BEETHOVEN

Kent Nagano

ORCHESTRE SYMPHONIQUEDE MONTRÉAL

Ideals of the French Revolution

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The General, for orchestra with soprano, choir and narratorMusic by Ludwig van BeethovenText by Paul Griffiths ©Maximilian Schell, narrationAdrianne Pieczonka, sopranoOSM ChorusMarika Kuzma, Chorus Director 1. Overture 8:29

[Egmont: Ouverture]2. No.1 Song: A drum in the distance 3:55 [Egmont: No.1, Song: Die Trommel gerühret]3. No.2 Melodrama: One thing I learned 2:03 [König Stephan: No.7, Melodrama]4. No.3 Melodrama: Informants, spies 0:49

[König Stephan: No.5, Melodrama]5. No.4 Interlude 1 3:34

[Egmont: No.6, Entr’acte 4]6. No.5 Interlude 2 5:08 [Leonore Prohaska: Funeral March] 7. No.6 Interlude 3 / Melodrama: I could do something 3:18 [Egmont: No.2, Entr’acte 1]8. No.7 Interlude 4 5:31 [Egmont: No.3, Entr’acte 2]9. No.8 Interlude 5 2:14 [Egmont: No.7, Clara’s Death]

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10. No.9 Melodrama: I was one human being 3:11 [Egmont: No.8, Melodrama]11. No.10 Song: Lost and despairing 1:23 [Egmont: No.4, Song: Freudvoll und leidvoll]12. No.11 Interlude 6 4:04 [Egmont: No.5, Entr’acte 3]13. No.12 Interlude 7 1:40 [König Stephan: No.8, Solemn March]14. No.13 Melodrama: I had nothing to say to these people 3:30 [König Stephan: No.8, Melodrama from Grave risoluto e ben marcato]15. No.14 ‘Victory Symphony’ 0:28 [Egmont: No.9]16. No.15 Finale 5:30 [Opferlied, Op.121b]

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Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) Symphony No.5 in C minor, Op. 671. Allegro con brio 6:562. Andante con moto 8:493. Allegro 7:564. Allegro 10:30Egmont, Op. 85 (excerpts)5. Overture 8:296. Lied Die Trommel gerühret, No.1 3:557. Lied Freudvoll und leidvoll, No.4 1:238. Opferlied (“Die Flamme lodert”), Op. 121b 5:30

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Founded in 1934 by a group of devoted music lovers, with the backing of the Québec Government, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal is one of the major cultural organ-izations of the city whose name it bears with pride. The music directors who have contributed to its growth and success are Wilfrid Pelletier, a Montrealer by birth and conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York who be-came the first Artistic Director of the OSM; Désiré Defauw; Igor Markevitch; Zubin Me-hta, who guided the OSM from 1961 to 1967, bringing increased prestige to the Orchestra since under his direction the OSM began its touring career in Europe; Franz-Paul Decker; Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos; Charles Dutoit, from 1977 to 2002, with whom the OSM assumed an important place on the international stage; and, since September 2006, Kent Nagano.

The Orchestra has toured in Asia nine times, visiting Japan on six of those, and has toured Europe on nine occasions and South America twice. The OSM has also performed at the Hollywood Bowl, as well as the Ravinia and Tanglewood festivals. Moreover, since 1982 the Orchestra has been an almost annual visitor to Carnegie Hall, where it plays to packed houses. In 2006 the OSM offered a concert at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet, its first international concert with Kent Nagano. In April 2007 the Orchestra completed its first coast-to-coast Canadian tour, placed under the direction of Kent Nagano. They made their Carnegie Hall debut in March of 2008, and will embark on a multi-city tour of Japan and South Korea this coming April.The OSM has produced 95 recordings, earn-ing 47 national and international awards, in-cluding two Grammys.

Orchestre symphOnique de mOntréal

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Kent Nagano has established a reputation as a gifted interpreter of both the operatic and symphonic repertoire. In September 2006, Nagano became Music Director of the Or-chestre symphonique de Montréal and also began his tenure as General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.His early professional years were spent in Boston, working in the opera house and as assistant conductor to Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He played a key role in the world premiere of Messiaen’s opera “Saint François d’Assise” at the request of the composer. Nagano’s success in America

led to European appointments: Music Director of the Opéra National de Lyon (1988-1998), Music Director of the Manchester Hallé Or-chestra (1991-2000) and Associate Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2003, Kent Nagano became the first Music Director of Los Angeles Opera after having already held the position of Principal Conductor for two years. A very im-portant period in his career was his time as Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin from 2000-2006 after which he was then given the title Honorary Conductor.As a much sought-after guest conductor he has worked with most of the world’s finest orchestras. World premieres from the past seasons include Bernstein’s A “White House Cantata” and operas by Peter Eötvös (Three Sisters), John Adams (“The Death of Klinghof-fer” and “El Niño”), Kaija Saariaho’s “L’amour de loin” at the Salzburg Festival and Unsuk Chin’s “Alice in Wonderland” at the Munich Opera Festival.

