Colorado Symphony 2017/18 Season Presenting Sponsor:
SPECIAL • 2017/18 YO-YO MA WITH THE COLORADO SYMPHONY COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor YO-YO MA, cello Sunday, December 10, 2017, at 7:30 p.m. Boettcher Concert Hall
JOHN WILLIAMS
Sound the Bells!
COPLAND
Appalachian Spring, Ballet for Orchestra
— INTERMISSION — DVOŘÁK Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 Allegro Adagio ma non troppo Finale: Allegro moderato
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PROGRAM 1
SPECIAL BIOGRAPHIES BRETT MITCHELL, conductor Hailed for delivering compelling performances of innovative, eclectic programs, Brett Mitchell begins his tenure as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony with the 2017-18 season. Prior to this four-year appointment, he served as Music Director Designate during the 2016-17 season. Mr. Mitchell’s recently announced inaugural season as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony features such guest artists as Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a significant commitment to a broad range of American music, from Copland, Bernstein, and Gershwin to Kevin Puts, Mason Bates, and Missy Mazzoli. Other highlights include Mahler’s First Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé, and Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Mr. Mitchell will also lead Handel’s Messiah, Wagner/Maazel’s The Ring without Words, and a two-part celebration of the music of John Williams, featuring a program of Mr. Williams’s concert works and a live-to-film performance of his score for Jurassic Park. Mr. Mitchell is also currently in his fourth and final season as a member of The Cleveland Orchestra’s conducting staff. He joined the orchestra as Assistant Conductor in 2013, and was promoted to Associate Conductor in 2015, becoming the first person to hold that title in over three decades and only the fifth in the orchestra’s hundred-year history. In this role, he leads the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour. From 2013 to 2017, Mr. Mitchell also served as the Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, performing full subscription seasons at Severance Hall, and leading the orchestra on a four-city tour of China in 2015, marking the ensemble’s second international tour and its first to Asia. In addition to these titled positions, Mr. Mitchell is in consistent demand as a guest conductor. Recent and upcoming guest engagements include the orchestras of Columbus, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Oregon, Rochester, Saint Paul, San Antonio, and Washington (National Symphony Orchestra), among others. His Summer 2017 festival appearances include the Blossom Music Festival with The Cleveland Orchestra, the Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago, the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge, the Sarasota Music Festival, and the Texas Music Festival in Houston. He has collaborated with such soloists as Rudolf Buchbinder, James Ehnes, Augustin Hadelich, Leila Josefowicz, and Alisa Weilerstein. From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Mitchell led over one hundred performances as Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony, to which he frequently returns as a guest conductor. He also held Assistant Conductor posts with the Orchestre National de France, where he worked under Kurt Masur from 2006 to 2009, and the Castleton Festival, where he worked under Lorin Maazel in 2009 and 2010. In 2015, Mr. Mitchell completed a highly successful five-year appointment as Music Director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra, where an increased focus on locally relevant programming and community collaborations resulted in record attendance throughout his tenure. As an opera conductor, Mr. Mitchell has served as music director of nearly a dozen productions,
PROGRAM 2
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
SPECIAL BIOGRAPHIES principally at his former post as Music Director of the Moores Opera Center in Houston, where he led eight productions from 2010 to 2013. His repertoire spans the core works of Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute), Verdi (Rigoletto and Falstaff), and Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress) to contemporary works by Adamo (Little Women), Aldridge (Elmer Gantry), Catán (Il Postino and Salsipuedes), and Hagen (Amelia). As a ballet conductor, Mr. Mitchell most recently led a production of The Nutcracker with the Pennsylvania Ballet in collaboration with The Cleveland Orchestra during the 2016-17 season. Born in Seattle in 1979, Mr. Mitchell holds degrees in conducting from the University of Texas at Austin and composition from Western Washington University, which selected him in as its Young Alumnus of the Year in 2014. He also studied at the National Conducting Institute, and was selected by Kurt Masur as a recipient of the inaugural American Friends of the Mendelssohn Foundation Scholarship. Mr. Mitchell was also one of five recipients of the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellowship from 2007 to 2010. brettmitchellconductor.com
JASON BELL
YO-YO MA, cello The many-faceted career of cellist Yo-Yo Ma is testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences and to his personal desire for artistic growth and renewal. Mr. Ma maintains a balance between his engagements as soloist with orchestras worldwide and his recital and chamber music activities. His discography includes over 100 albums, including 18 Grammy award winners. Mr. Ma serves as the Artistic Director of Silkroad, an organization he founded to promote crosscultural performance and collaborations at the edge where education, business, and the arts come together to transform the world. More than 80 works have been commissioned specifically for the Silk Road Ensemble, which tours annually. Mr. Ma also serves as the Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Negaunee Music Institute. His work focuses on the transformative power music can have in individuals’ lives, and on increasing the number and variety of opportunities audiences have to experience music in their communities. Mr. Ma was born in Paris to Chinese parents who later moved the family to New York. He began to study cello at the age of four, attended the Juilliard School and in 1976 graduated from Harvard University. He has received numerous awards, among them the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the National Medal of Arts (2001), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010). In 2011; Mr. Ma was recognized as a Kennedy Center Honoree. Most recently, Mr. Ma has joined the Aspen Institute Board of Trustees. He has performed for eight American presidents, most recently at the invitation of President Obama on the occasion of the 56th Inaugural Ceremony. For additional information, see: www.yo-yoma. com, www.silkroadproject.org, and www.opus3artists.com.
