BRAVO! VAIL OPENS WITH BEETHOVEN'S EROICA

Sinfónica de Minería Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

Orchestral Series

Thursday, June 20, 2024 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

Sinfónica de Minería opens its historic Bravo! Vail residency with an all-Beethoven program featuring Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 performed by Anne-Marie McDermott and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Eroica, led by Artistic Director Carlos Miguel Prieto.

Did you know?

When Beethoven premiered his Third Piano Concerto, in 1803, it had germinated for seven years but he hadn’t yet notated the piano part completely. Since he would be the soloist, he knew how the piece went, written out or not.

Featured Artists

Carlos Miguel Prieto

conductor

Anne-Marie McDermott

piano

Known for his charisma and expressive interpretations, Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto has established himself not just as a major figure in the orchestra world but also as an influential cultural leader, educator, and a champion of new music. In a significant career development, he will start his tenure as Music Director of the North Carolina Symphony at the beginning of the 2023-24 season.

From 2007 to 2022, he was the music director of the Sinfónica Nacional de México, the country’s leading ensemble, and significantly raised the caliber of the orchestra. He was also music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra since 2006, where he helped lead the cultural renewal of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, stepping down at the end of the 2022-23 season. In 2008, he was appointed music director of the Sinfónica de Minería, a hand-picked orchestra that performs a two-month series of summer programs in Mexico City.

Recent highlights include engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the Hallé, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Spanish National Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Strasbourg Philharmonic, and Auckland Philharmonia.

Prieto is in demand as a guest conductor with many of the top North American orchestras, including Cleveland, Dallas, Toronto, Minnesota, Washington, New World, and Houston Symphony, and has enjoyed a particularly successful relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the North Carolina Symphony.

Prieto made his BBC Proms debut at Royal Albert Hall on August 5, 2023 with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.

Since 2002, alongside Gustavo Dudamel, Prieto has conducted the Orchestra of the Americas (YOA), which draws young musicians from the entire American continent. A staunch proponent of music education, Prieto served as principal conductor of the YOA from its inception until 2011 when he was appointed music director. In 2018 he conducted the orchestra on a tour of European summer festivals, which included performances at the Rheingau and Edinburgh festivals, as well as Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. He has also worked regularly with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the NYO2 in New York.

Prieto is renowned for championing Latin American music, as well as his dedication to new music. He has conducted over 100 world premieres of works by Mexican and American composers, many of which were commissioned by him. Prieto places equal importance on championing works by Black and African American composers such as Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Courtney Bryan, among others.

Prieto has an extensive discography that includes the Naxos and Sony labels. Recent Naxos recordings include Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 & Études tableaux Op.33, with Boris Giltburg and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra RSNO, which won a 2018 Opus Klassik award and was listed as a Gramophone’s Critics’ Choice; and his 2017 recording of Korngold’s Violin Concerto with violinist Philippe Quint and the Sinfónica de Minería received two GRAMMY nominations. His recording of the Elgar and Finzi Violin Concertos with Ning Feng was released on Channel Classics in November 2018.

Prieto was recognized by Musical America as the 2019 Conductor of the Year. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard universities, Prieto studied conducting with Jorge Mester, Enrique Diemecke, Charles Bruck and Michael Jinbo.

Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott is a consummate artist who balances a versatile career as a soloist and collaborator. She performs over 100 concerts a year in a combination of solo recitals, concerti and chamber music. Her repertoire choices are eclectic, spanning from Bach and Haydn to Prokofiev and Scriabin to Kernis, Hartke, Tower and Wuorinen.

With over 50 concerti in her repertoire, Ms. McDermott has performed with many leading orchestra including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Seattle Symphony, National Symphony, Houston Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, Hong Kong Philharmonic, San Diego Symphony, New Jersey Symphony and Baltimore Symphony among others. Ms, McDermott has toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi.

In the recent seasons, Ms. McDermott performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Charlotte Symphony, Huntsville Symphony, Alabama Symphony, San Diego Symphony, the Oregon Mozart Players, and the New Century Chamber Orchestra.

Recital engagements have included the 92nd Street Y, Alice Tully Hall, Town Hall, The Schubert Club, Kennedy Center, as well as universities across the country. Anne-Marie McDermott has curated and performed in a number of intense projects including: the Complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas and Chamber Music, a Three Concert Series of Shostakovich Chamber Music, as well as a recital series of Haydn and Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Most recently, she commissioned works of Charles Wuorinen and Clarice Assad which were premiered in May 2009 at Town Hall, in conjunction with Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

As a soloist, Ms. McDermott has recorded the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas, Bach English Suites and Partitas (which was named Gramophone Magazine’s Editor’s Choice), and most recently, Gershwin Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra with the Dallas Symphony and Justin Brown.

In addition to her many achievements, Anne-Marie McDermott has been named the Artistic Director of the famed Bravo! Vail Music Festival in Colorado, which hosts the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony in addition to presenting over 40 chamber music concerts throughout the summer. She is also Artistic Director of Santa Fe Pro Musica, The Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival, McKnight Chamber Music Festival, and The Avila Chamber Music Celebration in Curacao.

As a chamber music performer, Anne-Marie McDermott was named an artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1995 and performs and tours extensively with CMS each season. She continues a long standing collaboration with the highly acclaimed violinist, Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg. As a duo, they have released a CD titled “Live” on the NSS label and plan to release the Complete Brahms Violin and Piano Sonatas in the future. Ms. McDermott is also a member of the renowned piano quartet, Opus One, with colleagues Ida Kavafian, Steven Tenenbom and Peter Wiley.

