CONCERT PROGRAMME 2016/17 SEASON The Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) gave its inaugural performance at Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS (DFP) on 17 August 1998. The MPO today comprises musicians from 24 countries, including 7 from Malaysia, a remarkable example of harmony among different cultures and nationalities. A host of internationally-acclaimed musicians has worked with the MPO, including Lorin Maazel, Sir Neville Marriner, Yehudi Menuhin, Joshua Bell, Harry Connick Jr., José Carreras, Andrea Bocelli and Branford Marsalis, many of whom have praised the MPO for its fine musical qualities and vitality. With each new season, the MPO continues to present a varied programme of orchestral music drawn from over three centuries, as well as the crowd-pleasing concert series. Its versatility transcends genres, from classical masterpieces to film music, pop, jazz, contemporary and commissioned works. The MPO regularly performs at major cities of Malaysia. Internationally, it has showcased its virtuosity to audiences in Singapore (1999, 2001 and 2005), Korea (2001), Australia (2004), China (2006), Taiwan (2007), Japan (2001 and 2009) and Vietnam (2013). Its Education and Outreach Programme, ENCOUNTER, reaches beyond the concert platform to develop musical awareness, appreciation and skills through dedicated activities that include instrumental lessons, workshops and school concerts. ENCOUNTER also presents memorable events in such diverse venues as orphanages, hospitals, rehabilitation centres and community centres. The MPO’s commitment to furthering musical interest in the nation has been the creation of the Malaysian Philharmonic Youth Orchestra (MPYO). It gave its inaugural concert at DFP on 25 August 2007, followed by a tour in Peninsular Malaysia. It has performed in Sabah and Sarawak (2008), Singapore (2009), Brisbane, Australia (2012), Kedah (2013) and Johore Bahru (2014). As it celebrates its 18th anniversary in 2016, the MPO remains steadfast in its mission to share the depth, power and beauty of great music. The MPO’s main benefactor is PETRONAS and its patron is Tun Dr. Siti Hasmah Haji Mohd Ali. Fri 10 Feb 2017 at 8.30 pm Sat 11 Feb 2017 at 8.30 pm Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra Roberto Abbado, conductor PROGRAMME WAGNER Parsifal: Prelude to Act I Parsifal: Prelude to Act III & Good Friday Music 31 mins INTERVAL 20 mins BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique, Op.14 49 mins All details are correct at time of printing. Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS reserves the right to vary without notice the artists and/or repertoire as necessary. Copyright © 2016 by Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS (Co. No. 462692-X). All rights reserved. No part of this programme may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright owners. Roberto Abbado conductor Roberto Abbado, awarded the prestigious Premio Abbiati by the Italian Music Critics Association for his “accomplished interpretative maturity, the extent and the peculiarity of a repertoire where he has offered remarkable results through an intense season”, is Musical Director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia. He studied orchestra conducting under Franco Ferrara at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he was invited – the only student in the history of the Academy – to lead the Orchestra di Santa Cecilia. He has returned regularly to the orchestras of the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, as well as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra – of which he is one of the ‘Artistic Partners’ – working with soloists including Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Nigel Kennedy, Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, Vadim Repin, Sarah Chang, Yefim Bronfman, Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, Radu Lupu, André Watts, Andras Schiff and Lang Lang. He was Musical Director of the Münchner Rundfunkorchester from 1991 to 1998, completing seven recordings with the orchestra. He has worked with many ensembles, including Amsterdam’s Concertgebouworkest, the Wiener Symphoniker, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, Staatskapelle Dresden, Gewandhausorchester (Leipzig), NDR Sinfonieorchester (Hamburg), Orchestra di Santa Cecilia, Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Filarmonica della Scala. Renowned for his work in opera, Abbado has led many productions