Marin Alsop, Music Director
MArch – April 2015
A magazine for the patrons of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Candide
The BSO’s production of the Voltaire story, as told by Leonard Bernstein, is rich in lessons about life.
Beethoven ’ s Fifth is Coming to the Meyerhoff
Bach Authority Masaaki Suzuki ’s All- Mozart event
Laurie Sokoloff: A solo piccolo with big shoes to fill
contents Departments 2 ) Letter from the President & CEO 4 ) In Tempo: News Of Note 6 ) BSO Live: Calendar of Events 7) Orchestra Roster
{
38) Honor Roll
44) Impromptu: Laurie Sokoloff, Solo Piccolo
10
Program Notes
Make your Garden Grow Celebrate the end of the BSO's season with Leonard Bernstein's brilliant comedic opera Candide.
12) Shakespeare in Love
8
and Simon Trpcˇeski March 6 & 8
18) Mozart’s Great Mass March 13 & 14
24) Haydn & Ravel March 20 & 21
4
28) A Symphonic Night at the Movies: Singin’ in the Rain March 27, 28 & 29
30) Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony April 9
33) Off the Cuff:
Features 8) Masaaki
Suzuki Debuts at the BSO
Tchaikovsky: Mad But for Music
by Christianna McCausland
April 11
34) Pictures at an Exhibition April 17 & 19
Preeminent Bach Authority to Conduct All-Mozart Performance.
10) A
Fresh Crack at Candide
by Martha Thomas
An opera director finally gets his chance to take on the Voltaire classic.
On the Cover
July 2014 saw the first-ever BSO Music Educators Academy, an all-new program specifically designed for aspiring and experienced music educators.
Be Green: Recycle Your Program! Please return your gently used program to the Overture racks in the lobby. Want to keep reading at home? Please do! Just remember to recycle it when you’re through.
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
1
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra 2014–2015 Season 410.783.8000 BSOmusic.org The Baltimore SyMphony ORchestra Marin Alsop Music Director Barbara M. Bozzuto Chair Paul Meecham President & CEO Eileen Andrews Vice President, Marketing & Communications Teresa Eaton Director of Public Relations & Publications Martha Thomas Publications Editor Janet E. Bedell Program Annotator Baltimore magazine Design and Print Division Director Ken Iglehart iken@baltimoremagazine.net 443.873.3916 Art Director Vicki Dodson Senior Graphic Artist Michael Tranquillo Contributing Writers Laura Farmer Christianna McCausland Martha Thomas Research Rebecca Kirkman Advertising Account Representatives Lynn Talbert lynn@overturemagazine.org 443.974.6892 Baltimore magazine Design and Print Division 1000 Lancaster Street, Suite 400 Baltimore, MD 21202 410. 873. 3900
2 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Welcome
For a musician, handling a beautiful instrument can be a revelation. The light heft of a bow, the vibration of a string, the clear note of a woodwind can take all those years of training to a new level. Over the past few seasons, Music Director Marin Alsop has enhanced the experience of both players and audience by lending a number of exceptional instruments from her family’s collection —including a circa 1763 century Guadagnini Marin alsoP violin, a Testore cello, and an ebony and silver violin understands how bow. These loans are in addition to the Steinway concert important a good grand piano donated by her late mother Ruth to the instrument is to BSO. (Please refer to the orchestra roster in this issue to see which players are playing on the Alsop instruments.) those learning Marin also understands how important a good to play. instrument is to those learning to play. Her extraordinarily generous multi-part Centennial gift of $100,000 to support special programming during the Centennial year also includes a donation of instruments for use by OrchKids and the Baltimore Symphony Youth Orchestra, two programs launched during her tenure. Maestra Alsop has proven herself over and over to be a friend to the BSO and to all of Baltimore, not just through her leadership as music director and her world-class conducting, but with her support for young musicians in our community. Last summer we announced that the charismatic German conductor Markus Stenz would become the BSO’s principal guest conductor beginning with the 2015 –2016 season. In the lead-up, he returns this May to conduct a program that includes Strauss’ wistful Four Last Songs with the rising young American dramatic soprano, Heidi Melton. This is one concert not to be missed! Finally, I encourage everyone to visit the Baltimore Symphony Associates’ Decorators’ Show House, opening at the end of April. The annual event brings together some of the region’s most talented designers in support of the BSO’s work. This year’s show house is in the heart of North Baltimore, on Charles Street, a grand home of a bygone age.
Paul Meecham President and CEO, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Follow your favorite Symphony orchestra beyond the stage visit the all-new BSOmusic.org
D e an Ale x an d er
overture
{ from the president
2015 mCDONOgH summER pROgRams aCaDEmIC pROgRams
Day Camps
Olympic Weightlifting Camp for boys and girls ages 13 to 17 July 6 to July 10
Red Feather For children turning four prior american Immersion at mcDonogh
to June 22, 2015 and for five-year-olds not yet attending kindergarten Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31
for boys and girls 10 to 17 Session 1: June 21 to July 4 Session 2: July 5 to July 18 Session 3: July 19 to August 1
Red Eagle For boys and girls 5 to 8 (entering first grade and up in fall 2015) Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31
Children play 2 Learn Robotics
senior Camp
for boys and girls ages 8 to 13 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
for boys and girls ages 9 to 12 Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31
mcDonogh Fencing Camp
for boys and girls ages 8 to 13 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
Children play 2 Learn Technology
for boys and girls ages 10 to 14 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
for boys and girls ages 10 to 15 Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31 for boys and girls ages 8 to 13 Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31
all sports Camp (Rope and Rock Wall) for boys and girls ages 10 to 14 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
Eagle Volleyball Camp for girls ages 10 to 17
June 22 to July 10
for girls ages 8 to 12 July 6 to July 10
June 22 to June 26
saT prep Course
mcDonogh Baseball school: pitching and Catching Camp for boys ages 11 to 15
mcDonogh Elite Baseball “Boot” Camp for boys ages 11 to 15 June 22 to June 26
June 29 to July 2 (Independence Day week)
sOLD OuT
Counselor-In-Training program for boys and girls ages 14 to 16 Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31
Fun On The Run Camp
for boys and girls ages 11 to 14 Session 1: July 6 to July 10 Session 2: July 20 to July 24
Extreme Camp: Beginners
For McDonogh students only! Session 1: June 22 to June 26 (For rising sixth and seventh graders only) Session 2: July 6 to July 10 (For rising eighth and ninth graders only)
for boys and girls ages 9 to 12 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
Chemistry For McDonogh students only!
Extreme Camp: advanced
physics For McDonogh students only!
for boys and girls ages 12 to 16 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
spORTs CLINICs
young actors Theatre
COED spORTs CLINICs The mcDonogh Tennis program: Beginner
for boys and girls ages 10 to 16 June 22 to July 21
young Filmmakers Camp
for boys and girls entering Grades 5 to 9 Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31
mcDonogh Rock shop
for boys and girls ages 9 to 15 Session 1: July 6 to July 17 Session 2: July 20 to July 31
Circus Camp Juniors
for boys and girls ages 6 to 8 Session 1: June 22 to June 26 Session 2: June 29 to July 2 (Independence Day Week) Session 3: July 6 to July 10
Circus Camp stars!
for boys and girls ages 9 to 15 Session 1: June 22 to June 26 Session 2: June 29 to July 2 (Independence Day Week) Session 3: July 6 to July 10
for boys and girls ages 12 to 15 July 13 to July 17
musical Theater Workshop Camp for boys and girls ages 6 to 9 July 20 to July 24
advanced art Techniques: Drawing for boys and girls ages 9 to 14 July 20 to July 24
advanced art Techniques: painting
for boys ages 6 to 14 July 6 to July 10
girls Defender Camp for girls ages 10 to 16
July 27 to July 31
girls goalkeeper Camp for girls ages 10 to 16
Junior High or Middle School girls; Grades 4-9 June 21 to June 23
Boys advanced Level Camp for boys ages 9 to 14 Between the pipes super savers girls Lacrosse Camp
for boys and girls ages 7 to 11 Session 1: June 22 to June 26 Session 2: June 29 to July 2 Session 3: July 13 to July 17
Boys Club Level Camp for boys ages 8 to 15
for girls entering grades 9 to 12 June 23 to June 25
Boys striker Camp for boys ages 10 to 16
mCDONOgH INTERNaTIONaL sOCCER sCHOOL:
July 27 to July 31
preseason prep Overnight Camp
July 27 to July 31
for boys and girls ages 10 to 18 August 2 to August 5
Boys Defender Camp for boys ages 10 to 16
Overnight striker Camp
Boys midfielder Camp for boys ages 10 to 16
mcDonogh golf academy: general skills
for boys and girls ages 9 to 14 Session I: June 22 to June 26 Session II: July 6 to July 10
July 27 to July 31
OVERNIgHT Camps
Half-Day Tennis/Half-Day golf Camp
mcDonogh Competitive swim Camp
July 27 to July 31
girls midfielder Camp for girls ages 10 to 16
Boys Half-Day soccer/Half-Day Tennis Camp
July 20 to July 24
skateboard Building
girls Club Level Camp for girls ages 8 to 15
July 20 to July 24
July 27 to July 31
July 13 to July 17
for boys and girls ages 10 to 15 Session 1: June 22 to June 26 Session 2: June 29 to July 2 Session 3: July 13 to July 17
girls advanced skills Camp
July 6 to July 10
for boys and girls ages 9 to 14 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
mcDonogh yoga
for boys and girls ages 10 to 15 July 6 to July 10
for girls ages 9 to 16 July 13 to July 17
girls Half-Day soccer/Half-Day Rock Wall Camp
Between the pipes growing goalies Boys Half-Day soccer/Half-Day Rock Wall Camp girls Lacrosse Camp
Tennis, Badminton, and pickle Ball
mcDonogh golf academy: advanced skills
for boys and girls ages 9 to 13 June 22 to July 10
mcDonogh Football Camp for boys ages 6 to 14
for boys ages 6 to 14 July 6 to July 10
for boys and girls ages 9 to 14 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
Visual arts Camp
July 6 to July 10
girls Half-Day soccer/Half-Day Tennis Camp
for girls ages 6 to 14 July 6 to July 10
Boys Team Training Camp for boys ages 7 to 14
Rackets, Ropes, and Rockwall
Session 2: June 29 to July 2 Session 3: July 13 to July 17
for girls ages 6 to 14 July 6 to July 10
mighty mites Novice Wrestling Camp
mCDONOgH INTERNaTIONaL sOCCER sCHOOL: Boys general skills Camp for boys ages 6 to 14 July 6 to July 10
for boys and girls ages 9 to 14 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
for boys and girls ages 10 to 14 June 22 to June 26
mCDONOgH INTERNaTIONaL sOCCER sCHOOL:
for girls ages 6 to 14 July 6 to July 10
Session 1: July 13 to July 17 Session 2: July 20 to July 24
The mcDonogh Tennis program: advanced
for boys and girls ages 8 to 12
for girls ages 8 to 13 July 13 to July 17
Rising star Boys Basketball for boys ages 8 to 15 girls striker Camp for girls ages 10 to 16
for boys and girls ages 6 to 12 Weekly: June 22 to July 31
stand-up Comedy and public speaking Session 1: June 22 to June 26
mcDonogh Field Hockey Camp
maryland Future Champs Wrestling Camp
Session 1: July 6 to July 10 Session 2: July 27 to July 31
June 22 to July 31
aRTs pROgRams
for girls ages 10 to 15 July 6 to July 10
girls Team Training Camp for girls ages 7 to 14
for boys ages 5 to 8 June 29 to July 2 (Independence Day week)
June 22 to July 31
mcDonogh softball Camp: advanced skills
mcDonogh Lacrosse academy
for boys ages 7 to 17 June 29 to July 2 (Independence Day week)
Biology For McDonogh students only! June 22 to July 31
June 29 to July 2 (Independence Day week)
mcDonogh softball Camp: general skills
girls general skills Camp
for boys ages 6 to 14 Session 1: June 22 to June 26 Session 2: July 13 to July 17
for boys and girls ages 5 to 14 Session 1: June 22 to June 26 Session 2: June 29 to July 2 (Independence Day Week) Session 3: July 27 to July 31
for girls ages 7 to 14 June 22 to June 26
mcDonogh Baseball school: Hitting Camp for boys ages 11 to 15 July 6 to July 10
mcDonogh Chess Camp
June 22 to June 26
BOys spORTs CLINICs mcDonogh Traditional Baseball school
for boys and girls ages 6 to 9 Sesson 1: June 22 to June 26 Sesson 2: June 29 to July 2 Sesson 3: July 6 to July 10
Writing strategies
Teen Camp
mcDonogh girls Lacrosse Camp: advanced skills for girls ages 6 to 14 mcDonogh soccer summer Camp
mcDonogh soccer summer Camp
for boys and girls ages 15 to 17 June 22 to July 10
for girls ages 6 to 14 June 22 to June 26
for boys and girls ages 8 to 13 Session 1: July 13 to July 17 Session 2: July 20 to July 24
Children play 2 Learn young Engineers for boys ages 7 to 14
all sports Camp
for boys and girls ages 9 to 14 July 27 to July 31
for boys and girls ages 4 to 6 July 6 to July 10
Children play 2 Learn Video game Design for boys ages 7 to 12
Outdoor adventure Camp
for boys and girls ages 13 to 15 Session 1: June 22 to July 10 Session 2: July 13 to July 31
International soccer school: Kinderkick Camp
mcDonogh girls Lacrosse Camp: general skills
July 27 to July 31
Boys goalkeeper Camp for boys ages 10 to 16
July 27 to July 31
matt stover Kicking Camp for boys ages 8 to 17 Date: TBA
gIRLs spORTs CLINICs mcDonogh girls Basketball Camp for girls entering grades 4 to 9 Sesson 1: June 22 to June 26 Sesson 2: July 27 to July 31
for boys and girls ages 10 to 18 August 2 to August 5
Overnight midfielder Camp
for boys and girls ages 10 to 18 August 2 to August 5
Overnight Defender Camp
for boys and girls ages 10 to 18 August 2 to August 5
Overnight goalkeeper Camp for boys and girls ages 10 to 18 August 2 to August 5
i
DON’T LET yOuR CHILD mIss OuT ON a summER OF FuN! i Free Lunch i Free Transportation
i Before and aftercare i Early Bird and multiple sibling Discounts
To find out about the 110 camps, sports clinics, and academic programs that McDonogh offers in the summer, call 443-544-7100, visit www.mcdonogh.org, or email summer@mcdonogh.org.
Call now for early bird specials!
{ IN tempo
4 O v ertur e |
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
NEWS OF NOTE
{I n D e sign}
Tour de Force The 39 th Symphony Decorators' Show House The Baltimore Symphony Associates 39th Symphony Decorators’ Show House will be open for tours April 26 – May 17. This year’s house is Oak Acre, built by Henry E. Singewald, a Baltimore attorney and banker in the 1920s. The beautiful house in the north Baltimore neighborhood of Guilford has been home to one family for more than 90 years. Guest designers have enhanced more than 22 areas with beautiful furniture, lovely fabrics and delightful decorating ideas.
Oak Acre
Tickets are available for purchase through the BSO Box Office at 410.783.8000 or BSOmusic.org. For more information, call the BSA office at 410.783.8023. www. bsomusic .org
{I n H i story}
The French composer
Maurice Ravel was born 140 years ago, on March 3, 1875. The BSO’s March concerts will feature two Ravel works that look at the waltz in diametrically opposite ways. His Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1912 is fragile and charming while La Valse of 1920 is flamboyant and violent. The intervening years of World War I may explain the difference.
{I n F i l m}
The Score’s the thing Ch r is B u rch
A Pops tribute to John Williams
From the fanfare of Star Wars to Harry Potter’s breathless escapades, John Williams’ compositions have set the mood in movies for more than half a century. Principal Pops Conductor Jack Everly and the Baltimore Choral Arts Society will close the Pops season with a tribute to Williams, May 28 at Strathmore and May 29 to 31 at the Meyerhoff.
Orchkids
BSYO
{I n S t ep}
Millennium Stage performance
Orchkids and BSYO perform
A tribute to John Williams
Members of the BSO’s OrchKids and Youth Orchestra—65 children, spanning pre-kindergarten through tenth grade—performed a mix of classical, jazz, pop and spiritual-inspired pieces on The Kennedy Center’s renowned Millennium Stage on February 6. The ensemble was accompanied by Chi-chi Nwanoku, principal double bass and a founding member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Endymion Ensemble in the orchestral version of Rihanna’s “Stay.”
{I n H ouse}
Wi lliam Ellis
Stenz Steps Up to the Podium Markus Stenz, principal conductor for the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, was recently named principal guest conductor of the BSO beginning with the 2015–2016 season. He’ll conduct the BSO for three weeks each season for the duration of his three-season contract. Maestro Stenz will lead the orchestra in Strauss’ Four Last Songs May 21 and 22. Guest soprano Heidi Melton will join the conductor for his first appearance at the BSO since he conducted Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony in 2012.
Markus Stenz
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
5
{ BSOlive Family Series Concert
BSO SuperPops
Power, simplicity, beauty. Christoph König conducts the most famous symphony of all—Beethoven’s Fifth.
Sat, May 2, 2015, 11 am
Fri, May 29, 2015, 8 pm
Ken Lam, conductor
Sat, May 30, 2015, 3 pm & 8 pm
Candide
Young Farkle McBride is a musical genius who plays the violin, flute, trombone and drums with incredible skill. Experience an orchestral adaptation of actor John Lithgow’s mesmerizing children’s book, where the fickle, yet lovable Farkle brings the sounds and rhythms of the orchestra to life.
Sun, May 31, 2015, 3 pm
A Tribute to John Williams
The Remarkable Farkle McBride
Oliver Schnyder
Debussy and Don Juan Fri, May 15, 2015, 8 pm Sun, May 17, 2015, 3 pm Mario Venzago, conductor Oliver Schnyder, piano Schubert: Symphony No. 8 in B minor, “Unfinished” Haydn: Harpsichord Concerto in D Major R. Strauss: Don Juan Debussy: La Mer
Young Farkle McBride
Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto Fri, May 8, 2015, 8 pm
Shimmering and evocative, rich but subtle, Debussy’s La Mer has endured as one of the composer’s most admired works. Mario Venzago conducts the thrilling and passionate Don Juan —strength and daring that leaps off the stage.
Strauss’ Four Last Songs
Sat, May 9, 2015, 8 pm
Thurs, May 21, 2015, 8 pm
Marin Alsop, conductor Lukáš Vondrácˇek, piano
Fri, May 22, 2015, 8 pm
Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Overture Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 Prokofiev: Symphony No. 7 Once deemed “worthless” and “impossible to play,” Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto is now regarded as one of classical music’s most enchanting solo works. Marin Alsop leads remarkable young Czech pianist Lukáš Vondrácˇek in this timeless concerto.
6 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Jack Everly, conductor Behind every great film is a compelling score, and the works of noted film composer John Williams are nothing short of brilliant. Join Maestro Jack Everly, the BSO and the Baltimore Choral Arts Society for a celebration of this iconic contemporary composer and hear your favorite themes from blockbusters such as Schindler’s List, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Empire of the Sun.
Beethoven’s Fifth Fri, June 5, 2015, 8 pm Sun, June 7, 2015, 3 pm Christoph König, conductor Alban Gerhardt, cello Sibelius: Symphony No. 7 Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No. 1 Beethoven: Symphony No. 5
Fri, June 12, 2015, 8 pm Sat, June 13, 2015, 8 pm Sun, June 14, 2015, 3 pm Marin Alsop, conductor Garnett Bruce, director Baltimore Choral Arts Society
An na u n d Pe ter Sch u d el- Halm (Sch nyd er)
All concerts are held at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall unless otherwise noted.
Cast to include: Dr. Pangloss: Joshua Hopkins Candide: Keith Jameson Paquette: Marie Lenormand Cunegonde: Lauren Snouffer Maximillian: Mark Diamond The Old Lady: Judy Kaye Bernstein: Candide Celebrate the end of the BSO’s season with Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant comedic operetta Candide! Based on the classic Voltaire tale of innocence, optimism and the unexpected lessons of life, Marin Alsop conducts this semi-staged operetta with a lively and talented cast.
Heidi Melton
Markus Stenz, conductor Heidi Melton, soprano Weber: Der Freischütz Overture R. Strauss: Four Last Songs Schumann: Symphony No. 2 Guest conductor Markus Stenz brings panache and musical depth to signature German repertoire, including Schumann’s vibrant Second Symphony, and the return of impressive rising star Heidi Melton in Richard Strauss’ last great outpouring for the soprano voice.
