CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 28 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
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Sunday’S concert iS SponSored by
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
deniSe and Scott HaSday.
Julie rubSam
J. BAKER
PHOTO: KELVIN
SPOTLIGHT BIOGRAPHIES
EARL LEE, conductor
Winner of the 2022 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, Earl Lee is a renowned Korean-Canadian conductor who has captivated audiences worldwide. Music Director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra since 2022, he recently finished a successful three-year tenure as Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he has led in subscription concerts both at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood.
In addition to a full season of concerts with the Ann Arbor Symphony, Earl’s 24/25 season includes debuts with the Atlanta, New World, Colorado, Sarasota, and Victoria Symphonies and the Juilliard Orchestra, and returns to the San Francisco Symphony and Royal Conservatory Orchestra Toronto.
Earl’s 23/24 season included subscription concerts with the Boston Symphony in Boston and at Tanglewood and guest conducting engagements with the Vancouver Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Winnipeg Symphony, Colorado Springs Philharmonic, The Florida Orchestra, the Royal Conservatory Orchestra Toronto, and Sejong Soloists at Carnegie Hall. Previous seasons have seen subscription debuts with the San Francisco Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic, Hawaii Symphony, and Edmonton Symphony; leading the Lunar New Year galas of both the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony; and concerts with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and with Sejong Soloists in both New York and Seoul.
Earl previously held positions as Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony and as the Resident Conductor of the Toronto Symphony. In 2022, he appeared with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam as a participant in the Ammodo masterclasses led by Fabio Luisi.
Earl’s 24/25 programs with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra include contemporary works by William Bolcom, Gyorgy Kurtag, Jessie Montgomery, Andrea Cassarubios, and Katherine Balch as well as standard repertoire from Mozart to Shostakovich. He leads the orchestra in its return to Detroit Orchestra Hall in January 2025 in a concert during the Sphinx Organizations’s annual SphinxConnect convention.
In all of his professional activities, Earl seeks ways to connect with fellow musicians and audiences on a personal level. He has taken great pleasure in mentoring young musicians as former Artistic Director and Conductor of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra, and as Music Director of the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra and is a regular guest conductor with the orchestras of North America’s top music schools such as Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School, and the New England, San Francisco, and Royal Conservatories.
As a cellist, Earl has performed at festivals such as the Marlboro Music Festival, Music from Angel Fire, Caramoor Rising Stars, and Ravinia’s Steans Institute and has toured as a member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO), with Musicians from Marlboro, and with Gary Burton & Chick Corea as a guest member of the Harlem String Quartet.
Earl was the recipient of the 50th Anniversary Heinz Unger Award from the Ontario Arts Council in 2018, of a Solti Career Assistance Award in 2021 and has been awarded a Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Scholarship by Kurt Masur and the Ansbacher Fellowship by the American Austrian Foundation and members of the Vienna Philharmonic. He studied cello at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School and conducting at Manhattan School of Music and the New England Conservatory. He lives in New York City with his wife and their daughter.
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BÉLA FLECK, banjo
Just in case you aren’t familiar with Béla Fleck, there are many who say he’s the premiere banjo player in the world. Others claim that Fleck has virtually reinvented the image and the sound of the banjo through a remarkable performing and recording career that has taken him all over the musical map and on a range of solo projects and collaborations. If you are familiar with Fleck, you know that he just loves to play the banjo, and put it into unique settings.
An eighteen-time Grammy Award-winner, Fleck has the virtuosic, jazz-toclassical ingenuity of an iconic instrumentalist and composer with bluegrass roots. For over 30 years, he has led Béla Fleck and The Flecktones, the groundbreaking quartet inspired by jazz, funk, bluegrass and beyond. From writing three banjo concertos for full symphony orchestra to exploring the banjo’s African roots with the award-winning 2009 documentary Throw Down Your Heart, many tout that Béla Fleck is the world’s premier banjo player. As Jon Pareles wrote for The New York Times, “That’s a lot of territory for five strings.”