and world premieres at the leading opera houses throughout the world. A passionate interpreter of modern and contemporary music, he frequently programs works by 20th and 21st century composers including Luciano Berio, Giorgio Battistelli, Henry Dutilleux, Olivier Messiaen, Alfred Schnittke, Hans Werner Henze, Helmut Lachenmann, John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, Christopher Rouse and Steven Stucky. A prolific recording conductor, he has made recordings of operas, arias, concerts and symphonic music for BMG (RCA Red Seal), Decca, Deutsche Grammophon and Stradivarius including award-winning performances of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Rossini’s Tancredi. DVD releases include Fedora with Mirella Freni and Placido Domingo from the New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Recently, Abbado was on the podium of the Salzburg Festival for a concert performance of La Favorite, and has conducted Don Pasquale, Samson et Dalila and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Lucia di Lammermoor and Benvenuto Cellini at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera, Simon Boccanegra and a concert dedicated to Verdi and Wagner on a tour to Hong Kong with Turin’s Teatro Regio, and Norma at the Teatro Real in Madrid. PROGRAMME NOTES The two composers on this programme lived most of their lives concurrently (Berlioz was born a few years before Wagner; Wagner lived a little longer than Berlioz), yet they moved in totally different circles. Each prided himself on being a Frenchman or a German, and they spent little time in each others’ countries. But both were among the boldest, most innovative, most uncompromising composers in the history of music. Both in the passionate nature of their music and in their personal love lives, they were romantics to the core. The history of music would not have been the same without them. RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883) Parsifal: Prelude to Act I Parsifal: Prelude to Act III & Good Friday Music The Background Arthurian myths, Buddhist philosophy and Christian legends, plus a good dose of Wagner’s own contributions make up the strange conflation of source material that went into his last and in many ways most perplexing opera. Little overt action, many long discourses, a sense of quasi-religious devotion and a pervasive air of spirituality count among its prominent features. Wagner began thinking about an opera based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century epic Parzifal (an earlier spelling) as far back as 1845 but only in 1877 did he arrive at the final version of the scenario. The composition occupied him over the next four years, and the first performance took place at the Bayreuth Festival on 22 July 1882. It is a story of a man’s road to self-enlightenment and spiritual discovery, and although the opera is set in Moorish Spain in the Middle Ages, a sense of timelessness hovers over the work, for its message is relevant to all people in all times. The Music This sense of timelessness sets in with the first notes of the Prelude, which seem to rise up out of the mists. The sound hovers in the air; pulse, meter, tempo, rhythm, even the orchestral colours are undefined, blurred, uncertain. This slowly rising, then falling line is known as the Love Feast motif, which eventually dissolves into a chord that pulses and shimmers gently with a halo-like glow. An aura of mystery and magic surrounds the music, transporting the listener into another dimension. A pause, then the whole long paragraph is repeated in a new key with similar but subtly different orchestration. A soft brass chorale introduces the Grail motif (the “Dresden Amen” cadence), echoed by woodwinds. The Faith motif follows immediately, sounded three times by ever-richer combinations of woodwinds and brass. These, plus one more important motif, that of the Spear, are the fragments out of which Wagner plots the course of this fifteen-minute Prelude, one of the longest in all opera. The fascinating blends, alternations and juxtapositions of sound colours never cease, as Wagner slowly leads us through the beginning of a musical, emotional and spiritual journey deeply imbued with solemnity, poignancy, yearning and mystical beauty. Act III opens with some of the bleakest, most despondent and despairing music ever written. Since the end of Act II, years of frustration, suffering and wandering have taken their toll. Everyone is much older. The castle of Montsalvat has