CLASSICS
2018/19
2018/19 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS:
MUSSORGSKY PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor AUGUSTIN HADELICH, violin Friday, March 29, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 30, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 31, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. Boettcher Concert Hall
IVES Symphony No. 3, “The Camp Meeting” Old Folks Gatherin’: Andante maestoso Children’s Day: Allegro Communion: Largo BARBER Violin Concerto, Op. 14 Allegro Andante Presto in moto perpetuo — INTERMISSION —
MUSSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition arr. RAVEL Promenade — The Gnome Promenade — The Old Castle Promenade — Tuileries Bydlo Promenade — Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle The Marketplace at Limoges — Catacombs, Roman Tombs — Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua The Hut on Fowl’s Legs — The Great Gate of Kiev
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SOUNDINGS
2018/19
PROGRAM 1
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES BRETT MITCHELL, conductor
PHOTO: ROGER MASTROIANNI
Hailed for presenting engaging, in-depth explorations of thoughtfully curated programs, Brett Mitchell began his tenure as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony in July 2017. Prior to this appointment, he served as the orchestra’s Music Director Designate during the 2016/17 season. He leads the orchestra in ten classical subscription weeks per season as well as a wide variety special programs featuring such guest artists as Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and Itzhak Perlman. Mitchell is also in consistent demand as a guest conductor. Highlights of his 2018/19 season include subscription debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and return appearances with the orchestras of Cleveland, Dallas, and Indianapolis. Other upcoming and recent guest engagements include the Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, National, Oregon, and San Antonio symphonies, the Grant Park Festival Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Mitchell also regularly collaborates with the world’s leading soloists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Rudolf Buchbinder, Kirill Gerstein, James Ehnes, Augustin Hadelich, Leila Josefowicz, and Alisa Weilerstein. From 2013 to 2017, Mitchell served on the conducting staff of The Cleveland Orchestra. He joined the orchestra as Assistant Conductor in 2013, and was promoted to Associate Conductor in 2015, becoming the first person to hold that title in over three decades and only the fifth in the orchestra’s hundred-year history. In these roles, he led the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour. From 2007 to 2011, 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, Mitchell completed a highly successful five-year appointment as Music Director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor, Mitchell has served as music director of nearly a dozen productions, principally at his former post 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). As a ballet conductor, Mitchell most recently led a production of The Nutcracker with the Pennsylvania Ballet in collaboration with The Cleveland Orchestra during the 2016/17 season. In addition to his work with professional orchestras, Mitchell is also well known for his affinity for working with and mentoring young musicians aspiring to be professional orchestral players. His tenure as Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra from 2013 to 2017
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES was highly praised, and included a four-city tour of China in June 2015, marking the orchestra’s second international tour and its first to Asia. Mitchell is regularly invited to work with the highly talented musicians at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the orchestras at this country’s highlevel training programs, such as the National Repertory Orchestra, Texas Music Festival, Sarasota Music Festival, and Interlochen Center for the Arts. Born in Seattle in 1979, Mitchell holds degrees in conducting from the University of Texas at Austin and composition from Western Washington University, which selected him as its Young Alumnus of the Year in 2014. He also 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. Mitchell was also one of five recipients of the League of American Orchestras’ American Conducting Fellowship from 2007 to 2010. For more information, please visit www.brettmitchellconductor.com
PHOTO: SUXIAO YANG
AUGUSTIN HADELICH, violin Augustin Hadelich has firmly established himself as one of the great violinists of today. Showcasing a wide-ranging and adventurous repertoire, he is consistently cited for his phenomenal technique, soulful approach, and beauty of tone. He has performed with every major orchestra in the U.S., as well as an ever-growing number of orchestras around the world, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Danish National Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, NHK Symphony (Tokyo), Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Seoul Philharmonic, and the radio orchestras of Frankfurt, Saarbrücken, Stuttgart, and Cologne. Mr. Hadelich is the winner of a 2016 Grammy® Award for his recording of Dutilleux’s Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. Other releases include Paganini’s 24 Caprices for Warner Classics, Tchaikovsky and Lalo Concertos with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO Live), Sibelius and Adès Concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Hannu Lintu (AVIE), which was nominated for a Gramophone Award, and Mendelssohn and Bartók Concertos with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and Miguel Harth-Bedoya (AVIE). Hadelich’s career took off when he won the Gold Medal at the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Since then, he has garnered an impressive list of honors, including a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in the UK (2011), the inaugural Warner Music Prize (2015), and Musical America’s “2018 Instrumentalist of the Year.” Mr. Hadelich plays the 1723 “Ex-Kiesewetter” Stradivari violin, on loan from Clement and Karen Arrison through the Stradivari Society of Chicago.
SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES CHARLES IVES (1874-1954): Symphony No. 3, “The Camp Meeting” Charles Ives was born on October 20, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut and died May 19, 1954 in New York City. The Symphony No. 3 was composed in 1901-1904 but not premiered until April 4, 1946 in New York, conducted by Lou Harrison. The score calls for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, trombone, bells, and strings. Duration is about 17 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the orchestra. Like Bach and Handel, Ives was an inveterate miner of his own music. One of his chief compositional processes was the recycling in new guises of earlier pieces, especially those he churned out seemingly non-stop during his student days at Yale and in his years as organist (18991902) at Central Presbyterian Church in New York. Ives explained the sources and history of the Third Symphony in his characteristic aphoristic manner in his Memos: “The Third Symphony was finished and copied out in fall in 1911. (It was mostly scored between 1901-1904.) The middle movement was the Children’s Day Parade (for string quartet and organ), and was played in Central Presbyterian Church, New York, on organ alone in 1902. The first and third movements were played in Central Presbyterian Church in 1901.... The first and last movements were fully scored a few years later, mostly about 1901 to 1904. The themes are mostly based around hymns.” The three original organ pieces on which the Symphony’s movements were based are all lost. The prototype for the first movement was a Prelude given at Central Presbyterian on December 12, 1901; Ives played a Postlude, the model for the second movement, there on May 12, 1902; and he
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COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 4
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES introduced the closing Piece for Communion in December 1901. The movements were apparently orchestrated and worked into the form of a symphony between 1901 and 1904, but then the manuscript, as with virtually all of Ives’ music, lay untouched and unperformed. He dug the score out early in 1911 to have a professional copy made (at his own expense) by the Tams Publishing Company, and Gustav Mahler, who was then in New York as music director of the Philharmonic, saw the piece, was fascinated, and expressed an interest in performing it during the following season. Tams gave the composer-conductor the score, which he planned to study in Europe that summer. Mahler was suddenly struck ill, however, and died in Vienna in May. That score was lost. (In his biography of Ives, David Wooldridge reported finding an aged musician in 1954 in Munich who claimed to have read through the Third Symphony with Mahler during the summer of 1910. The claim, however, is not substantiated by other sources.) It was not until after World War II that interest in performing the Third Symphony revived. The avant-garde American composer and champion of modern music Lou Harrison produced a score from Ives’ original pencil manuscript, and conducted it with the New York Little Symphony on April 5, 1946, the first of Ives’ major orchestral works to be performed since Nicolas Slonimsky had presented the Three Places in New England with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1932. The Symphony created a sensation. Niel Straus wrote in The New York Times the next day, “It possessed a freshness of inspiration, a genuineness of feeling and an intense sincerity that lent it immediate appeal and manifested inborn talent of a high order ... music close to the soil and deeply felt.” Harrison repeated the work on an all-Ives program at Columbia University’s Second Annual Festival of Contemporary American Music in May, and other conductors, including Koussevitzky, were suddenly clamoring to give their own performances. The Symphony won a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Music Critics Circle Award in 1947, newspapers and wire services carried the story, and Charles Ives was famous overnight — for a work he had written 43 years earlier. Ives, who at that late stage in his life played the part of the growling curmudgeon to perfection (he stubbornly refused to attend the premiere, so his wife, Harmony, represented the family alone), grumbled that “prizes are the badges of mediocrity,” but accepted the Pulitzer award and sent half of the money to Harrison. “He was a wonderfully generous man,” remembered the Symphony’s first conductor. Ives subtitled his Third Symphony “The Camp Meeting,” and gave each of its movements a heading: Old Folks Gatherin [sic], Children’s Day and Communion” The music incorporates the hymn tunes that were used in the church organ pieces on which it was based: Lowell Mason’s Azmon (1839, “Oh for a thousand tongues to sing”) and Charles Converse’s Erie (1868, “What a friend we have in Jesus”) in the first movement; Mason’s Fountain (1830, “There is a fountain filled with blood”) and Andrew Young’s Happy Land (1838, “There is a happy land”) in the second; and William Bradbury’s Woodworth (1834, “Just as I am without one plea”) in the finale. Ives admitted writing this Symphony in a more conservative idiom than other of his major works. He reasoned that since “a number of the themes and general subject matter had to do with religious themes, knowing that, if played at all, it would probably be played in church ... before people who couldn’t get out from under it,” he wrote it in a manner “to some extent boiled down, or rather suppressed, technically speaking.” Ives left no detailed account of the music itself, though he did tell the conductor and composer (famous for his scores to many of Hitchcock’s films) Bernard Herrmann that he wished the second movement “to represent the games little children played while their elders listened to the Lord’s word.” Because of its restrained style, reminiscences of traditional SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES tunes and limited instrumental requirements (one each of woodwinds, two horns, one trombone, strings and bells), the Third Symphony has been among the most frequently heard of Ives’ compositions. In its quintessential American-ness, it bears out Leonard Bernstein’s contention that Ives was “our first really great composer — our Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson of music.”
SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981): Violin Concerto, Op. 14 Samuel Barber was born on March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania and died on January 23, 1981 in New York City. The Violin Concerto was composed in 1939 and premiered on February 7, 1941 by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Albert Spalding as soloist; Eugene Ormandy conducted. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings. Duration is about 25 minutes. The concerto was last performed on March 13-15, 2015, with violin soloist Anne Akiko Meyers and Andrew Litton leading the orchestra. The 1939 Violin Concerto, with the warm lyricism of its first two movements and the aggressive rhythms and strong dissonances of its finale, is a microcosm of the stylistic evolution that Samuel Barber’s music underwent at the outbreak of World War II. The idiom of the works of his earlier years — the Overture to “The School for Scandal” (1932), Essay for Orchestra (1937), Adagio for Strings (1938), those pieces that established his international reputation as a 20thcentury romanticist — was soon to be augmented by the more modern but expressively richer musical language of the Second Symphony (1944), Capricorn Concerto (1944) and the ballet for Martha Graham, The Serpent Heart (1946), from which the orchestral suite Medea was derived. The Concerto’s opening movement, almost Brahmsian in its nostalgic songfulness, is built on two lyrical themes. The first one, presented immediately by the soloist, is an extended, arching melody; the other, initiated by the clarinet, is rhythmically animated by the use of the “Scottish snap,” a short–long figure also familiar from jazz idioms. The two themes alternate throughout the remainder of the movement, which follows a broadly drawn, traditional concerto form. The expressive cantabile of the first movement carries into the lovely Adagio. The oboe intones a plangent melody as the main theme, from which the soloist spins a rhapsodic elaboration to serve as the movement’s central section. Moto perpetuo — “perpetual motion” — Barber marked the finale of this Concerto and the music more than lives up to its title. After an opening timpani flourish, the soloist introduces a fiery motive above a jabbing rhythmic accompaniment that returns, rondo-like, throughout the movement.
MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839-1881): Pictures at an Exhibition Transcribed for Orchestra by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Modest Mussorgsky was born on March 21, 1839 in Karevo, Pskov District, Russia and died on March 28, 1881 in St. Petersburg. Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France and died on December 28, 1937 in Paris. Pictures at an Exhibition was composed for solo PROGRAM 6
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES piano in 1874 and transcribed for orchestra in 1923. That version was premiered in Paris on May 3, 1923 conducted by Sergei Koussevitzky. The score calls for three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 34 minutes. Jayce Ogren was on the podium when the piece was last performed on January 29 & 30, 2016. In the years around 1850, with the spirit of nationalism sweeping through Europe, several young Russian artists banded together to rid their native art of foreign influences in order to establish a distinctive character for their works. At the front of this movement was a group of composers known as “The Five,” whose members included Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, César Cui and Mily Balakirev. Among the allies The Five found in other fields was the artist and architect Victor Hartmann, with whom Mussorgsky became close personal friends. Hartmann’s premature death at 39 stunned the composer and the entire Russian artistic community. The noted critic Vladimir Stassov organized a memorial exhibit of Hartmann’s work in February 1874, and it was under the inspiration of that showing of his late friend’s works that Mussorgsky conceived his Pictures at an Exhibition for piano. Maurice Ravel made his masterful orchestration of the score for Sergei Koussevitzky’s Paris concerts in 1923. Promenade: according to Stassov, this recurring section depicts Mussorgsky “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly, and, at times sadly, thinking of his friend.” The Gnome: Hartmann’s drawing is for a fantastic wooden nutcracker representing a gnome who gives off savage shrieks while he waddles about. Promenade — The Old Castle: a troubadour sings a doleful lament before a foreboding, ruined ancient fortress. Promenade — Tuileries: Hartmann’s picture shows a corner of the famous Parisian garden filled with nursemaids and their youthful charges. Bydlo: Hartmann’s painting depicts a rugged wagon drawn by oxen. The peasant driver sings a plaintive melody (solo tuba) heard first from afar, then close-by, before the cart passes away into the distance. Promenade — Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells: Hartmann’s costume design for the 1871 fantasy ballet Trilby shows dancers enclosed in enormous egg shells. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle was inspired by a pair of pictures depicting two residents of the Warsaw ghetto, one rich and pompous (a weighty unison for strings and winds), the other poor and complaining (muted trumpet). Mussorgsky based both themes on incantations he had heard on visits to Jewish synagogues. The Marketplace at Limoges: A lively sketch of a bustling market. Catacombs, Roman Tombs. Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua: Hartmann’s drawing shows him being led by a guide with a lantern through cavernous underground tombs. The movement’s second section, titled “With the Dead in a Dead Language,” is a mysterious transformation of the Promenade theme. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs: Hartmann’s sketch is a design for an elaborate clock suggested by Baba Yaga, a fearsome witch of Russian folklore who flies through the air. Mussorgsky’s music suggests a wild, midnight ride. The Great Gate of Kiev was inspired by Hartmann’s plan for a gateway for the city of Kiev in the massive old Russian style crowned with a cupola in the shape of a Slavic warrior’s helmet. The majestic music suggests both the imposing bulk of the edifice (never built, incidentally) and a brilliant procession passing through its arches. ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
SOUNDINGS
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