Collaborators include Abigail Washburn, the Brooklyn Rider String Quartet, Chris Thile, The Blind Boys of Alabama, McCoy Tyner, Zakir Hussain, Edgar Meyer, and Rakesh Chaurasia (their latest album As We Speak won two Grammys in 2024). Fleck’s album Rhapsody in Blue was released February 12, 2024 on the centennial of the work’s premiere in New York City, and he debuted it at Carnegie Hall with an orchestra in May. His Grammy-winning project My Bluegrass Heart, is named in honor of his friend and hero Chick Corea (My Spanish Heart). Béla and Chick have toured as a duo and released three acclaimed albums, including their latest and final duo project, Remembrance (2024).
Rhapsody in Blue has entranced Béla Fleck since his childhood growing up. He recalls his Uncle Steve taking him to see the biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945) at the Thalia Theatre on the Upper West Side. (Fleck’s family lived only two blocks from Gershwin’s former residence in the neighborhood.)
“The movie had an incredible impact on young me, and the piece in particular blew me away,” Fleck says. “Over the years, I’ve checked in with Rhapsody in Blue regularly and always found it had that same compelling effect.” He added it to his “bucket list” of pieces he wanted to explore on the banjo. The pandemic gave him time to focus on the project.
Gershwin’s original score for Rhapsody – written at breakneck speed in the weeks before the premiere-is for two pianos. The composer/ arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated the music for Paul Whiteman’s jazz band, and it later became more widely known in a scoring for symphony orchestra he created in 1942. Fleck studied Gershwin’s piano score closely, “one measure at a time, just to see if it was even remotely possible on the banjo”, and concluded that “technically, it was possible-not easy, but some kind of possible.”
Fleck premiered his banjo interpretation of the piano part with the Nashville Symphony in 2023, with the original orchestration by Grofé for the orchestra. “I’ve always noted that banjo is kind like a lap piano,” says Fleck. One challenge, though, is that he can strike only three notes at a time (versus at least ten at the keyboard, using both hands-not to mention the much larger range of the piano). He thus had to change the piano part “to accommodate the banjo’s range and
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limitations.” Fleck adds that he is not incorporating improvised passages: “My goal is to play the piece very directly. I haven’t always enjoyed the improv-inclusive versions, although sometimes these are great. I just wanted to play the piece. It’s very challenging already!”
Fleck went on to expand and explore Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with an album by the same name in February 2024. Released for the iconic work’s centennial, the album pays homage to the legendary composer while redefining an American classic, growing from seminal idea to fruition through Fleck’s blend of inspiration, fearlessness, discipline and respect for the source material.
Gershwin was raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side as the son of Jewish-Russian immigrantsbackground he shared with Copland, just two years his junior. Growing up in this milieu sharpened his ear’s sensitivity to the polyglot musical textures around him; he would later weave these diverse musical styles into his music. Already in his teenage years Gershwin became firmly grounded in the “real” world of commercial entertainment: he launched his career by crafting popular songs (known as Tin Pan Alley songs in this era). In works like Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin used his gift for catchy, self-contained melodies to retool the European model of the piano miniature.
The title Rhapsody in Blue is a play on the artist James Whistler’s color-themed names for his paintings. George’s brother Ira Gershwin came up with that idea, replacing the working title American Rhapsody. But the piece remains “a musical kaleidoscope of America,” as Gershwin would later describe it, “of our vast melting pot, of our incomparable national pep, our blues, our metropolitan madness.”
As the culmination of Fleck’s lifelong love for Gershwin and his compositions, of his take on Rhapsody Fleck says, “I do hope that he would have loved it, that he would have gone, ‘Man, this is not what I expected, but I’m happy that the artist brought something different to it.’ Classical musicians do that all day long. The great ones find a way to inhabit a piece, and the composer would thank them for bringing themselves into it.
