Izmir Festival > Program > Musical Meeting in the Heaven of Healing FAZIL SAY & İZBB AHMED ADNAN SAYGUN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

NIL VENDITTI, conductor

“She has a great capacity for concentration and communication with the musicians, as well as magnetism and charisma, but also an enormous authority that is well understood and respected.” Scherzo, November 2022 

Italian-Turkish conductor Nil Venditti is fast establishing relationships with important orchestras and ensembles around the world. Highlights from recent seasons include collaborations with Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Dresdner Philharmonie, Castilla y León Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, and Irish National Opera as well as Orchestra della Toscana, where she was Principal Guest Conductor from June 2020 until May 2022. 

In the 2023/24 season, Venditti makes her debuts with Konzerthaus Berlin and the Tyrolean Symphony Orchestra Innsbruck in Germany and Austria; Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Tapiola Sinfonietta and the Royal Swedish Opera (for a new production of Don Giovanni) in the Nordics; the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the UK; and a double debut in Japan with the Nagoya Philharmonic and Hiroshima Symphony orchestras.

She continues her relationships with BBC’s National Orchestra of Wales (with three

engagements across the season), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Royal Northern Sinfonia, and returns to Stuttgart Opera, following her debut with the orchestra last season, for a production of Rigoletto.

With a strong affinity for Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Beethoven, Venditti’s interests are expanding to the Romantic repertoire. In recent seasons her interest in contemporary programming has seen her focus on the works of Fazil Say (whose Symphony No.5 she premiered at the Bremen Musikfest), Fabien Waksman, Lepo Sumera and Caroline Shaw.

She continues to excel in the operatic genre, having conducted operas from Mozart’s Così fan tutte to Peter Maxwell-Davies’ The Lighthouse.

Venditti is an advocate for finding inclusive experiences for new audiences. She has

championed Nicola Campogrande’s Concerto for Audience and Orchestra, originally

commissioned for the Philharmonie de Paris. In June 2022, Nil conducted Irish National Opera’s first virtual reality community opera Out of the Ordinary, which was developed for and with people living across Ireland, placing communities at the centre of the opera creation process. 

Venditti trained in conducting at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste under the guidance of Professor Johannes Schlaefli, as well as attending the Conducting Academy associated with the Pärnu Music Festival under  Paavo Järvi , Neeme Järvi and Leonid Grin. In Italy, she graduated in cello performance with Francesco Pepicelli and orchestral conducting with Marcello Bufalin.

 

FAZIL SAY, piano

Fazıl Say is one of the most renowned classical music artists with more than a hundred concerts in five continents in every year. Say completed his education at Hacettepe University’s State Conservatory in Ankara and Düsseldorf’s Schumann Academy. His teachers were Mithat Fenmen and Kamuran Gündemir, major music pedagogues in Turkey. He also worked with David Levine in Germany.

After winning first prize in the Young Concert Artists Competition in New York in 1994, his concert life started. He has worked with major orchestras and conductors on many concert platforms worldwide, and in particular with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Fazil Say has been artist in residence for several organisations – such as Konzerthaus Dortmund, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Zürcher Kammerorchester, Dresdner Philharmonic.

In addition to solo recitals, he has worked with Maxim Vengerov, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and Sabine Meyer, creating duo’s and touring the globe.

His CD’s include many different composers, from Bach to Stravinsky, Mozart to

Ravel, and from Beethoven to Chopin and Mussorgsky. Say has also  won more than 30 awards.

He has won Echo Awards four times as a pianist and composer, and in December 2016,he received the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights, Peace, Freedom, Poverty Reduction and Inclusion, in Bonn. In the autumn of 2017, he was awarded the city of Duisburg’s Music Prize and he has also won a Gramophone Classical Music Award.

Fazıl Say has focused on composing in recent years. His compositions include “İstanbul”, “Mesopotamia”, “Universe” and “Hope” Symphonies, “1001 Nights in the Harem” violin concerto, “Hezarfen” ney concerto, “Silk Road”, “Water” and “Silence of Anatolia piano concertos, along with several orchestral works - such as “Nirvana Burning”, “Overture 1914”, “Four Preludes”, “Symphonic Dances”, and “Grand Bazaar”.

Fazil has composed and recorded many chamber music works, including “Divorce”, “4 Cities Sonata”, and “Space Jump” . These works have also been included in the repertoire of many other different artists.

“Nâzım Oratorio”, “Metin Altıok”, “Sait Faik” and “Hermias” are among his Turkish works that integrate literature and music. He started to work on “First Songs” and “ New Songs” projects in his youth, and these took their place among the best-seller albums from 2012 to 2015. He has also recorded “Autumn Songs” ( 2017), The Secret of This World (2020), and Dünya Anne ( 2023).

Fazil Say’s album of Beethoven’s Complete Sonatas was performed in concert in 2020. Say had been working on this project for two years, playing all 32 sonatas of Beethoven.

The artist recorded over a hundred works from four generations of Turkish Composers during the first months of 2021, focussing on composition and recording works during the pandemic period, and presenting this archival work to the audience.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37

Allegro con brio

Largo

Rondo. Allegro

 

Beethoven composed this work in 1799-1800, and introduced it in Vienna on April 5, 1803. The first sketches go back to 1797 -- after he’d composed the B flat Piano Concerto (published as No. 2), but before composition of the C major Concerto (in 1798, published as No. 1). Although Beethoven played the first performance of No. 3 in 1803 from a short score -- no one was going to steal it from him! -- he’d actually completed the music prior to April 1800, apart from a few last-minute adjustments. In other words, before he wrote the Second Symphony (Op. 36), the Moonlight Piano Sonata (Op. 27/2), or the Op. 31 triptych for keyboard.

