Proud supporter of the Nashville Symphony. BEN FOLDS’ PIANO CONCERTO

CLASSICAL SERIES
CL A SS I C A L
Thursday, March 13, at 7 p.m.
Friday & Saturday, March 14 & 15, at 8 p.m.
S E R I ES
BEN FOLDS’
PIANO CONCERTO
Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor
Ben Folds, piano
RICHARD WAGNER
Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
BÉLA BARTÓK
Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19
INTERMISSION
GIAOCHINO ROSSINI
Overture to Guillaume Tell [William Tell]
BEN FOLDS
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
I. = 77
II. = 110
III. = 184
Ben Folds, piano
World premiere performances
Commissioned by Nashville Symphony,
Nashville Ballet and Minnesota Orchestra
Concert Sponsors
Media Partner
Official Partners
InConcert
15
RICHARD WAGNER
CL A SS I C A L
S E R I ES
Species, which was published the same year that
Wagner completed his score, Tristan is a work that
has shifted paradigms.
Wagner’s original plan for Tristan as a mere
“distraction” from his monumental efforts on the
four-opera Ring cycle didn’t last long. He began
infusing this ancient Celtic legend of doomed love
with philosophical ruminations on desire and
suffering. Ultimately, he created a radical musical
language that stretched traditional harmony to
the breaking point in order to convey the torment
of desire. The score proved to be so novel and
challenging that it took another six years before
Wagner could get the opera produced, and to cap
this drama of Tristan’s creation, the original tenor
star died after only four performances.
W H AT TO L I ST E N FO R
Born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Germany;
died on February 13, 1883 in Venice, Italy
Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und
Isolde
Composed: 1857-59
First performance: Wagner first conducted
the Prelude on January 25, 1860, as part of a
concert series devoted to his music in Paris.
He also prepared a concert version linking the
Prelude with the final minutes of the opera
(the “Liebestod”), which he conducted in
concert in 1863, two years before the opera’s
world premiere.
First Nashville Symphony performance:
November 23, 1948, with Music Director
William Strickland
Estimated length: 18 minutes
C
an you think of another artist who has been
so consistently controversial? Even 200 years
after his birth, Richard Wagner continues to be
a lightning rod. Yet quite a few music lovers who
have little use for Wagner in general have found
themselves unable to resist Tristan und Isolde.
Even those who remain immune to its appeal
have to acknowledge the incalculable impact of
this work on the history of music. Its profound
influence has also been felt in poetry, painting, the
theater and film. Like Darwin’s On the Origin of
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M A RC H 2 0 1 4
Instead of an overture that sets a mood or
simply extracts some of the more interesting tunes
to come, this Prelude distills the essence of the
entire opera. It can be heard as a compact tone
poem exploring the full implications of desire in a
world where it can never be fulfilled. That desire,
already within them, is awakened and externalized
in both Tristan and Isolde when they drink a love
potion they believe to be poison — the intended
means of fulfilling their implicit suicide pact at the
climax of the first act.
The two simplest directions for a melody —
ascending and descending — shape the two motifs
we hear at the outset from cellos and oboe. The
harmony produced at the crossing point where
the first ends and the second begins is a landmark
in music history and a microcosm of the entire
opera. Its ambiguity intensifies our need to hear
it “resolve” on a clear harmony, but Wagner
denies that desire. After a few more frustrated
repetitions of this sequence, a widely spanning
melody emerges in the cellos. This element and
the stepwise motifs already introduced provide
the central material for the rest of the Prelude.
Wagner sustains an unprecedented level of
tension. The silences only intensify the sense
of unresolved longing as the music surges and
billows relentlessly in a long-range crescendo
toward its shattering climax. Yet even this feels
unresolved, and the Prelude back-steps into the
music of the opening, now in the lower depths —
the music of desire unfulfilled.
of deliriously lush, swelling waves that crest
in an oceanic climax — the very climax that
was interrupted at the height of their duet and
postponed to this moment. As it subsides, the
motif of desire from the start of the Prelude
finally resolves on a pure, luminous chord that
seems to stretch into infinity.
