Program Notes | Opening Weekend: Xian Conducts Scheherazade

Gabriela Ortiz
Born: December 20, 1964, in Mexico City, Mexico
Composed: 2021
World Premiere: January 14, 2022, in Los Angeles; Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Duration: 7 minutes
Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, bongos, claves, glockenspiel, jawbone, log drum, metal guïro, seed pod rattle, shakers, sistrum, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tam tam, tambourine, xylophone), harp and strings

“I fell in love with music once I understood that sounds have souls, and it is through them that one may speak of oneself.”

Thus reads the home page of Mexico City native Gabriela Ortiz’s website. An internationally educated musician, she studied at the Paris École Normale de Musique, London’s Guildhall School of Music and University of London. She serves on the faculty of the National School of Music at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City and has also taught at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. She has earned a bevy of composition awards in Mexico, including the Bellas Artes Gold Medal in 2022, the highest distinction granted by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts. In this country she was both a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow, and she has been nominated twice for Latin GRAMMYs.

Ortiz grew up immersed in Mexican folk music—both her parents were folk musicians—and her compositions are a melting pot that draws on elements of Latin, Afro-Cuban and contemporary styles as well as folk and popular music, including rock and jazz. She composed Kauyumari for the Los Angeles Philharmonic as the world began to emerge from the isolation of the pandemic. Her composer’s note explains her title and its relevance to the circumstances of the commission.

Among the Huichol people of Mexico, Kauyumari means “blue deer.” The blue deer represents a spiritual guide, one that is transformed through an extended pilgrimage into a hallucinogenic cactus called peyote. It allows the Huichol to communicate with their ancestors, do their bidding, and take on their role as guardians of the planet. Each year, these Native Mexicans embark on a symbolic journey to "hunt" the blue deer, making offerings in gratitude for having been granted access to the invisible world, through which they also are able to heal the wounds of the soul.

When I received the commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to compose a piece that would reflect on our return to the stage following the pandemic, I immediately thought of the blue deer and its power to enter the world of the intangible as akin to a celebration of the reopening of live music. Specifically, I thought of a Huichol melody sung by the De La Cruz family—dedicated to recording ancestral folklore—that I used for the final movement of my piece, Altar de Muertos (Altar of the Dead), commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet in 1997. I used this material within the orchestral context and elaborated on the construction and progressive development of the melody and its accompaniment in such a way that it would symbolize the blue deer. This in turn was transformed into an orchestral texture which gradually evolves into a complex rhythm pattern, to such a degree that the melody itself becomes unrecognizable (the imaginary effect of peyote and our awareness of the invisible realm), giving rise to a choral wind section while maintaining an incisive rhythmic accompaniment as a form of reassurance that the world will naturally follow its course.

While composing this piece, I noted once again how music has the power to grant us access to the intangible; healing our wounds and binding us to what can only be expressed through sound. Although life is filled with interruptions, Kauyumari is a comprehension and celebration of the fact that each of these rifts is also a new beginning.

Kauyumari pulsates with positive energy, making liberal use of an extensive percussion battery augmented by several folk instruments. The message is one of renaissance in the sense of rebirth: an apt embrace of the world we all rejoiced in rediscovering as the pandemic eased.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born: January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791, in Vienna, Austria
Composed: March–April 1784
World Premiere: Probably April 29, 1784 in Vienna at the Kärntnerthor Theater
Duration: 30 minutes
Instrumentation: flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, solo piano and strings

In a letter to his father Leopold dated June 9, 1784, Mozart wrote:

Tomorrow Herr Ployer, the agent, is giving a concert in the country at Döbling, where Fräulein Babette is playing her new concerto in G, and I am performing the quintet; we are then playing together the grand sonata for two claviers. I am fetching Paisiello in my carriage, as I want him to hear both my pupil and my compositions.

What a wonderful time this was for Mozart! His music was the height of fashion; he was sought after by the nobility and wealthy upper middle classes, and he enjoyed the respect of the finest musicians of the day, among whom the composer Giovanni Paisiello must certainly be counted. One would almost like to freeze this moment in Mozart's frantic life, when he was happy and thriving on a growing career.

Babette (Barbara) Ployer was the daughter of Gottfried Ignaz von Ployer, Archbishop Colloredo's agent in Salzburg. She was obviously quite gifted, for Mozart had also written for her the splendid and unusual Concerto No. 14 in E-flat Major (we know it as K. 449). If he played his brilliant two-piano sonata (in D Major, K. 448) with her at the concert, he clearly respected her musicianship and technique. She was one of the few students he taught of whom he thought highly enough to permit her to play his works in public with his blessing.

