CLASSICS
STEINWAY PIANO SPONSOR
2019/20
2019/20 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:
BARBER PIANO CONCERTO PERFORMED BY OLGA KERN PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor OLGA KERN, piano Friday, January 10, 2020 at 7:30pm Saturday, January 11, 2020 at 7:30pm Sunday, January 12, 2020 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
MISSY MAZZOLI
Holy Roller
BARBER Piano Concerto, Op. 38 Allegro appassionato Canzone Allegro molto — INTERMISSION —
SAINT-SAËNS Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, “Organ Symphony” Adagio – Allegro moderato - Poco adagio Allegro moderato – Presto - Maestoso The custom Allen Digital Computer Organ is provided by Mervine Music, LLC
CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 31 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION. FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 8 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT! Friday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Mr. Paul E. Goodspeed and Ms. Mary Poole Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Schmitt Music Company Sunday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Dr. Jan Marie Crawford PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES PHOTO: ROGER MASTROIANNI
BRETT MITCHELL, conductor Hailed for delivering compelling performances of innovative, eclectic programs, Brett Mitchell was named the fourth Music Director of the Colorado Symphony in September 2016. He served as the orchestra’s Music Director Designate during the 16/17 season and began his four year appointment in September 2017.
Mr. Mitchell concluded his tenure as the Associate Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra in August 2017. He joined the orchestra as Assistant Conductor in 2013 and was promoted to Associate in 2015, becoming the orchestra’s first Associate Conductor in over three decades and only the fifth in its 98 year history. In this role, he led the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour. Mr. Mitchell also served as the Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra (COYO), which he recently led on a four-city tour of China, marking the ensemble’s second international tour and its first to Asia. In May, 2019 he returned to the Cleveland Orchestra to lead subscription performances of An American in Paris. In addition to his work in Cleveland and Denver, Brett Mitchell is in consistent demand as a guest conductor. Recent and upcoming guest engagements include subscription debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Dallas, San Antonio, Vancouver and New Zealand symphonies and the Orquesta Sinfonica del Principado de Asturias in Spain, as well as debuts with the Grant Park Music Festival in downtown Chicago and the Indianapolis Symphony during the orchestra’s summer festival at Conner Prairie. He has also appeared with the Detroit, National, Houston, Milwaukee and Oregon symphonies, the Rochester Philharmonic, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra among others. From 2007 to 2011, Brett Mitchell led over one hundred performances as Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony. He also held Assistant Conductor posts with the Orchestre National de France, where he worked under Kurt Masur from 2006 to 2009, and the Castleton Festival, where he worked under Lorin Maazel in 2009 and 2010. In 2015, Mr. Mitchell completed a highly successful five-year tenure as Music Director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra, where an increased focus on locally relevant programming and community collaborations resulted in record attendance throughout his tenure. As an opera conductor, Brett Mitchell has conducted nearly a dozen productions, principally during his tenure as Music Director of the Moores Opera Center in Houston, where he led eight productions from 2010 to 2013. His repertoire spans the core works of Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute), Verdi (Rigoletto and Falstaff), and Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress), to contemporary works by Adamo (Little Women), Aldridge (Elmer Gantry), Catán (Il Postino and Salsipuedes), and Hagen (Amelia). In addition to his work with professional orchestras, Mr. Mitchell is also well-known for his affinity for working with and mentoring highly talented young musicians aspiring to be professional orchestral players. His work with COYO during his Cleveland Orchestra tenure was
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES highly praised and he is regularly invited to work with the orchestra at the Cleveland Institute of Music as well as at summer orchestral training programs such as the Texas Music Festival, National repertory Orchestra, Interlochen and Sarasota Music Festival. Born in Seattle in 1979, Brett Mitchell holds degrees in conducting from the University of Texas in Austin and composition from Western Washington University, which selected him as its 2014 Young Alumnus of the Year. He studied at the National Conducting Institute and was selected by Kurt Masur as a recipient of the inaugural American Friends of the Mendelssohn Foundation Scholarship. Mr. Mitchell was also one of five recipients of the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellowship Program from 2007 to 2010.