Kent naganOMusic Director and Conductor

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Paul Griffiths worked for thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.A selection of his reviews and essays was pub-lished in 2005 as The Substance of Things Heard. Other recent publications include The New Penguin Dictionary of Music and A Concise History of Western Music.Paul Griffiths was born in Bridgend, Wales, in 1947. He studied biochemistry at Oxford, and joined the editorial team of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1973. Around the same time he began writing on music for various London papers; he was chief critic of The Times of London

(1982-92) and The New Yorker (1992-96), and wrote regularly for The New York Times (1996-2003). His first book, A Concise His-tory of Modern Music, came out in 1978, and has been translated into several languages. He has published studies of Boulez, Cage, Messiaen, Ligeti, Davies, Bartók, Stravinsky, Barraqué, and the string quartet, as well as the Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2004). He is also a novelist—Myself and Marco Polo won the 1989 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize—and a librettist: among other works are texts to music by Mozart (The Jewel Box, 1991), Tan Dun (Marco Polo,1996) and Elliott Carter (What Next?, 1999). He has given lectures and courses on various musical topics and on libretto writing, invited by insti-tutions ranging from the Munich Biennale to Harvard University. In 2002 he was made a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in Manorbier, Wales, and New York.

paul griffithsAuthor, critic, librettist and musicologist

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maximilian schellActor

Maximilian Schell is highly acclaimed around the world as a star of film, theatre and tele-vision.Twice nominated for an Academy Award, for Julia and Judgment at Nuremberg, he won the coveted Oscar as Best Actor in the latter. He made his Hollywood debut in 1958 in The Young Lions, which also starred Marlon Brando. In 1974 he wrote, poroduced, directed and starred in The Pedestrian, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

In addition to his international film career he has been active as a director, writer and ac-tor in European theatre, and he has also kept busy directing opera on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Dramatic and stunning, Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka is hailed for her “lushly beautiful sound and poignant vulnerability.” (New York Times) She performs on leading opera and concert stages throughout Europe, North America and Asia under the direction of such conductors as the late Sir Georg Solti, Sir Colin Davis, Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Valery Giergiev, Kent Nagano, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Loren Maazel, the late Richard Bradshaw, Christian Thielemann and many others. In addition to appearances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Vien-na Staatsoper, the Royal Opera House Covent

Garden, Los Angeles, and La Scala, Adrianne has performed at some of Europe’s finest summer festivals including Salzburg, Bay-reuth, Glyndebourne and Lucerne. Her reper-toire of over 30 roles embraces the music of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Janacek, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Richard Strauss.Particularly renowned for her interpretation of Verdi, Strauss and Wagner roles, Adrianne was called the “Sieglinde of our time” by Die Zeit at her Bayreuth Festival debut in 2006. Her impressive discography features operatic and symphonic works and her solo album of Wag-ner and Strauss arias (Orfeo) was nominated in 2007 for a Juno Award. Adrianne is an Officer of the Order of Can-ada and, in 2007, was named a Kammer-sängerin by the Austrian government. Origin-ally bestowed by the royal courts, the title “Kammersänger(in)”, or chamber singer, is awarded to distinguished singers who have made a significant career in Austria.She makes her home in Toronto, Canada.

adrianne pieczOnKaSoprano

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ludwig van BeethOven (1770-1827)

Beethoven was eighteen years old when the Bastille fell—of an age to be excited by the promise that now all human be-ings could live as free equals. The career of Napoleon, from 1795 onwards, indicated the Revolution would need to be sup-ported by force; Beethoven would have found that same message in contemporary French music, which used the march and other military motifs in a spirit of combat and optimism. He duly placed the name “Buonaparte” on the title page of his “Eroica” Symphony in 1803—but scratched it out the next year, when Napoleon, previously act-ing as first consul of the people, declared himself emperor—and brought his opera Fidelio (1804-5) to its close with a big choral finale in C major and march time, a finale that vastly exceeds the needs of the drama on stage to extend out into the audience as a paean to Revolutionary hope.That is the destination, too, of the symphony Beethoven began at the same time as the opera but did not complete until 1807-8: his Fifth, in C minor. The work’s first move-ment—impelled by its insistent four-note pattern, with only a short, wafting phrase as subsidiary material—seems to be asserting a demand that remains unmet even by the

