Program - Brahms Symphony No. 1 conducted by Christopher Dragon

2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:

CLASSICS 2021/22

BRAHMS SYMPHONY NO. 1 CONDUCTED BY CHRISTOPHER DRAGON CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor SIMONE PORTER, violin Friday, October 15, 2021 at 7:30pm Saturday, October 16, 2021 at 7:30pm Sunday, October 17, 2021 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

The Magic Flute Overture

MOZART

MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 I. Allegro molto appassionato II. Andante III. Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace

— INTERMISSION — BRAHMS Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 I. Un poco sostenuto; Allegro II. Andante sostenuto III. Un poco allegretto e gracioso IV. Adagio; Più andate; Allegro non troppo, ma con brio

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 38 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 CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor Australian conductor Christopher Dragon is the Music Director of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra and Resident Conductor of the Colorado Symphony. He joined the Colorado Symphony in the 2015/2016 Season as Associate Conductor – a position he held for four years. For three years prior, Dragon held the position of Assistant Conductor with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, which gave him the opportunity to work closely with Principal Conductor Asher Fisch.

Dragon works regularly in Australia and has guest conducted the Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. His 2015/16 debut performance at the Sydney Opera House with John Pyke and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was released on album by ABC Music and won an ARIA the following year. Dragon’s international guest conducting includes Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre, Omaha Symphony, San Diego Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

He has also conducted at numerous festivals including the Breckenridge and Bangalow Music Festivals, with both resulting in immediate re-invitations. At the beginning of 2016, Dragon conducted Wynton Marsalis’ Swing Symphony as part of the Perth International Art Festival alongside Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Dragon began his conducting studies in 2011 and was a member of the prestigious Symphony Services International Conductor Development Program in Australia under the guidance of course director Christopher Seaman. He has also studied with numerous distinguished conductors including Leonid Grin, Paavo and Neeme Jarvi at the Jarvi Summer Festival, Fabio Luisi at the Pacific Music Festival and conducting pedagogue Jorma Panula.

PROGRAM II

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

PHOTO: ELISHA KNIGHT

SIMONE PORTER, violin Violinist Simone Porter has been recognized as an emerging artist of impassioned energy, interpretive integrity, and vibrant communication. In the past few years she has debuted with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and with a number of renowned conductors, including Stéphane Denève, Gustavo Dudamel, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Nicholas McGegan, Ludovic Morlot, and Donald Runnicles. Born in 1996, Simone made her professional solo debut at age 10 with the Seattle Symphony and her international debut with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London at age 13. In March 2015, Simone was named a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

At the invitation of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Simone performed his work Lachen verlernt (Laughing Unlearnt), at the New York Philharmonic’s “Foreign Bodies,” a multi-sensory celebration of the work of the composer and conductor. In recent seasons, she has also appeared at the Edinburgh Festival performing Barber under the direction of Stéphane Denève, and at the Mostly Mozart Festival performing Mozart under Louis Langrée. She has also performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl with both Nicholas McGegan and Ludovic Morlot, and at Walt Disney Concert Hall with Gustavo Dudamel.

Internationally, Simone has performed with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra with Gustavo Dudamel; the Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira in Rio de Janeiro; the National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica; the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong; the Royal Northern Sinfonia; the Milton Keynes City Orchestra in the United Kingdom; and the Opera de Marseilles.

Simone made her Carnegie Zankel Hall debut on the Emmy Award-winning TV show From the Top: Live from Carnegie Hall followed in November 2016 by her debut in Stern Auditorium.

In June 2016, her featured performance of music from Schindler’s List with Maestro Gustavo Dudamel and members of the American Youth Symphony was broadcast nationally on the TNT Network as part of the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award: A Tribute to John Williams.

Raised in Seattle, Washington, Simone studied with Margaret Pressley as a recipient of the Dorothy Richard Starling Scholarship, and was then admitted into the studio of the renowned pedagogue Robert Lipsett, with whom she studied at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles. Summer studies have included many years at the Aspen Music Festival, Indiana University’s Summer String Academy, and the Schlern International Music Festival in Italy.

Simone Porter performs on a 1740 Carlo Bergonzi violin made in Cremona Italy on generous loan from The Master’s University, Santa Clarita, California. www.simoneporterviolin.com

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PROGRAM III

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Overture to Die Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”), K. 620 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, and died on December 5, 1791 in Vienna. He composed his last opera, The Magic Flute, during the summer of 1791, and conducted its premiere at Vienna’s Theater-auf-der-Wieden on September 30th. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds, horns and trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. Duration is about 7 minutes.

