Colorado Symphony 2016/17 Season Presenting Sponsor:
MASTERWORKS • 2016-2017 ADAGIO FOR STRINGS & AUGUSTIN HADELICH COLORADO SYMPHONY COURTNEY LEWIS, CONDUCTOR AUGUSTIN HADELICH, VIOLIN Friday’s Concert Is Gratefully Dedicated To Dr. Stephen Dilts Saturday’s Concert Is Gratefully Dedicated To Dr. Christopher Ott and Mr. Jeremy Simons
Friday, November 4, 2016, at 7:30pm Saturday, November 5, 2016, at 7:30pm Boettcher Concert Hall
BARBER
Symphony No. 1, Op. 9
BRITTEN Violin Concerto, Op. 15 Moderato con moto Vivace Passacaglia: Andante lento (un poco meno mosso) — INTERMISSION —
BARBER
Adagio for Strings
ELGAR
In the South, Op. 50, “Alassio”
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1
MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES
CHRIS LEE
COURTNEY LEWIS, conductor With clear artistic vision, subtle musicality, and innovative programming, Courtney Lewis has established himself as one of his generation’s most talented conductors. The 2016/17 season marks his second as Music Director of the Jacksonville Symphony. Previous appointments have included Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, where he returns on subscription in the 2016/17 season; Associate Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, where he made his subscription debut in the 2011/12 season; and Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. From 2008 to 2014, Courtney Lewis was the music director of Boston’s acclaimed Discovery Ensemble, a chamber orchestra dedicated not only to giving concerts of contemporary and established repertoire at the highest level of musical and technical excellence, but also bringing live music into the least privileged parts of Boston with workshops in local schools. This season, he debuts with the Dallas Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and returns to the Colorado Symphony. Highlights of the 2015/16 included debuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Royal Flemish Philharmonic, and Colorado Symphony, as well as assisting Thomas Adès at the Salzburg Festival for the world première of Adès’s opera The Exterminating Angel. Lewis made his major American orchestral debut in November 2008 with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, and has since appeared with the Atlanta Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Houston Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, and Ulster Orchestra, among others.
AUGUSTIN HADELICH, violin Grammy Award-winner Augustin Hadelich has established himself as one of the great violinists of his generation. He has performed with every major orchestra in the U.S., many on numerous occasions, as well as an ever-growing number of major orchestras in the U.K., Europe, and the Far East. Highlights of Mr. Hadelich’s 2016/2017 season include return performances with the New York Philharmonic; Los Angeles Philharmonic; the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Colorado, Dallas, San Diego, and St. Louis; as well as debuts with the philharmonic orchestras of Dresden, Hamburg, Munich, and Rotterdam, the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra; and the WDR/ Cologne. Festival appearances this past summer included debuts at the BBC Proms and Sun Valley Summer Symphony, in addition to return engagements at Aspen, Bravo! Vail, and Tanglewood. Augustin Hadelich is the winner of a 2016 Grammy for his recording of Dutilleux’s Violin Concerto, “L’arbre des songes,” with the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot (Seattle Symphony MEDIA). Future releases include a disc of the violin concertos by Tchaikovsky and Lalo (“Symphonie espagnole”) with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO Live, Spring 2017), as well as an album of duo works for violin and piano in collaboration with Joyce Yang (AVIE Records, Fall 2016). Mr. Hadelich’s career took off when he won the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. He has been the recipient of numerous awards—most recently, the inaugural Warner Music Prize. He plays the 1723 “Ex-Kiesewetter” Stradivari violin, on loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the Stradivari Society of Chicago. PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
introducing...
BRETT MITCHELL, recently appointed Music Director Designate for the Colorado Symphony! Get to know the Colorado Symphony’s Music Director Designate Brett Mitchell when he appears on the podium for 5 concerts during the 2016/17 Season! See all the concerts and subscribe to this package today at the Box Office or buy now at coloradosymphony.org!
