Program – Dragon Conducts Elgar Enigma Variations

2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:

CLASSICS 2021/22 DRAGON CONDUCTS ELGAR ENIGMA VARIATIONS CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor STEVE METCALF, double bass Friday, December 3, 2021 at 7:30pm Saturday, December 4, 2021 at 7:30pm Sunday, December 5, 2021 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

ROSSINI

William Tell Overture

TUBIN Concerto for Double Bass, ETW 22 I. Allegro con moto II. Andante sostenuto — III. Allegro non troppo, poco marciale — INTERMISSION — ELGAR Enigma Variations, Op. 36 (Variations on an Original Theme) Enigma: Andante Var. I. “C.A.E.” L’istesso tempo II. “H.D.S. – P.” Allegro III. “R.B.T.” Allegretto IV. “W.M.B.” Allegro di molto V. “R.P.A.” Moderato VI. “Ysobel” Andantino VII. “Troyte” Presto VIII. “W.N.” Allegretto IX. “Nimrod” Moderato X. “Dorabella – Intermezzo” Allgretto XI. “G.R.S.” Allegro di molto XII. “B.G.N.” Andante XIII. “*** - Romanaza” Moderato XIV. “E.D.U.” - Finale CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 26 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 7 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT! PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM I

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor Australian conductor Christopher Dragon is the Music Director of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra and Resident Conductor of the Colorado Symphony. He joined the Colorado Symphony in the 2015/2016 Season as Associate Conductor – a position he held for four years. For three years prior, Dragon held the position of Assistant Conductor with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, which gave him the opportunity to work closely with Principal Conductor Asher Fisch.

Dragon works regularly in Australia and has guest conducted the Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. His 2015/16 debut performance at the Sydney Opera House with John Pyke and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was released on album by ABC Music and won an ARIA the following year. Dragon’s international guest conducting includes Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre, Omaha Symphony, San Diego Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

He has also conducted at numerous festivals including the Breckenridge and Bangalow Music Festivals, with both resulting in immediate re-invitations. At the beginning of 2016, Dragon conducted Wynton Marsalis’ Swing Symphony as part of the Perth International Art Festival alongside Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Dragon began his conducting studies in 2011 and was a member of the prestigious Symphony Services International Conductor Development Program in Australia under the guidance of course director Christopher Seaman. He has also studied with numerous distinguished conductors including Leonid Grin, Paavo and Neeme Jarvi at the Jarvi Summer Festival, Fabio Luisi at the Pacific Music Festival and conducting pedagogue Jorma Panula.

PROGRAM II

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES STEVE METCALF, conductor Steve Metcalf joined the Colorado Symphony in 2017 as principal double bass, having previously performed with the San Diego Symphony and the San Antonio Symphony. His music festival appearances include serving as principal bassist of the New York String Orchestra Seminar at Carnegie Hall, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Germany, Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. Most recently, he was invited to play with the renowned Mainly Mozart festival in San Diego, but the festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Metcalf was born in Raleigh, North Carolina where he began his musical studies with North Carolina Symphony bassist Craig Brown. He went on to attend Indiana University where he studied under the instruction of Professor Emeritus, Lawrence Hurst, and received a Bachelor of Music. After graduating, he moved west to Los Angeles to continue his graduate studies with Peter Lloyd at the Colburn Conservatory, where he received both a Professional Studies Certificate and Master of Music degree. Steve is currently on faculty at Regis University in Denver teaching double bass while maintaining a small private studio of students.

In addition to performing and teaching orchestral repertoire, Metcalf is a multi-instrumentalist and enjoys arranging music for the guitar, mandolin, and double bass. He has recorded and filmed his arrangements of Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Handel, Purcell, and Glière that can all be found online. He also loves to play chamber music and can be found performing outreach programs, solo, and chamber music throughout the Front Range.

Steve lives with his wife Skye and dog Kiwi in West Denver. Outside of his work with the orchestra, he likes to enjoy the merits of living in Colorado that include climbing, backcountry skiing, backpacking, and running ultramarathons in the mountains.

SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM III

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES GIOACHINO ROSSINI (1792-1868) Overture to William Tell Gioachino Rossini was born on February 29, 1792 in Pesaro, Italy, and died on November 13, 1868 in Paris. He composed William Tell, his last opera, in 1828 and 1829. The premiere was given at the Paris Opéra on August 3, 1829, conducted by François Habeneck. The Overture is scored for piccolo, flute, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 12 minutes. The Overture was last performed October 28, 2017 with Jason Seber conducting.

