Saturday, December 17, 2022, 8pm
All Saints Parish
1773 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02445

Tickets are $15 general admission, $10 for students and seniors, and free for children 12 & under.

COVID Policy: You do not need to show proof of vaccination or a negative test result to enter All Saints Parish. To ensure the safety of everyone, the members of Brookline Symphony Orchestra are fully vaccinated and we strongly recommend our audience members to wear a mask. Please stay home if you are sick or have COVID-19 symptoms; you have been directed to self-isolate or quarantine; or you are awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test. Note: These policies are subject to change as the COVID-19 pandemic and community transmission rates evolve.

Gabriel Fauré, Pelleas and Melisande

Gabriel Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. His talent became clear when he was a young boy and at the age of nine he was sent to the École Niedermeyer music college in Paris. His teachers included Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, and went on to hold the positions of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire. Meanwhile, he retreated to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition. He was eventually recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day, but during the last twenty years of his life he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80 is a suite derived from incidental music composed for the London production of Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name. The play is about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. Fauré reused some earlier music from incomplete works and enlisted the help of his pupil Charles Koechlin, who orchestrated the music. Fauré later constructed a four-movement suite from the original theater music, orchestrating the concert version himself.

Frédéric Chopin, Piano Concerto No.1, mvt. 1

with Concerto Competition winner Katherine Liu

Frédéric Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote primarily for solo piano. A child prodigy, he completed his musical education and composed his earlier works in Warsaw before leaving Poland at the age of 20, after which he settled in Paris. He supported himself by selling his compositions and by giving piano lessons, for which he was in high demand. Chopin formed a friendship with Franz Liszt and was admired by many of his other musical contemporaries, including Robert Schumann. Piano Concerto No.1 was written when Chopin was twenty years old. It was the first of Chopin's two piano concertos to be published, and was therefore given the designation of Piano Concerto "No. 1" at the time of publication, even though it was actually written immediately after the premiere of what was later published as Piano Concerto No. 2. The piano concerto is dedicated to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, a pianist and composer whose playing Chopin admired.

Katherine Liu, 18, is senior at Wellesley High School. She has received top prizes in numerous national and international piano competitions, including the Arthur Fraser International Piano Competition, the International Piano-E Competition, and the Yamaha USASU International Piano Competition. Katherine has performed as a soloist with several orchestras, including the Concord Orchestra and the Boston Pops. She is also finalist in the National YoungArts Competition and the Vladimir Krainev Moscow International Piano Competition. Over the years, Katherine has worked as an “Advocate for the Arts,” speaking at conferences such as the E. G. Conference in California, the Story Gathering Conference in Tennessee, and the Imagine Solutions Conference in Florida. Since her Carnegie Hall debut in 2015, Katherine has performed several times in the Cartoon Festival at Boston’s Symphony Hall. She also appeared on NPR's From the Top at Jordan Hall in 2016 and performed at the “Lato z chopinem” festival in Poland. Katherine is a fourth-year recipient of the Chopin Foundation scholarship as well as a Davidson Fellow Laureate, which she was awarded for her project in music titled, “Innovation and Worldviews: A Challenge to Consistency and a Call for Change.” In the upcoming concert seasons, she is looking forward to her performance engagement with the South Carolina Philharmonic and her solo recital presented by the Harvard Musical Society.

Katherine has worked with great musicians including Alexander Ghindin, Valery Kuleshov, Kevin Kenner, Alexander Kobrin, Ewa Poblocka, Keith Lockhart, Vladimir Felstman, Rena Shereshevskaya, Boris Berman, Alexander Korsantia, and Garrick Ohlsson. She currently studies under Professor HaeSun Paik at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. In her free time, Katherine enjoys reading, taking long walks, and eating spicy food.

 
Igor Stravinsky, Symphony in C

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as Renard, L'Histoire du soldat, and Les noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassicism. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, and symphony) and drew from earlier styles, especially those of the 18th century. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form and instrumentation.

Symphony in C was written between 1938 and 1940 on a commission from American philanthropist Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. It was a turbulent period of the composer's life, marked by illness and deaths in his immediate family. In 1937, Stravinsky was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which had already forced his wife and two daughters to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Stravinsky's daughter and wife died of their illnesses in November 1938 and March 1939, respectively, followed by Stravinsky's own quarantine and the death of his mother in June 1939. Stravinsky was still mourning the deaths of his family members when World War II forced him to leave Europe. He had written the symphony's first two movements in France and Switzerland. Stravinsky wrote the third movement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the fourth movement in Hollywood, after his emigration to the United States. 

The symphony was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Stravinsky on November 7, 1940. Stravinsky disclaimed any link between his personal experiences and the symphony's content, and the title page bears the dedication: “This symphony, composed to the Glory of God, is dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of its existence.”  Its reception was lukewarm, and it remains something of a Cinderella among his works. Stravinsky would observe drily in later years that it only received as many performances as it did because he conducted them.