Si m o n Pau ly (M elto n)
MAY/June
upcoming key events
{ orchestra roster
2014–2015 Season
Marin Alsop — Music Director, Harvey M. and Lyn P. Meyerhoff Chair
Jack Everly: Principal Pops Conductor, Yuri Temirkanov: Music Director Emeritus
First Violins
Jonathan Carney ∫ Concertmaster, Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Chair Madeline Adkins † Associate Concertmaster, Wilhelmina Hahn Waidner Chair Rui Du Acting Assistant Concertmaster James Boehm Kenneth Goldstein Wonju Kim Gregory Kuperstein Mari Matsumoto Gregory Mulligan Rebecca Nichols E. Craig Richmond Ellen Pendleton Troyer Andrew Wasyluszko
Second Violins
Qing Li Principal, E. Kirkbride and Ann H. Miller Chair Ivan Stefanovic † Associate Principal
Angela Lee ∫ Assistant Principal Leonid Berkovich Leonid Briskin Julie Parcells Christina Scroggins Wayne C. Taylor James Umber Charles Underwood Minsun Choi**
Violas
D e an Ale x an d er (Al so p)
Lisa Steltenpohl ∫ Principal, Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Chair Noah Chaves Associate Principal Karin Brown Assistant Principal Rebekah Newman Richard Field Viola Principal Emeritus Peter Minkler
Sharon Pineo Myer Delmar Stewart Jeffrey Stewart Mary Woehr
Cellos
Dariusz Skoraczewski † Principal, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Chair
Clarinets
Steven Barta Principal, Anne Adalman Goodwin Chair Christopher Wolfe Assistant Principal William Jenken
E-flat Clarinet Christopher Wolfe
Bassoons
Chang Woo Lee Associate Principal Bo Li ∫ Assistant Principal Seth Low Susan Evans Esther Mellon Kristin Ostling Paula Skolnick-Childress Pei Lu**
Basses
Robert Barney Principal, Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair Hampton Childress Associate Principal Owen Cummings Mark Huang Jonathan Jensen David Sheets Eric Stahl
Flutes
Emily Skala Principal, Dr. Clyde Alvin Clapp Chair Marcia Kämper
Fei Xie Principal Julie Green Gregorian Assistant Principal Schuyler Jackson**
Contrabassoon David P. Coombs
Horns
Philip Munds Principal, USF&G Foundation Chair Gabrielle Finck Associate Principal Lisa Bergman Mary C. Bisson Bruce Moore* Jeanne Getz**
Trumpets
Andrew Balio Principal, Harvey M. and Lyn P. Meyerhoff Chair René Hernandez Assistant Principal Nathaniel Hepler
Trombones
Aaron LaVere Principal, Alex Brown & Sons Chair
Piccolo
Laurie Sokoloff
Oboes
Katherine Needleman Principal, Robert H. and Ryda H. Levi Chair Melissa Hooper Assistant Principal Michael Lisicky
English Horn
Jane Marvine Kenneth S. Battye and Legg Mason Chair
James Olin* Co-Principal John Vance
Bass Trombone Randall S. Campora
TUBA
Seth Horner**
Timpani
James Wyman Principal Christopher Williams Assistant Principal
Percussion
Christopher Williams Principal, Lucille Schwilck Chair John Locke Brian Prechtl
{ M usic D i r e c tor}
Harp
Marin Alsop
Piano
Marin Alsop is an inspiring and powerful voice in the international music scene, a music director of vision and distinction who passionately believes that “music has the power to change lives.” She is recognized across the world for her innovative approach to programming and for her deep commitment to education and to the development of audiences of all ages. Marin Alsop made history with her appointment as the 12th music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her inaugural concerts in September 2007, she became the first woman to head a major American orchestra. Her success as the BSO’s music director has garnered national and international attention for her innovative programming and artistry. Her success was recognized when, in 2013, her tenure was extended to the 2020 –21 season. Alsop took up the post of principal conductor of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in 2012, and became its music director in July 2013. There she steers the orchestra in its artistic and creative programming, recording ventures and its education and outreach activities. In the summer of 2014 Maestra Alsop served her 23rd season as music director of the acclaimed Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California. In September 2013 she made history as the first female conductor of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms in London. When Musical America named Maestra Alsop the 2009 Conductor of the Year, they commented, “[Marin Alsop] connects to the public as few conductors today can.”
Sarah Fuller** Lura Johnson** Sidney M. and Miriam Friedberg Chair
DIRECTOR OF ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL Nishi Badhwar
ASSISTANT PERSONNEL MANAGER Jinny Kim
Librarians
Mary Carroll Plaine Principal, Constance A. and Ramon F. Getzov Chair Raymond Kreuger Associate
Stage Personnel Ennis Seibert Stage Manager Todd Price Assistant Stage Manager Charles Lamar Audio Engineer Mario Serruto Electrician * On leave ** Guest Musician Performing with an instrument (†) or a bow (∫) on loan to the BSO from the private collection of the family of Marin Alsop. The musicians who perform for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra do so under the terms of an agreement between the BSO and Local 40-543, AFM.
Ken Lam: Artistic Director of BSYO & Associate Conductor for Education Nicholas Hersh: Assistant Conductor Michael Repper: BSO-Peabody Conducting Fellow
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
7
One onOne { Here, Maestro Suzuki discusses his debut in Baltimore and his passion for Baroque music: In your debut with the BSO, what do you want audience members to know about your approach to conducting and your expectations for the performance of Mozart’s “Great” Mass? I am thrilled to work with the BSO for the first time. In my approach to the music, I always look for the best way to realize the composer’s intention and wish. So in this case, I would like to come as close as possible to the Mozart-style intention, even if the instruments are modern and not the period instruments.
Masaaki Suzuki Debuts at the BSO
Preeminent Bach Authority to Conduct All-Mozart Performance. by Christianna McCausland
I
n March, conductor Masaaki Suzuki will debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in an all-Mozart performance including the “Great” Mass. Suzuki is a leading authority on the works of J.S. Bach. In 1990 he founded the Bach Collegium in Japan, which just completed the epic, 55-volume recording of the complete church cantatas, an effort that took almost 20 years. Suzuki, a native of Kobe, Japan, is the Collegium’s music director, founder and head of the early music department at Tokyo University, and visiting professor of choral conducting at the Yale School of Music and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Suzuki himself is an accomplished organist and harpsichordist. His recent honors include the Leipzig Bach Medal, which he was awarded in 2012, and the 2013 Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize.
8 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
The “Great” Mass is incomplete. What are some of the rewards and challenges of conducting this piece of music? This was composed probably just according to his personal wish, not directly meant for liturgical use. This may be the reason why, in so many spots, we find beautiful and personal expression, especially the “Et incarnatus,” which is breathtaking. These beautiful movements are the great rewards of this work, as well as its polyphonic structure in the choir movements, which might be influenced by J.S. Bach’s music. The Mozart Mass includes a large orchestra and choral groups. How do you personally prepare for such a monumental performance and how much time will you have to rehearse in Baltimore? We can have just a couple days for rehearsal. For me, it is very important that everyone in the orchestra and the choir be happy working together. So I am quite flexible in the rehearsal to find out the best way for singers and players [to work together] right in front of me. How do you feel your background as a harpsichordist and organist informs your conducting?
11989 Overture Magazine_March April 2015_Layout 1 1/30/15 12:54 PM Page 1
You are the founder and music director of the Bach Collegium Japan. Explain the mission of the Collegium and what you have accomplished in terms of the promotion of Baroque music. Our mission is to realize mainly Bach’s music in the best way possible in any country, especially in Asia. It has taken 18 years for us to complete the church cantata series recorded on 55 CDs, and during this period, there have been many younger ensembles born of our influence in Japan. What is it about Bach’s music specifically and Baroque music in general that you think gives it an enduring quality, regardless of the geographical and cultural setting of the performance? From a purely technical point of view, the polyphonic structure and its intricacy are most important in Bach’s music, and these elements give the music gravity and symbolic meanings. As audience members, we often think musicians’ lives are solely about music. Is there something about you that audience members might be surprised to know? Perhaps a hobby or personal passion you have outside of music? In my case, the music is hobby, work and everything.
Originally a keyboard player, Masaaki Suzuki has beome a leading conductor of Baroque choral music.
Mozart’s Great Mass Friday, March 13 and Saturday, March 14 at 8 pm
Ray Magnani
The background as an organist and harpsichordist has a great meaning for me to understand the polyphony, harmony and the structure.
AD EXPERIENCE ONE OF THE GREAT GARDENS OF THE WORLD Spring is the perfect time to stroll H. F. du Pont’s masterful 60-acre garden. Enjoy showstopping blooms in the March Bank, Sundial Garden, Azalea Woods, and Peony Garden. Narrated tram tours available. To discover what’s in bloom, visit gardenblog.winterthur.org or call 302.888.4856.
“At Winterthur, his family’s iconic estate in Delaware,
”
Henry Francis du Pont had the vision to let nature paint the picture. – Southern Living
Winterthur is nestled in Delaware’s beautiful Brandywine Valley on Route 52, between I-95 and Route 1. Take I-95 to Exit 7 in Delaware. 800.448.3883 • winterthur.org
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
9
A
ack r C h s e Fr
at
e d i d n Ca An opera director finally gets
his chance to take on the Voltaire classic. By Martha Thomas
Garnett Bruce has been itching to direct Candide for decades. When he was in his 20s, he interned for Leonard Bernstein when the composer was in the midst of recording his adaptation of the Voltaire story for Deutsche Grammophon. ¶ “I’ve been around it but I’ve never directed it, except in college” says Bruce, now an opera director whose credits include productions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Opera Naples, and the Peabody Opera. “It’s a piece that has been in the back of my mind forever.”
B 10 O v ertur e |
ruce, who also serves as resident stage director at the Peabody Institute, was thrilled when Marin Alsop asked him to direct the BSO production (June 11–14), he says. Alsop, too, has Bernstein connections: She was accepted as a conducting fellow with Bernstein when Bruce was working in the maestro’s office in the 1990s, though their paths didn’t cross much. But the man made an impression. “He was never not learning something. He was constantly curious, about new music, new artists, new food.” It’s that energy, says Bruce, “that I think of when I think of his works. I imagine him asking questions all his life.” These memories of Bernstein inform the director’s approach. “Any director who comes to Candide has some choices to make,” Bruce says, pointing out that www. bsomusic .org
the French philosopher wrote the story in 1759 as social satire. “Voltaire was the Jon Stewart of his day,” says Bruce. “He was taking something trendy and fashionable”—the philosophy of optimism— “and putting it in a place where people could see it for its inadequacy.” Candide, or the Optimist, is the tale of the eponymous student who goes out into a harsh world of violence and natural disaster, ultimately learning of “the goodness in human nature,” says BSO Music Director Marin Alsop, who will be conducting a semi-staged production of the work. The operetta’s message, she adds, is that “even though our behavior is often abhorrent, there is a fundamental human goodness.” Bruce says he wants the production to emphasize “Bernstein’s bigger ideas,” mainly, “don’t trust things on face value—ask questions, and look out for each other.”
Marin Alsop
Garnett Bruce
Judy Kaye
Though Leonard Bernstein originally wrote Candide in the 1950s, with a book by playwright Lillian Hellman, the operetta has gone through many versions with multiple writers to get to its current form, with a book by Hugh Wheeler (who was also librettist for the Stephen Sondheim musicals Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music). Marin Alsop first saw Candide in 1973. “It was wonderfully absurd while being completely moving,” she recalls. She has since conducted it, most notably in a 2004 production with the New York Philharmonic featuring Patti Lupone, Kristin Chenoweth, Paul Groves, and British baritone Sir Thomas Allen as Pangloss and as the narrator Voltaire. The story begins with Candide offending his baron uncle, the Duke of Westphalia, by kissing the baron’s daughter, Cunegonde. Banished from the castle, Candide is immediately kidnapped by soldiers. He escapes and is joined by the tutor Pangloss— known for his blind optimism, an attitude Voltaire clearly disdains. The two travel across the globe, caught up in one disaster after another, including a shipwreck, an earthquake, and an encounter with the Spanish Inquisition. CanMarin dide is eventually reunited with his love, thanks to the efforts of Cunegonde’s former maid, the Old Lady. In the closing number of the Bernstein/Wheeler version, “Make Our Garden Grow,” Candide and Cunegonde eschew the Panglossian optimism, embracing instead a realistic approach to their life together. Cunegonde sings: “I thought the world was sugar cake, for so our master said. But now I’ll teach my hands to bake our loaf of daily bread.” The message is not that everything happens for the best, says Bruce, “rather, it is that we actually control our destinies. We have to make the effort to do the best we know … to grow our gardens.” The garden theme is a Bernstein favorite, says Bruce. In fact, the director wrote an undergraduate thesis at Tufts University about
“garden imagery in Bernstein’s theater works.” (see sidebar) The garden, he says, represents the dream of a better world, and Bernstein’s question is, “How do we get there?” For Judy Kaye, Bernstein’s Candide “emphasizes the laughter.” Kaye, who will play the Old Lady in the BSO production, points out, “That’s a good way to take a bitter pill sometimes. With a big old soda pop.” Kaye is looking forward to working with Alsop, whom she first met in New York in the 1980s. Alsop invited Kaye to perform with the Concordia Symphony Orchestra, the Maestra’s ensemble dedicated to a “crossover” repertoire of jazz and contemporary music. Kaye remembers how Alsop “called me one day and said, ‘I’ve emptied my bank account and started an orchestra. Would you do a concert?’ That led to a bunch of concerts,” Kaye recalls. Among other collaborations with Alsop, Kaye played the part of Dinah in Concordia’s production of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti broadcast on BRAVO with Alsop conducting. Garnett Bruce worked with Kaye at the Sante Fe Opera, and she also headlined in a Bernstein gala he directed at the Aspen Music Festival & School. The BSO’s Candide “is going to be a wonderful reunion,” Kaye predicts. Bruce plans to stage the production in and around the orchestra, with the major set piece an overhead map to show the journey. He envisions the details fading as the show concludes. “I’ve asked them to dissolve all the political quarters, so at the end we see the topographical earth we all share,” he explains. Dialogue will be trimmed from the stage verAlsop sion, Bruce says, with the gaps filled in by a narrator, who will “help us connect to the various places in the story, whether it be Paris, Lisbon, Montevideo.” In the same way, with an orchestra sharing the stage with actors, the set must be spare. “We’ve invited all this mayhem into a concert hall,” he says. “The musicians are involved in the humor and sense of delight.” Mayhem in the music hall doesn’t bother Alsop, or the musicians, in the least. While actors move around, and sometimes within, the orchestra, Alsop points out, “They’re not creating havoc, they’re following meticulous direction.” The musicians, she says, “are completely up for this type of approach because it integrates them into the action. It’s great fun.”
Gr ant Lei ghto n (al so p); Dale H eise(B ru ce )
“It was wonderfully absurd while being completely moving.”
Bernstein’s Garden “Gardens,” says Garnett Bruce, “seem to be
a peaceful—even mythical—refuge in Bernstein’s work.” In Trouble in Tahiti (1952), he says, “Dinah dreams of a garden where ‘love will lead us to a quiet place.’ An offstage voice lifts the feuding gangs of West Side Story (1957) out of the ghetto for a moment, singing, ‘Somewhere … there’s a place for us.’”
While Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte “saw the gardens as chaos and confusion where the old world hierarchies fall apart,” says Bruce, “Bernstein finds peace away from a chaotic world.” When the garden theme comes into play, Bruce points out, “Gentle harmonies counterbalance the dissonance and pounding rhythm of a harsher world.”
The garden theme is apparent in Candide. “After the whirlwind of bad luck, missed opportunities, war, shipwrecks, earthquakes, and disease in Candide, our title character finishes his travels by cultivating his own garden.” Candide sings: “We’ll do the best we know; we’ll build our house and chop our wood, and make our garden grow.”
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
11
{
{ program notes Cristian Ma˘celaru
Jo seph M eyer ho f f Sy m pho n y Hall
Shakespeare in Love and Simon Trpcˇeski Friday, March 6, 2015 — 8 p.m. Sunday, March 8, 2015 — 3 p.m. Cristian Ma˘celaru, Conductor Simon Trpcˇeski, Piano
Igor Stravinsky Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss (Le Baiser de la fée) Sinfonia Danses suisses Scherzo Pas de deux Sergei Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat Major, opus 10 Allegro brioso Andante assai Allegro scherzando SIMON TRPCˇ ESKI
INTERMISSION
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
The Tempest Fantasy-Overture, op. 18
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture
12 O v ertur e |
The concert will end at approximately 9:50 p.m. on Friday and 4:50 p.m. on Sunday.
www. bsomusic .org
Winner of the 2014 Solti Conducting Award, Cristian Măcelaru has established himself as one of the fast-rising stars of the conducting world. Recently appointed conductor-inresidence of The Philadelphia Orchestra, Măcelaru has conducted The Philadelphia Orchestra in subscription concerts three times in recent seasons: his own 2014 performance and two substitutions. During the 2014 –15 season, Măcelaru conducts the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in Denmark and on tour in Germany and the United States. The 11-concert project, which includes Măcelaru’s official Carnegie Hall debut, celebrates the 150th anniversaries of the composers Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius, and features Anne-Sophie Mutter and Ray Chen as violin soloists. This season, Măcelaru also returns on subscription to both Chicago and Philadelphia and has subscription debuts with the Toronto, St. Louis, Seattle, Milwaukee, Detroit and Indianapolis symphony orchestras in North America; the U.K.’s Hallé Orchestra and Bournemouth Symphony; and the Hague’s Residentie Orkest in the Netherlands. Cristian Măcelaru his making his classical subscription debut.
Simon Trpcˇeski
Born in 1979, Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski has established himself as one of the most remarkable musicians to have emerged in recent years, performing with many of the world’s greatest orchestras and captivating audiences worldwide. This season’s highlights include the London Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic,
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle and St. Louis symphonies, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, RSO Berlin, NDR Hamburg, Russian National Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony and a tour of Australia and New Zealand. Trpčeski has given recitals in major cities around the world and also regularly performs chamber music, including such festivals as Aspen, Verbier and Risor. He regularly works with young musicians in Macedonia to cultivate the talent of his country’s next generation of artists. As a result, he was awarded the Presidential Order of Merit and the first-ever title National Artist of Macedonia. Trpčeski recorded on Onyx, Wigmore Hall Live, EMI and Avie labels. Simon Trpčeski last appeared with the BSO in March 2013 with conductor Dima Slobodeniouk in a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4.
Innovation
has always been at the heart of Willow Valley Communities’ success.
With the opening of The Clubhouse, Willow Valley breaks About the concert:
through convention to create something that once again helps
The Fairy’s K iss Divertimento
redefine senior living. Every amenity in this 30,000-square-foot
Igor Stravinsky
Born in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia, June 17, 1882; died in New York City, April 6, 1971
In 1928, 18 years after The Firebird’s premiere, another fairytale ballet with a score by Stravinsky opened at the Paris Opéra. In the intervening years, Stravinsky had shattered the traditional Russian ballet world with The Rite of Spring and had become one of Europe’s leading modernists. Therefore, The Fairy’s Kiss came as a shock to Parisian audiences because it was neither modern nor neo-Classical (Stravinsky’s current style), but instead a faithful recreation of the world and even the musical language of Tchaikovsky’s Romantic ballets. It was a bittersweet glance back at a world lost forever. One of Stravinsky’s fondest childhood memories was attending the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and observing the composer at close range in the audience. Even as his own musical voice grew far apart from Tchaikovsky’s,
building illustrates the spirit of “agelessness” that guides the philosophy of development at Willow Valley. The building is also a reflection of our organization’s commitment to intergenerational engagement. The Clubhouse opens a new world of possibilities for those who live at Willow Valley and creates a spirit of vibrancy compelling to people of all ages.
Life Lived Forward
866.230.0279 | WillowValleyCommunities.org | Lancaster, PA
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
13
{ program notes he continued to revere the older master. Thus when Alexander Benois approached him “to do something with Uncle Petya’s music,” he readily agreed. For his libretto, Stravinsky adapted Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ice Maiden, renaming it The Fairy’s Kiss. In a preface to his score, he summarized the plot: “A fairy marks a young man with her mysterious kiss while he is still a young child. She withdraws him from his mother’s arms; then she withdraws him from life on the day of his greatest happiness [his marriage] in order to possess him and preserve his happiness forever.” Stravinsky identified the young man with Tchaikovsky himself. For his score, Stravinsky drew on little-known piano pieces and songs by Tchaikovsky. He also wrote original music that skillfully imitated the older composer’s style: the shape of his melodies, the way he used instruments, his characteristic dramatic gestures, and his overall Romantic sweep. In 1931, Stravinsky extracted the “Divertimento,” a four-movement suite from the ballet. Its opening “Sinfonia” corresponds to the ballet’s first scene, “The Lullaby in the Storm.” As the child’s mother carries him through the storm, the boy is torn from her arms by the Fairy’s attendants. At the repeat of the poignant flute lullaby, the Fairy bestows her fatal kiss. The “Swiss Dances” correspond to scene two’s “Village Fete.” A rustic Stravinskian peasant band is playing. The child is now a young man, and to a more delicately scored waltz, he dances with his bride-to-be. In the ballet, after this musical sequence the Fairy reappears to seduce the man away from his fiancée. The “Scherzo” opens scene three, “At the Mill.” The young man follows his fiancée and, to this gossamer, playful music, finds her frolicking with her friends. Continuing the scene is the final “Pas de Deux,” a grand multi-sectional dance in the Russian balletic tradition for the two lovers. A romantic cello solo, favored by Tchaikovsky for such scenes, plays against harp and luminous woodwind solos. The Suite concludes with a fast virtuoso dance, representing the couple’s last moments
14 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
together before the Fairy returns to claim her prize forever. Instrumentation: Three flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings.
Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat Major
Sergei Prokofiev
Born in Sontsovka, Ukraine, April 23, 1891; died in Moscow, March 5, 1953
During his years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Sergei Prokofiev managed to annoy nearly all his teachers. Bursting with arrogance, he was a pianist of staggering technical prowess and a composer who marched to his own drummer, refusing to bow to the established traditions of Russian Romanticism. At his graduation in 1914, he decided to make up for his mediocre academic record by capturing the Anton Rubinstein Prize as the Conservatory’s finest pianist. And while all his competitors selected hallowed concertos from the canon, he decided to display his virtuosity with a piece of his own: his First Piano Concerto, written when he was only 20.
During his years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Sergei Prokofiev managed to annoy nearly all his teachers. This concerto had already been premiered in Moscow on July 25, 1912, where it had received both cheers and catcalls. Some hailed it as a breath of fresh air while others sided with the disgruntled critic who wrote, “If that is music, I really believe I prefer agriculture.” At the Conservatory’s competition on April 22, 1914, the jury was split, but Prokofiev’s audacity was ultimately rewarded with the Rubinstein Prize and a new piano.
