National Symphony Orchestra: Brahms’ Fourth Symphony & Tania León’s Pasajes & Camille Thomas Plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto
Thursday Nov 2, 7 p.m.; Friday Nov.3, 11:30 a.m.; Saturday, Nov. 4, 8 p.m.
Kennedy Center Concert Hall
Wow! What a full program! Guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno leads the National Symphony Orchestra in a program featuring Brahms’ Fourth Symphony and Elgar’s Cello Concerto with soloist Camille Thomas. On top of that, we’ll hear a new co-commission by 2022 Kennedy Center Honoree Tania León.
Let’s unpack this a little. Spanish conductor Gustavo Gimeno is the music director with Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He is also music director designate for Teatro Real.
Franco-Belgian cellist Camille Thomas makes her debut with the NSO. She plays the famous ‘Feuermann” Stradivarius 1730 on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation and is the first cellist signed by the Deutsche Grammophon record label in over 40 years. A true believer in the healing power of music, Camille recorded a series of solo performances in empty Paris museums during the Covid lockdown and posted them on the internet. “I wanted to symbolize with these images the loneliness of musicians without the public, of museums without visitors,” she said. As we inch closer to Veterans’ Day on November 11, it’s appropriate to remember that Elgar’s Cello concerto, his last full-scale work, dates from 1919 and the aftermath of World War I and reflects a sober outlook on humanity. The concerto did not become popular until the 1960’s when Jacqueline Du Pré made it her own.
“Each piece is a fresh idea...it’s like going to a museum and looking at a canvas that you have seen before. This is a new way of painting; like Picasso or Monet, but with a new palette.” That’s how Kennedy Center Honoree Tania León explains her piece Pasajes, or Passages. Here’s what the Arkansas Democrat Gazette heard in it: “Distant but happy childhood memories, bits of birdsong, rhythms of her native Cuba, and what she accurately describes as a ‘bombastic ending that shows what I have become as a musician’, oh, and a timpani cadenza to kick off that finale, a tour de force for the timpanist.” The Washington Post claimed that “[Tania León] the Kennedy Center Honoree has been an unstoppable force in expanding the possibilities of what American ‘classical’ music can—and ought to—sound like.”
Brahms’ last symphony, the fourth, is a work of such grandeur that Leonard Bernstein, in one of his recorded talks, spent 45 minutes describing the first movement alone. No worries, we’re not going to do that here. Suffice it to say that as the young Richard Strauss commented (he’d been helping conductor Hans von Bülow to prepare the score for performance) “It’s hard to put into words all the magnificent things this work contains, you can only listen to it over and over again with reverence and admiration.” The symphony is endlessly inventive, with a finale in which Brahms creates magic from a short passage from Bach’s Cantata No.150.
Program
Gustavo Gimeno, conductor
Camille Thomas, cello
National Symphony Orchestra
Tania León: Pasajes
Edward Elgar: Concerto in E minor for Cello and Orchestra, op.85
Johannes Brahms: Symphony No.4 in E minor, Op.98
The Kennedy Center Chamber Players: Fall Concert
Composed of titled musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra, this acclaimed ensemble presents classics from three centuries of chamber music.
Sunday, Nov. 5 at 2 p.m.
Terrace Theater
Ricardo Cyncynates, violin
Marissa Regni, violin
Peiming Lin, violin
Daniel Foster, viola
Rebecca Epperson, viola
Jennifer Mondie, viola
David Hardy, cello
Mark Evans, cello
Paul Cigan, clarinet
Robert Rearden, horn
Erin Dowrey, percussion
Lambert Orkis, piano
The program begins and ends with a Quintet.
Mozart’s String Quintet No.1 in B flat major, K.174 opens the concert. It was composed in 1773 when Mozart was 17 and had recently returned to Salzburg from his Italian travels.
The young American composer Nathaniel Heyder wrote Ahead of Time in memory of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was killed by police. “Certainly no string quartet is going to save the world or stop bad things from happening,” says Heyder, “but there’s something about the Kennedy Center and an organization of this magnitude [The Cartography Project*} deciding to focus on this. My main attempt in writing this piece was not to try to capture the severity of that moment, the tragedy...I want something positive to be associated with the name Tamir Rice. I saw a little bit of myself in him.”
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) filled her short life of 24 years with a remarkable amount of music. Three works for violin and piano are featured on this program: Nocturne, Cortège and D’un matin de printemps.
The concert ends as it began--with a quintet...Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op.44
This exuberant work was sketched in just a few days in 1842, Schumann’s so-called “Year of chamber music”. He dedicated the piece to his wife Clara whom he had married two years earlier. She performed it often, and called it “splendid, full of vigor and freshness.”
Schumann was the first major German composer to compose a work for piano and string quartet. He probably found powerful inspiration in the fact that his wife was a celebrated pianist!
*The Cartography Project is a new curatorial music program. Led by the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera, and one of the five pillars of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact work, The Cartography Project is a multi-year commissioning project engaging artists from around the nation to map Black dignity.
Program:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: String Quintet in B flat major, K.174
Nathaniel Heyder: Ahead of Time
Lili Boulanger: Nocturne, Cortege and D’un matin de printemps for violin and piano
Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op.44
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