In 1824, Rossini moved to Paris to become director of the Théâtre Italien, and there became fully aware of the revolutionary artistic and political trends that were then gaining prominence.

In music, the Romantic movement was heralded by such works as Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, first seen in the French capital in 1824. In politics, republican sympathies were again festering, and stage works that portrayed the popular struggle against oppression and tyranny stirred considerable sentiment. Auber’s opera La muette de Portici of 1828, based on the 17th-century Neapolitan revolt against Spain, not only proved to be a popular success, but also caught the spirit of the times in both its music and its subject. Rossini was too closely attuned to public fashion to ignore the changing audience tastes these pieces portended, and he began to cast about for a libretto that would keep him abreast of the latest developments in the musical theater while solidifying his position in Paris.

Schiller’s play William Tell, based on the heroic Swiss struggle against tyranny in the 14th century, had recently created much interest when it was introduced to Paris in a French translation. Rossini decided that the drama would make a fine opera (or, at least, a saleable one), and he seems to have taken special care to incorporate the emerging Romantic style into this epic work, as evidenced by its subject matter, symphonic scope and attention to dramatic and poetic content. From the summer of 1828, when word of the project first surfaced, through the following spring, when several delays were reportedly caused by prima donna incapacity (actually, Rossini was withholding the work’s premiere to press negotiations with the government over a lucrative contract for future — never realized — operas) until the premiere in August 1829, William Tell kept Parisian society abuzz. Once the opera finally reached the stage, it was hailed by critics and musicians, but disappointed the public, who felt that its six-hour length was more entertainment than a single evening should decently hold. (The score was greatly truncated when it was staged in later years.) Whether the new style of the opera was one Rossini did not wish to pursue, or whether he was drained by two decades of constant work, or whether he just wanted to enjoy in leisure the fortune he had amassed, William Tell was his last opera.

During the remaining 39 years of his life, he did not compose another note for the stage.

Rather than the single-movement forms that characterized Rossini’s earlier overtures, the one for William Tell is essentially a miniature tone poem divided into four evocative sections: dawn in the mountains, thunderstorm, pastoral countryside, and triumphant return of the Swiss troops.

 PROGRAM IV

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES EDUARD TUBIN (1905-1982): Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra Eduard Tubin was born on June 18, 1905 in Kallaste, Estonia, and died on November 17, 1982 in Stockholm. Tubin’s Double Bass Concerto dates from 1948. It was premiered with piano accompaniment on July 19, 1948 in Rockport, Maine by bassist Ludvig Juht and pianist Sofia Stumberg; the orchestral version premiered on March 8, 1957 in Bogota, Colombia, conducted by Olav Roots with Manuel Verdeguer as soloist. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, harp and strings. Duration is about 20 minutes. This is the Colorado Symphony premiere.

Eduard Tubin became one of Estonia’s leading musical figures during the brief time between the wars — 1918 to 1940 — that his native land lived free from Russian domination. Tubin was born in 1905 into a music-loving family in Kallaste, near Lake Peipus (on whose frozen surface Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod repelled the invading Teutonic Knights in 1242); Eduard learned violin, flute and balalaika as a boy. He began playing with the village band and making his first attempts at composition when he was ten, showing such musical promise that his father sold a calf at the local market to buy his son a piano. Tubin entered the Teachers College in nearby Tartu in 1920, playing in the school’s orchestra and occasionally being allowed to conduct its choir. In 1924, he went on to the Tartu Higher School of Music, where he studied composition with Heino Eller; his earliest preserved compositions, mostly songs and piano pieces, date from 1925. Tubin conducted the Tartu Male Choir and taught at Nõo, a Tartu suburb, while continuing his studies, and he won a job as an accompanist and conductor at Tartu’s Vanemuine Theater after graduating in 1930. He built a solid reputation as an opera, ballet, concert and choral conductor during the following years, and began gaining notice for his compositions with his Second Symphony of 1937. He met Bartók and Kodály on a trip to Budapest in 1938, and was encouraged by them to research the folk music of his own country and consider incorporating its influence into his creative language; two years of field study of indigenous music resulted in Kratt (“The Goblin”), one of the first Estonian ballets.

