Program Notes: Concert 4
About our soloist
Throughout his more than twenty-five year history as a full-time concert pianist, Frederick Moyer has carved out a vital and unusual career characterized by an enthusiastic interest in all things and an extremely exacting approach to music-making. Mr. Moyer was born into an artistic family and began playing the piano with his mother at the age of seven. Musically eclectic from the start, his youthful obsessions moved from the Tijuana Brass to Oscar Peterson to Sergei Rachmaninoff. While still in high school, Mr. Moyer received a full scholarship to attend the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; later he attended Indiana University. His major teachers in addition to his mother were Theodore Lettvin, Eleanor Sokoloff and Menahem Pressler.
A highly acclaimed New York debut at Carnegie Recital Hall shortly after his graduation launched Mr. Moyer on a career that has flourished ever since, taking him to forty-one countries and performance venues that include Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Sydney Opera House, Windsor Castle, Carnegie Recital Hall, Tanglewood and the Kennedy Center. He has appeared as piano soloist with world-renowned orchestras including the Cleveland, Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras; the St. Louis, Dallas, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Houston, Boston, Singapore, Netherlands Radio, Latvian, Iceland and London Symphony Orchestras; the Buffalo, Hong Kong and Japan Philharmonic Symphony Orchestras; the National Symphony Orchestra of Brazil and the major orchestras of Australia.
Mr. Moyer’s repertoire reflects an affinity for a wide variety of styles and composers. He has recorded five Mozart concerti for Norwegian radio and performed a series of three Rachmaninoff piano concerti with the Japan Philharmonic. His twenty-two recordings span virtually the entire piano repertoire from Bach to the latest composers. A champion of contemporary music, he has had many composers write for him, including Louis Calabro, George Walker, David Kechley, Ned Rorem, Kenneth Frazelle, Gordon Green, Donal Fox and Andersen Viana.
Mr. Moyer is an artist in tune with technology and the times. He has developed several computer programs to help him with his analysis and memorization of piano works, and he has been hired by art museums to create art-music presentations that interpret works of visual art. In addition, Mr. Moyer often offers his services to benefit causes in which he believes. Over the past twenty-five years, he has taken a strong interest in a music school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which he visits regularly to teach and perform.
PROGRAM NOTES
Café Neon
Steven Karidoyanes (1957– )
Café Neon was composed in 2000. The composer says of the work:
“When I first conducted Kodaly’s Galanta Dances, I was immediately taken by the music’s passion and color and wished there was a Greek equivalent which would gratify my Hellenic heritage. Café Neon now fills that void.”
Karidoyanes’ title is an Americanization of the Greek “cafenion,” meaning coffee bar. Built on four tunes, the work spotlights the clarinet, a centrally important instrument in Greek folk music. The four tunes are:
“Kathe Limani ke Kaimos” (“Heartache in Every Port”)
“Sou Topa mia, ke dhio, ke tris” (“I Told You Once, Twice and Thrice”)
“I Sklava” (“The Slave Girl”)
Conclusion: Presto
The concluding movement was inspired by the artistry of a Greek harmonica virtuoso heard at The Averof, a now defunct Greek and Middle East night club-restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first two songs were borrowed from the repertoire of Trio Bel Canto, a popular music group in Greece in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Portions of the first song return throughout the piece as unifying material.
Since its premiere, Café Neon has been performed in a number of American cities, as well as in Greece and Italy.
Piano Concerto no. 4
Camille Saint-Saens (1835–1921)
Starting out as a child piano prodigy, Camille Saint-Saens went on to enjoy a long and productive life as a composer. He remained a highly esteemed pianist and in fact personally premiered all five of his piano concertos. Concerto no. 4, written shortly after his well-known tone poem Danse Macabre, was first performed at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet on October 31, 1875.
The concerto falls into two main sections. In turn, each of these subdivides into two sub-sections, giving us what amounts to four movements in all.
- Allegro moderato – Andante. The concerto begins with a suspenseful eight-measure theme stated by the orchestra and then answered by the soloist. This back-and-forth exchange continues over the course of several variations, with the piano statements becoming increasingly freer and more soloistic. Marked by a key change from C Minor to A-flat Major, the stately Andante section follows without a pause.
- Allegro vivace – Allegro. The theme that opened the concerto provides material for the Allegro vivace, a lively scherzando alternating between 2/4 and 6/8 meter. A short Andante section utilizing material from the Andante of the first movement provides a bridge to the finale, an energetic, vigorous (marcatissimo) Allegro in C Major and 3/4 time, somewhat in the style of a rondo.
Symphony no. 5
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
When asked to name Mozart’s greatest opera, a noted music scholar famously replied, “Impossible. There is no greatest Mozart opera. All of them are great.” “But,” he added, after a moment’s thought, “if there was one, it would be The Marriage of Figaro.” Wouldn’t the same question, if applied to Beethoven’s symphonies (perhaps excluding the sui generis “Choral” no. 9), elicit from legions of music lovers a similarly hesitant but predictable endorsement of Symphony no. 5? True, the Eroica (no. 3) stands as the most revolutionary; and yes, Beethoven’s own favorite was the A Major (no. 7). But it is Beethoven’s Fifth, launched by the most famous four-note musical phrase ever written, that first comes to mind as proof that music can vie with all other arts in the expression of moral and philosophical themes, whether it be the inescapability of fate or the heroic triumph of the individual over that fate.
The Fifth was the product of a long gestation. Beethoven began work on it in 1804, taking until the spring of 1808 to finish it. Along the way he undertook and completed another symphony (now called the Fourth, even though it was started later than the Fifth), his violin concerto and his Fourth Piano Concerto. By the time Symphony no. 5 premiered on December 22, 1808, at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, Beethoven had also written the Sixth Symphony (Pastoral) which had its own premiere along with that of the Fifth. (Piano Concerto no. 4 was performed on the same bill, with Beethoven at the keyboard, in what has to rank as one of the most momentous concerts in music history.)
- Allegro con brio. Every bit as remarkable as the opening phrase itself (“Thus does fate knock at the door,” said the composer, according to his friend and biographer Anton Schindler) is Beethoven’s treatment of it over the course of the movement. The theme is a more or less constant presence, whether fortissimo, barely audible or somewhere in between. Other thematic material is present, but somehow Beethoven creates the impression of an entire symphonic movement essentially built on one four-note motif.
- Andante con moto. The second movement in 3/8 time is based on two themes: the first — tender, flowing and elegiac, played darkly by violas and cellos; the second — assertive and martial, proclaimed by brass and woodwinds. Variations on both themes are the stuff of the movement, with an ongoing series of contrasts emerging between the gentle tenderness of theme one and the bold assertiveness of theme two.
- Allegro. The scherzo begins with a short, eerie introductory passage followed by French horns hammering out the main theme, which turns out to be an only slightly altered version of the famous motto phrase of the first movement. A trio section, contrapuntal in nature and featuring scampering double basses, adds the symphony’s only touch of levity. After a return to the motto theme (given this time to the woodwinds), a feeling of harmonic uncertainty overtakes the orchestra. This builds suspensefully to a startling crescendo that leads without pause into the heroic theme of the final movement.
- Allegro. The finale bursts open with a majestic fanfare-like figure in C Major. This will prove to be the movement’s most striking theme, though only one of many. Recurrences of the motto theme, in one or another guise, are plentiful. Trombones and a piccolo, making their first appearance in a Beethoven symphony, add to the triumphal majesty of the movement.
These notes are written for Symphony by the Sea. They may be reproduced, provided that authorship acknowledgement is given to William R. Clark, © W. R. Clark