Program Notes: A Symphonic Evening with Chris Thile; Celtic Woman

CLASSICS 2022/23

A SYMPHONIC EVENING WITH CHRIS THILE

CHRIS THILE, mandolin ERIC JACOBSEN, conductor CLAUDE SIM, violin

Friday, December 2, 2022 at 7:30pm

Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 7:30pm

Sunday, December 4, 2022 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

JAMES LEE III Beyond Sensorial Portals

CHRIS THILE/ Arr. ROB MOOSE Escape from the Tuilleries

BACH Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043 I. Vivace II. Largo; ma non tanto III. Allegro

PUNCH BROTHERS/ Julep

Arr. GABE KAHANE

BARBER Violin Concerto, Op. 14 III. Presto in moto perpetuo

— INTERMISSION —

DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88 I. Allegro con brio II. Adagio III. Allegretto grazioso IV. Allegro ma non troppo

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 32 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION

FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 8 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT!

Saturday’S concert iS dedicated to Kip Wallen and edWard aShWood & candice JohnSon Sunday’S concert iS dedicated in honor of Jane Scofield and in memory of rob Scofield

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CHRIS THILE, mandolin

Chris Thile’s Laysongs is his first truly solo album: It’s just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on a set of nine new tracks, combining original songs with three wisely chosen covers that contextualize and banter with his ideas. While Thile’s critically lauded interpretations of Bach on mandolin (2013’s Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1) also showcased him on his own, that was a kind of duet, a dialogue between Thile and his beloved J.S. Bach. Laysongs, on the other hand, is more of a soliloquy, and it’s very much a soul-searching one. Thile confronts, cajoles, and cozies up to his personal -- and our shared -- angels and demons, an effort made more poignant, dramatic, and universal by the enforced isolation of the pandemic.

At the heart of the album is a three-part piece, “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” that Thile premiered during a fall 2018 composer’s residency at Carnegie Hall. It was, he’s noted, “the first (and so far only) music I’ve made specifically to perform alone, which felt like an opportunity to sing some words that it wouldn’t necessarily be fair to put in a collaborator’s mouth.” Little did Thile know he was merely at the start of what would become a solitary adventure, professionally and, lord knows, philosophically.

Thile had been inspired to write “Salt” after revisiting C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters -- a satirical collection of letters from a senior demon to his apprentice -- during a long-haul plane trip. The novel cleverly addresses temptation and the undermining of faith. In each movement of “Salt,” Thile plays a variation on a devil’s advocate, nurturing superiority complexes in believers and non-believers alike, with a targeted spiritual disinformation campaign. Thile’s performance is broad and full of mischief, and his playing is just as lively, but there’s a gravity to the questions he poses that lays the foundation for the rest of Laysongs.

Thile played part one of “Salt” during a December 2018 episode of his public radio show, Live from Here, broadcast from Manhattan’s The Town Hall. It was a memorable installment that also featured Thile and his stellar house band performing Randy Newman’s “God’s Song” and Regina Spektor’s “Laughing With.” Thile had built the evening around questions of faith, or the lack thereof, responding to the mixed spiritual and secular messages he’d been encountering on the streets of New York City during the holiday season.

Nonesuch Chairman Emeritus Robert Hurwitz was in attendance and, afterwards, he came backstage to encourage Thile to elaborate further on these ruminations. He saw the makings of an album that could tap into Thile’s own experiences of being raised in a Christian household, an early life that Thile regards with equanimity, not rancor. As he explains, “Bob said, ‘Man, you should do a God-themed record of some kind, it’s all over your work. I was touched that Bob had that suggestion. It is a lifelong obsession of mine, even post-Christianity, what the impact of that kind of devotion to any organized religion is, the extent to which it can be a force for good or for bad. It has probably woven itself though all the work I’ve ever made. And it's true of so many of the people I make music with, who grew up singing in church — starting with Sean and Sara Watkins [his Nickel Creek bandmates].”

PHOTO: JOSH GOLEMAN

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Throughout 2019, however, Thile had to keep his traveling radio show rolling. It wasn’t until the world went into COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020 and Live from Here ended its run that he seriously began to contemplate this idea. Again, Hurwitz supplied a nudge, encouraging him to “make a snapshot of your experience of the pandemic.” Soul-searching was becoming, for many, a daily routine: “I was coming out of the most intense creative period of my life, when all of a sudden, for the first time in a long time, I had a moment to think and dream a little -- and I wondered, ‘If I made something, what would it be?’”