end of this movement’s lengthy coda, which maintains the minor key. The slow move-ment, in A flat, is relaxed only in speed. By other means—its firm pulse (which might suggest a slow march), its dynamic out-bursts, and its reminiscences of the first movement’s motif—it continues the work’s determination. The scherzo restores both the key and, more directly, the motif of the open-ing movement. There is a break for a trio sec-tion in the major, but, second time round, the scherzo—and with it the whole work—finds its resolution in the C major march of communal triumph that is the finale.By now, the wars in Europe were being fought by rival empires, Austria and her allies being defeated by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) as they would be again at Wagram (1809), the ideals of Revolution forgotten. But not by Beethoven. In Goethe’s Egmont, completed the year before the fall of the Bastille, he found a drama matching the aspirations that had helped form his music—aspirations that power must serve progress, that oppression must be overcome, that the future must be one of equality in peace and joy. The play is a tragedy; Egmont’s mistress Klärchen kills herself, and Egmont himself is condemned to death. But the audience is left with the

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rousing words of the hero’s final speech: “Forward, brave people! The goddess of lib-erty leads you on!”Beethoven readily accepted, in the immedi-ate aftermath of Wagram, an invitation to write incidental music for a production of Egmont in Vienna, and produced his strong-est work for the theatre after Fidelio: a power-ful overture, four symphonic movements as interludes, two songs and a threnody for Klärchen, and a melodrama (music to en-gage with the speaking voice) for Egmont. The incidental scores Beethoven wrote later are much less significant, though he did pro-vide exceptional melodramas (among other pieces) for August von Kotzebue’s König Stephan in 1811, and four years later or-chestrated the slow movement of his A flat piano sonata, Op. 26, for Johann Friedrich Duncker’s Leonore Prohaska, which, like Egmont, concerns a war of liberation.Goethe’s Egmont is rarely presented now, these other plays probably never. Beethoven’s Egmont music is sometimes given in concert with an actor as Egmont, but that solution is not ideal, for several reasons. Egmont, only speaking, and Klärchen, only singing, exist on different planes. The five-act drama is hard to conflate. And any conflation will lose the epic

sweep of history to which Beethoven was responding.Hence The General, an attempt to create a new drama between actor and orchestra, a drama that will carry, for modern audi-ences, the weight of recent events, and that resituates Beethoven’s music—Beethoven’s hope—in the world of the present, even at a moment of extreme inhumanity. The protag-onist is not a remote figure but a man of our own times: Roméo Dallaire, head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1993-4, who could see catastrophe approaching, tried to prevent it, and was refused the means. He is the general. But his struggles—to support the endangered, to enlist the powers of the rich and privileged to protect the poor, not to ignore, by no means to ignore—are not his alone. These are our responsibilities, ours in general.The original idea, which came from Kent Nagano, seemed too enormous a challenge. Beethoven’s music is powerful, progressive and massively optimistic. Right will prevail. Liberty, though opposed and necessitating sacrifices, will triumph. The Rwanda story, on the other hand, was one of brutality and in difference. How could these two be brought together? I arrived at some guiding principles.

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After studying Dallaire’s memoir and other testimony, I decided the story would have to be told without specifying names or places. I also felt that words and music would have to be in dialogue, which would mean involving the actor closely with the orchestra as much as possible. And I took confidence from the belief that hope, which is almost the sub-stance of Beethoven’s music, must go on, even when we are contemplating the very worst we can do. Indeed, then most of all.Practicalities. The need for more dialogue led me to König Stephan; there also had to be more slow, elegiac music, which came from there and from Leonore Prohaska. Much more difficult was the question of how to end. Beethoven closed Egmont with a Victory Symphony, which repeats the last, affirma-tive minute or so of the overture. Our con-clusion would have to be different. I wanted a choral hymn, and found exactly what was needed in the Opferlied, a rarely performed late Beethoven piece for soprano, chorus and orchestra—in the music, that is, not the words.

In writing new words for the Opferlied, and in writing those for the actor, I was guided by the music. For example, the Andante maes-toso in No.2 is a gradual clarification, which the General then identifies as having taken place in his mind. And there are many pas-sages where the words were written so that the following musical phrase would seem to illustrate them. That had to be so, espe-cially, in the two big melodramas: No.9 (from Egmont) and No.13 (from König Stephan). In both the music is strongly dramatic; in both, too, the music goes through several changes of mood. All this had to be justified by the new text. I deliberately placed these movements relatively late (the first a little after the halfway point, the second precipi-tating the end) and made them sequences of self examination, which would allow shifts of view and moments of decision. In No.9 the General arrives at a recognition of his true position and loses hope. In No.13 he recovers hope through anger. The situations are, of course, very different from those for which the music was written. The trajector-ies, though, are parallel.

