CLASSICS 2021/22
2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:
TCHAIKOVSKY SYMPHONY NO. 5 PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor STEVEN BANKS, saxophone Friday, January 21, 2022 at 7:30pm Saturday, January 22, 2022 at 7:30pm Sunday, January 23, 2022 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
The Marriage of Figaro Overture, K. 492
MOZART
JOHN ADAMS Saxophone Concerto I. Animato – Moderato – Tranquillo, suave II. Molto vivo
— INTERMISSION —
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 I. Andante – Allegro con anima II. Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza III. Valse: Allegro moderato IV. Finale: Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace
CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 39 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!
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY SOUNDINGS
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PROGRAM I
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES 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. Now carrying the title of Conductor Emeritus, Oundjian’s fourteenyear 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, the Detroit, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. With the onset of world-wide concert cancellations support for students at Yale and Juilliard and the creation of a virtual summer festival in Boulder where he is Music Director of Colorado Music Festival became a priority. Winter 2021 saw the resumption of some orchestral activity with streamed events with Atlanta, Colorado, Indianapolis and Dallas symphonies. The 2021/22 season anticipates return visits to Toronto, Kansas City, Seattle, Colorado, Detroit, Baltimore and Indianapolis. 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 conducted the Yale and Juilliard Symphony Orchestras and the New World Symphony during the 2018/19 season. 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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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
PHOTO: CHRIS LEE
STEVEN BANKS, saxophone Recognized for his “glowing mahogany tone” (Seen and Heard International), “deeply felt lyricism” and “expert shaping of a dramatic arc” (Cleveland Classical), Steven Banks is an ambassador for the classical saxophone. He is establishing himself as both a compelling and charismatic soloist, dedicated to showcasing the vast capabilities of the instrument, and an advocate for expanding its repertoire. As an artist with a commitment to rethinking and expanding the boundaries of classical music, Banks “has the potential to be one of the transformational artists of the twenty-first century.” (Seen and Heard International) This season, Mr. Banks appears as concerto soloist under the direction of Peter Oundjian, first at the Colorado Music Festival in performances of works by Glazunov and Ibert, and later with the Colorado Symphony, performing John Adams’ Concerto. Mr. Banks will also appear on subscription concerts with The Cleveland Orchestra in Philip Glass’ Façades with John Adams on the podium. Additional solo engagements include the Mozart Concerto in C Major with the Westmoreland Symphony and the Oregon Mozart Players, as well as repeat performances of the Ibert Concertino da Camera and the Glazunov Concerto with the Erie Philharmonic. Mr. Banks regularly gives recitals at universities, performing arts series, and festivals across the United States and abroad. Recital invitations this season include Festival Napa Valley, Usedomer MusikFestival, Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota, Mary Baldwin University, Clemson University, Tannery Pond, Tennessee Arts Academy, Clarion Concerts, Jewish Community Alliance, Cutchogue Library, and the Aspen Music Festival. Prior to his invitation as soloist with The Cleveland Orchestra, Mr. Banks appeared with the ensemble under conductors including Franz Welser-Most, Jahja Ling, Matthias Pintscher, Alain Altinoglu, and Roderick Cox. He can be heard on a Naxos recording as baritone saxophonist of the award-winning Kenari Quartet. Mr. Banks is an advocate for diversity and inclusion in music education, performance, and newly commissioned works in the classical realm. He gave a talk at the TEDxNorthwesternU 2017 conference presenting his dynamic approach to overcoming institutionalized prejudices against women and people of color, and he has written and given lectures on the history of black classical composers. He also collaborated with colleagues Anthony Trionfo, flutist and violinist Randall Goosby to create the Learning to Listen roundtable, a discussion on the nuances of the Black experience in classical music and beyond. In partnership with the Sphinx Organization, they also created the Illuminate! series, which opened three essential conversations on the subject of music education, artist activism, and the LGBTQIA+ community in classical music. As Assistant Professor of Saxophone at Ithaca College, he makes a concerted effort to ensure that all music students feel supported in their everyday studies Last season, his critically acclaimed recital debut was streamed from Merkin Concert Hall, and co-sponsored by Washington Performing Arts featuring world premieres by Carlos Simon, Saad Haddad and one of his own compositions. Steven Banks is the first saxophonist to earn a place SOUNDINGS
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PROGRAM III
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES on the Young Concert Artists roster in its 60-year history, capturing First Prize at the 2019 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. Steven Banks has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Saxophone Performance with a minor in Jazz Studies from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and Master of Music degree from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music. His primary saxophone teachers have been Taimur Sullivan, Otis Murphy, Jr., and Galvin Crisp. Mr. Banks is an endorsing artist for Conn-Selmer instruments, D’Addario Woodwinds, lefreQue Sound Solutions, and Key Leaves.