“That is what I would aspire towards, to head in that direction.”
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CARLOS SIMON (b. 1986)
Selections from Four Black American Dances
Carlos Simon was born April 13, 1986 in Atlanta, Georgia. The Four Black American Dances were composed in 2023, and premiered on February 9, 2023 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 15 minutes. This is the Colorado Symphony premiere performance of this piece.
Carlos Simon, Kennedy Center Composer-in-Residence through 2024, was born in Atlanta in 1986, grew up playing organ at his father’s church, immersed himself in music in high school, earned degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College, and completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan. He also studied in Baden, Austria and at the Hollywood Music Workshop and New York University’s Film Scoring Summer Workshop. Simon taught at Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta before being appointed in 2019 to the faculty of Georgetown University, where his projects have included a new composition dedicated to the slaves who helped build the school. He has also performed as keyboardist with the Boston Pops, Jackson Symphony and St. Louis Symphony, toured Japan in 2018 under the sponsorship of the United States Embassy in Tokyo and US/Japan Foundation, served as music director and keyboardist for Grammy Award-winner Jennifer Holliday, and appeared internationally with Grammy-nominated soul artist Angie Stone. Carlos Simon received the 2021 Medal of Excellence of the Sphinx Organization, dedicated to promoting and recognizing Black and Latinx classical music and musicians, Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Award, Theodore Presser Foundation Award, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Award, fellowships from the Sundance Institute and Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music, and a residency at the 2021 Ojai Festival.
Simon wrote of Four Black American Dances, composed in 2022 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, “Ring Shout is an ecstatic, transcendent religious ritual, first practiced by enslaved Africans in the West Indies and the United States, in which worshipers move in a circle while shuffling and stomping their feet and clapping their hands.
“Holy Dance evokes the Protestant Christian denominations, such as the Church of God in Christ (C.O.G.IC.), Pentecostal Assemblies of God, Apostolic and Holiness Church, among many others, that are known for their exuberant outward expressions of worship. The worship services in these churches will often have joyous dancing, spontaneous shouting, and soulful singing. This movement calls on the vibrant, celebratory character that still exists in many churches today.”
@BÉLA FLECK (b. 1958)
Movement III from Banjo Concerto No. 2, “Juno”
Béla Fleck was born July 10, 1958 in New York City. He composed the “Juno” Concerto in 2015-2016, and was soloist in its premiere on March 19, 2016 with the Canton (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gerhardt Zimmermann. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 9 minutes. This piece was last performed by the orchestra May 30, 2019, at Red Rocks with Scott O'Neil conducting and Béla Fleck on banjo.
When I was searching for titles for the Banjo Concerto No. 2, I realized that the biggest change in my life [since the Banjo Concerto No. 1] had been that I was writing as a father. The
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world’s not the same when you become a father, and you see things very differently. You’re a different person when you’re part of that process. It’s not so much about me, even though writing a banjo concerto is sort of a heroic effort. But this time I had a different point of view, so I named the piece after my son Juno, who was 2½ when I started the piece in 2015. The fast third movement of the Juno Concerto avoids overtly bluegrass or Appalachian associations. I’m attempting to put the banjo into different waters and not have it play the role of the hayseed.
-B.F.
@GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)
Rhapsody in Blue for Banjo and Orchestra Orchestrated by FERDE GROFÉ ARRANGED BY BÉLA FLECK
George Gershwin was born September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, and died July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California. Ferde Grofé was born March 27, 1892 in New York City, and died April 3, 1972 in Santa Monica, California. Gershwin composed the Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 and was the soloist in its premiered on February 12, 1924 in New York City, conducted by Paul Whiteman. The work was orchestrated for jazz band in 1924 and later arranged for full orchestra by Grofé; Béla Fleck arranged for the solo part for banjo in 2020-2023 and premiered that version on September 9, 2023 with the Nashville Symphony, conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two alto saxophones, tenor saxophone, two bassoons, three horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 18 minutes. Rhapsody in Blue was last performed by the orcestra September 16-18, 2022 with conductor Peter oundjian and pianist Jon Kimura.