Early in 1791, Mozart was deeply in debt, troubled by the disinclination of the Viennese public to embrace his recent music and concert appearances, and suffering seriously from the kidney failure that would take his life before the year was out, so when Emanuel Schickaneder, a slightly shady actor and theater entrepreneur, suggested in May that they collaborate on a new opera that was sure to be a hit, the composer jumped at the chance. The Viennese public was especially fond at that time of comic pieces with Oriental or fantastic settings, and Schickaneder had achieved a fine success soon after he had arrived in town in 1789 with the “magic opera” Oberon by composer Paul Wranitzky and librettist Carl Ludwig Giesecke. For a sequel he proposed to write the libretto for a Singspiel called Die Zauberflöte — The Magic Flute — a comic musical with spoken dialogue based on Liebeskind’s story Lulu from Wieland’s 1786 collection of Oriental fairy-tales called Dschinnistan, for which Mozart would provide the music.

Mozart threw himself into composing the music for The Magic Flute in May and June. Most of the composition was completed by July, when he received two more commissions — one for an opera seria on Metastasio’s old text La Clemenza di Tito, to commemorate the coronation in Prague of the new Emperor, Leopold II, as King of Bohemia; the other, a mysterious order for a Requiem Mass, the work that was to cast such an ominous pall over Mozart’s last months. As Tito was needed for performance on September 6th, he had to begin the music immediately, and was still composing the score when he and Constanze left for Prague in mid-August, only three weeks after she had given birth to Franz Xaver. When they returned to Vienna a month later, Mozart began the final preparations for the premiere of The Magic Flute, which included composing the Overture, always the last part of his operas to be written. The full score was finished on September 28th, and the premiere given successfully on September 30th.

The Overture to The Magic Flute is one of the supreme orchestral works of the 18th century.

Rich in sonority, concise in construction, profligate in melodic invention, and masterful in harmonic surety, it balances the seemingly polar opposites of the opera — profundity and comedy — with surpassing ease and conviction. The slow introduction opens with the triple chords associated with the solemn ceremonies of the priests, the Overture’s only thematic borrowing from the opera. The Allegro is built on a tune of opera buffa jocularity treated, remarkably, as a fugue. The complementary theme, initiated by the flute, is characterized by its sensuous ascending chromatic scales. The balance of the Overture follows the traditional sonata form, with the triple chords of the priests reiterated to mark the beginning of the development section.

 PROGRAM IV

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 Felix Mendelssohn was born on February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, and died on November 4, 1847 in Leipzig. He dated the finished score of his E minor Violin Concerto on December 16, 1844, though the first ideas for the piece had originated six years earlier, in 1838. The Concerto was dedicated to Ferdinand David, the soloist in the premiere at the Leipzig Gewandhaus concert of March 13, 1845, conducted by the Danish composer and close friend of Mendelssohn, Niels Gade. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes.

“I would like to compose a violin concerto for next winter,” Mendelssohn wrote in July 1838 to his friend violinist Ferdinand David. “One in E minor keeps running through my head, and the opening gives me no peace.” It was for David that Mendelssohn planned and wrote his only mature Violin Concerto. Their friendship began when the two first met at about the age of fifteen while the young violinist was on a concert tour through Germany. They were delighted to discover the coincidence that David had been born only eleven months after Mendelssohn in the same neighborhood in Hamburg. Already well formed even in those early years, David’s playing was said to have combined the serious, classical restraint of Ludwig Spohr, his teacher, the elegance of the French tradition, and the technical brilliance of Paganini. Mendelssohn, who admired both the man and his playing, appointed David concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra when he became that organization’s music director in 1835. They remained close friends and musical allies. When Mendelssohn’s health was feeble, David looked after much of the routine activity of the Gewandhaus, where he spent 37 years, and he even stepped in to conduct the premiere of Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul when the composer was stricken during a measles epidemic in 1836.

Despite his good intentions and the gentle prodding of David to complete his Violin Concerto, Mendelssohn did not get around to serious work on the score until 1844. He had been busy with other composition and conducting projects, including a particularly troublesome one as director of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The requirements of that position — which included composing the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream — took much of his time, and it was not until he resigned from the post in 1844 that he was able to complete the Violin Concerto.

The Concerto opens with a soaring violin melody whose lyricism exhibits a grand passion tinged with restless melancholy. Some glistening passagework for the violinist leads through a transition melody to the second theme, a quiet, sunny strain shared by woodwinds and soloist.

More glistening arabesques from the violinist and a quickened rhythm close the exposition.

