Program - Copland’s Rodeo Conducted by Andrew Litton

Colorado Symphony 2017/18 Season Presenting Sponsor:

CLASSICS • 2017/18 COPLAND’S RODEO CONDUCTED BY ANDREW LITTON COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor ALBAN GERHARDT, cello Friday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Ed and Laurie Bock Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Bob and Cynthia Benson

Friday, April 6, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 7, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, April 8, 2018, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall

COPLAND

Rodeo: Ballet in One Act

BARBER Cello Concerto, Op. 22 Allegro moderato Andante sostenuto Molto allegro ed appassionato — INTERMISSION —

BRAHMS Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op.73 Allegro non troppo Adagio non troppo Allegretto grazioso (Quasi andantino) Allegro con spirito

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

JEFF WHEELER

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.

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES ALBAN GERHARDT, cello “One of the finest cellists around — expressive, unshowy, and infinitely classy“ (The Guardian). Alban Gerhardt has, for 25 years, made a unique impact on audiences worldwide with his intense musicality, compelling stage presence, and insatiable artistic curiosity. His gift for shedding fresh light on familiar scores, along with his appetite for investigating new repertoire from centuries past and present, truly set him apart from his peers. Highlights of the 2017/18 season include concerts with NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester and the premiere of a new concerto by Brett Dean for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Berliner Philharmoniker.

He will also give recitals at Berlin’s Konzerthaus and London’s Wigmore Hall, and perform at the Dresden, Rheingau, and Bratislava music festivals. Gerhardt is a keen chamber musician and performs on a quintet tour in Luxembourg, Zurich and Amsterdam. A highly acclaimed recording artist, he has won three ECHO Klassik Awards. Gerhardt is passionate about sharing his discoveries with audiences far beyond the traditional concert hall: outreach projects undertaken in Europe and the US have involved performances and workshops, not only in schools and hospitals, but also pioneering sessions in public spaces and young offender institutions. His collaboration with Deutsche Bahn, involving live performances on the main commuter routes in Germany, vividly demonstrates his commitment to challenging traditional expectations of classical music. In early 2017, Gerhardt founded #Musicians4UnitedEurope (www.musicians4unitedeurope.com), a group of international musicians working together to voice their support for a united and democratic Europe. Alban Gerhardt plays a Matteo Gofriller cello dating from 1710.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES AARON COPLAND (1900-1990): Rodeo, Ballet in One Act Aaron Copland was born November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York and died December 2, 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York. Rodeo was composed during the summer of 1942 for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and premiered on October 16, 1942 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, conducted by Franz Allers. The score calls for three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano (doubling celesta) and strings. Duration is about 24 minutes. The complete ballet was last performed on November 28, 2014, with Andrew Litton conducting the orchestra. The Colorado Symphony also recorded the piece during that week, producing a highly acclaimed CD of Copland works on the BIS label, BIS2164.

The great success of Billy the Kid in the spring of 1938 prompted the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo to commission Copland four years later to write a second ballet on a cowboy theme; Agnes de Mille was engaged to devise the scenario and the choreography. Copland worked quickly on the score for Rodeo, composing it between May and September while teaching at Tanglewood.

His music reflects the plot’s folksiness and unaffected characters in its lean, uncluttered style, its quotations of traditional American melodies, and its ebullient spirit, and the ballet’s premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in October was rousing success — “We took an extraordinary number of curtain calls that night,” the composer recalled.

Rodeo is set on a cattle ranch in the American Southwest; the action takes place on a Saturday afternoon and evening. As the curtain rises (Buckaroo Holiday), the Cowgirl, the Head Wrangler and the Champion Roper are seen leaning against a fence in the corral waiting for the start of the weekly rodeo, when the local cowboys gather to show off their riding and roping skills. The tomboyish Cowgirl, dressed in breeches, tries to catch their eye by imitating the cowboys’ feats, but she is ignored when several well-turned-out girls from Kansas City visiting the Rancher’s Daughter sashay toward the corral. Copland’s music incorporates two western folksongs, Sis Joe and If He’d Be a Buckaroo by Trade. Dusk settles over the ranch to the strains of Corral Nocturne, a modest, expressive song suffused with the moonlit stillness of the prairie.

Though no folksongs are heard in this movement, its themes are imbued with the manner and mood of countless familiar vernacular melodies.

