Program Notes - Dragon Conducts Scheherazade

DRAGON CONDUCTS SCHEHERAZADE

CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor HANNAH LUDWIG, mezzo-soprano

Friday, September 30, 2022 at 7:30pm

Saturday, October 1, 2022 at 7:30pm

Sunday, October 2, 2022 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

HUMPERDINCK

Hansel and Gretel: Prelude

ELGAR Sea Pictures, Op. 37

I. Sea Slumber Song

II. In Haven III. Sabbath Morning at Sea IV. Where Corals Lie V. The Swimmer

— INTERMISSION —

RIMSKY-KORSAKOFF Scheherazade, Op. 35

I. The Sea and Sinband’s Ship II. The Tale of Prince Kalendar III. The Young Price and the Princess

IV. The Festival at Bagdad; The Sea; The Ship Goes to Pieces on a Rock

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 36 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

Friday's concert is dedicated to deborah & ted Gaensbauer

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor

Australian conductor Christopher Dragon is the Resident Conductor of the Colorado Symphony and Music Director of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. 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 has a versatile portfolio ranging from live-to-picture performances of Nightmare Before Christmas, Jurassic Park and Mary Poppins, a wide variety of collaborations with artists such as The Flaming Lips, Cynthia Erivo and Wynton Marsalis, to standard and contemporary orchestral repertoire such as Danny Elfman’s Violin Concerto, Eleven Eleven, all areas of which he has become highly sought after. Christopher has become known for his charisma, high energy and affinity for a good costume, consistently delivering unforgettable performances that has made him an audience favourite.

Recent season highlights include his subscription series debut with the San Diego Symphony, performances of Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton with Danny Elfman reprising the role of Jack Skellington and the historic Colorado Symphony performances with the Wu-Tang Clan at Red Rocks and the Mission Ballroom. Dragon’s upcoming debuts include concerts with the San Francisco Symphony and the Utah Symphony.

Christopher works regularly in Australia and has guest conducted the Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. His 2015 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. Christopher’s other guest conducting includes Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Omaha Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic 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.

Christopher 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.

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

HANNAH LUDWIG, mezzo-soprano

The New York Times calls mezzo-soprano Hannah Ludwig “best in show” and further exclaims “Her tone chocolaty and large, yet with focus and agility, she captured the integral aspect of bel canto…expression emerging from a long, intelligently shaped musical line.” In the 2022-23 season, she returns to the Colorado Symphony for Elgar’s Sea Pictures and makes her debut with the National Symphony Orchestra singing Handel’s Messiah. She returns to the roles of Isabella in L’italiana in Algeri with Eroica Berlin and Maddalena in Rigoletto with Utah Opera as well as to Dallas Opera as Wellgunde in Das Rheingold.

Last season she made her debut Portland Opera as the District Attorney in Davis’ Central Park Five and sang excerpts of Adalgisa in Norma in a concert of bel canto repertoire with the Sacramento Philharmonic in addition to joining Boston Lyric Opera as Ljubica in Sokolović ’s Svadba.

Her scheduled performances of Szymanowski’s Stabat mater with Gianandrea Noseda conducting the National Symphony Orchestra and her international debut with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colón Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde were cancelled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A solo program of bel canto repertoire originally written for the castrato fach with the Bochumer Symphoniker and a return to the Columbus Symphony for Handel’s Messiah will be rescheduled.

