Program - Berlioz Symphonie fantastique

Steinway Piano Sponsor:

CLASSICS

2018/19

BERLIOZ SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE

2018/19 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS:

COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor CONRAD TAO, piano Friday, May 10, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, May 11, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, May 12, 2019, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall

MISSY MAZZOLI

Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)

RAVEL

Piano Concerto in G major Allegramente Adagio assai Presto

— INTERMISSION —

BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 Reveries and Passions: Largo — Allegro agitato e appassionato assai A Ball: Waltz - Allegro non troppo Scene in the Country: Adagio March to the Scaffold: Allegretto non troppo Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath: Larghetto — Allegro

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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.

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

PROGRAM 2

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES

PHOTO: SHERVINLAINEZ

CONRAD TAO, piano Conrad Tao has appeared worldwide as a pianist and composer, and has been dubbed a musician of “probing intellect and open-hearted vision” by The New York Times, who also cited him “one of five classical music faces to watch” in the 2018/19 season. Tao is both a recipient of a prestigious Avery Fischer Career Grant, and was named a Gilmore Young Artist—an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation. In 2018/19, Tao makes his performance debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the Cleveland Orchestra. His season opens with the World Premiere of his composition, Everything Must Go, commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic. He also inaugurates Nightcap, a new series at the New York Philharmonic where performers curate a late-night concert, joined by dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher and Charmaine Lee for an evening of multidisciplinary performances. Tao’s career as composer has garnered an eight consecutive ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and the Carlos Surinach Prize from BMI. In the 2013/14 season, while serving as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s artist-in-residence, Tao premiered his orchestral composition, The world is very different now. Commissioned in observance of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the work was described by The New York Times as “shapely and powerful.” Most recently, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia commissioned a new work for piano, orchestra, and electronics, An Adjustment, which received its premiere in September 2015 with Tao at the piano. The Philadelphia Inquirer declared the piece abundant in “compositional magic,” a “most imaginative [integration of ] spiritual post-Romanticism and ‘90s club music.” Tao was born in Urbana, Illinois, in 1994. He has studied piano with Emilio del Rosario in Chicago and Yoheved Kaplinsky in New York, and composition with Christopher Theofanidis.

SOUNDINGS

2018/19

PROGRAM 3

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES MISSY MAZZOLI (B. 1980): Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) Missy Mazzoli was born on October 27, 1980 in Abington, Pennsylvania. Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) was composed for chamber orchestra in 2013 and revised for full orchestra in 2016.

The chamber orchestra version was premiered on April 8, 2014 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel; the full orchestra version was first performed on February 12, 2016 by the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Michael Butterman. The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, percussion, piano (doubling synthesizer), and strings. The bassoons, horns, trumpets, and trombones also double harmonica. Duration is about 12 minutes. This is the first performance 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. Missy Mazzolli 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.

Mazzoli wrote that Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is “music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of Rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word ‘sinfonia’ refers to Baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.”

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PROGRAM 4

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937): Piano Concerto in G major Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France and died on December 28, 1937 in Paris. The Piano Concerto in G major was composed between 1929 and the autumn of 1931. The composer conducted the Lamoureaux Orchestra and soloist Marguerite Long in the premiere in Paris on January 14, 1932. The score calls for piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, E-flat clarinet, B-flat clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 22 minutes. Andrew Litton was both the soloist and conductor when the concerto was last performed on November 22-24, 2013.

Ravel’s tour of the United States in 1928 was such a success that he began to plan for a second one as soon as he returned to France. With a view toward having a vehicle for himself as a pianist on the return visit, he started work on a concerto in 1929, perhaps encouraged by the good fortune Stravinsky had enjoyed concertizing with his Concerto for Piano and Winds and Piano Capriccio earlier in the decade. However, many other projects pressed upon him, not the least of which was a commission from the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the First World War, to compose a piano concerto for left hand alone, and the Concerto in G was not completed until 1931.

The sparkling first movement of the Concerto in G opens with a bright melody in the piccolo that may derive from an old folk dance of the Basque region of southern France, where Ravel was born. There are several themes in this exposition: the lively opening group is balanced by another set that is more nostalgic and bluesy in character. The development section is an elaboration of the lively opening themes, ending with a brief cadenza in octaves as a link to the recapitulation. The lively themes are passed over quickly, but the nostalgic melodies are treated at some length. The jaunty vivacity of the beginning returns for a dazzling coda.

When Ravel first showed the manuscript of the Adagio to Marguerite Long, the soloist at the premiere, she commented on the music’s effortless grace. The composer sighed and told her that he had struggled to write the movement “bar by bar,” that it had cost him more anxiety than any of his other scores. The movement begins with a long-breathed melody for solo piano over a rocking accompaniment. The central section does not differ from the opening as much in melody as it does in texture — a gradual thickening occurs as the music proceeds. The texture then becomes again translucent, and the opening melody is heard on its return in the plaintive tones of the English horn.

