One of only two wind players to have been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize since the award's inception in 1974, Mr. Shifrin is in constant demand as an orchestral soloist, recitalist and chamber music collaborator.

Mr. Shifrin has appeared with the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras and the Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Milwaukee, Detroit and Denver symphonies among many others in the US, and internationally with orchestras in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

David Shifrin joined the faculty at the Yale School of Music in 1987 and was appointed Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Yale and Yale's annual concert series at Carnegie Hall in September 2008. He has also served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, University of Southern California, University of Michigan, Cleveland Institute of Music and the University of Hawaii. In 2007 he was awarded an honorary professorship at China's Central Conservatory in Beijing.

In addition to the Avery Fisher Prize, David Shifrin is the recipient of a Solo Recitalists' Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 1998 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Music Academy of the West. At the outset of his career, he won the top prize at both the Munich and the Geneva International Competitions. Mr. Shifrin resides in Connecticut with his wife and is the father of four children - Henry, Olivia, Sam and William.
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Program Notes

THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO
© Richard Freed

Mozart completed the score of Le nozze di Figaro in Vienna on April 29, 1786, and the opera was performed two days later at the Burg-Theater.

The score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets in pairs, with timpani and strings. Duration, 4 minutes.
Beaumarchais's two related comedies, Le Barbier de Séville and La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, had remarkable operatic consequences. Mozart might well have written operas on both of them if Giovanni Paisiello had not already produced a popular setting of Le Barbier (a circumstance that did not stop Rossini, who produced his own masterwork in 1816, after obtaining Paisiello's approval). Le Mariage de Figaro, first produced at the Comédie Française on April 27, 1784, with some of its incidental music composed by Beaumarchais himself, quickly made its way to Vienna, and Mozart's operatic version made its first appearance barely two years after the play's Paris premiere. It was his first collaboration (or, in any event, his first full-scale one) with his great librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, and it brought him the greatest success he was to enjoy in his lifetime. Michael Kelly, the Irish tenor who sang the roles of Don Basilio and Don Curzio in the first production (and with whom Mozart enjoyed playing ninepins, a pastime in which they were allegedly engaged when he composed the Clarinet Trio, K. 498), recalled in his Reminiscences:
Never was anything more complete than the triumph of Mozart and his Nozze di Figaro, to which numerous overflowing audiences bore witness. Even at the first full band rehearsal, all present were roused to enthusiasm, and when Benucci came to the fine passage, “Cherubino, alla vittoria, alla gloria militar,” which he gave with stentorian lungs, the effect was electric, for the whole of the performers on the stage, and those in the orchestra, as if actuated by one feeling of delight, vociferated, “Bravo! Bravo, Maestro! Viva, viva grande Mozart!” Those in the orchestra I thought would never have ceased applauding, by beating the bows of their violins against the music desks.

In January 1787 Mozart visited Prague to enjoy what proved to be a still grander triumph of his Figaro with that city's public. On the 15th he wrote to his father that “the one subject of conversation here is-- Figaro; nothing is played, sung or whistled but-- Figaro; nobody goes to any opera but-- Figaro; everlastingly Figaro! ” Four days later he introduced his Symphony in D major (No. 38, K. 504, known as the “Prague” Symphony), and before he left for home he received the commission for the opera that turned out to be Don Giovanni.

The effervescent Overture to Figaro does not make use of any thematic material from the opera itself, but captures the essence of the work superbly. Mozart is said to have intended to insert a slow interlude, in the old Italian tradition, just before the recapitulation, and to have omitted it only because he hadn't time to write it down; but evidently he recognized the perfection of this peerless curtain-raiser as it stands, for he never made any gesture toward amending it in any way.



CLARINET CONCERTO IN A MAJOR
©Phillip Huscher

First performed sometime in November or December 1791, in Vienna. The orchestra consists of two flutes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings. The work lasts approximately twenty-nine minutes.

This concerto is the last important work Mozart finished before his death. He entered it in his personal catalog without a date, directly following The Magic Flute and La clemenza di Tito. The only later listing is the little Masonic Cantata, entered November 15, 1791. The Requiem, as we know, did not make it into the catalog.

For decades the creation of the Requiem was full of mystery, while the Clarinet Concerto offered no puzzles. But in recent years, as we have learned more about the unfinished Requiem, questions about the concerto have begun to emerge. The Requiem riddles are now largely solved, damaging a fair amount of romantic myth and cinematic drama in the process. A fully accurate account of the Clarinet Concerto seems more uncertain today than ever.

