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2018/19
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MENDELSSOHN DOUBLE CONCERTO FEATURING YUMI HWANG-WILLIAMS COLORADO SYMPHONY CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor YUMI HWANG-WILLIAMS, violin ANNE-MARIE MCDERMOTT, piano Friday, February 1, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, February 2, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, February 3, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. Boettcher Concert Hall
MENDELSSOHN Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra in D minor Allegro Adagio Allegro molto — INTERMISSION —
SCHUBERT Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944, “Great” Andante — Allegro ma non troppo Andante con moto Scherzo: Allegro vivace Finale: Allegro vivace
Friday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Accetta Saturday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Ms. Sherri Colgan
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor Australian conductor Christopher Dragon is in his fourth season as the Associate Conductor of the Colorado Symphony. For three years he previously 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 debut performance at the Sydney Opera House with Josh 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 the Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre, the San Diego 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 Arts Festival alongside Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at the 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 Järvi at the Järvi Summer Festival, Fabio Luisi at the Pacific Music Festival, and conducting pedagogue Jorma Panula.
YUMI HWANG-WILLIAMS, violin Yumi Hwang-Williams has been Concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony since 2000 and will celebrate her 20th season in 2019/20. An American violinist of exceptional musicianship, she is recognized both for her stylish performances of the classics and her commitment to the works of present-day composers. Strings magazine calls her “a modern Prometheus” who has “emerged as a fiery champion of contemporary classical music.” Her interpretations of concertos by Thomas Adès, Aaron Jay Kernis, Michael Daugherty, and Christopher Rouse have earned critical acclaim as well as enthusiastic approval from the composers. She has collaborated with the Joffrey Ballet in a world premiere of Bold Moves, with numerous performances of Adès’ Concentric Paths for violin and orchestra choreographed by Ashley Page. Hwang-Williams recently celebrated the release of two albums of Isang Yun’s music with Matt Haimevitz with the Violin Concerto No. 1, Solo piece, and work with piano — a culmination of a decade-long project. Hwang-Williams has appeared as soloist with other major orchestras both in the U.S. and abroad, including the Cincinnati Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Sinfonieorchester Basel (Switzerland), and the Bruckner Orchester Linz (Austria) with conductors Marin Alsop, Dennis Russell Davies, Hans Graf, Brett Mitchell, Paavo Järvi, Peter Oundjian, and Markus Stenz. An avid chamber musician, she has collaborated with Jeffrey Kahane, Andrew Litton, AnneMarie McDermott, Pinchas Zukerman, among others. Prior to joining the Colorado Symphony, PROGRAM 2
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES Hwang-Williams served as Principal Second Violin for the Cincinnati Symphony. In addition, she previously served as Concertmaster of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra for 13 summers, has performed as Guest Concertmaster for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Ottawa, at the invitation of Music Director Pinchas Zukerman, and has been Guest First Violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Hwang-Williams began violin studies at the age of 10 in Philadelphia, one year after emigrating from South Korea. She was accepted to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music at age 15 and made her debut at the age of 15 as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Currently, she is Adjunct Violin Professor at the University of Denver, Lamont School of Music, and is actively involved in advancing the arts in her community through many local concerts and supporting the symphony. Hwang-Williams plays on a violin made by Carlo Landolfi c. 1752.
ANNE-MARIE MCDERMOTT, piano Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott is a consummate artist who balances a versatile career as a soloist and collaborator. She performs over 100 concerts a year in a combination of solo recitals, concerti, and chamber music. Her repertoire choices are eclectic, spanning from Bach and Haydn to Prokofiev and Scriabin to Kernis, Hartke, Tower, and Wuorinen. In recent seasons, McDermott performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Charlotte Symphony, Alabama Symphony, the Oregon Mozart Players, and the New Century Chamber Orchestra. Recital engagements have included the 92nd Street Y, Alice Tully Hall, Town Hall, The Schubert Club, Kennedy Center, as well as universities across the country. As a soloist, McDermott has recorded the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas, Bach English Suites and Partitas (which was named Gramophone Magazine’s Editor’s Choice), and Gershwin Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra with the Dallas Symphony and Justin Brown. In addition, McDermott has been named the Artistic Director of the famed Vail Valley Music Festival in Colorado which hosts the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Dallas Symphony in addition to presenting over 40 chamber music concerts throughout the summer. She is also Artistic Director of two new Festivals: The Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival and The Avila Chamber Music Celebration in Curacao. McDermott studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Dalmo Carra, Constance Keene and John Browning. She was a winner of the Young Concert Artists auditions and was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She continues to perform each season with her sisters, Maureen McDermott and Kerry McDermott in the McDermott Trio.