CLASSICS 2021/22
2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:
MARIN ALSOP CONDUCTS MARIN ALSOP, conductor Friday, January 7, 2022 at 7:30pm Saturday, January 8, 2022 at 7:30pm Sunday, January 9, 2022 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
BARBER
Essay No. 2, Op. 17
COPLAND Appalachian Spring: Suite — INTERMISSION — PROKOFIEV Romeo and Juliet: Suite Montagues & Capulets Scene Morning Dance Young Juliet Masks Friar Laurence Dance Death of Tybalt Dance of the Antilles Girls Aubade Romeo & Juliet’s Tomb CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 44 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
PHOTO: THERESA WEY
MARIN ALSOP, conductor A conductor of vision and distinction, Marin Alsop represents a powerful and inspiring voice. Convinced that music has the power to change lives, she is internationally recognised for her innovative approach to programming and audience development, deep commitment to education, and advocacy for music’s importance in the world. The 2019-20 season marked Alsop’s first as Chief Conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which she leads at Vienna’s Konzerthaus and Musikverein, and on recordings, broadcasts and tours. As Chief Conductor and Curator of Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, she also curates and conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming summer residencies, formalizing her long relationship with Ravinia, where she made her debut with the orchestra in 2002. Appointed in 2020 as the first Music Director of the National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F), a program of the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, she will lead a newly formed conductor academy and conduct multiple concerts each June with the NOI+F Philharmonic. In collaboration with YouTube and Google Arts & Culture, Alsop is spearheading the “Global Ode to Joy” (GOTJ), a crowd-sourced video project to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. Together with Germany’s official Beethoven anniversary campaign and the leading arts organizations of six continents, Alsop invites the global community to share the call for tolerance, unity and joy of the composer’s Ninth Symphony in videos tagged #GlobalOdeToJoy. The project culminates in December 2020, the month of Beethoven’s birth, with a grand video finale: a GOTJ highlight reel, set to a performance of the “Ode to Joy” anchored by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, the international Stay-at-Home Choir and Alsop herself. In 2021, Alsop becomes Music Director Laureate and OrchKids Founder at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. This concludes her outstanding 14-year tenure as Music Director, which has seen her lead the orchestra on its first European tour in 13 years, on multiple awardwinning recordings and in more than two dozen world premieres, besides founding OrchKids, its successful music education program for the city’s most disadvantaged youth. In 2019, after seven years as Music Director, Alsop became Conductor of Honour of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), where she continues conducting major projects each season. Alsop has longstanding relationships with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras, and regularly guest conducts such major international ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Budapest Festival and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras. In 2019-20 she returned to the Philadelphia Orchestra, Danish National Symphony and Orchestre de Paris, whose season she opened in September 2020.
PROGRAM II
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES Recognized with multiple Gramophone Awards, Alsop’s extensive discography includes recordings for Decca, Harmonia Mundi and Sony Classical, and acclaimed Naxos cycles of Brahms with the London Philharmonic, Dvořák with the Baltimore Symphony, and Prokofiev with the São Paulo Symphony. Committed to new music, she was Music Director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years. The first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Alsop has also been honored with the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award, and made history as the first female conductor of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms. Amongst many other awards and academic positions, she serves as 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, is Director of Graduate Conducting at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute and holds Honorary Doctorates from Yale University and the Juilliard School. To promote and nurture the careers of her fellow female conductors, in 2002 she founded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, which was re-named in her honor as the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship in 2020.
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.