After Estonia was again occupied by Russian troops, in 1940, Tubin was appointed to the faculty of the Tartu Music School and head conductor at the Vanemuine, and sent to Leningrad to be indoctrinated into Soviet musical life. He continued his work as well as possible during the World War II (he barely escaped injury when the theater was bombed during a performance of Kratt in early 1944), but he fled to Sweden with thousands of his compatriots just before the Soviets overran Tallinn in September 1944; Stockholm remained his home for the rest of his life. Soon after he arrived, Tubin helped organize the Stockholm Estonian YMCA Male Choir with some of his fellow exiles, and conducted the ensemble until 1959. In 1945, he accepted a position working in the archives of the historic Drottningholm Royal Court Theater that allowed him sufficient time to compose, and he thereafter devoted himself largely to creative work until his death in Stockholm in 1982, completing ten symphonies, concertos for violin, double bass, piano and balalaika, numerous independent orchestral compositions, two operas (whose premieres he returned to Estonia to supervise in 1969 and 1979), chamber works, choral numbers and piano pieces, many imbued with the spirit and sound of Estonian folk music.

SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM V

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES His importance in the musical life of his adopted country was recognized with the prestigious Atterberg Prize and membership in the Royal Swedish Music Academy. Familiarity with Tubin’s music remained largely confined to the Baltic countries until 1979, when the Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi began presenting his works internationally and recording them on a series of acclaimed releases.

Tubin composed his Double Bass Concerto in 1948 on a commission from the Estonian-born virtuoso Ludvig Juht (1894-1957), who played in the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1935 until his death and appeared frequently as a soloist. The Concerto comprises three movements, played without pause. The opening Allegro con moto is in two large structural chapters, each containing one section for the soloist and one for the orchestra. The main theme of the first section is presented by the bass above an anxious, syncopated accompaniment. Theme and accompaniment are given a feverish development in the following interlude, allowing the orchestra to unleash a power that is necessarily restrained when playing with the soloist. The movement’s second formal section begins with a more lyrical, slightly exotic melody in the bass, and gathers intensity as it leads to another intense orchestral episode. The central Andante is based on a broad, melancholy strain presented by the bass; a nervous, dotted-rhythm motive provides contrast. After the trombones recall the melancholy strain and the orchestra works it into a powerful climax, the soloist is allotted a difficult and lengthy cadenza as a bridge to the last movement. The tentative ideas that begin the finale, a brilliant showpiece for the virtuoso bassist, soon develop into a march-like theme, which is skillfully combined with transformations of the Andante melody as the movement unfolds.

 SIR EDWARD ELGAR (1857-1934): Variations on an Original Theme, “Enigma,” Op. 36 Edward Elgar was born on June 2, 1857 in Broadheath, England, and died on February 23, 1934 in Worcester. His “Enigma” Variations, composed in 1898-1899, bears the composer’s dedication to his “friends pictured within.” Hans Richter conducted the work’s premiere at St. James’s Hall, London on June 19, 1899. Elgar revised the score immediately after its first performance, and he conducted the premiere of that definitive version at the Worcester Festival on September 13, 1899. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, organ ad libitum and strings. The duration is about 30 minutes. The last time this piece was performed by the Symphony was October 16-17, 2015 with Conductor Courtney Lewis.

In 1920, George Bernard Shaw, brandishing his steely tipped pen like a curmudgeonly sword, wrote, “The phenomenon of greatness in music had vanished from England with Purcell....

England had waited two hundred years for a great English composer, and waited in vain.... For my part, I expected nothing of any English composer; and when the excitement about The Dream of Gerontius began, I said, wearily, ‘Another Wardour-street festival oratorio!’ But when I heard the Variations [in 1899] I sat up and said, ‘Whew!’ I knew we had got it at last.” Bernard PROGRAM VI

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Shaw, who wrote music criticism in his early days in London, was given to excitement over few musical matters that were not Richard Wagner, but he saw in these two works — the “Enigma” Variations and the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius — the long-desired emergence of a major creative personality in British music. That composer, Edward Elgar, had been writing for over twenty years when he undertook these two pieces in 1898, but they were the first to gain him a solid reputation not only among his countrymen but also abroad.

Elgar’s triumph in London came by a Continental route, through the eminent German conductor Hans Richter. Richter, who played a major role in the popularization of Wagner’s music in the Britain, had a close relationship with the English musical community and its audiences, and for his series of concerts there in 1899 he investigated new scores by English composers that might be presented on his programs. His agent in London regularly dispatched manuscripts to Germany, and one such parcel arrived with an especially high recommendation. It contained the score for a new set of “Variations on an Original Theme” by Elgar. Richter’s enthusiasm grew as he read through the pages, and he determined to present the work not only in London, but also on his provincial concerts. Those performances spread the composer’s fame so quickly and successfully that he was knighted for his services to British music only five years later, in 1904.

