M&T Bank Classics Series November 12 and

MADISON CLAIRE PARKS, VOCALS

Madison Claire Parks is a Musical Theatre actress and singer most wellknown for starring as Luisa in THE FANTASTICKS Off-Broadway at the Jerry Orbach Theatre in New York, for over 400 performances. Madison most recently completed her run as Laurey Williams in Rodgers & Hammerstein's OKLAHOMA! with North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts. Prior to that Madison was back Off-Broadway starring as Katherine Talbot in Lerner and Loewe's rarely done musical: THE DAY BEFORE SPRING with The York Theatre Company. This was the first time the complete piece was done in New York since its original run on Broadway in 1943. Madison also recently starred as Nellie Forbush in Rodgers & Hammerstein's SOUTH PACIFIC, opposite Broadway's Ben Davis as Emile de Becque, at The Rubicon Theatre Company. Prior to that, Madison gained critical acclaim for her portrayal of Sarah Brown in GUYS & DOLLS with both Musical Theatre West at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach, California, and with Theatre Under The Stars at the Hobby Center in Houston, Texas. Other favorite roles include Cosette in LES MISÉRABLES, Hedy LaRue in HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUISNESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, Lady Larken in ONCE UPON A MATTRESS, Marsinah in KISMET, Precious in STEEL PIER, and Daisy Mae in the Los Angeles revival of LI’L ABNER. Madison has appeared as a soloist for numerous concerts throughout the country. Madison is a third generation performer. Her mother is Broadway actress, Karen Culliver, and her father is composer, Garrett Parks, son of Madison's grandmother; famous Broadway actress and MGM film star Betty Garrett, to whom she dedicates all her work and performances. Spreading her “Joie De Vivre” with charm and generosity, Myra's voice touches the soul and the world is amazed. Her intriguing personality and captivating artistry are as diverse as her origins. Living between New-York City and Hamburg (Germany), born and raised in Paris (France), with roots in Madagascar and Martinique, Myra is a real citizen of the world.

The multi-award singer-songwriter, instrumentalist, and producer started her career in Paris where she studied piano, saxophone, and dance at the Conservatory. Like many singers, Myra developed her singing and musical craft in church. After several shows as a singer and Master of Ceremony in Disneyland Paris, she was invited to travel the world as a soloist with the Claude Bolling Jazz Big Band and the Orchestre National Symphonique De France. Throughout the years, Myra shared the stage with superstars such as Mireille Matthieu, Johnny Hallyday, Céline Dion. or Enrique Iglesias and performed in the presence of Quincy Jones in Davos (Switzerland) with her own choir Gospel Sans Frontières. She starred as the great Josephine Baker in the French movie “Les Enfants Du Pays" with Michel Serrault. In 2001 she left Paris to play the lead role of "Nala" in the Lion King Musical in Hamburg (Germany). In addition to her success as a performer Myra is a highly sought after musical and vocal coach and workshop facilitator. She has led team building workshops for large multi-national corporations and smaller companies. In addition, she regularly donates and invests her time by singing in hospitals and prisons. In 2010 Myra received her first platinum record in South Africa, for the album "Afri-Frans", a project which presents traditional South African folk songs in French. The 2nd album reached Gold Status. Myra’s international acclaim tremendously grew when she was invited to be the lead singer of the Opening Ceremony of the 2011 FIFA Women’s Soccer World Cup in Frankfurt, an event which had in excess of 130,000 spectators. In 2014, she released her first jazz album entitled "Salt - La Solution”, a project in collaboration with acclaimed producer, Lutz Krajenski. Another major expansion of her international footprint took place when she was invited to be the headliner of the Eleuthera Jazz Festival (Bahamas) in 2015, 2017 and 2018.

In 2015, Paris welcomed her back. Myra played the lead role "Rosa L'Amour" in the musical Gospel Sur La Colline 50 performances at Les Folies Bergère (Paris, France). From 2016 to 2019 Myra starred in a series of tribute performances honoring the life and legacy of the legendary Whitney Houston. She was accompanied by the Leipzig Philharmonic Orchestra. (Germany) In May 2019, one of her biggest dreams came true when the Greenberg Artists and Schirmer Theatrical selected her in NYC to perform as a soloist for their new big production PROHIBITION.