gone to ruin. Sacred rituals are neglected. Somewhat later in the act, Parsifal finds himself before a meadow filled with fragrant flowers on a radiantly beautiful spring morning. With quiet rapture he gazes over the scene, which seems to him to take on an aura of quiet ecstasy and magic. His companion Guernemanz explains that this is the spell cast by Good Friday, a day not of mourning as Parsifal believes, but of joy in rebirth, when the earth renews itself. As with the opera’s opening Prelude, Wagner’s miraculous orchestration is everywhere in evidence in music of ravishing sweetness and rich evocations of pastoral enchantment. It is small wonder that Debussy could call Parsifal “one of the most beautiful edifices in sound ever raised to the glory of music”. HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803-1869) Symphonie fantastique, Op.14 (1830/1832) I. Dreams, Passions: Largo - Allegro agitato e appassionato assai II. A Ball: Waltz: Allegro non troppo lII. Scene in the Country: Adagio IV. March to the Scaffold: Allegretto non troppo V. Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath: Larghetto - Allegro The Background The strongest and most direct influence on the composition of the Symphonie fantastique was a young Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, who appeared in Paris as Ophelia and Juliet in productions by a touring company from England. When Berlioz first saw her on stage on 11 September 1827, he was so overwhelmed and consumed with passion for her that he became like a man possessed. In a heroic gesture designed to attract her attention to his burning love, this most romantic of Romantics wrote his Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Artist to prove to her that he too was a dramatic artist. The performance took place on 5 December 1830, though Harriett apparently was unaware of the event. Two years later, Berlioz revised the symphony and created a long sequel, Lélio, or The Return to Life, preceded by an extended spoken monologue. He mounted a production of this triple bill, contriving through friends to have Harriet in attendance this time. This event took place on 9 December 1832. The ruse worked: Berlioz eventually met Harriet and married her a few months later, but it was not a happy union, and they separated after a decade. The most prominent autobiographical element of the score is the use of the idée fixe, a melody that recurs throughout each of the five movements in varying guises ̶ fervent, beatific, distant, restless, diabolical, etc., depending on the changing scene. This idée fixe (a term borrowed not from music but from the then-new science of psychology) actually operates on two levels, for it can also be regarded as a quasi-psychological fixation which possesses the music as it possesses the thoughts of the artist of the programme. The Music Here are some of Berlioz’s descriptive comments of each movement: I. A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. II. He meets his beloved again during the tumult of brilliant festivities. III. On a summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds piping back and forth to each other a ranz des vaches [traditional cow call played by Swiss shepherds]. This pastoral duet, the scenery, the quiet rustling of the trees gently stirred by the wind, some prospects of hope he has recently found – all combine to soothe his heart with unaccustomed calm. IV. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death, and is being led to execution. V. He sees himself at the sabbath, in the midst of a frightful troop of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, who have come together for his funeral. The beloved melody appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness: it is no more than a dance tune, base, trivial and grotesque; it is she, coming to join the sabbath. – A roar of joy at her arrival. – She takes part in the devilish orgy. – Funeral knell, burlesque parody of the Dies irae. Throughout the symphony, the listener is treated to a myriad of instrumental effects and tonal colours, including the otherworldly wisps of sound high in the violins in the slow introduction; the distant, plaintive oboe and English horn calls and the threatening thunderstorm heard on four differently-tuned timpani in the third movement; the terrifying brass and drum effects in the March; the grisly scrapings and twitterings in the introduction to the last movement, followed by the diabolical parody of the idée fixe in the high