Program Information

Artist Bios

MICHAEL STERN conductor

CHRISTINA NAUGHTON and MICHELLE NAUGHTON piano duo

Program Notes

Please Note: Due to illness, conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya is unable to appear with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra for this week's concert program. In his absence, conductor Michael Stern takes the podium to lead the NJSO on a program that will include Brahms' Symphony No. 2 and Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3.

Christina and Michelle Naughton are twin sisters who began their piano studies at the age of four. In the fall of 2007, they began their studies as merit-based full-tuition scholarship students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where Christina holds the Hirsig Fellowship and Michelle holds the Bernard M. Guth Fellowship. They have performed extensively as soloists, with orchestra and in piano duo.

Christina made her orchestral debut at age 9, performing Haydn’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in D Major. She was the bronze medalist at the quadrennial Gina Bachauer Young Artist International Piano Competition; as a member of the Vesta Trio, she won the gold medal at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. She has performed with Chicago’s Ars Viva and Park Ridge Symphony Orchestras, the Madison, Fort Collins and Utah Symphonies and Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra and at Ravinia’s Martin Theater.

Michelle made her orchestral debut at age 10, performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A Major K. 488. She won first prize at the PianoArts Biennial National Piano Concerto and Solo Competition; she was the gold-medal winner in the quadrennial Virginia Waring International Piano Competition. She has performed with Chicago’s Ars Viva and Park Ridge Symphony Orchestras and the Milwaukee, Madison and Gulf Coast Symphonies, as well as on Denver’s St. John’s Cathedral’s concert series and at the Green Lake Music Festival.

Christina and Michelle have performed with Cleveland’s Red Orchestra, the Erie Philharmonic and Sheboygan Symphony, as well as on the Artist Series of Sarasota, UAB Piano Series, Rancho Mirage Library Classical Piano Series, Chamber Music San Francisco Series and Chicago’s “Music in the Loft” and Pianoforte classical piano series.

They have performed for broadcast on WFMT, Chicago, and on WHYY, Philadelphia. Last season, they debuted at the Terrace Theater in Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, and with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Upcoming concerts include performances on the Steinway Society of the Bay Area’s piano series and at Florida’s Kravis Center.

BY LAURIE SHULMAN, ©2009

FIRST NORTH AMERICAN SERIAL RIGHTS ONLY

Concerto in D Minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra

Francis Poulenc

Born January 7, 1899 in Paris, France

Died January 30, 1963 in Paris

Francis Poulenc is one of the early 20th-century French composers collectively known as “Les Six.” The scion of a wealthy pharmaceuticals manufacturing family, he had a somewhat unorthodox musical education. His mother was a fine pianist; she and Poulenc’s uncle initiated the boy’s study of piano and also introduced him to other facets of Parisian cultural life, particularly theatre. That acquaintance was to serve Poulenc richly in his operas.

Poulenc’s musical style

In his youthful works, Poulenc favored breezy moods and chamber-music textures. Musicologist Michael Thomas Roeder describes his music thus:

Poulenc’s generally light style is marked by a range of traits: simple, tuneful melodic ideas of narrow range and short duration; lively rhythmic content often using ostinatos and a fluidity of changing meters; clear, transparent textures with little contrapuntal writing; an essentially diatonic tonal language spiced by some dissonance; and clear forms, occasionally involving cyclical recall of thematic material.

The Concerto for Two Pianos is usually cited as marking the end of Poulenc’s early period. It aptly illustrates many of the characteristics that Roeder enumerates. Poulenc composed the concerto for the Princess Edmond de Polignac, an American-born arts patron who also commissioned works from Stravinsky, Ravel, Kurt Weill and Erik Satie. Her Paris salon was a gathering place for the musical avant-garde.

Confidence booster

Poulenc completed the Princess’ commission in barely three months during the summer. His boyhood friend Jacques Février joined him to play the premiere performance in Venice on September 5, 1932, with Désiré Defauw (later conductor of the Chicago Symphony) conducting. The concerto was an immediate success, boosting Poulenc’s confidence. In early October, he wrote to the Belgian musicologist Paul Collaer: "You will see for yourself what an enormous step forward it is from my previous work and that I am really entering my great period."

Immodest though that assessment might seem, the concerto justifies Poulenc’s satisfaction. He was keenly aware of the effect the work had on audiences, and he took great delight in its popularity.

The Mozart effect

The concerto is clearly modeled on Mozart’s Concerto in E-flat for two pianos, K. 365. Poulenc’s slow movement has moments that will be immediately recognizable to listeners familiar with Mozart’s keyboard concertos. Poulenc intentionally dispenses with sonata form in his opening Allegro ma non troppo, opting instead for a brisk tripartite movement with a slower middle section. The overriding atmosphere is “gay and direct,” words Poulenc used to describe his music. If Mozart was his model in this first movement, it is the Mozart of entertainment music: the Divertimenti and Serenades. Poulenc’s musical language derives more directly from Stravinsky’s French works and from the Balinese gamelans he had heard the year before at the Colonial Exhibition.

The simple accompaniment of the Larghetto—another ternary structure—clearly suggests Mozart and the formulaic writing of lesser 18th-century composers. Later in the Larghetto, Poulenc alludes to the famous Andante from Mozart’s C Major Concerto, K. 467 (the so-called Elvira Madigan movement). The central section echoes the spirit of Camille Saint-Saëns, who, though French, is also among the most Mozartean of 19th-century composers.

