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Beethoven Symphony No. 5

October 27 @ 2:30 pm

A fateful quote from The Iliad inspired Beethoven, and the American composer Carlos Simon. Is it fate, “knocking at the door” that their works should be featured on the same program? Like Beethoven, Prokofiev composed five piano concertos. From its premiere in 1921 with the Chicago Symphony, Prokofiev’s Third Concerto has proven to be his most popular—a brilliant showcase of both the lyrical and the virtuosic gifts of the great pianist-composer.


Sundays at the Royal Series underwritten by Jill Gibson
Concert underwritten by Tim McGee, KC & Mary Mullens
David Danzmayr underwritten by Sandra Lackenbauer
Natasha Paremski underwritten by Peter & Sharon Jando

David Danzmayr, conductor

David Danzmayr is in his second season as Music Director of the Oregon Symphony, having started his tenure there in the orchestra´s 125th anniversary season. He also stands at the helm of the versatile ProMusica Chamber Orchestra Columbus.

In addition he holds the title of Honorary Conductor of the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra with whom he had served as Chief Conductor – leading the Zagreb musicians on several European tours with acclaimed concerts in the Salzburg Festival Hall, performing in the prestigious New Year´s concert, and the Vienna Musikverein.

David has won prizes at some of the world´s most prestigious conducting competitions including at the International Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition and the International Malko Conducting Competition. Additionally, he has been awarded the Bernhard Paumgartner Medal by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum.

Propelled into a far reaching international career, Danzmayr has quickly become a sought after guest conductor having worked, among others, with the symphonies of Cincinnati, Seattle, Baltimore, Houston Symphony, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Mozarteum Orchester and Radio Symphony Orchestras of Vienna and Stuttgart.

David was also strongly influenced by Pierre Boulez – who entrusted Danzmayr with the
preparatory rehearsals for his own music – and Claudio Abbado in his time as conducting fellow of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. Subsequently he gained significant experience as assistant to Neeme Järvi, Stephane Deneve, and Sir Andrew Davis.

 

Natasha Paremski, piano

With her consistently striking and dynamic performances, pianist Natasha Paremski reveals astounding virtuosity and voracious interpretive abilities. She continues to generate excitement from all corners as she wins over audiences with her musical sensibility and powerful, flawless virtuosity.

Natasha is a regular return guest of many major orchestras, including the, San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

In Europe, Natasha Paremski has toured extensively, appearing with such orchestras as the Bournemouth Symphony, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Tonhalle Orchester in Zurich, and the Moscow Philharmonic..

Natasha Paremski was awarded several prestigious prizes at a very young age, including the Gilmore Young Artists prize in 2006 at the age of eighteen.  In 2012 she recorded Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody with the Royal Philharmonic on the orchestra’s label distributed by Naxos.

Natasha began her piano studies at the age of four and then studied at San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at the Mannes College of Music.  from which she graduated.  At the age of fifteen she debuted with Los Angeles Philharmonic and recorded two discs with Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.

Natasha is based in New York where she is Artistic Director of the New York Piano Society, a non-profit organization that supports pianists whose professions lie outside of music.

BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 5

To defend Ludwig van Beethoven’s genius at this late date is not only unnecessary, but absurd. The work speaks for itself, as does its historical context and its enduring appeal. But certain biographical details can shed light on that work, and in contemplating the composer’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor it may be useful to know that Beethoven was essentially an autodidact. Having left school at the tender age of 11, he not only taught himself to write music at the highest level, he also honed his intellectual powers by reading widely. According to his friend and biographer Anton Schindler, in Beethoven’s library at the time of his death were copious quantities of music-related journals, scores, and theoretical tomes. There were also works of philosophy, theological tracts, groundbreaking reports on natural history, and complete editions of the great writers of his time and before.