Scene II is set at that evening’s dance. De Mille envisioned this Ranch House Party as “Dance music inside. Night music outside,” with the honky-tonk piano of the opening sequence accompanying the festivities inside before the Cowgirl is noticed sitting pensively on the porch in the moonlight. The Roper and the Wrangler stroll out and try to cheer the Cowgirl up before heading back inside. Left alone, she disappears as the dance continues to the accompaniment of Saturday Night Waltz, which exudes an air of faded courtliness and manners-carefully-observed.

The rhythm of the dance sways gently between 3/4 and 6/8, as though the participants were not quite sure about the proper pattern of the steps. When the Cowgirl reappears, she is clad in a pretty dress with her hair done up in a bow, and both the Roper and the Wrangler immediately notice her transformation into a fetching young lady. Both invite her to dance and she chooses the Roper — though with a wistful glance at the Wrangler. For the infectious Hoe-Down that closes the ballet, Copland borrowed the traditional tunes Bonyparte and McLeod’s Reel to portray the foot-stomping, country fiddling and swaggering bravado of a rousing Western square dance.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981): Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 22 Samuel Barber was born March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania and died January 23, 1981 in New York City. The Cello Concerto was composed in 1945 and premiered on April 5, 1946 in Boston, conducted by Sergei Koussevitzky with Raya Garbousova as soloist. The score calls for two flutes, oboe, English horn, two clarinets (second doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, two horns, three trumpets, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes. Carter Brey was the soloist and Marin Alsop conducted the orchestra when the concerto was last performed on November 14-16, 1997.

Samuel Barber’s success as one of America’s greatest composers was both early and lasting. Born and raised in a small town on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he received a thorough appreciation of music as a boy from his mother, a talented pianist, and from his aunt, the noted Metropolitan Opera contralto Louise Homer. In 1924, at the tender age of fourteen, he entered the first class enrolled at the Curtis Institute, and received instruction in piano, voice and composition, winning the Bearns Prize in composition in 1928. Three years later, he composed the sparkling Overture to “The School for Scandal”, which was premiered by Alexander Smallens and the Philadelphia Orchestra in August 1933, and secured for the young composer an immediate reputation. In 1935, Barber won both the Pulitzer Scholarship and the American Prix de Rome, enabling him to study in Europe. While abroad, he conducted, gave recitals (he had an excellent and well-trained baritone voice) and met some of the most important musicians of the day, including Toscanini, who became a champion of his works. The great Italian conductor premiered both the Essay for Orchestra and the famous Adagio for Strings during the 1938 season of the NBC Symphony, Barber thus becoming the first American composer whose works Toscanini conducted with that ensemble.

When Barber was inducted into the Army Air Force in 1943, the military recognized his abilities by assigning as part of his duties while in the service the composition of two works.

One, the Second Symphony, was heard in Boston in 1944. The other, the Commando March of 1943, made an instant success and continues to be among the great American compositions for concert band. Another work of those years, one not written on commission, was the Capricorn Concerto, named after the house in Mt. Kisco, New York that Barber had purchased in 1943 with his friend, the composer Gian-Carlo Menotti. When Barber was mustered out of the military in September 1945, he returned to “Capricorn,” and full-time duties as a composer. The first work that he undertook as a reinstated civilian was the Cello Concerto, commissioned for the virtuoso Raya Garbousova by John Nicholas Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, an amateur cellist. Upon completing the score on November 22, 1945, Barber dedicated it “To John and Anne Brown.” The work was premiered by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 5, 1946 with Miss Garbousova as soloist.

In the Cello Concerto, Barber balanced his characteristic lyricism with a fiendishly difficult solo part filled with wide leaps, double stops, harmonics and other technical challenges. To point up the formidable obstacles to the soloist in this piece, Nathan Broder recounted in his study of the composer an incident that occurred when Barber was in London in 1950 to record the Concerto with cellist Zara Nelsova. “At one of the sessions, the soloist ended with great brilliance,” wrote Broder, “whereupon a cellist from the orchestra leaped up from his chair, ran down to the front of the stage, wildly shouting something about giving up the cello after hearing playing such as Nelsova’s, and smashed his instrument against the side of the platform, in full view of the assembled players, recording engineers, the startled composer-conductor, and the pale and trembling soloist. Strings and bits of wood flew in all directions. There was a SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES general uproar, and then Barber and Nelsova realized that the whole thing was a joke staged by the cello section as a tribute to the difficulty of the Concerto. Each man had contributed towards buying a cello in a pawn shop for two pounds in order to smash it.”