Babette benefited from Mozart's exceptional gifts during a year when virtually everything he produced was an immortal masterpiece. Both concertos written for her date from 1784; the autograph of K. 453 is dated March 22. Its companion pieces that year were five additional piano concertos, two sonatas, one string quartet and the fine E-flat quintet for piano and winds (K. 452) to which Mozart alludes in the letter quoted above; he considered that work to be the finest he had written to date.

The G-major concerto is primarily important because it is the first mature concerto to use variations rather than sonata/rondo for its finale; that technique would reach its culmination in the C-minor concerto, K. 491 two years later. But K. 453 has other, ineffable charms. Charles Rosen calls its opening movement “perhaps the most graceful and colorful of all Mozart's military allegros.” Arthur Hutchings describes the concerto as “one of those few in the series wherein each of the three movements reaches a supreme level of excellence.” He was right; there is no weak link among the three movements. Writing for Babette Ployer seems to have brought out the best in Mozart.

The concerto opens with a characteristic dotted rhythm melody in 4/4 time, a favorite pattern of Mozart's in his first movements. This one, however, is unsupported by trumpets or timpani. The march tune is belied by delicate commentary from flute, oboes and bassoons that establishes a mood more lyrical and intimate than martial. There is little here to connect it with the “military” concerti beyond its rhythm. Mozart's selection of G major as the home tonality reinforces a sense of innocence and joy. Grace and lyric beauty prevail in this lovely movement, where another perfectly delectable melody seems to be lurking around every corner. The second theme, a harmonically unstable melodic query that Mozart develops with magnificent chromatic skill, bears special attention, for it resurfaces in the slow movement, metamorphosed into the principal melody.

The first movement development section takes its cue from the second theme, stressing harmonic tension and adventurous wandering rather than technical bravura. This concerto's drama is of a more subtle nature than the others composed the same year.

The Andante opens with strings alone, then the winds enter in a lovely serenade-like passage. The solo piano entrance, in the tonic of C major, cedes almost immediately to a G minor outburst. Distinctly operatic, this passage foreshadows the wide melodic leaps so emotionally effective in the F-sharp minor slow movement of the A major concerto, K. 488. In the ensuing music, so far afield does Mozart travel that when he returns to the opening statement in C major, it sounds as if he is traveling to a foreign land. A brief episode in the distant key of E-flat does little to mitigate the sense of harmonic disorientation. Surely this is the type of movement that caused the 19th-century Romantics to claim Mozart as one of their own!

Mozart's finale is a splendid set of variations on a theme that brings a smile to one's face and presages the carefree music that Papageno sings in The Magic Flute. Mozart is said to have adapted a theme his pet starling sang, but for modern listeners the entire movement is imbued with the spirit of opera buffa. It's essential structure is theme and five variations, plus a finale marked Presto that provides an imposing conclusion. Reducing it to such analysis does it an injustice, for every segment of this delicious movement is touched with genius, and humor, and the kind of chromatic transitions that cause us to shake our heads in disbelief that so much imagination and magic could touch a single work.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Born: 1844 in Tikhvin, near Novgorod, Russia
Died: 1908 in Liubensk, near St. Petersburg, Russia
Composed: 1888
World Premiere: October 28, 1888, in St. Petersburg; the composer conducted.
Duration: 42 minutes
Instrumentation: three flutes (two doubling piccolo); two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones (third doubling bass trombone), tuba, timpani, percussion (snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine), harp and strings

The concept of Orientalism carried great sway in late 19th-century Russia. The land itself spanned thousands of miles from west to east, subsuming vastly different cultures within its boundaries. When he began work on Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov had recently completed his friend Alexander Borodin's unfinished opera, Prince Igor, whose music is heavily tinged with Eastern flavor. These same colorful and unusual harmonies associated with the Eastern world at the time exerted a strong influence on Rimsky-Korsakov's own symphonic suite.

In his memoirs, My Musical Life, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote of Scheherazade:

I had in view the creation of an orchestral suite in four movements, closely knit by the community of its themes and motives, yet presenting, as it were, a kaleidoscope of fairy-tale images and designs of Oriental character... All I desired was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders.

He placed a note at the head of his score recapitulating the story. Sultan Shakriar, convinced that all women are faithless, determines to put each of his wives to death after the first night. Clever Sultana Scheherazade saves herself one night after another by captivating her husband with different fairy tales and adventures. Driven by curiosity, the sultan repeatedly postpones her execution, eventually abandoning his bloodthirsty plan.

