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2018/19
2018/19 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS:
BRAHMS SYMPHONY NO. 4 COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor PETER COOPER, oboe Friday, April 12, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 13, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 14, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. Boettcher Concert Hall
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
KEVIN PUTS Oboe Concerto No. 2, “Moonlight” Moonlight Folly Air (The Eye Begins to See) — INTERMISSION —
BRAHMS Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 Allegro non troppo Andante moderato Allegro giocoso Allegro energico e passionato
Friday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Northern Trust Saturday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Ed and Laurie Bock PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES BRETT MITCHELL, conductor
PHOTO: ROGER MASTROIANNI
Hailed for presenting engaging, in-depth explorations of thoughtfully curated programs, Brett Mitchell began his tenure as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony in July 2017. Prior to this appointment, he served as the orchestra’s Music Director Designate during the 2016/17 season. He leads the orchestra in ten classical subscription weeks per season as well as a wide variety special programs featuring such guest artists as Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and Itzhak Perlman. Mitchell is also in consistent demand as a guest conductor. Highlights of his 2018/19 season include subscription debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and return appearances with the orchestras of Cleveland, Dallas, and Indianapolis. Other upcoming and recent guest engagements include the Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, National, Oregon, and San Antonio symphonies, the Grant Park Festival Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Mitchell also regularly collaborates with the world’s leading soloists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Rudolf Buchbinder, Kirill Gerstein, James Ehnes, Augustin Hadelich, Leila Josefowicz, and Alisa Weilerstein. From 2013 to 2017, Mitchell served on the conducting staff of The Cleveland Orchestra. 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 these roles, he led the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour. From 2007 to 2011, Mitchell led over one hundred performances as Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony. 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, Mitchell completed a highly successful five-year appointment as Music Director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra. Born in Seattle in 1979, 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. Mitchell was also one of five recipients of the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellowship from 2007 to 2010. For more information, please visit www.brettmitchellconductor.com
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES PETER COOPER, oboe A strong believer in expanding the solo repertoire for the oboe, Cooper has commissioned and premiered five oboe concertos. The Colorado Symphony co-commissioned for Peter Cooper, “Moonlight”, an oboe concerto by Kevin Puts which Cooper will perform in 2019. In 2000 he premiered David Mullikin’s Oboe Concerto with the Colorado Symphony and recorded it in 2001 with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in London for Summit Records. This disc also includes Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto. In its review of this CD, BBC Music Magazine praised Cooper as, “a first rate soloist.” In addition to this recording, Cooper previously recorded Swiss composer Heinrich Schweizer’s Oboe Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He also premiered concertos by Bill Douglas and Gregory Walker with the Colorado Symphony, and Chen Gang’s Oboe Concerto with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. In 2010 the Shanghai Philharmonic invited him to Shanghai to perform Chen Gang’s Oboe Concerto as part of the Shanghai International Arts Festival. In 2000 Summit Records released Cooper’s Whispers of the Past, a collaboration recording with harpist Marcia LaBella that garnered critical acclaim. Classical London Magazine lauded the CD as “a well recorded disc with stylish and charming performances,” and the American Record Guide critic stated, “Mr. Cooper has my favorite type of oboe sound: sweet, not too harsh, no sharp edges, just a melting soft pastoral tone.” Excerpts from Whispers of the Past are frequently heard on National Public Radio. Invited to perform as guest principal oboist with many noted ensembles, Cooper has frequently played with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and has toured and recorded with them. Other noted ensembles with which he has performed as guest principal oboist include the Boston, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, and San Diego symphonies, and the Israel Chamber Orchestra. A prizewinner in the Tokyo International Oboe Competition, he performed as soloist with orchestras in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and England, as well as with the San Francisco Symphony. He has been a frequent soloist with the Colorado Symphony. In 1988 he played the first performance of the Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto in China with the Central Philharmonic in Beijing. He is a regular soloist and master class teacher at the International Double Reed Society conferences held annually throughout the United States and overseas. Cooper plays on oboes made by Marigaux, Paris. Marigaux has sponsored him in a series of master classes and recitals in the United States and overseas in France, Hong Kong, Japan and China. In 2019 he was invited to give two days of master classes at the Paris Conservatory. He has also been a consultant for Marigaux in the development of instruments for the American market. He has coached and toured with the Asian Youth Orchestra in the Far East and the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge, Colorado. He has performed as principal oboist of the Grand Teton Music Festival, Oregon Bach Festival, St. Barth Music Festival, El Paso Chamber Music Festival, and Strings in the Mountains. A 1981 graduate of Northwestern University, Peter Cooper studied with Ray Still and Gladys Elliot.