A prolific interpreter of the repertoire of Rossini, she has joined Teatro Nuovo as Pippo in La gazza ladra, Isaura in Tancredi, and Rosina in Il barbiere di Sviglia; her performances of Calbo in Maometto II were also cancelled due to COVID-19. She sang further performances of Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia with Annapolis Opera and on film with Opera Louisiane and, also in the bel canto realm, she sang her first performances of Giovanna Seymour in Anna Bolena with Baltimore Concert Opera and Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor with Opera Philadelphia. She made her Dallas Opera debut as Dritte Dame in Die Zauberflöte

On the concert stage, she sang her first performances of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with the Colorado Symphony and Mozart’s Requiem with the Columbus Symphony, both under the baton of Rossen Milanov, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with the Flint Symphony Orchestra. Her other recent concert appearances include Handel’s Messiah with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as well as Mozart’s Requiem and Forrest’s Requiem for the Living with MidAmerica Productions at Carnegie Hall. She presented “Songs from a Distance,” a recital featuring Schubert, Argento, Boyle, and Musto as well as a series of outdoor concerts by Opera Delaware and Baltimore Concert Opera.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

Ms. Ludwig is a graduate of the prestigious Academy of Vocal Arts, at which she sang a host of roles that include Isabella in L’italiana in Algeri, Charlotte in Werther, Maddalena in Rigoletto, Fricka in Das Rheingold, Azucena in Il trovatore, Komponist in Ariadne auf Naxos, Dritte Dame in Die Zauberflöte, and the Nurse in The Demon. With the Aspen Music Festival, she performed Ursule in Béatrice et Bénédict conducted by Johannes Debus and Sesto in La clemenza di Tito led by Maestro Jane Glover. In her home state of California, she has sung Ruggiero in Alcina at the Napa Music Festival.

She recently won second place in the 2018 Loren L Zachary Society for the Performing Arts Vocal Competition. She has received encouragement awards from the James Toland Vocal Arts Competition, Jensen Foundation Vocal Competition, Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions Gulf Coast Region, and the Licia Albanese-Puccini International Vocal Competition. She is also a grant winner of the Giulio Gari Vocal competition.

Prior to attending the Academy of Vocal Arts, Ms. Ludwig received her Bachelor of Music degree in vocal performance from the University of the Pacific.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK (1854-1921)

Prelude to Hansel and Gretel Engelbert Humperdinck was born September 1, 1854 in Siegburg, Germany, near Bonn, and died September 27, 1921 in Neustrelitz. Hansel and Gretel was composed in 1890-1893, and premiered on December 23, 1893 in Weimar, conducted by Richard Strauss. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 8 minutes. The Orchestra last performed this piece March 2-4, 2012 , with Christopher König on the podium.

Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, assessed by the young Richard Strauss, conductor of the premiere, to be “a masterwork of the first order,” began as a children’s entertainment. In 1890, the composer’s sister, Adelheid Wette, devised a little dramatized version of the old Grimm fairy tale for her children to perform at home, and she asked her brother to provide a few songs for the impromptu production. Humperdinck, who had established a modest reputation for his songs and choral pieces and was then teaching at the distinguished Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt and serving as opera critic for one of the papers in that city, was so enchanted with the potential of the subject that he convinced Adelheid to collaborate in expanding the piece to a full-length opera. They first considered doing Hansel and Gretel as a Singspiel, the popular German theatrical form combining music and spoken dialogue, but ultimately settled on giving it a full operatic setting in the opulent, through-composed manner of Richard Wagner, whom Humperdinck had served as proselytizing acolyte since meeting the Master of Bayreuth in Italy in 1880. (Humperdinck assisted at the premiere of Parsifal in 1882, even composing a passage for the opera, later excised, to cover a scenery change.)

In 1893, when Humperdinck finished Hansel and Gretel, his first creation for the stage, he presented it to Hermann Levi, with whom he had worked on the premiere of Parsifal and who was at that time chief conductor of the Royal Theater in Munich. Levi was captivated by the opera, but delays in the Munich production allowed Richard Strauss, then making a name for himself as conductor at the Court Theater in Weimar, to give the premiere two days before Christmas in 1893, thereby establishing the holiday association of Hansel and Gretel that has continued to this day. The opera, an unlikely but immensely successful stylistic mix of Wagnerian orchestral and harmonic opulence with the naiveté of German folksong (two traditional songs are quoted), became an immediate hit and spread Humperdinck’s name around the musical world — it was produced in more than fifty European theaters within a year, reached London on Boxing Day 1894, and played in New York the following October. It was the first complete opera to be broadcast on radio (from Covent Garden, London, January 6, 1923), and the first to be broadcast live by the Metropolitan Opera (December 25, 1931).

