CLASSICS 2021/22
2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:
DVOŘÁK SYMPHONY NO. 9 “FROM THE NEW WORLD” JAIME MARTÍN, conductor KAREN GOMYO, violin Friday, October 1, 2021 at 7:30pm Saturday, October 2, 2021 at 7:30pm Sunday, October 3, 2021 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
KODÁLY Dances of Galánta I. Lento II. Allegretto moderato III. Allegro con moto, grazioso IV. Allegro V. Allegro vivace TCHAIKOVSKY Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 I. Allegro moderato II. Canzonetta: Andante III. Finale: Allegro vivacissimo — INTERMISSION —
DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 “From the New World” I. Adagio – Allegro molto II. Largo III. Molto vivace IV. Allegro con fuoco CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 29 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
2 0 2 1 /2 2
PROGRAM I
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES JAIME MARTÍN, conductor In 2022, Spanish conductor Jaime Martín takes on the position of Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Since 2019 Maestro Martín has been Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, with his appointment now extended up to 2027, and Chief Conductor of Ireland’s RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. He has been the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of Gävle Symphony Orchestra since 2013, and was recently announced as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España (Spanish National Orchestra) for the 2022/23 season. Having spent many years as a highly regarded flautist, working with the most inspiring conductors of our time, Jaime turned to conducting full-time in 2013 and has become very quickly sought after at the highest level. Recent and future engagements include his debuts with the Dresden and Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestras, return visits to the London Symphony, Sydney Symphony, RTVE National Symphony, Antwerp Symphony, Colorado Symphony and Gulbenkian orchestras, as well as a nine-city European tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
PROGRAM II
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES KAREN GOMYO, violin Violinist Karen Gomyo has captivated audiences in North America, Europe and Australasia with her musical integrity, technical assurance and compelling interpretations. Ms. Gomyo has worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, and the Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Houston, Vancouver, Indianapolis and Oregon symphonies, among many others. Recent and upcoming appearances in North America include a tour with the Toronto Symphony to Montreal and Ottawa, and re-engagements with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and the St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, Toronto, Milwaukee and New Jersey symphonies and the Minnesota Orchestra. Internationally, Ms. Gomyo has appeared with the Philharmonia in London, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, Bamberg Symphony, Danish National Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Radio France, Deutsches Symphony Orchestra Berlin, Vienna Chamber Orchestra and the Polish National Radio Orchestra in Europe; and in Australasia with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania and West Australia (Perth) symphonies as well as on tour with the New Zealand Symphony. In October 2020, she made her debut with the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Semyon Bychkov and returns to Prague to work with the orchestra again in December 2021. Strongly committed to contemporary works, in May 2018, Ms. Gomyo performed the world premiere of Samuel Adams’ Chamber Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen to great critical acclaim. The work was written for her and commissioned by the CSO to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its MusicNow series. She also performed the North American premiere of Matthias Pintscher’s Concerto No. 2 “Mar’eh” with the composer conducting the National Symphony Orchestra, as well as Peteris Vasks’“Vox Amoris” with the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds. In April 2022, she will premiere a double concerto written for her and trumpet player Tine Thing Helsmeth composed by Xi Wang with the Dallas Symphony. Karen Gomyo is deeply interested in the Nuevo Tango music of Astor Piazzolla, and collaborates with Piazzolla’s longtime pianist and tango legend Pablo Ziegler. She also performs regularly with the Finnish guitarist Ismo Eskelinen, with whom she has appeared at the Dresden and Mainz Festivals in Germany, and in recitals in Helsinki and New York. Born in Tokyo, Ms. Gomyo studied in Montreal and in New York at The Juilliard School with famed violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay. She plays on the “Aurora, exFoulis” Stradivarius violin of 1703 that was bought for her exclusive use by a private sponsor.