With Laysongs, Thile had to explore that question, of necessity, completely on his own, which somehow seems fitting: What better way to wrestle with one’s thoughts? Metaphorical isolation had become all too real. But Thile, as a songwriter and performer, is an amiable agnostic, even in these trying times. Rather than weighing him down, this period in the epistemological wilderness has lifted him up.

Thile takes a playfully discursive path on this journey toward earthbound salvation. He allows the listener to connect the dots along the way, to figure out how a song about Dionysus, for example, or a virtuosic performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin, may fit into his plan. “Ecclesiastes 2:24” has no lyrics and may require a brief visit to the Old Testament to see what Thile has up his sleeve. He does offer a clue: “Ecclesiastes 2:24 is one of the bible verses that resonates most with me. It’s good for a person to eat and drink and take satisfaction in their work. And it foreshadows ‘Dionysus.’”

“God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” is based on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s psychedelic adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem from her 1969 album, Illuminations. Thile discovered it while researching SainteMarie for a Live from Here birthday tribute. He honors its incantatory spirit before launching into the intense and at times rollicking “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth.” He says, “Covering other people’s material is an opportunity to jam or have a soirée with the likes of Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Hazel Dickens, and Béla Bartók. It was important to me to interact with other artist’s perspectives on this topic while I explored it.”

Though Thile often performs works from the classical canon, including his aforementioned forays into Bach an arrangement of the Passepied from Claude Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque” with his fellow Punch Brothers (on The Phosphorescent Blues), he’d never approached Bartók, whose work he calls “the biggest influence on me that I hadn’t yet attempted to perform.” But Thile found the perfect -- and perfectly provocative -- spot for Bartok’s sonata on Laysongs. As he says: “It’s the furthest afield from the theme, but there is something so infernal about it. After ‘Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,’ one might expect something light, some sort of exhale. Instead, we launch immediately into the fourth movement of the Bartók. It’s as if one of the demons in ‘Salt’ stole my mandolin and started playing.”

Thile had the makings of an album, it turned out, well before he embarked on the actual recording of it. All it took was tying together these various threads from his writing and his research. Helping him put it together was his wife, the accomplished actor Claire Coffee, who’d long been his unofficial sounding board and now serves as his co-producer: “I’ve leaned on Claire’s opinions ever since we met. She has incredible taste and narrative intuition. She was able to help me weave the original and non-original material together into what you’re hearing.”

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By the summer of 2020, Thile, Coffee, and their son Calvin had relocated to a rental house in Hudson, NY, a haven for urban expats, as they waited for pandemic-delayed renovations to be completed on their Brooklyn home. In what might have been a bit of divine intervention, they found a recording studio, Future-Past, that was housed in an old church right in the center of town. “I went in there to look at the space and instantly felt so at home,” Thile recalls. “I loved the amount of sound around the sound. I had two sonic collaborators on this record: the tremendous engineer Jody Elff and that church.”

He continues, “It was so easy for me to stay in character because of where we were. Every hour or so I would take a stroll around the church and let the stained-glass windows transport me back to the last church I attended regularly, Grace Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco.”

Thile realizes -- and illustrates in these songs -- that the greatest spiritual sustenance comes from communion with others, in breaking bread, sharing wine, and, above all, singing together. The final track on Laysongs, a cover of bluegrass legend Hazel Dickens’ “Won’t You Come Sing for Me,” serves as secular recessional hymn. As he notes, “There is no worship of a deity in that song; it’s very much a plea to your close friends, a plea for fellowship.”

By summer 2020, Thile reveals, “I was more than ever before craving that thing -- singing with people, making music with people, but particularly that very selfless kind of music making that happens in church. At best you aren’t thinking about yourself or even about the people you’re making music with. You’re all just doing it together and it’s about something else. It’s really beautiful. And it’s maybe the only thing about organized religion that I miss.”

ERIC JACOBSEN, conductor

Hailed by the New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” conductor and cellist Eric Jacobsen has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative programming. He is the newly-named Music Director of the Virginia Symphony, becoming the 12th music director in the orchestra’s 100-year history, and assumed that post on July 1, 2021.

