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今回、幸運にも貯めたANAマイルで発券したスターアライアンス特典航空券にてファーストクラスで世界１周をしてきました。タイ・バンコクを最初の目的地として、ミュンヘン・ウィーン・ブダペスト、そしてニューヨークを巡ります。タイ国際航空、ルフトハンザ航空、ANAと計4回のファーストクラスにも搭乗しました。

これまでの世界1周旅行記については、下のボタンをクリックしてご覧下さい。

2019年世界１周旅行記

1位　ベルリン・フィルハーモニー管弦楽団
2位　バイエルン放送交響楽団
3位　ロイヤル・コンセルトヘボウ管弦楽団
4位　ウィーン・フィルハーモニー管弦楽団
5位　ドレスデン国立管弦楽団（シュターツカペレ）
6位　パリ管弦楽団
7位　シカゴ交響楽団
8位　ロンドン交響楽団
9位　マーラー室内管弦楽団
10位　ドイツ・カンマーフィルハーモニー・ブレーメン
11位　ベルリン国立管弦楽団（シュターツカペレ）
12位　ボストン交響楽団

FRANZ LISZT
Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514

Franz Liszt was a man of exceptional energy, active throughout his life as a pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher, with constant commitments in France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary. He was a lifelong reviser of his own music, so it is never clear which piece he was working on at any given moment. Many works were sketched, drafted, completed, revised, and revised again before being published or performed, and even then were often subject to more revision. His output of original compositions and transcriptions of various kinds being so vast, it is likely that his mind, if not his desk, was a traffic jam of complete and incomplete pieces at all times. For many pieces there are no precise dates of composition; he allowed several at a time to take shape in parallel, working now on one, now on another. The nearest estimate for the composition of the Mephisto Waltz No. 1 remains “between 1856 and 1861,” no more precise facts (including for a date of first performance) being accessible to the most searching modern scholarship. Its other title is “The Dance at the Village Inn,” published as the second of Two Episodes from Lenau’s Faust.

Poet Nikolaus Lenau (1802–1850) is best-known to musicians for these pieces and for Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan. He and Liszt probably never met, but the latter’s interest in this particular Faust concentrated on two scenes that were not represented in his three-movement Faust Symphony, completed in 1857 and derived purely from Goethe. The first is a “Night Procession,” while the second (which also exists as a solo piano piece) depicts a village wedding where Mephistopheles seizes the violin from a strolling fiddler and strikes up a wild, diabolic dance. The assembled company leap to their feet and whirl around. They pair off, Faust pressing the hand of a brunette and leading her out through the open door into the night.

The violin’s open strings are heard being strummed at the beginning, leading into the main dance, marked rustico, with its heavy, demonic energy. There follows a tender theme on the cellos, and the air fills with fantastic flutterings. For a while the dance is heard returning, then a wild outburst leads to an accumulation of energy, which subsides for the softer, atmospheric music of the nightingale and the murmuring of the trees outside. The piece has a possessed character, with a brilliant portrayal not only of the dance, but also of Mephistopheles’s sinister power over the mind of Faust. It was a subject into which Liszt could readily pour the best of himself. Some 20 years later, he composed a second Mephisto Waltz, again either for orchestra or for piano solo.

—Hugh Macdonald

THOMAS ADÈS
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

Thomas Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was composed for soloist Kirill Gerstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra through the generous support of Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser, and through the generous support of the New Works Fund established by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. This is Adès’s second work for piano and full orchestra. The first, In Seven Days (2008), has been one of several vehicles for collaboration between Adès and Gerstein. It was with that piece that Gerstein made his Boston Symphony Orchestra subscription series debut, under Adès’s direction, in November 2012. They recently devised and performed a two-piano recital program, heard last summer at Tanglewood and last week in Boston and here at Carnegie Hall. Last month in recital, Gerstein gave the world premiere of a new solo work by Adès, a Berceuse from his 2017 opera, The Exterminating Angel.

Adès’s In Seven Days was a piano concerto doubling as tone poem, the narrative impetus for which was the creation myth from the Book of Genesis. His new Concerto for Piano and Orchestra—as its unleavened title hints—comes from the abstract heart of the genre. The three-movement, fast-slow-fast overall form, within-movement architecture, and use of clearly audible motifs have their foundations in the tradition of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Adès’s individual musical voice is readily heard in his characteristically brilliant approach to orchestration and in the organic harmonic flow. The physical, dancing basis for the concerto’s rhythm and meter, carefully notated to insure flexibility from the performers, is a further Adès hallmark. Rigorous craft in the service of musical fluidity and expressiveness are the fundamental tenets of Adès’s art.

This month’s premiere performances of the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in Boston and at Carnegie Hall represent a high point in Adès’s tenure, just recently extended from three to five years, as artistic partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a position that will now continue through the 2020–2021 season. Adès and Gerstein will present the European premiere of the concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on April 25 and 26, 2019.