BÉ L A BA RTÓ K
Born on March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós in
the Habsburg Empire (now Sânnicolau Mare,
Romania); died on September 26, 1945, in New
York City
Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin
Composed: 1918-19, with orchestration
completed in 1924; Bartók made further
revisions until 1931, and in 1927 he arranged a
concert suite consisting of about two-thirds of
the full score.
First performance: The complete pantomimeballet was first performed on November 27,
1926, in Cologne, Germany. Ernst von Dohnányi
led the Budapest Philharmonic in the premiere
of the concert suite on October 15, 1928.
First Nashville Symphony performance:
January 20-21, 1995, with Music Director
Kenneth Schermerhorn
Estimated length: 20 minutes
B
éla Bartók replaced Romanticism’s idealizing
tendencies toward folklore with an attitude
much more in keeping with the new discipline of
ethnomusicology. His work in this field shaped
the development of his own composition. Folk
sources didn’t supply a mere addition to his
palette of sound colors but offered him a way to
rethink the very basics of musical language. They
gave him an impetus to imagine how melody,
harmony and rhythm could be recharged with a
new sense of expressive purpose.
Ultimately, Bartók’s research into the local
folk musics of Eastern Europe inspired him to
forge a freer language and an alternative to the
either/or dilemma of tonality versus atonality —
a dilemma toward which Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde had substantially paved the way. Bartók
explored a language of aggressive rhythms and
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S E R I ES
The Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes,
English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons,
4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass tuba,
timpani, harp and strings.
CL A SS I C A L
In concert performances, the Prelude is
often followed by the music Isolde sings in the
opera’s final minutes, when she arrives too late
to heal the mortally wounded Tristan. Isolde’s
song (performed here by the orchestra alone)
has become known as the Liebestod (“LoveDeath”), although Wagner called Isolde’s farewell
a “transfiguration.” In her “transfigured” state,
Isolde sees the dead Tristan in a kind of ecstatic
hallucination.
Wagner recapitulates the incandescent final
section of their love music from the second
act. But he rephrases it into serene patterns
CL A SS I C A L
S E R I ES
startling orchestral colors in such works as The
Miraculous Mandarin. Before he wrote this piece,
he had already revealed a singularly powerful
dramatic gift in his chilling one-act opera
Bluebeard’s Castle and the “ballet-pantomime” The
Wooden Prince. The latter’s successful premiere
in Budapest in 1917 marked the composer’s first
real public breakthrough, though resistance to
Bartók’s work (often for political as much as
aesthetic reasons) would remain the norm for the
rest of his career in Europe.
In fact, it’s conceivable that Bartók would
have given us more works for the stage if
he hadn’t had his fill of frustration with the
collaborations involved. The last straw may have
been the scandal sparked by the premiere of
The Miraculous Mandarin in Cologne in 1926.
Musically, Bartók’s tonal adventurousness and
eerie sound effects outraged some in the audience,
but the scandal itself was triggered by the lurid,
near pornographic nature of the scenario, as
some of his contemporaries deemed it. The
mayor of Cologne even had the new work banned
following its scandalous first performance.
The Miraculous Mandarin’s libretto was
written by Menyhért Lengyel, a Hungarian
Expressionist author who eventually emigrated to
America and became a Hollywood screenwriter.
Cinematic impulses are already discernible in
the narrative style of this ballet. Here, as with the
preceding The Wooden Prince, Bartók used the
term “pantomime” because dance per se is used
only sparingly as a narrative device; most of the
story is conveyed through mime.
Set in a seedy urban neighborhood, The
Miraculous Mandarin is a kind of Freudian
allegory of desire. The story involves three thugs
who use a girl to lure unsuspecting victims to
their run-down apartment, where they can be
beaten and robbed. Dancing seductively in the
window, the girl attracts her first two victims: a
shabby old fellow and a shy young student. The
third potential victim to appear is a mysterious,
automaton-like Mandarin, a wealthy Chinese
man. (Despite the work’s avant-garde qualities,
Lengyel relied on an ugly stereotype of Asians.) A
spooky creature with a fixed stare, the Mandarin
chases the girl about the room, so the thugs
intervene and rob him. They then try to murder
the Mandarin by suffocation, stabbing and
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M A RC H 2 0 1 4
hanging, but he remains freakishly unharmed.