The finale is a whirling showpiece for soloist and orchestra that evokes the energetic world of jazz. Trombone slides, muted trumpet interjections, shrieking exclamations from the woodwinds abound. The episodes of the form tumble continuously one after another on their way to the abrupt conclusion of the work.

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SOUNDINGS

2018/19

PROGRAM 5

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803-1869): Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803 in Côte-Saint-André, France and died on March 8, 1869 in Paris. The Symphonie fantastique was composed in 1830 and premiered on December 5, 1830 at the Paris Conservatoire, conducted by François Habeneck. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets (second doubling E-flat clarinet), four bassoons, four horns, two cornets, two trumpets, three trombones, tenor and bass tubas, two timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes. The piece was last performed on November 20 & 21, 2015, with Andrew Litton on the podium.

By 1830, when he turned 27, Hector Berlioz had won the Prix de Rome and gained a certain notoriety among the fickle Parisian public for his perplexingly original compositions. Hector Berlioz was also madly in love. The object of his amorous passion was an English actress of middling ability, one Harriet Smithson, whom the composer first saw when a touring English theatrical company performed Shakespeare in Paris in 1827. During the ensuing three years, this romance was entirely one-sided, since the young composer never met Harriet, but only knew her across the footlights as Juliet and Ophelia. He sent her such frantic love letters that she never responded to any of them, fearful of encouraging a madman. Berlioz, distraught and unable to work or sleep or eat, wandered the countryside around Paris until he dropped from exhaustion and had to be retrieved by friends.

Berlioz was still nursing his unrequited love for Harriet in 1830 when, full-blown Romantic that he was, his emotional state served as the germ for a composition based on a musical “Episode from the Life of an Artist,” as he subtitled the Symphonie fantastique. In this work, the artist visualizes his beloved through an opium-induced trance, first in his dreams, then at a ball, in the country, at his execution and, finally, as a participant in a witches’ sabbath. She is represented by a musical theme that appears in each of the five movements, an idée fixe (a term Berlioz borrowed from the just-emerging field of psychology to denote an unhealthy obsession) that is transformed to suit its imaginary musical surroundings. The idée fixe is treated kindly through the first three movements, but after the artist has lost his head for love (literally — the string pizzicati followed by drum rolls and brass fanfares at the very end of the March to the Scaffold graphically represent the fall of the guillotine blade and the ceremony of the formal execution), the idée fixe is transmogrified into a jeering, strident parody of itself in the finale in music that is still original and disturbing almost two centuries after its creation. The sweet-tosour changes in the idée fixe (heard first in the opening movement on unison violins and flute at the beginning of the fast tempo after a slow introduction) reflect Berlioz’s future relationship with his beloved, though, of course, he had no way to know it in 1830. Berlioz did in fact marry his Harriet–Ophelia–Juliet in 1833 (when news of the nuptials drifted back across the channel, one waggish London critic wrote, “We trust this marriage will insure the happiness of an amiable young woman, as well as secure us against her reappearances on the English boards”), but their initial bliss faded quickly, and they were virtually estranged within a decade.

Berlioz wrote of the Symphonie fantastique, “PART I: Reveries and Passions. The young musician first recalls that uneasiness of soul he experienced before seeing her whom he loves; then the volcanic love with which she suddenly inspired him, his moments of delirious anguish, of jealous fury, his returns to loving tenderness, and his religious consolations. PART II: A Ball.

He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant fête. PART III: Scene in the PROGRAM 6

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Country. One summer evening in the country he hears two shepherds playing a ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue; this pastoral duet, some hopes he has recently conceived, combine to restore calm to his heart; but she appears once more, he is agitated with painful presentiments; if she were to betray him! ... One of the shepherds resumes his artless melody, the other no longer answers him. The sun sets ... the sound of distant thunder ... solitude ... silence ... PART IV: March to the Scaffold. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death, and led to execution. The procession advances to a march which is now somber and wild, now brilliant and solemn. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for an instant, like a last love-thought interrupted by the fatal stroke. PART V: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. He sees himself at the Witches’ Sabbath, amid ghosts, magicians and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies. He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter, shrieks. The beloved melody reappears, but it has become an ignoble, trivial and grotesque dance-tune; it is she who comes to the Witches’ Sabbath.... She takes part in the diabolic orgy ... Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies Irae [the ancient ‘Day of Wrath’ chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead]. Witches’ Dance. The Witches’ Dance and the Dies Irae together.” ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

SOUNDINGS

2018/19

PROGRAM 7

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