≈ 2 hours · With intermission
Last updated: February 11, 2020
In L’Éloignement, I can feel a strong sense of homesickness. The combination of Western classical music techniques with Chinese folk tunes is unique, and can only be found in pieces by Chinese composers who lived abroad. I chose this piece because I felt connected to it. When you leave your home for a long time, you miss it and want to return.
This is the first time the NAC Orchestra has played Qigang Chen’s L’Éloignement.
For the NAC Orchestra’s first interpretation of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, given in 1974, Vladimir Ashkenazy led the ensemble from the piano. The Orchestra gave their most recent performance of this concerto in 2017, with Carlo Rizzi conducting and Charles Richard-Hamelin playing the solo part.
The NAC Orchestra played Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony for the first time in 1969, under the direction of Mario Bernardi, and most recently in 2013, with Pinchas Zukerman conducting.
Repertoire
L’éloignement
Born in Shanghai, August 28, 1951
Now living in Paris
Chinese-born Qigang Chen was just beginning music lessons when the Cultural Revolution descended upon his country. His father, a calligrapher, painter, and an administrator in the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts, was sent to a labour camp. The boy was kept in confinement and put through ideological re-education. But Qigang was lucky. He was just old enough to become a member of that famous “class of 1978,” named for the year conservatories reopened in China. Chen won one of just 26 spots from among two thousand applicants who passed the entry exams for the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. He remained at the Conservatory for five years, then, in 1984, moved to Paris to study privately for four years with Messiaen, who took on Chen as his last student after leaving the Conservatoire. Messiaen spoke highly of his only pupil during these years: “Endowed with exceptional intelligence, and an excellent internal ‘ear,’ he has very quickly assimilated European music and all contemporary music.… His compositions display real inventiveness, very great talent and a total assimilation of Chinese thinking to European musical concepts.”
In 1989, Chen received his Diplome de Musicologie at the University of Paris-IV Sorbonne. Awards and public recognition soon followed. In 1990, he was chosen “Musician of the Year” by the Chinese press, in 1992 he was awarded the Nadia and Lili Boulanger grant, and in 2000 the Grand Prize of the City of Paris. Commissions began pouring in, many of them from French sources. Charles Dutoit became one of his champions, and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal commissioned from Chen Un Temps disparu, which was to have had its world premiere in April 2002, an event unfortunately cancelled when Dutoit left the orchestra. Chen’s reputation received a further boost when the film (followed soon after by the ballet) Raise the Red Lantern became an international hit. Chen was invited to become music director for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. He has been a French citizen since 1992. In 2013, the French government conferred on him the decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His violin concerto, La joie de la souffrance, was premiered at the 2017 Beijing Music Festival with Maxim Vengerov as soloist.
L’Éloignement, Chen’s 15-minute work for 34 strings, was composed on commission from the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, which gave the first performance at Shanghai’s International Arts Festival in 2003.
The composer writes:
“There is a Chinese proverb that says when a man is uprooted, he gains vital force. If he remains stationary, he cannot flourish. Renewal of his surroundings brings new opportunities; whatever changes there may be, large or small, are always experienced like a great rebirth.
Still, while this brings hope and excitement, change also means separation from the immediate environment, and from family and friends. It is this sense of distancing, or estrangement, that is described in the peasant song from northwest China, “Zou Xi Kou” (Going beyond the western gorges). A love-song upon the departure of a beloved one, plaintive and nostalgic, its melody is used in L’Éloignement because it retains a basic simplicity and because it gives the composer the possibility to express therein his own estrangement.
Laid out as a rondo with variations, L’Éloignement depicts separation, disorder, imagination, and yearning. The music is both happy and sad, nostalgic and exciting, all of which account for the conflicting moods of the departing one.”
– Program note by Robert Markow
Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major
Born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756
Died in Vienna, December 5, 1791
This concerto, one of the two or three most popular of all Mozart’s piano concertos, represents just one of the 12 he wrote in Vienna during the brief period of 1784 to 1786. The artistic inspiration, consummate grace, structural perfection and technical mastery of the A-major Concerto are beyond dispute, and contribute to making it one of the most beloved of Mozart’s 23 works in this genre. (The first four are merely adaptations of movements by other composers.)