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SPECIAL PROGRAM NOTES JOHN WILLIAMS (b. 1932): Sound the Bells John Williams was born on February 8, 1932 in Flushing, New York. Sound the Bells was composed in 1993 and premiered in Tokyo on June 10, 1993 by the Boston Pops, conducted by the composer. The score calls for three flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, three clarinets (3rd doubling bass), three bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), four horns, four trumpets, four trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 3 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. Sound the Bells was written for the royal wedding of Crown Prince Masako of Japan and Masako Owada in June 1993. Williams took his inspiration for the work from the great temple bells of Japan, and orchestral bells and percussion are featured prominently, but there are few traces of overt Orientalism in this joyous and festive showpiece.
PROGRAM 4
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
SPECIAL PROGRAM NOTES AARON COPLAND (1900-1990): Appalachian Spring, Complete Ballet for Full Orchestra Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York and died on December 2, 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York. Appalachian Spring was composed for chamber orchestra in 1943-1944 and arranged for full orchestra in 2016 by Aaron Sherber, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, Philip Rothman, and David Newman. The ballet was premiered on October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., conducted by Louis Horst; the full orchestral version was premiered in Dallas on May 11, 2016 by the Meadows Symphony Orchestra and Meadows Dance Ensemble at Southern Methodist University, conducted by Paul Phillips. The score calls for two flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 33 minutes. Last performance of the Complete Ballet for Orchestra was on May 20, 21, and 22, 2016 with Andrew Litton on the podium. Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, one of America’s greatest patrons of the arts, went to see a dance recital by Martha Graham in 1942. So taken with the genius of the dancer-choreographer was Mrs. Coolidge that she offered to have three ballets specially composed for her. Miss Graham chose as composers of the music Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, and an American whose work she had admired for over a decade — Aaron Copland. In 1931, Miss Graham had staged Copland’s Piano Variations as the ballet Dithyramb, and she was eager to have another dance piece from him, especially in view of his recent successes with Billy the Kid and Rodeo. She devised a scenario based on her memories of her grandmother’s farm in turn-of-the-20th-century Pennsylvania, and it proved to be a perfect match for the direct, quintessentially American style that Copland espoused in those years. Edwin Denby’s description of the ballet’s action from his review of the New York premiere in May 1945 was reprinted in the published score: “[The ballet concerns] a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the 19th century. The bride-to-be and the young farmerhusband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end, the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.” The premiere was set for October 1944 (in honor of Mrs. Coolidge’s 80th birthday) in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the limited space in the theater allowed Copland to use a chamber orchestra of only thirteen instruments (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, and nine strings). He began work on the score in June 1943 in Hollywood while writing the music for the movie North Star, and finished it a year later in Cambridge, where he was delivering the Horatio Appleton Lamb Lectures at Harvard. The plot, the music, and most of the choreography were completed before a title for the piece was selected. Miss Graham was taken at just that time with the name of a poem by Hart Crane — Appalachian Spring — and she adopted it for her new ballet, though the content of the poem has no relation with the stage work. Appalachian Spring was unveiled in Washington on October 30, 1944, and repeated in New York in May to great acclaim, garnering the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Music and New York Music Critics Circle Award as the outstanding theatrical work of the 1944-1945 season. Soon after its New York premiere, Copland revised the score as a suite of eight continuous sections for full orchestra by eliminating about eight minutes of music in which, he said, “the interest is primarily choreographic.” On October 4, 1945, Artur Rodzinski led the New York Philharmonic in the premiere of that version. SOUNDINGS
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PROGRAM 5
SPECIAL PROGRAM NOTES In the 1950s, Eugene Ormandy, Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, approached Copland about creating a version of the complete Appalachian Spring for full orchestra. Copland did orchestrate one large section but he never finished the project, so in 2014 the Aaron Copland Fund for Music commissioned a collaborative completion of the score from Aaron Sherber, Music Director of the Martha Graham Dance Company; Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, a Copland scholar and historian who works with the Fund; Philip Rothman, editorial adviser to the Fund; and composer and conductor David Newman. Of Copland’s completed section that the team used as the model for the work, Rothman said that it is “more dissonant and modernsounding than what is typically associated with Copland’s work from that period.” To which Sherber added, “Much of that section is indeed more disquieting, more edgy, than the music in the rest of the suite, which to me makes the ballet a richer piece of music. So I think for people who know the suite, hearing the full ballet will make them think of the piece differently, just as for people who know Graham’s dance, seeing it with full orchestra will make them think of it differently as well.” The complete Appalachian Spring for full orchestra was premiered on May 11, 2016 by Meadows Symphony Orchestra and Meadows Dance Ensemble at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, conducted by Paul Phillips.
