MASTERWORKS • 2016/2017 Colorado Symphony 2016/17 Season Presenting Sponsor:
MOZART PERFORMED BY JASON SHAFER COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor JASON SHAFER, clarinet Friday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Argonaut Wine & Liquor Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to GBSM, Inc. Sunday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Lt. Col. and Mrs. Robert W. Riegel
Friday, April 7, 2017, at 7:30pm Saturday, April 8, 2017, at 7:30pm Sunday, April 9, 2017, at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
DUKAS
La Péri, Poème dansé
OZART M Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622 Allegro Adagio Rondo: Allegro – INTERMISSION – RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherazade, Op. 35 The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship: Largo e maestoso – Allegro non troppo The Tale of the Kalender Prince: Lento – Allegro molto The Young Prince and the Young Princess: Andantino quasi allegretto The Sea; The Ship Goes to Pieces on a Rock: Allegro molto
SOUNDINGS 2016/2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1
MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES BRETT MITCHELL, conductor
LAND+LOCK
Hailed for delivering compelling performances of innovative, eclectic programs, Brett Mitchell has been named the fourth Music Director of the Colorado Symphony, beginning in the 2017/18 Season. Prior to this fouryear appointment, he will serve as Music Director Designate during the 2016/17 Season. Mr. Mitchell is also currently the Associate Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra. He joined the orchestra as Assistant Conductor in 2013, and was promoted to his current position in 2015, becoming the orchestra’s first Associate Conductor in over three decades and only the fifth in its 98-year history. In this role, he leads the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour. Mr. Mitchell also serves as the Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, which he recently led on a fourcity tour of China. In addition to these titled positions, Brett 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, and Washington (National Symphony Orchestra), among others. He has collaborated with such soloists as Rudolf Buchbinder, James Ehnes, Leila Josefowicz, and Alisa Weilerstein, and has served as cover conductor and musical assistant at The Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Born in Seattle in 1979, Brett Mitchell holds degrees in conducting from the University of Texas at Austin and composition from Western Washington University, which selected him 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.
JASON SHAFER, clarinet
LAND+LOCK
Jason Shafer joined the Colorado Symphony as Principal Clarinet at the start of the 2013-2014 Season. Previously, he played for four years as a fellow with the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL. He received his Bachelor of Music with Highest Distinction from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, where he studied with Kenneth Grant. His other major musical influences include Mark Nuccio and Burt Hara. Jason has appeared in guest principal roles with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, where he has been a regular member since 2012. Always looking for opportunities to travel, he has performed abroad in Austria, Estonia, and Russia. Jason has collaborated in chamber music performances with Yefim Bronfman, Jeremy Denk, and Laura Aikin; as a concerto soloist, he has performed with the Colorado Symphony, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the Eastman Philharmonia, among others. He is passionate about teaching and is on the faculty of the University of Northern Colorado; he also taught at the Metropolitan State University of Denver from 2015-2016. In addition, Jason studied piano during his time at Eastman, and loves to accompany other musicians.
PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2016/2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES PAUL DUKAS (1865-1935): La Péri, Poème Dansé (1912) Paul Dukas was born on October 1, 1865, in Paris and died there on May 18, 1935. He composed La Péri in 1912 and conducted its premiere on April 22, 1912, in Paris. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 20 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra took place on December 9 and 10, 1968, with Vladimir Golschmann conducting. Paul Dukas spent his entire life in Paris as a greatly respected teacher and composer. He showed his musical aptitude early, teaching himself to play piano, and entered the Conservatoire in 1882, where he proved to be an excellent student, winning the second Prix de Rome in 1888. Though he had to abandon his formal training for a time to serve in the army, he turned that period to good use by studying many of the classical works of music, the basis upon which he later built his own compositions. (He later edited several volumes of works by Rameau, Beethoven, Couperin, and Scarlatti.) After his stint in the military, he completed the overture Polyeucte, his first work to be performed publicly. The Symphony in C major followed in 1896, and he gained international recognition a year later with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Dukas held important positions throughout his life as an instructor at the Conservatoire and as a critic, and was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1906. Stern self-criticism of his compositions led him to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts before his death, so that his small musical legacy comprises only three overtures, a symphony, an opera (Ariane et Barbe-Bleu), a ballet (La Péri), three piano works, a short Villanelle for horn, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Dukas’ La Péri was one of four ballets commissioned and premiered by Natacha Trouhanova at her gala performance in Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet on April 22, 1912. (D’Indy’s Istar, Florent Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé and Ravel’s Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs, set to the orchestrated version of his Valses nobles et sentimentales, rounded out the glittering program.) The story of La Péri concerns an aged Persian nobleman, Iskender, who wanders the world seeking the Flower of Immortality, which he finds in the hand of a beautiful sleeping “Péri” (an imaginary fairy-like being in Persian mythology represented as a descendent of the fallen angels who are excluded from Paradise until their penance is accomplished). He plucks the Flower from her grasp, she awakens, and he is filled with longing for her. She dances the dance of the Péris for him, and draws nearer until their faces touch. He surrenders the Flower to her, she disappears, and Iskender is surrounded by the darkness of mortality. This visionary story drew from Dukas a twenty-minute score of luxuriant opulence, which Dukas preceded with a thematically unrelated Fanfare for brass that was added just before Trouhanova’s premiere performance. As a preface to the score, Dukas provided a poetic telling of the story that captures its visionary exoticism: It happened that at the end of his youthful days, since the Seers observed that his star was growing pale, Iskender went about Iran seeking the flower of immortality. The sun sojourned thrice in its dozen dwellings without Iskender finding the flower. At last he arrived at the end of the earth, where sea and clouds are one. There, on the steps that lead to the hall of Ormuzd, a Péri was reclining, asleep in her jeweled robe. A star sparkled above her head; her lute rested on her breast; in her hand shone the flower.
SOUNDINGS 2016/2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 3
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES It was a lotus like unto an emerald, radiant like the sea in the morning sun. Iskender noiselessly leaned over the sleeper and, without awakening her, snatched the flower, which suddenly became between his fingers like the noonday sun over the forests of Ghilan. The Péri, opening her eyes, clapped the palms of her hands together and uttered a loud cry, for she could not now ascend towards the light of Ormuzd. Iskender, regarding her, wondered at her face, which surpassed in beauty even the face of Gurda-ferrid. In his heart he coveted her. The Péri knew the thoughts of the King, for in Iskender’s right hand the lotus grew purple and became as the face of longing. Thus the Servant of the Pure knew that this flower of life was not for him. To recover it, she darted forward like a bee, while the invincible lord bore away from her the lotus, torn between his thirst for immortality and the delight he beheld. But the Péri danced the dance of the Péris, always approaching him until her face touched his face; and at the end he gave back the flower without regret. Then the lotus was like unto snow and gold, as the summit of Elbourz at sunset. The form of the Péri seemed to melt in the light coming from a chalice, and soon nothing more was to be seen than a hand raising the flower of flame, which faded in the realm above. Iskender saw her disappear. Knowing from this that his end drew near, he felt the darkness surround him.