller’s concertos—his Horn Concerto No. 1, Piano Concerto, and Bassoon Concerto—
are available on disc together (GM Recordings). BSO principal bass Edwin Barker is soloist in a recording,
released in early 2005, of Schuller’s Concerto for Double Bass with the composer conducting the Bostonbased Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra (GM Recordings, with works for double bass by Vanhal, Tom Johnson,
and Theodore Antoniou). The Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Gil Rose recorded Schuller’s Journey
into Jazz with jazz soloists including the composer’s sons Edwin and George (BMOP/sound).
Robert Kirzinger
The important modern biography of Mozart is Maynard Solomon’s Mozart: A Life (HarperPerennial
paperback). Peter Gay’s wonderfully readable Mozart is a concise, straightforward introduction to the
composer’s life, reputation, and artistry (Penguin paperback). John Rosselli’s The life of Mozart is one of the
compact composer biographies in the series “Musical Lives” (Cambridge paperback). Christoph Wolff’s
Mozart at the Gateway to his Fortune: Serving the Emperor, 1788-1791 takes a close look at the realities,
prospects, and interrupted promise of the composer’s final years (Norton). For further delving, there are
Stanley Sadie’s Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781 (Oxford); Volkmar Braunbehrens’s Mozart in Vienna,
1781-1791, which focuses on the composer’s final decade (HarperPerennial paperback); Julian Rushton’s
Mozart: His Life and Work, in the “Master Musicians” series (Oxford), and Robert Gutman’s Mozart: A
Cultural Biography (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Harvest paperback). Peter Clive’s Mozart and his Circle: A
Biographical Dictionary is a handy reference work with entries on virtually anyone you can think of who
figured in Mozart’s life (Yale University Press). The Mozart Compendium: A Guide to Mozart’s Life and
Music, edited by H.C. Robbins Landon, includes an entry by Robert Levin on the concertos (Schirmer). A
Guide to the Concerto, edited by Robert Layton, includes a chapter by Denis Matthews on “Mozart and the
Concerto” (Oxford paperback). Alfred Einstein’s Mozart: The Man, the Music is a classic older study (Oxford
paperback). Other older books still worth knowing are Cuthbert Girdlestone’s Mozart and his Piano
Concertos (Dover paperback) and Arthur Hutchings’s A Companion to Mozart’s Piano Concertos (Oxford
paperback). Michael Steinberg’s program note on Mozart’s B-flat piano concerto, K.595, is in his compilation
volume The Concerto–A Listener’s Guide (Oxford paperback).
Recordings of Mozart’s B-flat piano concerto, K.595, include—listed alphabetically by soloist, who also
doubles as conductor unless otherwise noted—Géza Anda’s with the Camerata Academica of the Salzburg
Mozarteum (Deutsche Grammophon), Daniel Barenboim’s with the English Chamber Orchestra (Warner
Classics), Alfred Brendel’s with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (Philips), Jen˝o
Jandó’s with András Ligeti and the Concentus Hungaricus (Naxos), Murray Perahia’s with the English
Chamber Orchestra (Sony), and Mitsuko Uchida’s with Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra
(Philips).
The biggest biography of Richard Strauss is still Norman Del Mar’s three-volume Richard Strauss, which
gives equal space to the composer’s life and music (Cornell University paperback); Ein Heldenleben receives
detailed consideration in Volume I. More recent books on Strauss include Tim Ashley’s Richard Strauss in the
well-illustrated series “20th-Century Composers” (Phaidon paperback); The life of Richard Strauss by Bryan
Gilliam, in the series “Musical lives” (Cambridge paperback); Raymond Holden’s Richard Strauss: A Musical
Life, which examines the composer’s life through detailed consideration of his work as a conductor (Yale
University Press), and Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge University Press) by Michael
Kennedy, who also wrote Richard Strauss in the “Master Musicians” series (Oxford paperback).
Andris Nelsons has recorded Ein Heldenleben with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Orfeo). The
Boston Symphony Orchestra recorded Ein Heldenleben in 1963 with Erich Leinsdorf conducting (RCA) and
in 1981 under Seiji Ozawa (Philips). Strauss himself recorded Ein Heldenleben in 1941 with the Bavarian
State Orchestra (reissued on Dutton) and in 1944 with the Vienna Philharmonic (reissued on Preiser). Other
recordings include Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s with the Rotterdam Philharmonic (BIS), Bernard Haitink’s live
with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO Resound), Fabio Luisi’s with the Dresden Staatskapelle, which
uses Strauss’s original ending (Sony), Mariss Jansons’s with the Royal Concergebouw Orchestra of
Amsterdam (RCO Live), and Fritz Reiner’s with the Chicago Symphony (RCA, virtually never out of the
catalogue). Of interest to collectors will be the historic accounts led by Clemens Krauss with the Vienna
Philharmonic (Testament), Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra (a powerful 1941 radio
broadcast, on Music & Arts), and Willem Mengelberg with the New York Philharmonic from 1928 (reissued
on Pearl, Opus Kura, and RCA) and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam from 1942 (Naxos
Historical).
