2/2 NY Philharmonic 2010 Opening Night - Alan Gilbert / Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis / 9/22/10

Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Weber 00:00 Allegro 04:33 Scherzo (Turandot): Moderato – Lively 12:50 Andantino 17:10 Marsch Alan Gilbert, conductor NY Philharmonic Orchestra Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center - NY, NY (9/22/10) NY Times - "After intermission, he ended with a work that the Philharmonic introduced in 1944, Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber.” Once a staple, this piece does not turn up that often these days. The title may sound a little convoluted, but it describes what goes on. Hindemith borrowed obscure tunes from Weber and, in a true metamorphosis, generated a delightful, dazzling and ingenious four-movement symphonic suite. The score proves that sometimes a tune is just a little thing a composer can use to get a piece going. Mr. Gilbert and the Philharmonic played it to the hilt. The Hindemith and Strauss works will be repeated as part of the Philharmonic’s first subscription program through Tuesday at Avery Fisher Hall. There will also be a work by Dutilleux and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with Itzhak Perlman, no less, as soloist." LA Phil Program Notes – Howard Posner Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber began life in early 1940, when Hindemith first took up residence in the U.S. after several years of public and private jousting with the Nazi government of his native Germany. (The Nazis officially called his music “degenerate,” though they may also have been responding to his private, but hardly secret, expressions of detestation regarding their policies.) Hindemith sketched a series of movements based on themes by Weber, to be used in a ballet for a dance company run by Léonide Massine, who had already collaborated with Hindemith on the ballet Nobilissima visione. The project died when Hindemith and Massine had one too many artistic differences Massine’s staging ideas, which would have used backdrops by Salvador Dalí, were too weird for Hindemith, and Massine thought Hindemith’s score “too personal,"), and in 1943 Hindemith redid the music into the Metamorphosis, in the process turning it into a splashy, colorful orchestral piece of the sort that American audiences in particular seemed to like. It was an immediate success when it was premiered by Artur Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic in January 1944. It has remained perhaps Hindemith’s most popular work. Weber (1786-1826), an important figure in the development of German opera and a seminal influence on Romanticism. The themes Hindemith used are from some of Weber’s most obscure works, and came to Hindemith’s attention because they could all be found in one volume of piano duets that he owned. Hindemith not only retained all but one of the themes almost exactly as Weber wrote them, but also preserved much of the formal structure of the pieces as well. Hindemith alters nearly everything else, making radical changes to the harmony and adding to the music both vertically and horizontally. The surprising thing is that Hindemith’s end product, while staying so close to Weber, sounds so little like the original. For example, in the first movement, there are few hints of the 19th century aside from the middle-section theme given to the oboe. (This is followed by one of Hindemith’s niftier touches: when the principal theme returns in the violas and clarinets, he has the flute play in parallel an octave and a fifth higher, and the piccolo in parallel two octaves and a third higher. They act much like mixture stops on an organ, and make the orchestra sound more than a little like a calliope.) The second movement is based on Weber’s incidental music to Schiller’s adaptation of Turandot, the same Carlo Gozzi fantasy about China that Puccini used for his 1926 opera. Weber took his melody from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1767 Dictionaire de Musique. Rousseau had gotten it from a sinologist but, cautioned that it had likely been adapted to Western ears in the transmission and its authenticity was therefore suspect. It was nonetheless as close as Weber was going to get to a real Chinese melody, and he used it almost exclusively in five of the six numbers he wrote for the play. Hindemith repeats it eight times in different settings, building to a splashy climax. The brass then take a syncopated variant of the theme and turn it into a fugue. The third movement retains most of the substance, and the ABA structure, of Weber’s Andantino con moto from Six Pièces for two pianos, Op. 10, No. 2. The dancing flute solo in the last third of the piece is solely Hindemith’s. The march finale is again from the Op. 60 duets, much expanded. The horn calls implicit in Weber’s trio section are made explicit in Hindemith’s version, and become the basis of the requisite big finish.