Curiously, in later life Rimsky-Korsakov spoke of aversion to an overly specific program for the suite. While he acknowledged that the solo violin represented the silken voice of the gifted Sultana as she related her stories, he held that his technique was a musical unifier, rather than a programmatic device. The composer wanted the story to act as a catalyst for each individual listener's imagination, rather than having us interpret the music as a literal illustration of the literary program.

Scheherazade was sketched in Petersburg in early 1888 and completed during the summer while Rimsky-Korsakov was on holiday in the country. It was approximately contemporary with his Russian Easter Overture, and the two works were premiered on the same concert that December. Along with his Capriccio Espagnol, Rimsky-Korsakov felt that Scheherazade and the overture:

...close[d] a period in my work, at the end of which my orchestration had attained a considerable degree of virtuosity and warm sonority without Wagnerian influence, limiting myself to the normally constituted orchestra used by Glinka.

Rimsky-Korsakov rightly regarded Scheherazade as the peak of his orchestration achievement, though not necessarily his finest musical achievement. Perhaps the greatest achievement of this suite is that the composer succeeded so completely in evoking the specific and unfamiliar of his subject without the use of unconventional instruments. It is a veritable festival for the orchestra. Colorful solos for nearly every instrument ingeniously weave together the different melodic lines that connect the music and evoke the magical spirit of the 1001 Arabian nights.

2024–25 will mark the GRAMMY and Emmy Award-winning conductor Xian Zhang’s ninth season as music director of the New Jersey Symphony. Starting in 2025–26, Zhang will also hold the role of music director at Seattle Symphony. Zhang holds the position of conductor emeritus of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, having previously held the position of music director between 2009–2016.

The 2024–25 season sees Zhang return to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to conduct David McVicar’s acclaimed production of Puccini’s Tosca.

Zhang is in high demand as a guest conductor, appearing regularly with Philadelphia Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic, returning to both in 2024–25. Her recording with Philadelphia Orchestra and Time for Three, Letters for The Future (released 2022 on Deutsche Grammophon), won multiple GRAMMY Awards in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition (Kevin Puts’ Contact) and Best Classical Instrumental Solo categories.

Following a successful collaboration at Tanglewood Festival 2023, Zhang returns to Boston Symphony Orchestra this season. She remains a favored guest of the Orchestra of St Luke’s and recently stepped in for their Brahms Requiem concert at Carnegie Hall. Other 2024–25 highlights include Montreal Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, NAC Orchestra, Belgian National Orchestra and Milan Symphony Orchestra.

Zhang continues to enjoy good relationships with many leading orchestras worldwide, including London Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, Houston Symphony, St Louis Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra DC and Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse.

Zhang previously served as principal guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales, the first female conductor to hold a titled role with a BBC orchestra. In 2002, she won first prize in the Maazel-Vilar Conductor's Competition. She was appointed New York Philharmonic’s assistant conductor in 2002, subsequently becoming their associate conductor and the first holder of the Arturo Toscanini Chair.

“One of the most admired pianists of his generation” (The New York Times), Inon Barnatan has received universal acclaim for his “uncommon sensitivity” (The New Yorker), “impeccable musicality and phrasing” (Le Figaro) and his stature as “a true poet of the keyboard: refined, searching, unfailingly communicative” (The Evening Standard).

As a soloist, Barnatan is a regular performer with many of the world’s foremost orchestras and conductors, and he was the inaugural Artist-in-Association of the New York Philharmonic. Equally at home as a curator and chamber musician, Barnatan is music director of La Jolla Music Society Summerfest in California, one of leading music festivals in the country, and he regularly collaborates with world-class partners such as Renée Fleming and Alisa Weilerstein. His passion for contemporary music has resulted in commissions and performances of many living composers, including premieres of new works by Thomas Adès, Andrew Norman and Matthias Pintscher, among others.

A recent addition to Barnatan’s acclaimed discography is a two-volume set of Beethoven’s complete piano concertos, recorded with Alan Gilbert and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields on Pentatone. In its review, BBC Music Magazine wrote “The central strength of this first installment of Inon Barnatan’s piano concertos cycle is that, time and again, it puts you in touch with that feeling of ongoing wonderment.”

Born in Tel Aviv in 1979, Inon Barnatan started playing the piano at the age of three, when his parents discovered his perfect pitch, and made his orchestral debut at eleven. He studied with some of the 20th century’s most illustrious pianists and teachers, including Professor Victor Derevianko, Christopher Elton and Maria Curcio, and the late Leon Fleisher was also an influential teacher and mentor.

For more information, visit inonbarnatan.com.