Marc Mandel
Andris Nelsons
Andris Nelsons begins his tenure as the BSO’s Ray and Maria Stata Music Director with the 2014-15 season,
during which he leads the orchestra in ten programs at Symphony Hall, repeating three of them at New York’s
Carnegie Hall in April. Mr. Nelsons made his Boston Symphony debut in March 2011, conducting Mahler’s
Symphony No. 9 at Carnegie Hall. He made his Tanglewood debut in July 2012, leading both the BSO and the
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra as part of Tanglewood’s 75th Anniversary Gala (a concert subsequently
issued on DVD and Blu-ray, and televised nationwide on PBS), following that the next day with a BSO
program of Stravinsky and Brahms. His Symphony Hall and BSO subscription series debut followed in
January 2013, and at Tanglewood this past summer he led three concerts with the BSO, as well as a special
Tanglewood Gala featuring both the BSO and the TMC Orchestra. His appointment as the BSO’s music
director cements his reputation as one of the most renowned conductors on the international scene today, a
distinguished name on both the opera and concert podiums. He made his first appearances as the BSO’s music
director designate in October 2013 with a subscription program of Wagner, Mozart, and Brahms, and returned
to Symphony Hall in March 2014 for a concert performance of Strauss’s Salome. He is the fifteenth music
director in the history of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Maestro Nelsons has been critically acclaimed as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra since assuming that post in 2008; he remains at the helm of that orchestra until summer 2015. With
the CBSO he undertakes major tours worldwide, including regular appearances at such summer festivals as the
Lucerne Festival, BBC Proms, and Berlin Festival. Together they have toured the major European concert
halls, including Vienna’s Musikverein, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the Gasteig in Munich, and
Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional de Música. Mr. Nelsons made his debut in Japan on tour with the Vienna
Philharmonic and returned to tour Japan and the Far East with the CBSO in November 2013. Over the next
few seasons he will continue collaborations with the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Bavarian Radio
Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. He is a regular guest at the Royal Opera House–Covent
Garden, the Vienna State Opera, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. In summer 2014 he returned to the
Bayreuth Festival to conduct Lohengrin, in a production directed by Hans Neuenfels, which Mr. Nelsons
premiered at Bayreuth in 2010. Andris Nelsons and the CBSO continue their recording collaboration with
Orfeo International as they work toward releasing all of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral works and a majority of
works by Richard Strauss, including a particularly acclaimed account of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Most of
Mr. Nelsons’ recordings have been recognized with the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. In October
2011 he received the prestigious ECHO Klassik of the German Phono Academy in the category “Conductor of
the Year” for his CBSO recording of Stravinsky’s Firebird and Symphony of Psalms. For audiovisual
recordings, he has an exclusive agreement with Unitel GmbH, the most recent release being a Dvořák disc
entitled “From the New World” with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, released on DVD and Blu-ray
in June 2013. He is also the subject of a recent DVD from Orfeo, a documentary film entitled “Andris
Nelsons: Genius on Fire.”
Born in Riga in 1978 into a family of musicians, Andris Nelsons began his career as a trumpeter in the Latvian
National Opera Orchestra before studying conducting. He was principal conductor of Nordwestdeutsche
Philharmonie in Herford, Germany, from 2006 to 2009 and music director of Latvian National Opera from
2003 to 2007.
Guest Artist
Richard Goode
Richard Goode has been acknowledged worldwide as one of today’s leading interpreters of Classical and
Romantic music, acclaimed for regular performances with major orchestras, recitals in the world’s music
capitals, and an extensive discography. Recent appearances have included performances with the New York
Philharmonic under David Zinman, the Toronto Symphony and Peter Oundjian, the Chicago Symphony under
Mark Elder, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, also under Oundjian, and the Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin and Herbert Blomstedt, as well as a chamber music concert with members of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra. Recital highlights have taken him to Wigmore Hall, Piano aux Jacobins Toulouse, the
Aldeburgh Festival, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and major concert halls across the United States, including
Carnegie Hall. A native of New York, Mr. Goode studied with Nadia Reisenberg at the Mannes College of
Music and with Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute. His numerous prizes over the years include the Young
Concert Artists Award, first prize in the Clara Haskil Competition, the Avery Fisher Prize, and a Grammy
Award. His first public performance of the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas at New York’s 92nd Street Y
in 1987-88 garnered critical acclaim; he later performed the cycle with great success at London’s Queen
Elizabeth Hall in 1994 and 1995. Mr. Goode continues to perform across Europe and the United States. An
exclusive Nonesuch recording artist, he has made more than two dozen recordings, ranging from solo and
chamber works to Lieder and concertos. His 2009 recording of the five Beethoven concertos with Iván Fischer
and the Budapest Festival Orchestra was highly praised and was nominated for a Grammy award. His ten-CD
set of the complete Beethoven sonata cycle, the first ever by an American-born pianist, was nominated for a
Grammy and chosen for the Gramophone Good CD Guide. Other recording highlights include a series of
Bach partitas, a duo-recording with Dawn Upshaw, and Mozart piano concertos with the Orpheus Chamber
Orchestra. He and Mitsuko Uchida serve as co-artistic directors of the Marlboro Music School and Festival in
Marlboro, Vermont. Richard Goode is married to the violinist Marcia Weinfeld; when they are not on tour,
they and their collection of some 5,000 volumes live in New York City. Since his first BSO appearance as
concerto soloist in July 1991, Richard Goode has appeared many times with the Boston Symphony Orchestra
at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood, most recently for subscription performances of Mozart’s C major piano
concerto, K.503, in November 2011, followed that December by tour performances with the orchestra in San
Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Palm Desert, California. More recently, in January 2014, he appeared here with
members of the BSO in an all-Mozart concert as pianist in the composer’s Piano Quartet in E-flat, K.493.