In the familiar story, Hansel and his sister Gretel leave their family cottage to pick strawberries in the nearby woods. They become lost and must spend the night in the forest. When they awaken in the morning, the mists have lifted to reveal the toothsome gingerbread house of the Witch, who bakes little children in her oven. The children outsmart the Witch, however, and are reunited with their parents.

Humperdinck said that the opera’s Prelude is “a sort of symphonic prologue, which might be called a description of childhood.” It begins with the music of the Evening Prayer, played by the horn

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

choir, in which the lost children ask for divine protection as night descends on the forest. This lovely, hymnal strain returns throughout the Prelude, with intervening episodes devoted to a staccato trumpet theme (associated with breaking the witch’s spell at the end of the opera) and a broad, rising string melody (to which the Dew Fairy awakens the children after their night in the forest).

EDWARD ELGAR (1857-1934)

Sea Pictures, A Cycle of Five Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra, Op. 37 Edward Elgar was born June 2, 1857 in Broadheath, England and died February 23, 1934 in Worcester. Sea Pictures was composed in 1899 and premiered on October 5, 1899 in Norwich, conducted by the composer with Clara Butt as soloist. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes. This is the premiere performance for the Orchestra.

It was the lightning success of the Enigma Variations following its premiere under the direction of Hans Richter in London on June 19, 1899 that propelled Edward Elgar to international notoriety. Cambridge University made him a doctor honoris causa in 1900; Oxford did so five years later. With his choral ode for the coronation of Edward VII in 1901 and the appearance of the first two Pomp and Circumstance Marches in 1902, Elgar became England’s unofficial music laureate; he was knighted in 1904.

Alberto Randegger, director of the Norwich Festival, sought to capitalize on the composer’s burgeoning fame by commissioning from him a large vocal work to be premiered at the Festival in October 1899, Elgar’s first major project after Enigma. Elgar first mooted a piece for chorus, but finally settled on a cycle of songs when he learned that the splendid contralto Clara Butt, then just beginning her career, would be performing at the Festival. Elgar began the composition by reworking a setting he had made in 1897 of a poem by his wife, Alice, which he published in that year as Lute Song. Alice’s images of the sea suggested to him a cycle of verses by different poets on that subject, rather in the manner of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été (“Summer Nights”). Sea Pictures was duly composed in July 1899 at Birchwood Lodge, a secluded cottage near Worcester to which Elgar retreated during those years when he needed to work in solitude. The premiere, conducted by the composer with Miss Butt as soloist at the Norwich Festival on October 5th, was a fine success. “The cycle went marvelously well, and we were recalled four times — I think — after that, I lost count,” Elgar wrote to A.J. Jaeger, his publisher and close friend (who was immortalized as “Nimrod” in the Enigma Variations). Sea Pictures was introduced to London before a packed house at St. James’s Hall two days later, and given a command performance before Queen Victoria at Balmoral on October 22nd. Elgar performed it frequently with Clara Butt and other singers, and recorded it with Leila Megane and the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra in 1922-1923. Sea Pictures, with its broad melodic writing and burnished orchestral sonority, masterfully reflects the sweep and majesty of its panoramic subject.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

Sea Slumber-Song

Text: Roden Noel

Sea-birds are asleep, The world forgets to weep, Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song On the shadowy sand

Of this elfin land; “I, the Mother mild, Hush thee, O my child, Forget the voices wild!

Isles in elfin light Dream, the rocks and caves, Lulled by whispering waves, Veil their marbles bright, Foam glimmers faintly white

Upon the shelly sand

Of this elfin land; Sea-sound, like violins, To slumber woos and wins, I murmur my soft slumber-song, Leave woes, and wails, and sins, Ocean’s shadowy might Breathes good-night, Good-night!”