SOUNDINGS
2 0 2 1 /2 2
PROGRAM III
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES ZOLTÁN KODÁLY (1882-1967): Dances of Galánta Zoltán Kodály was born on December 16, 1882 in Kecskemét, Hungary, and died on March 6, 1967 in Budapest. He composed these folk-inspired Dances during the summer of 1933 for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society, to which organization the score is dedicated. Ernst von Dohnányi conducted the Society’s orchestra in the premiere, on October 10, 1933. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, snare drum, triangle, glockenspiel and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes. The last performance of this piece at Boettcher Concert Hall was November, 2016, conducted by Peter Oundjian. In 1905, when Kodály was working toward his doctoral degree at Budapest University, he found it necessary to leave town to do some research for his thesis — he needed information on the stanzaic structure of Hungarian folksong — and he returned to his childhood home to collect it. Between 1885 and 1892 (ages three to ten), Kodály lived in Galánta, a small market town near the Austrian border, where his father was the local stationmaster for the national railway and where he had first heard the folksongs and Gypsy bands which were among his most lasting and influential musical impressions. When he returned there in 1905 on what proved to be the first of many folk music hunts throughout eastern Europe, he went to old friends, servants and neighbors and asked them to sing again the songs he had so loved as a boy. He accumulated over 150 examples, more than enough material to complete his thesis, and he returned to Budapest. During the next thirty years, Kodály not only continued to collect indigenous music, but he also devised a system of music education based on Hungarian folk song and consistently utilized its stylistic components in his compositions. When the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned him to write a work for its 80th anniversary, Kodály dipped once again into his inexhaustible folk treasury for melodic material, turning specifically to some books of Hungarian dances published in Vienna around 1800 which contained music “after several Gypsies of Galánta.” These dances were in the verbunkos or Gypsy style that had been assimilated into the concert works of, among many others, Liszt, Bartók and Enesco. The verbunkos, a Hungarian dance of alternating fast and slow sections, became something of a national institution when it was used by local military recruiters during the 18th-century imperial wars as a tactic to entice young men into joining the armed forces. (A sergeant leading a dozen of his hussars through the masculine motions of the dance to the accompaniment of a Gypsy band was apparently irresistible to any red-blooded Hungarian.) While no modern young man would consider enlisting just because he saw a nice dance, it must be remembered that the soldiers of that era were equally proficient at wine, wenches and waltzing as at war, and a spirited verbunkos was more a promise of pleasures to come than a mere temporary diversion. The verbunkos withered away after conscription was begun in 1849, but its progeny still resound in concert halls throughout the world. The Dances of Galánta follow the structure of the alternating slow and fast sections of their verbunkos model. The work’s slow introduction consists of a series of instrumental solos (played in turn by cello, horn, oboe and clarinet) separated by rushing string figures. The first dance, a slow one begun by the solo clarinet, displays a restrained Gypsy pathos in its snapping rhythmic figures. The quicker second dance, initiated by the solo flute, is based on a melody circling around a single pitch in halting rhythms. The first dance returns in the full orchestra as a bridge to the next
PROGRAM IV
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES number in the series, a spirited tune with engaging syncopations heard first in the oboe. Another brief recall of the opening dance leads to the finale, a brilliant whirlwind of music that is twice broken off in its headlong rush. The first interruption is for a cheeky little tune insouciantly paraded by the clarinet and the other woodwinds. The second interruption is for a final reminiscence of the opening dance, which dissolves into a short clarinet cadenza. The closing section of the Dances of Galánta, electric in its rhythmic intensity and gleaming orchestration, is music of stomping feet, whirling bodies and abundant, youthful enthusiasm.
