Program Information

Artist Bios

JACQUES LACOMBE conductor

ALESSIO BAX piano

LUCILLE CHUNG piano

Program Notes

Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 7:30 pm | Community Theatre in Morristown

Friday, May 21, 2010 at 7:30 pm | Patriots Theatre at the War Memorial in Trenton

Saturday, May 22, 2010 at 8 pm | Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank

Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 3 pm | bergenPAC in Englewood

NEW JERSEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

JACQUES LACOMBE conductor

LUCILLE CHUNG piano

ALESSIO BAX piano

LISZT Mephisto Waltz No. 1

MOZART Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466

Romance (Second Movement)

LUCILLE CHUNG piano

CHOPIN Variations on “Là chi darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Op. 2

Alla Polacca (Fifth Variation)
ALESSIO BAX piano

BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No. 8, Op. 13, “Pathétique” 

Adagio cantabile (Second Movement)

ALESSIO BAX piano

RAVEL Le Tombeau de Couperin

Rigaudon (Fourth Movement)

SCHUMANN Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54

Allegro vivace (Third Movement)

LUCILLE CHUNG piano

MUSSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition

“The Old Castle”
“The Tuileries Gardens”

PROKOFIEV Summer Day, Op. 65

Waltz

"Tip and Run"

RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18

Allegro scherzando (Third Movement)

ALESSIO BAX piano

From the beginning of his career, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designate Jacques Lacombe has been highly praised as a remarkable conductor whose artistic integrity and rapport with orchestras have propelled him to international stature.

Lacombe began the 2009–10 season with his debut with the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, leading an all-star cast of Tosca. He led Ariadne auf Naxos for his debut with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He leads Turandot and Les Contes d’Hoffmann for Opéra de Monte-Carlo and Der fliegende Holländer, Eugene Onegin and concert performances of Waltershausen’s rarely heard Oberst Chabert at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Lacombe appears with the Edmonton and Québec Symphony Orchestras this season. Lacombe is also Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Orchestre Symphonique de Trois-Rivières in Quebec.

Career highlights include his relationship with the Montreal Symphony. As Principal Guest Conductor from 2002 to 2006, he led the orchestra in more than 75 performances, including programs from the central European classics to the French and Russian literature, as well as several world premieres. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting Werther and returned for Die Fledermaus. Lacombe has led Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande and Zemlinsky’s Der Traumgörge with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, as well as the world premiere of Vladimir Cosma’s Fanny et Marius. He served for three years as music director of both orchestra and opera with the Philharmonie de Lorraine in France.

Lacombe has conducted the symphony orchestras of Toronto, Vancouver and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, as well as European orchestras including those of Toulouse, Halle, Liege and Avignon. He has led the Slovakia Philharmonic, Budapest Symphony and Royal Flemish Philharmonic. He has recorded for the Analekta label and has been broadcast on PBS, the CBC, Arte TV in France and on Hungarian Radio-Television.

Born in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, Lacombe received his musical training at the Conservatoire de Musique Montréal and at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna.

To learn more about Jacques Lacombe, click here.

Winner of the 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant, ALESSIO BAX also took first prize at the Leeds and Hamamatsu competitions. His extensive concerto repertoire has led to appearances with more than 80 orchestras, including the London Philharmonic and Dallas and Tokyo Symphonies. Festival appearances include London’s International Piano Series, the Switzerland’s Verbier Festival, England’s Aldeburgh and Bath festivals and the Ruhr Klavierfestival. He has given recitals in Rome, Milan, Madrid, Paris, London, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, New York, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. Gramophone magazine selected his 2004 recording for Warner Classics, “Baroque Reflections,” as “Editor’s Choice.” Other recordings on various labels include the complete works for two pianos and piano-for-four-hands of György Ligeti (with Lucille Chung) and Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. Signum Records released Bax’s latest recording, “Bach Transcribed,” in the fall of 2009 to critical acclaim. Gramophone praised his “stylistic perception and palette of tone-colours … together with a level of technical control that gives new meaning to the word ‘awesome.’” At age 14, he graduated with top honors from the conservatory of his hometown, Bari, Italy. He studied in France with François-Joël Thiollier, attended the Chigiana Academy in Siena under Joaquín Achúcarro and moved to Dallas in 1994 to continue his studies with Achúcarro at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, where he is now on the teaching faculty. He is married to pianist Lucille Chung. Bax is a member of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society Two.

Canadian pianist Lucille Chung has been declared “a first-rate pianist…and a name to watch.” She made her debut performance with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10, and a few years later she claimed first place in the Stravinsky International Piano Competition. Chung has performed with more than 50 leading orchestras worldwide, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, KBS Orchestra, Israel Chamber Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerífe, Staatskapelle Weimar, UNAM Philharmonic (Mexico), Lithuanian Philharmonic, Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, Flemish Radio Orchestra as well as all the major Canadian orchestras.

In solo recital, Lucille has appeared in concert halls including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, as well as halls in Amsterdam, London and Madrid. Festival appearances include the Felicja Blumental, ChangChun, Bard and MDR Summer Festivals. Chung has received excellent reviews worldwide for her recordings of the complete works of Ligeti. In addition, her recording of Scriabin piano works on the Dynamic label garnered the maximum 5 Stars from the BBC Music Magazine and Fono Forum in Germany, as well; it received the R10 rating from Répertoire Classica in France.

Chung graduated from both the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School before the age of 20. She furthered her studies in Europe. The recipient of the prestigious Virginia Parker Prize from the Canada Council of the Arts, she garnered an honors diploma from the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy. She is on the faculty of the Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas. Chung and her husband, pianist Alessio Bax, are artistic co-directors of the Joaquín Achúcarro Foundation and perform together regularly as part of the Bax-Chung Piano Duo.