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791): Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622 (1791) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg and died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna. He composed his Clarinet Concerto in October 1791, just two months before he died. Though there is no record of its premiere, the work was probably played soon after its completion by Anton Stadler, for whom it was written. The score calls for strings plus pairs of flutes, bassoons, and horns. Duration is about 30 minutes. Bil Jackson was the soloist and Jeffrey Kahane conducted when the concerto was last performed on March 18, 2006. Mozart, the man, continues to puzzle and to fascinate. Peter Shaffer’s brilliant play and movie, Amadeus, portrayed the composer as an insensitive, foul-mouthed, puerile lout roaring through Vienna raising envy, tempers, and women’s skirts while dispensing masterpieces like a gum-ball machine. While each of these strains did indeed run through Mozart’s personality, they do not account entirely for his character, as Shaffer would seem to have us believe. Mozart’s relationship with the man for whom he wrote the Clarinet Concerto is only one example refuting the playwright’s view. Mozart harbored a special fondness for the graceful agility, liquid tone, and ensemble amiability of the clarinet from the time that he first heard the instrument as a young boy during his tours, and he later wrote for it whenever it was available. During his years in Vienna, he was especially impressed by the technical accomplishment and expressive playing of the clarinetist in the imperial court orchestra, Anton Stadler. Stadler was a Freemason, and, when Mozart
PROGRAM 4 SOUNDINGS 2016/2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES joined the fraternity, the two musicians became close friends. Those last years of Mozart’s life were ones of stifling poverty, ill health, and family problems that often forced him to go begging for loans from others, especially another fellow Mason, Michael Puchberg, who earned many laudatory footnotes in the closing pages of the composer’s biography for his generosity. It says much about Mozart’s kindness and sensitivity that he, in turn, loaned Stadler money when he could, and even once gave him two gold watches to pawn when there was no cash at hand. The final accounting of Mozart’s estate after his death showed that Stadler owed him some 500 florins — several thousand dollars at today’s rate. Stadler also came out of the friendship with far more than just some of Mozart’s silver. In addition to the flawless Clarinet Concerto, Mozart wrote for him the Clarinet Quintet (K. 581); the Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Viola (K. 498); the clarinet and basset horn parts in the vocal trios; and the clarinet solos in the opera La Clemenza di Tito. The Clarinet Concerto started as another piece apparently intended for Stadler — a work for basset horn (alto clarinet), strings, two flutes, and two horns that was sketched as early as 1789. When Stadler conferred with Mozart about the solos in Tito, it seems that he encouraged him to revise the sketch into a full concerto for his instrument. The Clarinet Concerto was the next-to-last work that Mozart completed, followed before his untimely death in December 1791 by only the Masonic Cantata (K. 623) and the unfinished Requiem. The Concerto’s beauty, grace, and deep emotion mark it as one of his supreme masterpieces. Only the greatest creator could have balanced music of such limpid, effortless formal perfection with the incipient Romantic sensibility pulsing beneath the work’s surface, a quality that the noted German musicologist Friedrich Blume wrote imparts “the impression of consummate equipoise and proportion.” The first movement is an exquisitely sculpted sonataconcerto form throughout which the dark, sensuous sound of the clarinet is carefully integrated into the orchestral texture. The simplicity of the theme and structure of the following Adagio belie the emotional depth of its music. The rondo-finale not only maintains the spirit of gaiety associated with that form, but also brings to it an entire world of feelings, by turns cheerful and somber, effusive and introverted. This wonderful Concerto embodies the words of the renowned pianist and Mozart specialist Lili Kraus, who stated in a New York Times interview of several years ago: “There is no feeling — human or cosmic — no depth, no height the human spirit can reach that is not contained in Mozart’s music.”