For George White’s Scandals of 1922, the 24-year-old George Gershwin provided something a little bit different — an opera, a brief, somber one-acter called Blue Monday (later retitled 135th Street) incorporating some jazz elements that White cut after only one performance on the grounds that it was too gloomy. Blue Monday, however, impressed the show’s conductor, Paul Whiteman, then gaining a national reputation as the self-styled “King of Jazz” for his adventurous explorations of the new popular music styles with his Palais Royal Orchestra. A year later, Whiteman told Gershwin about his plans for a special program the following February in which he hoped to show some of the ways traditional concert music could be enriched by jazz, and suggested that the young composer provide a piece for piano and jazz orchestra. Gershwin, who was then busy with the final preparations for the upcoming Boston tryout of Sweet Little Devil and somewhat unsure about barging into the world of classical music, did not pay much attention to the request until he read in The New York Times on New Year’s Day that he was writing a new “symphony” for Whiteman’s program. After a few frantic phone calls, Whiteman finally convinced Gershwin to undertake the project, a work for piano solo (to be played by the composer) and Whiteman’s 22-piece orchestra — and then told him that it had to be finished in less than a month. Themes and ideas for the new piece immediately began to tumble through Gershwin’s head, and late in January, only three weeks after it was begun, the Rhapsody in Blue was completed.
The premiere of the Rhapsody in Blue — New York, Aeolian Hall, February 12, 1924 — was one of the great nights in American music. Many of the era’s most illustrious musicians attended, critics from far and near assembled to pass judgment, and the glitterati of society and culture graced the event. Gershwin fought down his apprehension over his joint debuts as serious composer and concert pianist, and he and his music had a brilliant success. “A new talent finding
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its voice,” wrote Olin Downes, music critic for The New York Times. Conductor Walter Damrosch told Gershwin that he had “made a lady out of jazz,” and then commissioned him to write the Concerto in F. There was critical carping about laxity in the structure of the Rhapsody in Blue, but there was none about its vibrant, quintessentially American character or its melodic inspiration, and it became an immediate hit, attaining (and maintaining) a position of popularity almost unmatched by any other concert work of a native composer.
Rhapsody in Blue has been variable in its instrumental settings since its inception in 1924, appearing almost simultaneously in Gershwin’s versions for one and two pianos and for piano soloist with jazz orchestra by Ferde Grofé, Paul Whiteman’s arranger; two years later Grofé scored it for “theater” (chamber) orchestra and in 1942 for full symphony orchestra, the version in which it is best known. The music’s popularity and instrumental flexibility have also invited a wide range of arrangements over the years — from organ to concert band, from saxophone quartet to unaccompanied marimba, with adaptations of the solo part for trumpet, harmonica, two clarinets and other instruments — and, in observance of the centennial of the Rhapsody’s premiere, banjo wizard Béla Fleck adapted the solo piano part for his instrument.
Fleck first heard the Rhapsody in Blue at age seven in his native New York City, when an uncle took him to a screening of the eponymous 1945 biopic that starred Robert Alda (Alan Alda’s father) as Gershwin and used the Rhapsody as its finale. “The movie had an incredible impact on young me,” Fleck recalled, “and the Rhapsody in Blue in particular blew me away. Over the years, I’ve checked in with Rhapsody regularly and always found that it had that same compelling effect on me,” so he added it to the “bucket list” of pieces he wanted to explore on his instrument. That opportunity arrived with the Covid pandemic lockdown in 2020, when concert life abruptly ceased and performers sought productive ways to use their unexpected free time. Fleck studied Gershwin’s piano score “one measure at a time, just to see if it was even remotely possible on the banjo…. Technically,” he concluded, “it would not be easy, but some kind of possible.”