BY LAURIE SHULMAN, ©2010

FIRST NORTH AMERICAN SERIAL RIGHTS ONLY

Composers have been linked to the keyboard since Medieval and Renaissance times, when nearly everyone who wrote music also played the organ. In the Baroque era, organ remained a staple of church music, but harpsichord gained in popularity with composers and performers as a domestic and court instrument. By the end of the 18th century, the upstart piano—invented about 1710—had supplanted the harpsichord as the keyboard instrument of choice. Indeed, European musical culture expected that accomplished composer-pianists would play their own music, and perhaps even improvise on the spot. The tradition of the virtuoso composer reached its pinnacle in the 19th century and persisted well into the 20th.

This program samples works by nine composers spanning nearly 150 years. All of them played piano, and at least a half dozen of them can lay claim to being among the greatest pianists who have ever lived. More to the point, that they all wrote magnificently for piano. Selections on this program range from an intimate solo movement to the two virtuosic, extroverted concerto finales. Several compositions originated as piano works that the composer subsequently orchestrated. Some of the pieces tell a story, or refer to non-musical topics; others are “absolute music”—music for its own sake, existing on its own terms. These compositions all celebrate the legacy of the piano, even when the keyboard is not present as a participant.

* * *

Mephistopheles, the diabolical purchaser of Faust’s soul, is most famous in the literary settings by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe. Nicholas Lenau’s lesser known Faust was the inspiration for Franz Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz. Subtitled “The Dance at the Village Inn,” Mephisto relates Lenau’s story. Faust and the Devil happen upon a wedding celebration; a pretty young woman catches Faust’s eye, and Mephistopheles plays the fiddle to cast a spell over the merry-makers so that Faust may seduce the maiden. The wedding party disintegrates into an orgy.

Liszt was a bona fide rock star in the mid-19th century: a handsome lady-killer with almost supernatural gifts at the piano. His dazzling waltz, which exists in both solo piano and orchestral versions, bordered on the risqué, thrilling his audience.

Only two of Mozart’s 27 keyboard concerti are in minor keys. No. 20 in D minor, composed in 1785, was completely unlike any concerto that Mozart had written previously. Because of its turbulent outer movements, it is often heralded as Mozart’s prescient realization of romanticism in music. But the slow movement has its own dramatic surprise.

This Romance is a large A-B-A structure whose outer sections are a celestial interlude. A raging G minor episode jolts the equilibrium of the otherwise tranquil Romance. Impetuous and headlong, it hits us like a violent patch of rapids amid calm waters. The return to tranquility barely erases the sense of danger.

In the early 19th century, one way operas became known was through piano transcriptions and variations on popular arias. Chopin’s flashy Variations on “Là ci darem,” a beloved duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, was his first work for piano and orchestra, written when he was 17. The excerpt we hear, a Polonaise, salutes his national heritage.

Anyone old enough to remember Karl Haas’s long-running radio program, “Adventures in Good Music,” will recognize Beethoven’s Adagio cantabile from the "Pathétique" Sonata, Op. 13. What one doesn’t hear in that excerpt is the turbulent middle section, an analogue to the Mozart concerto movement we heard earlier. In this instance, Beethoven speaks in a more restrained language than Mozart, though the emotional impact is surely equal.

If the early romanticism of Mozart and Beethoven show chinks in the refined armor of classicism, the 20th-century Frenchman Maurice Ravel represents the opposite end of the spectrum. Living in the modern era with all its freedoms—societal and compositional—he sought refuge in classical forms and ideals.

His suite Le Tombeau de Couperin is a collection of dances and other musical forms that flourished during the Baroque era. The word tombeau, as its spelling suggests, means tomb or grave; however, the French term also connotes “homage” or “tribute.” Ravel was paying his respects to Couperin and to French Baroque heritage.

The Rigaudon is an ancient Provençal dance that was beloved to Ravel and was popular in the 18th century. Ravel originally published Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1918, as a piano suite of six movements. He later orchestrated four of its movements, including the Rigaudon.

Robert Schumann chose to emphasize musicianship over spectacle in his Piano Concerto, Op.54. His solo part, while difficult, always serves the broader goals of the music first. Schumann’s wife Clara was the concerto’s first interpreter and remained its great champion. The sparkling finale has a pianistic brilliance and rhythmic exuberance that are irresistible.

Pictures at an Exhibition is ingenious in both its piano and orchestral incarnations. Structurally it is a suite of ten miniatures connected by a recurring interlude. Each movement evokes a painting by Mussorgsky’s friend, the painter Viktor Hartmann. His “Old Castle” shows a medieval troubadour playing the lute. Ravel’s orchestration gives the solo to an alto saxophone. “Les Tuileries” depicts the famous Parisian gardens with children squabbling at play and teasing one another.

The program concludes with music by two other Russians: Sergei Prokofiev and Sergei Rachmaninoff, both of whom enjoyed enormous success as performers in the west. Ultimately Prokofiev returned to his homeland; Rachmaninoff did not. Both of them left a stupendous legacy to the piano literature.

A Summer Day originated in 1935 as a collection of 12 easy piano pieces, Music for Children. In 1941, Prokofiev orchestrated seven of them. Their origins come through in the relatively simple harmonies, but characteristic twists and turns reveal them as quintessential Prokofiev. Waltz is an affectionate mockery of a hurdy-gurdy tune. “Tip and Run,” with its pizzicato alternating with arpeggios in a tarantella rhythm, suggests many children’s games.

No sampling of pianist/composers would be complete without Rachmaninoff. His Second Piano Concerto (1901) was a breakthrough work for him, both pulling him out of a long depression and establishing his international reputation. At once melancholy and rhapsodic, the finale balances an expansive solo part, glorious melodies and a lush orchestra.