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893): Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, and died on November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg. He composed his only Violin Concerto in March and April 1878. It was dedicated to Adolf Brodsky, who played the premiere with the Vienna Philharmonic on December 4, 1881, Hans Richter conducting. The work is scored for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Duration is about 33 minutes. Last performed by the orchestra November, 2019, with conductor Brett Mitchell and violinist Angelo Xiang Yu. In the summer of 1877, Tchaikovsky undertook the disastrous marriage that lasted less than three weeks and resulted in his emotional collapse and attempted suicide. He fled from Moscow to his brother Modeste in St. Petersburg, where he recovered his wits and discovered that he could find solace in his work. He spent the late fall and winter completing his Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onégin. The brothers decided that travel outside of Russia would be an additional balm to the composer’s spirit, and they duly installed themselves at Clarens on Lake Geneva in Switzerland soon after the first of the year. In Clarens, Tchaikovsky had already begun work on a piano sonata when he was visited by Joseph Kotek, a talented young violinist who had been a student in one of his composition classes at the Moscow Conservatory, who brought with him a score for the recent Symphonie Espagnole for Violin and Orchestra by the French composer Edouard Lalo. They read through the piece, and Tchaikovsky was so excited by the possibilities of a work for solo violin and orchestra that he set aside the gestating piano sonata and immediately began a concerto of his own. He worked quickly, completing the present slow movement in a single day when he decided to discard an earlier attempt. (This abandoned piece ended up as the first of the three Meditations for Violin and Piano, Op. 42.) By the end of April, the Concerto was finished. Tchaikovsky sent the manuscript to Leopold Auer, a friend who headed the violin department at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and who was also Court Violinist to the Czar, hoping to have him premiere the work. Much to the composer’s regret, Auer returned the piece as “unplayable,” and apparently spread that word with such authority to other violinists that it was more than three years before the Violin Concerto was heard in public.
SOUNDINGS
2 0 2 1 /2 2
PROGRAM V
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES It was Adolf Brodsky, a former colleague of Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, who first accepted the challenge of this Concerto. After having “taken it up and put it down,” in his words, for two years, he finally felt secure enough to give the work a try, and he convinced Hans Richter to include it on the concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1881. Brodsky must have felt that he was on something of a crusade during the preparations for the performance. There was only a single full rehearsal allotted for the new work, and most of that was taken up with correcting the parts, which were awash with copyist’s errors. Richter wanted to make cuts. The orchestra did not like the music, and at the performance played very quietly so as not to enter with a crashing miscue. Brodsky deserves the appreciation of the music world for standing pat in his belief in the Concerto amid all these adversities. When the performance was done, the audience felt that way as well, and applauded him. The piece itself, however, was roundly hissed. The critical barrage was led by that powerful doyen of Viennese conservatism, Eduard Hanslick, whose tasteless summation (“Music that stinks in the ear”) irritated Tchaikovsky until the day he died. Despite its initial reception, Brodsky remained devoted to the Concerto, and he played it throughout Europe. The work soon began to gain in popularity, as did the music of Tchaikovsky generally, and it has become one of the most famous concertos in the literature. It is a revealing side-note that Leopold Auer, who had initially shunned the work, eventually came to include it in his repertory, and even taught it to his students, some of whom — Seidel, Zimbalist, Elman, Heifetz, Milstein — became its greatest exponents in the 20th century. The Concerto opens quietly with a tentative introductory tune. A foretaste of the main theme soon appears in the violins, around which a quick crescendo is mounted to usher in the soloist. After a few unaccompanied measures, the violin presents the movement’s lovely main theme above a simple string background. After an elaborated repetition of this melody, a transition follows that eventually involves the entire orchestra and gives the soloist the first of many opportunities for pyrotechnical display. The second theme is the beginning of a long dynamic and rhythmic buildup that leads into the development with a sweeping, balletic presentation of the main theme by the full orchestra. The soloist soon steals back the attention with breathtaking leaps and double stops. The grand balletic mood returns, giving way to a brilliant cadenza as a link to the recapitulation. The flute sings the main theme for four measures before the violin takes it over, and all then follows the order of the exposition. An exhilarating coda asks for no fewer than four tempo increases, and the movement ends in a brilliant whirl of rhythmic energy. The slow middle movement begins with a chorale for woodwinds that is heard again at the end of the movement to serve as a frame around the musical picture inside. On the canvas of this scene is displayed a soulful melody intoned by the violin with the plaintive suggestion of a Gypsy fiddler. The finale is joined to the slow movement without a break. With the propulsive spirit of a dashing Cossack trepak, the finale flies by amid the soloist’s dizzying show of agility and speed. Like the first movement, this one also races toward its final climax, almost daring listeners to try to sit still in their seats. After playing the Concerto’s premiere, Adolf Brodsky wrote to Tchaikovsky that the work was “wonderfully beautiful.” He was right.