Two particularly well thumbed volumes were the ancient Greek bard Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In the early part of the 20th century, the German musicologist Arnold Schering advanced a radical theory: The subject of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, also known as the “Sinfonia Eroica”, he argued, was not its original dedicatee, Napoleon I, but the Homeric hero Hector, whose exploits form the Iliad’s core. With assiduous research—and the occasional imaginative leap—Schering demonstrated that Beethoven’s musical themes and structures were at odds with events in the French emperor’s life. However, they could be overlaid perfectly on the Iliad’s timeline, especially if one considered that Hector’s wife Andromache, left behind in Troy with the couple’s young son, inspired the Sinfonia Eroica’s more melancholic passages.

Beethoven “extracted certain scenes from the poem, transubstantiated them into music, and with them designed the first three movements of the symphony,” Schering argued. His view has its detractors today, but it is compelling enough that his view of Beethoven as “a spiritual child of German idealism” for whom “classical antiquity was a second homeland”, is worth considering when examining his oeuvre as a whole.

In the case of the Symphony No. 5, dubbed the “Fate Symphony”, Homeric concepts are especially applicable. In the blind poet’s Greece, death in battle led to posthumous fame, and while a long and quiet life had immediate rewards, its end would be the end; there would be no eternal glory for cautious souls. Need we ask which path Beethoven chose? His battle was aesthetic, not martial, but in both musical and historical terms, he achieved his goals, and it’s fitting that the best known passage in his entire output—the four-note motif that introduces the Symphony No. 5—is emblematic of Fate itself.

The African-American composer Carlos Simon has made it clear that he was thinking explicitly of Beethoven’s Homeric idealism when he composed Fate Now Conquers, which the Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin premiered in 2020. More specifically, Simon was inspired by a journal entry from 1815, in which Beethoven quoted from the Iliad: “Fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share In my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit/And that some great deed shall beget that all lives shall inherit.” This seems a clear indication that Beethoven was acutely conscious of posterity—and the fact that 21st-century composers are still reading his notebooks and quoting his music reinforces the clarity of his resolve.

Fate Now Conquers, a brief, enigmatic, and luminous fanfare, is loosely based on a particularly shimmering passage from the Beethoven canon. “Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony,” Simon explains, “I have composed musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate. Jolting stabs [and] frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of free-flowing running passages depict the uncertainty of life that hovers over us.”

Fate and heroism take on markedly different roles in Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major. Here, the heroism is primarily pianistic; the composer, who premiered it himself with the Chicago Symphony in 1921, described the soloist’s part as “devilishly difficult”. That is impossible to deny, in part because of its passages of almost mechanical arpeggiation taken at an absolutely breakneck pace.

In this concerto, we also encounter Prokofiev’s personal notion of Fate, as shaped by both his experience of the Russian revolution and his interest in new forms of music as espoused by American jazz musicians and Italy’s Futurist ideologues. Whereas the ancient Greeks considered it possible to haggle with Fate, albeit using one’s own death as a bargaining chip, Prokofiev expresses it as an implacable force, as resistant to entreaty as some vast machine.

Perhaps all one can do in the face of such impossible odds is try one’s best—and that Prokofiev did, producing music of such enduring appeal that it may yet prove as immortal as Beethoven’s.

Notes by Alex Varty

Carlos Simon (1986— )
Fate now Conquers

Sergei Prokofiev (1891—1953)
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26
I. Andante – Allegro
II. Andantino
III. Allegro ma non troppo

INTERMISSION

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770—1827)
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante con moto
III. Allegro
IV. Allegro

PROKOFIEV: Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83, mvt. 3: Precipitato
Performed by Natasha Paremski

Details

Date:
October 27
Time:
starts at 2:30 pm
Event Category:

Organizer

Victoria Symphony

Venue

Royal Theatre
805 Broughton St + Google Map
Phone
250.386.6121

Concert Programme

  • Carlos Simon
    Fate Now Conquers
  • Prokofiev
    Piano Concerto No. 3
  • Beethoven
    Symphony No. 5

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