Happy New Year!

Since the Elbphilharmonie opened, the terrific New Year's Eve concerts given by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra have been among the highlights of the season. And this year, too, the orchestra and its chief conductor Alan Gilbert make the sparks fly in the Grand Hall: with Dvořák's effervescent »Carnival« Overture, Rachmaninov's impressive »Symphonic Dances« and the Gershwin evergreen »Rhapsody in Blue«, the spirited concert programme ensures plenty of variety and a festive mood. The evening's star guest is Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone. Happy New Year!

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester

Makoto Ozone piano

conductor Alan Gilbert

Antonín Dvořák
Carnival / concert overture Op. 92

John Adams
The Chairman Dances / Foxtrot for orchestra

George Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue (version for piano and orchestra)

- Interval -

Sergej Rachmaninow
Symphonic Dances Op. 45

There are only two American-born composers on tonight's programme (plus a third US native on the conductor's rostrum). Nonetheless: the United States are the secret motto of the concert: the USA played a central role in the lives of all the composers featured, who were inspired to all manner of interesting stylistic experiments by the »melting pot«, and thus enriched music history by pursuing entirely new paths. All the better, then, that Alan Gilbert – who in 2009 become the first New York native to lead the New York Philharmonic from the rostrum – has managed to incorporate something of the famous American openness and easy-going attitude into this musical New Year's celebration.

Born in 1981 as a butcher's son 1841 in a little village just outside Prague, the young Antonín Dvořák can have had little idea that his career would one day take him across the Atlantic to New York. It was thanks to the support of Johannes Brahms that his career took off. Dvořák learnt a lot from Brahms, but still went his own way, integrating the folk music of his native Bohemia into his own works. He thus advanced to become the figurehead of a new national Czech style. And that was exactly why Jeannette Thurber, the president of the New York National Conservatory of Music, appointed him its director in 1892. Dvořák's mission was to evolve an individual, wholly American style of music, thus ending the country's intellectual dependence on Europe.

And he actually did explore American Indian chants and the spirituals sung by the black plantation workers, which he incorporated, for example, into his Ninth Symphony. This work, popularly known as the »New World« Symphony, has been regarded since then as a foundation stone of American classical music – albeit one that cannot deny its author's Czech origins.

Shortly before he left for New York, Dvořák published his latest composition in Prague: a trilogy entitled »Nature, Life and Love«, which he put on the programme of his very first concert in New York's Carnegie Hall. He subsequently brought out the work's three sections as individual concert overtures under new names: »Love« became »Othello« and »Life« turned into »Carnival«. The latter piece is a perfect opener for a New Year's concert thanks to its boisterous mood. But the middle section also strikes up a more pensive note: according to the composer, it depicts a solitary stroller out at night who observes a party through the windows of an apartment. A metaphor for the fact that life is not just one long party – and can be brought to an unexpected halt…

One genuine American composer – and in fact one of the most important of all living composers– is John Adams. He started out playing the clarinet in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and now lives in San Francisco. He regularly writes works to commission for orchestras all over the world, and has been awarded several Grammys and even the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Adams was one of the founding fathers of Minimal Music, a style that emerged in  the 1960s and is based on so-called »patterns«. These are basically simple little motif fragments such as triads that are constantly repeated, thus evolving a fascinating motor drive – especially when they shift against each other slightly.

Adams's piece »The Chairman Dances« follows this style. It comes from his opera »Nixon in China«, which comments ironically on the first state visit of a US president to the People's Republic of China in 1972. – A typical subject for the composer, who  takes an interest in politics. The word »Dances« here is meant as a verb: the scene shows Mao Zedong's wife sabotaging an official banquet with a racy striptease show. The Great Chairman himself is only present in the form of a monumental painting, but soon enough he can't take it any more and climbs down from the frame to dance a foxtrot with his spouse.

As honourable as Dvořák's attempt to create an American style of music was, it was left to a US native to pursue his goal, and he attained it with lasting and indeed spectacular effect. George Gershwin's biography itself is representative of the cultural melting pot that the United States was: he was born in Brooklyn in 1898 to Jewish immigrants from St. Petersburg by the name of Gershovitz, who soon adapted their name to make it easier to pronounce in English. Thus Gershwin had direct experience of the Roaring Twenties as a young man: New York grew into a booming metropolis of six million people, the first skyscrapers were built, and Ford Model T's rattled down the urban canyons.

During the Prohibition Era alcohol was banned, a policy that spawned notorious gangsters like Al Capone as well as tens of thousands of illegal bars, known as speakeasies. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Americans were literally addicted to entertainment. The centre of the US music industry was in a  side street off Broadway, where numerous music publishers were based whose contract pianists produced new songs on a daily basis. One of these was Gershwin.

His creativity gained unexpected momentum on 3 January 1924, when he was playing billiards with friends in his regular club on Broadway. His brother suddenly jumped up from his armchair as if he'd been stung by a bee and showed George the daily paper with an announcement by bandleader Paul Whiteman of a concert on 12 February entitled »An Experiment in Modern Music«, featuring among other works »a new composition by George Gershwin, a jazz concerto«. But this was the first that Gershwin heard of it.

Afraid that a rival bandleader might steal his idea, Whiteman put his money where his mouth was, so the composer had no choice but to throw himself into his work. He produced something unprecedented in record time: a piano concerto that combined classical music and jazz, as the title already indicated. »Rhapsody in Blue« was born, a composition where Gershwin makes use of the blues, ragtime and jazz – »the most American music of all«, as he called it himself.

The first performance was nothing short of a triumph for Gershwin. And that was saying something, with some of the grandees of classical music sitting in the audience: Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, Leopold Stokowski and many other big names. »Rhapsody in Blue« was originally designed for performance by Whiteman's 24-piece big band, but it received such resounding applause that Gershwin immediately set about writing a version for full orchestra with the help of Whiteman's regular arranger Ferde Grofé. Jazz had conquered the classical concert platform, and America had found its own sound.

Sergei Rachmaninov first set foot on American soil in autumn 1909. His tour of America as a pianist and conductor was a huge success, not least thanks to his brand new Third Piano Concerto. However, the circumstances surrounding his next Atlantic crossing in 1917 were less gratifying: after achieving considerable prosperity in his native Russia, the composer and his family were forced by the Bolshevist revolution to seek exile in America. Although he met up again in the US with many other European artists that he knew, continued to earn well as a pianist and was soon able to travel back to Europe, Rachmaninov was at odds with having been uprooted, and as a result hardly composed any more music. This state of affairs was exacerbated by the outbreak of the Second World War.

He wrote his last major work in 1940 on Long Island: the »Symphonic Dances« are a kind of musical autobiography, in which Rachmaninov looks back on his eventful life. This finds concrete expression, for example, where the opening movement quotes from his First Symphony, composed 50 years earlier. After a melancholy waltz, the final movement is largely based on the Gregorian hymn »Dies irae«, which Rachmaninov incorporated into many of his works. The score is more like a symphony than a set of dances in character, but certainly offers the warm and sophisticated sounds that single the composer out as perhaps the last of the Romantics, and show that he remained true to himself throughout his life despite all the adversities he encountered.

Text: Clemens Matuschek
English translation: Clive Williams

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