The succinct development section is largely based on the opening theme. In this Concerto, Mendelssohn moved the cadenza forward from its traditional place as an appendage near the end of the first movement to become an integral component of the structure, here separating the development from the recapitulation. It leads seamlessly into the restatement of the movement’s thematic material.

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PROGRAM V

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES The thread of a single note sustained by the bassoon carries the Concerto to the Andante, a wordless song of sentiment and elegance. This slow movement’s center section is distinguished by its rustling accompaniment and bittersweet minor-mode melody. A dozen measures of chordal writing for strings link this movement with the finale, an effervescent sonata form that trips along with the aerial grace of which Mendelssohn was the undisputed master.

 JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, and died on April 3, 1897 in Vienna. He completed his First Symphony in September 1876 after it had been gestating for many years. The premiere was given on November 4, 1876, when Felix Otto Dessoff conducted the orchestra of the Grand Duke of Baden in Karlsruhe. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. Duration is about 45 minutes.

Brahms, while not as breathtakingly precocious as Mozart, Mendelssohn or Schubert, got a reasonably early start on his musical career: he had produced several piano works (including two large sonatas) and a goodly number of songs by the age of nineteen. In 1853, when Brahms was only twenty, Robert Schumann wrote an article for the widely read Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Journal for Music”), his first contribution to that publication in a decade, hailing Brahms as the savior of German music, the rightful heir to the mantle of Beethoven. Brahms was extremely proud of Schumann’s advocacy and he displayed the journal with great joy to his friends and family when he returned to his humble Hamburg neighborhood after visiting Schumann in Düsseldorf, but there was the other side of Schumann’s assessment as well, that which placed an immense burden on Brahms’ shoulders.

Brahms was acutely aware of the deeply rooted traditions of German music extending back not just to Beethoven, but even beyond him to Bach and Schütz and Lassus. His knowledge of Bach was so thorough, for example, that he was asked to join the editorial board of the first complete edition of the works of that Baroque master. He knew that, having been heralded

by Schumann, his compositions, especially a symphony, would have to measure up to the standards set by his forebears. At first he doubted he was even able to write a symphony, feeling that Beethoven had nearly expended all the potential of that form, leaving nothing for future generations. “You have no idea,” Brahms lamented, “how it feels to hear behind you the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.”

Encouraged by Schumann to undertake a symphony (“If one only makes the beginning, then the end comes of itself,” he cajoled), Brahms made some attempts in 1854, but was

PROGRAM VI

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES unsatisfied with the symphonic potential of the sketches, and diverted them into the First Piano Concerto and the German Requiem. He began again a year later, perhaps influenced by a performance of Schumann’s Manfred, and set down a first movement, but that music he kept to himself, and even his closest friends knew of no more than the existence of the manuscript.

Seven years passed before he sent the movement to Clara, Schumann’s widow and herself a gifted composer and brilliant pianist, to seek her opinion. With only a few reservations, she was pleased with this C minor sketch, and encouraged Brahms to finish the rest so that it could be performed. Brahms, however, was not to be rushed. Eager inquiries from conductors in 1863, 1864 and 1866 went unanswered. It was not until 1870 that he hinted about any progress beyond the first movement.

The success of the superb Haydn Variations for orchestra of 1873 seemed to convince Brahms that he could complete his initial symphony, and in the summer of 1874 he began two years of labor — revising, correcting, perfecting — before he signed and dated the score of the First Symphony in September 1876. It is a serious, important composition (“Composing a symphony is no laughing matter,” according to Brahms), one that revitalized the symphonic sonata form of Beethoven and combined it with the full contrapuntal resources of Bach, a worthy successor to the traditions Brahms revered. In the years since its premiere, it has become one of the most cherished pieces in the orchestral literature.

The first movement begins with a slow introduction energized by the heartbeat of the timpani. The violins announce the upward-bounding main theme in the faster tempo that launches a magnificent, seamless sonata form. The second movement starts with a placid, melancholy song led by the violins. After a mildly syncopated middle section, the bittersweet melody returns. The third movement, with its prevailing woodwind colors, is reminiscent of the pastoral serenity of Brahms’ earlier Serenades. The finale begins with an extended slow introduction based on several pregnant thematic ideas, and concludes with a noble chorale intoned by trombones and bassoons. The finale proper begins with a new tempo and a broad hymnal theme, and progresses in sonata form, but without a development section. The work closes with a majestic coda in the brilliant key of C major featuring the trombone chorale of the introduction in its full splendor.

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

SOUNDINGS

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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.