The opening movement of Barber’s Cello Concerto follows the traditional sonata/concerto form. A brief orchestral introduction presents the thematic materials: a short, angular motive, presented in the first two measures, that returns to punctuate important points of the structure; a broad, lyrical melody, initiated by flute and English horn, enlivened by snapping rhythms; a winding phrase of small intervals heard in the bassoons; and an arching strain given by the violins. The soloist takes up the winding phrase, and builds from it a short cadenza that leads without pause into the full exposition of the themes previewed in the introduction. The orchestra begins the development section, which continues with some pyrotechnical displays from the soloist that lead eventually to another cadenza that serves as the bridge to the recapitulation.

The Andante is a richly textured song of deep expression in three-part form that is based on a chordal theme in a siciliano-like rhythm. The finale is constructed in a sort of telescoped sonata form. After a forceful, jagged introductory gesture, the soloist presents the principal theme, dominated by the interval of a half-step in syncopated rhythm. The slow, contrasting melody, first played by the soloist above an ostinato bass, begins quietly but builds to a full orchestral climax. When the two themes return, they are considerably elaborated, as though the functions of development and recapitulation had been combined. (Brahms used a similar technique in the finale of his Third Symphony.) The Concerto comes to a brilliant end with a coda of considerable verve and virtuosity.

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JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897): Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73 Johannes Brahms was born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg and died April 3, 1897 in Vienna. The Second Symphony was composed in 1877 and premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic on December 30, 1877, conducted by Hans Richter. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes. The last performance took place on April 25-27, 2014, with Michael Stern on the podium.

“The new symphony is merely a ‘sinfonia,’ and I shall not need to play it for you beforehand.

You have only to sit down at the piano, put your little feet on the two pedals in turn, and strike the chord of F minor several times in succession, first in the treble, then in the bass, fortissimo and pianissimo, and you will gradually gain a vivid impression of my latest work.”

With the premiere of his pastoral Second Symphony only a month away, Brahms served up this red herring in early November to his friend, correspondent and supporter Elisabeth von Herzogenberg to playfully mislead her about the character of this lovely work. He tossed another false clue to Clara Schumann when he told her that the halcyon first movement was “quite elegiac in character,” and, again to Elisabeth, that so sad a piece would require the orchestra to play with crepe bands on their sleeves and the printed score would have to bordered in black. “The new Symphony is so melancholy that you will not be able to bear it,” he told his publisher, Fritz Simrock. Such statements are characteristic of Brahms both in their eccentric, sometimes cranky humor, and their reticence to divulge any information about a work PROGRAM 6

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES that had not been publicly displayed. He was always reluctant to discuss or even mention new pieces to anyone, even to such trusted friends as Clara Schumann. (Clara begged him for years to complete his First Symphony without knowing that the project was almost constantly on his mind and on his desk during the time.) He usually destroyed all his drafts and tentative sketches for a finished composition so that his preliminary thoughts and working procedures remain a mystery. He refused to be disturbed while composing. Once, a youthful admirer, unable to gain an audience with Brahms, set up a ladder to climb to the composer’s second-story window to deliver his encomium. Brahms, deep in work and detesting any distraction, angrily threw the ladder from the sill, causing the young man no little harm. It is because of such secretiveness that little is known about the actual composition of the Second Symphony.

In the summer of 1877, Brahms repaired to the village of Pörtschach in the Carinthian hills of southern Austria. He wrote to a Viennese friend, “Pörtschach is an exquisite spot, and I have found a lovely and apparently pleasant abode in the Castle! You may tell everybody this; it will impress them.... The place is replete with Austrian coziness and kindheartedness.” The lovely country surroundings inspired Brahms’ creativity to such a degree that he wrote to the critic Eduard Hanslick, “So many melodies fly about, one must be careful not to tread on them.”

Brahms plucked from the gentle Pörtschach breezes a surfeit of beautiful music for his Second Symphony, which was apparently written quickly during that summer — a great contrast to the fifteen-year gestation of the preceding symphony. He brought the manuscript with him when he returned to Vienna at the end of the summer, and played it at an informal gathering in a fourhand piano version with Ignaz Brüll in September. Brahms kept the true nature of the piece from the friends who were not at that gathering, and he was delighted by their surprised response at the public premiere late in December.