MYRA MAUD, VOCALS

Saturday, November 12, 2022 at 7:30 PM Sunday, November 13, 2022 at 2:30 PM

Classics Series ELGAR & KODÁLY

JoAnn Falletta, conductor Asier Polo, cello

WALTON Portsmouth Point Overture

ELGAR Concerto in E minor for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 85

I. Adagio; Moderato

II. Lento; Allegro molto

III. Adagio

IV. Allegro; Moderato; Allegro ma non troppo Asier Polo, cello

INTERMISSION

SCHMITT

KODÁLY Cippus Feralis (Tombstone) from In Memorium Gabriel Fauré

Suite from Háry János

I. Prelude, The Fairy Tale Begins

II. The Viennese Musical Clock

III. Song

IV. The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon

V. Intermezzo

VI. Entrance of the Emperor and his Court

Learn about this program from the conductor and guest artists at Musically Speaking, one hour prior to the start of Saturday's and Sunday's concert. Patrons are asked to turn off all electronic devices. The use of cameras and recording devices is strictly prohibited.

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

We welcome you to an international collection of wonderful pieces that we hope you will love. The concert's first half highlights two extraordinary English works - Walton's brilliant musical portrait of the bustling city of Portsmouth, and Elgar's heartfelt memorial to those lost in the Great War, his beautiful cello concerto. The extraordinary French composer Florent Schmitt composed an elegie for his beloved teacher Gabriel Faure, and we will end the concert with Kodaly's imaginative orchestral masterpiece, Hary Janos. The BPO musicians and I are delighted to welcome the acclaimed Spanish cellist, Asier Polo, in his Buffalo debut.

PROGRAM NOTES

William Walton (English; 1902-1983)

Portsmouth Point Overture

Composed 1925; Duration 6 minutes Born into a musical family, William Walton excelled as a young impressionable student at Oxford, where he discovered modern music and moved in circles of esoteric poets, artists, and high-society types. He found himself living in a London attic of the well-to-do Sitwells, who only fanned the flames of his avantgarde adventures. Inspired by the raucous port scene created a century earlier by cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson, Walton sought to recreate the image’s vibrantly chaotic depiction of drunk sailors, a fiddler, and other lascivious episodes in his Portsmouth Point Overture. Dedicated to his friend, poet Siegfried Sassoon, the work was published on his recommendation by the Oxford press and premiered as an interlude during a Sergei Diaghelev ballet production. It was performed a few years later at the Proms under Walton’s baton. Walton sets his scene with sunny, bustling brass chords. Throughout, a sailor’s hornpipe dances drunkenly in and out of busy off-kilter accents. The persistent syncopations drive an atmosphere of unpredictable excitement. 26

Edward Elgar (English; 1857-1934)

Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85

I. Adagio – Moderato II. Lento – Allegro Molto III. Adagio IV. Allegro – Moderato – Allegro ma non-troppo Composed 1919; Duration 30 minutes During the First World War, Elgar’s contributions were musical and patriotic, but exhaustion and ill health punished this senior statesman of British music, by then in his sixth decade. Retiring to his secluded Sussex cottage, each sound of artillery fire from across the nearby Channel was a reminder that the world was forever changed, and not so welcoming to the voices of the past. As a young man, Elgar enjoyed singing in a Glee club and teaching music lessons, and with a continental education financially untenable, he relied on local opportunities—performing with a provincial orchestra, composing works for choral festivals—to learn and develop. While many of his colleagues would remain obscure on the world stage, his 1899 Enigma Variations brought him international fame overnight. Arguably, he was the first British composer of orchestral music to be taken seriously abroad for centuries, and this led to high-profile commissions, international tours, and a knighthood in 1904. Throughout his career, his wife Alice inspired Elgar in their shared successes, and she was ecstatic as he composed three substantial chamber works from their cottage in the closing days of the war. As Elgar healed from a recent surgery, he knew his wife was succumbing to frailty. As her death loomed, he composed his Cello Concerto. Composed in four movements, the opening cadenza cries out in grief, followed by a lamenting melody that first flows from the violas. Sorrowful and contemplative, the opening movement, with hesitance, is balanced by a fleeting scherzo where the soloist traverses the instrument with rapidfire notes. The Adagio is stunning for its simplicity, as the cello sings lyrically above the orchestra. The finale is symphonic, noble, and varied, spanning a spectrum of moods. Reminiscing on music that came before, this great finale is sometimes spirited, often brooding, but is ultimately heartbreaking in its conclusion. Elgar’s Concerto opened the London Symphony’s 1919 season, but suffered from little rehearsal attention from the conductor, and the work would not gain any traction in its composer’s life. While Elgar was certainly not obscure in his final years—he still had many supporters—he was old-fashioned, and he lost his greatest inspiration. Not six months following the premiere of his Concerto, his wife Alice succumbed to cancer, and Edward would not complete another major work. Three decades after Elgar died, the first seminal recording of his Concerto was made, establishing it as a fundamental part of the cello repertoire while bringing international fame to Jacqueline du Pré. Florent Schmitt (French; 1870-1958)