In Haven (Capri)

Text: C. Alice Elgar

Closely let me hold thy hand, Storms are sweeping sea and land; Love alone will stand.

Closely cling, for waves beat fast, Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast; Love alone will last.

Kiss my lips, and softly say: “Joy, sea-swept, may fade to-day; Love alone will stay.”

Sabbath Morning at Sea

Text: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The ship went on with solemn face: To meet the darkness on the deep, The solemn ship went onward. I bowed down weary in the place; For parting tears and present sleep Had weighed mine eyelids downward.

The new sight, the new wondrous sight! The waters around me, turbulent, The skies, impassive o’er me, Calm in a moonless, sunless light, As glorified by even the intent Of holding the day glory!

Love me, sweet friends, this sabbath day. The sea sings round me while ye roll Afar the hymn, unaltered, And kneel, where once I knelt to pray, And bless me deeper in your soul Because your voice has faltered.

And though this sabbath comes to me Without the stolèd minister, And chanting congregation, God’s Spirit shall give comfort. He Who brooded soft on waters drear, Creator on creation,

He shall assist me to look higher, Where keep the saints, with harp and song, An endless sabbath morning, And on that sea commixed with fire, Oft drop their eyelids raised too long To the full Godhead’s burning.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

Where Corals Lie

Text: Richard Garnett

The deeps have music soft and low When winds awake the airy spry, It lures me, lures me on to go And see the land where corals lie.

By mount and mead, by lawn and rill, When night is deep, and moon is high, That music seeks and finds me still, And tells me where the corals lie.

Yes, press my eyelids close, ’tis well; But far the rapid fancies fly To rolling worlds of wave and shell, And all the lands where corals lie.

Thy lips are like a sunset glow, Thy smile is like a morning sky, Yet leave me, leave me, let me go And see the land where corals lie.

The Swimmer

Text: Adam Lindsay Gordon

With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid, To southward far as the sight can roam, Only the swirl of the surges livid, The seas that climb and the surfs that comb. Only the crag and the cliff to nor’ward, And the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward, Waifs wreck’d seaward and wasted shoreward, On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim, grey coast and a seaboard ghastly, And shores trod seldom by feet of men — Where the batter’d hull and the broken mast lie, They have lain embedded these long years ten.

Love! when we wandered here together, Hand in hand through the sparkling weather, From the heights and hollows of fern and heather, God surely loved us a little then.

The skies were fairer and shores were firmer — The blue sea over the bright sand roll’d; Babble and prattle, and ripple and murmur, Sheen of silver and glamour of gold.

So, girt with tempest and wing’d with thunder And clad with lightning and shod with sleet, And strong winds treading the swift waves under The flying rollers with frothy feet. One gleam like a bloodshot sword-blade swims on The sky line, staining the green gulf crimson, A death-stroke fiercely dealt by a dim sun That strikes through his stormy winding sheet.

O, brave white horses! you gather and gallop, The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins; Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop In your hollow backs, on your high-arched manes. I would ride as never a man has ridden In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden; To gulfs foreshadow’d through strifes forbidden, Where no light wearies and no love wanes.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908)

Scheherazade, Op. 35 Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born March 18, 1844 in Tikhvin, near Novgorod and died June 21, 1908 in St. Petersburg. He composed Scheherazade in June 1888 and conducted the orchestra of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Russian Musical Society in the premiere on December 15, 1888. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes. The last performance by the Orchestra was April 7-9, 2017, with Brett Mitchell conducting.