—Robert Kirzinger

In the Composer’s Own Words

The first-movement Allegramente opens with a statement of the theme by piano and then tutti. A march-like bridge passage leads to the more expressive second subject, first played by the piano and then taken up by the orchestra. The development section interrogates the first theme before an octave mini-cadenza leads to the recapitulation, played fortissimo. There is then a solo cadenza based on the second subject, first played tremolo and then over many octaves, the piano joined first by horn and then by the full orchestra. The movement ends with a coda based on the first theme and the march.

The second movement, marked Andante gravemente, consists of a chordal introduction and a melody, which is joined by a countermelody, and a second idea with a simple falling melody over rising harmony. The first melody reappears, leading to a fortissimo climax, subsiding to a final statement of the original theme and a coda based on the countermelody.

The finale, marked Allegro giojoso, begins with a three-chord call to arms, and then a tumbling theme for piano and orchestra, which is interrupted by the blustering entry of a clarinet solo, heralding a burlesque canon. There is a good deal of argument, with frequent differences of opinion regarding the key, brought to an end by the call to arms. Eventually the piano takes up a new theme in the style of a ball bouncing downstairs and develops it to a chorale climax. The tumbling material is developed, and the call to arms is heard in multiple directions, leading to an impasse, a winding down of tempo, and a new slow (Grave) section in triple time with a new falling theme. This leads to a precipice which the piano falls off with the original tumbling theme, and a coda that lines up all the other themes for a final resolution on the call to arms.

—Thomas Adès

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s intensely dramatic Fourth Symphony was a breakthrough work for the composer. Written in 1877–1878, shortly after Swan Lake but before his other best-known works, it featured a formal complexity and emotional depth unprecedented in his earlier symphonies. Premiered on March 4, 1878, in Moscow, with Nikolai Rubinstein conducting, the work became one of the composer’s favorites, and together with his concurrently composed opera Eugene Onegin helped spread his name abroad.

The symphony was dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s patroness Nadezhda von Meck, an extremely wealthy and cultured woman who had recently initiated an intense correspondence with the composer and who began to sponsor him financially in the fall of 1877. In one of the frequent updates he sent her on what he referred to as “our” symphony, Tchaikovsky provides a detailed and dramatic program that has long colored interpretation of the Fourth Symphony. He describes the work’s monumental first movement—at 20 minutes, almost as long as the other three movements combined—as a musical depiction of the inevitability of fate, to him a brutal force “which prevents the impulse to happiness from attaining its goal, which jealously ensures that peace and happiness shall not be complete and unclouded, which hangs above the head like the sword of Damocles, unwaveringly, constantly poisoning the soul.” Many see in this dramatic program a reflection of Tchaikovsky’s extreme trauma from his brief and disastrous marriage in the summer of 1877 to a female admirer he hardly knew; musicological research shows the relationship between this event and the composition of the symphony is quite different and more complex than popularly imagined, but nonetheless evidenced.

The symphony’s first movement compellingly conveys Tchaikovsky’s fatalistic concept through a skillful adaptation of sonata form structured around a recurring “fate” motif. This motif, a blaring brass fanfare, opens the movement dramatically. After two striking fortissimo chords, the first theme, representing “gloomy and hopeless feelings,” is presented in the strings, and indeed creates a sense of obsessive rumination with its repetitive recycling of a syncopated chromatic motif. The fitful second theme, which represents taking “refuge in dreams,” pairs a meandering clarinet line with an arc of chromatic flurries in the woodwinds before being joined by a languid string melody. A major-key third theme—representing for Tchaikovsky a “sweet and gentle daydream”—pairs a lyrical woodwind melody in thirds with a brighter transformation of the first theme. The exposition is driving unsteadily to a triumphant climax when it is cut short by the unexpected return of the dire fate motif in the brass. The subsequent development, recapitulation, and coda sections each meet with the same end, of interruption by increasingly grand and terrifying restatements of the fate motif just as they are moving towards more joyful territories. Altogether, the movement fittingly depicts Tchaikovsky’s summary of it: “And so all life is an unbroken alternation of harsh reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness … No haven exists … Drift upon that sea until it engulfs and submerges you in its depths.”

Though the fate motif returns again in the finale, the symphony’s remaining movements are not nearly as dark as the first. The second, which evokes Russian folk tunes with its plaintive oboe melody and chordal string chorus, creates an atmosphere of melancholic nostalgia that is lightened by the recurrence of a spirited woodwind melody. The playful third-movement Scherzo is framed by the strings’ lighthearted, purely pizzicato passages and contains a trio marked with speedily buoyant piccolo flourishes and hints of a passing military procession. The Finale presents variations on a Russian folk song in a vigorous, upbeat frame that represents the “festive merriment of ordinary people” and refuses to be halted by the recurring fate motif, suggesting a potential path toward fulfillment in community.

—Claudia Carrera