Jacobsen is Artistic Director and conductor of The Knights, and serves as the Music Director for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. Jacobsen founded the adventurous orchestra The Knights with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen, to foster the intimacy and camaraderie of chamber music on the orchestral stage. As conductor, Jacobsen has led the “consistently inventive, infectiously engaged indie ensemble” (New York Times) at Central Park’s Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, (Le) Poisson Rouge, the 92nd Street Y, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center; at major summer festivals such as Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Ojai; and on tour nationally and internationally, including at the Cologne Philharmonie, Düsseldorf Tonhalle, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Salzburg Großes Festspielhaus, Vienna Musikverein, National Gallery of Dublin, and the Dresden Musikfestspiele. Recent collaborators include violinists Itzhak Perlman and Gil Shaham, singers Dawn Upshaw, Susan Graham, and Nicholas Phan, and pianists Emanuel Ax and Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Also in demand as a guest conductor, Jacobsen has led the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Detroit, the New World, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Deutsche Philharmonie Merck and the Tonkunstler Orchestra, with whom Jacobsen appeared at Vienna’s legendary Musikverein.

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At the close of a successful sixth season with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, Jacobsen has continued to pioneer the orchestra’s programming and community engagement in new and exciting directions. During the 20-21 season, the Orlando Philharmonic was one of the few orchestras internationally that was able to perform live concerts, including with renowned pianist Yuja Wang, and they closed their season with “America, Come,” an Orlando Philharmonic commission from Aoife O’Donovan honoring the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Previous seasons included Inside the Score, in which Jacobsen led the audience on a guided exploration of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique; appearances by multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón as composer-in-residence; and guest appearances by Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens and internationally acclaimed cello virtuoso Jan Vogler.

In December 2012, Jacobsen and his brother Colin were selected from among the nation’s top visual, performing, media, and literary artists to receive a prestigious United States Artists Fellowship. Eric splits his time between New York and Orlando with his wife, singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan, and their daughter.

CLAUDE SIM, violin

Claude Sim enjoys a varied career as a chamber musician, orchestral leader, soloist, and multigenre performing artist. He studied violin performance at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (BM ‘99) with Greg Fulkerson, Almita Vamos, and viola with Roland Vamos. At age 21, he was appointed Associate Concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony under music director Marin Alsop. As frequent soloist with the orchestra, he has earned praise for his ‘lustrous tone and poise’ by the Rocky Mountain News and was dubbed ‘Denver’s Musical Adventurer’ by the Denver Post. Formerly Associate Principal Second of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Sim has served in guest capacities as Concertmaster of the Kansas City Symphony, Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, Boulder Philharmonic, as Principal Second of the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa, and first violin with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Sim has been a grand prizewinner at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and has served as guest first violin and viola on concert tours with the critically acclaimed Miró and Pacifica Quartets. He has collaborated in chamber music performance with pianists Christopher O’Riley, Jeffrey Kahane, and members of the Vermeer and Tokyo String Quartets.

As solo violinist of the tango ensemble Extasis, Sim has recorded a studio album. The quartet’s arrangements of Golden Age tango by D’Arienzo, Troilo and Pugliese through the nuevo tango of Rovira and Piazzolla serve as foundations of their wide-ranging repertoire. Extasis performance tours and community engagements have reached audiences across the United States and Europe.

Known for his multi-genre interests, Sim’s jazz album Time With You presents a collection of standards from the American Songbook. Trumpeter Greg Gisbert (Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry sideman) is a featured artist on the record. Sim has performed with Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. and Odom’s jazz combo as guest soloist. He has shared the stage with Irish American fiddler Eileen Ivers, Warren Haynes (Allman Brothers Band, Gov’t Mule), rock band Guster, and with iconic Denver rock band DeVotchka, both live and on the album 100 Lovers. In 2014,

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he performed as a duo with Grammy award-winning artist and banjo master Béla Fleck on a Colorado tour, culminating at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

Sim’s interest in exploring original and standard gypsy jazz has led to collaborations with today’s elite string jazz artists including live radio broadcasts and a tour with German guitarist Joscho Stephan.

Claude Sim’s performing career and concurrent teaching mission focus on developing true artistic versatility while building connections across musical genres and communities. His previous teaching appointments include University of Colorado Denver and Colorado State University. From 2019-2022, he served as Assistant Professor of Violin at CU Boulder College of Music.

