This Saturday evening at 8pm and Sunday afternoon at 2:30pm, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra presents a pair of concerts in the M&T Bank Classics Series titled “Viennese Masters,” featuring works by Franz Schreker, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The BPO is currently recording three Strauss works for release on the Naxos label. The last pair of BPO concerts featured exciting performances of the first two Strauss works to be recorded, the Symphonic Fantasy: Woman Without a Shadow (based on music from Strauss’ opera Die Frau ohne Schatten) and the Symphonic Fragment: Legend of Joseph (Josephs Legende), with both works receiving their BPO premieres. The Strauss work on this weekend’s concerts is the far better known and much loved Suite from Der Rosenkavalier.

Richard Strauss was a highly successful composer from an early age. His very well received orchestral works such as the tone poem Don Juan were followed by dark, heavily emotional operas such as Salome and Elektra when in 1910 he composed the charmingly lighter opera Der Rosenkavalier. Set to the libretto by his longtime collaborator the Austrian poet Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, the enormously successful opera is set in 18th century Vienna during the reign of the Empress Maria Theresa. In the opera, a princess, the Marschallin, is pursued by her boorish suitor, Baron Ochs, who is finally bested by the Marschallin’s young lover Octavian. The bittersweet ending finds the Marschallin, a ‘woman of a certain age’, realizing that, she too, will eventually lose her lover Octavian to a younger woman. The Suite in the BPO program was arranged by the composer himself, and though centered on the beautifully florid waltzes that every listener will find him or herself humming on the way home, includes more of the music from the love sequences than the arrangements by other hands.

The rarity on the program is a selection of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn) by Gustav Mahler. The work has been performed only once before by the BPO, back in 1977, when Michael Tilson Thomas was on the podium and Jessye Norman was one of the soloists.

Mahler currently is more highly regarded as a composer than he was during his lifetime and for many decades after his death. Though he is most thought of as a composer of magnificent, monumental symphonies, almost everything that he wrote is song-like, sometimes deriving explicitly from the various song cycles that he composed during the early part of his career. No work was more important to Mahler as a source of literary inspiration than the collection of folk songs, poetry and prose known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim published the massive collection in the first decade of the 19th century to instant acclaim, winning the praise, no less, of Goethe, the greatest living German author, who thought the massive collection contained the volksseele, or soul of the German people.

JoAnn Falletta explained in a recent interview the particular importance that Des Knaben Wunderhorn held for Mahler. “When Mahler was appointed the assistant conductor at Leipzig in 1886, he moved into the house of Captain Carl von Weber. The captain was the grandson of the great composer of the same name, and he hired Mahler to complete “Die Drei Pintos,” an unfinished opera by his grandfather. Weber’s wife, Marion Mathilde, gave the young Mahler a copy of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Gustav and Marion eventually developed a relationship and planned an elopement. Marion had a last minute change of heart, and Mahler was left standing at the station.” While Mahler lost his love, he kept the book that she gave him, and that perhaps accounts, at least in part, for the poignancy of some of the many songs that he composed based on it.

Mahler never developed a specific sequence for performing the songs. Henry-Louis de La Grange, the most distinguished biographer of the composer, writes that when the Dutch baritone Johannes Messchaert, the first person to perform all the songs (in 1907) asked him in what order they should be performed Mahler told him “to make up his own mind about the sequence.” Falletta observed, “Since we could not perform all the songs due to the overall length of the piece, I got together with the soloists, soprano Cristina Nassif and baritone Tom Barrett, to make a balanced selection arranged in a sequence that makes dramatic sense. The arrangement of numbers that we agreed upon should be helped by the singers, who in addition to being very talented vocalists are also great actors who will be able to convey the meaning of the texts.” The songs of love and war are treated with affection, irony and tragic realism without a hint of quaintness or picturesque Romanticism.

The program opens with Franz Schreker’s short Prelude to a Drama, a BPO premiere. Falletta explained, “Schreker was an amazing musician who developed a new, very lush, hyper-romantic language for the orchestra. In some sense, he bridges the gap between the musical language of Strauss and that of Schoenberg.”

JoAnn Falletta has gone from strength to strength in her tenure as the Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. While discussing the amazing amount of works being performed this season that have never before been performed by the BPO, Falletta observed, “The musicians are working harder than ever learning works new to the orchestra, but they enjoy it.” Thanks to the talents and dedication of Falletta and the musicians of the BPO, area music lovers are also able to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

For more information: bpo.org or phone 885-5000.

Pacifica Quartet at UB

Pacifica Quartet

The Pacifica Quartet will return to the area for the first time since 2004, on Sunday March 30, at 7pm, to present the fifth concert in the complete Slee Beethoven Quartet Cycle in the Lippes Concert Hall of Slee Hall on the University at Buffalo Amherst campus. UB Professor James Currie will present a pre-concert lecture at 6:15pm prior to the 7pm performance of the Pacifica String Quartet. The members of the Pacifica Quartet, Sibbi Bernhardsson and Simin Ganatra, violins; Masumi Per Rostad, viola, and Brandon Vamos, cello, have moved to near the top of the American string quartet scene in a relatively short time since their founding in 1994. The group has won top prizes in several leading international competitions from the Cleveland Quartet Award to the Naumburg, and it was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2006, only the second chamber music ensemble ever to be selected.

Commissioning new works annually and performing contemporary music on a regular basis, the Pacifica Quartet is a champion of the string quartets of Elliott Carter. The ensemble has distinguished itself with performances of the complete cycle of five quartets by Carter in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Cleveland, and abroad in Japan and Germany and at the Edinburgh International Festival. In January 2008, the Quartet released the first in a two-disc set of the complete string quartets of Carter, released on the Naxos label in celebration of the composer’s 100th birthday.

The Tokyo String Quartet raised the bar for Beethoven string quartet performance during its three-day residency at UB in February. The Pacifica Quartet has already performed many complete Beethoven String Quartet cycles in its career, and it may well be the most likely young American string quartet now performing to reach, or even someday exceed, that lofty standard.

Advanced tickets for the concert are priced at $12, with discounts for senior citizens ($9), and students ($5). At the door, tickets purchased will be $20, with discounts for senior citizens ($15), and students ($8). Advanced tickets can be obtained at the Slee Hall box office Monday through Friday between 9am and 4pm, the Center for the Arts box office (Monday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm), or at any Ticketmaster outlet.

For further information, please visit the website: slee.buffalo.edu. Phone 645-2921