We can start with Anton Stadler. Mozart tells us that he wrote the concerto for this great virtuoso clarinet player, a close friend, a fellow Mason (although a member of a different lodge), and, on numerous occasions, a spirited gambling companion. Mozart enjoyed Stadler's friendship and admired his talent, easily accepting that the latter was infinitely more generous and reliable than the former. The musical skill was evidently prodigious: "One would never have thought," wrote a critic in 1785, "that a clarinet could imitate the human voice to such perfection." But Sophie Haibel, Mozart's sister-in-law, remembered Stadler as one of the composer's" false friends, secret bloodsuckers, and worthless persons who served only to amuse him at the table and intercourse with whom injured his reputation." Perhaps she had learned from Constanze of the 500 gulden Mozart lent Stadler, a hefty sum that was still unpaid when officials tallied the composer's estate.

Stadler's true debt to Mozart is one clarinetists still owe him today: pages upon pages of music as precious as any in the repertoire. It is likely Mozart first heard Stadler play in March 1784, in a performance of his B-fiat wind serenade. The Clarinet Trio, written two years later and supposedly finished in a bowling alley on one of those occasions when Mozart could not separate music from life, may have been composed with Stadler in mind. By 1789, the year of the magnificent quintet for clarinet and strings, virtually every note Mozart wrote for the instrument, including the added clarinet parts for the great G-minor symphony, was written with Stadler in mind.

We come now to the last year of Mozart's life. In late August 1791, Mozart set off for Prague to oversee the first performances of La clemenza di Tito, accompanied by Stadler, who was to play in the Prague orchestra; Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who would soon inherit the task of finishing the Requiem; and Constanze Mozart worked on the opera in the coach, writing two virtuoso obbligato solos for Stadler. The premiere, on September 6, was decently received, though the Empress Maria Luisa is said to have shouted from her box, "Una porcheria tedesca!" (German rubbish, to use the imperial translation). Mozart hurried home to Vienna, leaving Stadler behind to accept thunderous applause and even cheers from his fellow orchestra members, for his big solos each night.

On September 28 Mozart entered The Magic Flute in his catalog; the premiere, two nights later in a suburban Viennese theater, was only a partial success. Sometime in the middle of this crazy schedule—two opera premieres in less than a month, plus work on a Requiem that had recently been commissioned through a mysterious messenger—Mozart began what would be his last concerto, for Stadler's clarinet. But there is no mention of the concerto until October 7, when Mozart wrote to Constanze, who had gone to Baden, boasting that after her departure he played two games of billiards, sold his horse for fourteen ducats, sent out for black coffee, and smoked a splendid pipe of tobacco before orchestrating "almost the whole Rondo for Stadler.' A letter dated October 14, Mozart's last, describes the evening Mozart took Salieri to see The Magic Flute, an outing unfairly embellished in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Two days later, Anton Stadler played the first performance of his clarinet concerto in Prague. We do not know what he reported back to Mozart. Little more than a month later Mozart took to bed; he died in less than three weeks.

We come now to the questions, some still unanswered. Around the time Mozart met Anton Stadler, he had begun to play a large new clarinet—we now call it the basset clarinet though in Mozart's day it had no particular name. This curious instrument extended the clarinet's glorious lower register down a major third, reaching four new deep and resonant notes. It now seems dear that this is the instrument Mozart had in mind when he wrote both the celebrated quintet and this final concerto. But by the time the clarinet concerto was published, a decade after Mozart's death, Stadler's basset clarinet had gone out of favor, and the concerto was printed in a version rewritten for the narrower range of the standard clarinet. Even though a contemporary review argued that this was not the music Mozart wrote, and Stadler was still alive to protest, players and audiences came to accept what was printed on the page. Mozart's original intentions were quickly forgotten, along with the basset clarinet.

Mozart's autograph score has been lost. There is, however, a fragment, 199 measures long and written entirely in Mozart's hand, of a concerto in G for basset horn—another ancient member of the clarinet family—that nearly duplicates more than half the first movement of the clarinet concerto. Apparently Mozart first conceived the music for basset horn, perhaps as early as 1787, and later rewrote and finished it for Stadler's modified clarinet. We cannot be certain for whom the earlier concerto was intended, nor why he chose to refashion it for Stadler at one of the most hectic times in his life. But we do know that Mozart had nothing to do with the revised version for standard clarinet—the one, ironically, that generations of musicians have come to know.