PHOTO: CHRIS LEE
OLGA KERN, piano Russian-American pianist Olga Kern is now recognized as one of her generation’s great pianists. She jumpstarted her U.S. career with her historic Gold Medal win at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas as the first woman to do so in more than thirty years. First prize winner of the Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition at seventeen, Ms. Kern is a laureate of many international competitions. In 2016 she served as Jury Chairman of both the Seventh Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition and the first Olga Kern International Piano Competition, where she also holds the title of Artistic Director. Ms. Kern frequently gives masterclasses and since September 2017 has served on the piano faculty of the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. Additionally, Ms. Kern has been chosen as the Virginia Arts Festival’s new Connie & Marc Jacobson Director of Chamber Music, beginning with the 2019 season. For the 2019/20 season, Kern will perform with the Allentown Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, Toledo Symphony Orchestra, New Mexico Philharmonic, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, New West Symphony, and the Sao Paulo Symphony, as well as appearing on United States Tour with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine. She is also the guest soloist at the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center for Leonard Slatkin’s 75th Birthday Celebration. She will appear in recitals in Orford, Sunriver, Fort Worth (Cliburn), Carmel, San Francisco, Sicily, Calvia, and Helsingborg. This October and November, Olga Kern will be hosting her Second Olga Kern International Piano Competition. This season, she will also be a part of the jury at the following piano competitions: Sydney International Piano Competition, Gurwitz International Piano Competition, Gershwin Piano Competition, Schumann Prize Competition, and the Scriabin International Competition.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES MISSY MAZZOLI (b. 1980): Holy Roller Missy Mazzolli was born on October 27, 1980 in Abington, Pennsylvania. Holy Roller was composed in 2012 and premiered on May 18, 2012 by the Albany Symphony, conducted by David Alan Miller. The score calls for three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the orchestra. Missy Mazzoli is a gifted artist of wide-ranging talents whose works, according to her publisher, the distinguished New York firm of G. Schirmer, “reflect a trend among composers of her generation to combine styles, writing music for the omnivorous audiences of the 21st century.” Mazzoli was born in 1980 in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington and studied at Boston University, Yale University School of Music, and Royal Conservatory of the Hague; her composition teachers included Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, David Lang, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Charles Fussell, Richard Cornell, Martin Amlin, and John Harbison. Mazzoli taught composition at Yale in 2006 before serving for the next three years as Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of young composers; in 2010, she was appointed to the faculty of New York’s Mannes College of Music. She was a Composer-Educator Partner with the Albany Symphony in 20112012 and has held residencies with Gotham Chamber Opera, Music Theatre-Group, and Opera Philadelphia, which premiered her Breaking the Waves, based on Lars von Trier’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning 1996 film of the same name, in September 2016; her most recent opera, Proving Up, premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in January 2018. In June 2018 Mazzoli began a two-year tenure as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; three months later it was announced that she had been commissioned to write a new work for the Metropolitan Opera based on librettist Royce Vavrek’s adaptation of George Saunders’ best-selling novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Missy Mazzoli is also active internationally as a pianist, often performing with Victoire, an ensemble she founded in 2008 to play her own compositions; the group has released two CDs that have earned positive reviews from both the classical and indie rock communities. Mazzoli has received four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, the Detroit Symphony’s Elaine Lebenbom Award, and grants from the Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Barlow Endowment, and fulfilled commissions from such noted ensembles, institutions and artists as the Kronos Quartet, Young People’s Chorus of New York City, Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Whitney Museum of Art, cellist Maya Beiser, and pianist Emanuel Ax. Mazzoli wrote that Holy Roller, commissioned and premiered in 2012 by the Albany Symphony, “is devotional music for a non-existent religion. This piece has its roots in melodies and harmonies from [English composer] Thomas Tallis’ 16th-century Psalm settings, but the original material has been transformed, stretched, turned inside-out and all but obliterated by the orchestra. While writing this piece, I had in mind the visionary architecture of Ferdinand Cheval and Simon Rodia, men typically labeled ‘ousider artists.’ Cheval, a French postman, spent 33 years of his life creating Le Palais Ideal, an ornate palace made of rocks he picked up on his postal route. Simon Rodia was an Italian construction worker who, also over 33 years, PROGRAM 4
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES built the now-iconic Watts Towers in Los Angeles out of steel pipes decorated with found objects. These artworks have always seemed to me to be monuments to a personal or even non-existent religion, private expressions of obsession and devotion. In a way, Holy Roller is my ‘outsider architecture’ — a cathedral of found musical objects, a sonic temple of bottle caps and broken glass.”
SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981): Piano Concerto, Op. 38 Samuel Barber was born on March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania and died on January 23, 1981 in New York City. He wrote his Piano Concerto during the summer of 1962. It was premiered on September 24, 1962, during the opening week of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf; John Browning was the soloist. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes. Jon Kimura Parker was the soloist and Marin Alsop conducted the last performance of the concerto on October 5-7, 1995. In Joseph Machlis’ Introduction to Contemporary Music, Samuel Barber is classified as one of the “American Romantics,” along with Virgil Thomson, Howard Hanson, and Norman Dello Joio. Another noted writer on music, David Ewen, summarized the reasons for that designation: “Barber belonged to the conservative American composers ... in that he paid considerable attention to his architectonic construction, was not afraid to yield to fluent melodic writing, preferred simplicity to complexity, and was ever in search of a deeply poetic idea.” Barber made a point of writing accessible music, and his compositions are among the most frequently performed of those by any American composer. An important component of Barber’s style was his ability to write expressive melodies. He came by this sense of lyricism almost as part of his birthright, since his aunt was the great operatic contralto Louise Homer, and her frequent visits to the family home left a lasting impression on the budding musician. When Barber went to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia to undertake his professional training, he studied not only composition and piano, but also voice. He was good enough to give several professional recitals in his early years, and he even made a recording of his own Dover Beach as baritone soloist. The ideal of Romantic song wedded to clear forms and beautiful harmony is at the heart of his compositional style, and it is not an incidental fact that his music attracted such conductors of the great classical masters as Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, and George Szell. In the works of Barber’s mature years, his style came to include more modern procedures of harmony and rhythm. Rather than forfeiting any of the essence of his earlier music, however, these works gained in depth of expression and technical mastery because of the expanded resources at Barber’s disposal. The Piano Concerto is one such work. Though there are more than subtle traces of the influences of Bartók, Stravinsky, and other 20th-century masters, especially
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES in the Concerto’s finale, Barber still sang with his own distinctive voice to produce one of the most gratifying piano works of the mid-20th century. It gained such an immediate popularity at its premiere that it was performed more than fifty times in Europe and North and South America within its first year. For the premiere, Barber provided the following outline of the Concerto’s structure: “The Concerto begins with a solo for piano in recitative style in which three themes or figures are announced, the first declamatory, the second and third rhythmic. The orchestra interrupts, più mosso, to sing the impassioned main theme, not before stated. All this material is now embroidered more quietly and occasionally whimsically by piano and orchestra until the tempo slackens and the oboe introduces a second lyric section. A development along symphonic lines leads to a cadenza for soloist and a recapitulation with a fortissimo ending. “The second movement (Canzone) is song-like in character, the flute being the principal soloist. The piano enters with the same material, which is subsequently sung by muted strings to the accompaniment of piano figurations. “The last movement (Allegro molto in 5/8), after several fortissimo repeated chords by the orchestra, plunges headlong into an ostinato bass figure for piano, over which several themes are tossed. There are two contrasting sections (one for solo clarinet, and one for three flutes, muted trombones, and harp) where the fast tempo relents: but the ostinato figure keeps insistently reappearing, mostly from the piano protagonist, and the 5/8 meter is never changed.”
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921): Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, “Organ Symphony” Camille Saint-Saëns was born on October 9, 1835 in Paris and died December 16, 1921 in Algiers. He composed his Third Symphony in 1886 on commission from the Philharmonic Society of London; the score is dedicated “to the memory of Franz Liszt.” The composer conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the premiere on May 19, 1886. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, organ, piano (four hands), and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes. The last performance took place on January 28 & 29, 2012, with MeiAnn Chen conducting. “There goes the French Beethoven,” declared Charles Gounod to a friend as he pointed out Camille Saint-Saëns at the Paris premiere of the “Organ” Symphony. This was high praise, indeed, and not without foundation. Though the depths of feeling that Beethoven plumbed were never accessible to Saint-Saëns, both musicians largely devoted their lives to the great abstract forms of instrumental music — symphony, concerto, sonata — that are the most difficult to compose and the most rewarding to accomplish. This was no mean feat for Saint-Saëns.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES The Paris in which Saint-Saëns grew up, studied, and lived was enamored of the vacuous stage works of Meyerbeer, Offenbach, and a host of lesser lights in which little attention was given to artistic merit, only to convention and entertainment. Berlioz tried to break this stranglehold of mediocrity, and earned for himself a reputation as an eccentric, albeit a talented one, whose works were thought unperformable, and probably best left to the pedantic Germans anyway. Saint-Saëns, with his love of Palestrina, Rameau, Beethoven, Liszt, and, above all, Mozart, also determined not to be enticed into the Opéra Comique but to follow his calling toward a more noble art. To this end, he established with some like-minded colleagues the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 to perform the serious concert works of French composers. The venture was a success and did much to give a renewed sense of artistic purpose to the best Gallic musicians. Saint-Saëns produced a great deal of music to promote the ideals of the Société Nationale de Musique, including ten concertos and various smaller works for solo instruments and orchestra, four tone poems, two orchestral suites, and five symphonies, the second and third of which were unpublished for decades and discounted in the usual numbering of these works. The last of the symphonies, the No. 3 in C minor, is his masterwork in the genre. Saint-Saëns placed much importance on this composition. He pondered it for a long time and realized it with great care, unusual for this artist, who said of himself that he composed music “as an apple tree produces apples,” that is, naturally and without visible effort. “I have given in this Symphony,” he confessed, “everything that I could give.” Of the work’s construction, Saint-Saëns wrote, “This Symphony is divided into two parts, though it includes practically the traditional four movements. The first, checked in development, serves as an introduction to the Adagio. In the same manner, the scherzo is connected with the finale.” Saint-Saëns clarified the division of the two parts by using the organ only in the second half of each: dark and rich in Part I, noble and uplifting in Part II. The entire work is unified by transformations of the main theme, heard in the strings at the beginning after a brief and mysterious introduction. In his “Organ” Symphony, Saint-Saëns combined the techniques of thematic transformation, elision of movements and richness of orchestration with a clarity of thought and grandeur of vision to create one of the masterpieces of French symphonic music. ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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