The model for this startlingly dramatic concerto was Mozart’s C minor (K. 491), which

Beethoven played in public concerts. But ‘model’ does not mean he merely imitated; indeed, the orchestra’s traditional first exposition is so extensively developed that the soloist’s repetition risks sounding anticlimactic. Otherwise, as Charles Rosen has written with formidable insight in The Classical Style, “There are many passages in the first movement, Allegro con brio, which allude to Mozart’s concerto in the same key...particularly the role of the piano after the cadenza. But the striking development section, with [a] new melody half-recitative [and] half-aria, is entirely original, as is the new sense of weight to the form.”

Beethoven wrote down that cadenza several years later, to preserve the work’s character and momentum, when implacable deafness seriously disadvantaged his public appearances at the keyboard.

To his contemporaries the slow movement came -- and can still come -- as a shock. Not only did he mark it Largo (which is to say very slowly), in 3/8 time, but chose the remote key of E major (four sharps, vs. C minor’s three flats). Alone, the piano leads off for 11 measures, introducing both the main theme and ornamentation that accompanies it throughout. Here Beethoven anticipated the solo opening of his G major Fourth Concerto five years down the road, although in that work he dispensed with thematic decorations, beautiful as they were (and are) in the Largo of No. 3.

Characteristically, the finale is a rondo Allegro, again in tonic C minor, with a pair of principal themes introduced by the soloist. This movement is rich in humor yet also dramatic, with a passage midway in E major to remind us where we’ve been. Following another (but brief) cadenza, Beethoven switches to C major, accelerates the tempo to Presto, and gives the orchestra the last word. Description by Roger Dettmer

 

Edward Elgar

Enigma Variations, for orchestra, Op. 36

 

Theme. Andante

C.A.E. (C. Alice Elgar, composer’s wife - romantic & delicate)

H.D.S.-P. (Hew David Steuart-Powell, pianist friend - diatonic run)

R.B.T. (Richard Baxter Townshend - low voice portrayed by bassoon)

W.M.B. (William Meath Baker, ‘country squire’, gentleman, scholar)

R.P.A. (Richard Penrose Arnold, self-taught pianist)

Ysobel (Isabel Fitton, viola player - pensive & romantic)

Troyte (Arthur Troyte Griffith - saying the unexpected)

W.N. (Winifred Norbury - characteristic laugh)

Nimrod (August J. Jaeger - discourse on Beethoven’s Pathétique)

Dorabella (Intermezzo) (Dora Penny - dancelike lightness)

G.R.S. (George Robert Sinclair - his dog falling into the river)

B.G.N. (Basil G. Nevinson, amateur cellist - cello solo)

(Romanza) (Lady Mary Lygon on a sea voyage to Australia, throb of engines - throb of drums)

E.D.U. Finale. Allegro (Elgar himself)

 

At the end of an overlong day laden with teaching and other duties, Edward Elgar lit a cigar, sat at his piano and began idling over the keys. To amuse his wife, the composer began to improvise a tune and played it several times, turning each reprise into a caricature of the way one of their friends might have played it or of their personal characteristics. “I believe that you are doing something which has never been done before,” exclaimed Mrs. Elgar. Thus was born one of music’s great works of original conception, and Elgar’s greatest large-scale hit: the Enigma Variations. The enigma is twofold: each of the 14 variations refers to a friend of

Elgar’s, who is depicted by the nature of the music, or by sonic imitation of laughs, vocal inflections, or quirks, or by more abstract allusions. The other enigma is the presence of a larger ‘unheard’ theme which is never stated but which according to the composer is very well known. The identity of the phantom tune left the world with the composer, and guesses have ranged from ‘God Save the King’ to a simple major scale.

This apparatus aside, the variations contain some of the most charming and deeply felt music Elgar ever penned, more than redeeming the work from the status of mere gimmickry.

The main theme is hesitating, lean and haunting, and is reprised with the passionate first variation that represents Caroline, the composer’s wife, a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. The remaining variations are as follows:

II. H.D.S.-P. -- Hew Stuart-Powell, a pianist with whom Elgar played chamber music.

III. R.B.T. -- Richard Townsend, whose vocal pitch would rise when excited.

IV. W.M.B. -- William Baker, who after barking out plans for the day would leave the room with a vigorous door-slam

V. R.P.A. -- Richard Arnold, son of the writer Matthew Arnold, who would punctuate serious discourse with a nervous laugh.

VI. Isobel Fitton, a violist.

VII. Troyte -- Arthur Griffith, an architect and raucous pianist.

VIII. W.N. -- Winifred Norbury, a gracious and gentle friend.

IX. Nimrod -- Augustus Jaeger, Elgar’s close friend. The most beautiful and famous of the variations, this music describes a nighttime walk when Jaeger gave verbal encouragement to composer, recalling Beethoven’s determination in adversity. Jaeger means ‘hunter’ in German, and Nimrod was a biblical hunter.

X. Dorabella -- Dora Penny, whose infectious laugh is depicted in the woodwinds.

XI. G.R.S. -- George Sinclair, an organist depicted frolicking with his bulldog, Dan.

XII. B.G.N. -- Basil Nevinson, a cellist.

XIII. *** -- The identity of this person is not known, but she is thought to have been on an ocean voyage at the time -- this divined from a quote from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.

 

XIV. E.D.U. -- Elgar himself. Edu was Caroline’s nickname for her husband. This heartily extroverted, even boisterous, finale ties together the first variation and the Nimrod themes, as though to suggest that the composer has taken advice to heart and is determined to succeed. The entry of an organ in the final measures brings the work to a confident, happy close. Description by Wayne Reisig