Brahms’ misleading statements depicting the Second Symphony as a tragic work were plausible in view of the stony grandeur of its predecessor. The premiere audience had every expectation of hearing a grand, portentous statement similar in tone to the First Symphony, but was treated instead to the composer’s most gentle and sun-dappled music. After their initial befuddlement had passed, they warmed to the occasion as the performance progressed, and such was their enthusiasm at the end that they demanded an encore of the third movement.

Brahms himself allowed, “[The work] sounded so merry and tender, as though it were especially written for a newly wedded couple.” Early listeners heard in it “a glimpse of Nature, a spring day amid soft mosses, springing woods, birds’ notes, and the bloom of flowers.” Richard Specht, the composer’s biographer, found it “suffused with the sunshine and warm winds playing on the waters.” Comparisons with Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony were inevitable, though Brahms never revealed any specific programmatic intention rippling among these notes. Despite its exploration of a new, gentler world of emotions, the work displays again the peerless technical mastery that marked the First Symphony. The conductor Felix Weingartner thought it the best of the four symphonies: “The stream of invention has never flowed so fresh and spontaneous in other works by Brahms, and nowhere else has he colored his orchestration so successfully.”

To which critic Olin Downes added, “In his own way, and sometimes with long sentences, he formulates his thought, and the music has the rich chromaticism, depth of shadow and significance of detail that characterize a Rembrandt portrait.”

Its effortless technique, rich orchestral writing and surety of emotional effect make this composition a splendid sequel to Brahms’ First Symphony. The earlier work, probably the best first symphony anyone ever composed, is filled with a sense of struggle and hard-won victory, an accurate mirror of Brahms’ monumental efforts over many years to shape a worthy successor SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES to Beethoven’s symphonies. (“You have no idea how it feels to hear behind you the tramp of a giant like Beethoven,” Brahms lamented.) The Second Symphony, while at least the equal of the First in technical mastery, differs markedly in its mood, which, in Eduard Hanslick’s words, is “cheerful and likable ... [and] may be described in short as peaceful, tender, but not effeminate.”

So taken aback by the work’s pastoral quality was the Leipzig critic Dörffel that he wrote of the performance conducted by the composer in his city only two weeks after the Viennese premiere, “We require from him music that is something more than simply pretty ... when he comes before us as a symphonist.” Though this Symphony is more “simply pretty” than any other by Brahms, there is also a rich emotional vein and inevitable structural logic that motivates the music. It is understandable that, of the four he wrote in the genre, this one has probably had, over its history, the most performances.

The Symphony opens with a three-note motive, presented softly by the low strings, which is the germ seed from which much of the thematic material of the movement grows. The horns sing the principal theme, which includes, in its third measure, the three-note motive. The sweet second theme is given in duet by the cellos and violas. The development begins with the horn’s main theme, but is mostly concerned with permutations of the three-note motive around which some stormy emotional sentences accumulate. The placid mood of the opening returns with the recapitulation, and remains largely undisturbed until the end of the movement.

The second movement plumbs the deepest emotions in the Symphony. Many of its early listeners found it difficult to understand because they failed to perceive that, in constructing the four broad paragraphs that comprise the Second Symphony, Brahms deemed it necessary to balance the radiant first movement with music of thoughtfulness and introspection in the second. This movement actually covers a wide range of sentiments, shifting, as it does, between light and shade — major and minor. Its form is sonata-allegro, whose second theme is a gently syncopated strain intoned by the woodwinds above the cellos’ pizzicato notes.

The following Allegretto is a delightful musical sleight-of-hand. The oboe presents a naive, folk-like tune in moderate triple meter as the movement’s principal theme. The strings take over the melody in the first Trio, but play it in an energetic duple-meter transformation. The return of the sedate original theme is again interrupted by another quick-tempo variation, this one a further development of motives from Trio I. A final traversal of the main theme closes this delectable movement.

The finale bubbles with the rhythmic energy and high spirits of a Haydn symphony. The main theme starts with a unison gesture in the strings, but soon becomes harmonically active and spreads through the orchestra. The second theme is a broad, hymnal melody initiated by the strings. The development section, like that of many of Haydn’s finales, begins with a statement of the main theme in the tonic before branching into discussion of the movement’s motives. The recapitulation recalls the earlier themes, and leads with an inexorable drive through the triumphant coda (based on the hymnal melody) to the brazen glow of the final trombone chord. ©2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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