In Memoriam: Gabriel Fauré, Op. 72

I. Cippus feralis Composed 1935; Duration 12 minutes Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was among France’s most celebrated composers, known in part for his musical progeny, which included the talented nonconformist Florent Schmitt. Schmitt had many teachers, but most treasured his relationship with Fauré, whose 1920 retirement from the Paris Conservatory sparked a project of piano works composed by his most prestigious students (such as Maurice Ravel and Georges Enesco). The project was initiated by the periodical La Revue Musicale, which challenged composers to create works in which notes would spell out Fauré’s name. Schmitt’s contribution to the project was a Scherzo “sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré.” Schmitt’s bombastic Scherzo, curiously steeped in disorienting dissonance, would hardly be recognizable as belonging to a student of Fauré’s. Perhaps the discovery of one’s own voice, an independent separation, is the greatest homage. In 1935, years after Fauré’s 1924 death, Schmitt returned to the Scherzo, orchestrating it and adding an extensive, reflective first movement which together he titled In Memoriam. The work’s opening movement, titled Cippus feralis, possibly referring to a grave marker, is a slowly unfolding atmospheric processional. The lone oboe opens, introducing a primary melody which is joined in counterpoint by a second oboe, and together, they develop a central rhythmic figure, a building block of the movement. Schmitt explores vast orchestral colors throughout the movement’s episodes, which build to a billowing climax. The following Scherzo differs from the opening movement for its brevity, as well as for its cheeky energy. The two movements pro-

vide contrasting views of Schmitt and his teacher. The Scherzo, written while Fauré was still alive, reflects a dynamic, friendly, even jocular relationship between the two, while the opening movement, composed a decade later, is a respectful reflection on Schmitt’s most important mentor. Zoltán Kodály (Hungarian; 1882-1967)

Háry János Suite

I. Prelude; the Fairy Tale Begins

II. Viennese Musical Clock

III. Song

IV. The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon

V. Intermezzo

VI. Entrance of the Emperor and His Court Composed 1926; Duration 22 minutes Most heralded for his pedagogical efforts in developing the Kodály Method of music education, his ground-breaking work in ethnomusicology (specifically of Hungarian music) and composition is often overshadowed by that of his prodigy Béla Bartók—a situation that is on the mend. A deep curiosity and nationalistic interest in Hungarian music and culture shaped Kodály’s mentality as a composer, notably with his only opera, his relatively early 1926 folk-opera Háry János. Technically a singspiel, having spoken text with songs interspersed, the four-act work is operatic in scope and drive, with a Hungarian-language libretto by Béla Paulini. Based on the 1843 comedic epic Az obsistos (the veteran) by Hungarian writer Garay János, the story focuses on Háry János (a play on the author’s name), an old veteran of the Napoleonic wars, who sits in a tavern and tells ridiculous tales of self-aggrandizing war adventures. For Kodály, the project was an opportunity to bring Hungarian music to the operatic stage, but the sentiment of this folk hero—a peasant soldier, dreamer, and storyteller—harnesses the qualities of the Hungarian spirit. First staged at Budapest’s Royal Hungarian Opera House in 1926, Kodály was quick at work condensing the score into a six-part orchestral suite that premiered the following year. The Prelude transports the listener to a different world, first with a flourishing figure, then a descent to long, low, moodsetting strings. Heroic horns set in a frantically dreamy texture grow to music that flies across a European landscape. The opening movement prepares for the coming music by establishing a dreamy fairytale scene. What follows is a series of movements chronicling our hero’s absurd stories, first with the Viennese Musical Clock, representing his induction into Austria’s Imperial Guard. This vibrant military march is colored by the clanging of bells. The third movement, simply titled Song, opens with a plaintive bout of nostalgia from a solo viola. Kodály features a cimbalom, a Hungarian dulcimer, throughout the movement, adding a folksy element to the adventurer’s tune. The central story is of the hero’s singlehanded victory over Napoleon, portrayed in the victorious fourth movement. With clumsy battle music, triumphant fanfares, and a funeral march played by a saxophone, the underlying humor of the tale is captured in Kodály’s musical narrative. The cimbalom is featured heavily again in the work’s intermezzo. The self-aware over-seriousness of the movement has a tongue-in-cheek quality, maintaining a certain levity. The final movement portrays Háry János receiving a hero’s welcome by the Emperor with an uptempo march played by trumpets and flutes. The finale is an energetic jaunt to cap off our folk hero’s resplendent tales.

