Aspen Chamber Symphony
Matthias Pintscher, conductor
Blake Pouliot, violin

Maurice Ravel

Mother Goose Suite

Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Basses Pyrénées, France, on March 7, 1875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. He composed the Mother Goose Suite for piano four-hands in the years 1908–10 and orchestrated the piece in 1911. The original piano version was premiered by a pair of children, six and seven years old, at a concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante in Paris in 1910; a further expansion of the orchestrated piece into a ballet was first performed in January 1912 . The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons (second doubling contrabassoon), two horns, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp, and strings

As an adult Ravel understood the world of childhood as few composers have before or since. Perhaps Ravel, a tiny man who was painfully sensitive about his small stature, felt more comfortable with persons still smaller than himself. His empathy for a child’s point of view is especially apparent in his masterly and charming opera L’enfant et les sortilèges, which deals with the experience of a naughty child whose long-mistreated toys come to life to teach him a lesson. Ravel’s sensitivity is also revealed in his response to a series of illustrations of French fairy tales, which he used as the basis of a suite of simple fourhand piano pieces called Ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose), designed as a gift for Mimi and Jean Godebski, the children of his friends Ida and Cipa Godebski. The children were fairly accomplished pianists, but the work Ravel wrote for the two of them to play together risks slightness of substance in its simplicity of technique. Nonetheless, it is charming and clearly characterized throughout.

The orchestration came about at the instigation of Jacques Rouché, who was the director of the Théâtre des Arts and who hoped to persuade Ravel to write a full-scale ballet to compete with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The piece you hear today is an orchestration of the piano piece without the additional material added for the ballet.

The most famous writer of fairy tales in France was Charles Perrault (1628–1703), who is responsible for adapting many folk tales to the taste of the aristocrats in the court of Louis XIV. Perrault’s 1697 book became known popularly in France as “Mother Goose,” yet Perrault provided only two of the tales for Ravel’s suite: Sleeping Beauty and Tom Thumb.

The Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty depicts one of Perrault’s most famous fairy tales. A pavane is a slow and stately dance in 4/4 time popular in the sixteenth century. The stately music suggests the nobility of the princess as she settles into her enchanted slumber.

The music of Tom Thumb describes a single episode identified by the passage from Perrault’s story: Tom Thumb believed that he would have no difficulty in finding his way home by means of the breadcrumbs which he had strewn wherever he had passed, and was greatly surprised when he could not find a single crumb; the birds had come and eaten them all. Ravel begins the tale with an aimless, wandering figure in the strings that changes meter in each bar, from 2/4 to 3/4 to 4/4 to 5/4 . Tom Thumb meets a group of lost children, whom he shows his clever trail of breadcrumbs before they settle down to sleep. In just four measures, Ravel brilliantly paints the musical image of the birds (solo violin harmonics, twittering piccolo and flute) eating up all the crumbs, so that when the children wake up, not a crumb is to be found. They weep and sob, then slowly start out.

The third movement, Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas, relates a fairly unfamiliar story. A wicked witch turned a princess ugly. Ashamed of her appearance, she hid herself in a distant castle. One day she met a green serpent, who had himself been a handsome prince. They voyage to a country inhabited by Pagodas, tiny people made of jewels, crystal, and porcelain; this turns out to be the country of which the green serpent is king. Eventually both Laideronette and the green serpent are restored to their original form and, of course, they marry. Ravel’s music provides a colorful depiction of one scene in which “the Pagodas and Pagodines began to sing and play on instruments; some had theorbos made of walnut shells; some had violas made of almond shells.”

Conversations of Beauty and the Beast begins with the entrance of the Beauty as the solo clarinet begins its gentle, rocking waltz tune. The low rumble of the contrabassoon represents the Beast. At first the Beauty rejects the Beast’s declarations of love, and he falls sobbing at her feet in a forceful passage for the full orchestra. She begins flirting with him and teasing him as his music becomes more and more impassioned. Suddenly he collapses at her feet (general pause in the orchestra). She takes pity on him and offers her hand; a harp glissando leads to a shimmering melody played in harmonics on the solo violin that depicts the Beast’s transformation into a handsome prince. He thanks the Beauty for having broken the spell that had held him.