Prokofiev
Though he’d written a number of other pieces, Prokofiev considered the First Piano Concerto to be his first “more or less mature” work. Already it revealed most of the characteristics that were to make up his distinctive voice for the rest of his career: classical clarity mixed with a sometimes brutal modernity; biting, sarcastic wit; an evocative, dark lyricism; high rhythmic energy; and technical brilliance. Even though it is only a bit over 15 minutes in length, it is a true “take-no-prisoners” concerto and an extraordinary showpiece. Though ostensibly divided into the traditional three movements, this concerto, Prokofiev tells us, was conceived as one continuous movement: an overarching sonata form following architecture pioneered by Liszt. The opening Allegro brioso is unforgettably arresting: a business card hurled at the audience. Three vehement D-flat chords launch piano and orchestra on an ascending theme etched in brawny octaves. This music is the basis for the whole concerto and will return at important structural moments. After this astounding introduction, the music accelerates for witty, metallically brilliant music dominated by the piano. After a mocking cadence, Prokofiev abruptly shifts into a slower, vaguely disturbing section with dark brass fanfares and a tolling piano part. Gradually, the pianist’s glissandos and other caprices drive this mood away. The curtain-raising music returns with a virtuosic new counterpoint for the piano. The music then flows into an Andante assai slow movement, which Prokofiev calls an “interlude before the development.” But this uncanny mood piece, both fragile and passionately powerful, is
70+ reasons why dining in Baltimore has never Been Better
whether you are looking for brunch in mount vernon or a date night in harbor east, we’ll help you decide. visit DineDowntownBaltimore.com to make reservations.
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
15
{ program notes much more than an “interlude”; it is the first of the composer’s flights of lyrical reverie, which grew more poignant in his later music after hardships had tempered his youthful bravado. Horns and tuba break in to launch the Allegro scherzando, Prokofiev’s brittle, laughing “development section,” which sends up elements of the first movement’s themes. This continues into a spiky solo cadenza, which savages one of the secondary themes — it was passages like this that made the conservatives squirm! The piano pyrotechnics become more and more frenzied until the curtain-raising music makes its final appearance, now glittering with bells and double-fisted keyboard octaves, for a stunning “take-that!” finish. Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.
The Tempest Fantasy-Overture, op. 18 Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born in Votkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840; died in St. Petersburg, November 6, 1893
While Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy is one of his most familiar compositions, probably few audience members are familiar with his other two Shakespearean tone poems: Hamlet and The Tempest. An opportunity to hear The Tempest brings the discovery of one of the Russian master’s most alluring romantic melodies. Composed in August 1873, The Tempest was the product of a particularly happy time in Tchaikovsky’s life. He had just returned from a vacation in Western Europe, and before returning to Moscow, he decided to spend a few weeks at Usovo, the country estate of his wealthy friend Vladimir Shilovsky. Since Shilovsky was away, the composer had the whole place to himself. As he later remembered in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck: “I was in a kind of exalted, blissful frame of mind, wandering during the day alone in the woods … and sitting at
16 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
night by the open window listening to the solemn silence of this out-of-the-way place. ... During those two weeks I wrote The Tempest in rough without any effort, as though moved by some supernatural force.” The success of The Tempest’s first performance in Moscow in December 1873 far exceeded the response to Romeo and Juliet in 1869. The idea of setting to music this magical romance of reconciliation, Shakespeare’s last play, had come from Vladimir Stasov. The composer reduced Stasov’s detailed scenario to this outline printed in the score: “The sea. The magician Prospero sends his obedient spirit Ariel to raise a tempest, which wrecks the ship with Ferdinand on board. The magic island. First timid feelings of love between Miranda [Prospero’s daughter] and Ferdinand [son of one of Prospero’s enemies]. Ariel. Caliban. The lovers give themselves up to the delights of passion. Prospero renounces his magic power and leaves the island. The sea.” The music closely follows this scenario. It opens with a portrait of the calm sea surrounding the island where Prospero and Miranda have been exiled, with many divided string parts representing the undulating waves. A solemn, enigmatic horn melody emerges from this background; it is the key theme unifying the piece. Prospero, in majestic brass chords, and his fairy servant Ariel, in flickering high woodwinds, appear and conjure the
The BSO
tempest, which wrecks the ship carrying the magician’s old enemies from Italy and casts them upon the shores of his island. After the storm subsides, we hear in the cellos the glorious love theme representing the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand. The central portion presents contrasting musical portraits of the airy spirit Ariel and the ugly island troll Caliban, both servants of Prospero. The love music soon resumes, now becoming more passionate and resembling a great balletic pas de deux. With a ringing brass chorale, Prospero gives up his magical powers, as all the characters, now reconciled, prepare to leave the island. The Tempest closes as it began with the undulating music of the sea. Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.
Romeo and Juliet
In 1869, the 28-year-old Tchaikovsky was recovering from the breaking off of his only love affair with a woman — the fascinating Belgian opera singer Desirée Artôt — when he was urged to use Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a vehicle to transform his pain into art by his fellow Russian composer Mily Balakirev. This renunciation had been difficult for Tchaikovsky, and soon after, he was seen at the opera
LONG AND FOSTER REAL ESTATE house listening to Artôt with tears streaming down his face. A member of the five Russian nationalist composers known as the “Mighty Handful,” Balakirev became more famous for the compositions he inspired in others than for his own works, and the young Tchaikovsky was one of his protégés. Like Stasov, Balakirev provided a detailed plot for a tone poem, but Tchaikovsky used his own artistic discretion about his suggestions. The first version of his “FantasyOverture” was written in just six weeks at the end of 1869. But when he heard it performed in Moscow in March 1870, Tchaikovsky decided it needed considerably more work. In revisions made soon after, he added the brooding opening that so perfectly establishes a mood of tender pathos, and before publishing it in 1880, he devised the startling conclusion that confirms the tragic denouement with eight searing B-major chords. The musical events of Tchaikovsky’s first masterpiece are so well known they need little explanation; they convey virtually all the dramatic elements of Shakespeare’s play except the scenes of comic relief. Some commentators have linked the dark chant-like theme that opens the work with the character of Friar Laurence who marries the young lovers. This theme plays an important role in the middle development section — striving in the horns against the jagged principal theme representing the battles between the Capulets and Montagues, just as in the play Laurence tries vainly to bring the families together. Notice how craftily Tchaikovsky introduces his famous love theme, one of the most inspired this great melodist ever wrote. He first presents it with very subdued scoring — an English horn solo over violas — saving its full passion for later when it returns soaring aloft in the violins. Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright ©2015
You enjoy a first class music experience. Shouldn’t you also enjoy a first class
real estate experience? CONTACT
DONNA BROWN Long & Foster Real Estate REALTOR/RELOCATION SPECIALIST
410-804-3400
EMAIL: donna.brown@lnf.com WEB: http://donnabrown.lnf.com
100 North Charles Street, 16th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21201
Instilling Confidence for Over 100 Years With over a century of experience and a commitment to excellence, WCS provides skilled service in handling your most challenging legal needs. Our acclaimed attorneys concentrate in a variety of practice areas. Estates and Trusts • Litigation • Real Estate • Corporate and Business Law • Family Law • Employment & Labor Law • Construction
410-659-1300 | www.wcslaw.com Maryland’s Super Lawyers® and Rising Stars®, Best Lawyers in America®, and Best’s Recommended Insurance Attorneys® . WCS holds the gold standard of law firm ratings and is rated by Martindale-Hubbell as an AV Preeminent Status firm. AV is a testament to the fact that our lawyers’ peers rank them at the highest level of professional excellence.
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
17
Jo seph M eyer ho f f Sy m pho ny Hall
Marco Bo rg gr e ve
{ program notes
Mozart’s Great Mass
Friday, March 13, 2015 — 8 p.m. Saturday, March 14, 2015 — 8 p.m. Masaaki Suzuki, Conductor Augustin Hadelich, Violin Simona Sˇaturová, Soprano Joanne Lunn, Mezzo-Soprano Nicholas Phan, Tenor Kyle Ketelsen, Bass-Baritone University of Maryland Concert Choir —Edward Maclary, Director
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Overture to Don Giovanni, K. 527
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, K. 219, “Turkish” Allegro aperto Adagio Rondo: Tempo di menuetto AUGUSTIN HADELICH
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Mass in C Minor, K. 427 (417a), “The Great” Kyrie Gloria Gloria in excelsis deo Laudamus te Gratias agimus tibi Domine Deus Qui tolis Quoniam tu solus Jesu Christe/Cum Sancto Spiritu Credo Credo in unum deum Et incarnates est Sanctus Benedictus SIMONA Sˇaturová JOANNE LUNN NICHOLAS PHAN KYLE KETELSEN UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CONCERT CHOIR The concert will end at approximately 10 p.m.
18 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Since founding Bach Collegium Japan in 1990, Masaaki Suzuki has established himself as a leading authority on the works of Bach; his impressive discography on the BIS label includes all Bach’s major choral works and the complete cycle of cantatas. He also conducts repertoire as diverse as Britten and Stravinsky with orchestras including the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the New York Philharmonic and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. Masaaki Suzuki is an active organist and harpsichordist, having studied with Ton Koopman at the Sweelinck Conservatory, Amsterdam. Founder and head of the early music department at the Tokyo University of the Arts, he also holds positions at the Yale School of Music and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Masaaki Suzuki is making his BSO debut.
Rosali e O ’Co n n o r
INTERMISSION
Masaaki Suzuki
Augustin Hadelich
Multiple performances with almost every major orchestra in the U.S. have confirmed Augustin Hadelich as one of the most important violinists of his generation, continuing to astonish audiences with his phenomenal technique, poetic sensitivity and gorgeous tone. Highlights of Mr. Hadelich’s 2014 –15 season include debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra, Danish National Symphony and the London Philharmonic, as well as re-invitations to perform with the New York Philharmonic and the symphonies of Houston, Indianapolis, Liverpool, Saint Louis and Seattle. In addition to his many performances in the U.S., Canada, and South America, Mr. Hadelich has appeared with the BBC Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony, Dresden
Philharmonic, NHK Symphony/ Tokyo and Royal Scottish National Orchestra, to name a few. Augustin Hadelich’s first major orchestral recording, featuring the violin concertos of Jean Sibelius and Thomas Adès with Hannu Lintu conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, was released to great acclaim in March 2014 and nominated for a Gramophone Award. Augustin Hadelich last appeared with the BSO and Maestro Juanjo Mena in January 2011 when he played the Brahms Violin Concerto.
Simona Sˇaturová
Simona Šaturová, born in Bratislava, Slovakia, studied singing at the Bratislava Conservatory and attended various master classes, most notably with the Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas. She regularly performs at the Théâtre de la Monnaie Brussels and Aalto-Theatre Essen, as Violetta Valéry (La traviata), Sandrina (La finta giardiniera), Servilia (Titus), Gilda (Rigoletto), Konstanze (The Abduction from the Seraglio), and Elettra (Idomeneo). Besides numerous performances at the Prague National Theatre, she can also be heard on the stages of Teatro Colón Buenos Aires, Théâtre du Châtelet Paris, Opéra de Monte Carlo, Oper Frankfurt and in Athen`s Megaron Concert Hall. Simona Šaturová has also earned an international reputation as a concert and oratorio singer. Conductors with whom Šaturová has worked include Christoph Eschenbach, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sir Neville Marriner, Jiří Bělohlávek, Manfred Honeck, Tomáš Netopil, Kent Nagano, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Adam Fischer, Ivan Fischer und Christopher Hogwood. Simona Šaturová is making her BSO debut.
Photo by Broadmead resident: Erroll Hay
™
proudly supports the arts and the BSO. • 94 acre beautifully landscaped campus
• Stimulating social activities
• Single story garden homes
• Exceptional dining venues
• Fitness, aquatic, and wellness programs
• Pet friendly campus
To request a free information kit please call 443.578.8008 or visit www.Broadmead.org 13801 York Rd. Cockeysville, MD 21030 TTY/Voice - Maryland Relay Service 1.800.201.7165
B A LT I M O R E C H O R A L A R T S P R E S E N T S
Quest for Peace Sunday, April 26, 2015 at 3 pm Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher College
Tom Hall leads the full Chorus and string orchestra in poignant and powerful settings of Dona nobis pacem by Ralph Vaughn Williams and Pateris Vasks, as well as Arvo Pärt’s beautiful meditation, Da pacem Domine. The provocative program, which features vocal soloists Hyunah Yu and Robert Cantrell, also includes the Mid-Atlantic premiere of Jake Runestad’s Fear Not, Dear Friend, based on the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson. Tickets: $25 – $40 A Choral Conversation follows the performance featuring Tom Hall and special guests including author and former President of the Alliance for Peacebuilding Chic Dambach, discussing the role that music and the arts play in peace-making.
Call 410-523-7070 or visit BCAsings.org Baltimore Choral Arts is also grateful for the support of The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, creator of the Baker Artist Awards, www.bakerartistawards.org.
Tom Hall, Music Director
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
19
Joanne Lunn
Joanne Lunn studied at the Royal College of Music in London, where she was awarded the prestigious Tagore Gold Medal. Ms. Lunn has performed with the OAE, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, the Academy of Ancient Music, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Concerto Köln and many others at venues including the Conservatoire Royal (Brussels), Tchaikovsky Concert Hall (Moscow), Sage Gateshead, St Paul’s Cathedral, and at the Halle Handel Festival and the BBC Proms. Engagements in 2014 –15 include regular appearances with the Dunedin Consort (John Butt) and New London Consort & Musicians of the Globe (Philip Pickett), as well as with Bach Collegium Japan (Masaaki Suzuki) across Europe and in the US. Future engagements include The Nelson Mass in Moscow, Handel cantatas with Musica Alta Ripa and a program of 16th-century music at the Rhine Valley Music Festival with The Queen’s Revels. Joanne Lunn is making her BSO debut.
Nicholas Phan
Nicholas Phan has appeared with many leading orchestras in North America and Europe, including the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and BBC Symphony. He has toured extensively throughout Europe with Il Complesso Barocco and appeared with the Oregon Bach, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Marlboro, and Edinburgh festivals and at the BBC Proms. In opera, Phan has appeared with the Houston Grand, Seattle, Glyndebourne, and Frankfurt operas and the Maggio Musicale in Florence. In recital, he has been presented by Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the University of Chicago. Phan’s growing discography includes the Grammy-nominated Pulcinella with the
20 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and his solo albums Winter Words and Still Falls the Rain. His many engagements this season include his return to Houston Grand Opera for Sweeney Todd, and concerts with the orchestras of Cleveland, San Francisco, Dallas, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Vancouver.
Nicholas Phan last appearance with the BSO in November 2013, in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with Marin Alsop conducting.
Kyle Ketelsen
American bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen is in regular demand by the world’s leading opera companies and orchestras for his vibrant, handsome stage presence and his distinctive vocalism. Mr. Ketelsen opens the 2014 –15 season as Leporello in a new production of Don Giovanni at Lyric Opera of Chicago, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis and directed by Robert Falls. Other operatic highlights of Mr. Ketelsen’s upcoming season include his return to Canadian Opera Company as Leporello in Don Giovanni and Cadmus in the company’s production of Semele at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as performances of his acclaimed Escamillo in Carmen with the Minnesota Opera under the baton of Michael Christie and at the Chorégies d’Orange festival in France. Mr. Ketelsen’s symphonic engagements include Mozart’s Requiem with Pinchas Zukerman and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Kyle Ketelsen is making his BSO debut
University of Maryland Concert Choir
Over the past decade the University of Maryland Concert Choir has established itself as one of the premier symphonic choruses in the United States. Regular collaborations with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the National
University of Maryland Concert Choir
Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC in repertoire such as the Britten War Requiem, the Mozart Requiem, Haydn’s The Creation, the Bach St. Matthew Passion and B Minor Mass, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Handel’s Messiah have been met with acclaim from audiences and critics alike. Performances at the University’s College Park campus have included Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Verdi’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Student singers are chosen by audition from the School of Music as well as from across the University’s various disciplines. Under the direction of Edward Maclary, the UMD Concert Choir strives to meet the highest professional standards while providing its membership with a joyful educational and social experience. University of Maryland Concert Choir last performed with the BSO in November 2013 in Britten’s War Requiem with the BSO with Marin Alsop conducting.
About the concert: Overture to Don Giovanni
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Born in Salzburg, Austria, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, December 5, 1791
In 1786, just as Mozart’s popularity in Vienna went into a slump, the city of Prague, capital of the then-Austrian province of Bohemia, came to the rescue. Mozart’s new comic opera The Marriage of Figaro had been such a spectacular success at the Prague Opera House that the city’s musical leaders begged the composer to visit as soon
Aliso n Har bau gh
{ program notes
April 10 - May 10, 2015
as possible. Arriving in early January 1787, he found the city gripped by Figaro-mania. He described a ball given in his honor: “I looked on … with the greatest pleasure while all these people flew about in sheer delight to the music of my Figaro arranged for contradances and German dances. For there, they talk about nothing but Figaro. Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but Figaro. No opera is drawing like Figaro. … Certainly a great honor for me!” Not surprisingly, the Prague Opera House offered a commission for a new opera, and it turned out to be one of his greatest masterpieces: Don Giovanni, premiered in Prague on October 29, 1787. The story of Don Juan, the prodigious Spanish womanizer who seduces thousands of women throughout southern Europe, dated back at least to the late 16th century. The French dramatist Molière created a play about him, while the forgotten Giuseppe Gazzaniga had produced a one-act opera in Venice earlier in 1787. Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte actually cribbed from Gazzaniga’s libretto to create his longer story for Mozart. Da Ponte and Mozart called their work a “dramma giocoso” because, to an unprecedented degree, it combined comedy with a very serious drama of crime and punishment. The opera’s riveting overture encapsulates both the tragic and the comic aspects of this dramma giocoso. First, we hear a slow introduction in D minor, full of darkness and foreboding; its whirling scale passages terrifyingly portray the supernatural forces that will ultimately destroy the Don; this music returns in the opera’s final scene when Don Giovanni meets his doom. Then the tempo accelerates to Allegro, and the key brightens to D Major for music of comic verve. But it also has more weight than do the overtures for Mozart’s more purely comic operas and with its dashing fanfares seems a portrait of the virile Don himself. Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.
ROMEO AND JULIET By William Shakespeare
CHESAPEAKE SHAKESPEARE COMPANY
TICKETS 410.244.8570 ChesapeakeShakespeare.com 7 South Calvert Street Baltimore, MD 21202
The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund
You don’t need a ph.D to understand
why Roland Park Place is the right choice.
How To Keep Your Imagination Racing. Healthy minds make for healthy bodies. And nowhere does it apply more than at Roland Park Place. It’s true, we do have delectable dining, exceptional amenities and well-designed apartment homes and cottages. But it’s the intellectual stimulation that attracts so many residents. Perhaps this is why engaging individuals from all walks of life have chosen to live here. Residents enjoy world-class musicians and lecturers discussing a variety of topics. They also participate in a range of special interest clubs, creative arts, wellness classes, singing groups and more. There are regular outings to local cultural attractions such as Everyman Theater, Centerstage, the Meyerhoff, the Lyric Opera House and Shriver Hall, as well as Kennedy Center ballets. We take excursions as far afield as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Ocean City. In fact, at Roland Park Place the possibilities are as endless as your own imagination. Why not explore it right now? Call (410) 243-5700 or visit RolandParkPlace.org 830 W. 40th St. Baltimore, MD 21211 (410) 243-5700 rolandparkplace.org
The educated choice.
RPPJ6392 PhD Ad 4.625x4.875_BO.indd 1
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
21
1/14/15 4:24 PM
M
FEBRUARY 1, 2015 AT 4 PM FREE! s deine Cantata 179: Siehe zu, dass deine elei Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei inor sei Violin , Concerto in A minor, BWV 1041
{ program notes
At Christ Lutheran Church 230 701 S. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21230
MARCH 1, 2015 AT 4 PM
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, “Turkish”
(tickets required) $33 in advance; $38 at the door
B Minor Mass
At First Lutheran Church 3604 Chatham Rd., Ellicott City, MD 21042 21042
JANUARY 4, 2015 4 PM REE APRIL 5, 2015 AT 4ATPM - FREE (ticket required) $15 uche Cantata 49: Ich geh und suche Cantata 112: Der Herr ist mein emit verlangen getreuer Hirt
At Zion Lutheran Church, Handel: Water Music Suite #1 400HWV E. Lexington 21202 348 St., Baltimore, MD 21202
h 6
At Christ Lutheran Church
MAY, 2015 AT 4 PM 701 S.3, Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21230
(ticket required) $33 in advance; $38FEBRUARY at the door 1, 2015 AT 4 PM -
FREE! Brahms Requiem
Cantata 179: Siehe zu, dass deine
At Towson United Methodist Church Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei 501 Hampton Ln., Towson, MD 21286
sei Violin Concerto in A minor, BWV 1041
JUNE 7, 2015 Church AT 4 PM - FREE! REE! At Christ Lutheran 701 S. Charles Bravo! BachSt., Baltimore, MD 21230
At Zion Lutheran Church, MARCH 1, 2015 AT 4 PM 21202 400 E Lexington St., Baltimore, MD 21202 (tickets required) $33 in advance; $38 at the door
Minor Mass ForB tickets, concert information, or tion, or First Lutheran Church to At audition to join the choir, please , please 3604 Chatham Rd., Ellicott City, MD 21042 isit call 410-941-9262, or visit APRIL 5, 2015 AT 4 PM - FREE www.BachInBaltimore.org. org. Cantata 49: Ich geh und suche emit verlangen At Zion Lutheran Church, 400 E. Lexington St., Baltimore, MD 21202
MAY, 3, 2015 AT 4 PM
Maryland Bach In Baltimore is supported State by a grant from the Maryland State brant Arts Council, cultural an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural (ticket required) $33 in advance; community where the arts thrive.
$38 at the door
r, Jr.Bach Memorial In Baltimore acknowledges the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial rArtistA Fund, creator of the wards. Baker Artist Awards, www.BakerArtistAwards. on and org, for fundinga a part-time executive director position and a At Towson United Church Working Capital Reserve forMethodist the 2013-2014 season.
Brahms Requiem
501 Hampton Ln., Towson, MD 21286
JUNE 7, 2015 AT 4 PM - FREE! Bravo! Bach At Zion Lutheran Church, 400 E Lexington St., Baltimore, MD 21202
In perfect harmony. For tickets, concert information, or to audition to join the choir, please call 410-941-9262, or visit www.BachInBaltimore.org.