SOUNDINGS
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PROGRAM III
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981) Essay No. 2, Op. 17 Samuel Barber was born on March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and died on January 23, 1981 in New York City. He composed the Essay No. in 1942. It was premiered by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic on April 16th of that year. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes. This piece was last performed July 5, 2010 at Red Rocks with Scott O'Neil conducting. Literature and music have long had close associations, especially in the musical settings of poetry and in the opera house. Early in the 19th century, however, some compositions without sung text began to reflect the extra-musical world of the written word, and program music based on literary works became an important genre of the Romantic era. Beethoven’s powerful, stormy Coriolan Overture was inspired by the play of Joseph von Collin; Liszt penned more than a dozen tone poems for orchestra, most based on literary subjects; Strauss glossed Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra. This Romantic tradition carried over to the works of one of the masters of American 20th-century music — Samuel Barber. Barber was a sensitive, cultured and discriminating reader of the best literature throughout his life, and he translated several of his favorite writings into music. His catalog shows compositions inspired by Matthew Arnold, Shelley, James Agee, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and A.E. Housman. It was with the Overture to “The School for Scandal” of 1932 (“suggested by Sheridan’s comedy,” as the composer noted in the published score) that his musical style crystallized. Barber’s reputation was solidified when Toscanini gave the premieres of the bardic Adagio for Strings and the Essay No. 1 with the NBC Symphony in 1938, the first American works performed by that conductor and orchestra. An “essay,” according to The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, is “a short literary composition on a particular theme or subject, usually in prose and generally analytical, speculative, or interpretative.” With the Essay No. 1 for Orchestra of 1937, Barber created a musical counterpart of the literary genre — a compact, single-movement, tightly reasoned work of reflective quality and considerable expressive substance. He returned to the form with the Second Essay, written when Bruno Walter requested from him a new piece that could be performed at the conductor’s concerts with the New York Philharmonic in 1942. (The Third Essay of 1978 was among Barber’s last compositions.) Barber produced the Second Essay at a time when his style was turning toward greater harmonic tension and more probing expression. The work is built from three themes. The first, an open-interval melody that is at once heroic and nostalgic, is given immediately by solo flute and repeated by bass clarinet. The timpani introduces the second theme, built around a small skip played in quick rhythms. Elements of both the earlier motives are transmuted in the wide-ranging third theme, initiated by violas and carried forward by the solo oboe. After a simultaneous development of the themes, the woodwinds begin a fugue based on the timpani’s motive. The entire ensemble is eventually drawn into the thematic discussion, whose climax is
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES achieved by weaving together all three themes. The music quiets, and the timpani hints again, softly, at its theme before a coda of broad and noble sentiment draws to a close this work of superb craftsmanship and stirring emotion.
AARON COPLAND (1900-1990) Suite from Appalachian Spring Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on December 2, 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York. Appalachian Spring was composed for chamber orchestra of thirteen instruments in 1943-1944 and revised as a suite for full orchestra in 1945. The ballet was premiered at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 1944. The first performance of the orchestral suite was given on October 4, 1945 by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Artur Rodzinski. The score calls for woodwinds, horns, trumpets and trombones in pairs, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings. The last performance of this piece by the orchestra was October 15, 2006, conducted by Scott O'neil Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, one of America’s greatest patrons of the arts, went to see a dance recital by Martha Graham in 1942. So taken with the genius of the dancer-choreographer was Mrs. Coolidge that she offered to have three ballets specially composed for her. Miss Graham chose as composers of the music Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith and an American whose work she had admired for over a decade — Aaron Copland. In 1931, Miss Graham had staged Copland’s Piano Variations as the ballet Dithyramb, and she was eager to have another dance piece from him, especially in view of his recent successes with Billy the Kid and Rodeo. She devised a scenario based on her memories of her grandmother’s farm in turn-of-the20th-century Pennsylvania, and it proved to be a perfect match for the direct, quintessentially American style that Copland espoused in those years. Edwin Denby’s description of the ballet’s action from his review of the New York premiere in May 1945 was reprinted in the published score: “[The ballet concerns] a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the 19th century. The bride-to-be and the young farmerhusband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end, the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.” The premiere of Appalachian Spring (Miss Graham borrowed the title from a poem by Hart Crane, though the content of the poem has no relation to the stage work) was given on October 30, 1944 (in honor of Mrs. Coolidge’s 80th birthday) in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the limited space in the theater allowed Copland to use a chamber
SOUNDINGS
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PROGRAM V
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES orchestra of only thirteen instruments (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano and nine strings). The performance was repeated in New York in May to great acclaim, and garnered the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Music Critics Circle Award as the outstanding theatrical work of the 1944-1945 season. Soon after its New York premiere, Copland revised the score as a suite of eight continuous sections for full orchestra by eliminating about eight minutes of music in which, he said, “the interest is primarily choreographic.”