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JAMES LEE III (born in 1975)

Beyond Sensorial Portals

James Lee III was born on November 26, 1975 in St. Joseph, Michigan. He composed Beyond Sensorial Portals in 2022. It was premiered on October 1, 2022 by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Eric Jacobsen. The work is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 11 minutes. The is premiere performance by the Colorado Symphony premiere.

“I want to compose music,” says James Lee III of the deep spirituality of his creative work, “to reach into the inner soul of listeners and elevate them regardless of race and religious affiliation.” Lee was born in 1975 in St. Joseph, Michigan, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and holds bachelor’s (1995), master’s (2001) and doctoral degrees (2005) in piano and composition from the University of Michigan, where his teachers included William Bolcom, Bright Sheng and Michael Daugherty. Lee was also a Seiji Ozawa Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center during the summer of 2002, when he studied composition with Osvaldo Golijov, Michael Gandolfi, Steven Mackey, Kaija Saariaho and Augusta Reed Thomas and conducting with Stefan Asbury. In addition to his fellowship at Tanglewood, he has also received the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rackham Merit Fellowship from the University of Michigan, and First Prize in the Leigh Morris Chorale Choral Composition Competition. Lee has taught at Marygrove College in Detroit and the Village Music School in Plymouth, Michigan, and since 2005 has been on the faculty of Morgan State University in Baltimore, where he is now Professor of Composition and Theory. From August to December 2014, James Lee III was a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at the State University of Campinas in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, where he taught composition, composed, and researched the music of 20th- and 21st-century Brazilian composers.

Lee’s Beyond Sensorial Portals was commissioned in 2022 for the inaugural season of Steinmetz Hall, home of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, which premiered the work on October 1, 2022. The composer wrote, “Beyond Sensorial Portals is a rhapsodic orchestral work that can also

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be summarized with one word — Celebration! The title of the work is inspired by the idea of concertgoers anticipating going to an orchestral concert and hearing great music! One imagines the initial admiration of a patron upon entering a building that contains a concert hall. After entering the edifice, one’s senses may be impressed by observing the beauty of the chandeliers, paintings in the foyer, and other visual items of art. I also tried to hint in the music at the idea of various conversations discussing the works that one will soon hear. Throughout Beyond Sensorial Portals, I introduced themes that are presented, revisited and transformed in playful, reflective and triumphant manners. After the concertgoers’ sense of sight has been dazzled by the scenes in the foyer, the sight is further impressed by the beauty of the concert hall itself after passing the next ‘portal.’ The visuals of the orchestral players trying out certain passages is then surpassed by the sense of hearing that tries to distinguish between melodies among the different family groups of instruments. Finally, after the first downbeat of the concert, the audience members’ senses of sight and hearing see the gestures of the conductor and hear the beautiful and coherent sounds emanating from the orchestra. It is then that we pass through the next ‘portal’ and go beyond the senses and directly focus on the music itself. The various episodes of the music also include moments of beauty and reflection upon the great Creator, who gave us the wonderful gift of music. After continual ascents in the orchestra, the piece ends with a heroic and grand explosion of sound.”

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)

Movement III (Allegro) from Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany and died on July 28, 1750 in Leipzig. His Two Violin Concerto was composed around 1720 or 1730. The work is scored for strings and keyboard. Duration of the third movement is about 6 minutes. This piece was last performed by the orchestra January 7, 1998. It featured conductor Lawrence Loh and violinists Jeffrey Hughes and Kenyata Thomas.

Scholars have estimated that as much as one-quarter of the music Bach composed has been lost or destroyed through indifference and neglect. One who must bear a good deal of the blame was Wilhelm Friedemann, Bach’s eldest son. At Bach’s death, many of his important manuscripts were divided between Friedemann and his younger brother Carl Philipp Emanuel. Emanuel took loving care of his part of the treasure, but Friedemann did not. Friedemann, it seems, was too busy just trying to hold his tottering life together to pay much attention to his father’s old-fashioned music. Johann Sebastian had thoroughly trained him in music, and he held some important positions as a young man, but he never was able to live up to the family’s expectations. When he apparently lost his presence of mind soon after his father’s death, he gave way to dissipation and made a thorough mess of his life. Many of the precious manuscripts he inherited were destroyed or lost or perhaps sold for a flagon of wine. In Friedemann’s defense it should be noted that hardly anyone else thought much of Bach’s music in the years after 1750. The new musical style of the Classical age had demolished the taste for the complex old Baroque tonal language, and the stories of Bach’s manuscripts being used to wrap fish in a Leipzig market are as sad as they are true. The scores for the Brandenburg Concertos were sold at auction for the equivalent of a dime each. At any rate, it is known that Friedemann allowed at least three of his father’s violin concertos to slip through his unsteady fingers into oblivion. It was Emanuel who preserved the three that exist today.

