Program - Stravinsky's The Firebird

CLASSICS • 2017/18 Colorado Symphony 2017/18 Season Presenting Sponsor:

STRAVINSKY'S THE FIREBIRD COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor JUSTIN BARTELS, trumpet Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Drs. Sarah and Harold Nelson Sunday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Dr. Everette J. Freeman

Friday, October 20, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, October 21, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, October 22, 2017, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall STRAVINSKY Symphony in Three Movements Quarter note = 160 Andante — Con moto JOHN WILLIAMS Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra Maestoso — Risoluto — Slowly Allegro deciso — INTERMISSION — STRAVINSKY Suite from The Firebird (1945 revision) Introduction — The Dance of the Firebird Pantomime No. 1 Pas de Deux of the Firebird and Ivan Tsarevich Pantomime No. 2 Scherzo: Dance of the Princesses Pantomime No. 3 Round Dance of the Princesses Infernal Dance of the King Kashchei Berceuse — Finale

SOUNDINGS 2017/18 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1

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ANDREW LITTON, conductor Andrew Litton currently serves as Principal Guest Conductor of the Colorado Symphony, Artistic Advisor of Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Director of the New York City Ballet, Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest, and Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth Symphony. He was also Music Director of the Dallas Symphony from 1994-2006. He guest conducts the world’s leading orchestras and has a discography of over 120 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy®, France’s Diapason d’Or, and many British and other honours. Litton has also conducted many of the world’s finest opera companies, such as the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the Australian Opera. In 2011, in recognition of his work with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, King Harald V conferred the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit on Andrew Litton. Under him the orchestra has made appearances at the BBC Proms, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Musikverein, Berlin’s Philharmonie, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. Besides his Grammy®-winning Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with Bryn Terfel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, he also recorded the complete symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, a Dallas Mahler cycle, and many Gershwin recordings, as both conductor and pianist. For Hyperion Andrew Litton’s recordings include piano concertos by Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Grieg with Stephen Hough;

by Shostakovich, Shchedrin, and Brahms with Marc-André Hamelin; and by Alnæs and Sinding with Piers Lane; Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto and Symphony-Concerto with Alban Gerhardt; Viola Concertos by Bartók and Rózsa with Lawrence Power; the complete symphonies by Charles Ives and orchestral works by Joseph Schwantner. Andrew Litton received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard in piano and conducting. He is an accomplished pianist, and often conducts from the keyboard and enjoys performing chamber music with his orchestra colleagues. For further information, please visit www.andrewlitton.com.

JUSTIN BARTELS, trumpet Justin Bartels has held the position of Principal Trumpet since July 2008.

In addition to his position with the Colorado Symphony, he served on the Faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder as a Trumpet Lecturer/ Instructor. Justin is also a Visiting Guest Artist in Orchestral studies at the University of Denver. Previously, Justin was the Applied Trumpet Instructor at Regis University (2009-2012) and as a sabbatical replacement instructor at the University of Denver in the Fall of 2012. Justin performs with the Colorado Symphony Brass Quintet, Bartels Brass Sextet and is also a member of Up Close and Musical which provides educational concerts to local Denver students.

Mr. Bartels previously played Principal Trumpet with the Central City Opera Orchestra from 2005-2007 and 2009-2013. Prior to arriving in Denver, Justin had an established professional career. He held Principal Trumpet positions with Columbus (OH) Symphony (2007-2008), Augusta Symphony (2006-2007), South Carolina Philharmonic (2006) and The Columbus Indiana

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES Philharmonic (IN) (2001-2003). From 2003-2006, Justin was a also member of the New World Symphony. He has also played Guest Principal Trumpet with the San Francisco Symphony and St. Louis Symphony. He has had the pleasure of performing with many of the country’s top orchestras including: The New York Philharmonic, Alabama Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Virginia Symphony and the Houston Symphony. Justin is a proud graduate of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (B.M. 2003), he also attended the University of Alabama (BM Studies 1996-1997) and the University of Cincinnati CollegeConservatory of Music (BM Studies 1997-2000). While on the path to becoming an orchestral trumpet player, Justin had the privilege to study with many great trumpet teachers and performers including: Marie Speziale, John Rommel, Ed Cord, Alan Siebert, Michael B. Johnson, and Joe Ardovino.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971): Symphony in Three Movements Igor Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, and died on April 6, 1971, in New York City. The Symphony in Three Movements was composed in 1942-1945 and premiered on January 24, 1946, in New York, conducted by the composer. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, harp, piano, and strings.

Duration is about 24 minutes. Scott O’Neil conducted the last performance by the orchestra on March 20-22, 2009.

Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements came into existence, as it were, in pieces, and over a considerable period of time. The composer Alexander Tansman, Stravinsky’s close friend and eventual biographer, said that the first movement originated in 1942 as an orchestral piece with a prominent concertante piano part, not dissimilar from the way Petrushka had evolved thirty years before. The piano, however, had largely been subsumed into the orchestral texture by the time the movement was completed before the end of the year. The music for the Andante, composed during the spring of 1943, was first intended for use in the score of a film based on Franz Werfel’s novel The Song of Bernadette. Stravinsky said that the music was to accompany the vision of the Virgin Mary that miraculously appeared to the 19th-century peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous in the town of Lourdes, though its icy insouciance seems little related to the mood of that event, except for the prominence of its harp part. At any rate, Stravinsky withdrew from the project for artistic and financial reasons (as he did from every other movie deal proposed to him during the years he lived in Los Angeles), and the music, like the eventual first movement of the Symphony, remained an as-yet dissociated fragment. (The Song of Bernadette, incidentally, was made into an enormously successful if rather syrupy film in 1943 by director Henry King. It won four Oscars, including one for Jennifer Jones as Best Actress and one for Alfred Newman, who supplied the music.) The incentive to pull these musical orphans together into a finished symphony came with a commission from the New York Philharmonic in 1945. Stravinsky composed a third movement, which brought together the piano and harp featured in the two existing pieces, and completed the Symphony in Three Movements on August 7, 1945, just one week before the Japanese surrender ended World War II. He conducted its premiere in New York on January 24, 1946. It was his first new work to be heard after he became a naturalized United States citizen on December 28, 1945.

The first movement, Stravinsky said, “was inspired by a war film, a documentary of scorched-earth tactics in China. The middle part of the movement — the music for clarinet, piano and strings, which mounts in intensity and volume until the explosion of the three chords [from the full orchestra] — was conceived as a series of instrumental conversations to accompany a cinematographic scene showing the Chinese people scratching and digging in their fields.” The Andante, given its association with The Song of Bernadette and its prominent part for the harp, is a halcyon respite from the intensity of the surrounding movements. It is structured in Classical three-part form: a repeated-note melody in the strings informs the first and third sections of the movement; an austere passage, initiated by flute and harp and framed by shimmering chords floating in the high register of strings (before) and woodwinds (after), stands at the center. The movement is connected directly to the finale by a brief, chordal interlude. “The beginning of the finale,” Stravinsky explained, “is a musical reaction to the newsreels of goose-stepping soldiers. The march music is predominant until the fugue [begun PROGRAM 4 SOUNDINGS 2017/18 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES in fragmentary manner by piano and trombone], which is the stasis and the turning point. The immobility at the beginning of the fugue is comic, I think — and so, to me, was the overturned arrogance of the Germans when their machine failed. The exposition of the fugue and the end of the Symphony are associated in my plot with the rise of the Allies and their eventual triumph.”

 JOHN WILLIAMS (B. 1932): Trumpet Concerto John Williams was born on February 8, 1932, in Flushing, New York. He composed his Trumpet Concerto in 1996 for the Cleveland Orchestra and its principal trumpet, Michael Sachs, who premiered the work at Severance Hall on September 26, 1996, under the direction of Christoph von Dohnányi. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings.

Duration is about 20 minutes. This is the first performance by the orchestra.

John Williams is one of America’s most widely known and highly respected composers.

Born in New York in 1932, Williams moved with his family when he was sixteen to Los Angeles, where his father worked as a studio musician. After serving in the Air Force, Williams returned to New York in 1954, working there as a jazz pianist in clubs and on recordings while attending the Juilliard School. He subsequently moved back to Los Angeles to enroll at UCLA and study privately with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. By the early 1960s, he was composing music for feature films and television, as well as working as a pianist, arranger, and conductor for Columbia Records. His music began to receive wide recognition during the 1960s, when he won Emmys for his scores for the television movies Heidi and Jane Eyre. Williams has since composed music and served as music director for well over 300 movies and television shows, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, Jaws, E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, the Harry Potter movies, Catch Me If You Can, The Adventures of Tin-Tin, Lincoln, and The Book Thief. Williams has received 50 Academy Award nominations (the most of any living person and second only to Walt Disney) and won five Oscars, 23 Grammys, four Golden Globes, and four Emmys, as well as numerous gold and platinum records. In addition to his film music, Williams has written many concert works, including two symphonies, eight concertos, and numerous chamber and orchestral works. From 1980 to 1993, he served as conductor of the Boston Pops and has also appeared as guest conductor with major orchestras. Among Williams’ many distinctions are twenty honorary degrees, induction into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame, a Kennedy Center Honor (America’s highest award for artistic achievement), Golden Baton Award for Lifetime Achievement from the League of American Orchestras, National Medal of Arts, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute.

Williams wrote of his Trumpet Concerto, “As a youngster growing up in the 1940s, I was not unaware of the enormous influence that the brass players of the great swing bands had on the young people of our country. Beginning with Louis Armstrong, whose contribution inspired generations of trumpeters, these artists extended the expressive capabilities of their instruments and can certainly be credited with developing a school of brass playing, the influence of which SOUNDINGS 2017/18 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES can still be felt in nearly every musical ensemble that employs brass. ​“In my teen years, I too wanted to join in the fun. My father agreed that if I continued with piano studies, I could have a trombone, and he arranged for me to take lessons. I also taught myself to play a little on the trumpet, but I was never very comfortable switching mouthpiece size, so my brass playing — always amateur level to be sure — was pretty much restricted to the trombone.