For 25 years, we’ve been a strong, stable senior living community that keeps you connected to family, friends and your favorite traditions. Bach In Baltimore is supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive.
Bach In Baltimore acknowledges the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, creator of the Baker Artist Awards, www.BakerArtistAwards. org, for funding a part-time executive director position and a Working Capital Reserve for the 2013-2014 season.
Call 410-415-9034 to learn more
www.NorthOaksLCS.com
725 Mount Wilson Lane Pikesville, MD 21208
22 O v ertur e |
699365 www. bsomusic .org
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Although he eventually chose to concentrate on the keyboard, the young Mozart was almost equally gifted as a violinist, admired for the beauty and purity of his tone. As concertmaster of the PrinceArchbishop Colloredo’s court orchestra, he played the principal violin part and led the orchestra from his chair. He was soon to grow deeply frustrated with this role, but between 1773 and 1775, it inspired him to write his five violin concertos, as well as a number of other works with prominent solo violin parts for him to play. The last three of these concertos, all written in 1775 when he was 19, rank among his earliest masterpieces. Dated December 20, 1775, the Violin Concerto in A Major is the last of the group. Full of surprises and shifts of emotional tone, it shows Mozart playing freely and creatively with the concerto norms of his day. It is nicknamed “Turkish” for an exuberant episode of “alla Turca” (“in the Turkish manner”) music Mozart inserted in its vivacious finale. Such music — with its exotic leaping melodies, menacing unison passages, drone basses, and the clatter of drums and cymbals — was very fashionable in Europe during the late-18th century. But this music really isn’t “Turkish” at all; rather, as Mozart scholar Neal Zaslow explains, it actually came from Hungary. The first movement opens with music of charm and insouciance. The orchestral violins merely sketch the principal theme with pert ascending notes. Likewise, the winsome second theme with its humorous repeated notes is but a preview of what the soloist will do. Now comes Mozart’s first surprise: instead of entering in this mood and tempo, the soloist floats in with a dreamy romance over rustling orchestral strings in a much slower tempo. Eventually, he shifts up to Allegro and transforms the orchestral pencil sketch of the principal theme into a soaring, full-color melody. Movement two is an early example of Mozart’s almost painfully beautiful slow
movements, which yearn for something more than ordinary life can give. The long-spun melodic lines are continually punctuated by little sighing figures in the orchestra. The work closes with a finale in the rondo form Mozart favored for his concertos. In this form, a refrain melody keeps returning in the home key while, in between, episodes of contrasting music explore other keys. Here the refrain tune is a courtly minuet ending with a little teasing upward flourish. Midway through the movement comes Mozart’s “Turkish” surprise. Since he didn’t have percussion in his small ensemble, he cleverly asked the cellos to thump their instruments with the wooden side of their bows to produce the drum-and-cymbals effect. Instrumentation: Two oboes, two horns and strings.
Mass in C Minor, “The Great,” K. 427
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
By strange coincidence, both of Mozart’s greatest sacred choral/orchestral works, the Requiem and the “Great” Mass in C Minor, were left unfinished. The tragic story of Mozart attempting to complete the Requiem before his death was well-known to music lovers even before the deathbed scene in Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus dramatized it with many fictional embellishments. But what of Mozart’s other unfinished masterpiece? When Mozart composed the C-Minor Mass in 1782–83, he was in good health and recently married to Constanze Weber. Why should he break off in midstream, leaving half the “Credo” and all of the “Agnus Dei” unset? If Mozart had continued writing on the scale he’d begun, the C-Minor would have been as long as Bach’s epic B-Minor Mass. And in fact there are many parallels with the B-Minor, which Mozart surely knew. Like Bach, Mozart divided the mass text into various brief segments and then worked them out expansively in the form of solo arias or elaborate choruses. Both Bach and Mozart set the Gloria’s “Laudamus Te” section as a florid aria for the second
ANN, 55 soprano soloist and the “Cum Sancto Spirito” as a spectacular choral fugue. Indeed, the influence of Baroque composers, particularly Handel and Bach, is very strong throughout the C-Minor Mass. In 1782, the year he began composing this work, Mozart became acquainted with Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a scholar of the Baroque with a splendid library of music of this period. Pouring over van Swieten’s scores, Mozart soaked up the contrapuntal techniques of these earlier masters and became very enamored of their music. Not surprisingly, the C-Minor Mass became a glorious melange of Baroque practices, particularly in its choral music. But back to the mystery of why this work was never completed. On August 4, 1782, shortly after he began writing the C-Minor Mass, Mozart married Constanze Weber, much to the dismay of his father. Mozart seems to have begun the Mass as an act of thanksgiving for his marriage and a bridal gift to Constanze, for whom he wrote the first soprano solo. Perhaps the pressure of commissions that would earn him money against this personal work that was growing too big to be performed by any church finally drove him to break it off. Only a portion of what he had written was premiered at St. Peter’s Church, Salzburg, with Constanze as soprano soloist, in either late August or late October 1782. And Mozart seemed to have little appreciation for the greatness of his work in progress; in 1785, he actually cannibalized it to meet a hasty commission for a sacred cantata Davidde penitente. The “Kyrie” gives us a dark, dramatic setting of the “Lord, have mercy” text, in keeping with the character of the C-minor tonality. A gentler, more personal prayer, “Christ, have mercy,” is offered by the first soprano soloist, above a more subdued chorus and orchestra. The “Gloria,” the longest completed section, begins in a blaze of brass and the bright key of C Major. This is the first chorus in which you’ll hear the influence of Handel, including some nearly direct quotes from the “Hallelujah Chorus.” The second soprano is then introduced in “Laudamus te”: a vivacious, virtuosic aria of praise, full of joyful ascending scales in the violins.
FIRST DAY: KNEE REHAB, JANUARY 14 FIRST PLACE: PURPLE E DAISIES, DAISI JULY 3
When you leave the hospital, you have a choice. Choose Keswick. Keswick is there at each important point along your recovery: When you leave the hospital • When you’re rehabilitating When you return home
Right Care. Right Time. Right Place.
410.235.8860 CHOOSEKESWICK.ORG
Get results from award-winning design and print services that are within your area code and within your budget. For nearly 20 years, we’ve served local businesses and nonprofits, producing everything from ads, annual reports and brochures, to web sites and logos. (And we designed and printed the magazine you’re holding now.) 106 years of top-notch design. Our design and production staff emulate the same high standards reflected each month in Baltimore magazine, the nation’s oldest city magazine at 106 years. Very competitive fees. Because we generate millions of dollars a year in printing and have a dozen design and production experts on the staff of the magazine and its ancillary products, we can offer wholesale printing and design fees that are kept low by our efficient company structure. To see samples of our work or for an estimate on your next project, call us at 410.752.4200.
Proud supporter of the BSO
DPD_Ad_Square.indd 1
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
23
12/17/13 4:53 PM
{ program notes In addition to the lovely duet for both sopranos for “Domine Deus” and flowing trio for the sopranos and the tenor for “Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus,” the major numbers of the “Gloria” are the extraordinarily powerful “Qui Tollis” and the grand choral fugue for “Cum Sancto Spiritu.” Michael Steinberg has called the “Quoniam” section “one of the summits of Classical church music,” and it is difficult to argue with him. In G minor and a slow tempo, this is a Baroque-style choral piece, set over a traditional Baroque descending bass accompaniment. “Cum Sancto Spiritu” (“With the Holy Spirit”) traditionally received a fugal treatment, but Mozart’s is exciting rather than pedantic. A slow, simple fugal subject juxtaposes beautifully against continuous faster-note passages, and a little downand-up figure is exploited to create two thrilling, long crescendo passages. The glory of the incomplete “Credo” section is the long, sublimely beautiful aria for the first soprano, “Et incarnatus est” (“And was incarnate from the Holy Spirit”). Traditionally, composers offer their loveliest writing for this passage, but this exquisite setting with the soprano accompanied by solo flute, oboe, and bassoon arguably tops them all. Particularly marvelous are the passages in which the soprano sings with the woodwinds; Mozart also exploits this blending of singer and instruments in a lengthy cadenza near the end. No husband could ever have devised a more magnificent gift for his wife! Many parts are missing in the concluding “Sanctus” section, but several editors believe this already massive music should be scored for eight-part double chorus. The eight-voice division then continues into the intricate, high-speed double fugue for “Osanna.” Although this makes a satisfactory conclusion for this “noble torso”, we can only weep that Mozart apparently didn’t prize this glorious work as we do today and bring it to completion. Instrumentation: Flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, organ and strings. Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright ©2015
24 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Jo s e ph Meye rho ff Sym pho ny Hall
Haydn & Ravel
Friday, March 20, 2015 — 8 p.m. Saturday, March 21, 2015 — 8 p.m. Marin Alsop, Conductor Sol Gabetta, Cello
Maurice Ravel Valses nobles et sentimentales
Franz Joseph Haydn Cello Concerto in C Major, H. VIIb:1 Moderato Adagio Allegro molto SOL GABETTA
INTERMISSION
Maurice Ravel La Valse Richard Strauss Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, opus 59
The concert will end at approximately 9:50 p.m.
Marin Alsop
For Marin Alsop’s bio., please see pg. 7.
Sol Gabetta
Sol Gabetta achieved international acclaim upon winning the Crédit Suisse Young Artist Award in 2004 and making her debut with the Wiener Philharmoniker and Valery Gergiev. Following her highly acclaimed debut with Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle in 2014, Gabetta performed her debut Staatskapelle Berlin this past December.
Other highlights for the 2014 –15 season include her debut with Toronto Symphony Orchestra, a European tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski as well as recitals across Europe with Bertrand Chamayou. Gabetta’s performances today include appearances with leading orchestras and conductors worldwide including the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.), Orchestre National de France, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, and The Philadelphia, London Philharmonic and Philharmonia orchestras; and conductors
program notes { Giovanni Antonini, Mario Venzago, and Thomas Hengelbrock. Sol Gabetta maintains an intensive chamber music activity, performing worldwide in halls such as Wigmore Hall in London, Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Sol Gabetta last performed with the BSO in November–December 2012 with Mario Venzago conducting the Elgar Cello Concerto.
About the concert: Valses nobles et sentimentales
Maurice Ravel
Born in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France, March 7, 1875; died in Paris, December 28, 1937
Many of Maurice Ravel’s most beautiful orchestral pieces began as works for the piano. Such is the case with the gracious Valses nobles et sentimentales, which he composed in 1911, taking his inspiration from Schubert’s waltzes for piano of a century earlier (12 Valses nobles and 34 Valses sentimentales). The fragile charm of these pieces was summed up in the brief quotation the composer added at the top of the score, drawn from a recent novel by Henri de Régnier: “The delightful and always novel pleasures of a useless occupation.” However, when shortly thereafter the Russian-French ballerina Natasha Trouhanova commissioned a new ballet score from Ravel, he thought these piano pieces arranged for orchestra would suit the projected ballet scenario, which he was also creating for Trouhanova. He polished off the exquisite scoring in only 15 days, and the ballet, titled Adélaïde, ou la langage des fleurs (“Adélaïde, or the Language of Flowers”), was premiered in Paris at the Theâtre du Châtelet on April 22, 1912, with Ravel himself conducting. Later the score became a concert work, first performed in Paris in February 1914. In Ravel’s ballet scenario set in 1820, the courtesan Adélaïde dallies between two suitors: the serious and idealistic Lorédan and a more frivolous but extremely
wealthy Duke. The flirtation and courtship are carried out through the exchange of various flowers, each representing a different virtue or vice. Lorédan presents Adélaïde with a buttercup as a symbol of true love while the Duke offers a sunflower representing extravagance. The Duke is finally rejected, but Lorédan is kept in suspense as the courtesan presents him with a tuberose (pleasure) and then a poppy (forgetfulness). When in the Epilogue he threatens suicide, Adélaïde relents and gives him a red rose as she falls into his arms. Though Valses nobles calls for a large orchestra, it mostly features gorgeously subtle playing for the strings and, above all, the woodwinds, whose delicately variegated colors Ravel masterfully exploits. The seven waltzes are contrasted in key, tempo, and mood. Only in the last of them, which is the longest and richest of the set, does Ravel let the full orchestra fly in a sweeping, truly Viennese waltz. A final movement, the Epilogue, quotes from most of the preceding dances and brings the piece to a nostalgic, bittersweet close. Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and percussion, two harps, celeste and strings.
Cello Concerto in C Major
Joseph Haydn
Born in Rohrau, Austria, March 31, 1732; died in Vienna, May 31, 1809
Perhaps the ultimate dream of the sleuthing musicologist is to discover, hidden away in some dusty drawer or overlooked closet, a major missing work by one of the master composers. It happened in 1961 when Czech musicologist Oldrich Pulkert was working in the Prague National Museum: he unearthed Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C Major, lost for nearly 200 years. The composer’s Cello Concerto in D, written in 1783, had long been in the active repertoire. But scholars knew there was an earlier concerto because it was listed both in the catalogue of Haydn’s works he’d begun in 1765 and in the
DHMH RSA # R24924
WWW.ELIZABETHCOONEYAGENCY.COM
TRUST, INTEGRITY & EXCELLENCE SINCE 1957
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
25
Alexa F. Faraday, MD
{ program notes
Board Certified in Internal Medicine
Personal & attentive medical care Health care coordination & advocacy Access 24/7 House calls available Greater Baltimore Medical Center 6701 N. Charles Street, Suite 4106 Baltimore, MD 21204 Phone: 855-372-5392
www.DrAlexaFaraday.com
For more information, please contact us
PEABODY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Leon Fleisher, guest conductor Andrew W. Mellon Chair in Piano
Min Young Park, piano
Harrison L. Winter Piano Competition Winner Carl Maria von Weber: Overture to Der Freischütz Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K.503 Richard Strauss: Don Juan, Op. 20 Maurice Ravel: La valse
Saturday, April 25 at 8:00 pm Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall
$15 Adults, $10 Seniors, $5 Students For tickets, call 410-234-4800 or visit peabody.jhu.edu/events.
26 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
works list he prepared shortly before his death. Since Haydn had included the opening two measures of the solo entrance (known as the “incipit”) in his catalogue, Pulkert was able to verify his discovery easily. The “new” Haydn Cello Concerto made its debut the following year at the Prague Spring Music Festival and was promptly taken up by cello virtuosi around the world. Believed to have been written sometime between 1761 and 1765 during Haydn’s first years at the court of Prince Esterházy, this concerto was probably created for the lead cellist of the Esterházy orchestra, Joseph Franz Weigl, to play at one of the court’s twice-weekly orchestral concerts. Weigl must have been highly accomplished, for the concerto fully exploits the special qualities of the instrument as well as the technical skills of a virtuoso player. Scored for a small string ensemble with two oboes and two horns, this is a lovely work that looks back to the Baroque era while being advanced enough to stand proudly beside its better-known sibling. The opening movement is warm, noble, and expansive. It is in sonata form, but with a more leisurely Moderato tempo rather than the customary fast Allegro. The thematic material emphasizes three elements: syncopated rhythms, large upward leaps, and rapid repeated notes. In place of a leap, the cellist frequently reverses direction and swoops downward to powerful low notes. She also exploits the bouncing repeated notes to add drama to the middle development section and the cadenza. The Adagio second movement is a beautiful aria for soloist and strings, reminiscent of the great Baroque slow movements. The soloist enters gently on a sustained note an octave below the violins and employs the cello’s sweetest tenor/alto singing range throughout. By extending phrases beyond where we would expect them to end, Haydn contrives to give this movement the quality of endless, ever-flowing song. Haydn is famous for his brilliant, high-spirited finales, and this one is a vivacious, virtuosic example. Here the cello’s low register is exploited, often to comic effect, as well as the soloist’s agility
in long passages of very rapid notes. Toward the end, in a game of one-upmanship, the orchestra pushes the soloist to ever-greater feats of daring. Instrumentation: Two oboes, two horns and strings.
L a Valse
Maurice Ravel Ravel originally conceived La Valse in 1906 as the tone poem Wien (“Vienna”): “a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz,” he called it, in tribute to Johann Strauss. However, by the time he came to write it in 1919–20, World War I had smashed that enchanted world, along with the Austrian Hapsburg empire, forever. Though pushing 40 and of frail physique, Ravel had struggled to play his patriotic role for France. Repeatedly turned down by the army and air force, he became a truck driver behind the front lines. When he was demobilized, his health was broken. The death of his beloved mother early in 1917 sent him into a long depression. La Valse was written by a man who had experienced horrors both on the battlefield and in his personal life. There was no longer any possibility of creating a Romantic apotheosis, only, in Ravel’s words, “the impression of fantastic and fatal whirling.” Like his beloved Daphnis and Chloé, La Valse was originally intended as a ballet for the flamboyant Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev and given the subtitle “choreographic poem.” But when Ravel and a colleague played it in a two-piano version for Diaghilev in April 1920, he dismissed it with a backhanded compliment: “It’s a masterpiece … but it’s not a ballet. It’s a portrait of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.” However, La Valse has been subsequently choreographed several times, with George Balanchine creating a particularly successful version in the 1950s. Ravel provided a brief synopsis for his ghostly dance, in which nostalgia and horror are superbly blended: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds
program notes { gradually scatter: one sees … an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. … The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the [first] fortissimo. … An imperial court, about 1855.” The music opens ominously with the dark rumble of low strings and bassoons, and a nightmarish thud in 3/4 time delivered by basses and timpani. A few waltz strains gradually penetrate the mists, then shine forth brilliantly. The ominous dark music returns, and, whirling faster, the waltzes begin to collide with each other in wild harmonic and rhythmic confusion. Finally, even the 3/4 beat breaks down in an orgy of selfdestruction — the most violent ending in Ravel’s music. In just 12 minutes, we have experienced the most vivid sound portrait imaginable of the end of an era. Instrumentation: Three flutes, piccolo, three oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings.
Suite from Der Rosenkavalier
Richard Strauss
Born in Munich, Germany, June 11, 1864; died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, September 8, 1949
Having devoted his early career to the composition of tone poems, in middle age Richard Strauss moved on to the most dramatic musical form of all: opera. Of his 15 operas, the most popular and, in the opinion of many critics, the finest is Der Rosenkavalier, his bittersweet comedy set in 18th-century Vienna. With a libretto by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, it tells the story of a love triangle involving different generations: two women vying for the love of one man. The older woman is the Marschallin, a beautiful, married noblewoman who is carrying on an affair with the 17-year-old Octavian, Count Rofrano. (Because he personally disliked the tenor voice, Strauss cast Octavian as a mezzosoprano, a “trouser role” like Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.)
When the Marschallin’s cousin, the boorish country bumpkin Baron Lerchenau von Ochs, arrives with the news he is wooing the teenaged Sophie von Faninal and needs a young man to present a silver rose to her as a token of his love (the old Viennese ceremony of the “Rose Cavalier”), the Marschallin proposes Octavian as rosebearer, half knowing she is sending him into the arms of an attractive woman his own age. And indeed the story unfolds as she suspected. Sophie and Octavian are instantly smitten with each other during the rose presentation ceremony; Ochs’ crude wooing throws Sophie into Octavian’s arms; and, after various comic episodes, Ochs admits defeat, and the Marshallin gracefully surrenders Octavian to Sophie. Ever since its premiere in 1911, this opera has entranced audiences with its soaring ensembles for its three female (Octavian included here) leads, its comic sparkle, and especially its anachronistic (the waltz hardly existed in the 18th century) but gloriously Viennese waltzes. The suite we hear tonight is a potpourri of its greatest melodies pulled together by an unknown arranger with the elderly Strauss’ blessing in 1945, when World War II had left him in desperate financial straits. We will hear: the Act II “Rose Presentation Scene,” with its high cascading motive shimmering in celesta, harps, flutes, and strings; the tender duet in which Octavian and Sophie first acknowledge their attraction; Baron Ochs’ sentimental waltz “Mit mir” (the most famous of the opera’s waltzes); the glorious Act III trio in which the Marschallin tenderly renounces her claims to Octavian; and the charmingly naive duet for the young lovers that closes the opera. Finally, though Baron Ochs loses in the opera, he gets the last word in the suite with his exuberant waltz boasting of the “Luck of the Lerchenaus.”
MARCH 29, APRIL 26, MAY 17
What? ’ you re not in Overture? you’re missing out,
hon.
Advertise, and reach over 100,000 patrons of the BSO five times a year in Overture, a program that’s about more than just beautiful music.
Instrumentation: Three flutes, piccolo, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, piccolo clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings.
Design Printing AD sAles to advertise, ContaCt:
Ken Iglehart: iken@baltimoremagazine.net Lynn Talbert: lynn@overturemagazine.org
Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright ©2015
Advertising proceeds go to the BSO, not Baltimore magazine
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
27
Jo seph M eyer ho f f Sy m pho ny Hall
Jack Everly | Principal Pops Conductor
A Symphonic Night at the Movies: Singin’ in the Rain Friday, March 27, 2015 — 8 p.m. Saturday, March 28, 2015 — 8 p.m. Sunday, March 29, 2015 — 3 p.m. With the score performed live by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Jack Everly Film Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. THE CAST Gene Kelly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Don Lockwood Donald O’Connor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cosmo Brown Debbie Reynolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kathy Selden Jean Hagen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lina Lamont Millard Mitchell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R.F. Simpson Cyd Charisse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dancer Douglas Fowley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roscoe Dexter Rita Moreno. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zelda Zanders Screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden Directed by Gene Kelly (Director and Choreographer) and Stanley Donen Produced by Arthur Freed Music by Nacio Herb Brown (songs) and Arthur Freed Producer: John Goberman Music Preparation: Larry Spivack Original orchestrations reconstructed by John Wilson, Paul Campbell and Andrew Cottee The producer wishes to acknowledge the contributions and extraordinary support of John Waxman (Themes & Variations). “A Symphonic Night at the Movies” is a production of PGM Productions, Inc. (New York) and appears by arrangement with IMG Artists.