Photo: Roger Mastroianni
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981): Symphony No. 1 (In One Movement), Op. 9 Samuel Barber was born on March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and died on January 23, 1981, in New York City. His Symphony No. 1 was composed in 1936 and revised in 1942. It was premiered on December 13, 1936, in Rome, conducted by Bernardino Molinari. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 19 minutes. The symphony was last performed on October 31, November 1 and 2, 2003, with Marin Alsop conducting. Samuel Barber, who first revealed his considerable talents to the world with his sparkling Overture to “The School for Scandal” in 1932, had his standing as one of America’s brightest young composers reaffirmed when, three years later, he received both the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship and the American Prix de Rome. (He was awarded a second Pulitzer in 1936, the first composer to be so honored.) The purpose of these awards was to allow their recipients to work and study abroad (the Prix de Rome prize included free room and board in that city), and in August 1935, Barber sailed for Europe. That winter in Rome was a productive one for Barber: he wrote several songs and finished his First Symphony. Through two American friends—the pianists Alexander Kelberine and his wife, Jeanne Behrend—he met Bernardino Molinari, the conductor of Rome’s Augusteo Orchestra, and played for him the new Symphony at the piano. Molinari was taken with the piece, and he promised to perform it during the following season. The concert on December 13th was a success. Barber set out immediately for home, where Artur Rodzinski presented the work’s first American performance with the Cleveland Orchestra on January 22, 1937. On July 25th, Rodzinski again conducted the score, at the Salzburg Festival, making it the first American piece heard at that prestigious event. The composer wrote, “The form of my Symphony in One Movement is a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony. It is based on three themes of the initial Allegro non troppo, which retain throughout the work their fundamental character. The Allegro opens with the usual exposition of a main theme, a more lyrical second theme, and a closing theme. After a brief development of the three themes, instead of the customary recapitulation, the first theme, in diminution, forms the basis of the scherzo section (Vivace). The second theme (oboe over muted strings) then appears in augmentation, in an extended Andante tranquillo. An intense crescendo introduces the finale, which is a short passacaglia based on the first theme (introduced by the violoncelli and contrabassi), over which, together with figures from other themes, the closing theme is woven, thus serving as a recapitulation for the entire symphony.”
PROGRAM 4 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976): Violin Concerto, Op. 15 Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, and died on December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. His Violin Concerto was composed in 1938-1939 and premiered on March 28, 1940, in New York City, conducted by John Barbirolli with Antonio Brosa as soloist. The score calls for three flutes (second and third both doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 31 minutes. This is the first performance of the concerto by the orchestra. Benjamin Britten was 26 in 1939, and much unsettled about his life. Though he had already produced fourteen works important enough to be given opus numbers and a large additional amount of chamber music, choral works, songs and film and theater scores, he felt his career was stymied both by an innate conservatism among the British music public and by the increasingly assured threat of war in Europe. Also troubling was his proclaimed pacificism in a nation girding itself for battle. In January 1939, his friends—poet W.H. Auden and novelist Christopher Isherwood—left for America in search of creative stimulation and freedom from what Auden called the English artist’s feeling of being “essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots.” Britten followed them in May, producing such important scores as the Violin Concerto, Les Illuminations, Michelangelo Sonnets, Sinfonia da Requiem, and Ceremony of Carols during his three years in this country. The Concerto’s broad, darkly noble first movement begins with a succinct, open-interval motive in the timpani that recurs throughout as a motto. Above the bassoon’s muttering repetitions of the motto, the solo violin presents the main theme, a melody made from a series of short, smooth, mostly descending phrases. The orchestra takes over the main theme to provide a transition to the second subject, which is constructed from extensive elaborations of the rhythms and intervals inherent in the motto. A climax is built from this material in the development section before the recapitulation begins with roles reversed from the exposition: the upper strings play the main theme while the soloist hammers out aggressive permutations of the motto. The second subject is omitted in the recapitulation, but the violin reclaims the main theme in the coda, intoning it musingly above a sparse accompaniment of timpani, harp, and plucked strings. The second movement is a driving, virtuosic, slightly sinister scherzo for which the more relaxed central section provides formal and expressive contrast. A brilliant cadenza that recalls the timpani motto and the main theme from the first movement serves as a bridge to the finale. The somber closing movement is a passacaglia, a formal technique using a series of variations on a short, recurring melody. Britten fitted this passacaglia with nine variations on a stern scalar theme, and gave the music a serious emotional cast that seems to have reflected his sorrow over the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, which reached its bloody climax when he was completing the Concerto. “It is at times like these,” he said, “that work is so important—so that people can think of other things than blowing each other up! ... I try not to listen to the radio more than I can help.” Though Britten was only 27 when he composed his Violin Concerto, the work shows that he had already become a master of reflecting the human condition in music of technical mastery and emotional depth.
