No. 2040 Subscription (Program B)

Born in Paris during the Belle Époque, Jacques Ibert (1890–1962) developed his musical talent early on because of his pianist mother. From 1910, he studied under André Gedalge (Ravel’s teacher) and others at the Paris Conservatoire. It was in Gedalge’s private orchestration class that Ibert met Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) and Arthur Honegger (1892–1955): with Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Milhaud and Honegger will soon form “Les Six (The Six).” While this avant-garde circle livened up Paris until the early 1920s, Ibert was mostly absent from the capital as he first served in World War I as a nurse and a naval officer, and then won the Prix de Rome (a prestigious art scholarship) to stay in Rome from 1920 to 1923.
Ibert’s renown increased right after this sojourn in Italy. His orchestral piece Escales (Ports of Call)(1922) was premiered in Paris in 1924 to be highly praised, before the immense success of his comic opera Angélique (1927) firmly established his fame in France and abroad. In chamber music, his Three Short Pieces for Wind Quintet (1930) dates from this period.
Considered one of the most important and popular flute concertos alongside Mozart’s No. 1 and No. 2, Ibert’s Flute Concerto was composed in 1932–1933 and dedicated to the legendary French flutist Marcel Moyse (1889–1984). The dedicatee premiered it as the soloist in 1934 with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire conducted by Moyse’s teacher Philippe Gaubert (1879–1941) who himself was a distinguished flutist.
Written for the instrument which opens Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) and Ravel’s Boléro (1928), Ibert’s Flute Concerto embodies the modern French music with its elegance, clarity, refinement and wittiness while showing his great knowledge of flute’s techniques and expressions. The opening movement in sonata form has the imminent, snaky first theme and the contrastive, calm second theme. The slow second movement gives an exquisite duet by the flute solo and a violin towards the end. The high-spirited virtuosic finale in rondo form starts with the flute solo announcing the recurrent rondo theme with playful triplets.

[Kumiko Nishi]

The late-Romantic composer Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) was a rare late bloomer in the classical music sphere crowded with infant phenomena. Born near Linz in Upper Austria, he made a living as a schoolteacher and church organist before moving to Vienna in 1868 in his mid-forties. It is only from that moment that most of his representative works including Symphonies No. 2 to No. 9 were penned. He had to long put up with cold treatment of his symphonies until the 1884 successful premiere of No. 7 spread his fame widely, merely twelve years before he passed away in Vienna at age 72.
Bruckner composed the Symphonies No. 2 to No. 5 between 1871 and 1876 before being deeply absorbed in revising works (he even wrote a completely new scherzo for No. 4 in 1878). His only chamber work from his Vienna period, the String Quintet in F major, was finished in July 1879. Penned from September 1879, No. 6 was for him a new symphony to tackle after the previous gap, and it is today considered an important work in the transition to the composer’s final mature period. Incidentally, he set to work on Te Deum, a masterpiece of the sacred music repertoire nowadays, in May 1881 while he was completing No. 6.
As Bruckner didn’t revise No. 6 after the completion, the situation is much simpler than his other symphonies’ with many different versions and editions mostly owing to his frequent large and small modifications. The main reason for that is that No. 6 was partly premiered in 1883 in Vienna (only the second and third movements with large cuts) to be coldly received and then forgotten. It was three years after Bruckner’s death that Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of all movements in Vienna, but with large cuts and re-orchestration. The entire symphony was first heard in 1901 under the baton of Karl Pohlig in Stuttgart.
All the movements of No. 6 but the third (scherzo) are written as a three-theme sonata (instead of the traditional two-theme), Bruckner’s favorite form. The opening movement begins with the majestic first theme on cellos and contrabasses accompanied by violins’ rhythmical ticks. This theme will return on trombones during the coda of the final movement to end the symphony brilliantly. The slow second movement has, although in F major, a touch of melancholy. The bright, mellifluous second theme first sung by violins and cellos makes a sharp contrast with the third theme in the style of a funeral march. The next movement in A minor is an ABA-form scherzo which is, unexpectedly, less boisterous than Bruckner’s other symphonies’. The trio (central) section B lets horns play a fanfare-like melody before the woodwinds recall the opening theme of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5 (1878). Horn players will assume a vital role again at the fervent finale, powerfully stating the dotted first theme.

[Kumiko Nishi]