Over the past forty years a number of musicians have attempted to reconstruct Mozart's original version for basset clarinet. The differences are not extensive—just 53 of the first movement's 359 measures are in any way affected—and mostly only involve transposing a particular passage from one octave to another. Sometimes the shape of a line is changed entirely, as the basset clarinet carries a phrase down to its natural conclusion, where the traditional version must circle back up.

The concerto is one of Mozart's most personal creations; like the final piano concerto, it is intimate and conversational like chamber music, rather than grand and dramatic. One cannot blame historians—or playwrights for that matter—for suggesting Mozart knew his time was running out, for the music implies as much. The slow movement of this concerto carries an almost unnatural burden of sadness on its simple phrases. Of the two outer movements, with their endless, natural lyricism, one could not find words more apt than those H.C. Robbins Landon remembered from Shakespeare: "The heart dances, but not for joy."

SYMPHONY NO. 41 (JUPITER)
©Phillip Huscher

Mozart completed this symphony on August 10, 1788. The date of the first performance is not known. The score calls for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Performance time is approximately thirty-three minutes.

Mozart, who did not expect the C major symphony performed at these concerts to be his last, never called it the Jupiter. According to an entry in the British publisher Vincent Novello's diary, Mozart's son Franz Xaver reported that the London impresario Johann Peter Salomon gave the work its nickname after the most powerful of the Roman gods. The title first appeared in print for a performance in Edinburgh on October 20, 1819. When Muzio Clementi's popular piano arrangement of the score was published in 1823, the cover announced "Mozart's celebrated Symphony, 'The Jupiter,' " and depicted the god himself regally sitting atop billowing clouds. In Germany, well into the nineteenth century, it was simply known as the symphony with the fugue at the end, just as Mozart's Prague was called the symphony without a minuet.

This great C major symphony was celebrated long before Clementi introduced its splendors to the parlors of countless eager amateur pianists. (Many surely struggled with the finale, which juggles more ideas at a fast speed than the average two hands can coordinate.) Joseph Haydn, who owed the existence of his last twelve (and most popular) symphonies to the same Salomon who named this symphony, knew the work and admired it excessively.

The nickname itself suggests that the Jupiter Symphony was accepted as the summit of instrumental music within a few years of its composition. At least until 1808, when Beethoven premiered his Fifth Symphony in the same key, it could safely be mentioned as the C major symphony, without danger of confusion. (Beethoven's begins in C minor and only ends in the major.) Schumann, who wrote at length about many pieces he admired, thought it "wholly above discussion," like the works of Shakespeare; Mendelssohn and Wagner both modeled youthful symphonies on it.

Salomon's nickname probably was suggested by the majesty and nobility of the first movement, which includes the brilliant sound of trumpets and drums and features stately dotted rhythms in the opening measures (C major was the traditional key for ceremonial music in the eighteenth century). But the movement, cast in conventional sonata form, is also light and playful. Mozart starts the recapitulation in the wrong key (the subdominant) as an inside joke and quotes the music of a light hearted aria he recently had written to a text presumably by Lorenzo da Ponte: "You are a bit innocent, my dear Pompeo," a bass sings to an inexperienced lover, "Go study the ways of the world." Like Don Giovanni, this movement is dramma giocoso—the quintessentially Mozartean mixture of the serious and the comic.

The Andante, with muted strings to counter the midday brilliance of the opening movement, exposes the darkness that is often at the heart of Mozart's music. This is a world of poignant contemplation, yearning and naked distress. It is as heart-wrenching as Pamina's great aria from The Magic Flute, and even more remarkable for being in a major key. The minuet and trio are unusually rich and complicated, both musically and emotionally, for all their plain, traditional dance forms.

The finale that includes the famous fugue at the end is as celebrated as any single movement of eighteenth-century music. It begins innocently enough, with an innocuous do-re-fa-mi theme, and turns into a tour de force of classical counterpoint. Five themes are presented, developed, and restated; then at the end, in the great, miraculous coda, they are brought together in various combinations (and sometimes upside-down) in a dazzling display of perfect counterpoint. With these two minutes of music, Mozart shifts the center of gravity from the beginning of the symphony to the end, anticipating Beethoven, Brahms, and countless other composers who owe him so much else in this field. Mozart cannot have known that this work would bring his own symphonic career to an end, but he could not have found a more spectacular and fitting way to crown his achievement, and, at the same time, to point the way to the future.