“Given this background and after writing so much brass music for films and ceremonial pieces, you can imagine my pleasure when the Cleveland Orchestra asked me to write a concerto for their principal trumpeter, Michael Sachs. The premier performances in September 1996 were conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi with Mr. Sachs as soloist.”

Though Williams wrote that both the popular big band music of his youth and his own movie scores served as background to the Trumpet Concerto, their influences are more in the work’s virtuosity, rhythmic drive, melodic surety, and colorful instrumental palette than in any overt style characteristics. The Concerto opens, appropriately, with an introductory fanfare scored largely for brass led by the soloist’s tocsins. The main body of the movement is based on a muscular accompaniment with sharply dotted rhythms supporting a nimble, wide-ranging theme for the soloist. A more lyrical, less intense melody is introduced for contrast and formal balance. Following a development section based on the main theme, the opening fanfare is recalled as a bridge to a solo cadenza. A final iteration of the main theme serves as a coda that leads without pause to the second movement, whose scoring, expressive restraint, and brooding mood recall Aaron Copland’s Quiet City for trumpet, English horn, and strings, based on his incidental music for Irwin Shaw’s 1939 experimental play Quiet City, which explored the “night thoughts of many different kinds of people in a great city.” The play’s principal character was a jazz trumpeter, the spokesman for the author, whose music was intended to “arouse the conscience of his fellow players and of the audience.” Williams personalized this movement by assigning a prominent role to the solo trombone, his own youthful instrument. The finale is a musical dynamo, which admits a few lyrical passages but never slackens its charged rhythms or propulsive energy.

 IGOR STRAVINSKY: Suite from The Firebird (1945 Version) The Firebird was composed in 1909-1910 and premiered on June 25, 1910, in Paris, conducted by Gabriel Pierné. The score of the 1945 suite calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 28 minutes. The 1945 Version of The Firebird was last performed on October 1 and 3, 1981, with Gaetano Delogu on the podium.

Fireworks. There could not have been a more appropriate title for the work that launched the meteoric career of Igor Stravinsky. He wrote that glittering orchestral miniature in 1908, while still under the tutelage of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and it shows all the dazzling instrumental technique that the student had acquired from his teacher. Though the reception of Fireworks was cool when it was first performed at the Siloti Concerts in St. Petersburg on PROGRAM 6 SOUNDINGS 2017/18 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES February 6, 1909, there was one member of the audience who listened with heightened interest.

Serge Diaghilev was forming his Ballet Russe company at just that time, and he recognized in Stravinsky a talent to be watched. He approached the 27-year-old composer and requested orchestral transcriptions of short pieces by Chopin and Grieg that would be used in the first Parisian season of the Ballet Russe. Stravinsky did his work well and on time.

During that same winter, plans were beginning to stir in the creative wing of the Ballet Russe for a Russian folk ballet — something filled with legend and magic and fantasy. The composer Nikolai Tcherepnin was associated with the Ballet Russe at that time, and it was assumed that he would compose the music for a plot derived from several traditional Russian sources. However, Tcherepnin was given to inexplicable changes of mood and he was losing interest in ballet at the time, so he withdrew from the project. Diaghilev inquired whether Stravinsky had any interest in taking it over, and he agreed. The triumphant premiere of The Firebird in Paris on June 25, 1910, rocketed Stravinsky to international fame.

The story deals with the glittering Firebird and the evil ogre Kashchei, who captures maidens and turns men to stone if they enter his domain. Kashchei is immortal as long as his soul, which is preserved in the form of an egg in a casket, remains intact. The plot shows how Prince Ivan wanders into Kashchei’s garden in pursuit of the Firebird; he captures it and exacts a feather before letting it go. Ivan meets a group of Kashchei’s captive maidens and falls in love with one of them. The princesses return to Kashchei’s palace. Ivan breaks open the gates to follow them, but he is captured by the ogre’s guardian monsters. He waves the magic feather and the Firebird reappears to smash Kashchei’s vital egg; the ogre expires. All the captives are freed and Ivan and his Tsarevna are wed.

Stravinsky drew three orchestral suites from The Firebird. The third, from 1945, uses the reduced orchestration of the more familiar 1919 suite (the 1911 suite requires the very large orchestra of the original ballet), but incorporates several additional scenes from the full score. The first two, Introduction and The Dance of the Firebird, accompany the appearance of the magical creature. There follow three Pantomimes, the Pas de Deux of the Firebird and Ivan Tsarevich, and the Scherzo: Dance of the Princesses. Next comes the Round Dance of the Princesses, which uses the rhythm and style of an ancient Russian dance called the Khorovod.

The Infernal Dance of King Kashchei, the most modern portion of the score, depicts the madness engendered by the appearance of the Firebird at Kashchei’s court after the revelation to Ivan of the evil ogre’s vulnerability. The haunting Berceuse is heard when the thirteenth princess, the one of whom Ivan is enamored, succumbs to a sleep-charm which saves her from the terrible King while Ivan destroys Kashchei’s malevolent power. The Finale, initiated by the solo horn, confirms the life-force that had been threatened by Kashchei. ©2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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