CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 30 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
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PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor
Recognized as a masterful and dynamic presence in the conducting world, Peter Oundjian has developed a multi-faceted portfolio as a conductor, violinist, professor and artistic advisor. He has been celebrated for his musicality, an eye towards collaboration, innovative programming, leadership and training with students and an engaging personality. Strengthening his ties to Colorado, Oundjian is now Principal Conductor of the Colorado Symphony in addition to Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival, which successfully pivoted to a virtual format during the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021.
Now carrying the title Conductor Emeritus, Oundjian’s fourteen-year tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony served as a major creative force for the city of Toronto and was marked by a reimagining of the TSO’s programming, international stature, audience development, touring and a number of outstanding recordings, garnering a Grammy nomination in 2018 and a Juno award for Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works in 2019. He led the orchestra on several international tours to Europe and the USA, conducting the first performance by a North American orchestra at Reykjavik’s Harpa Hall in 2014.
From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra during which time he implemented the kind of collaborative programming that has become a staple of his directorship. Oundjian led the RSNO on several international tours, including North America, China, and a European festival tour with performances at the Bregenz Festival, the Dresden Festival as well as in Innsbruck, Bergamo, Ljubljana, and others. His final appearance with the orchestra as their Music Director was at the 2018 BBC Proms where he conducted Britten’s epic War Requiem.
Highlights of past seasons include appearances with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Iceland Symphony, the Detroit, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Dallas, Seattle, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. With the onset of world-wide concert cancellations, support for students at Yale and Juilliard became a priority. In the 2022/2023 season, Oundjian conducted the opening weekend of Atlanta Symphony, followed by return engagements with Baltimore, Indianapolis, Dallas, Colorado and Toronto symphonies, as well as a visit to New World Symphony.
Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981, and in 2013 was awarded the school’s Sanford Medal for Distinguished Service to Music. A dedicated educator, Oundjian regularly conducts the Yale, Juilliard, Curtis and New World symphony orchestras.
An outstanding violinist, Oundjian spent fourteen years as the first violinist for the renowned Tokyo String Quartet before he turned his energy towards conducting.
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ITZHAK PERLMAN, violin
Undeniably the reigning virtuoso of the violin, Itzhak Perlman enjoys superstar status rarely afforded a classical musician. Beloved for his charm and humanity as well as his talent, he is treasured by audiences throughout the world who respond not only to his remarkable artistry, but also to his irrepressible joy for making music.
Having performed with every major orchestra and at concert halls around the globe, Mr. Perlman was granted a Presidential Medal of Freedom –the Nation’s highest civilian honor – by President Obama in 2015, a National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in 2000, and a Medal of Liberty by President Reagan in 1986. Mr. Perlman has been honored with 16 GRAMMY® Awards, four Emmy Awards, a Kennedy Center Honor, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Genesis Prize.
In the 2024/25 season, Mr. Perlman celebrates the 30th anniversary of his iconic PBS special In the Fiddler’s House with performances in Cleveland, Kansas City, Costa Mesa, Bethesda, and Mesa alongside today’s klezmer stars including Hankus Netsky, Andy Statman and members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band. He is joined by an illustrious group of collaborators – Emanuel Ax, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the Juilliard String Quartet – in a special Itzhak Perlman and Friends program in select appearances presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, UC Santa Barbara’s Arts & Lectures, and the San Francisco Symphony. His orchestral engagements include Cinema Serenade programs with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Richmond Symphony, Tucson Symphony, and Nashville Symphony as well as a concerto performance with the Colorado Symphony.
He continues touring An Evening with Itzhak Perlman, which captures highlights of his career through narrative and multi-media elements intertwined with performance, and plays recitals across North America including Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Antonio, West Palm Beach and Sarasota among others with pianist Rohan De Silva in their 25th anniversary season.
Over the past thirty years, Mr. Perlman has been devoted to music education, mentoring gifted young string players alongside his wife Toby in the Perlman Music Program. He has taught fulltime at the Program each summer since its founding in 1994. With close to 800 alumni, PMP is shaping the future landscape of classical music worldwide.
Mr. Perlman has an exclusive series of classes with Masterclass.com, the premier online education company that enables access to the world’s most brilliant minds including Gordon Ramsay, Wolfgang Puck, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Helen Mirren, Jodie Foster and Serena Williams, as the company’s first classical-music presenter.
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FLORENCE B. PRICE (1888-1953)
Adoration for String Orchestra
Arranged by Tyler Merideth
Florence Price was born on April 9, 1888 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and died June 3, 1953 in Chicago. Adoration was composed for organ around 1950. The arrangement for string orchestra is by Tyler Merideth. Duration is about 4 minutes. This is the premiere performance by the orchestra.
Florence B. Price was a musical pioneer — one of the first African-American students to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music; the first African-American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major American orchestra; the first winner of the composition contest sponsored by the progressive Wanamaker Foundation.