“In the middle of the winter [of 1888], engrossed as I was in my work on Prince Igor and other things, I conceived the idea of writing an orchestral composition on the subject of certain episodes from Scheherazade.” Thus did Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov give the curt explanation of the genesis of his most famous work in his autobiography, My Musical Life. His friend Alexander Borodin had died the year before, leaving his magnum opus, the opera Prince Igor, in a state of unfinished disarray. Rimsky-Korsakov had taken it upon himself to complete the piece, and may well have been inspired by its exotic setting among the Tartar tribes in 12th-century central Asia to undertake his own embodiment of musical Orientalism. The stories on which he based his work were taken from the Thousand and One Nights, a collection of millennium-old fantasy tales from Egypt, Persia and India that had been gathered together, translated into French, and published in many installments by Antoine Galland beginning in 1704. They were in large part responsible for exciting a fierce passion for turquerie and chinoiserie among the fashionable classes of Europe later in the century, a movement that left its mark on music in the form of numerous tintinnabulous “Turkish marches” by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and a horde of lesser now-faded lights, and in Mozart’s rollicking opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. The taste for exoticism was never completely abandoned by musicians (witness Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers or Puccini’s Madama Butterfly or Turandot or even The Girl of the Golden West; Ravel prided himself on his collection of Oriental artifacts), and proved the perfect subject for Rimsky-Korsakov’s talent as an orchestral colorist. Preliminary sketches were made for the piece in St. Petersburg during the early months of 1888, the score was largely written in June at the composer’s country place on Lake Cheryemenyetskoye, near Luga, and the orchestration completed by early August. Scheherazade was a success at its premiere in St. Petersburg in December, and it has remained one of the most popular of all symphonic works.

To refresh the listener’s memory of the ancient legends, Rimsky-Korsakov prefaced the score with these words: “The sultan Shakriar, convinced of the falsehood and inconstancy of all women, had sworn an oath to put to death each of his wives after the first night. However, the sultana Scheherazade saved her life by arousing his interest in the tales she told him during 1,001 nights. Driven by curiosity, the sultan postponed her execution from day to day, and at last abandoned his sanguinary design. Scheherazade told many miraculous stories to the sultan. For her tales she borrowed verses from the poets and words from folk-songs combining fairy-tales with adventures.” To each of the four movements of his “symphonic suite” Rimsky gave a title: The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship, The Story of the Kalandar Prince, The Young Prince and the Young Princess and Festival at Baghdad—The Sea—Shipwreck. At first glance, these titles seem definite enough to lead the listener to specific nightly chapters of Scheherazade’s soap opera. On closer examination, however, they prove too vague to be of much help. The Kalandar Prince, for instance, could be any

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one of three noblemen who dress as members of the Kalandars, a sect of wandering dervishes, and tell three different tales. “I meant these hints,” advised the composer, “to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled, and leave more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each listener. All I had desired was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders.”

Of the musical construction of Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov noted, “A characteristic theme, the theme of Scheherazade herself, appears in all four movements. This theme is a florid melody in triplets, and it generally ends in a free cadenza. It is played, for the most part, by the solo violin.” There is another recurring theme, given in ponderous tones in the work’s opening measures, which seems at first to depict the sultan. However, the composer explained, “In vain do people seek in my suite leading motives linked always with the same poetic ideas and conceptions. On the contrary, in the majority of cases, all these seeming leitmotives are nothing but purely musical material, or the given motives for symphonic development. These given motives thread and spread over all the movements of the suite, alternating and intertwining each with the other. Appearing as they do each time under different moods, the self-same motives and themes correspond each time to different images, actions and pictures.” Well, then, if there is here no programmatic plot and if the movements tumble forth in some sort of free musical fantasy, how is the attentive listener to find his way through Rimsky-Korsakov’s story of Scheherazade? Perhaps the advice of Donald N. Ferguson about this veritable orgy of blazing orchestral color and atmospheric sensuality is profitably heard: “Ecstasies of imaginatively fulfilled desire: visions of celestial luxury engendered in the hashish-fevered mind of some squalid dreamer in the market place of Baghdad or Teheran — such are the tales of Scheherazade and the Arabian nights.”

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda