Soundings: Dvořák's New World Symphony with Peter Oundjian
CLASSICS 2024/25
DVOŘÁK’S NEW WORLD SYMPHONY WITH PETER OUNDJIAN
PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY
PETER OUNDJIAN, conductor JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET, piano
Friday, September 13, 2024 at 7:30pm
Saturday, September 14, 2024 at 7:30pm
Sunday, September 15, 2024 at 1:00pm
Boettcher Concert Hall
BERLIOZ
GERSHWIN
DVOŘÁK
Roman Carnival Overture, Op. 9
Concerto in F
I. Allegro
II. Adagio – Andante con moto
III. Allegro agitato
— INTERMISSION —
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 42 MINUTES. INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.
FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 37 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT!
Friday’s concert is sponsored by nancy and tony accetta saturday’s concert is sponsored by dr. Harold nelson
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
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. Strengthening his ties to Colorado, Oundjian is now Principal Conductor of the Colorado Symphony in addition to Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival, which successfully pivoted to a virtual format during the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021.
Now carrying the title Conductor Emeritus, Oundjian’s fourteen-year 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, Iceland Symphony, the Detroit, Atlanta, Saint Louis, Baltimore, Dallas, Seattle, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. With the onset of world-wide concert cancellations, support for students at Yale and Juilliard became a priority. In the 2022/2023 season, Oundjian conducted the opening weekend of Atlanta Symphony, followed by return engagements with Baltimore, Indianapolis, Dallas, Colorado and Toronto symphonies, as well as a visit to New World Symphony.
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 regularly conducts the Yale, Juilliard, Curtis and New World symphony orchestras.
An outstanding violinist, Oundjian spent fourteen years as the first violinist for the renowned Tokyo String Quartet before he turned his energy towards conducting.
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET, piano
Through elegant musicality and an insightful approach to both contemporary and established repertoire, Jean-Yves Thibaudet has earned a reputation as one of the world’s finest pianists. He is especially known for his diverse interests beyond the classical world; in addition to his many forays into jazz and opera—including works which he transcribed himself for the piano—Thibaudet has forged profound friendships around the globe, leading to fruitful collaborations in film, fashion, and visual art. A recording powerhouse, Thibaudet appears on more than 70 albums and six film scores. He is a devoted educator and is the first-ever Artist-in-Residence at the Colburn School, which awards several scholarships in his name.
Thibaudet records exclusively for Decca; his extensive catalogue has received two Grammy nominations, two ECHO Awards, the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Diapason d’Or, Choc du Monde de la Musique, Edison Prize, and Gramophone awards. His most recent solo album, 2021’s Carte Blanche, features a collection of deeply personal solo piano pieces never before recorded by the pianist. Other highlights from Thibaudet’s catalog include a 2017 recording of Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety” with Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop; recordings of the complete solo piano music of Debussy and Satie; Grammy-nominated recordings of Ravel’s complete solo piano works and Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerti Nos. 2&5; the jazz albums Reflections on Duke and Conversations With Bill Evans; and Aria–Opera Without Words, which features arias transcribed for solo piano by Thibaudet himself.
Thibaudet has also had an impact on the worlds of fashion, film, and philanthropy. He was soloist on Aaron Zigman’s score for Wakefield; this was the first time that the composer had allowed a pianist other than himself to perform his film work. He was also soloist in Dario Marianelli’s award-winning scores for the films Atonement (which won an Oscar for Best Original Score) and Pride and Prejudice, as well as Alexandre Desplat’s soundtracks for the 2012 film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. He had a cameo in Bruce Beresford’s film on Alma Mahler, Bride of the Wind, and his playing is showcased throughout. In 2004 he served as president of the prestigious charity auction at the Hospices de Beaune. His concert wardrobe is designed by Dame Vivienne Westwood.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet was born in Lyon, France, where he began his piano studies at age five and made his first public appearance at age seven. At twelve, he entered the Paris Conservatory to study with Aldo Ciccolini and Lucette Descaves, a friend and collaborator of Ravel. At age fifteen, he won the Premier Prix du Conservatoire and, three years later, the Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York City. Among his numerous commendations is the Victoire d’Honneur, a lifetime career achievement award and the highest honor given by France’s Victoires de la Musique. In 2010 the Hollywood Bowl honored Thibaudet for his musical achievements by inducting him into its Hall of Fame. Previously a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Thibaudet was awarded the title Officier by the French Ministry of Culture in 2012. In 2020, he was named Special Representative for the promotion of French Creative and Cultural Industries in Romania. He is co-artistic advisor, with Gautier Capuçon, of the Festival Musique & Vin au Clos Vougeot.