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953) Suite from Romeo and Juliet Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Russia, and died on March 5, 1953 in Moscow. The ballet Romeo and Juliet was composed in 1935, but not premiered until December 1938 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Prokofiev drew three orchestral suites from the complete score, which are excerpted on this concert. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, cornet, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings. Duration is about 45 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece February 6-8,2004, with Marin Alsop conducting. When Prokofiev returned to Russia in 1933 after his long sojourn in the West, he had already acquired a reputation as a composer of ballet. His first balletic effort had been the volcanic Ala and Lolly written for Diaghilev in Paris in 1914, whose music is better known in its concert form as the Scythian Suite. Though Diaghilev did not like the piece and refused to stage it, he remained convinced of Prokofiev’s talent and commissioned Chout (“The Buffoon”) from him in 1921 and produced it with his Ballet Russe. Le Pas d’acier (“The Steel Step”) followed in 1927, and The Prodigal Son in 1928, the last new ballet Diaghilev produced before his death the following year. Sur le Borysthène (“On the Dnieper”) was staged, unsuccessfully, by the Paris Opéra in 1932. The last two of these works showed a move away from the spiky musical language of Prokofiev’s earlier years toward a simpler, more lyrical style, and the Kirov Theater in Leningrad took them as evidence in 1934 that he should be commissioned to compose a full-length, three-act ballet on one of the theater’s classic stories of romance — Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev was immediately taken with the Leningrad Kirov’s proposal for a Romeo and Juliet ballet, and spent much time during the spring of 1935 with the company’s stage director, Sergei Radlov, working out a detailed scenario. Enough of the music was composed during the summer at Prokofiev’s secluded house in Polenovo, near Tarusa, that he could write to a friend in late July, “Juliet is already tripping through the third act.” For reasons never made clear (had the outspoken Prokofiev tread on some sensitive political toe?), the Kirov withdrew its offer to produce the ballet, and a contract with the Moscow Bolshoi was arranged instead. A tryout of the music was given in the Beethoven Hall of the Bolshoi Jan. 7-9, 2022, page 3 Theater in October, but failed to ignite enthusiasm for its balletic potential. “Undanceable,” declared some. PROGRAM VI
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES V.V. Konin, in a dispatch to the Musical Courier, criticized “the awkward incongruity between the realistic idiom of the musical language, which successfully characterizes the individualism of the Shakespearean images, and the blind submission to the worst traditions of the old form.” This last comment referred to the “happy ending” of the original scenario, in which Romeo and Juliet survive to join in the finale. (“Dead people don’t dance,” reasoned Prokofiev.) Whatever its motive, the Bolshoi broke its contract to stage the ballet, so Prokofiev turned to the expedient of extracting music from the complete score for concert performance. Two orchestral suites were assembled and heard in Russia and the United States before the complete ballet was premiered, in Brno, Czechoslovakia in December 1938, a production in which the composer took no part. A third orchestral suite dates from 1944. At about the time of the Brno performance, Prokofiev met the choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky. Lavrovsky, building on the reputation the Romeo and Juliet music had acquired in its concert performances, finally convinced the Leningrad Kirov to stage the work. A satisfactory way was found to restore the tragic close of the original play. At a celebratory supper party following the successful opening of Romeo and Juliet, delayed for a half-decade in its Russian premiere, Galina Ulanova, the production’s prima ballerina, ended her toast with a bit of fractured Shakespeare: “Never was a story of more woe/Than this of Prokofiev’s music for Romeo.” Romeo and Juliet has since become one of the most popular of all full-length ballets. Montagues and Capulets incorporates, as slow introduction, the music accompanying the Duke as he forbids further fights between the families on pain of death, the heavy-footed Dance of the Capulet Knights from the Act I ballroom scene, and a graceful transformation of the Knights’ theme to portray Juliet. Scene depicts the morning awakening of city’s streets. The bright Morning Dance follows. Young Juliet characterizes the several moods of the heroine, not yet fourteen years old. The swaggering/cautious Masks depicts the arrival in masks and costumes of Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio at the ball in the house of their enemy. The ecclesiastical music depicting Friar Laurence occurs as the friendly monk and Romeo await Juliet in the cleric’s cell. Dance is an episode from the scene of the folk festival in Act II. Death of Tybalt is based on the music accompanying the duel of Tybalt and Mercutio, Tybalt’s death, and his funeral procession. Bridesmaids circle quietly around the sleeping Juliet in Dance of the Antilles Girls. The Aubade (“morning music”) occurs in the ballet after Juliet has drunk the potion and fallen asleep. Romeo at Juliet’s Tomb is taken from the ballet’s final scene — Juliet’s funeral procession and Romeo’s grief at her presumed death. Juliet’s Death is the poignant music that closes the ballet. ©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
SOUNDINGS
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DON’T MISS THESE UPCOMING EVENTS!
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 JAN 21-23 FRI-SAT 7:30 ✣ SUN 1:00 Peter Oundjian, conductor Steven Banks, saxophone MOZART The Marriage of Figaro Overture, K. 492 JOHN ADAMS Saxophone Concerto TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64
Berlioz Symphonie fantastique conducted by Douglas Boyd FEB 11-13 FRI-SAT 7:30 ✣ SUN 1:00 Douglas Boyd, conductor Brook Ferguson, flute MENDELSSOHN The Hebrides, Op. 26 “Fingal’s Cave” MOZART Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major, K. 313 BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14
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