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847): Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra in D minor Felix Mendelssohn was born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg and died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig. He composed the Concerto for Violin and Piano in 1823. It was premiered that summer at a private concert at the Mendelssohn family home in Berlin, with Eduard Rietz as violinist and the composer as pianist. The score calls for string orchestra. Duration is about 38 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the orchestra. In addition to being born with the proverbial silver spoon, Felix Mendelssohn was virtually bestowed a golden baton as a natal gift. His parents’ household was among the most cultured and affluent in all of Berlin, but his family saw to it that his privilege was well balanced by discipline and responsibility. Young Felix arose at 5:00 every morning (6:00 on Sunday), and spent several hours in private tutoring with the best available teachers. When his musical talents became obvious in his early years, he was first given instruction in piano and soon thereafter in theory and composition by the distinguished pedagogue Carl Friedrich Zelter. Mendelssohn’s earliest dated composition is a cantata completed on January 3, 1820, three weeks before his eleventh birthday, though that work was almost certainly preceded by others whose exact dates are not recorded. To display the boy’s blossoming musical abilities, the Mendelssohn mansion was turned into a twice-monthly concert hall featuring the precocious youngster’s achievements. A frequent participant in the Mendelssohn Sunday matinees was Eduard Rietz, a close friend of young Felix and a violinist of excellent talent and taste. Rietz, born in Berlin in 1802 (seven years before Mendelssohn), was the son of a musical family — his father was a musician at the Prussian court; his brother, Julius, a noted cellist, conductor and composer, succeeded Mendelssohn as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts upon the composer’s death in 1847 and edited his complete works for publication in the 1870s. The year 1823 yielded a spate of new works in whose performances Rietz participated: Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 2; String Quartet in E-flat (published posthumously); the last three of the string sinfonias; Sonata in F minor for Piano and Violin, Op. 4; and the present Concerto for Violin and Piano in D minor, completed on May 6, 1823, three months after his fourteenth birthday, in which the composer joined Rietz as soloists. The ambitious D minor Concerto for Violin and Piano, whose duration rivals that of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, joins Mendelssohn’s thorough training in Bachian counterpoint and Classical form with his feeling for the fashionable mannerisms of 19th-century virtuoso string and keyboard performance. The fourteen-year-old composer showed off his precocious skill at polyphony with the main theme, which consists of a rudimentary motive comprising a step and a falling interval of a fifth intoned above a chugging contrapuntal accompaniment. An arching lyrical melody in a brighter tonality provides contrast before the main theme and its melodramatic mood return to round out the introduction. The piano and violin announce their entry with rocket arpeggios, which they continue as an elaborate filigree strewn upon the repetition of the main theme. The violin reiterates the second theme from the introduction above the piano’s background while the orchestra remains largely silent, establishing the primacy that the soloists enjoy throughout the Concerto. The expansive development section, nicely balanced between figuration and motivic elaboration, is interrupted twice by recitative-like cadenza passages, the second of which serves as the bridge to the recapitulation. SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES (Mendelssohn revived this formal technique in his E minor Violin Concerto, written 21 years later.) The complete return of the earlier themes and a cadenza, a sort of miniature sonata for violin and piano, end the movement. The Adagio, a set of free variations on the tender theme presented at the outset by the orchestra, uses a wealth of inventive and carefully devised solo figurations that attest to Mendelssohn’s knowledge of both piano and violin. The sonata-form finale, all bustle and brilliance, resumes the contrapuntal interplay and restless mood of the opening movement. A coda based on the second theme turns temporarily to the radiance of D major, but the work’s home tonality proves irresistible, and the Concerto ends with ribbons of scales in the anxious principal key of D minor.