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904): Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 Antonín Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia and died on May 1, 1904 in Prague. The Cello Concerto was composed in 1894-1895 and premiered on March 19, 1896 by the Philharmonic Society of London, conducted by the composer with Leo Stern as soloist. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes. Last performance by the orchestra was on November 21, 22, and 23, 2014 with soloist Silver Ainomäe and Andrew Litton on the podium. During the three years that Dvořák was teaching at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, he was subject to the same emotions as most other travelers away from home for a long time: invigoration and homesickness. America served to stir his creative energies, and during his stay from 1892 to 1895 he composed some of his greatest scores: the “New World” Symphony, the Op. 96 String Quartet (“American”), the E-flat major String Quintet, and the Cello Concerto. He was keenly aware of the new musical experiences to be discovered in the land far from his beloved Bohemian home when he wrote, “The musician must prick up his ears for music. When he walks he should listen to every whistling boy, every street singer or organ grinder. I myself am often so fascinated by these people that I can scarcely tear myself away.” But he missed his home and, while he was composing the Cello Concerto, looked eagerly forward to returning. He opened his heart in a letter to a friend in Prague: “Now I am finishing the finale of the Violoncello Concerto. If I could work as free from cares as at Vysoká [site of his country home], it would have been finished long ago. Oh, if only I were in Vysoká again!” The Concerto might just as well have been written in a Czech café as in an East 17th Street apartment. Elements of both Dvořák’s American experiences and his longing for home found their way
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C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
SPECIAL PROGRAM NOTES into the Cello Concerto, the last of his works composed in this country. The inspiration to begin what became one of the greatest concertos in the literature was a performance by the New York Philharmonic in March 1894 at which Victor Herbert (the Victor Herbert of operetta fame, who was then also teaching at the National Conservatory) played his own Second Cello Concerto. That work convinced Dvořák that the cello was a viable solo instrument, something about which he had been unsure despite the assurances of Hanuš Wihan, cello professor at the Prague Conservatory, who had long been urging his fellow faculty member to write a piece for the instrument. Dvořák asked Wihan for his comments on the score (which Dvořák largely ignored) when they read through the piece together privately in September 1895, soon after Dvořák had returned home, but Wihan, despite the composer’s pleading, was unable to give either the work’s world or Prague premiere because of already-scheduled conflicts. Those privileges fell instead to the young English virtuoso Leo Stern, who introduced the work on March 19, 1896 with the London Philharmonic and gave its first performance in Dvořák’s home city three weeks later with the Czech Philharmonic, both conducted by the composer. Wihan first played the Concerto publicly at The Hague in January 1899 and regularly thereafter, including a performance in Budapest under the composer’s direction on December 20, 1899. The Concerto’s opening movement is in sonata form, with both themes presented by the orchestra before the entry of the soloist. The first theme is heard immediately in the clarinets. “One of the most beautiful melodies ever composed for the horn” is how the esteemed English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey described the major-key second theme. Otakar Šourek, the composer’s biographer, described the second movement as a “hymn of deepest spirituality and amazing beauty.” It is in three-part form (A–B–A). A touching bit of autobiography is attached to the composition of this movement. While working on its middle section, Dvořák learned that his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová, who had aroused in him a secret passion early in his life, was seriously ill. He showed his concern by using one of her favorite pieces in the central portion of this Adagio — his own song, Let Me Wander Alone with My Dreams, Op. 82, No. 1. She died a month after he returned to Prague in April 1895, so he revised the finale to include another reference to the same song to produce the autumnal slow section just before the end of the work. The finale is a rondo of dance-like nature. Following the second reprise of the theme, the Andante section recalls both the first theme of the opening movement and Josefina’s melody from the second. A brief and rousing restatement of the rondo theme led by the brass closes this majestic Concerto. ©2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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PROGRAM 7
Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé FEB 2-4 FRI-SAT 7:30 SUN 1:00 n
Brett Mitchell, conductor Jessica Rivera, soprano Colorado Symphony Chorus, Duain Wolfe, director DEBUSSY DEBUSSY ESA-PEKKA SALONEN RAVEL
Syrinx Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun Five Images After Sappho Daphnis et Chloé (complete ballet)
COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG