Notes

JESSIE

MONTGOMERY

born: 1981, New York, NY Starburst

(2012)

premiere: September 2012 in Miami, Florida

Composer, violinist, and educator Jessie Montgomery was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Her parents — her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller — were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Ms. Montgomery has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, language, and social justice, placing her squarely as one of the most relevant interpreters of 21st century American sound and experience. Starburst was commissioned by the Sphinx Organization, a non-profit dedicated to the development of young Black and Latino classical musicians. The composer provides the following commentary: This brief one-movement work for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst: “the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly” lends itself almost literally to the nature of the performing ensemble who premieres the work, The Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.

“Music is my connection to the world. It guides me to understand my place in relation to others and challenges me to make clear the things I do not understand.” — Jessie Montgomery

jessiemontgomery.com

WOLFGANG AMADEUS

MOZART

born: January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria died: December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria Eine kleine Nachtmusik

Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major, K. 525 (1787)

completed: August 10, 1787 in Vienna A fair amount of mystery surrounds Mozart’s Serenade in G Major, Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Mozart’s own catalogue reflects that the work was completed on August 10, 1787, while the composer was in Vienna working on his opera, Don Giovanni — in this context, it’s worth noting that in the final scene of that opera, a group of instrumentalists provide entertainment for the Don’s lavish banquet, playing selections from popular operas of the day, including Mozart’s own Le nozze di Figaro. But we don’t know the circumstances surrounding the Serenade’s composition, or even whether Eine kleine Nachtmusik was performed during Mozart’s lifetime.

It was Mozart himself who gave the Serenade its famous title, Eine kleine Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”). As was typical of 18th century serenades, the work originally contained five movements, with an initial Minuet and Trio appearing between the opening Allegro and the Romanze. Sadly, that movement appears to have been lost forever. In its familiar four-movement structure, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik is one of the composer’s most performed and beloved works, admired for its lively, joyful quality and memorable melodies. This concert features the opening two movements of Eine kleine Nachtmusik. The first movement (Allegro) opens with the famous ascending and descending fanfare-like motif. The first violins introduce the elegant melody that forms the basis of the slow-tempo Romanze (Andante).

Eine kleine Nachtmusik was featured prominently in the Academy Awardwinning biopic Amadeus as the character of Italian composer Antioni Salieri, Mozart’s nemesis in the film, lamented that the work had become far more popular than his own. F. Murray Abraham as Salieri in Amadeus (1984).

LEONARDO BALADA

born: September 22, 1933, in Barcelona, Spain A Little Night Music in Harlem

(2006)

premiere: 2007 in Budapest, Hungary

Born in Barcelona, Spain in 1933, composer Leonardo Balada graduated from the Juilliard School in 1960 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1981. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti and Aaron Copland. Some of his best known works were written in a dramatic avantgarde style in the sixties. He is credited with pioneering a blend of ethnic music with those avant-garde techniques, creating a very personal style. A Little Night Music in Harlem was commissioned by the Hungarian Chamber Orchestra and its music director Alberto Santana. Those artists (the work’s dedicatees) performed the premiere of A Little Night Music in Harlem in 2007, in Budapest. Scored for strings, A Little Night Music in Harlem is inspired by another work for that ensemble, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (see p. 11). In program notes accompanying a Naxos recording of A Little Night Music in Harlem by the Iberian Chamber Orchestra and conductor José Luis Temes (Naxos 8.572625), the composer explains that he uses “motifs from Mozart’s composition which, in a subtle way, are integrated into my personal style. These motifs are not presented suddenly, as in a collage, but rather in a surrealist transformation, blending seamlessly.” A Little Night Music in Harlem contains elements of jazz, as well as “(a)leatoric devices, layer on layer textures, polytonality alternating with straight tonality and many other contemporary techniques.” In the final measures, Mozart’s composition appears in its original form.

FELIX

MENDELSSOHN

born: February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany died: November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany Concerto for Violin and Strings

in D minor (1822)

premiere: February 4, 1952 in New York

Like Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn was a brilliant child prodigy - beginning his music studies at the age of seven. In 1820, Mendelssohn composed his first musical work. An impressive number of compositions soon followed. In 1822, the German singer and actor Eduard Devrient met Felix Mendelssohn for the first time. While at the Mendelssohns’ Berlin home, Devrient watched the thirteen year-old Felix rehearse singers who would perform one of the young composer’s operettas: The singers sat round the big dining-table, near the grand piano at which Felix, perched on a stool provided with a thick cushion, conducted and controlled us without a trace of shyness, earnestly and eagerly and with as little ado as if he had been playing games with a handful of his playmates. That so many adults were giving time and trouble to his compositions seemed no more to make him conceited than did the fact that he had already written his third little opera and was hard at work on a bigger one. That same year, Mendelssohn composed his Concerto in D minor for Violin and String Orchestra for his teacher, violinist Eduard Rietz. The score was discovered in 1951 by violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who championed the publication and performance of this early work, a predecessor to Mendelssohn’s beloved Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64 (1844). While the D minor is not perhaps the equal of the E minor (few violin concertos are), it is a highly accomplished and engaging work that showcases the youthful Mendelssohn’s extraordinary gifts. The Concerto is in three movements. The opening Allegro is based upon two themes; the first imposing and austere, the second, lyrical and plaintive. The slow-tempo second movement (Andante) begins with an extended orchestral introduction. The soloist immediately presents the finale’s (Allegro) central theme, a spirited dance that serves as the basis for the Concerto’s most overtly virtuoso movement.