Since Gershwin’s piano writing was dense, complex and technically challenging, an immediate problem for Fleck was that his instrument could only play three notes simultaneously versus the piano’s potential ten, and did so across a much wider range. “It’s a very two-handed part,” Fleck explained. “There are lots of things that go in opposite directions, with both hands working really hard. And I simply couldn’t do them on the banjo. It took three separate banjo staves entered into a music notation application for me to even understand what the piano part was doing. I worked on each measure over the course of the year to accommodate the banjo’s range and limitations, and then still had to judge whether the piece was good enough as a banjo feature, doing without all of the things that a piano could do. Finally I decided that if George was OK with Larry Adler playing it on the harmonica [in 1934], I think he’d probably be OK with my version.”
With the Rhapsody’s solo part carefully tailored to his own instrument, Fleck integrated it into Grofé’s 1942 arrangement for full orchestra and premiered the piece on September 9, 2023 with the Nashville Symphony, conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. Fleck recorded his arrangement the following February with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and conductor Eric Jacobson and timed the release to coincide with the exact centenary of the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue — February 12, 2024.
For those familiar with Grofé’s 1942 arrangement of the Rhapsody in Blue for piano with full orchestra, Fleck’s arrangement presents the piece in a different expressive light. Since the Rhapsody is, among many things, a showcase for the breathtaking technique of a virtuoso
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pianist (which Gershwin was universally attested to be), that aspect is inherent in most performances. The banjo, however, cannot match the piano in its power, speed or cascades of notes, so Fleck’s version is performed slower than customary (18:50 for his recording, ca. 16:00 for published editions and most recordings). The resulting music is more lean, spacious and intimate, allowing many of the score’s details to be heard more clearly and to better appreciate the remarkable craftmanship that the 25-year-old George Gershwin brought to the Rhapsody in Blue, his first composition for the concert hall.
@SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45
Sergei Rachmaninoff was born April 1, 1873 in Oneg (near Novgorod), Russia, and died March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California. He composed the Symphonic Dances in 1940 at his summer home in Huntington, Long Island, completing the orchestration by late October. The score is dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who gave the premiere on January 4, 1941. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings. Duration is about 34 minutes. The symphony last performed this piece September 16, 2022 with conductor Peter Oundjian.
World War I was inevitably a trial for Rachmaninoff and his countrymen, but his most severe personal adversity came when the 1917 Revolution smashed the aristocratic society of Russia — the only world he had ever known. He was forced to flee his beloved country for America and he pined for his homeland the rest of his life. He did his best to keep the old language, food, customs and holidays alive in his own household, “but it was at best synthetic,” wrote American musicologist David Ewen. “Away from Russia, which he could never hope to see again, he always felt lonely and sad, a stranger even in lands that were ready to be hospitable to him. His homesickness assumed the character of a disease, and one symptom of that disease was an unshakable melancholy.” By 1940, when he composed the Symphonic Dances, he was worried about his daughter Tatiana, who was trapped in France by the German invasion (he never saw her again), and had been weakened by a minor operation in May. He nevertheless felt the need to compose for the first time since the Third Symphony of 1936, and the Symphonic Dances were written quickly that summer. Still, it was the man and not the setting that was expressed in this music — “I try to make music speak directly that which is in my heart at the time I am composing,” he said. “If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, they become part of my music.”
The first of the Symphonic Dances, in a large three-part form (A–B–A), is spun from a tiny three-note descending motive heard at the beginning. The middle portion is given over to a folk-like melody initiated by the alto saxophone. The return of the opening section, with its distinctive falling motive, rounds out the first movement. The waltz of the second movement is more rugged and deeply expressive than the Viennese variety. The finale begins with a sighing introduction for the winds, which leads into a section in quicker tempo. The movement accumulates rhythmic energy as it progresses and virtually explodes into the last pages, a coda based on an ancient Russian Orthodox chant.