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PHOTO: DAVID WHITE
KEVIN PUTS, composer Winner of numerous prestigious awards, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his debut opera Silent Night, Kevin Puts’ works have been commissioned, performed, and recorded by leading ensembles and soloists throughout the world, including Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Jeffrey Kahane, Dame Evelyn Glennie, the New York Philharmonic, the Tonhalle Orchester (Zurich), the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Miro Quartet, and the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Cincinnati, Detroit, Atlanta, Colorado, Houston, Fort Worth, St. Louis, and Minnesota. His newest orchestral work, The City, was co-commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in honor of its 100th anniversary and by Carnegie Hall in honor of its 125th anniversary. His new vocal work Letters From Georgia, written for Soprano Renée Fleming and orchestra and based on the personal letters of Georgia O’Keeffe, had its world premiere in New York in Fall 2016, and his first chamber opera, an adaptation of Peter Ackroyd’s gothic novel The Trial of Elizabeth Cree commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, had its world premiere in September 2017, followed by performances with Chicago Opera Theater in February 2018. Kevin is currently a member of the composition department at the Peabody Institute and the Director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer’s Institute.
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COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958): Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for Strings Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on October 12, 1872 in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire and died on August 26, 1958 in London. His Tallis Fantasia was composed in June 1910, and premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra under his direction on September 6, 1910 at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival. The score calls for strings divided into a solo quartet, a small orchestra of nine players, and another larger ensemble of the remaining musicians. Duration is about 16 minutes. The last performance of the work was conducted by Thomas Dausgaard on May 12 & 13, 2012. The main influence and inspiration for Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia was the great Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585), remembered not only for his excellent music but also for his political acumen. While steadfastly maintaining his Catholicism in the fluid religious landscape of 16th-century England, he wrote sacred music with either Latin or vernacular texts according to the theological preference of the current monarch, and even became such a favorite of the Protestant Elizabeth that he (with William Byrd) was granted the exclusive privilege of printing music and ruled music paper for all of Britain. During his labors on the English Hymnal (“some of the best — as well as some of the worst — tunes in the world,” he said), Vaughan Williams discovered a set of nine hymns that Tallis had contributed to the English Metrical Psalter published in 1567 by Mathew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. Vaughan Williams was drawn to the third of these, an austere melody in the Phrygian mode to the text now known as “Why do the heathens rage and the people imagine a vain thing?,” but given in those pre-King James I times as “Why fumeth in sight: the Gentiles spite, In fury raging stout?” Vaughan Williams conceived his Tallis Fantasia for the resonant spaces of Gloucester Cathedral, where it was first heard as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival. Its scoring was carefully arranged to create the aural impression of great depth and reverberation in the Cathedral through the use of three antiphonal groups within the string orchestra — a solo quartet, a small ensemble and the entire orchestra. The Fantasia is in a free variation form that carries some suggestion of its 16th-century namesake. There is a quiet introduction in which the opening phrases of Tallis’ theme, given by pizzicato low strings, alternate with a phrase of Vaughan Williams’ invention, played in parallel harmonies. Tallis’ hymn is then heard in full in the orchestra’s rich middle register supported by pizzicato basses and tremolo violins, after which the high violins take it over for an intensified repetition. The central portion of the Fantasia comprises variants of fragments from the old melody and the parallel-harmony phrase, making sumptuous use of the acoustical possibilities offered by the three string groups. Tallis’ tune is heard again, complete, near the end, floating high in the solo violin over a shimmering orchestral background. A serene coda closes the work, one of the most thoughtful, ecstatic and sonorous in the entire orchestral repertory.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES KEVIN PUTS (b. 1972): Oboe Concerto No. 2, “Moonlight” Kevin Puts was born on January 3, 1972 in St. Louis. His Oboe Concerto No. 2 was composed in 2017 and premiered on June 23, 2018 by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop with Katherine Needleman as soloist. The score calls for string orchestra to accompany the oboe soloist. Duration is about 22 minutes. As this is the Colorado premiere of the work, it is the first performance by the orchestra. Kevin Puts, born on January 3, 1972 in St. Louis, received his bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music (1994), his master’s degree from Yale (1996), and his doctorate from Eastman (1999); his composition teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Samuel Adler and David Burge. He also participated in the 1996 Tanglewood Festival Fellowship Program, where he worked with Bernard Rands and William Bolcom. Puts taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1999 until the fall of 2006, when he joined the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore; he is also Director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer’s Institute. Kevin Puts has accumulated an impressive array of distinctions: the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his acclaimed opera Silent Night, based on the 2005 French film Joyeux Nöel and premiered by Minnesota Opera in November 2012; from 1996 to 1999, he served concurrently as Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony (which premiered three of his works) and Young Concert Artists, Inc. in New York; he has received commissions from the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Minnesota Orchestra, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, Eroica Trio, Ying Quartet and other noted ensembles and organizations; he was the first undergraduate to be awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he has received grants and fellowships from BMI, ASCAP, Tanglewood, the Hanson Institute for American Music and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Benjamin H. Danks Award for Excellence in Orchestral Composition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Barlow