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The text for The General is dedicated to Kent Nagano and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, who commissioned it for perform-ances given in Montréal on 16-17 January, 2007. Those performances proved, and now this recording does so again, how forcefully Beethoven can speak to us—we who live, as he did, in a time of vast political disappoint-ment, rapid technological advance, and in-cessant war.© Paul Griffiths

Narration and song lyrics available on www.analekta.com

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Orchestre symphOnique de mOntréal

First violinsRichard Roberts, principal concertmaster Gregory Ahss, guest concertmaster (The General) Arkady Gutnikov, guest concertmaster (Symphony No.5) Luis Grinhauz, assistant concertmaster Ramsey Husser, 2nd assistant Marc Béliveau Marie Doré Marianne Dugal Sophie Dugas Xiao-Hong Fu Marie Lacasse Jean-Marc Leblanc Ingrid Matthiessen Myriam Pellerin Susan Pulliam Claire Segal Eva Svensson

Second violinsRénald L’Archevêque, principal Marie-André Chevrette, associateBrigitte Rolland, 1st assistantAnn ChowVictor EichenwaldMary Ann FujinoJohannes JansoniusRenaud LapierreJean-Marc LeclercIsabelle LessardAlison Mah-Poy

Katherine PalygaSara PistolesiMonique PoitrasGratiel RobitailleDaniel Yakymyshyn

Violas Neal Gripp, principal Jean Fortin, 1st assistantCharles Meinen, 2nd assistantChantale BoivinWilma HosAnna-Belle MarcotteRémi Nakauchi PelletierVéronique PotvinDavid QuinnNatalie RacineBertrand RobinRosemary Shaw

CellosBrian Manker, principal Pierre Djokic, acting associateGary Russell, acting 1st assistant Karen BaskinLi-Ke ChangSylvie LambertGerald MorinSylvain MurrayMichael NicolasPeter Parthun

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Basses Brian Robinson, acting solo Eric Chappell, acting associateJacques BeaudoinScott FelthamAndrew HortonLindsey MeagherPeter RosenfeldEdouard Wingell

Flutes Timothy Hutchins, principal Denis Bluteau, associateCarolyn Christie, 2nd Virginia Spicer, piccolo

Oboes Theodore Baskin, principal Margaret Morse, associateAlexa Zirbel, 2nd Pierre-Vincent Plante, English horn

Clarinets Robert Crowley, principal Alain Desgagné, associateMichael Dumouchel, 2nd and E flat clarinetAndré Moisan, bass clarinet and saxophone

Bassoons Stéphane Lévesque, principalMathieu Harel, associateMartin Mangrum, 2nd

Mark Romatz, contrabassoon

Horns John Zirbel, principal Denys Derome, associateJohn Milner, 3rd

Jean Gaudreault, 4nd Nadia Côté

TrumpetsPaul Merkelo, principal Russell Devuyst, associateJean-Luc Gagnon, 2nd

TrombonesJames Box, principal Vivian Lee, 2nd Pierre Beaudry, bass trombone principal

TubaDennis Miller, principal

Timpani Andrei Malashenko, principal Jacques Lavallée, assistant

PercussionSerge Desgagnés, principal

HarpJennifer Swartz, principal

Music Library Michel Léonard

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OSM Chorus Marika Kuzma, Chorus Director

SopranosMarie-Noël DaigneaultMarnie ReckenbergMarie MagistryStéphanie Pothier

AltosCatharine MurrayJosée LalondeGilda SalomoneMarie-Annick BéliveauMarie-Josée Goyette

TenorsDavid BensonBernard CayouetteJean-Guy ComeauMichel Léonard

BassesGeoffroy SalvasNormand RichardAlain DuguayAlfred Lagrenade

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The GeneralRecorded in September 2007, January and February 2008 Studio MMR, McGill University (Montréal).Symphony No.5Recorded in February 2008 Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier (Place des Arts, Montréal).Producer: Wilhelm Hellweg Producer, Sound Engineer, mix and mastering: Carl Talbot Conductor in residence and artistic director’s assistant (OSM): Jean-François Rivest Sound Engineer: Martin Léveillée Assistant Engineers : Jeremy Tusz, François Goupil, Pascal Shefteshy Editor: Jeremy TuszAcknowledgements: Mari KodamaNarrationRecorded in March 2008, at Studio Audio ZSound Engineers: Alexandre Wang-Legentil, Martin Rouillard

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Executive Producer, Artistic Director: Mario LabbéAssistant Executive Producer: Julie Fournier Photo Kent Nagano (cover): © Jean-François Gratton Photo Adrianne Pieczonka: © Johannes IfkovitsPhoto OSM: © Nicolas RuelProofreading: Rédaction Lyre, Jacques-André HouleDesign and graphic production: Concept IS

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