It was long thought that Bach composed his three extant violin concertos — two for solo

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violin and one for two violins — while serving as “Court Kapellmeister and Director of the Princely Chamber Musicians” at Anhalt-Cöthen, north of Leipzig, from 1717 to 1723, a productive period for instrumental music when he wrote the Brandenburg Concertos, orchestral suites, many sonatas and suites for solo instruments and keyboard, suites and sonatas for unaccompanied violin and cello, and such important solo harpsichord pieces as the French Suites and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. In the Bach tercentenary issue of Early Music published in May 1985, however, Harvard professor and Bach authority Christoph Wolff surmised from stylistic evidence and from the fact that the only extant performance materials for the Concerto in A minor (BWV 1041) and the Concerto in D minor for Two Violins (BWV 1043) were copied around 1730 that at least those two works date from the years (1729-1736) that Bach was directing the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, the city’s leading concert-giving organization. The finale of the Two Violin Concerto moves with a sense of urgency and drama, propelled by Bach’s characteristic rhythmic energy.

SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981)

Movement III (Presto in moto perpetuo) from Violin Concerto, Op. 14 Samuel Barber was born on March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania and died on January 23, 1981 in New York City. He composed his Violin Concerto in 1939. It was premiered on February 7, 1941 by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Albert Spalding as soloist; Eugene Ormandy conducted. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano and strings. Duration of the third movement is about 4 minutes. Last performance by the Orchestra was April 30May 1, with conductor Brett Mitchell and violinist Augustin Hadelich.

In his 1954 study of the composer, Nathan Broder wrote as follows of the genesis of the Violin Concerto: “In the summer of 1939, after a visit to England and Scotland, Barber settled down in the village of Sils-Maria in Switzerland to work on a violin concerto, which had been commissioned by a wealthy Philadelphia merchant. This progressed slowly and he set off for Paris, planning to complete the work there during the fall. But he had hardly arrived in Paris when all Americans were warned to leave. He sailed for home, and word reached the ship before they arrived in New York that German troops had invaded Poland.” The work was completed after Barber returned home and premiered on February 7, 1941 by Albert Spalding with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. It has become one of the most frequently performed of all 20thcentury concertos.

Moto perpetuo — “perpetual motion” — Barber marked the finale of the Violin Concerto, and the music more than lives up to its title. After an opening timpani flourish, the soloist introduces a fiery motive above a jabbing rhythmic accompaniment that returns, rondo-like, throughout the movement. A whirling coda of vertiginous speed and virtuosic brilliance brings this splendid Concerto to a dazzling close.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)

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Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88

Antonín Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia and died on May 1, 1904 in Prague. His Symphony No. 8 dates from 1889. The composer conducted the Prague National Theater Orchestra in the Symphony’s premiere, on February 2, 1890. The work is scored for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Duration is about 34 minutes. The Orchestra last performed this piece October 14-16, conducted by Brett Mitchell.

You would probably have liked Dvořák. He was born a simple (in the best sense) man of the soil who retained a love of country, nature and peasant ways all his life. In his later years he wrote, “In spite of the fact that I have moved about in the great world of music, I shall remain what I have always been — a simple Czech musician.” Few passions ruffled his life — music, of course; the rustic pleasures of country life; the company of old friends; caring for his pigeons; and a child-like fascination with railroads. American musicologist Milton Cross sketched him thus: “To the end of his days he remained shy, uncomfortable in the presence of those he regarded as his social superiors, and frequently remiss in his social behavior. He was never completely at ease in large cities, with the demands they made on him. He was happiest when he was close to the soil, raising pigeons, taking long, solitary walks in the hills and forests of the Bohemia he loved so deeply. Yet he was by no means a recluse. In the company of his intimate friends, particularly after a few beers, he was voluble, gregarious and good-humored.” His music reflects his salubrious nature, and the G major Symphony, composed during his annual summer country retreat at Vysoká, perfectly mirrors its creator.