International Prize for Orchestral Music; and in 2007 he was Composer-in-Residence with both the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and the Fort Worth Symphony. His most recent opera is The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, whose libretto Mark Campbell based on the Gothic novel by Peter Ackroyd, which premiered by Philadelphia Opera in September 2017. Puts wrote of his Oboe Concerto No. 2, “Moonlight,” composed in 2017 on a co-commission from the Colorado Symphony and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, “Immediately following her performance of the beautiful Oboe Concerto by Christopher Rouse at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in August 2016, I approached Katherine Needleman [Principal Oboist of the Baltimore Symphony] about doing a project together, and, to my great delight, she was enthusiastic. “When it came time to compose the piece, I had just finished work on my third opera, Elizabeth Cree. It was October 2016. All eyes were focused on the coming election, and it seemed — in light of her considerable lead in the polls — that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. “The shock to my system that followed made it hard to approach the writing of abstract music from the perspective to which I had grown accustomed — that is, with confidence in the essential good in humanity. I had never avoided dark moments in my music, but I PROGRAM 6
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES usually emerge ‘in the light.’ After November 8, 2016, a profound disillusionment overcame me, especially since it had felt for the previous eight years that we were on a path to greater tolerance, understanding and reason. The election had revealed — not withstanding legitimate feelings of economic desperation — a festering ugliness and fear-based hate across much of the country. Without the aid of an opera libretto to guide me, where was the music to come from? “On a cross-country flight a few months later, I discovered the 2016 film Moonlight in the in-flight entertainment guide. I knew only that it had recently won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was partly through my emotional response to this beautiful film — which follows the life of a young, tormented gay man with an addict for a mother who is taken in and befriended by a drug dealer and his girlfriend — that I found my way back into writing music. The film is divided into three parts that chronicle three stages in the life of its main character — youth, adolescence and early adulthood. “My Oboe Concerto is also in three parts. I call the first movement (and the whole piece) Moonlight because … why not? Beethoven did it. Anyway, I heard this opening music every time I thought of the film, though it does not sound like the soundtrack of the film. “The second part, Folly, is a musical exploration of duplicity, deception and downright absurdity. It is by turns insidious and grotesque, obsessively hanging onto a two-note motive throughout. “Theodore Roethke wrote: ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see.’ I continue to strive for vision and understanding in the midst of our great national division.”
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897): Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg and died on April 3, 1897 in Vienna. The Symphony No. 4 was composed in 1884-1885 and premiered on October 25, 1885 by the Meiningen Orchestra under the composer’s direction. The score for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes. The symphony was last performed on October 2 & 3, 2015, with James Feddeck on the podium. In the popular image of Brahms, he appears as a patriarch: full grey beard, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes. He grew the beard in his late forties as, some say, a compensation for his late physical maturity — he was in his twenties before his voice changed and he needed to shave — and it seemed to be an external admission that Brahms had allowed himself to become an old man. The ideas did not seem to flow so freely as he approached the age of fifty, and he even put his publisher on notice to expect nothing more. Thankfully, the ideas did come, as they would for more than another decade, and he soon completed the superb Third Symphony. The philosophical introspection continued, however, and was reflected in many of his works. The Second Piano Concerto of 1881 is almost autumnal in its mellow ripeness; this Fourth Symphony is music of deep thoughtfulness that leads “into realms where joy and sorrow are hushed, and humanity bows before that which is eternal,” wrote the eminent German musical scholar August Kretzschmar. One of Brahms’ immediate interests during the composition of the Fourth Symphony SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES was Greek drama. He had been greatly moved by the tragedies of Sophocles in the German translations of his friend Gustav Wendt (1827-1912), director of education in Baden-Baden (Wendt dedicated the volume to Brahms upon its publication in 1884), and many commentators have seen the combination of the epic and the melancholy in this Symphony as a reflection of the works of that ancient playwright. Certainly the choice of E minor as the key of the work is an indication of its tragic nature. This is a rare tonality in the symphonic world, and with so few precedents such a work as Haydn’s in that key (No. 44), a doleful piece subtitled “Mourning Symphony,” was an important influence. That great melancholic among 19th-century composers, Tchaikovsky, chose E minor as the key for his Fifth Symphony. The Symphony’s first movement begins almost in mid-thought, as though the mood of sad melancholy pervading this opening theme had existed forever and Brahms had simply borrowed a portion of it to present musically. The movement is founded upon the tiny two-note motive (short–long) heard immediately at the beginning. To introduce the necessary contrasts into this sonata form other themes are presented, including a broadly lyrical one for horns and cellos and a fragmented fanfare. The movement grows with a wondrous, dark majesty to its closing pages. “A funeral procession moving across moonlit heights” is how the young Richard Strauss described the second movement. Though the tonality is nominally E major, the movement opens with a stark melody, pregnant with grief, in the ancient Phrygian mode. The mood brightens, but the introspective sorrow of the beginning is never far away. The dance-like quality of the third movement heightens the pathos of the surrounding movements, especially the granitic splendor of the finale. The closing movement is a passacaglia — a series of variations on a short, recurring melody. There are some thirty continuous variations here, though it is less important to follow them individually than to feel the massive strength given to the movement by this technique. The opening chorale-like statement, in which trombones are heard for the first time in the Symphony, recurs twice as a further supporting pillar in the unification of the movement. ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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