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828): Symphony No. 9 in C major, “Great” Franz Schubert was born January 31, 1797 in the Viennese suburb of Lichtenthal and died November 19, 1828 in Vienna. He composed the “Great” C major Symphony between 1825-1828, but it was not performed until March 21, 1839 in Leipzig, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted the Gewandhaus Orchestra. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, three trombones, timpani and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes. The “Great” was last performed on March 16 & 17, 2012, with Mark Wigglesworth on the podium. One of the pleasures of a visit to Vienna in years gone by, as it remains today, was the chance to commune with the shades of the great masters — to breath the air of the Wienerwald; to stop for a leisurely Kaffee mit Schlag at some ancient café; to stand misty-eyed and pensive before silent gravestones. Robert Schumann was not immune to these charms when he went to Vienna in the autumn of 1838. He was looking to improve his fortunes from those he had known in Germany, and he thought the imperial city of the Habsburgs might prove to be a lucky place. It was not to be. As with many men of genius, Vienna threw up a cold shoulder to him, and Schumann’s residency lasted only a few months. Two of the places Schumann was most eager to visit when he arrived in Vienna were the gravesites of the composers who stood above all others in his estimation. This was easily accomplished as Beethoven and Schubert were buried side by side in the Währing Cemetery. (In later years, the bodies were moved to Vienna’s vast Central Cemetery.) Schumann, full of Jean-Paul’s fantasies and bursting with heady Romanticism, found a steel pen on Beethoven’s grave, and took it to be an omen. It was with this enchanted instrument that he composed his First Symphony. Standing before Schubert’s grave had no less effect. In those early years after Schubert’s death at the age of 31 in 1828, his works were known only to a limited but devoted following of music lovers who were determined to see that he received the recognition he deserved. As one of that enthusiastic band, Schumann had his resolve strengthened as one of Schubert’s most ardent disciples by his visit to Währing Cemetery. Franz Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand, a teacher of organ at a local conservatory, had become custodian of the unsorted piles of manuscripts that were left at the composer’s death. Ferdinand, whom Schumann described as “a poor schoolmaster, entirely without PROGRAM 6
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES means and with eight children to support,” was trying to have Franz’s works performed and published, and he was probably happy to arrange a visit with Schumann, better known at the time as the editor of the important periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Journal for Music”) than as a composer. The two men met on New Year’s Day 1839 and Schumann set about digging through the musty stacks of manuscript paper. Among the many treasures waiting to be salvaged from this pile, Schumann discovered one of Schubert’s greatest jewels — the wondrous C major Symphony. As Schumann excitedly turned the pages of the bulky manuscript, he realized that he had in his hands something of surpassing beauty, perhaps Schubert’s greatest work. He had a copy of the score made and sent to Felix Mendelssohn, then director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, with an urgent plea for the work’s performance. Mendelssohn at once realized the extraordinary nature of the Symphony, and he revealed it to the world in a performance only three months after Schumann had unearthed the score. Little is known of the circumstances of the composition of the C major Symphony. Schubert had no commission for the work, and it was certainly too difficult for the amateur musical societies for which most of his earlier symphonies had been written. The finished score was dated in March 1828, but when the composition was begun is uncertain. It seems likely that Schubert hoped for a performance of the C major Symphony by the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. A friend reported that Schubert had decided at the time that he was finished with song writing, and would devote himself henceforth to opera and symphony. The score was submitted to the Viennese organization, which accepted it for consideration. It is uncertain if they held a trial run-through of the work (if they did, it would have been the only time Schubert could have heard any of this music), but it was decided that the piece would not be performed publicly because of its length and difficulty. It was a full decade before Schumann again brought the score to light. Schubert’s C major Symphony opens with a broad introductory melody intoned by the horns. This theme not only establishes the mood and tonality of the piece, but also serves, with its emphasis on a dotted (long–short) rhythmic pattern, as the germ from which much of the material of the movement is derived. The strings provide a complementary phrase before the trombones restate the opening melody. The main part of the movement begins, at a quicker tempo, with the presentation of the main theme by the strings. This section is enlivened by the interplay between this skipping theme and a contrasting triplet rhythm supplied by the woodwinds. The second theme, a melody given by the oboes and bassoons, has a slight flavor of the Gypsy about it. The third section of the exposition is a re-examination of the melody from the introduction, employing the rich tones of the trombones. The exposition closes with a grand, lyrical theme for full orchestra. The development is a masterful construction into which are woven all of the themes of the movement: dotted-rhythm main theme, woodwind triplets, second theme and introductory melody. The recapitulation returns all of the earlier themes in heightened settings. The coda is vivified by a faster tempo and an exalted version of the first theme materials. The movement closes with a triumphant restatement of the introductory melody. The second movement shares its introspective mood with Schubert’s late song cycle Die Winterreise. Its form is subject to more than one interpretation (sonatina — sonata without development section — is perhaps the closest description), and the best way to listen to this music is as a series of splendid melodies, carefully balanced in mood, tonality and emotional weight. SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Schumann wrote that this movement “seems to have descended from another sphere. And every instrument seems to listen, as if aware that a heavenly guest had glided into the orchestra.” The Scherzo, bursting with the vibrant energy of a peasant festival, is illuminated by Schubert’s unerring sense of melody, tone color and formal balance. This Scherzo is actually a complete sonata structure, containing a true development section that explores some wonderful Romantic harmonies. The central trio encompasses one of the most inspired melodies in all of the symphonic literature, a triumph of Viennese Gemütlichkeit, sentiment and sensuality. The finale bristles with a barely contained riot of unquenchable high spirits, Schubert’s tribute to the whirling, Dionysian rhythmic exuberance of the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. One of the manifold miracles of this Symphony is the manner in which the ebb and flow of this bursting energy is controlled to produce a large, perfectly proportioned formal structure. Every page is part of a logical progression leading to an ending that is satisfying, overwhelming and seemingly inevitable. This movement is an indelible reminder that every composition of Schubert, who died at the age of only 31, was a youthful work, brimming with the vital life force. ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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