M i chael Tam maro
{ program notes Jack Everly
Jack Everly is the principal pops conductor of the Indianapolis and Baltimore Symphony orchestras, Naples Philharmonic Orchestra and the National Arts Centre Orchestra (Ottawa). He has conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, The New York Pops at Carnegie Hall and appears regularly with the Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center. This season, Maestro Everly will conduct over 90 performances in more than 20 North American cities. As music director of the National Memorial Day Concert and “A Capitol Fourth” on PBS, Everly proudly leads the National Symphony Orchestra in these patriotic celebrations on the National Mall. These concerts attract hundreds of thousands of attendees on the lawn and the broadcasts reach millions of viewers and are some of the highest rated programming on PBS television. Originally appointed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mr. Everly was music director of the American Ballet Theatre for 14 years. In addition to his ABT tenure, he teamed with Marvin Hamlisch on Broadway shows that Mr. Hamlisch scored. He conducted Carol Channing hundreds of times in Hello, Dolly! in two separate Broadway productions. Maestro Everly, a graduate of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, holds an honorary doctorate of arts from Franklin College in his home state of Indiana. He is a proud resident of the Indianapolis community for over 12 years, and when not on the podium, Maestro Everly can be found at home with his family which includes Max the wonder dog. Jack Everly last appeared with the BSO in February 2015 with guest vocalist Patti Austin in performances of works by Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington.
The concert will end at approximately 10:05 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and 5:05 p.m. on Sunday.
28 O v ertur e |
About the concert: Singin’ in the Rain: Hollywood’s Greatest Musical www. bsomusic .org
program notes { Some movies make a big splash when released, win fistfuls of Oscars and Golden Globes, then fade into history. The 1952 MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain has followed exactly the opposite trajectory. Initially only a modest success with audiences and critics, it was nominated for two Academy Awards — Best Supporting Actress for Jean Hagen and Best Score — and astonishingly won neither. Yet today it is generally regarded as the finest of the legendary string of MGM musicals of the 1940s and ’50s, and in its 2007 list of the greatest American movies ever made, the American Film Institute ranked it number five. Its producer Arthur Freed, head of the famed “Freed Unit” in charge of MGM’s musicals, conceived it with the most modest goal in mind: to be a vehicle to showcase a selection of songs he had written as lyricist with composer Nacio Herb Brown for previous films of the late 1920s and ’30s, among them the eponymous “Singin’ in the Rain” (featured in Hollywood Revue of 1929). Only the witty “Moses Supposes” was freshly created for the film. The plot was recycled, too: the popular writing team of Betty Comden and Adolf Green based it on the MossHart/George S. Kaufman stage comedy Once in a Lifetime, itself made into a movie in 1932. The sets utilized whatever was hanging around the MGM lot from previous productions. Dancing star Gene Kelly shared the director’s role with the very young Stanley Donen. Singin’ in the Rain’s plot is set in 1927 during Hollywood’s perilous transition from silent films to “talkies” and hilariously reflects the trials of directors trying to sequence sound with image and of silent stars (like John Garfield) whose weak or unattractive voices betrayed their photogenic faces. (Even that decision was made without much forethought — Freed simply thought the period would match the era when his songs were composed.) It revolves around Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), the dashing star of silent costume pictures; his co-star and strictly publicityengineered love interest, the blonde screen siren Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen); and his sidekick, hoofer Cosmo Brown (Donald
O’Connor). Trying to escape his voracious fans, Lockwood virtually falls into the lap of the pretty chorus girl with big aspirations Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), and they fall in love. When Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer is released as the wildly successful first talkie, Lockwood and Lamont’s studio, Monumental Pictures, is faced with a crisis. They attempt to turn the co-stars’ next film The Dueling Cavalier into a sound picture, but are thwarted by Lina’s screechy voice and intractable New York accent. Cosmo Brown’s ingenious solution is to turn the film into a musical The Dancing Cavalier, with Kathy’s mellow voice dubbed in for Lina’s and a big “modern” dance sequence for Lockwood, “Broadway Melody.” What made Singin’ in the Rain a legend are its spectacularly performed and staged song-and-dance sequences. Donald O’Connor’s breakneck virtuoso dancing — done without the assistance of stunt doubles or today’s special effects — in “Make ‘Em Laugh” actually caused him to be hospitalized briefly. In her first starring role, Debbie Reynolds was only 19 and a gymnast rather than a trained dancer; none other than Fred Astaire volunteered to coach her, producing a perkily graceful performance to match her fine singing. The film features an ambitious 15-minute dance sequence, “Broadway Melody,” in which Kelly is paired with Cyd Charisse as a sexy, gloriously long-legged femme fatale. However, the number that has made this film immortal is Gene Kelly’s rendition of the title song as, realizing he is in love with Kathy, he dances through the rain-soaked streets of Hollywood. Originally, this was intended to be a trio for Kelly, O’Connor, and Reynolds, as shown in the opening credits, but Kelly as codirector appropriated it for himself. Kelly’s deftly imaginative use of his umbrella is the supreme example of his penchant for building dances around props and the given set. Though it took several days to shoot, during which time the ailing Kelly’s temperature rose to 103 degrees, this dance embodies the effortless spontaneity achieved only by great art. Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright ©2015
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
29
{ program notes Jo seph M eyer ho f f Sy m pho n y Hall
Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony Thursday, April 9, 2015— 8 p.m.
Presenting Sponsors: Alena and David M. Schwaber
Marin Alsop, Conductor Adam Walker, Flute
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Hallé, Bournemouth Symphony, Northern Sinfonia, City of Birmingham Symphony and is a regular visitor to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Concerto highlights of the 2014–15 season include a return to the U.S. for performances with the Seattle Symphony and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Marin Alsop, as well as a debut with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra under Mikko Frank and an appearance with the RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Adam Walker is making his BSO debut.
About the concert: Dmitri Shostakovich
Festive Overture, opus 96
Kevin Puts Flute Concerto With great sincerity and affection; flexible, with motion Andante Very fast, with tremendous energy ADAM WALKER
INTERMISSION Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, opus 64 Andante — Allegro con anima Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza Valse: Allegro moderato Finale: Andante maestoso — Allegro vivace The concert will end at approximately 9:50 p.m.
Marin Alsop
For Marin Alsop’s bio., please see pg. 7.
Adam Walker
“The fluency and apparently effortless virtuosity of this extraordinary musician … was spellbinding.” —The Guardian. In 2009 at the age of 21, Adam Walker was appointed principal flute of the London Symphony Orchestra and
30 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
received the Outstanding Young Artist Award at MIDEM Classique in Cannes. In 2010 he won a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship Award and was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Outstanding Young Artist Award. As a soloist Adam has performed with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra at the Konzerthaus, the Solistes Européens, Luxembourg, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the Southbank Centre’s “The Rest is Noise” Festival and with the London Symphony Orchestra,
Festive Overture
Dmitri Shostakovich Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, September 25, 1906; died in Moscow, August 9, 1975
After the Soviet government in 1948 condemned him for the second time for writing difficult, modernist music that was deemed unhealthy for Soviet citizens, Dmitri Shostakovich adopted a protective covering for his work. He used a simpler, more accessible idiom for his public music, while saving his more complex, dissonant style for personal works such as his string quartets. Composed in November 1954 to celebrate the 37th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Festive Overture naturally was in his most accessible idiom: tonal, tuneful, and totally positive in spirit. In Elizabeth Wilson’s biography Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, the composer’s friend Lev Lebedinsky recalled how, when the anniversary concert’s organizers suddenly found themselves without a suitable opener, Shostakovich produced this overture for them in a matter of hours. “Then he started composing. The speed with which he wrote was truly astounding. Moreover, when he wrote light music he was able to talk, make jokes, and compose simultaneously, like the legendary Mozart … About an hour or so later, Nebol’sin started telephoning:
program notes { “ ‘Have you got anything ready for the copyist? Should we send a courier?’ “A short pause and then Dmitri Dmitriyevich answered, ‘Send him.’ “What happened next was like the scene with the hundred thousand couriers out of Gogol’s Government Inspector. Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat there scribbling away, and the couriers came in turn to take away the pages while the ink was still wet — first one, then a second, a third, and so on. Nebol’sin was waiting at the Bolshoi Theatre and kept the copyists supplied. “Two days later the dress rehearsal took place. I hurried down to the Theatre, and I heard this brilliant, effervescent work, with its vivacious energy spilling over like uncorked champagne.” Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, three oboes, three clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.
Flute Concerto
Kevin Puts
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, January 3, 1972
In November 2011, the Minnesota Opera mounted the world premiere production of Kevin Puts’ opera Silent Night, inspired by the moving 2005 French film Joyeux Noël about the December 1914 Christmas Day armistice between the French, English, and German troops during World War I. Though it was only his first work in this tremendously difficult form, it was a significant critical and popular success, so much so that it was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music. It has subsequently received productions throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Unlike many composers of today, Puts — a member of the Peabody Institute’s composition faculty since 2006 — is not afraid to tackle the grandest of the traditional classical genres: the symphony and the concerto, as well as opera. Indeed, in a recent interview on NPR he stated that these extended forms are the “place[s] where my music wants to live. I need a private place where I can express the spiritual,
the epic, the heartbreaking without shame or embarrassment.” He is also drawn to such timeless virtues as compelling melodies, clear tonally based harmonies, and unfettered emotional expressivity. Not only Marin Alsop but also the BSO’s two previous music directors Yuri Temirkanov and David Zinman have embraced Puts’ vibrantly appealing music. Maestro Termikanov chose Puts’ Network for performances here in 2002, and River’s Rush followed in 2006. Maestra Alsop introduced Baltimore audiences to his Fourth Symphony, “From Mission San Juan” in 2012 and has presented many of his works at her Cabrillo Festival. One of the composer’s most important pieces, Vision for cellist Yo-Yo Ma and orchestra, was commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival in honor of Maestro Zinman’s 70th birthday. Now we will meet Puts’ new Flute Concerto, created for the London Symphony’s extraordinary 27-year-old principal flutist Adam Walker and premiered at the Cabrillo Festival in August 2013. As Puts explains, it was born from a clandestine commissioning of two separate works: “Bette and Joe Hirsch are longtime patrons of the annual Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, who became fans of my music when they heard my Symphony No. 2 performed at the Festival in 2002. Incidentally, this was the first time Marin Alsop, the Festival’s music director, had programmed a piece of mine and the beginning of a musical friendship I continue to cherish.
Kevin Puts
“A few years ago, Bette secretly approached the Festival about commissioning an orchestra piece from me for Joe’s 75th birthday. Not long after, Joe also secretly approached the Festival about a chamber piece for the couple’s 35th wedding anniversary. My thought was that a single piece might suffice (!), and why not a flute concerto, as I had never written one, and Bette played the flute in her youth?
“What opens the concerto is a melody I have had swimming in my head for more than half a lifetime now.” “What opens the concerto is a melody I have had swimming in my head for more than half a lifetime now, something I began singing to myself in college and for which I had never found appropriate context. I was reminded of it while listening to a recording of Adam Walker, the brilliant principal flutist of the London Symphony Orchestra and the soloist whom Maestra Alsop had invited to premiere the concerto. Built on a simple three-note motive, the theme is lyrical and easy to remember, but somewhat rhythmically irregular at the same time. “The second movement was written during a period in which I was rather obsessed with the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 467, often referred to as the “Elvira Madigan Concerto” due to its use in the eponymously titled film of the ’70s. What Mozart could evoke, traversing all these different emotional territories, with a major chord repeated in triplets, a simple bass-line played pizzicato, and a melody floating above is mind-boggling and humbling to me. Nevertheless, I decided to enter into this hallowed environment and, in a sense, to speak from within it in my own voice. “Rhythm drives the third movement, its main ideas drawn from the main theme of the first movement and culminating in
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
31
{ program notes a highly energetic dialogue between the soloist and a small contrapuntal band of winds, brass, and percussion.” Instrumentation: Piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, percussion and strings.
Symphony No. 5 in E Minor
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born in Votkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840; died in St. Petersburg, November 6, 1893
More than a decade elapsed between the composition of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies. The composer who sat down in May 1888 to create his Fifth had grown enormously in fame and confidence during this period. In 1877, he was still recovering from his disastrous marriage and suicide attempt; in 1888, he was world famous and had just returned to Russia from a highly successful European tour conducting programs of his works before cheering audiences from London to Berlin. Czar Alexander III had recently acknowledged his importance to Russia with a handsome life pension. And yet Tchaikovsky was still plagued by doubts about his creativity and the morbid nervousness that was the dark side of his genius. In 1887, he had rushed to the bedside of a dying friend, Nikolai Kodratyev, and for a month was tormented nearly as much as the poor victim: “Painful, terrible hours! Oh, never will I forget all that I have suffered here.” To his benefactress, Nadezda von Meck, he wrote despairingly: “Can it be that we are all so afraid when we die?” As he began his new symphony, he wrote again: “I am dreadfully anxious to prove not only to others but also to myself, that I am not yet played out as a composer.” Far from being played out, Tchaikovsky found that, once he’d begun, inspiration flowed in abundance, and by the end of August, the Fifth Symphony was completed. The composer himself led the premiere in St. Petersburg on November 17, 1888; both the audience and the orchestra gave him a prolonged ovation.
32 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Like the Fourth, the Fifth Symphony has a motto theme that appears in all movements and is also associated with the concept of Fate. Here fate begins as a menacing force, threatening the composer’s happiness, but is ultimately transformed into a major-mode song of triumph. We hear it immediately, played in the minor by two clarinets in their deepest chalumeau register, in the first movement’s slow introduction. Then the tempo accelerates for the sonata form proper. A duo of clarinet and bassoon introduce the rhythmically intricate first theme, a halting march. The contrasting second theme, sung by the violins, is a tender syncopated melody in Tchaikovsky’s best lyric vein that taps wells of passion as it builds to a vigorous climax. After a short, intense development based mostly on the first theme, the solo bassoon ushers in the recapitulation. The lengthy coda is fascinating. Beginning with a sped-up, frenzied treatment of the halting-march theme, it descends into the orchestral basement for a surprisingly quiet ending, veiled in deepest black. The Andante cantabile second movement is one of the most beautiful Tchaikovsky ever wrote, and the ardor and yearning of its two main themes seem to link it with romantic love. As a homosexual unreconciled with his nature, Tchaikovsky found love an ideal nearly always out of reach. In a letter to Mme von Meck, he wrote: “I disagree with you absolutely that music cannot fully express the feelings of love. On the contrary —
only music can do so. You say that words are needed. No, words are not enough, and where they are powerless, comes full-armed a more eloquent language — music.” The horn soloist opens with the famous yearning principal theme. Soon violins pour out the passionate second theme: an upward-aspiring melody reminiscent of the music Tchaikovsky created for his most passionate balletic pas de deux. A lighter middle section, featuring woodwind motives decorated with oriental arabesques, is suddenly smashed by the trumpets loudly proclaiming the Fate motto. The violins recover to sing the horn melody on their rich-toned Gstrings. But again Fate rudely intervenes, this time in the trombones, and the movement ends in very subdued tones. The waltz third movement also belongs to Tchaikovsky’s beloved world of ballet. He wrote that the main theme was inspired by a tune sung by a street urchin in Florence, but that street song surely lacked the smoothly flowing sophistication we find here. By contrast, the middle trio section is nervous, agitated music based on brusque string scales. The Fate motto makes a discreet appearance toward the end in the clarinets, but causes little disruption. Fate is vanquished in the finale as the movement opens with a majestic statement low in the strings and now in E major, rather than minor. The Allegro vivace main section returns to the minor with an off-the-beat principal theme that seethes with aggressive energy — Tchaikovsky mastering his fears with a vengeance. A huge coda brings the Fate theme back again — and again! — in majestically slow E major and, upon accelerating to Presto, reprises the first movement’s halting-march theme, now blazing away in brass splendor. Here Tchaikovsky perhaps overplays his triumph, but audiences happily succumb to his joy. Instrumentation: Three flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings.
Tchaikovsky
Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright ©2015
program notes {
Jo seph M eyer ho f f Sy m pho n y Hall
Scholarship as a playwright-lyricist. Didi Balle is also a published writer and journalist and worked as an editor for The New York Times for 13 years. Didi Balle’s “Shostakovich: Notes for Stalin” was performed by the BSO and Maestro Alsop in November 2014.
Off the Cuff: Tchaikovsky: Mad But for Music Saturday, April 11, 2015 — 7 p.m. Marin Alsop, Conductor
Tchaikovsky: Mad But for Music, A Symphonic Play TM Written and Directed by
Didi Balle
THE CAST Pete Bradbury. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Steve Tague. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky Katie DeBuys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Antonina Milyukova Tchaikovsky Laureen Smith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mrs. Nadezhda von Meck Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, opus 64 Andante — Allegro con anima Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza Valse: Allegro moderato Finale: Andante maestoso — Allegro vivace
Marin Alsop
For Marin Alsop’s bio., please see pg. 7.
Didi Balle
In the spring of 2013, Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) announced the appointment of Didi Balle as the organization’s first-ever playwrightin-residence. “Tchaikovsky: Mad But for Music” mark Balle’s fifth successful Symphonic Play™ collaboration and world premiere with Alsop and the BSO. Other commissioned works with Alsop include: “CSI: Mozart,” “A Composer Fit for a King: Wagner & Ludwig II,”
“Analyze This: Mahler & Freud” and “CSI: Beethoven.” Symphonic PlaysTM commissioned and premiered by The Philadelphia Orchestra include “Shostakovich: Notes for Stalin” and “The Secret Life of Isaac Newton.” Didi Balle’s work as a writer and director includes commissions, broadcasts and stage productions of her work from Symphonic PlaysTM, radio musicals, musical theater, song cycles and opera. She’s created a new genre called Symphonic PlaysTM borne out of a friendship and dynamic collaboration with Marin Alsop. Founding director of Symphonic Stage Shows, Balle received her MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she was awarded the Oscar Hammerstein
Pete Bradbury (Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky)
Peter Bradbury’s Broadway credits includeThe Elephant Man (and upcoming West End Production), Casa Valentina, Cyrano De Bergerac, Picnic, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, That Championship Season, The Norman Conquests, A Man For All Seasons, Present Laughter, Hedda Gabler, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and The Herbal Bed. Off-Broadway, he’s been seen in A Christmas Carol, Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin, The City Club and Tricks the Devil Taught Meamong others. Look for him in the upcoming film Maggie Black. On TV, he’s appeared in Boardwalk Empire, Homeland, House of Cards White Collar and Sally. He attended the American Conservatory Theater school and Vassar College. Pete now lives in NYC with his wife, Loretta and daughters Emma and Grace.
Steve Tague (Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky)
Steve got his first professional job at Baltimore’s Center Stage many years ago. He played the title role in Titus Andronicus at the Intiman Theater and Hamlet at The Great Lakes Theater Festival, as well as Tartuffe, King Lear, Richard the Third and Macbeth among many others. A member of the acting company at The Resident Ensemble Players in Delaware, he has appeared in Noises Off, Little Foxes and world premieres of two Theresa Rebeck plays, Fever and O Beautiful. At the REP he has directed Angels in America,
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
33
{ program notes Mousetrap, Anything to Declare and will direct the world premiere of The Patsy, an adaptation of Feydeau’s Le Dindon by Greg Leaming. He is on the faculty at the University of Delaware.
Jo s e ph Meye rho ff Sym pho ny Hall
Katie DeBuys
(Antonina Milyukova Tchaikovsky) Katie deBuys appeared in the BSO production of A Midsummer Nights Dream last year. DC area credits include Stupid F**king Bird and In the Next Room or the vibrator play at Woolly Mammoth; Fool for Love and Seminar (Helen Hayes nomination: Best Supporting Actress in a Hayes Production) at Hound House Theatre; Henry V and others at Folger Theatre; Measure for Measure at Shakespeare Theatre Company; and Aladdin’s Luck at Imagination Stage. Regional credits include The Giver at Indiana Repertory Theatre; Bug (B. lden Payne Award: Best Actress) and more. Ms. deBuys hails from Santa Fe, New Mexico and holds a BS in Theatre from Northwestem University and an MFA in Acting from The University of Texas at Austin.
Laureen Smith (Mrs. Nadezhda von Meck)
Laureen Smith previously appeared with the BSO in CSI: Beethoven. She was seen by Washington audiences as Mrs. K in Rep Stage’s The Piano Teacher. In Vancouver, British Columbia, Laureen recently appeared in Beggars in the House of Plenty (Beaumont Stage), You Can’t Take It With You and Shadowlands (Pacific Theatre), as well as in the Canadian feature film, Rain Down, and the Cannes Festival Short invitee, Tell Me. Laureen premiered Kerric Harvey’s Palace of Weariness at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, reprised at Vancouver’s Fringe. She has directed in Canada and the U.S. and taught at the University of British Columbia and at George Washington University, where she also received her PhD. Laureen hails from the Napa Valley in California.