Dvořák was absolutely profligate with themes in the Symphony’s opening movement. The first theme is presented without preamble in the rich hues of trombones, low strings and low woodwinds; the second theme is a chirruping melody for flute. The opening theme is recalled to initiate both the development and the recapitulation. The second movement contains two kinds of music, one hesitant and somewhat lachrymose, the other stately and smoothly flowing. The first is indefinite in tonality, rhythm and cadence; its theme is a collection of fragments; its texture is sparse. The following section is greatly contrasted: its key is unambiguous; its rhythm and cadence points are clear; its melody is a long, continuous span. These two antitheses alternate, and the form of the movement is created as much by texture and sonority as by the traditional means of melody and tonality. The third movement is a lilting essay in the style of the Austrian folk dance, the Ländler. Like the beginning of the Symphony, the movement opens in G minor with a mood of sweet melancholy, but gives way to a languid melody in G major for the central trio. Following the repeat of the scherzo, a vivacious coda in faster tempo paves the way to the finale. The trumpets herald the start of the finale, a theme and variations with a central section resembling a development in character. The bustling second variation returns as a sort of formal mile-marker — it introduces the “development” and begins the coda. The Symphony ends swiftly and resoundingly amid a burst of high spirits and warm-hearted good feelings.

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

CELTIC WOMAN A CHRISTMAS SYMPHONY TOUR 2022

LLOYD BUTLER, conductor

Monday, December 5, 2022 at 7:30pm Boettcher Concert Hall

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 2 HOURs WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION

FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 8 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT!

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CELTIC WOMAN

Experience the magical sound of Celtic Woman this holiday season.

Celtic Woman is the most successful all-female group in Irish history, with a legacy of 12 consecutive Billboard number ones, 10 million album sales and an incredible 2 billion online streams to date.

This is a rare opportunity to hear Celtic Woman’s angelic harmonies with the thrilling live sound of a full symphony orchestra in an intimate concert setting.

Christmas in Ireland is all about hospitality. The visitor is greeted with the traditional “hundred thousand welcomes” and is offered the best seat in the house. Now we invite you to join in the festivities, as the crystalline voices of Celtic Woman melt your cares away.

From delicate traditional Irish carols to magnificent uplifting anthems, Celtic Woman has a wealth of seasonal music to gladden your heart. Hear stunning new arrangements of the classic Silent Night and the ancient Gaelic carol Dia do Bheatha from their holiday album, The Magic of Christmas. Listen out for the jingle of bells as you glide through the snowy landscape of Sleigh Ride and get ready to sing along when it’s time to Deck the Halls!

When shimmering strings and magnificent brass fanfares are fused with the tinkle of the Irish harp, the proud call of the bagpipes, and the beat of the bodhrán drum, you have a performance to remember. When Celtic Woman sings and plays for you, you have a performance you will never forget.

So, take your seat – and let the holiday season begin!

www.celticwoman.com

LLOYD BUTLER, conductor

Lloyd Butler maintains an active schedule as a Music Director/Conductor, having conducted orchestras around the world and the United States. Most recently, Lloyd toured as the Pianist, Conductor and touring Music Director for the Grammy-Nominated international sensation, Celtic Woman. He is also the Music Director and Conductor for the Hollywood Festival Orchestra, which regularly tours to Japan and performs for soldout crowds throughout the country. Additionally, he has conducted for Il Divo, The Irish Tenors, Dr. Ronan Tynan of The Irish Tenors, Judy Collins, Petula Clark, and America’s Got Talent star - Alice Tan Ridley. Lloyd’s USA guest conducting appearances include Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Utah Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Boise Philharmonic, Naples Philharmonic, and many more. Internationally, Mr. Butler has conducted the Arad Philharmonic in Romania; The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Australia; the Pärnu City Orchestra in Estonia; Orquesta Sinfonica and the Camerata in San Luis Potosi, Mexico; The Orquesta Sinfonietta of the Universidad Autonoma de Universidad SLP and Orquesta Sinfonica Juvenil Julián Carillo in Mexico; and jazz bands in Manchester, England and Tallinn, Estonia. Beyond his work with symphony orchestras, he equally enjoys collaborating in theatre having music directed more than 45 musicals and operas including some favorites Die Zauberflöte, A Little Night Music, Into The Woods, Oklahoma, Miss Saigon, The Addams Family, and so many others. Lloyd holds a Master of Music degree in Conducting from Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Music degree in Vocal Performance from Ohio Northern University.