This concerto also represents the summation of the perfect blending of soloist and orchestra, not as competitors, but as partners playing together (conserere, rather than concertare) in the original spirit of concerto writing. Hence, the sharply defined dualism of solo and tutti is softened, with the two forces sharing musical material, co-operating and working simultaneously much of the time. Louis Biancolli summarizes this historical achievement as follows: “Of equal weight and variety, the piano and orchestra exchange musings, merge, supplement one another, and from time to time clash only to renew ties in a fuller synthesis of mutual enrichment. The piano has moved toward a closer intimacy and teamwork with the orchestra, bringing richer fusions but also more profound tensions.”
The melodic riches of this concerto are profuse, even by Mozartian standards. The first movement contains at least four significant melodic strains, while up to ten have been identified in the finale. The work opens with one of Mozart’s most gracious and heavenly serene themes, sung first by the strings, then echoed by the seven wind instruments (flute, pairs of clarinets, bassoons and horns) that contribute so much to the concerto’s euphony. A tutti passage with a sturdy rhythmic pattern ensues, followed by another theme of gently lyric quality, unusual length and great beauty. The addition of bassoon and flute to this line is just one of countless felicities of orchestration to be found in the concerto. Another vigorously rhythmic tutti brings the orchestral exposition to a close. The soloist now enters and shortly afterwards begins the dialogue of soloist and orchestra in multifarious facets.
The second movement is one of the most ravishing slow movements Mozart ever composed. Biancolli’s poignant description stands as just one of many inspired utterances about this movement: “An indefinable sorrow, hopeless yet exquisite, clutches the heart.… Mozart would seem to have unlocked new areas of spiritual stress for which only an anguished resignation was the answer.” The truly special quality of this movement is underscored by its tonality of F-sharp minor, an extremely rare key in the 18th century, and quite possibly the sole instance where Mozart used this key.
The veiled colours and dark mood of the Adagio are dispelled instantly with the opening gesture of the effervescent rondo-finale. To musicologist Alfred Einstein, this “seems to introduce a breath of fresh air and ray of sunlight into a dark and musty room,” and to program annotator Edward Downes, “the high spirits of the finale are like a sudden release from prison.” A steady succession of new themes in alternation with already familiar material provides an almost perpetual motion machine of melodic freshness right to the final bars.
– Program note by Robert Markow
Symphony No. 41 in C major, “Jupiter”
Born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756
Died in Vienna, December 5, 1791
Mozart’s valedictory effort as a symphonist has, in its 200-plus years of existence, never been out of favour. It represents the supreme height of symphonic craftsmanship welded to artistic inspiration, inviting the most eloquent praise and poetic expression from those who experience its beauties and perfection. It was composed, along with Symphonies Nos. 39 and 40, during a six-week period in the summer of 1788.
Mozart did not assign the nickname “Jupiter” (it came years after his death from the impresario Salomon, Haydn’s London sponsor), but it seems absolutely appropriate for music that evokes images of Olympian pomp, nobility, grandeur and perfect mastery of construction. Klaus G. Roy sees in this music a “classic divinity… Nowhere else in his entire output does Mozart convey so directly the atmosphere of mastery, imperiousness, even omnipotence. There is a sense of total command over the materials chosen… it is in this music that he defeated the cruel, thoughtless world in which he lived; he celebrated a conquest in the spiritual sphere that has proved over the centuries to have been decisive. It was, in this medium, the final thunderbolt of the chief of the musical gods.”
The first movement contains three distinct themes, each a perfectly balanced entity in itself. The first consists of a brusque, imperious call to attention followed by a graceful, lilting figure. The second also reveals within itself contrasts and balances: of ascending and descending scale-like fragments, of strings alone and then combined with woodwind coloration, as well as being an overall contrast to the first theme. The third theme has a mischievous and capricious quality to it. Mozart borrowed this closing theme from a comic aria he had written for bass just months before, “Un bacio di mano,” K. 541, written as an additional number for an opera by Pasquale Anfossi.
In the second movement, Mozart turns from the proud, extroverted mood of the opening movement to one of profound expression, pensive eloquence and restrained elegance. The first theme is one of the longest he ever wrote. The use of muted violins throughout lends a shadowy, introverted character to the music. Trumpets and timpani are silent.