34 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Pictures at an Exhibition Friday, April 17, 2015— 8 p.m. Sunday, April 19, 2015— 3 p.m. Peter Oundjian, Conductor Katherine Needleman, Oboe
Franz Joseph Haydn Symphony No. 96 in D Major, “The Miracle” Adagio - Allegro Andante Menuet: Allegretto Vivace Ralph Vaughan Williams Concerto for Oboe and Strings Rondo Pastorale: Allegro moderato Minuet and Musette: Allegro moderato Finale (Scherzo): Presto KATHERINE NEEDLEMAN
INTERMISSION Modest Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel Promenade Gnomus Promenade The Old Castle Promenade Tuileries Bydlo Promenade Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks in their Shells Samuel Goldenberg and Schmüyle Limoges: The Market The Catacombs With the Dead in a Dead Language Baba-Yaga: The Hut on Hen’s Legs The Great Gate of Kiev The concert will end at approximately 9:30 p.m. on Friday and 4:30 p.m. on Sunday.
program notes { Sian R i char ds
Peter Oundjian
Peter Oundjian is celebrating 10 years as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and led the orchestra on a sixconcert tour of Europe in summer 2014. Oundjian is also in his third season as music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. He has already led the orchestra on a tour of China, in performances in Europe, the Edinburgh International Festival and BBC Proms. As a regular guest conductor, his recent and future engagements include concerts with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic orchestras, as well as the Orchestre de Paris, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the RundfunkSinfonieorchester Berlin. U.S highlights include concerts with the Detroit, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Houston and St. Louis Symphony orchestras. Further afield, Oundjian has travelled to Australia to conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and he made his Japanese conducting debut with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in 2013. Regular soloist collaborations include Yefim Bronfman, James Ehnes, Leila Josefowicz, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang and Renée Fleming. Peter Oundjian last led the BSO in May of 2012, conducting Bruckner’s Te Deum and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
Katherine Needleman
Katherine Needleman joined the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as principal oboe in 2003, the same year she won first prize at the International Double Reed Society’s Gillet-Fox Competition. Since then, Ms. Needleman has been described as the “BSO’s sterling principal oboist” and a “boon for the orchestra.” She has appeared with the BSO as soloist in works of Bach, Beethoven, Lukas Foss, Martinů, Mozart, Vivaldi and Strauss. Ms. Needleman has also been
soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra, the Haddonfield Symphony, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia. She has performed as guest principal oboist with the New York Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Boston, Atlanta, San Diego and New Zealand. Highlights of her 2014–2015 season include a performance of the Christopher Rouse Oboe Concerto with the Peabody Concert Orchestra and a solo recording with pianist Jennifer Lim. Katherine Needleman appeared with the BSO on March 2014 as a soloist in J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 led by Jonathan Carney.
About the concert: Symphony No. 96 in D Major, “Miracle”
Joseph Haydn
Born in Rohrau, Austria, March 31, 1732; died in Vienna, May 31, 1809
Life began anew for Joseph Haydn late in 1790 when the German-English impresario Johann Peter Salomon appeared without warning on the 58-year-old composer’s doorstep in Vienna. “I am Salomon from London and have come to fetch you,” he briskly announced. “Tomorrow we shall conclude an agreement.” Since his employer Prince Nicholas Esterházy had recently died, Haydn found himself free at last to pursue creative opportunities in the larger world, and he had long dreamed of traveling to England, whose flourishing musical life exceeded even Vienna’s. Salomon offered him a princely sum to come to London to write and perform symphonies and other works for his ambitious concert series. Though Haydn spoke virtually no English and was at an age when most men were either dead or quietly retired, he accepted. Symphony No. 96 is believed to be the first symphony Haydn wrote expressly for
London, and it may have been premiered at his first concert there on March 11, 1791. The nickname “Miracle” has become attached to it in commemoration of an extraordinary event in which a chandelier fell in the concert hall, but no one was injured because the audience had rushed forward to applaud Haydn; actually, however, this “miracle” occurred at a performance of Symphony No. 102. However, this music is quite miraculous enough, for Haydn was exercising all his compositional brilliance to surprise and delight his new audience.
Symphony No. 96 is believed to be the first symphony Haydn wrote expressly for London. The first movement opens with a moody Adagio introduction. Though the home key of D Major is forcefully proclaimed in unison at the beginning, it shifts on its repeat to D minor, a key that will haunt this symphony. A melancholy oboe solo bridges to the quick-tempo main section, whose infectious theme is built around pattering repeated notes. The belated entrance of the trumpets and timpani intensify the music with whirling scales. The middle development section suddenly comes to a dramatic halt, which leads us to expect that the recapitulation of the opening section might be about to begin. But although we do hear that pattering theme repeat, Haydn was playing games with his London audience, and this is a “false” recapitulation in the wrong key — there is still much more developmental turbulence to come! And when the recapitulation really does arrive, it is also full of exhilarating surprises, including a brief, stormy return of D minor. For music with such a graceful, innocent-sounding main theme, the Andante second movement in G Major is filled with an astonishing amount of drama, especially in its middle section,
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
35
Dave Har p
{ program notes
The BSO
a stormily imposing fugato in the minor mode. And in the movement’s closing coda, Haydn pays a compliment to the tastes of his British listeners by drawing up to a preparatory 6/4 chord such as we hear at the end of a concerto and then interpolating a charming cadenza passage for two solo violins and woodwind soloists in the style of the concerto grosso form they particularly loved. Movement three is a very grand minuet full of sweeping gestures. Its trio section is a delightful Austrian ländler dance featuring the solo oboe with contributions from solo bassoon. The finale is a merry rondo with an incessantly repeating theme. But as he did in the second movement, Haydn fills it with spectacularly dramatic outbursts in D minor and keeps his listeners continually primed to expect the unexpected. Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.
36 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Concerto for Oboe and Strings
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England, October 12, 1872; died in London, August 26, 1958
Like Haydn, Ralph Vaughan Williams was a composer whose creativity flourished to an extraordinary degree in his later years; indeed, his last five symphonies were written after he was 70. In 1953 at the advanced age of 81, he told a friend: “I have so much music in my head I know I will never have time to write it down.” Fortunately, he lived to be nearly 85, composing right up to the end. By the 1940s, Vaughan Williams was considered the Grand Old Man of English music. At the beginning of the century, he had tramped through the English countryside collecting traditional folksongs before they were lost in the onrush of the 20th century. From their modal scales and characteristic alternation of duple and
triple rhythms, he had formulated his own compositional voice: one that reflected the melodic style of his native land rather than the dominant Austro-German musical vocabulary. He had also given the Anglican Church a new English Hymnal, with tunes brought back from England’s musical golden age, the 16th-century Tudor-Elizabethan era, as well as some wonderful ones of his own. One of his most beautifully lyrical works was his Fifth Symphony, bringing a vision of peace in 1943 in the midst of the terrors of the Blitz. Its mood and even some of its discarded music found its way into his next piece, the Concerto for Oboe and Strings of 1944. It was written for the pre-eminent English oboist Léon Goosens, who was renowned for the superb tone he drew from the instrument. Vaughan Williams exploited that tone in his wonderful pastoral themes and chose an orchestra of strings only so the oboe would never be obscured. Because London was then being menaced by the German V-1 rocket attacks, the work’s premiere performance on September 30, 1944 was shifted to Liverpool The first movement, “Rondo pastorale,” opens with a lovely modal theme for the oboe in the gently nostalgic pastoral cast so typical of much of this composer’s music. Eventually, it moves from A minor to A Major and a livelier folklike dance theme for the oboe. The soloist’s extended closing cadenza is poignantly lyrical rather than showily virtuosic. Though labeled a Minuet, the second movement is actually a country waltz and despite its C-minor key, so often used for heroic tragedy, is very light and playful. A second dance theme, a swaying Musette or bagpipe dance is dominated by the orchestra, the low strings providing the drone. The Scherzo finale is the work’s longest movement and the one that finally displays the soloist’s virtuosity — and that of the orchestra as well. It begins with gossamer, high-speed music of considerable contrapuntal intricacy. A sweeping romantic waltz makes a contrasting second theme. But as the
program notes { movement continues, it becomes progressively slower and more poignantly expressive, recapturing some of the first movement’s flavor. And it is that nostalgic mood that ultimately has the last word. Instrumentation: Solo oboe and strings.
Pictures at an Exhibition arr. Maurice Ravel
Modest Mussorgsky
Born in Karevo, Ukraine, March 21, 1839; died in St. Petersburg, March 28, 1881
When one of his closest friends, the artist and architect Victor Hartman, died of an aneurism at age 39 in 1873, a devastated Modest Mussorgsky helped organize an exhibition of Hartman’s paintings in St. Petersburg early the next year. He then decided to “draw in music” (his words) ten of them in a work for solo piano that he composed rapidly during June 1874. Apparently, he had no plans to orchestrate his Pictures at an Exhibition, and the work was not even published until after his death. It remained little known outside of Russia. All this changed in 1922 when Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Maurice Ravel, one of the greatest orchestrators of the 20th century, to score Pictures for his Paris ensemble. Working with love and respect for Mussorgsky’s music, the Frenchman created a masterpiece in a new genre, in which uncommon instruments like the tuba, alto saxophone, and celesta enrich a glowing orchestral canvas. Several other composers have subsequently produced orchestrations of Pictures, but Ravel’s remains the touchstone. The following movement descriptions draw on the words of Russian art critic Vladimir Stassov, friend to both Hartman and Mussorgsky: Promenade: Mussorgsky depicts “himself … as he strolled through the exhibition, joyfully or sadly recalling the talented deceased artist … he does not hurry, but observes attentively.” This music returns throughout the piece as a linking device, changing to reflect
the composer’s different responses to the pictures. By 1874, Mussorgsky had grown fat, and we hear this in the music’s stately, lumbering gait. Gnomus: “A fantastic lame figure on crooked little legs … This gnome is a child’s toy, fashioned, after Hartman’s design, in wood for the Christmas tree … in the style of the nutcracker, the nuts being inserted in the gnome’s mouth. … The gnome accompanies his droll movements with savage shrieks.” Il vecchio castello (“The Old Castle”): This is a sketch of a medieval Italian castle; a troubadour is singing in the foreground. Above the strumming of the guitar, the alto saxophone with a bassoon partner sings the troubadour’s song in dark sepia tones. Tuileries: Stassov wrote that this highspirited episode is based on a picture of children playing with their nurse in Paris’ Tuileries Gardens.
“Victor Hartman gave Mussorgsky two of his sketches from real life, those of the rich and the poor Jew,” from Sandimir, Poland. Bydlo (“Polish Cart”): This melancholy piece, featuring solo tuba, portrays a heavy Polish ox-drawn wagon. Low strings and bassoons depict the groaning of its wheels. Mussorgsky intended this to begin loudly, but Ravel gradually builds the volume, then lets it fade as the wagon rumbles toward us, then moves away. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks: “In 1870, Hartman designed the costumes … for the ballet Trilbi at the Maryinsky Theatre. … In the cast were a number of boy and girl pupils . . . arrayed as canaries. Others were dressed up as eggs.” Hartman’s sketches in which the children’s arms and legs protrude from the egg shells inspired this chirping piece of high woodwinds and celesta. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle: “Victor Hartman gave Mussorgsky two of his sketches from real life, those
of the rich and the poor Jew” from Sandimir, Poland. Mussorgsky named the two and richly characterized the haughty rich man (in low unison strings and winds) Goldenberg dismissing the whining pleas (muted trumpet solo) of the poor Schmuÿle. Limoges—The Market: “Old women quarreling at the market in Limoges.” Catacombae and “Con mortuis in lingua mortua” (Catacombs and “With the Dead in a Dead Language”): In the solemn tones of low brass this bursts immediately from Limoges. Hartman’s picture shows the artist, a friend, and a guide examining the Paris catacombs by lamplight. A pile of skulls is heaped in one corner; Mussorgsky imagines that they begin to glow from within. The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba-Yaga): Powerful and grotesque, “this piece is based on Hartman’s design for a clock in the form of Baba-Yaga’s hut on hen’s legs, to which Mussorgsky added the ride of the witch in her mortar.” Baba-Yaga is a Russian fairytale witch who lures children into the woods, eats them, then crushes their bones in a giant mortar in which she rides through the woods. Baba-Yaga soars upward into … The Great Gate of Kiev: The grand finale, based on the “Promenade” music, depicts Hartman’s competition design for a ceremonial arch in Kiev to commemorate Tsar Alexander II’s escape from an assassination attempt. It is “in the massive old Russian style in the form of a Slavonic helmet.” Kiev is the historic seat of Russian orthodoxy; Mussorgsky incorporates a Russian orthodox hymn-tune sung by the woodwinds. Ringing with church bells and brass fanfares, the work climaxes in a blaze of Slavic glory. Instrumentation: Three flutes, two piccolos, three oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tenor tuba or baritone horn, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celeste and strings. Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright ©2015
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
37
T h e B a l t i mo r e S y m p h on y O r c h est r a
Symphony fund Honor Roll October 24, 2013 – December 24, 2014 We are proud to recognize the BSO’s Symphony Fund Members whose generous gifts to the Annual Fund between October 24, 2013 and December 24, 2014 helped the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra further its mission: “To make music of the highest quality, to enhance Baltimore and Maryland as a cultural center of interest, vitality and importance and to become a model of institutional strength.”
The Citizens of Baltimore County
The BSO is funded by an operating grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive.
The Century CLub The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is deeply grateful to the individual, corporate, foundation and governmental donors whose cumulative annual giving of $100,000 or more plays a vital role in sustaining the orchestra’s magnificent tradition of musical excellence. Marin Alsop Donna and Paul Amico The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation The Baltimore Orioles Georgia and Peter Angelos The Baltimore Symphony Associates Sandy Feldman, President Mayor and City Council of Baltimore
The Citizens of Baltimore County BGE Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation and the Estate of Ruth Marder* Kenneth W. DeFontes, Jr. and Donna C. DeFontes Hecht-Levi Foundation Ryda H. Levi* and Sandra Levi Gerstung
Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development Maryland State Arts Council The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Joseph & Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County and Montgomery County Maryland
National Endowment for the Arts Linda and Stanley* Panitz PNC Bruce and Lori Laitman Rosenblum Alena and David M. Schwaber The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company Mr.* and Mrs. Willard Hackerman
$25,000–$49,999 The Kenneth S. Battye Charitable Trust in honor of Kenneth S. Battye* Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation Sander & Norma K. Buchman Foundation The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Ruth Carol Fund Mr. and Mrs. Robert Coutts Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation The Goldsmith Family Foundation
Adalman-Goodwin Foundation Hilda Perl Goodwin and Douglas* Goodwin, trustees Peggy & Yale Gordon Trust Young Artist Sponsor Mr. and Mrs. Kingdon Gould, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin H. Griswold, IV Mr.* and Mrs. E. Phillips Hathaway Hoffberger Family Philanthropies Ensign C. Markland Kelly, Jr. Memorial Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Stephen M. Lans The Huether-McClelland Foundation George and Catherine McClelland
Dr. and Mrs.* Thomas Pozefsky Rifkin, Livingston, Levitan and Silver, LLC Mr. and Mrs. Alan M. Rifkin Lainy LeBow-Sachs and Leonard R. Sachs The Salmon Foundation The Honorable Steven R. Schuh Mr. and Mrs. Stephen D. Shawe The Speedwell Foundation David and Chris Wallace Dr. Ellen Yankellow and Mr. Bill Chapman
Michael G. Hansen and Nancy E. Randa Joel and Liz Helke Dr. and Mrs.* Murray Kappelman Barbara Katz Sarellen and Marshall Levine Howard Majev and Janet Brandt Majev Hilary B. Miller and Dr. Katherine N. Bent Mr. and Mrs. H. Hudson Myers, Jr. Judy and Scott Phares Mr.* and Mrs. Michael P. Pinto Arnold and Diane Polinger Alison and Arnold Richman Mr. George A. Roche Esther and Ben Rosenbloom Foundation Michelle G. and Howard Rosenbloom Morris Shapiro Family Foundation Dr. and Mrs. Charles I. Shubin Richard C. and Julie I. Vogt
$10,000–$14,999 Anonymous Erin Becker Dr. Emile A. Bendit and Diane Abeloff Mr. and Mrs. Ed Bernard Mr. and Mrs. A.G.W. Biddle, III Diane and Leland Brendsel Ms. Mary Catherine Bunting Ms. Kathleen A. Chagnon Mr. and Mrs. H. Chace Davis, Jr. Chapin Davis Investments Judith and Mark D. Coplin Linwood and Ellen Dame Mr. and Mrs. James L. Dunbar Doris T. and Bill Fader Mr. Mark Fetting Joanne Gold and Andrew A. Stern The Sandra and Fred Hittman Philanthropic Fund Drs. Riva and Marc Kahn Mrs. Barbara Kines
Dr. and Mrs. Yuan C. Lee Harriet and Jeffrey Legum In memory of James Gavin Manson Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Sally S. and Decatur* H. Miller Drs. Mark and Virginia Myerson Mr. and Mrs. Bill Nerenberg Dr. Selvin Passen Gar and Migsie Richlin Barry and Susan Rosen John and Dawn Sadler The Honorable and Mrs. James T. Smith, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Gideon N. Stieff, Jr. Ms. Harriet Stulman The Louis B. Thalheimer and Juliet A. Eurich Philanthropic Fund Aaron and Joanie Young The Zamoiski-Barber-Segal Family Foundation
founders circle $50,000 or more William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund Creator of the Baker Artist Award www.bakerartistawards.org The Charles T. Bauer Foundation Andrew and Janet Hartman The Bozzuto Family Charitable Fund Jessica and Michael Bronfein The Annie E. Casey Foundation Mark and Pat Joseph Dr. and Mrs. Solomon H. Snyder Ellen W.P. Wasserman
maestra’s circle $15,000–$24,999 Anonymous (2) Herbert Bearman Foundation, Inc. Dr. Sheldon and Arlene Bearman David and Pat Bernstein Robert H. Boublitz “In memory of Harry A. Boublitz” Mr. and Mrs. George L. Bunting, Jr. Charlotte A. Cameron / The Dan Cameron Family Foundation Caswell J. Caplan Charitable Income Trusts Constance R. Caplan The Dopkin-Singer-Dannenberg Foundation, Inc. Mrs. Margery Dannenberg Rosalee C. and Richard Davison Foundation Alan and Carol Edelman Sara and Nelson Fishman Sandra Levi Gerstung Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Hamilton
38 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
* Deceased
S y m p h on y f u nd Hono r Ro l l
Jeremiah is the third in a series of Bernstein Symphony recordings underwritten by donor Sandra Levi Gerstung.
Governing Members Gold $5,000 – $9,999 Anonymous (2) Dr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Allen Dr. and Mrs. Mandell Bellmore Deborah and Howard M. Berman Linda and Barry Berman Alan and Bunny Bernstein John and Bonnie Boland Ms. Shirley Brandman and Mr. Howard Shapiro Steven and Ann Loar Brooks Ms. Mary Catherine Bunting Mr. and Mrs. Robert Butler Nathan and Suzanne Cohen Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Elbert Cole Judith and Mark Coplin Mr. and Mrs. Albert R. Counselman, The RCM&D Foundation and RCM&D, Inc. Mr. and Mrs. William H. Cowie, Jr. Faith and Marvin Dean Ronald E. Dencker Drs. Sonia and Myrna Estruch Ms. Margaret Ann Fallon Andrea and Samuel Fine Susan Fisher Susan W. Flanigan John Gidwitz Sandra and Barry Glass Frances Goelet Charitable Trust Dr. and Mrs. Philip Goelet Betty E. and Leonard H. Golombek Mr. and Mrs. J. Woodford Howard, Jr. Mr.* and Mrs. H. Thomas Howell Susan and David Hutton Susan and Stephen Immelt Mr. and Mrs. Harry Kaplan Mr. William La Cholter Dr. David Leckrone and Marlene Berlin Dr. James and Jill Lipton Susan Liss and Family Joseph H. and Eileen A. Mason Dan and Agnes Mazur / Norfolk Southern Foundation Mrs. Kenneth A. McCord Margot and Cleaveland Miller Jolie and John Mitchell Dr. and Mrs. C.L. Moravec Elizabeth Moser Mr. and Mrs. Peter Muncie Mrs. Joy Munster David Nickels and Gerri Hall Dr. A. Harry Oleynick Dr. and Mrs. David Paige William and Kathleen Pence Marge Penhallegon Jan S. Peterson & Alison E. Cole Helene and Bill Pittler The Rabin Family
Donors Bill Nerenberg and Dotty Rosenthal with BSO guest keyboard Lura Johnson.
Dr. Scott and Frances Rifkin Mr. and Mrs. William Rogers Mike and Janet Rowan Neil J. and JoAnn N. Ruther Dr.* and Mrs. Marvin M. Sager M. Sigmund and Barbara K. Shapiro Philanthropic Fund Mr. and Mrs. J. Mark Schapiro Jacob S. Shapiro Foundation Jane and Stan Rodbell, and James Shapiro Francesca Siciliano and Mark Green The Sidney Silber Family Foundation Daniel and Sybil Silver Mr. and Mrs. Harris J. Silverstone Melissa and Philip Spevak Ms. Patricia Stephens James Storey and Janice Collins Mr. Peter Van Dyke and Ms. Judy Van Dyke Ms. Mignon Yvette Velie* Mr. and Mrs. Loren Western Dr. Brian Woolf and Ms. Amy (Webb) Woolf Mr. Edward Wiese Susan Wolman Laurie S. Zabin Danielle and Jeffrey Zoller Governing Members Silver $3,000 – $4,999 Anonymous (6) Mr. and Mrs. Edward J. Adkins Julianne and George Alderman Frederick Apfel and Meredith Pattin Mr.* and Mrs. Alexander Armstrong Jackie and Eugene Azzam Mr. and Mrs. Thomas H.G. Bailliere, Jr. Susan and David Balderson Ms. Penny Bank Donald L. Bartling Dr. and Mrs. Theodore M. Bayless Eric* and Claire* Beissinger Dr. and Mrs. Mandell Bellmore Donna and Stanley Ber Dr. and Mrs. Mordecai P. Blaustein Dr. and Mrs. Paul Z. Bodnar Ms. Carol Bogash Carolyn and John Boitnott Jeffrey and Peggy Boltz Mr. and Mrs. John M. Bond, Jr. Dr. Helene Breazeale Dr. Rudiger and Robin Breitenecker Dr. Nancy D. Bridges Mr. and Mrs. Thomas H. Broadus, III Dr. and Mrs. Donald D. Brown Number Ten Foundation Mr. and Mrs. S. Winfield Cain Lt Gen (Ret) Frank B. and Karen Campbell
Donors, BSO patrons, and community leaders gather in the Meyerhoff Lobby for the the Women’s Executive Leadership breakfast.