Florence Beatrice Smith was born in 1888 into the prosperous and cultured family of a dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, and received her first piano lessons from her mother, a schoolteacher and singer; Florence first played in public when she was four. She later also took up organ and violin, and at age fourteen was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she studied with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, two of their generation’s leading composers, wrote her first string trio and a symphony (now lost), and graduated in 1907 with honors for both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate. She returned to Arkansas, where she taught at Arkadelphia Academy and Shorter College before being appointed music department chairman at Clark University in Atlanta in 1910. She returned to Little Rock two years later to marry attorney Thomas J. Price, and left classroom teaching to devote herself to raising two daughters, giving private instruction in violin, organ and piano, and composing.
In 1927, following racial unrest in Arkansas that included a lynching, the Price family moved to Chicago, where Florence studied composition, orchestration, organ, languages and liberal arts at various schools with several of the city’s leading musicians and teachers. Black culture and music flourished in Chicago then — jazz, blues, spirituals, popular, theater, even classical — educational opportunities were readily available, recording studios were established, the National Association of Negro Musicians was founded there in 1919, and Price took advantage of everything. She ran a successful piano studio, wrote educational pieces for her students, published gospel and folksong arrangements, composed popular songs (under the pseudonym VeeJay), and performed as a church and theater organist. Among her many friends were the physician Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors and his wife, organist and music teacher Estelle C. Bonds, and Price became both friend and teacher to their gifted daughter, Margaret. In 1932, Price and Bonds (then just nineteen) won respectively first and second prize in the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation Composition Competition, established to recognize classical compositions by Black composers, Price for her Symphony in E minor and Piano Sonata and Bonds for her song Sea Ghost. The performance of Price’s Symphony on June 15, 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, was the first by a major American orchestra of a symphonic work by an African-American woman. Price continued to compose prolifically — three more symphonies and two more piano concertos, a violin concerto, chamber, piano and organ pieces, songs, spiritual arrangements, jingles for radio commercials — and received numerous performances, including her arrangement of the spiritual My Soul’s Been Anchored
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in the Lord that Marian Anderson used to close her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on April 9, 1939. Florence Price died in Chicago on June 3, 1953.
Price graduated from the New England Conservatory with honors in organ performance, and taught and performed on the instrument throughout her life, in both church and theater. She was an active member of the Chicago Chapter of the American Guild of Organists and the Chicago Club of Women Organists, and composed many works for her own public performances and worship services and for publication that ranged from concert suites, fugues and passacaglias to short devotional and secular pieces such as Hour of Peace, Caprice, Little Pastorale and Adoration, one of her best-known organ compositions. Price published Adoration in 1951 with the Lorenz Company of Dayton, Ohio. The arrangement of Adoration for string orchestra is by composer and arranger Tyler Merideth, Orchestra and Choir Conductor at Hillwood High School in Nashville, Tennessee. Mr. Merideth and his student musicians have committed to contributing the proceeds from his arrangement to the recording of the solo piano works of Florence Price by pianist Karen Walwyn.
@IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
Suite from The Firebird (1919 Version)
Igor Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum, Russia, near St. Petersburg, and died on April 6, 1971 in New York City. He composed The Firebird between November 1909 and following April. The premiere was given at the Paris Opéra by the Ballet Russe on June 25, 1910. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes. This piece was last performed March 28-29, 2015, with David Lockington conducting.
Fireworks. There could not have been a more appropriate title for the work that launched the meteoric career of Igor Stravinsky. He wrote that glittering orchestral miniature in 1908, while still under the tutelage of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and it shows all the dazzling instrumental technique that the student had acquired from his teacher. Though the reception of Fireworks was cool when it was first performed at the Siloti Concerts in St. Petersburg on February 6, 1909, there was one member of the audience who listened with heightened interest. The impresario Serge Diaghilev was forming his Ballet Russe company at just that time, and he recognized in Stravinsky a talent to be watched. He approached the 27-year-old composer and requested orchestral transcriptions of short pieces by Chopin and Grieg that would be used in the first Parisian season of the Ballet Russe. Stravinsky did his work well and on time.
During that same winter, plans were beginning to stir in the creative wing of the Ballet Russe for a Russian folk ballet — something filled with legend and magic and fantasy. The composer Nikolai Tcherepnin was associated with the Ballet Russe at that time, and it was assumed that he would compose the music for a plot derived from several traditional Russian sources. However, Tcherepnin was given to inexplicable changes of mood and he was losing interest in ballet at the
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time, so he withdrew from the project. Diaghilev inquired whether Stravinsky had any interest in taking it over, and he agreed. The triumphant premiere of The Firebird in Paris on June 25, 1910, rocketed Stravinsky to international fame.