Face masks and proof of vaccination required Welcome Back We are looking forward to seeing you at Boettcher Concert Hall this season!
COVID-19 Protocols To protect audiences and the community from illness and to slow the transmission of COVID-19, the Colorado Symphony joins the resident companies of the Denver Performing Arts Complex — Colorado Ballet, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Opera Colorado — in requiring both proof of full vaccination and face masks to attend indoor public performances starting October 1, 2021. Please see Coloradosymphony.org for full details. Please see Coloradosymphony.org for full details.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Overture to Le nozze di Figaro (“The Marriage of Figaro”), K. 492 ] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, and died on December 5, 1791 in Vienna. He composed The Marriage of Figaro during the winter of 1785-1786, and directed its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna on May 1, 1786. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Duration is about 4 minutes. The piece was last performed by the orchestra on May 11-13, 2018, with conductor Ken David Masur. On April 12, 1782, Pietro Metastasio, dean of 18th-century Italian opera librettists, died in Vienna. The following year, the poet Lorenzo da Ponte, a Venetian-born Jew who converted to Catholicism as a young man and took priestly orders but lived a life profligate enough to be dubbed “a kind of minor Casanova” by Mozart’s biographer Eric Blom, arrived in the Imperial City to fill the void. He was so successful that he was named poet to the Imperial Theaters the following year by Emperor Joseph II, whose taste in opera ran more to the traditional Italian variety than to its more prosaic German counterpart. Mozart, who claimed to his father to have searched through “hundreds of plays” to find a subject for a new opera, met da Ponte in 1783 and the writer agreed to furnish him with a new libretto. That promise bore no immediate fruit, but in 1785 Mozart approached da Ponte again with the idea that a recent satiric comedy of manners called La mariage de Figaro by the French writer Beaumarchais might well make a fine opera buffa. Mozart threw himself completely into the work’s preparations, and the premiere, on May 1, 1786 in Vienna’s Burgtheater, proved to be a fine success — the audience demanded the immediate encores of so many of its numbers that the performance lasted nearly twice as long as anticipated. Intrigues against both Mozart and da Ponte, however, managed to divert the public’s attention to other operas, and The Marriage of Figaro was seen only eight more times during the year. It was not given in Vienna at all in 1787, though its stunning success in Prague led to the commissioning of Don Giovanni for that city. The noted American critic Henry Edward Krehbiel (1854-1923) called the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro “the merriest of opera overtures ... putting the listener at once into a frolicsome mood.” It was the last part of the score Mozart wrote, and captures perfectly its aura of sparkling good spirits and fast action.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES JOHN ADAMS (born in 1947) Saxophone Concerto John Adamas was born on February 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Saxophone Concerto was composed in 2013 and premiered on August 22, 2013 by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer with Timothy McAllister as soloist. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, three oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, harp, piano, celesta and strings. Duration is about 29 minutes. This is the premiere performance by the Symphony. John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career: a recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he received the University of Louisville’s distinguished Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was the focus of the New York Philharmonic’s Composer Week, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America magazine; he has been made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 1999, Nonesuch released The John Adams Earbox, a critically acclaimed ten-CD collection of his work; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and was also recognized by New York’s Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work titled “John Adams: An American Master,” the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted at Lincoln Center; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society” and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, which included residencies and teaching at Northwestern University; he was a 2009 recipient of the NEA Opera Award; he has been granted honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music (London), Juilliard School and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities, honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and the California Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. Adams wrote of his Saxophone Concerto, composed in 2013 and premiered on August 22, 2013 by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and soloist Timothy McAllister under the composer’s direction, “American audiences know the saxophone almost exclusively via its use in jazz, soul and pop music. The instances of the saxophone in the classical repertory are rare, and the most famous appearances amount to only a handful of solos in works by Ravel (his Boléro and his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition), by Prokofiev (Lieutenant Kijé and Romeo and Juliet), Milhaud (La Création du Monde) and, of course, the Jet Song solo in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, probably one of the most immediately recognizable fivenote mottos in all of music. Nonetheless, its integration into the world of classical music has been a slow and begrudged one. “A composer writing a violin or piano concerto can access a gigantic repository of past models for reference, inspiration or even cautionary models. But there are precious few worthy PROGRAM VI
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES concertos for saxophone, and the extant ones did not especially speak to me. But I knew many great recordings from the jazz past that could form a basis for my compositional thinking, among them Focus, a 1961 album by Stan Getz for tenor sax and an orchestra of harp and strings arranged by Eddie Sauter. Although clearly a ‘studio’ creation, this album featured writing for the strings that referred to Stravinsky, Bartók and Ravel. Another album, Charlie Parker and Strings, from 1950, although more conventional in format, nonetheless helped to set a scenario in my mind for the way the alto sax could float and soar above an orchestra. Another album that I’d known since I was a teenager, New Bottle Old Wine, with Cannonball Adderley and that greatest of all jazz arrangers, Gil Evans, remained in mind throughout the composing of the new concerto as a model to aspire to. “While the Concerto is not meant to sound jazzy per se, its jazz influences lie only slightly below the surface. I make constant use of the instrument’s vaunted agility as well as its capacity for a lyrical utterance that is only a short step away from the human voice. The piece begins with one long first part that combines a fast movement with a slow, lyrical one. This is followed by a shorter second part, a species of funk-rondo with a fast, driving pulse.”