She continues to perform each season with her sisters, Maureen McDermott and Kerry McDermott in the McDermott Trio. Ms, McDermott has also released an all Schumann CD with violist, Paul Neubauer, as well as the Complete Chamber Music of Debussy with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Ms. McDermott studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Dalmo Carra, Constance Keene and John Browning. She was a winner of the Young Concert Artists auditions and was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Ms. McDermott regularly performs at Festivals across the United States including, Spoleto, Mainly Mozart, Sante Fe, La Jolla Summerfest, Mostly Mozart, Newport, Caramoor, Bravo, Chamber Music Northwest, Aspen, Music from Angelfire, and the Festival Casals in Puerto Rico, among others.

Carlos Miguel Prieto, conductor
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 3, Eroica

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 - 1827)

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo: Allegro

A music-lover listening to Beethoven’s C-minor Piano Concerto may entertain recollections of an earlier C-minor Piano Concerto, the brooding, even despairing one that Mozart composed in 1786. During Mozart’s lifetime, however, it could be played only from manuscript parts. It was not published until 1800, the same year Beethoven brought the first movement of his own C-minor Piano Concerto into reasonably finished form. Beethoven was an admirer of the Mozart work. Walking with the pianist-and-composer Johann Baptist Cramer, he overheard an outdoor performance (or perhaps a rehearsal) of Mozart’s C-minor Concerto. He is reputed to have stopped in his tracks, called attention to a particularly beautiful motif, and exclaimed, with a mixture of admiration and despondency, “Cramer, Cramer! We shall never be able to do anything like that!” “As the theme was repeated and wrought up to the climax”— according to the account of Cramer’s widow—“Beethoven, swaying his body to and fro, marked the time and in every possible manner manifested a delight rising to enthusiasm.”

On April 2, 1800, at Vienna’s Burgtheater, Beethoven undertook his first benefit concert (in those days, a benefit concert being understood to mean “for the benefit of the composer”). He planned to unveil his C-minor Piano Concerto on that high-profile occasion but managed to complete only the stormy first movement and a detailed sketch of the second by the time the date arrived. He stopped working on the piece until the opportunity for another prominent concert arose, which it did in 1802. But for some reason that concert was canceled, and again Beethoven devoted himself to other more immediately profitable projects rather than finish his concerto.

By the time he completed the noble second movement and the rather jaunty third, the composition of the C-minor Concerto stretched over some three and a half years, not including preliminary sketches, which reached back to 1796—plus a further year if you count the time it took him to actually write out the piano part, and yet another five beyond that until he wrote down the first-movement cadenza. Neither of these last two was necessary as long as Beethoven was the soloist; he knew how the piece should go, after all. Nonetheless, the fragmentary state of the piano score caused considerable stress for Beethoven’s colleague Ignaz von Seyfried, who served as page-tuner at the premiere. “He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages,” Seyfried reported, “and my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly and he laughed heartily during the jovial supper which we ate afterwards.”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55,
Sinfonia Eroica
Allegro con brio
Marcia funebre: Adagio assai
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
Finale: Allegro molto—Poco andante
Presto

Beethoven was a partisan of noble humanitarian principles, joining those who saw the democratic ideals of ancient Greece reflected in the aspirations of the Jacobins of post-Revolutionary France. At the head of the Jacobins was Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Beethoven viewed as a repository of hope for the social enlightenment of humankind.

At the urging of the future King of Sweden, Beethoven began contemplating a musical celebration of Napoleon as early as 1797. As his sketches coalesced into a symphony, he resolved not to simply dedicate his composition to Napoleon, but to name it after him. In the spring of 1804, just as he completed his symphonic tribute, news arrived that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, that the standard-bearer of republicanism had seized power as an absolutist dictator. Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries wrote: “He flew into a rage, shouting, ‘Is even he nothing but an ordinary man! Now he will also trample upon human rights and become a slave to his own ambition; now he will set himself above all other men and become a tyrant.’ Beethoven went to the table, grabbed the top of the title-page, tore it in two, and threw it to the floor. The first page was re-written and the symphony was then for the first time given the title of Sinfonia Eroica.”

When the piece was published, it was presented as Sinfonia Eroica ... per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo (Heroic Symphony ... to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man), and the work’s dedication, originally intended for Napoleon, was given instead to Beethoven’s patron Prince Lobkowitz. It became a leitmotif in Beethoven’s life that individuals would fail to live up to his idealizations, and that he would prefer Mankind in the abstract to Man in the flesh.

At first, critical response was guarded. On February 13, 1805, readers of Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung ingested this report: “The reviewer belongs to Herr van Beethoven’s sincerest admirers, but in this composition he must confess that he finds too much that is glaring and bizarre, which hinders greatly one’s grasp of the whole, and a sense of unity is almost completely lost.” The same critic maintained that the piece “lasted an entire hour” (italics his). That comment was an exaggeration, but the Eroica was nonetheless the longest symphony ever written when it was unveiled. “If I write a symphony an hour long,” Beethoven is said to have countered, “it will be found short enough.” Reviews of the piece quickly turned favorable, or at least respectful, as critics started to make sense of its more radical elements and accept it as one of the summit achievements in all of music.