PHOTO:
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803-1869)
Overture, The Roman Carnival, Op. 9
Hector Berlioz was born December 11, 1803 in La Côte-Saint-André, France, and died March 8, 1869 in Paris. The Roman Carnival Overture was composed in 1843 on themes from the 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini. Berlioz conducted the first performance of the Overture, at the Salle Herz in Paris on February 3, 1844. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, two cornets, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 8 minutes. This piece was last performed by the orchestra January 19-21, 2018, with Brett Mitchell conducting.
The failure of Berlioz’s opera Benvenuto Cellini at its premiere in September 1838 was nearly complete. Except for the original overture to the opera, everything else, Berlioz reported, “was hissed with admirable energy and unanimity.” Five years later, he mined the opera for thematic material for a new overture that he could use either as an independent concert work or as the introduction to the second act of Benvenuto. With the flavor of the opera’s setting and his own Italian travels as guides, he named it Roman Carnival. The Overture had a resounding success at its concert premiere in Paris on February 3, 1844, and was encored. It immediately joined the Symphonie Fantastique as the most popular of Berlioz’s music, and it was one of the works he programmed most frequently on the concerts he conducted.
The Roman Carnival Overture borrows two melodies from Benvenuto Cellini. The slow theme, presented by the solo English horn, is based on Benvenuto’s aria O Teresa, vous que j’aime (“O Teresa, whom I adore”), a melody originally composed for the cantata La Mort de Cléopatre, Berlioz’s unsuccessful attempt to win the Prix de Rome in 1829. The Overture’s other theme is a bubbling saltarello reminiscent of the folk dances Berlioz heard in Rome. The Overture is in two large sections, preceded by an introductory flourish based on the saltarello melody. The theme of the work’s first section is presented by the English horn. As it proceeds and is repeated, this lovely strain is wrapped in Berlioz’s characteristic, glowing orchestral fabric. (Note, for example, the shimmering gloss applied to the sound by the tambourine and triangle.) Following this love song, the strains of the saltarello launch the Overture into a rousing carnival dance. Amid the swirling gaiety of this street festival, the simple strain of the love song from the first section is heard in the rich sonorities of bassoons and trombones. The rollicking exuberance of the saltarello soon resumes to close this musical Mardi Gras with some dazzling rhythmic and harmonic surprises.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)
Piano Concerto in F
George Gershwin was born September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, and died July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California. He composed his Concerto in F between May and September 1925, and completed the orchestration in November. He was the soloist in the premiere, on December 3rd at New York’s Carnegie Hall; Walter Damrosch conducted the New York Symphony. 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 31 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece September 28-29 2018 with Brett Mitchell conducting and Joyce Yang on piano.
Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony and one of America’s most prominent musical figures for the half-century before World War II, was among the Aeolian Hall audience when George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue exploded above the musical world on February 12, 1924. He recognized Gershwin’s genius (and, no doubt, the opportunity for wide publicity), and approached him a short time later with a proposal for another large-scale work. A concerto for piano was agreed upon, and Gershwin was awarded a commission from the New York Symphony to compose the piece, and also to be the soloist at its premiere and a half dozen subsequent concerts. The story that Gershwin then rushed out and bought a reference book explaining what a concerto is probably is apocryphal. He did, however, study the scores of some concertos of earlier masters to discover how they had handled the problems of structure and instrumental balance. He made the first extensive sketches for the work while in London during May 1925. By July, back home, he was able to play large fragments of the evolving work for friends, tentatively entitled “New York Concerto.” The first movement was completed by the end of that month, the second and third by September, and the orchestration carried out in October and November, by which time the title had become simply Concerto in F. He gave the premiere with Damrosch the following month in Carnegie Hall.
Gershwin provided a short analysis of the Concerto for the New York Tribune: “The first movement employs a Charleston rhythm. It is quick and pulsating, representing the young, enthusiastic spirit of American life. It begins with a rhythmic motif given out by the kettledrums, supported by other percussion instruments and with a Charleston motif introduced by bassoon, horns, clarinets and violas. The principal theme is announced by the bassoon. Later, a second theme is introduced by the piano. The second movement has a poetic, nocturnal atmosphere that has come to be referred to as the American blues, but in a purer form than that in which they are usually treated. The final movement is an orgy of rhythms, starting violently and keeping the same pace throughout.”
