TMSO Concert in Odawara

This concert is over. Date: Mon. 13. November 2023 18:30 (17:30)

Venue: Odawara Sannomaru Hall Venue Info

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Artists

John AXELROD, Conductor
Alexandra CONUNOVA, Violin

Profile

John AXELROD (Conductor)

John Axelrod was formerly Music Director and Chief Conductor of Luzerner Sinfonieorchester and Luzerner Theater, Music Director of Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and Royal Seville Symphony, and Principal Conductor of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi. Currently he serves as Principal Conductor of Bucharest Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of City of Kyoto Symphony. Axelrod has appeared with orchestras including Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Orchestre de Paris, London Philharmonic, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Danish National Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Chicago Symphony.

Alexandra CONUNOVA (Violin)

First Prize at the Joseph Joachim Violin Competition in Hannover in 2012, and prizewinner at the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and at the Singapore International Violin Competition, Alexandra Conunova has been hailed by her virtuosity, warm tone, impressive range of color, and flawless technique. In 2016 she also received the prestigious Fellowship by the Borletti-Buittoni Trust in London.
Recent highlights include engagements with the NDR Radiophilharmonie, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Musikkollegium Winterthur, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Paris Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Mariinsky Orchestra, Russian National Orchestra, NFOR, Orchestra Teatro Regio Torino, among others. She frequently performs under the batons of maestros Theodor Currentzis, Mikhail Pletnev, Gabor Takacs-Nagy, Lawrence Foster and Gianandrea Noseda, among others.
Conunova is regularly invited to the most prestigious festivals, such as Verbier, Gstaad, Montreux, Septembre Musical, Aix-en-Provence, Folle Journée, Besançon, Martha Argerich Festival, Ferrara Musica, Accademia Santa Cecilia…and collaborates as chamber music partner with Martha Argerich, Renaud Capuçon, Gauthier Capuçon, Denis Kozhukhin, Michail Lifits, Andreas Ottensamer, Gérard Caussé, Boris Brovtsyn and Jean Rondeau, among others.

Program

Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Music（2002）

Program Notes
Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D minor, op.47

Program Notes
Shostakovich: Symphony No.5 in D minor, op.47

Program Notes

Silvestrov: Stille Musik (Silent Music) (2002)

Ⅰ Walzer des Augenblicks (Waltz of Moment)
Ⅱ Abendserenade (Evening Serenade)
Ⅲ Augenblicke der Serenade (Moments of the Serenade)

Valentin Silvestrov: Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, September 30, 1937; now living in Berlin

What do Sergei Prokofiev, Karol Szymanowski, Igor Markevitch, and Reingold Glière have in common? They were all composers born in Ukraine but left soon after for other lands. Silvestrov too was born in Ukraine, but he stayed. He would be there still if the Russians hadnʼt invaded his country last year (he now lives in Berlin). As such, he stands at the age of 86 as Ukraineʼs best-known living composer. In 1995 he won the Shevchenko National Prize, his countryʼs highest award for an artist.
Silvestrov was born during the period of the Soviet governmentʼs most oppressive stance against artists. He refused to conform to Party dictates, and as a result his music was slow in attracting international attention. Fortunately, that situation has changed. His catalogue includes nine symphonies composed across the span of more than half a century (1963 to 2019) as well as many works for piano and for various chamber ensembles.
Much of Silvestrovʼs music reflects the unhappy artistic environment in which he lived.
His catalogue is filled with titles like Requiem, Hymn, Lacrimosa, Meditation, Prayer, and Epitaph. Elegy is one of his favorite genres. Much of his recent music has a reposed, consoling, spiritual quality to it. Critic Robert Carl described him as “a connoisseur of nostalgia but not of sentimentality.” Such is the eleven-minute Silent Music, one of Silvestrovʼs most frequently performed works. To Carl, it “positively drips with fin de siècle world-weariness.” Silent Music was composed in 2002 as a present for Manfred Eicher, founder of the ECM label, which has recorded many of Silvestrovʼs works, including Silent Music. The world premiere took place in two stages: the first movement on September 18, 2002; the second and third on October 3, 2003. For both events, Valeri Matjuchin conducted the Kyjivska Kamerata in Kyiv.
The three short movements are played without pause. Each explores a single melodic idea in a musical landscape aching with melancholy and deep intimacy, often suggesting smiling through the tears. The performance directions dolce (sweetly) and dolcissimo (very sweetly) occur frequently, mutes are often in use, and the overall dynamic level is subdued. There is a single forte in the opening bar; thereafter we find only shades of piano, from pianississimo (ppp) to mezzo-piano (mp).

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D minor, op.47

Ⅰ Allegro moderato
Ⅱ Adagio di molto
Ⅲ Allegro ma non tanto

Jean Sibelius: Born in Hämeenlinna (Tavastehus), Finland, December 8, 1865; died in Järvenpää (near Helsinki), September 20, 1957