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893) Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, and died November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg. The Fifth Symphony was composed in 1888. The composer conducted the orchestra of the Russian Musical Society in St. Petersburg in the premiere, on November 17, 1888. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Duration is about 44 minutes. The last performance of this symphony was conducted by Brett Mitchell on September 22-24, 2017. Tchaikovsky was never able to maintain his self-confidence for long. More than once, his opinion of a work fluctuated between the extremes of satisfaction and denigration. The unjustly neglected Manfred Symphony of 1885, for example, left his pen as “the best I have ever written,” but the work failed to make a good impression at its premiere and Tchaikovsky’s estimation of it tumbled. The lack of success of Manfred was particularly painful, because he had not produced a major orchestral work since the Violin Concerto of 1878, and the score’s failure left him with the gnawing worry that he might be “written out.” The three years after Manfred were devoid of creative work. It was not until May 1888 that Tchaikovsky again took up the challenge of the blank page, collecting “little by little, material for a symphony,” he wrote to his brother Modeste. Tchaikovsky worked doggedly on the new symphony, ignoring illness, the premature encroachment of old age (he was only 48, but suffered from continual exhaustion and loss of vision), and his doubts about himself. He pressed on, and when the orchestration of the Fifth Symphony was completed, at the end of August, he said, “I have not blundered; it has turned out well.”
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Tchaikovsky never gave any indication that the Symphony No. 5, unlike the Fourth Symphony, had a program, though he may well have had one in mind. In their biography of the composer, Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson reckoned Tchaikovsky’s view of fate as the motivating force in the Symphony No. 5, though they distinguished its interpretation from that in the Fourth Symphony. “In the Fourth Symphony,” the Hansons wrote, “the Fate theme is earthy and militant, as if the composer visualizes the implacable enemy in the form, say, of a Greek god. In the Fifth, the majestic Fate theme has been elevated far above earth, and man is seen, not as fighting a force that thinks on its own terms, of revenge, hate, or spite, but a wholly spiritual power which subjects him to checks and agonies for the betterment of his soul.” The structure of the Fifth Symphony reflects this process of “betterment.” It progresses from minor to major, from darkness to light, from melancholy to joy — or at least to acceptance and stoic resignation. The Symphony’s four movements are linked together through the use of a recurring “Fate” motto theme, given immediately at the beginning by unison clarinets as the brooding introduction to the first movement. The sonata form proper starts with a melancholy melody intoned by bassoon and clarinet over a stark string accompaniment. Several themes are presented to round out the exposition: a romantic tune, filled with emotional swells, for the strings; an aggressive strain given as a dialogue between winds and strings; and a languorous, sighing string melody. All of the materials from the exposition are used in the development. The solo bassoon ushers in the recapitulation, and the themes from the exposition are heard again, though with appropriate changes of key and instrumentation. At the head of the manuscript of the second movement Tchaikovsky is said to have written, “Oh, how I love … if you love me…,” and, indeed, this wonderful music calls to mind an operatic love scene. (Tchaikovsky, it should be remembered, was a master of the musical stage who composed more operas than he did symphonies.) Twice, the imperious Fate motto intrudes upon the starlit mood of this romanza. If the second movement derives from opera, the third grows from ballet. A flowing waltz melody (inspired by a street song Tchaikovsky had heard in Italy a decade earlier) dominates much of the movement. The central trio section exhibits a scurrying figure in the strings. Quietly and briefly, the Fate motto returns in the movement’s closing pages. The finale begins with a long introduction based on the Fate theme cast in a heroic rather than a sinister or melancholy mood. A vigorous exposition, a concentrated development and an intense recapitulation follow. The long coda uses the motto theme in its major-key, victory-won setting.
©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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