The final section of the score is an apotheosis entitled The Fairy Garden. A grave and stately slow waltz gradually builds to joyous fanfares that bring this tale to a close: “...and they all lived happily ever after.” — © Steven Ledbetter

Matthias Pintscher

Assonanza for Violin and Orchestra

Matthias Pintscher was born in Marl, Germany, in 1971. An acclaimed composer and conductor, he has studied with Pierre Boulez and Peter Eotvös, and now teaches composition at The Juilliard School. Assonanza, a violin concerto, was composed in 2021 for Leila Josefowicz and premiered in 2022. In addition to violin solo, the piece is scored for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), oboe doubling English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, piano, celesta, percussion, harp, and strings.

When violinist Leila Josefowicz initially approached her friend Matthias Pintscher in the early 2010s about writing her a violin concerto, he demurred. He had written two violin concertos already within the previous decade—En sourdine in 2002 and Mar’eh in 2010–11—and he worried that he didn’t have anything more to say in the form. Even though Josefowicz was persistent, Pintscher could never find the time between the demands of conducting and other commissions.

Then the Covid pandemic struck, and Pintscher found himself suddenly with nothing but time. Josefowicz seized the moment, asking him, “Why don’t you at least write me a solo piece?” So he sprang into action. “After the initial shock, and then several very dark months, this was a lifesaver,” he told the Cincinnati Symphony’s Fanfare magazine. “That constant interaction with Leila gave me the structure to stop drowning in anxiety and just get up and write.”

That piece, La linea evocativa, is full of haunting tones and fluttering gestures. Josefowicz premiered it in an empty gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in early 2021. Soon after, she called Pintscher again, suggesting that he use the “great material” in it as the basis for her long-sought concerto. “She tricked me,” he laughed. But he once again got to work.

“Assonanza” (assonance) refers to the repetition of similar vowel sounds in poetry. In expanding La linea evocativa, Pintscher chose to treat the orchestra as a kind of “resonance chamber around the soloist,” a creature that repeats and expands her sounds. “It forms an acoustical space that [Josefowicz] walks through,” he said, “sending out signals, colors, timbres, gestures. And the space, as a flexible wall of sound, may accept or reject them. . . . I’ve drawn up materials and textures that allow her to be spontaneous, almost like an opera singer moving freely onstage. I lay out the path, but she is free within certain parameters to make detours and step outside.”

From Josefowicz’s perspective at around the time of the piece’s 2022 premiere, “This piece is a very spiritual, existential work in which the violin is the sorceress—she calls the tribes, the voices, the caverns, the birds in their caves out to respond, she triggers them, she asks them, she seduces them to resonate with her, to join with her, but ultimately, she’s alone.” — © Dan Ruccia

Maurice Ravel

Tzigane, rapsodie de concert

Joseph Maurice Ravel composed his Tzigane for violin and piano for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi. He later orchestrated the accompaniment for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, celesta, percussion, harp, and strings.q

Strictly speaking, there is no international style of “gypsy” music. In the nineteenth century, however, the musical activity of the Roma in Hungary led everyone to equate “Hungarian music” with “gypsy music,” an idea that was spread across the musical world by the Hungarian rhapsodies of Franz Liszt, then taken up by Brahms and other composers before becoming a popular feature of operetta.

Maurice Ravel therefore drew upon a well-established trope of musical exoticism when he wrote Tzigane in 1924 for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi. A grandniece of Joseph Joachim, d’Arányi was one of the leading violinists of her day; Bartók had composed his two sonatas for violin and piano for her a few years earlier. No doubt because of the soloist’s background, Ravel decided to write a work à la Hongroise. The dedicatee was presented with the score only days before the first performance, but she made such a hit with it that Ravel later provided an orchestral version. — © Steven Ledbetter

Johannes Brahms

Symphony No. 3 in F, op. 90

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He completed his Third Symphony during a stay at Wiesbaden in the summer of 1883. Hans Richter led the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance of the F-major symphony on December 2, 1883. The Symphony is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.

By the time Brahms wrote his Third Symphony, he had come to be regarded with great respect by many critics and the public, particularly those who saw in him a bulwark of instrumental abstract music against Wagner’s “Music of the Future.” That is not to say that new works were received with universal acclaim. For one thing, Wagner’s partisans were always as vicious in their denunciations of Brahms as the Brahmsians were in their attacks on the Wagnerian faction. And many well-intentioned music-lovers simply found Brahms’s elusive, complex music unclear and demanding, highly intellectual rather than emotional. When the Third Symphony was performed in the U.S. in the fall of 1884, the response was all too typical: “Like the great mass of the composer’s music, it is painfully dry, deliberate, and ungenial; and like that, too, it is free from all effect of seeming spontaneity.” It is well known that Brahms waited until he was well into his forties before daring to bring forth his First Symphony. But once that hurdle was cleared, he quickly created the Second the following year.