—Chaz Stuart, 2022

ASIER POLO, CELLO

Considered by the specialist music press as one of the most important cellists of his generation, Asier Polo has worked with many of the major international orchestras, such as the Philharmonia Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionalle della RAI, Dresdner Philharmonie, Orchestre de Paris, BBC Philharmonic, Bergen Filharmoniske Orkester, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Berliner Symphoniker, Orquesta Nacional de México, Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo, Louisiana Philharmonic, Spanish National Orchestra and Basel Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of distinguished conductors such as John Axelrod, Pinchas Steinberg, Christian Badea, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Claus Peter Flor, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Günther Herbig, Juanjo Mena, Antoni Wit and Anne Manson.

He is a regular guest at prestigious festivals, such as those held in Schleswig-Holstein, Nantes, Ohrid, Biennale di Venezia, Rome, Lisbon, Gstaad Menuhin Festival, Morelia, Granada and the Quincena Musical in San Sebastián.

He has appeared with great artists such as Silvia Marcovici, Nicolás Chumachenco, Sol Ga¬betta, Maxim Rysanov, Isabelle van Keulen, Josep Colom, Eldar Nebolsin, Gerard Caussé, Cuarteto Janácek, Cuarteto Casals and Alfredo Kraus, who in the last years of his career invited him to perform as soloist at his concerts, with engagements at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London, Tonhalle in Zurich and the prestigious Musikverein in Vienna, as well as a successful tour in the major concerts halls in Japan.

He is devoted to contemporary music, especially from his native country. Composers such as Gabriel Erkoreka, Jesús Torres, Luis de Pablo, Jesús Villa-Rojo, Fernando Velázquez and Antón García Abril have all dedicated their cello concertos to Asier Polo. He enjoys combining modern music with the great classical repertoire, covering everything from Bach’s Suites, classical and romantic concertos, to contemporary music such as Dutilleux, Cristobal Halffter and Sofia Gubaidulina.

He has recorded 19 albums for major record labels such as Naxos, Claves, RTVE, IBS Classical and Marco Polo, playing some of the major Spanish repertoire for cello, such as the concertos by José María Usandizaga, Joaquín Rodrigo, Francisco Escudero, Tomás Marco, Carmelo Bernaola and Jesús Rueda. Highlights include the nominated for the Gramophon Editor’s Choice Award CD dedicated to the work of the composer Sofia Gubaidulina (Et’cetera Records) and the recording of the Ecos y Sombras [Echoes and Shades] DVD dedicated to Cristóbal Halffter, performing his Cello Concerto no. 2 with the Spanish National Orchestra (KP Music).

His latest CD releases -all them for IBS Classical- include Rachmaninov and César Frank’s sonatas for cello and piano with Marta Zabaleta and Brahms’ cello sonatas with the pianist Eldar Nebolsin, as well as Vivaldi, Boccherini and Haydn’s cello concertos together with the Orquesta Barroca de Sevilla and Andrés Gabetta, and the whole set of Cello Suites by J. S. Bach, his latest album.

Two new albums will soon be released with the Spanish National Orchestra, conducted by Juanjo Mena: Joaquín Rodrigo’s two cello concertos -Concierto como un Divertimento and Concierto in modo Galante, as well as Alberto Ginastera’s Cello Concerto no. 2, Op.50 (1980).

Asier Polo studied in Bilbao, Madrid, Cologne and Basel with Elisa Pascu, Maria Kliegel and Ivan Monighetti, and also received guidance from János Starker, Natalia Gutman and Mstislav Rostropovich in various masterclasses. He soon stood out as a promising young musician, winning

the first prizes in Cello and Chamber Music at the National Young Musicians Competition in Spain.

Asier Polo has been awarded numerous prizes, and amongst others, the Ojo Crítico by Radio Nacional de España (2002), the Fundación CEOE Prize for Musical Interpretation (2004) and the National Music Award by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Spain (2019). In 2009 he was appointed “Ilustre de Bilbao” (Bilbao being his native city).

He is regularly invited to be on the judging panel of international cello competitions, such as the Dotzauer Wettbewerb (Germany), Carlos Prieto International Cello Competition (Mexico), Benedetto Mazzacurati Competition (Italy) and the Manhattan International Music Competition (New York). He also gives masterclasses in many countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil.

Asier Polo plays a Francesco Ruggeri cello (Cremona, 1689) purchased in collaboration with the Fundación Banco Santander.