SOUNDINGS 2016/2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908): Scheherazade, Symphonic Suite, Op. 35 (1888) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born on March 18, 1844, in Tikhvin, near Novgorod and died June 21, 1908, in St. Petersburg. He composed Scheherazade in June 1888 and completed the orchestration in August; he conducted the orchestra of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Russian Musical Society in the premiere on December 15, 1888. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes. Carlos Miguel Prieto was on the podium when the piece was last performed on October 5-7, 2012. “In the middle of the winter [of 1888], engrossed as I was in my work on Prince Igor and other things, I conceived the idea of writing an orchestral composition on the subject of certain episodes from Scheherazade.” Thus did Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov give the curt explanation of the genesis of his most famous work in his autobiography, My Musical Life. His friend Alexander Borodin had died the year before, leaving his magnum opus, the opera Prince Igor, in a state of unfinished disarray. Rimsky-Korsakov had taken it upon himself to complete the piece, and may well have been inspired by its exotic setting among the Tartar tribes in 12th-century central Asia to undertake his own embodiment of musical Orientalism. The stories on which he based his work were taken from the Thousand and One Nights, a collection of millennium-old fantasy tales from Egypt, Persia, and India which had been gathered together, translated into French, and published in many installments by Antoine Galland beginning in 1704. They were in large part responsible for exciting a fierce passion for turquerie and chinoiserie among the fashionable classes of Europe later in the century, a movement that left its mark on music in the form of numerous tintinnabulous “Turkish marches” by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and a horde of lesser now-faded lights, and in Mozart’s rollicking opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. The taste for exoticism was never completely abandoned by musicians (witness Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers or Puccini’s Madama Butterfly or Turandot or even The Girl of the Golden West; Ravel prided himself on his collection of Oriental artifacts), and proved the perfect subject for Rimsky-Korsakov’s talent as an orchestral colorist. Preliminary sketches were made for the piece in St. Petersburg during the early months of 1888; the score was largely written in June at the composer’s country place on Lake Cheryemenyetskoye, near Luga; and the orchestration completed by early August. Scheherazade was a success at its premiere in St. Petersburg in December, and it has remained one of the most popular of all symphonic works. To refresh the listener’s memory of the ancient legends, Rimsky-Korsakov prefaced the score with these words: “The sultan Shakriar, convinced of the falsehood and inconstancy of all women, had sworn an oath to put to death each of his wives after the first night. However, the sultana Scheherazade saved her life by arousing his interest in the tales she told him during 1,001 nights. Driven by curiosity, the sultan postponed her execution from day to day, and at last abandoned his sanguinary design. Scheherazade told many miraculous stories to the sultan. For her tales she borrowed verses from the poets and words from folk-songs combining fairy-tales with adventures.” To each of the four movements of his “symphonic suite” Rimsky gave a title: The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship, The Story of the Kalandar Prince, The Young Prince and the Young Princess and Festival at Baghdad — The Sea — Shipwreck. At first glance, these titles seem definite enough to lead the listener to specific nightly chapters of Scheherazade’s soap opera. On closer examination, however, they prove too vague to be of much help. The Kalandar Prince, for PROGRAM 6 SOUNDINGS 2016/2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES instance, could be any one of three noblemen who dress as members of the Kalandars, a sect of wandering dervishes, and tell three different tales. “I meant these hints,” advised the composer, “to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled, and leave more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each listener. All I had desired was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders.” Of the musical construction of Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov noted, “A characteristic theme, the theme of Scheherazade herself, appears in all four movements. This theme is a florid melody in triplets, and it generally ends in a free cadenza. It is played, for the most part, by the solo violin.” There is another recurring theme, given in ponderous tones in the work’s opening measures, which seems at first to depict the sultan. However, the composer explained, “In vain do people seek in my suite leading motives linked always with the same poetic ideas and conceptions. On the contrary, in the majority of cases, all these seeming leitmotives are nothing but purely musical material, or the given motives for symphonic development. These given motives thread and spread over all the movements of the suite, alternating and intertwining each with the other. Appearing as they do each time under different moods, the self-same motives and themes correspond each time to different images, actions and pictures.” Well, then, if there is here no programmatic plot and if the movements tumble forth in some sort of free musical fantasy, how is the attentive listener to find his way through RimskyKorsakov’s story of Scheherazade? Perhaps the advice of Donald N. Ferguson about this veritable orgy of blazing orchestral color and atmospheric sensuality is profitably heard: “Ecstasies of imaginatively fulfilled desire: visions of celestial luxury engendered in the hashish-fevered mind of some squalid dreamer in the market place of Baghdad or Teheran — such are the tales of Scheherazade and the Arabian nights.” ©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
SOUNDINGS 2016/2017 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 7
STUDENT TICKETS! Students and teachers receive
$10
[ Limitations apply ]
with valid school I.D.! Learn more at: coloradosymphony.org 303.623.7876 box office mon-fri: 10 am - 6 pm :: sat: 12 pm - 6 pm