James N. Campbell, M.D. and Regina Anderson, M.D. Michael and Kathy Carducci Ms. Susan Chouinard Geri and David Cohen Mr. Harvey L. Cohen and Ms. Martha Krach Wandaleen and Emried Cole Dr. Elizabeth H. Jones & Steven P. Collier Mr. and Mrs. John W. Conrad, Jr. David and Ellen Cooper Robert A. and Jeanne Cordes Jane C. Corrigan Mrs. Rebecca M. Cowen-Hirsch Alan and Pamela Cressman Mr. and Mrs. Edward A. Dahlka, Jr. Dr. and Mrs. Cornelius Darcy Mr. and Mrs. William F. Dausch Dr. Karlotta M. Davis Kari Peterson, Benito R. and Ben De Leon Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Drachman Mr. and Mrs. Larry D. Droppa Bill and Louise Duncan Mr. and Mrs. Laurence Dusold Dr. Sylwester J. Dziuba Donna Z. Eden and Henry Goldberg Deborah and Philip English Ms. Marietta Ethier J. Fainberg Michaeline Fedder and Susan Arisman Sherry and Bruce Feldman Mr. and Mrs. Maurice R. Feldman David and Merle Fishman Winnie and Bill Flattery Dr. and Mrs. Jerome L. Fleg Ms. Lois Flowers Mr. and Mrs. John C. Frederick Jo Ann and Jack Fruchtman John Galleazzi and Elizabeth Hennessey Mr. Robert Gillison and Ms. Laura L. Gamble Mrs. Ellen Bruce Gibbs Mr. and Mrs. Joseph S. Gillespie, Jr. Helaine and Louis Gitomer Ms. Jean M. Suda and Mr. Kim Z. Golden Dr. Diana Griffiths Ms. Mary Therese Gyi Carole Hamlin and C. Fraser Smith Mr. Gary C. Harn Melanie and Donald Heacock John P. Healy Mr. and Mrs. Edward Heine Sandra and Thomas Hess Mr. Thomas Hicks Betty Jean and Martin* S. Himeles, Sr. Bruce and Caren Beth Hoffberger Ms. Marilyn J. Hoffman
Governing Members enjoy a trip to Mt. Vernon, VA that included a visit to The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington.
Betsy and Len Homer Donald W. and Yvonne M. Hughes Bill and Ann Hughes Elayne and Benno Hurwitz Mrs. Wendy M. Jachman In memory of John T. Ricketts, III Dr. and Mrs. Richard T. Johnson Richard and Brenda Johnson Susan B. Katzenberg Louise and Richard Kemper Townsend and Bob Kent Suzan Russell Kiepper Richard Kitson and Andrew Pappas Dr. and Mrs. Richard A. Kline Paul Konka and Susan Dugan-Konka Dr. Morton D. Kramer Miss Dorothy B. Krug Marc E. Lackritz and Mary DeOreo Sandy and Mark Laken Dr. and Mrs. Donald Langenberg The Lavagnino Family Anna and George Lazar Burt and Karen Leete Mr. and Mrs. Howard Lehrer Ruth and Jay Lenrow Richard W. Ley Mr. and Mrs. Vernon L. Lidtke Dr. Frances and Mr. Edward Lieberman Darielle and Earl Linehan June Linowitz & Howard Eisner Dr. Diana Locke and Mr. Robert E. Toense Mr. James Lynch Ms. Louise E. Lynch Louise D. and Morton J. Macks Family Foundation, Inc. Diane and Jerome Markman Howard and Linda Martin Donald and Lenore Martin Dr. Marilyn Maze and Dr. Holland Ford Drs. Edward and Lucille McCarthy Mr. and Mrs. Scott A. McWilliams Paul Meecham and Laura Leach John Meyerhoff, M.D. and Lenel Srochi-Meyerhoff Northern Pharmacy and Medical Equipment--Judy and Martin Mintz Mr. and Mrs. Humayun Mirza Ms. Patricia J. Mitchell Drs. Dalia and Alan Mitnick Mr. and Mrs. Charles O. Monk, II Dr. Mellasenah Y. Morris Dr. William W. Mullins Rex Myers Roy and Gillian Myers Roger Nordquist and Joyce Ward In memory of the Rev Howard G. Norton and Charles O. Norton Kevin and Diane O’Connor Anne M. O’Hare
Drs. Erol and Julianne Oktay Mrs. Bodil Ottesen Frank W. Palulis & Chris Ahlberg Beverly and Sam Penn Ms. Diane M. Perin Dr. and Mrs. Anthony Perlman Joan Piven-Cohen and Samuel T. Cohen Martin and Henriette Poretsky David and Lesley Punshon-Smith Peter E. Quint Dr. Jonas Rappeport and Alma Smith Louise Reiner Nathan and Michelle Robertson Mr. and Mrs. Richard Roca Rona and Arthur Rosenbaum Robert and Lelia Russell Ilene and Michael Salcman Ms. Doris Sanders Lois Schenck and Tod Myers Marilyn and Herb* Scher Dr. and Mrs. James L. Scott Ida & Joseph Shapiro Foundation and Diane and Albert Shapiro Mr. Stephen Shepard Dr. and Mrs. Ronald F. Sher Thom Shipley and Chris Taylor Francine and Richard Shure Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Sieber Drs. Ruth and John Singer Ellwood and Thelma Sinsky Rev. Joseph and Barbara Skillman Ms. Leslie J. Smith Ms. Nancy E. Smith Patricia Smith and Dr. Frances Lussier Cape Foundation, Turner and Judy Smith Mr. and Mrs. Lee M. Snyder Dr. and Mrs. John Sorkin Dr. and Mrs. Charles S. Specht Joan and Thomas Spence Don Spero and Nancy Chasen Anita and Mickey Steinberg Mr. Edward Steinhouse Dale and Roma* Strait Mr. Alan Strasser & Ms. Patricia Hartge Alan V Asay and Mary K Sturtevant Susan and Brian Sullam Mr. James Sutherlin Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taubman Mr. and Mrs. Terence Taylor Dr. Ronald J. Taylor Sonia and Carl Tendler Dr. and Mrs. Carvel Tiekert Mr. and Mrs. Paul G. Tolzman Dr. Jean Townsend and Mr. Larry Townsend In Memory of Jeffrey F. Liss, Dr. & Mrs. Henry Tyrangiel Dr. Frank C. Marino Foundation
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
39
T h e B a l t i mo r e S y m p h on y O r c h est r a
Membership Benefits 2014– 2015 season
A contribution to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra qualifies you for special events and exclusive opportunities to enhance your BSO experience throughout the season: $75– $149 Bach Member Benefits include: • BSO Membership Card—10% discount on music, books, and gifts at the Symphony Store and An die Musik • Admission for two to the Annual Donor Appreciation Concert (R) • Invitation to one Open Rehearsal (R) • Opportunity to purchase tickets prior to public sale* $150 – $249 Beethoven Member All of the above, plus… • Invitation to a second Open Rehearsal (R) • Two complimentary drink vouchers $250 – $499 Brahms Member All of the above, plus… • 10% discounts on tickets to BSO performances* • Admission for two additional guests to the Annual Donor Appreciation Concert (R) $500 – $1,199 Britten Member All of the above, plus… • Invitation to the Premium Evening Open Rehearsal (R) • Donor recognition in one issue of Overture magazine • Two additional complimentary drink vouchers • Four complimentary dessert vouchers • Invitation to the Opening Night Celebration Cast Party (R) $1,200 – $1,999 Symphony Society Silver All of the above, plus… • Private Backstage Hall Tour (R) • Invitation to the Season Opening Gala (R/$) • Priority access to Premium Seating • Year-long recognition in Overture magazine • Invitations to all Cast Parties (R) • Two complimentary passes to the BSA Decorators’ Show House • Two one-time passes to the Georgia and Peter Angelos Governing Members Lounge • Additional admission for two guests to the Annual Donor Appreciation Concert (R) $2,000 – $2,999 Symphony Society Gold All of the above, plus… • Invitation to Allegretto Dinners (R/$) • Trip Invitations (R/$) • An additional pass to the Georgia and Peter Angelos Governing Members Lounge • Exclusive email updates with insider information and news about the BSO $3,000 – $4,999 Governing Member Silver All of the above, plus… • Exclusive season sneak preview • Quarterly edition of the GM Insider newsletter • On-Stage Rehearsals (R) • Complimentary parking (upon request) • VIP Ticket Concierge Service • NEW! Invitation to the Annual State of the Orchestra Address • Invitation to After Hours with the BSO event (R) • Invitation to social events with BSO musicians (R/$) • Special recognition at GM concert sponsorship celebrations • Season-long access to the Georgia and Peter Angelos Governing Members Lounge • Opportunity to serve on Governing Members Steering Committee • Priority box seating at the Annual Donor Appreciation Concert (R) $5,000 –$9,999 Governing Member Gold All of the above, plus… • Signed CD of all BSO recording releases • Musician Concierge program (upon request) • Sponsor a Break with the BSO ($/upon request) $10,000+ Maestra’s Circle All of the above, plus… • Exclusive and intimate events catered to this special group including post-concert receptions with some of the top artists in the world who are performing with the BSO • Formal Salon Dinner- Be our guests at the Springtime Soiree: Chamber Music & Dinner with Maestra Alsop & the BSO. Enjoy an Exclusive Maestra Circle event at a very special location. • One complimentary use of the GM Lounge facilities for hosting personal or business hospitality events ($)
Support the BSO and make a donation today! Email membership@BSO music.org or call 410.783.8124 (R) Reservation required $ Admission Fee * Some concerts excluded
40 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
John & Susan Warshawsky Martha and Stanley Weiman Dr. and Mrs. Matthew R. Weir Mr. and Mrs. David Weisenfreund Ms. Beverly Wendland and Mr. Michael McCaffery Mr. and Mrs. Christopher West Ms. Camille B. Wheeler and Mr. William B. Marshall Dr. Edward Whitman Ms. Louise S. Widdup In Memory of Carole L. Maier, Artist Mr. and Mrs. Barry F. Williams Mr. and Mrs. T. Winstead, Jr. Laura and Thomas Witt Mr. and Mrs. Richard Wolven Drs. Yaster and Zeitlin Chris and Carol Yoder Mr. and Mrs. Michael Young Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. Zadek Symphony Society Gold $2,000 – $2,999 Anonymous (4) Dr. and Mrs. Robert J. Adams George and Frances Alderson Mr. Paul Araujo Robert and Dorothy Bair Msgnr. Arthur W. Bastress Leonard and Gabriela Bebchick Barbara and Ed Brody Dr. Robert P. Burchard Loretta Cain Brad and Kate Callahan Campbell & Company Marilyn and David Carp Ernie and Linda Czyryca Arthur F. and Isadora Dellheim Foundation, Inc. Walter B. Doggett, III and Joanne Doggett Mrs. Nancy S. Elson Kenneth R. Feinberg Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Flach
Dr. and Mrs. Donald S. Gann Constance A. Getzov Bruce Yale Goldman John and Meg Hauge Lloyd Helt and Ruth Gray Betsy and George Hess Paula K. and Martin S. Himeles Barbara and Sam Himmelrich Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Hoefler Fran and Bill Holmes Mr. and Mrs. A. C. Hubbard, Jr. Dr. Helmut Jenkner and Ms. Rhea I. Arnot Mr. Max Jordan Dr. Phyllis R. Kaplan Mr. Daniel Klein Marie Lerch and Jeff Kolb Mr. Charles Miller Herbert and Mirium Mittenthal Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Neiman Thomas P. Perkins, III Dr. & Mrs. Jonathan D. Philipson Mr. and Mrs. John Brentnall Powell Dr. Thomas Powell Mrs. Randall S. Robinson Bill and Shirley Rooker Mr.* and Mrs. Nathan G. Rubin Roger and Barbara Schwarz Norman and Leonora Sensinger Ronald and Cathi Shapiro Ronnie and Rachelle Silverstein Karen and Richard Soisson Jennifer Kosh Stern and William H. Turner William and Salli Ward Michael White and Rena Gorlin Mr. and Mrs. Sean Wharry Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Wilcoxson Dr. and Mrs. E.F. Shaw Wilgis Ms. Anne Worthington Symphony Society Silver $1,200 – $1,999 Anonymous (4) Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Abell
Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Abrams Charles Alston and Susan Dentzer Mr. & Mrs. W. Michael Andrew Robert and Martha Armenti Phyllis and Leonard J. Attman Mr. William J. Baer and Ms. Nancy H. Hendry Mrs. Jean Baker Dr. and Mrs. Bruce Barnett Caroline W. and Rick Barnett Ms. Franca B. Barton and Mr. George G. Clark Karl Becker Mr. and Mrs. John W. Beckley Arthur and Carole Bell Mrs. Elaine Belman Mr. and Mrs. Alan and Lynn Berkeley Mr. and Mrs. Charles Berry, Jr. Mr. Edward Bersbach Mr. and Mrs. Albert Biondo Roy Birk Drs. Lawrence and Deborah Blank Mr. and Mrs. John Blodgett Stephen F. Bono Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Booth Honorable and Mrs. Anthony Borwick Elizabeth W. Botzler David E. and Alice R. Brainerd Drs. Joanna and Harry Brandt Dr. and Mrs. Mark J. Brenner Mr. Richard H. Broun & Ms. Karen E. Daly Gordon F. Brown Jean B. Brown Robert and Patricia Brown Ms. Elizabeth J. Bruen Mrs. Edward D. Burger Frances and Leonard Burka Dr. and Mrs. Arthur L. Burnett Charles and Judy Cahn Mr. and Mrs. David Callahan Marla Caplan Mr. and Mrs. John Carey
Upcoming Member Events On-Stage Rehearsal
Allegretto Dinner
Friday, March 6 9:15 am Light refreshments 10 am Rehearsal
Saturday, March 21 6 pm Cocktails 6:30 pm Dinner
Governing Members Silver and higher ($3,000+)
Symphony Society Gold Members and higher ($2,000+)
Join us for a romantic rehearsal as the BSO and pianist Simon Trpcˇeski put the finishing touches on our Shakespeare in Love concert. Led by conductor Cristian Macelaru, the BSO will rehearse Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overtures from The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet.
Join us for an evening of cocktails and appetizers, an elegant dinner of food and wine pairings, and your wonderful BSO musicians prior to the performance of Haydn and Ravel. Cost: $50 per person
Cast Party
On-Stage Rehearsal
Saturday, March 14 Immediately following the performance
Friday, April 17 9:15 am Light refreshments 10 am Rehearsal
Symphony Society Silver Members and higher ($1,200+) Extend your night of Mozart by joining us in the Meyerhoff Lounge for refreshments after the concert! Mingle with guest conductor Masaaki Suzuki, violinist Augustin Hadelich, and your favorite BSO musicians.
Governing Members Silver and higher ($3,000+) Sit beside your favorite musicians and fellow Governing Members on stage as the BSO puts the finishing touches on Mussorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Vaughan Williams’ Oboe Concerto performed by BSO Principal Oboe Katherine Needleman.
Events subject to change. Please RSVP to MemberEvents@BSOmusic.org or 410.783.8074.
S y m p h on y f u nd Hono r Ro l l
Mr. and Mrs. John Carr Mr. James T. Cavanaugh, III Ms. Jennifer Cawthra David P. and Rosalie Lijinsky Chadwick Cecil Chen & Betsy Haanes Dr. Mark Cinnamon & Ms. Doreen Kelly Mary D. Cohen Mr. Harvey A. Cohen and Mr. Michael R. Tardif Jane E. Cohen Mr. and Mrs. Jonas M. L. Cohen John and Donna Cookson Catherine and Charles Counselman, Jr. Ms. Sally Craig Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Crooks James Daily Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Darr Richard A. Davis and Edith Wolpoff-Davis Mr. and Mrs. William C. Dee Rev. and Ms. DeGarmo Dr. and Mrs. Thomas DeKornfeld Nicholas F. Diliello Mr. John C. Driscoll Dr. Jeanne A. Dussault and Mr. Mark A. Woodworth Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Elsberg & The Elsberg Family Foundation Chuck Fax and Michele Weil Dr. Edward Finn Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Fitzpatrick Mr. and Mrs. Arthur P. Floor Dr. and Mrs. William Fox Virginia K. Adams and Neal M. Friedlander, M.D. Mr. and Mrs. Roberto B. Friedman Mr. and Mrs. Stanford Gann, Sr. Mary Martin Gant Mr. George Garmer Mr. and Mrs. Austin George Dr. and Mrs. Frank A. Giargiana, Jr. Mary and Bill Gibb Mr. Price and Dr. Andrea Gielen Peter Gil Joan de Pontet Dr. and Mrs. Sanford Glazer George and Joni Gold Dr. and Mrs. Harvey R. Gold Joanne and Alan Goldberg Dr. & Mrs. Morton Goldberg Drs. Joseph Gootenberg and Susan Leibenhaut Mr. Jonathan Gottlieb and Ms. Valerie Omicoili Judith A. Gottlieb Mr. Alexander Graboski Robert Greenfield Donna and Gary Greenwald Mrs. Ann Greif Mr. Charles H. Griesacker David and Anne Grizzle Mark & Lynne Groban Joel and Mary Grossman Mr. and Mrs. Donald Gundlach Mr. and Mrs. Norman M. Gurevich Sandra and Edward J. Gutman Mary Hambleton John and Linda Hanson Sara and James A. Harris, Jr. Mr. Fred Hart and Ms. Elizabeth Knight Mr. David L. Heckman Ms. Jennifer Heller Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Herman Ellen and Herb Herscowitz David A. and Barbara L. Heywood Gina and Daniel Hirschhorn Annette Hopkins Herbert H. Hubbard Alexandra Huff and James BonTempo
Jennifer Hulse Nancy Hulse Madeleine and Joseph Jacobs Mr. and Mrs. Scott Jacobs Betty W. Jensen Honor and John Johnson Mrs. Harry E. Karr Richard M. Kastendieck and Sally J. Miles Dr. and Mrs. Richard Katz Mr & Mrs. Christopher Keller Virginia and Dale Kiesewetter Ms. Kristine Kingery Rev. Elmer J. Klein George and Catherine Klein Marcel and Barbara Klik Ms. Kathleen Knepper Dr. John Boronow & Ms. Adrienne Kols, In Memory of John R. H. & Charlotte Boronow Barbara and David Kornblatt Robert W. Krajek Dr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Kremen Francine and Allan Krumholtz Mr. Charles Kuning Marcia Diehl and Julie Kurland Dr. and Mrs. James LaCalle Andrew Lapayowker and Sarah McCafferty Dr. Edward and Ms. Rebecca Lawson Peter Leffman Darrell Lemke and Maryellen Trautman Mr. Ronald P. Lesser Dr. Harry Letaw, Jr. and Mrs. Joyce W. Letaw Len and Cindy Levering Dr. and Mrs. Bernard Levy Ms. Joanne Linder Drs. David and Sharon Lockwood Dr. and Mrs. Peter C. Luchsinger Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Lynch Michael & Judy Mael Ms. Janet L. Mahaney Susan J. Mathias Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Mathews Mr. Winton Matthews Mrs. Linda M. McCabe Marie McCormack Jim and Sylvia McGill David and Kay McGoff Mr. and Mrs. David Menotti Mr. Timothy Meredith Benjamin Michaelson, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Miller Dr. and Mrs. Stanley R. Milstein Ms. Zareen T. Mirza Mr. and Mrs. Glenn Miyamoto Mr. Howard Moy Marita K. Murray Douglas and Barbara Norland Ms. Irene E. Norton and Dr. Heather T. Miller Dr. Antonella Nota Noah* and Carol C. O’Connell Minkin Ms. Margaret O’Rourke and Mr. Rudy Apodaca Mrs. S. Kaufman Ottenheimer Mary Frances Padilla Mr. & Mrs. Ellis Parker Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Parr Dr. and Mrs. Arnall Patz Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Pearson Mrs. J. Stevenson Peck Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Petrucci Dr. Sally Pinkstaff Mr. and Mrs. Morton B. Plant Herb and Rita Posner Ms Deborah Lou Potee Dr. G. Edward Reahl, Jr. Mr. Charles B. Reeves, Jr. Richard and Melba Reichard Dorothy Reynolds
Corporate SPonsors
$100,000 or more
$50,000 or more
$25,000 or more
Mr. and Mrs. B. Preston Rich Carl and Bonnie Richards Mr. & Mrs. Herbert Ridder Dr. and Mrs. Gerald Rogell Mr. and Mrs. Barry Rogstad Stephen Root and Nancy Greene Joellen and Mark Roseman Mr. and Mrs. Frank B. Rosenberg John B. Sacci and Nancy Dodson Sacci Beryl and Philip Sachs Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Schapiro Mrs. Barbara K. Scherlis Estelle D. Schwalb Mrs. Phyllis Seidelson Laura H. Selby Donald M. Simonds Dr. and Mrs. Jeffrey R. Singer Marshall and Deborah Sluyter Mr. and Mrs. Miles T. Smith Mr. and Mrs. Scott Smith Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Spero Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey L. Staley Margot & Phil Sunshine Mr. and Mrs. Richard Swerdlow Mr. and Mrs. William J. Tate Mr. & Mrs. Richard Tullos Robert and Sharonlee Vogel Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. Wagandt, II Ms. Joan Wah and Ms. Katherine Wah Charles E. Walker Mr. and Mrs. Kent Walker Dr. Robert F. Ward
Drs. Susan and James Weiss David Wellman & Marjorie Coombs Wellman John Hunter Wells Mrs. Margaret Wheeler Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Wickenden Mr. and Mrs. Jack Wilen Dr. Ann M. Willis Dr. and Mrs. Donald E. Wilson Sylvia and Peter Winik Mr. George H. Winslow Mr. Sander L. Wise Marc and Amy Wish Mr. John W. Wood Dr. S. Lee Woods Dr. and Mrs. Howard and Barbara Woolf Dr. Richard Worsham and Ms. Deborah Geisenkotter H. Alan Young and Sharon Bob Young, Ph.D. Drs. Paul and Deborah Young-Hyman
Corporate
$10,000 – $24,999 American Trading & Production Corporation Baltimore Ravens Bank of America Chesapeake Employers’ Insurance Company Gordon Feinblatt LLC Legg Mason Macy’s Saul Ewing LLP
Shugoll Research Total Wine & More Venable $5,000 – $9,999 City Cafe D. F. Dent & Company DLA Piper US LLP Georgetown Paper Stock of Rockville SC&H Group, LLC Wells Fargo Zuckerman Spaeder LLP $2,500 – $4,999 Federal Parking, Inc. S. Kann Sons Company Foundation Amelie and Bernei Burgunder $1,000 – $2,499 Constantine Commercial Construction Eagle Coffee Company Ellin & Tucker, Chartered Eyre Bus, Tour & Travel Gailes’ Violin Shop Independent Can Company J.G. Martin Company, Inc. Medifast Murthy Law Firm
Foundations
$10,000 – $24,999 Anonymous (1) Clayton Baker Trust Bunting Family Foundation
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
41
T h e B a l t i mo r e S y m p h on y O r c h est r a
Join the Centennial Challenge! In honor of the BSO Centenary in 2016, we have established a goal of 100 new or increased members of the Legato Circle. These visionary donors are helping to secure our second century of musical excellence by including the BSO in their estate plans. This includes gifts by bequest, trust, life income gift, IRA, donor advised fund, or life insurance. As in a legato musical line, these special designations ensure the smooth transfer of musical values from this generation to the many following. We gratefully acknowledge the following donors who have let us know that they have included the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in their estate plans: Anonymous (9) Dr. James M. Anthony (N) Paul E. Araujo (N) Donna B. and Paul J. Amico Hellmut D.W. “Hank” Bauer Nancy H. Berger (N) Deborah R. Berman Ms. Jeanne Brush Dr. Robert P. Burchard Katharine H. Caldwell Mrs. Selma Carton Harvey A. Cohen, PhD Harvey L. Cohen & Martha R. Krach (N) Mark D. and Judith L. Coplin Mr. and Mrs. William H. Cowie, Jr. Ann Weller Dahl (N) Roberta L.* and Richard A. Davis Ronald E. Dencker Jim Doran (N) Freda (Gordon) Dunn Dr. Jeanne Dussault & Mark Woodworth H. Lawrence Eiring, CRM Carol and Alan Edelman Mr* and Mrs. Thomas Fallon (N) Mr. and Mrs. Maurice R. Feldman Gary and Debra Brown Felser Winnie and Bill Flattery Haswell M. and Madeline S. Franklin
George W. Gebhardt (N) Robert E. Greenfield Sue and Jan K. Guben Carole B. Hamlin Ms. Denise Hargrove Gary C. Harn Mrs. Betty J. Himeles & The Martin S. Himeles, Sr. Foundation, Inc. Beth R. Horton Gwynne and Leonard Horwits Mr. and Mrs. H. Thomas Howell Mr.* and Mrs. Richard E. Hug David and Susan Hutton Dr. Phyllis R. Kaplan Dr. and Mrs.* Murray M. Kappelman Albert D. Keller Jo Ansley B. Kendig Suzan Kiepper Krannich Miss Dorothy B. Krug Dr. Sandra Leichtman (N) Ruth and Jay Lenrow Lynne and Joe Lentz, Jr. Joyce and Dr. Harry Letaw, Jr. Bernice S. Levinson Constance J. Lieder (N) Mrs. George R. McClelland Carol O’Connell Minkin Mr. Roy E.* and Mrs. M. Moon Mrs. Joy Munster Bill and Dotty Nerenberg (N) Robert* and Marion Neiman
Stanley* and Linda Hambleton Panitz Mr. and Mrs. John Pecora (N) Mr. and Mrs. William Pence (N) Margaret Penhallegon Beverly and Sam Penn (F) G. Edward Reahl, Jr. M.D. Nancy Rice (N) Dr. Henry Sanborn Lois Schenck and Tod Myers Harold and Carolyn Schlenger Nancy E. Smith Dr. and Mrs. Solomon H. Snyder (N) Catherine R. Soares Dr.* and Mrs. Harry S. Stevens Mr. Michael R. Tardif Roy and Carol Thomas Fund for the Arts Dr. and Mrs. Carvel Tiekert Leonard Topper Mr.* and Mrs. William Volenick Mark Wiesand (N) W. Owen and Nancy J. Williams Rebecca G. Wingate (N) Charles* and Shirley Wunder Mr. and Mrs.* Calman J. Zamoiski, Jr. (F) Founding Member (N) New since 9/2013 *Deceased
We gratefully acknowledge the following donors, now deceased, who have provided a gift through their estate in support of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: Mrs. Ruth Alsop Mrs. Claire Beissinger Mrs. Phyllis B. Brotman (F) Elizabeth A. Bryan (N) Mr. Walter Budko Mrs. Alma T. Martien Bond W. George Bowles Mrs. Frances H. Burman Joseph and Jean Carando Clarence B. Coleman Sergiu and Robinne Comissiona (N) Mildred and Patrick Deering (F) Dr. Perry A. Eagle (F) Douglas Goodwin Dailina Gorn
Mr. Joseph P. Hamper, Jr. Judith C. Johnson Richard M. Lansburgh John Christian Larsen Ruby Loflin-Flaccoe Robert and Ryda H. Levi Lauretta Maisel Mrs. Jean M. Malkmus Ruth R. Marder Ralph W. Nichols Margaret Powell Payne Mrs. Margery Pozefsky Joan Marie Pristas Mr. Robert N. Riley Lawrence Melvin Roberts
Mr. William G. Robertson, Jr. Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Randolph S. and Amalie R. Rothschild Eugene Scheffres and Richard E. Hartt Mrs. Muriel Schiller (F) Dr. Albert Shapiro George Steele Howard A. and Rena S. Sugar Mignon Y. Velie (N) Albert and Martha Walker (N) Ingeborg B. Weinberger
Make a musical difference in the lives that follow! If you have named the BSO in your estate plans, or would like more information, we would like to thank you. To learn more about ways to help sustain the BSO into the next century through tax-wise giving, please contact Kate Caldwell, Director of Philanthropic Planning at 410.783.8087 or kcaldwell@BSOmusic.org
42 O v ertur e |
For more information, please visit
baltimoresymphony.plannedgiving.org www. bsomusic .org
The Getty Education and Community Investment Grant Program Supported by The League of American Orchestras and The Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation LaVerna Hahn Charitable Trust Betty Huse MD Charitable Trust Foundation John J. Leidy Foundation, Inc. The Letaw Family Foundation Macht Philanthropic Fund of the AJC Ronald McDonald House Charities of Baltimore, Inc. Cecilia Young Willard Helping Fund Wright Family Foundation $5,000 – $9,999 Anonymous (1) The Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Family Foundation Cameron and Jane Baird Foundation Clark Winchcole Foundation The Charles Delmar Foundation Rogers-Wilbur Foundation, Inc. Jim and Patty Rouse Charitable Foundation $2,500 – $4,999 ALH Foundation, Inc. The Campbell Foundation, Inc. Edith and Herbert Lehman Foundation, Inc. Israel and Mollie Meyers Foundation, Inc. $1,000 – $2,499 Anonymous (1) ACMP Foundation Charlesmead Foundation Margaret O. Cromwell Family Fund Dimick Foundation The Harry L. Gladding Foundation Ralph and Shirley Klein Foundation, Inc. Ethel M. Looram Foundation, Inc. Government Grants Mayor and City Council of Baltimore The Citizens of Baltimore County Carroll County Government & the Carroll County Arts Council Commonwealth Foundation Fund of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region Howard County Government & the Howard County Arts Council Maryland State Arts Council Maryland State Department of Education Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County National Arts and Humanities Youth Program National Endowment for the Arts
Endowment
The BSO gratefully acknowledges the generosity of the following donors who have given Endowment Gifts to the Sustaining Greatness and / or the Heart of the Community campaigns. Anonymous (6) Diane and Martin* Abeloff AEGON USA Alex. Brown & Sons Charitable Foundation Dr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Allen Eva and Andy Anderson
Anne Arundel County Recreation and Parks Department William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund Mr. H. Furlong Baldwin Baltimore Community Foundation Baltimore County Executive, County Council, and the Commission on Arts and Sciences The Baltimore Orioles Georgia and Peter Angelos The Baltimore Symphony Associates, Marge Penhallegon, President Patricia and Michael J. Batza, Jr. Henry and Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Foundation The Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Bruce I. Blum Dr. and Mrs. John E. Bordley* Jessica and Michael Bronfein Mr. and Mrs. George L. Bunting, Jr. Laura Burrows Dr. and Mrs. Oscar B.* Camp Carefirst BlueCross BlueShield CitiFinancial Constellation Mr. and Mrs. William H. Cowie, Jr. Richard A. Davis and Edith Wolpoff-Davis Rosalee C. and Richard Davison Foundation Mr. L. Patrick Deering*, Mr. and Mrs. Albert R. Counselman, The RCM&D Foundation and RCM&D, Inc. DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary US LLP Carol and Alan Edelman Dr. and Mrs. Robert Elkins Deborah and Philip English Esther and Ben Rosenbloom Foundation France-Merrick Foundation Ramon F.* and Constance A. Getzov John Gidwitz The Goldsmith Family Foundation, Inc. Joanne Gold and Andrew A. Stern Jody and Martin Grass Louise and Bert Grunwald H&S Bakery Mr. John Paterakis Harford County Hecht-Levi Foundation Ryda H. Levi* and Sandra Levi Gerstung Betty Jean and Martin* S. Himeles, Sr. Hoffberger Foundation Howard County Arts Council Harley W. Howell Charitable Foundation The Huether-McClelland Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Richard E. Hug Independent Can Company Beth J. Kaplan and Bruce P. Sholk Dr. and Mrs. Murray M. Kappelman Susan B. Katzenberg Marion I. and Henry J. Knott Scholarship Fund The Zanvyl and Isabelle Krieger Fund Anne and Paul Lambdin Therese* and Richard Lansburgh Sara and Elliot* Levi Bernice and Donald S. Levinson Darielle and Earl Linehan Susan and Jeffrey* Liss Lockheed Martin
S y m p h on y f u nd Hono r Ro l l Th e Baltimore Sym phony Orch estr a
E. J. Logan Foundation M&T Bank Macht Philanthropic Fund of the AJC Mrs. Clyde T. Marshall Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development The Maryland State Arts Council MD State Department of Education McCarthy Family Foundation McCormick & Company, Inc. Mr. Wilbur McGill, Jr. MIE Properties, Inc. Mr. Edward St. John Mercantile-Safe Deposit & Trust Joseph & Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds Sally and Decatur Miller Ms. Michelle Moga Louise and Alvin Myerberg* / Wendy and Howard* Jachman National Endowment for the Arts Mr. and Mrs. Bill Nerenberg Mrs. Daniel M. O’Connell Mr. and Mrs. James P. O’Conor Stanley* and Linda Hambleton Panitz Cecile Pickford and John MacColl Dr. Thomas and Mrs.* Margery Pozefsky Mr. and Mrs. T. Michael Preston Alison and Arnold Richman The James G. Robinson Family Mr. and Mrs. Theo C. Rodgers Mr. and Mrs. Randolph S. Rothschild* The Rouse Company Foundation Nathan G.* and Edna J. Rubin The Rymland Foundation S. Kann Sons Company Foundation, Inc. B. Bernei Burgunder, Jr. Dr. Henry Sanborn Saul Ewing LLP Mrs. Alexander J. Schaffer Mr. and Mrs. J. Mark Schapiro Eugene Scheffres and Richard E. Hartt* Mrs. Muriel Schiller Dorothy McIlvain Scott* Mrs. Clair Zamoiski Segal and Mr. Thomas Segal Ida & Joseph Shapiro Foundation and Diane and Albert Shapiro Mr. and Mrs. Earle K. Shawe The Sheridan Foundation Richard H. Shindell and Family Dr. and Mrs. Solomon H. Snyder The St. Paul Companies Barbara and Julian Stanley T. Rowe Price Associates Foundation, Inc. The Alvin and Fanny Blaustein Thalheimer Guest Artist Fund Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation, Inc. TravelersGroup The Aber and Louise Unger Fund Venable LLP Wachovia Robert A. Waidner Foundation The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company Mr. and Mrs. Willard Hackerman Mr. and Mrs. Jay M. Wilson / Mr. and Mrs. Bruce P. Wilson The Zamoiski-Barber-Segal Family Foundation
Board of Directors & Staff Board of Directors Officers Chair Barbara M. Bozzuto* Secretary Kathleen A. Chagnon, Esq.*
Board of Trustees— Baltimore Symphony Endowment Trust Benjamin H. Griswold, IV Chairman Terry Meyerhoff Rubenstein Secretary Chris Bartlett
Alice H. Simons Director of Institutional Giving
Janice Johnson Senior Accountant
Richard Spero Community Liaison for BSO at Strathmore
Evinz Leigh Administration Associate
Barbara M. Bozzuto
President and CEO Paul Meecham*
Paul Meecham
EDUCATION
The Honorable Steven R. Schuh Calman J. Zamoiski, Jr.
Nicholas Cohen General Manager of OrchKids and BSYO
* Board Executive Committee † Ex-Officio
Annemarie Guzy Director of Education
Treasurer The Honorable Steven R. Schuh*
Board Members Rick Bernstein A.G.W. Biddle, III Constance R. Caplan August J. Chiasera Robert B. Coutts Alan S. Edelman* Sandy Feldman President, Baltimore Symphony Associates †
Sandra Levi Gerstung Michael G. Hansen* Denise Hargrove † Governing Members Co-Chair Robert C. Knott Stephen M. Lans Ava Lias-Booker, Esq. Howard Majev, Esq. Liddy Manson Hilary B. Miller* E. Albert Reece, M.D. Barry F. Rosen Ann L. Rosenberg Stephen D. Shawe, Esq. The Honorable James T. Smith, Jr. Solomon H. Snyder, M.D.* Andrew A. Stern* Gregory W. Tucker Amy Webb
Staff Paul Meecham President and CEO Leilani Uttenreither Executive Assistant John Verdon Vice President and CFO Eileen Andrews Vice President of Marketing and Communications Carol Bogash Vice President of Education and Community Engagement Jack Fishman Vice President of External Affairs, BSO at Strathmore
Directors Emeriti Barry D. Berman, Esq. Murray M. Kappelman, M.D. M. Sigmund Shapiro
Chairman Laureate Michael G. Bronfein Kenneth W. DeFontes, Jr. Calman J. Zamoiski, Jr.
* Deceased
Theresa Kopasek Marketing and PR Associate
Mollie Westbrook Education Assistant
Ricky O'Bannon Writer in Residence
OrchKids
Erin Ouslander Senior Graphic Designer
Dan Trahey Artistic Director
Adeline Sutter Group Sales Manager
Nick Skinner Director of Operations
Martha Thomas Publications Editor
Camille Delaney-McNeil OrchKids Site Manager, Lockerman-Bundy Elementary School
Rika Dixon White Director of Marketing and Sales
Jaclyn Dorr OrchKids Site Coordinator
TICKET SERVICES
Juliana Marin Senior Ticket Agent for Strathmore
Toby Blumenthal Director of Rentals & Presentations
Kay Sheppard OrchKids Site Manager, Booker T. Washington Middle School for the Arts
Tiffany Bryan Manager of Front of House
Mairin Srygley OrchKids Site Coordinator
Michael Schultz Senior Ticket Agent, Special Events
Nishi Badhwar Director of Orchestra Personnel
Patrick Chamberlain Artistic Coordinator Jinny Kim Assistant Personnel Manager
Evan Rogers Operations Manager
Amy Bruce Director of Ticket Services
Ken Lam Artistic Director and Conductor of YO MaryAnn Poling Conductor of CO
Sandy Feldman President
Nana Vaughn Conductor of SO
Florence McLean Secretary
Jessica Abel Grants Program Manager
James Brown Housekeeper
Jordan Allen Institutional Giving Coordinator
Shirley Caudle Housekeeper
Katie Applefeld Director of External Affairs, OrchKids
Alvin Crawley Facilities Technician
Megan Beck Manager of Donor Engagement and Special Events
Rose Ferguson Housekeeper
Sara Kissinger Development Operations & Membership Coordinator
Barbara Kelly Treasurer Kitty Allen Parliamentarian
Bertha Jones-Dickerson Senior Housekeeper Curtis Jones Building Services Manager Renee Thornton Housekeeper
Marge Penhallegon Immediate Past President Kitty Allen Vice President, Communications Regina Hartlove Vice President, Education Carolyn Stadfeld Vice President, Meetings/Programs Barbara Dent Vice President, Recruitment/ Membership JoAnn Ruther Vice President, Special Services/Events
Mary Maxwell Manager of Annual Giving, BSO at Strathmore
Frank Wise Housekeeper
Emily Montano Annual Fund Assistant
FINANCE and INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Joanne M. Rosenthal Director of Principal Gifts & Government Relations
Thomas Treasure Ticket Services Agent
BALTIMORE SYMPHONY ASSOCIATES
Alicia Kosack Operations Manager
FACILITIES OPERATIONS
Katharine H. Caldwell Director of Philanthropic Planning
Peter Murphy Ticket Services Manager
Michael Suit Ticket Services Agent
Baltimore Symphony Youth Orchestras
DEVELOPMENT
Stephanie Moore Director of the Annual Fund Katherine Holter, Receptionist
Derek A. Johnson Senior Marketing Manager
Larry Townsend Education Assistant
Timothy Lidard Manager of VIP Ticketing
Rheda Becker
Linda Hambleton Panitz
Justin Gillies Graphic Designer
Johnnia Stigall Education Program Coordinator
Lisa Philip OrchKids Artistic Coordinator
Meg Sippey Artistic Planning Manager and Assistant to the Music Director
Robert E. Meyerhoff
Teresa Eaton Director of Public Relations & Publications
ARTISTIC OPERATIONS
Life Directors
Harvey M. Meyerhoff
Derek Chavis Marketing Coordinator
Rafaela Dreisin OrchKids Senior Site Manager, Mary Winterling Elementary School
Tabitha Pfleger Director of Operations and Facilities
Yo-Yo Ma
MARKETING & PUBLIC RELATIONS
Matthew Spivey Vice President of Artistic Operations
Jeffrey Zoller † Chair, Baltimore Symphony Youth Orchestras
Peter G. Angelos, Esq.
Jeff Wright Director of Information Technology
Sarah Weintraub Executive Assistant and Office Manager
Vice Chair Lainy LeBow-Sachs*
Kenneth W. DeFontes, Jr.
Donna Waring Payroll Accountant
Janie Szybist Research & Campaign Associate
Larry Albrecht Vice President, Symphony Store Louise Reiner Office Manager
Sarah Beckwith Director of Accounting Sophia Jacobs Senior Accountant
March– April 2015 |
O v ertur e
43
{ impromptu
L aura Farmer
Laurie Sokoloff Solo Piccolo
She’s got big musical shoes to fill. The BSO celebrates its centennial year in 2016 and promises to mark this milestone with great fanfare. But for BSO Solo Piccolo Laurie Sokoloff, another centenarian provides personal cause for celebration: her mother, Eleanor Sokoloff, turned 100 in the summer of 2014. Like the BSO, Mrs. Sokoloff the elder continues to thrive a century on. In fact, her legacy has become the stuff of legends at The Curtis Institute, where she holds the distinction of serving on the piano faculty for more than 77 years, the longest tenure of any Curtis faculty member. Young Eleanor’s musical journey began in 1931, when she enrolled at Curtis at age 16, during the height of the Depression. In 1936, she began teaching supplementary piano lessons (piano for non-piano majors) before she graduated in 1938. While still a student at Curtis, another pianist caught her eye—Vladimir (“Billy”) Sokoloff, who would eventually become the principal pianist for the Philadelphia Orchestra. The pair began performing duo piano together and eventually realized that their compatibility extended beyond the keyboard. “It was wonderful to always have music in our home. Mother had a teaching studio with two grand pianos on the second floor and my father practiced on the first floor. My mother’s example of commitment to her students is an inspiration to me,” recalls Laurie fondly. “I have followed in her footsteps and now teach at The Peabody Institute, as well as private lessons.”
Laurie Sokoloff reviews music for her students at the Peabody in Leith Symington Griswold Hall.
44 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
“I developed an early idea of what I wanted for my life. While my friends were still trying to find their paths well into their 20s, I was fortunate enough to leave high school after two years and finish at Curtis. I knew what I wanted to do. My mother helped me find a purpose. I’m so proud of all that she’s accomplished and I know that she feels the same way about me.”
M itro H o o d
But descending from piano royalty also has its drawbacks. “I began studying piano when I was young and it was torture! My mother told me I was not as good as her worst student,” says Laurie with a laugh. “Luckily, she let me switch to flute when my piano teacher moved away. ”
the
HerzoG feStivAl Two plays by Amy Herzog
Center Stage is proud to present the work of Pulitzer Prize nominee Amy Herzog in a first-of-its-kind festival coming to Baltimore March 18–May 24.
one American family. two Great American Plays.
After the revolution 4000 MileS Mar 18–29 | apr 14–26 | May 12–17 by Amy Herzog
Ambitious lawyer Emma Joseph finds both her political career and family legacy threatened when secrets regarding her beloved grandfather emerge.
apr 1–12 | apr 28–May 10 | May 19–24 by Amy Herzog In this sharp-witted drama, young Leo finds himself forming an unexpected bond with his 91-year-old grandmother, Vera, after a life-changing, cross-country biking trip.
see both shows with our Festival Pass!
410.332.0033 | centerstage.org
TickeTs sTarT aT
$19
Your future is waiting to unfold. Just 15 minutes from cosmopolitan Baltimore, Blakehurst is situated on 40 acres within a pristine neighborhood and has recently undergone beautiful interior updates. Expanded dining options. New spaces for entertaining family and friends. Health Center enhancements. This prestigious senior living community is positioned for you and your engaging lifestyle for years to come. Experience Blakehurst for yourself today. Call (410) 870-5766 for more information or to schedule a personal tour.
1055 West Joppa Road • Towson, MD 21204 (410) 870-5766 • www.BlakehurstLCS.com 699523