In the summer of 1882 he began his Third Symphony, completing it the next summer. The first performance took place that December in Vienna, where it was well received except for the noisy opposition of a few members of the Wagner camp. In those days, of course, there were neither recordings nor radio broadcasts to carry the sound of a new work beyond the audience that first heard it in the concert hall. Brahms’s friends in other cities—particularly his oldest and dearest friend and confidante, Clara Schumann—were eager to hear the piece. They did not have to wait long; orchestras all over Europe and even the distant United States undertook to perform it in 1884: before the end of the year performances had taken place in Cambridge, Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne, Meiningen, and the United States. For all the immediate fame and success that the Symphony achieved (and for all its influence on Brahms’s contemporaries, including Dvořák and the American George W. Chadwick, whose own Third Symphony is in some ways an homage to this piece), Brahms’s Third is programmed less often than his other symphonies. Every movement ends quietly, including the finale, and this may be one reason why it is rarely heard: audiences are psychologically more attuned to applaud a loud, brilliant finish rather than a quiet close.

The first, second, and fourth movements of the Symphony are linked by the presence of a motto that first appears in the piece’s opening measures: three chords underlying a three-note melody consisting of F rising to A-flat before soaring upward to the F in the higher octave. In this context, A-flat would suggest that the Symphony is to be in F minor, but the chords underlying the first and third pitches have instead an A natural, which suggests (as indeed the score officially decrees) that the Symphony is in F major. From the first three measures, then, the Symphony unfolds an expressive scheme that is constantly playing with the opposition between major and minor, sometimes forcefully, but most often in delicate ways.

The two middle movements are both more gentle, being of the type that Brahms elsewhere chose to call intermezzo. The second movement features a melody that seems almost as simple as a folk song, developed with rich changes in the orchestration. The lyric flow is twice interrupted by a succession of chords that sound vaguely ominous. The cellos sing a gorgeously poignant melody at the opening of the third movement, and the first violins soon take it up. Though this movement lacks specific references to the continuing struggle between A-natural and A-flat, its mood of overall melancholy fits right in with the nature of that harmonic combat.

The finale opens in F minor, giving the impression that the A-flat will ultimately triumph. A chorale-like passage and a succession of motives build a powerful symphonic struggle. But rather than carrying this through to anything like a heroic conclusion, Brahms draws all of the thematic materials of this movement together into a luminous conclusion that finally settles the original question—minor or major?—in favor of the latter.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Matthias Pintscher is the newly appointed Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony (KCS), effective from the 2024–25 season. He launched his tenure with the KCS with a highly successful tour to Europe last August, performing concerts at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonie, and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. Highlights of the 2025–26 season include the world premiere of Pintscher’s new opera Das kalte Herz by the Berlin State Opera, which he will also conduct, and a reprise of the French version of the opera (titled Nuit sans aube) at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in the same season. He returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and will be in his sixth year as creative partner at the Cincinnati Symphony. Pintscher was formerly the music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and has held several titled positions, including BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s artist-in-association, a position he held for nine seasons; music director of the 2020 Ojai Festival; and Season Creative Chair with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. Pintscher is also well known as a composer, and his works have been performed by such orchestras as the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, and many others. He has been on the composition faculty at Juilliard since 2014. Matthias Pintscher is published exclusively by Bärenreiter, and recordings of his works can be found on the labels Kairos, EMI, Teldec, Wergo, and Winter & Winter.

Matthias Pintscher is the newly appointed Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony (KCS), effective from the 2024–25 season. He launched his tenure with the KCS with a highly successful tour to Europe last August, performing concerts at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonie, and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. Highlights of the 2025–26 season include the world premiere of Pintscher’s new opera Das kalte Herz by the Berlin State Opera, which he will also conduct, and a reprise of the French version of the opera (titled Nuit sans aube) at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in the same season. He returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and will be in his sixth year as creative partner at the Cincinnati Symphony. Pintscher was formerly the music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and has held several titled positions, including BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s artist-in-association, a position he held for nine seasons; music director of the 2020 Ojai Festival; and Season Creative Chair with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. Pintscher is also well known as a composer, and his works have been performed by such orchestras as the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, and many others. He has been on the composition faculty at Juilliard since 2014. Matthias Pintscher is published exclusively by Bärenreiter, and recordings of his works can be found on the labels Kairos, EMI, Teldec, Wergo, and Winter & Winter.