Throughout his life Elgar had a penchant for dispensing startling or mystifying remarks just to see what response they would elicit. Turning this trait upon his music, he added the sobriquet “Enigma” above the theme of the work after it had been completed. He posited not just one puzzle here, however, but three. First, each of the fourteen sections was headed with a set of initials or a nickname that stood for the name of the composer’s friend portrayed by that variation. Though the speculation on the identity of the individuals began immediately, Elgar did not confirm any guesses until 1920. The second mystery dealt with the theme itself, the section that specifically bore the legend, “Enigma.” It is believed that the theme represented Elgar himself (note the similarity of the opening phrase to the speech rhythm of his name — Ed-ward EL-gar), thus making the variations upon it portraits of his friends as seen through his eyes. Elgar gave a helpful clue to the solution of this mystery when he used the melody again, in The Music Makers of 1912, and said that it stood there for “the loneliness of the creative artist.”

The final enigma, the one that neither Elgar offered to explain nor for which others have been able to find a definitive solution, arose from a statement of his: “Furthermore, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’ but is not played.... So the principal theme never appears, even as in some recent dramas — e.g., Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse and Les Sept Princesses — the chief character is never on stage.” Conjectures about this unplayed theme that fits each of the variations have ranged from Auld Lang Syne (which guess Elgar vehemently denied) to a phrase from Parsifal. One theory was published in 1975 by the Dutch musicologist Theodore van Houten, who speculated that the phrase “never, never, never” from the grand old tune “Rule, Britannia” fits the requirements, and even satisfies some of the baffling clues that Elgar had spread to his friends. (“So the principal theme never appears.”) We shall never know for sure.

Elgar took the solution to his grave.

Variation I (C.A.E.) is a warm and tender depiction of the composer’s wife, Caroline Alice, who was not only his loving spouse but also his most trusted professional advisor.

Variation II (H.D. S.-P.) represents the warming-up finger exercises of H.D. Steuart-Powell, a piano-playing friend who was a frequent chamber music partner of Elgar.

SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Variation III (R.B.T.) utilizes the high and low woodwinds to portray the distinctive voice of Richard Baxter Townsend, an amateur actor with an unusually wide vocal range.

Variation IV (W.M.B.) suggests the considerable energy and firm resolve of William Meath Baker.

Variation V (R.P.A.) reflects the frequently changing moods of Richard Penrose Arnold, son of the poet Matthew Arnold.

Variation VI (Ysobel) gives prominence to the viola, the instrument played by Elgar’s pupil, Miss Isobel Fitton.

Variation VII (Troyte) describes the high spirits and argumentative nature of Arthur Troyte Griffith.

Variation VIII (W.N.) lithely denotes the charm and grace of Miss Winifred Norbury.

Variation IX (Nimrod), named for the great-grandson of the Biblical Noah, who was noted as a hunter, is a moving testimonial to A.J. Jaeger, an avid outsdoorsman and Elgar’s publisher and close friend. The composer wrote, “This Variation is a record of a long summer evening talk, when my friend grew nobly eloquent (as only he could be) on the grandeur of Beethoven, and especially of his slow movements.”

Variation X (Dorabella): Intermezzo describes Miss Dora Penny, a young friend hesitant of conversation and fluttering of manner.

Variation XI (G.R.S.) portrays the organist George R. Sinclair and his bulldog, Dan, out for a walk by the River Wye. The rhythmic exuberance of the music suggests the dog’s rushing about the bank and paddling in the water.

Variation XII (B.G.N.) pays homage to the cellist Basil G. Nevinson.

Variation XIII (* * *): Romanza was written while Lady Mary Lygon was on a sea journey. The solo clarinet quotes a phrase from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture and the hollow sound of the timpani played with wooden sticks suggests the distant rumble of ship’s engines.

Variation XIV (E.D.U.): Finale, Elgar’s brilliant self-portrait, recalls the music of earlier variations.

A.J. Jaeger wrote of Elgar in The Musical Times following the premiere of the “Enigma” Variations, “Here is an English musician who has something to say and knows how to say it in his own individual and beautiful way.... He writes as he feels, there is no affectation or make-believe.

Effortless originality combined with thorough savoir-faire and, most important of all, beauty of theme, warmth and feeling are his credentials, and they should open to him the hearts of all who have faith in the future of our English art and appreciate beautiful music wherever it is met.”

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

PROGRAM VIII C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G