The ballet’s story deals with the glittering Firebird and the evil ogre Kashchei, who captures maidens and turns men to stone if they enter his domain. Kashchei is immortal as long as his soul, which is preserved in the form of an egg in a casket, remains intact. The plot shows how Prince Ivan wanders into Kashchei’s garden in pursuit of the Firebird; he captures it and exacts a feather before letting it go. Ivan meets a group of Kashchei’s captive maidens and falls in love with one of them. The princesses return to Kashchei’s palace. Ivan breaks open the gates to follow them, but he is captured by the ogre’s guardian monsters. He waves the magic feather and the Firebird reappears to smash Kashchei’s vital egg; the ogre expires. All the captives are freed and Ivan and his Tsarevna are wed.
Stravinsky drew three concert suites from The Firebird. The 1919 suite includes six scenes from the complete score. The first two, Introduction and The Dance of the Firebird, accompany the appearance of the magical creature. The Round Dance of the Princesses uses the rhythm and style of an ancient Russian dance called the Khorovod. The Infernal Dance of King Kashchei, the most modern portion of the score, depicts the madness engendered by the appearance of the Firebird at Kashchei’s court after the revelation to Ivan of the evil ogre’s vulnerability. The haunting Berceuse is heard when the thirteenth princess, the one of whom Ivan is enamored, succumbs to a sleep-charm that saves her from the terrible King while Ivan destroys Kashchei’s malevolent power. The Finale, initiated by the solo horn, confirms the life-force that had been threatened by Kashchei.
@LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61
Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770 in Bonn, and died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna. He composed his only Violin Concerto in 1806, completing the score just in time for the premiere on December 23 at the Theater-an-der-Wien, Vienna. Franz Clement, for whom the work was written, was the soloist at the first performance. The score calls for flute, pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes. This piece was last performed April 21-23, 2023, conducted by Pter Oundjian and featuring James Ehnes on violin.
In 1794, two years after he moved to Vienna from Bonn, Beethoven attended a concert by an Austrian violin prodigy named Franz Clement. To Clement, then fourteen years old, the young composer wrote, “Dear Clement! Go forth on the way which you hitherto have travelled so beautifully, so magnificently. Nature and art vie with each other in making you a great artist. Follow both and, never fear, you will reach the great — the greatest — goal possible to an artist here on earth. All wishes for your happiness, dear youth; and return soon, that I may again hear your dear, magnificent playing. Entirely your friend, L. v. Beethoven.”
Beethoven’s wish was soon granted. Clement was appointed conductor and concertmaster
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of the Theater-an-der-Wien in Vienna in 1802, where he was closely associated with Beethoven in the production of Fidelio and as the conductor of the premiere of the Third Symphony. Clement, highly esteemed by his contemporaries as a violinist, musician and composer for his instrument, was also noted for his fabulous memory. One tale relates that Clement, after participating in a single performance of Haydn’s The Creation, wrote out a score for the entire work from memory. Of Clement’s style of violin performance, Boris Schwarz wrote, “His playing was graceful rather than vigorous, his tone small but expressive, and he possessed unfailing assurance and purity in high positions and exposed entrances.” It was for Clement that Beethoven produced his only Violin Concerto.
The sweet, lyrical nature and wide compass of the solo part of this Concerto were influenced by the polished style of Clement’s playing. The five soft taps on the timpani that open the work not only serve to establish the key and the rhythm of the movement, but also recur as a unifying phrase throughout. The main theme is introduced in the second measure by the woodwinds in a chorale-like setting. A transition, with rising scales in the winds and quicker rhythmic figures in the strings, accumulates a certain intensity before it quiets to usher in the second theme, another legato strophe entrusted to the woodwinds. Immediately after its entry, the violin soars into its highest register, where it presents a line spun around the main thematic material of the orchestral introduction. The development section is largely given over to wide-ranging figurations for the soloist. The recapitulation begins with a recall of the five drum strokes of the opening, here spread across the full orchestra sounding in unison. The themes from the exposition return with more elaborate embellishment from the soloist. Following the cadenza, the second theme serves as a coda.
“In the slow movement,” wrote English music scholar Sir Donald Tovey, “we have one of the cases of sublime inaction achieved by Beethoven and by no one else except in certain lyrics and masterpieces of choral music.” The comparison to vocal music is certainly appropriate for this hymnal movement. Though it is technically a theme and variations, it seems less like some earthbound form than it does a floating constellation of ethereal tones, polished and hung against a velvet night sky with infinite care and flawless precision. Music of such limited dramatic contrast cannot be brought to a satisfactory conclusion in this context, and so here it leads without pause into the vivacious rondo-finale. The solo violin trots out the principal theme before it is taken over by the full orchestra. This jaunty tune returns three times, the last appearance forming a large coda. The intervening episodes allow for a virtuoso display from the soloist and even a touch of melancholy in one of the few minor-mode sections of the Concerto.