In 1902, the German violinist Willy Burmester asked Sibelius to write him a concerto. When Sibelius sent him the piano reduction of the first two movements in September of 1903, Burmester was enthusiastic and suggested the premiere be given in Berlin in March of 1904. But Sibelius had other ideas. Due to strained financial circumstances, he wanted the concerto performed as soon as possible, and secretly asked another violinist to give the premiere in Helsinki at an earlier date. What Sibelius got in the end was a far inferior soloist (a local teacher named Viktor Nováček, who never did learn the concerto properly), a cool reception at the premiere (February 8, 1904), mostly negative reviews in the press, and the justifiable resentment of Burmester.
Following the premiere, the concerto was put aside for over a year until Sibelius got around to revising it. He toned down some of the overtly virtuosic passages, tightened the structure of the outer movements and altered the orchestration of numerous passages. The revisions amount to far more than mere window dressing, and the results are fascinating to compare with the original.
On October 19, 1905, the concerto received its premiere in the final form in Berlin, with Karl Halir as soloist and none other than Richard Strauss on the podium. Shortly afterwards, Sibeliusʼ friend Rosa Newmarch told him that “in fifty yearsʼ time, your concerto will be as much a classic as those of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.” How right she was!
Sibeliusʼ affinity for the violin stemmed from his youth, when he aspired to become a great violinist. “My tragedy,” he wrote, “was that I wanted to be a celebrated violinist at any price. From the age of fifteen, I played my violin for ten years, practicing from morning to night. I hated pen and ink. … My preference for the violin lasted quite long, and it was a very painful awakening when I had to admit that I had begun my training for the exacting career of an eminent performer too late.” His very first composition (Vattendroppar), written at the age of eight or nine, was a piece for violin and cello. Although he left just one violin concerto, he also composed numerous short pieces for the instrument, mostly with piano.
The solo part is one of the most difficult in the entire repertory. Virtuosic passages abound, but they are welded to disciplined musical thought; there is no empty display material here. The orchestral writing bears much evidence of Sibeliusʼ deep interest in this medium, and serves a far greater purpose than a mere backdrop for the soloist. Dark, somber colors predominate, as is this composerʼs tendency, lending an air of passionate urgency to the music. Note particularly the third theme in B-flat minor in the first movement, played by the unison violins, or the second theme of the Finale, again played by the violins, with its interplay of 6/8 and 3/4 meters.
Attention to the formalities of sonata form is largely avoided in favor of originality of thought. In the first movement, there is no development section as such; instead, each of the three main themes is fully elaborated and developed upon initial presentation. A cadenza occurs at the point where a full development would normally stand, followed by a recapitulation of the three themes, each of which is subjected to further expansion. In the Adagio movement, Sibelius contrasts the long, dreamy and reflective opening theme with a turbulent and darkly passionate section in the minor mode. The finale, in rondo form, calls to the fore the full technical prowess of the soloist. Energetic rhythms suggestive of the polonaise and gypsy dances offer further elements of excitement to this exuberant movement.

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

Shostakovich: Symphony No.5 in D minor, op.47

Ⅰ Moderato
Ⅱ Allegretto
Ⅲ Largo
Ⅳ Allegro non troppo

Dmitri Shostakovich: Born in St. Petersburg, September 25, 1906; died in Moscow, August 9, 1975

Many of the works we today hail as masterpieces suffered difficult birth pangs. But Shostakovichʼs Fifth Symphony sprang into the world fully accepted. In this case, there is a double irony, for the composer managed to please two entirely different, in fact, diametrically opposed, ideological fronts simultaneously, right from the symphonyʼs premiere on November 21, 1937 in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg again): 1) Soviet officialdom, which was demanding from Shostakovich music free of “formalistic perversion,” that is, music easily intelligible to the Soviet masses; 2) those who believed in the mandate for a creative artist to produce only according to the dictates of his esthetic impulses and personal convictions.
Shostakovich subtitled his symphony “A Soviet Artistʼs Reply to Just Criticism” as a palliative to the heavy-handed government critics who had mercilessly railed at his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and other works. Further for the benefit of Soviet officialdom, Shostakovich claimed that the symphony had as its theme “the making of a man. … The finale is the optimistic solution of the tragically tense moments of the first movement.”
Government officials swallowed the hypocrisy. The composerʼs true feelings were revealed to the public, at least in the West, only years later: “I never thought about any exultant finales, for what exultation could there be? The rejoicing is forced, created under threat.” Occupying a middle ground between the forces of the exhilarated and the bitter we might simply take the traditional romantic view of a big symphony as a generalized portrayal of conflict and struggle leading to triumph, as seen in such works as the Fifth Symphonies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler.
Needless to say, one is free to accept or reject any or all of these interpretations, and to listen to the symphony only as an abstract configuration of purely musical components.
The work abounds in extended but easily recognizable and memorable themes that lend themselves to fragmentation and development. There are passages of haunting beauty (the closing pages of the first movement especially, described by one writer as “strange spatial loneliness”); pressing intensity (the inexorable build-up to the climax of the third movement); mordant wit (the cumbersome, grotesquely ponderous effect of the opening of the second movement, set off by squealy high woodwinds a moment later); strident militarism (the sardonic march in the first movement or the principal theme of the finale); and an almost unlimited number of imaginative and inventive orchestral effects: fanfares, extremes of range (the finaleʼs coda begins with horns in unison playing the lowest note but one in the entire repertory for that instrument), prominent use of piano and celesta, wide leaps with mischievous effects, unexpected contrasts of high/low and loud/soft, and chamber-music delicacy contrasted with massive tuttis.
Regardless then of the ideological, philosophical, or musical preconceptions and attitudes one brings to bear on Shostakovichʼs Fifth Symphony, the music has shown itself capable of both absorbing and transcending them all, and in so doing, has secured for itself a secure niche in the pantheon of the worldʼs greatest and most popular symphonies.

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

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