Café music meets Javanese gamelan

Poulenc’s finale is a rondo that evokes the sass of a Parisian music hall and, again, the eastern sonorities of the gamelan orchestra. Rapid chatter and sparkling repeated notes lend it an effervescent quality. The composer’s melodic gift is almost profligate, with a new theme around every corner. As his biographer Henri Hell so dryly notes, “the finale flirts with one of those deliberately vulgar themes never far from the composer’s heart.”

In general, the Poulenc concerto places greater demands of ensemble than of technique on the two soloists. While difficult, the piece is not excessively virtuosic, and conventional cadenzas have no place here. The two pianists play nearly constantly throughout the concerto, however, sometimes unaccompanied by the orchestra. Their timing requires an instinctive precision, both with each other and with the conductor and orchestra. Part of the work’s charm is the extreme skill of Poulenc’s dialogue between the two keyboards and the supporting ensemble. His orchestration places the woodwinds, brass and percussion in the aural foreground, with strings in an unaccustomed subservient role.

Poulenc scored the concerto for flute, piccolo, two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, shallow snare drum, snare drum, bass drum, castanets, triangle, military drum, suspended cymbal, two solo pianos and strings. Timing: approximately 19 minutes.

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73

Johannes Brahms

Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, Germany

Died April 3, 1897 in Vienna, Austria

Alpine paradise

During the summer of 1877, Brahms wrote glowingly to his friends of the beautiful mountain countryside surrounding the village of Pörtschach am Wörthersee in the Austrian Alps. The pastoral atmosphere was conducive to composing, most notably the beginning of his second symphony. In a letter to the influential Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, Brahms dropped a hint regarding the new piece’s character.

If I should have a symphony played to you in the winter, it shall sound so cheerful and lovely that you will think I wrote it specially for you, or even your young lady! That’s no great feat, you will say, Brahms is a smart fellow and the Wörthersee virgin soil, with so many melodies flying about that you must be careful not to tread on any.

He enjoyed Pörtschach enough to return for two additional summers, completing three major works of strikingly similar spirit, all imbued with those glorious melodies he mentioned to Hanslick: this symphony, the Violin Concerto and the First Violin Sonata. All three are undisputed masterpieces—but the Second Symphony is remarkable because it is so different from what preceded it.

Floodgates open: composing with ease

Brahms labored over his First Symphony for two decades. By contrast, the Second Symphony unfolded naturally and rapidly, ready for its premiere barely more than a year later. It was as if the floodgates had been opened. Now that Brahms had cleared the hurdle of that first symphony, his ideas streamed forth—and such ideas! “It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine and cool green shadows. How beautiful it must be at Pörtschach!” exclaimed the composer’s friend Theodor Billroth, upon hearing the new symphony played through at the piano. Clara Schumann reported with similar rapture in her diary in October 1877:

Johannes came this evening and played me the first movement of his Second Symphony in D Major, which greatly delighted me…I also heard a part of the last movement and am quite overjoyed with it.

Brahms’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony

The Second Symphony appeals its combination of gentleness and underlying strength. Often called Brahms’s “Pastoral,” the work overflows with the dappled sunlight and exquisite natural beauty of the Austrian Alps. It is practically devoid of the tension and tragic struggle that permeate the First Symphony. The critic Hanslick wrote of its “untroubled charm.” Yet the symphony is not without urban sophistication.

The seductive power of waltzes

The first movement is in gentle, swaying triple time. Triple meter was somewhat unusual for a first movement in Brahms’s day. Far from apologizing for it, he emphasized it with a frankly waltz-like second subject, closely related to his beloved lullaby. Though it has dramatic moments, notably a fugal development section, the first movement establishes an aura of benign geniality that prevails for most of the symphony. The coda includes a dreamy horn solo, one of those delicious scoring details that rewards careful listening.

Spotlight on cellos and low brass

The rich key of B major provides the backdrop for Brahms’s slow movement, which opens with a luscious, expressive cello melody. The cello section maintains a high profile throughout the movement. Brahms emphasizes the darker sound of the lower instruments by retaining timpani, trombones and tuba in his scoring. A transitional passage switches meter from 4/4 to 12/8, ushering in a contrasting middle section in B minor. Clouds temporarily obliterate the sunshine before a poignant oboe solo reintroduces the cello theme of the beginning.

The Schubert connection

More an intermezzo than a scherzo, the Allegretto grazioso rocks gracefully between major and minor modes, recalling similar ambivalence in Schubert. Its two intervening trio sections (one in 2/4, the other in 3/8), have a sprightlier character, but they still draw their melodic motives from the Allegretto. Both trios include some fine woodwind passages.

Contrapuntal tour de force

Brahms the contrapuntalist is in rare form in the finale, applying virtually every technique in the imitative book. After a bright start for strings alone, he takes maximum advantage of the episodes for ingenious contrapuntal feats. Canon and inversion, augmentation and diminution, fugato—all are incorporated with consummate skill. The sunshine of the first movement is definitively restored, with a healthy dash of Haydnesque exuberance thrown in for good measure.

Symphony No. 2 is scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons in pairs; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Timing: approximately 39 minutes.