E flat clarinet accompanied by a galloping figure on four bassoons; and the Dies irae theme in the tubas, accompanied by deep bells. MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA PRINCIPAL CONDUCTOR vacant VIOLA Co-Principal Gábor Mokány PICCOLO Principal Sonia Croucher RESIDENT CONDUCTOR Harish Shankar Naohisa Furusawa Fumiko Dobrinov Ong Lin Kern Carol Pendlebury Sun Yuan Thian Aiwen Fan Ran *Akiko Kobayashi *Christoven Tan *Lim Chun *Jan Wea Yeo OBOE Section Principal Simon Emes Sub-Principals Niels Dittmann *Steinar Hannevold FIRST VIOLIN Co-Concertmaster Peter Daniš Principal Ming Goh Co-Principal Zhenzhen Liang Runa Baagöe Maho Daniš Miroslav Daniš Evgeny Kaplan Martijn Noomen Sherwin Thia Marcel Andriesii Tan Ka Ming *Alexandru Radu *Lynette Rayner *Rumen Lukanov *Pal Jász *Marco Roosink SECOND VIOLIN Section Principal Timothy Peters Co-Principal *Kirsty Hilton Assistant Principal Luisa Hyams Catalina Alvarez Chia-Nan Hung Anastasia Kiseleva Stefan Kocsis Ling Yunzhi Ionut Mazareanu Yanbo Zhao Ai Jin Robert Kopelman Petia Atanasova *Ikuko Takahashi *Mykola Koval CELLO Co-Principal Csaba Kőrös Assistant Principal Steven Retallick Sub-Principal Mátyás Major Gerald Davis Julie Dessureault Laurentiu Gherman Elizabeth Tan Suyin Sejla Simon *Erika Kadi *Yoёl Cantori DOUBLE BASS Section Principal Wolfgang Steike Co-Principal Joseph Pruessner Raffael Bietenhader Jun-Hee Chae Naohisa Furusawa John Kennedy Foo Yin Hong Andreas Dehner FLUTE Section Principal Hristo Dobrinov Co-Principal Yukako Yamamoto Sub-Principal Rachel Jenkyns COR ANGLAIS Principal *Michael Austin CLARINET Section Principal Gonzalo Esteban Co-Principal *Oliver Casanovas Sub-Principal Matthew Larsen BASS CLARINET Principal Chris Bosco BASSOON Section Principal Alexandar Lenkov Sub-Principals Orsolya Juhasz *Michiko Kobayashi CONTRABASSOON Principal Vladimir Stoyanov HORN Section Principals Grzegorz Curyla *Dmitry Babanov Co-Principal James Schumacher Sub-Principals Laurence Davies *Anton Schroeder Assistant Principal Sim Chee Ghee TRUMPET Section Principal *Gabriel Dias Co-Principal William Theis Sub-Principal *Jeffrey Missal Assistant Principal John Bourque TROMBONE Section Principal *Fernando Borja Co-Principals *Ricardo Mollá *Daniel Schwalbach BASS TROMBONE Principal Zachary Bond TUBA Section Principal Brett Stemple Sub-Principal *Hidehiro Fujita TIMPANI Section Principal Matthew Thomas Assistant Principal Matthew Kantorski PERCUSSION Section Principal Matthew Prendergast Sub-Principals *Joshua Vonderheide *Sabela Garcia *Kyle Ritenauer HARP Principal Tan Keng Hong Sub-Principal *Bryan Lee Note: Sectional string players are listed alphabetically and rotate within their sections. *Extra musician. Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Nor Raina Yeong Abdullah CEO’S OFFICE Hanis Abdul Halim BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT At Ziafrizani Chek Pa Fadzleen Fathy Nurartikah Ilyas Kartini Ratna Sari Ahmat Adam Nik Sara Hanis Mohd Sani MARKETING Yazmin Lim Abdullah Hisham Abdul Jalil Munshi Ariff Farah Diyana Ismail Noor Sarul Intan Salim CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT Asmahan Abdullah Jalwati Mohd Noor Music TALENT DEVELOPMENT & MANAGEMENT Soraya Mansor PLANNING, FINANCE & IT Mohd Hakimi Mohd Rosli Norhisham Abd Rahman Siti Nur Illyani Ahmad Fadzillah Nurfharah Farhana Hashimi PROCUREMENT & CONTRACT Logiswary Raman Norhaszilawati Zainudin HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT & ADMINISTRATION Sharhida Saad Muknoazlida Mukhadzim Zatil Ismah Azmi Nor Afidah Nordin Nik Nurul Nadia Nik Abdullah TECHNICAL OPERATIONS Firoz Khan Mohd Zamir Mohd Isa Yasheera Ishak Shahrul Rizal M Ali Dayan Erwan Maharal Zolkarnain Sarman Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Nor Raina Yeong Abdullah general manager Timothy Tsukamoto ORCHESTRA MANAGEMENT Amy Yu Mei Ling Tham Ying Hui ARTISTIC ADMINISTRATION Khor Chin Yang MUSIC LIBRARY Sharon Francis Lihan Ong Li-Huey EDUCATION & OUTREACH Shafrin Sabri Shireen Jasin Mokhtar MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC YOUTH ORCHESTRA Ahmad Muriz Che Rose Fadilah Kamal Francis Box Office: Ground Floor, Tower 2, PETRONAS Twin Towers Kuala Lumpur City Centre 50088 Kuala Lumpur Email: boxoffice@dfp.com.my Telephone: 603 - 2331 7007 Online Tickets & Info: mpo.com.my malaysianphilharmonicorchestra DEWAN FILHARMONIK PETRONAS – 462692-X MALAYSIAN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA – 463127-H
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