The dignified Menuetto, like the first movement, combines contrasts of loud and soft, graceful and imperious, smoothly lyrical and sharply detached in music of exquisitely balanced form. Other features of this movement include a greater degree of chromatic writing than normally found in minuets of the time, and the only instance in a Mozart minuet of separate parts for cellos and basses. In the Trio section Mozart engages in some Haydnesque humour, beginning with a classical cadential figure that sounds more like an ending than a beginning.
The final movement opens with a four-note motif. Several new themes and motifs are presented as well in the course of this sonata-form movement. Mozart builds everything into an effortlessly flowing web of counterpoint involving a veritable catalogue of devices: double and triple counterpoint, thematic inversion, canon, stretto, augmentation and diminution, all fashioned into a dazzling display of tonal architecture. The Olympian coda simultaneously combines all five thematic ideas into an incredible contrapuntal tour de force.
– Program note by Robert Markow
Artists
Xian Zhang is currently in her sixth season as Music Director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Since taking up this position, she has commissioned works from such composers as Thomas Adès, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Qigang Chen, Christopher Rouse, Vivian Li, Gary Morgan, Christian McBride, and Paquito D’Rivera. She is responsible for introducing an annual Lunar New Year Celebration concert to the orchestra and will remain at the helm of the orchestra through and beyond their 100th anniversary in 2022.
The acclaim she has been receiving for her work in New Jersey has resulted in a strong North American career, with upcoming engagements which include returns to San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia, Detroit New World, Minnesota, Montreal, NAC Ottawa, and Toronto Symphony orchestras. Lauded by Steven Smith in The New York Times as a “virtual-concert jet-setter”, she has been championing works by Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Tyshawn Sorey, and William Grant Still.
Xian Zhang holds the positions of Principal Guest Conductor of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Conductor Emeritus of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, following a hugely successful period from 2009–2016 as Music Director. She has previously served as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales and was the first female conductor to hold a titled role with a BBC orchestra. In 2002, she won first prize in the Maazel-Vilar Conductor's Competition. She was appointed New York Philharmonic’s Assistant Conductor in 2002, subsequently becoming their Associate Conductor and the first holder of the Arturo Toscanini Chair.
Since its debut in 1969, the National Arts Centre Orchestra has been praised for the passion and clarity of its performances, its visionary educational programs, and its prominent role in nurturing Canadian creativity. Under the leadership of Music Director Alexander Shelley, the Orchestra performs a full series of subscription concerts at the National Arts Centre each season, featuring world-class artists such as James Ehnes, Angela Hewitt, Joshua Bell, Xian Zhang, Gabriela Montero, Stewart Goodyear, Jan Lisiecki, and Principal Guest Conductor John Storgårds.
Alexander Shelley began his tenure as Music Director in 2015, following Pinchas Zukerman’s 16 seasons at the helm. Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and former Chief Conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra (2009 - 2017), he has been in demand around the world, conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic, DSO Berlin, Leipzig Gewandhaus, and Stockholm Philharmonic, among others, and maintains a regular relationship with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and the German National Youth Orchestra.
National and international tours have been a hallmark of the National Arts Centre Orchestra from the very beginning. The Orchestra has toured 95 times since its inauguration in 1969, visiting 120 cities in Canada, as well as 20 countries and 138 cities internationally. In recent years, the orchestra has undertaken performance and education tours across Canada, as well as the U.K. and China. In 2019, the Orchestra marked its 50th anniversary with a seven-city European tour that included performances and education events in England, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, and that showcased the work of six Canadian composers.
The NAC Orchestra has recorded many of the more than 80 new works commissioned since its inception, for radio and on over 40 commercial recordings. These include Angela Hewitt’s 2015 JUNO Award-winning album of Mozart Piano Concertos; the groundbreaking Life Reflected, which includes My Name is Amanda Todd by Jocelyn Morlock, winner of the 2018 JUNO for Classical Composition of the Year; and from the 2019 JUNO nominated New Worlds, Ana Sokolović’s Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes, 2019 JUNO Winner for Classical Composition of the Year.
The NAC Orchestra reaches a national and international audience through touring, recordings, and extensive educational outreach. The Orchestra performed on Parliament Hill for the 2019 Canada Day noon concert in a live broadcast for CBC Television.