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES SAMUEL BARBER: Adagio for Strings Barber composed this work in 1936 as the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11; he arranged it for string orchestra the following year. The Pro Arte Quartet premiered the complete Quartet in Rome in December 1936. Arturo Toscanini conducted the strings of the NBC Symphony in the first performance of the orchestral version of the Adagio on his network broadcast of November 5, 1938. Duration is about 8 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra took place on November 16 and 17, 2007, with Pinchas Zukerman on the podium. At the time Artur Rodzinski played Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1 at the Salzburg Festival in 1937, the Festival’s chief conductor was Arturo Toscanini, who was to begin his tenure with the NBC Symphony later that year. Toscanini asked Rodzinski if he could suggest an American composer whose work he might program during the coming season, and Rodzinski advised that his Italian colleague investigate the music of the 27-year-old Barber. By October, Barber had completed and submitted to Toscanini the Essay No. 1 for Orchestra and an arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement from the Quartet (Op. 11, in B minor) that he had written in Rome in 1936—the Adagio for Strings. Toscanini accepted both pieces for performance, and broadcast them on November 5, 1938, with the NBC Symphony. The Adagio was an instant success. It was the only American work that Toscanini took on his tour of South America. Sibelius praised it. The audience at its 1945 Russian premiere in Kiev would not leave the hall until Stokowski encored it. It was the music broadcast from New York and London following the announcement of the death of President Roosevelt. The Adagio for Strings, with its plaintive melody, rich modalism, austere texture, and mood of reflective introspection, is among Samuel Barber’s greatest legacies—a 20th-century masterwork.
EDWARD ELGAR (1857-1934): In the South, Op. 50, “Alassio” Edward Elgar was born on June 2, 1857, in Broadheath, England, and died on February 23, 1934, in Worcester. In the South was composed in 1904 and premiered on March 16, 1904, in London, conducted by the composer. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 20 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the orchestra. As a restorative for body and spirit during the damp British winter, Elgar and his devoted wife, Alice, left London for the Mediterranean coastal town of Bordighera, just east of Monte Carlo, on November 21,1903. Elgar found Bordighera “lovely but too Cockney for me,” and on December 11, the couple travelled up the coast to Alassio to take rooms at the Villa San Giovanni, from which Elgar reported that he could see “streams, flowers, hills, with the distant snow mountains in one direction and the blue Mediterranean in the other.” On one sunny afternoon, the Elgars made an outing to an old church in the village of Moglio, the sound of whose name so appealed to Elgar that he repeated it over and over to PROGRAM 6 SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES himself until it had generated a musical motive in his mind. He added this fragment to the other sketches he was accumulating for an overture, called tentatively In the South, but it was not until an excursion to the Vale of Andora four days later that the finished shape and content of the new work became clear to him. The score of In the South, to which Elgar appended the subtitle Alassio, was finished in London on February 21, 1904. The work’s premiere on March 16 confirmed his reputation as the leader of English music; he was knighted four months later. Though Elgar called In the South an overture, its scale, orchestral expansiveness, evocative episodes, and even its form make it, in effect, a symphonic poem. Its allusive qualities are indicated by two poetic excerpts the composer placed at the head of the score. The first is from Tennyson: “What hours were thine and mine, In lands of palm and southern pine, In lands of palm, of orange blossom.” The other excerpt was culled from Byron’s Childe Harold, the literary inspiration for Berlioz’s Harold in Italy: “... a land Which was the mightiest in its old command And is the loveliest ... Wherein were cast ... the men of Rome! Thou art the garden of the world.” Elgar contained his vision within a modified sonata form, which was made to accommodate two atmospheric episodes in place of the usual development section. An entire procession of fine melodic ideas occupies the first theme area: a heroic leaping motive; a striding, downward melody marked with the composer’s most characteristic performance instruction, Nobilmente; and a gentle, limpid strain led by the clarinet. The formal second theme, assigned to the strings, is quiet and almost passionately lyrical. The center of In the South holds two of Elgar’s most evocative sound pictures. The first is a bold depiction inspired by his vision of ancient Roman armies; the second grows from a haunting, bucolic melody entrusted to the solo viola. A full recapitulation of the earlier themes rounds out In the South. ©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
SOUNDINGS 2016-2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 7
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