Though Gershwin based his Concerto loosely on classical formal models, its structure is episodic in nature. His words above do not mention several other melodies that appear in the first and second movements, nor the return of some of those themes in the finale as a means of unifying the work’s overall structure.
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”
Antonín Dvořák was born September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, and died 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. This piece was last performed by the orchestra October 1-3, 2021, with Jaime Martin conducting.
There would not have been a “New World” Symphony without Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, one of America’s most ardent and effective supporters of the arts during the decades around the turn of the 20th century. The daughter of a Danish immigrant violinist, she was born Jeanette Meyers in 1850 in a small town 150 miles north of New York City, immersed in music as a child, and trained in the field at the venerable Paris Conservatoire, whose support by the national government became the model she sought to duplicate at home. Aided by the fortune of her husband, Francis Beatty Thurber, a wealthy grocery wholesaler, she obtained a state charter in 1885 to establish a National Conservatory of Music in New York City, which she intended not just as a school for training the country’s most talented musicians, but also as a radically progressive social institution, admitting women, Blacks, Native Americans and even handicapped students on an equal basis. In 1891, the school was incorporated by a special act of Congress and authorized to grant diplomas and confer honorary degrees.
To direct the National Conservatory, Mrs. Thurber turned in 1892 to a composer and educator of international renown — Antonín Dvořák, who was already well-known in New York through his chamber and piano compositions (the Slavonic Dances of 1878 and 1886 were an international hit) as well as the symphonies and shorter orchestral works that the New York Philharmonic had programmed a dozen times during the previous decade. As an emissary to Dvořák, Mrs. Thurber dispatched the Vienna-born pianist Adele Margolies, a Conservatory faculty member, to Prague. Dvořák was at first reluctant to leave his beloved Czech homeland, but when Mrs. Thurber’s offer ballooned to a breathtaking $15,000 per annum (some $500,000 today and several multiples of Dvořák’s salary at the Prague Conservatory) and the expenses for resettling his family included, he agreed to a term of three years. His responsibilities were also arranged to allow sufficient time for his own creative work — four months’ summer leave, three hours of daily teaching, and involvement in six annual concerts. Soon after arriving in New York in September 1892, Dvořák wrote to a friend in Prague, “The Americans expect great things of me and the main thing is, so they say, to show them to the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music…. There is more than enough material here and plenty of talent.” Despite Mrs. Thurber’s dedicated efforts to sustain the National Conservatory, its spending outstripped available resources, government funding never materialized, and competition from the Institute of Musical Art of New York, established in 1904 (and which became the Juilliard School in 1926), forced her institution to close in 1928. The “New World” Symphony that she and her school inspired from its most famous faculty member remains a permanent part of her legacy.
It was precisely Mrs. Thurber’s liberal admission policies that motivated the “New World”
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES
Symphony in the person of Henry Thacker Burleigh, a gifted Black singer, pianist and songwriter from Erie, Pennsylvania who won a scholarship to the National Conservatory in 1892 and became a student of Dvořák. Burleigh sang many traditional melodies for his teacher, who recognized in them some similarities in expression and construction to the folk music of his Czech homeland. “Dr. Dvořák was very deeply impressed by the Negro spirituals from the old plantation,” Burleigh recalled. “He just saturated himself in the spirit of those old tunes.” Dvořák’s response appeared in the New York Herald: “The Negro melodies of America 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.”
Inspired by Henry Burleigh’s songs, heritage and personality (Burleigh went on to a distinguished career as soloist at New York’s St. George’s Episcopal Church and Temple EmanuEl, nationally known baritone recitalist, composer of 300 songs, and charter member of ASCAP), Dvořák began the Symphony “From the New World” in December 1892 and completed it in May (its sobriquet may have been suggested by Mrs. Thurber). “I should never have written the Symphony as I have,” he said, “if I hadn’t seen America.” The work triumphed at its premiere, given on December 16, 1893 in Carnegie Hall by conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Philharmonic, and immediately earned a place in the orchestral repertory that has never diminished.
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 the spiritual 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 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.