Finally the girl embraces him, and the Mandarin
begins to bleed and dies.
W H AT TO L I ST E N FO R
Even without staging, the music is so graphic
that it encourages us to envision the story. Bartók
achieves this through imaginative exploitation
of all his orchestral resources, including special
effects such as flutter-tonguing and unusual
tunings. At the end of the complete ballet score
— the part he excluded from the Suite — Bartók
introduces one of the most disturbing choral
passages ever written. It’s simply a bit of wordless
texture for a scene in which the “resurrected”
Mandarin, having survived the thugs’ attempt to
hang him, starts glowing with a “green-blue” light.
The Miraculous Mandarin also consolidates
a language of vivid harmonic colors and savagely
aggressive rhythms that Bartók had learned from
the Stravinsky of The Rite of Spring and from
the brilliant Technicolor orchestration of the
tone poems of Richard Strauss. But the sound
world he constructs is different from theirs and
recognizably his own.
The vivid rush of the opening music
immediately establishes the decadent urban
scene. In the brass, Bartók evokes the rude chaos
of traffic. Sinuous clarinet solos accompany each
of the girl’s seductive “decoy” dances. Sliding
trombones signal the appearance of a penniless
old man, and a young student lured into the
apartment is characterized by a timid oboe and
English horn. Each of the thugs’ attacks on the
unsuspecting johns conjures music of knife-edged
violence.
A simple, folk-like theme in the brass
announces the arrival of the Mandarin, just after
the third and most elaborate “decoy music” from
the clarinet. A mood of suspenseful eroticism
is established (listen for the ironic slant on the
waltz) as the girl dances for the Mandarin.
Furious chasing music in the strings swirls
outward to draw in the rest of the orchestra.
Bartók’s use of texture effectively depicts the
intensity of the Mandarin’s passion and his
suddenly aroused desire. Bartók wrote a brief
ending to conclude the concert suite at this point.
In the complete Miraculous Mandarin, the thugs
try to do in the protagonist, but he revives each
time and tries to grab the girl. Only when she
finally gives in to his embrace does the Mandarin
expire in a grotesque, spasmodic “love-death.”
GIOACCHINO ROSSINI
S E R I ES
Born on February 29, 1792, in Pesaro, Italy; died
on November 13, 1868, in Paris
Overture to William Tell
Composed: 1828
First performance: The complete Guillaume
Tell was premiered at the Paris Opera on
August 3, 1829.
First Nashville Symphony performance:
December 11, 1952, with Music Director Guy
Taylor in a pops concert at Vanderbilt’s
Memorial Gym
Estimated length: 12 minutes
I
f you associate Gioacchino Rossini with comedy
alone (The Barber of Seville), William Tell will
open your ears to the versatility of this composer’s
genius. Rossini was only in his late 30s when he
wrote this epic swan song. Afterwards he retired
from the Hollywood-like rat race that was the
nineteenth-century opera industry. William Tell
adapts Friedrich Schiller’s play from 1804 about a
legendary Swiss patriot from the early fourteenth
century. Tell rouses his fellow peasants to resist
the tyranny of their imperial Austrian overlords.
W H AT TO LISTE N F OR
Rossini lavished unusual attention on his
Overture to William Tell. Instead of the usual
single movement, or slow introduction and fast
main section, this is an ambitious four-part
piece that anticipates the later Romantic genre
of the tone poem. Each section corresponds to
a dramatic moment in the opera, and the first
three sections depict different aspects of the allimportant Swiss landscape. Overall, the Overture
provides a thrilling workout for the entire
orchestra, each section showcasing different
sections of the ensemble.
Rossini begins with a striking effect: five
solo cellos blended together — eventually joined
by the other low strings — to evoke the sunrise.
The pace quickens and suggestive three-note
“raindrops” are heard in the woodwinds before
all hell breaks loose in a furious storm, which is
conveyed through downward sliding half-notes
set against a pattern in the opposite direction
from the trombones. The third section reverts
to the idyllic and reflective mood of the first, but
with different colors. The English horn imitates
the Swiss alphorn, standing in for a mountain
herdsman calling to his flock; a flute joins in
dialogue with the English horn.