PROGRAM VI
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904): Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World” Antonín Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, and died on May 1, 1904 in Prague. He composed the “New World” Symphony between December 1892 and May 24, 1893, during the first of his three years as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Anton Seidl led the New York Philharmonic in the work’s premiere on December 16, 1893 in Carnegie Hall. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra was January, 2019, with Brett Mitchell conducting. When Antonín Dvořák, aged 51, arrived in New York on September 27, 1892 to direct the new National Conservatory of Music, both he and the institution’s founder, Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, expected that he would help to foster an American school of composition. He was clear and specific in his assessment: “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. They can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.... There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot find a thematic source here.” Dvořák’s knowledge of this music came from Henry Thacker Burleigh, an African-American song writer and student of his who sang the traditional melodies to the enthralled composer. Burleigh later recalled, “There is no doubt that Dr. Dvořák was very deeply impressed by the Negro spirituals from the old plantation. He just saturated himself in the spirit of those old tunes, and then invented his own themes.” The “New World” Symphony was not only Dvořák’s way of pointing toward a truly American musical idiom but also a reflection of his feelings about his own country. “I should never have written the Symphony as I have,” he said, “if I hadn’t seen America,” but he added in a later letter that it was “genuine Bohemian music.” There is actually a reconciliation between these two seemingly contradictory statements, since the characteristics that Dvořák found in Burleigh’s indigenous American music — pentatonic (five-note) scales, modal minor keys with a lowered seventh degree, rhythmic syncopations, frequent returns to the central key note — are common to much folk music throughout the world, including that of his native Bohemia. Because his themes for the “New World” Symphony drew upon these cross-cultural qualities, to Americans, they sound American; to Czechs, they sound Czech. The “New World” Symphony is unified by the use of a motto theme that occurs in all four movements. This bold, striding phrase, with its arching contour, is played by the horns as the main theme of the sonata-form opening movement, having been foreshadowed (also by the horns) in the slow introduction. Two other themes are used in the first movement: a sad, dancelike melody for flute and oboe that exhibits folk characteristics, and a brighter tune, with a striking resemblance to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, for the solo flute. Many years before coming to America, Dvořák had encountered Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, which he read in a Czech translation. The great tale remained in his mind, and he considered making an opera of it during his time in New York. That project came to nothing, but Hiawatha did have an influence on the “New World” Symphony: the second movement was
SOUNDINGS
2 0 2 1 /2 2 PROGRAM VII
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES inspired by the forest funeral of Minnehaha; the third, by the dance of the Indians at the feast. That the music of these movements has more in common with the old plantation songs than with the chants of native Americans is due to Dvořák’s mistaken belief that African-American and Indian music were virtually identical. The second movement is a three-part form (A–B–A), with a haunting English horn melody (later fitted with words by William Arms Fisher to become the folksong-spiritual Goin’ Home) heard in the first and last sections. The recurring motto here is pronounced by the trombones just before the return of the main theme in the closing section. The third movement is a tempestuous scherzo with two gentle, intervening trios providing contrast. The motto theme, played by the horns, dominates the coda. The finale employs a sturdy motive introduced by the horns and trumpets after a few introductory measures in the strings. In the Symphony’s closing pages, the motto theme, Goin’ Home and the scherzo melody are all gathered up and combined with the principal subject of the finale to produce a marvelous synthesis of the entire work — a look back across the sweeping vista of Dvořák’s musical tribute to America. ©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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.
PROGRAM VIII C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G