Suddenly, in the distance, a rousing trumpet
call, echoed by the horns, sets the pace for the
heroic final section. This earworm music has been
repurposed countless times by popular culture
but never as effectively as in its original context,
where it brings the Overture to a pulse-raising
conclusion.
The Overture is scored for piccolo, flute, 2 oboes,
English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns,
2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, bass drum,
cymbals triangle and strings.
InConcert
CL A SS I C A L
The Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin is scored
for 2 flutes and piccolo (doubling 3rd flute), 3
oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets, bass
clarinet, 3 bassoons and contrabassoon (doubling
4th bassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones,
tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp, piano,
organ and strings. 19
BEN FOLDS
CL A SS I C A L
S E R I ES
Born on September 12, 1966, in WinstonSalem, North Carolina, and currently resides in
Nashville
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Composed: 2013-14
First performance: With these performances,
the Nashville Symphony is giving the world
premiere of Ben Folds’ new concerto.
Estimated length: 25 minutes
T
here’s a neat symmetry to the ambitious project
Ben Folds recently decided to undertake with
his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. The classical
prototype for the piano concerto as a form — the
source that has served as a model for composers
right up to the present — was created by artists
who doubled as performers and composers: Mozart
and, in his immediate wake, Beethoven. They were
celebrity pianists among their own contemporaries
and wrote concertos for themselves to “star” in. An
acclaimed and popular singer-songwriter, performer
and record producer, Folds has also achieved fame
for his distinctive and thrillingly unorthodox
keyboard style.
“It can seem like it doesn’t really make any
sense: to move from a four-minute pop song
to a 25-minute concerto,” Folds remarks with a
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M A RC H 2 0 1 4
trademark note of self-deprecating humor.
“But I’ve always been fascinated with the long
form. I once had the idea of making one of
my albums a single 45-minute piece. That
got me a lot of free lunches: free because the
record company, the producer and my own
bandmates kept taking me out to lunch to talk
me out of it, which they did. But now I’m fired
up by the experience and want to write more
pieces along these lines.”
Folds’ Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
was also created with the Nashville Ballet in
mind. This May brings the world premiere
of the Ben Folds Project with the Nashville
Symphony, which will feature choreography
by Paul Vasterling set to Folds’s concerto.
“The dare and the deadline came first,” Folds
recalls, explaining just how he managed to
psych himself into the mindset he needed to
begin this daunting effort.
He immersed himself in the rich
repertory of classical, romantic and early
modern piano concertos for a solid year. “I
wanted to see where these composers’ heads
were at when they wrote their concertos,
compared with when they wrote a symphony
or a string quartet or another kind of piece.
I’ve never felt so close to dead people
before. What I don’t want to be is a tourist,
but a humble, self-invited guest into their
world. And that meant a lot of listening and
reflecting on what went into these things.”
Folds points out that the greatness of
classic composers like Mozart and Beethoven
is obviously intimidating. But this look-overyour-shoulder phenomenon is familiar to pop
songwriters, too: “It’s similar to people who
say, ‘OK, we’ve had the Beatles, now what?’ It
can seem things are so well done that there
isn’t anything else left for me. But you can’t
think like that.”
It was reassuring to discover that the
composers whose piano concertos “really
perked me up” wrote with a harmonic
sensibility that felt entirely familiar from his
own work as a songwriter. Folds mentions
the composer-performers Ravel, Prokofiev,
Rachmaninoff, Gershwin and Bartók.
On the big scale, Folds follows the everreliable concerto format of fast movement/slow,
lyrical movement/butt-kicking finale. And he
knows how essential it is to make a big impact
with the first movement, which he kicks off with
a brief orchestral introduction before the solo
part jumps in with a deep rumble in the bass.
“There’s a fantasy aspect to the first movement,
where I imagined what it would be like if I did
these flourishes that I’ve never thought about
doing at the piano.”
Folds describes the collage-like process
that informs the first movement: “We’re in the
age of post-Lady Gaga and sampling. The first
movement is all about that. It’s overtly and
proudly derivative, but never for more than
10 seconds at a time.” His approach was to
synthesize many of the inspirations he found
In addition to solo piano, the Concerto is scored for
piccolo (doubling flute), 2 flutes (1 doubling bass
and alto flute), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets,
bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3
trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
celesta, harp and strings.
— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s
program annotator, is a writer and translator who
covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs
at memeteria.com.
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21
S E R I ES
W H AT TO LISTE N F OR
while immersing himself in the great piano
concertos of the past. “It’s essentially built on the
excitement of that and on the things that I can do
on the piano that other people don’t seem to be
able to do.”
Against a backdrop of tuned percussion and
sustained, shimmering harmonies in the strings,
the second movement occupies the emotional
space equivalent to the “big song” on an album —
i.e., the song whose melody is lovingly allowed to
unspool and develop. Folds refers to the inspiring
examples of the waltz-like slow movement of
Ravel’s Concerto in G and Beethoven’s “Holy
Song of Thanksgiving” from the String Quartet
No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, which, he says, “has
been my church for the last year.” Deceptively
simple, this movement proved especially hard to
write, since there’s no “show-off ” factor to lean
on. Folds grinningly refers to it as the “Concerto
for One Finger” movement.
After the slow movement dies out, the
Concerto hurtles forward into the final
movement, which is introduced by a section
Folds likens to Van Halen. The overall feel, he
suggests, is similar to a scherzo movement, but
it’s not just playfulness he conjures: “The third
movement goes nuts — it’s insanity!” Folds also
draws comparison to the famously terse poem
Muhammad Ali once improvised: “Me/We!”
There’s still another aspect to playing “in
concert” with the symphony that Folds believes
listeners today can treasure: “We see so much
emphasis on what’s divisive, how things are
unable to work together. What a difference it
makes when you see people working in concert
with this incredible musical tool that has
hundreds of years of wisdom behind it.”
CL A SS I C A L
“Harmonically, this era exists in my music
anyway.”
And inviting himself into their world,
Folds began to realize, didn’t have to mean
abandoning his own. In fact, in his student days
Folds had serious training as a percussionist — a
background that has left its mark on his largely
self-taught piano style. He jokes that parts of the
score look like they were written as a “Concerto
for the Left-Handed Drummer.”
Folds was also able to use the knowledge
he’s acquired from years of playing with
orchestras, but he acknowledges that he had
some valuable assistance: “I turned to Joachim
Horsely of the film scoring world to help with
the orchestration. It’s always been very important
to me to be the arranger of what I write — it’s
part of the composition. But orchestration is a
craft beyond arrangement of the notes. Joachim
assured me that even Prokofiev had an
orchestrator. Hell, if we had left the orchestration
to me, it might have hospitalized the French horn
section. There’s also an art to making what you
arrange actually speak. Joachim taught me a lot
as we orchestrated this together. It’s not my style
to drop off melodies, as most pop artists do, and
run. In quite a few places, compositionally, the
piano was the last consideration, which is how I
often arrange for a rock band.”
ABOUT THE SOLOIST
CL A SS I C A L
S E R I ES
BEN FOLDS, piano
Ben Folds first found mainstream success as
the leader of the critically acclaimed, platinumselling Ben Folds Five. He has gone on to have
a very successful solo career, recording multiple
studio albums, a pair of records documenting
his renowned live performances, a remix record
and music for film and TV, as well as numerous
collaborations with artists from Sara Bareilles to
William Shatner. In 2012, Folds reunited with the
Ben Folds Five and released a new album, The
Sound of the Life of the Mind. The band toured the
world in early 2013 and released their first live
album, Ben Folds Five LIVE, a few months later.
Folds, who serves as a member of the Board
of Directors of the Nashville Symphony, will
perform his Piano Concerto throughout in 2014
as a part of a global symphonic tour. He has also
enjoyed a special relationship with symphony
musicians, having performed with some of the
world’s greatest orchestras.
Folds has also achieved critical acclaim
for his insight as a judge on NBC’s a cappella
competition The Sing-Off, which returned to
the air in 2013. A Nashville resident, he owns
and operates the historic RCA Studio A, where
legends of all genres of music — from Elvis
Presley to the Monkees, Eddy Arnold to Dolly
Parton, Tony Bennett to the Beach Boys — have
recorded. A member of the distinguished Artist
Committee for Americans for the Arts, Folds is
also an outspoken advocate for music therapy and
music education.