CLASSICS
2018/19
2018/19 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS:
DANNY ELFMAN VIOLIN CONCERTO FEATURING SANDY CAMERON COLORADO SYMPHONY CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor SANDY CAMERON, violin Friday, May 17, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 18, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, May 19, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. Boettcher Concert Hall
HERRMANN Suite from Psycho Part I: Prelude Part 2: The Madhouse - The Murder The Water - The Swamp Part 3: The Stairs, The Knife and The Cellar Finale RAVEL Mother Goose (complete ballet) Prelude Spinning-wheel Dance Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty Tom Thumb Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas Conversations of Beauty and the Beast The Enchanted Garden — INTERMISSION —
DANNY ELFMAN Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, “Eleven Eleven” Grave; Animato Spietato Fantasma Giocoso; Lacrimae
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
SOUNDINGS
2018/19
PROGRAM 1
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.
S TAY
SOCIAL #ColoradoSymphony Make the most of your Colorado Symphony experience by connecting with us on social media. Find backstage features, concert announcements, musician updates, and special discounts! @coloradosymphony @coloradosymphony @CO_Symphony
COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 2
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES
PHOTO: MEGAN WINTORY
SANDY CAMERON, violin Declared “brilliant” by The Washington Post, violinist Sandy Cameron is one of the most strikingly unique artists of her generation. Since her debut at the age of 12 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Cameron has performed extensively as a soloist throughout the world. Here are some personal highlights of Cameron’s work: Places: The White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, when the sun would barely set, was one of the first of a number of unique performance experiences Cameron has had. Another standout was her first time to Australia, performing at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Performing in an Olympic stadium in South Korea and bringing world premiere performances to Tokyo have also been very special. Additionally, Cameron has enjoyed playing in David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Royal Albert Hall in London, and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany. Orchestras: The Seattle Symphony and the Kirov Orchestra were the first two great orchestras Cameron had the privilege of performing with. Since then, collaborations have included the San Diego Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic, and the National Symphony Orchestra, among others. Projects: The most rewarding experience of Cameron’s career is Danny Elfman’s Violin Concerto, “Eleven Eleven”. Elfman wrote this concerto for Cameron, and she had the great pleasure and honor of presenting the world premiere with conductor John Mauceri at the Prague Proms in June 2017. It was received with great success, and they had the luxury of continuing that success in Hamburg at the Elbphilharmonie. She first began working with Elfman while performing with the Los Angeles based Cirque du Soleil show, “IRIS”, which ran from 2011-2013. Since Cirque, she’s had a number of exciting experiences which include performing Tan Dun’s Martial Arts Trilogy, touring globally with renowned trumpeter-composer Chris Botti, as a featured soloist in Austin Wintory’s score to the video game Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, and a number of featured solo appearances in concert productions such as Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton, Disney’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Live in Concert, Disney’s The Little Mermaid Live in Concert, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Live in Concert, all at the Hollywood Bowl. The outstanding violin played by Cameron, crafted by Pietro Guarnerius of Venice, c. 1735, is on extended loan through the generous efforts of the Stradivari Society® of Chicago. COLUMBIA ARTISTS MANAGEMENT LLC Tim Fox, President – Alison Williams, Vice President – Erika Noguchi, Associate Manager 5 Columbus Circle @ 1790 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
SOUNDINGS
2018/19
PROGRAM 3
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES BERNARD HERRMANN (1911-1975): Suite from Psycho Bernard Herrmann was born on June 29, 1911 in New York City and died December 24, 1975 in Los Angeles. The soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho was composed in 1960. The score calls for string orchestra. Duration is about 19 minutes. This is the first performance of the Suite by the orchestra All who have seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or Vertigo, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or any other of the 56 movies for which he provided the background scores know the music of Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann was not only among the most prolific, and unquestionably the greatest, of all the native-born composers for American films during the golden age of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, but he also wrote a sizeable body of concert and stage music, and was one of the most enterprising conductors of his generation. Bernard Herrmann, born in New York City in 1911, studied the violin as a youngster and won a $100 prize for a song titled The Bells in a composition competition when he was thirteen. That success decided him on a career in music, and he studied composition as an undergraduate at New York University with Philip James and Percy Grainger, and later with Bernard Wagenaar at Juilliard, where he also took conducting lessons from Albert Stoessel. Herrmann made his debut as composer and conductor on Broadway with his score for a ballet scene in the 1932 show Americana; two years later, he was appointed to the musical staff of CBS. In 1933, he founded the New Chamber Orchestra, which he directed for several years in adventurous concerts featuring the music of Ives, Cowell, Varèse and other modernists, an activity for which he received awards from the department store Lord & Taylor and the Society of American Composers for broadening the musical repertory. At CBS, Herrmann was responsible for providing background music for several radio series, including Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater. (Herrmann was a collaborator on the famous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast that panicked the nation.) When Welles moved to Hollywood to produce Citizen Kane, he brought along Herrmann as his composer. The music that Herrmann provided for that epochal movie became the touchstone of his work in Hollywood, and a paragon of the sweeping, symphonic film score precisely integrated to the drama on the screen. For the next quarter century, Herrmann was one of the busiest composers in Hollywood, creating perhaps his most outstanding work for the medium with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and Marnie; Herrmann also provided music for Hitchcock’s television series. In 1966, with fashion and commercial expediency prompting studio executives to abandon the traditional symphonic film score in favor of a more saleable collection of potentially popular tunes, Herrmann had a falling out with Hitchcock over the music for Torn Curtain, which was scrapped in favor of a more conventional score by John Addison. Herrmann moved to London, where he continued to write for films and to conduct and record his own music as well as works by other composers. In 1975, he returned to Hollywood to record the soundtrack for Taxi Driver; he died of a heart attack just hours after finishing the sessions. In addition to his widely known work as a film composer, Herrmann also created concert and stage works throughout his life. His creative catalog includes a ballet (The Skating Rink, inspired by the 19th-century prints of Currier & Ives), an opera drawn from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a symphony, a violin concerto, several orchestral pieces (some incorporating music from his movies), works for chorus and orchestra (including one based on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol) and a few chamber compositions. Herrmann’s music, whether intended to be heard in the dark or in the light, always grew from his strongly held belief in the essentially PROGRAM 4
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES communicative power of his art. “Musically I count myself as an individualist,” he said. “I believe that only music which springs out of genuine emotion is alive and important. I hate all cults, fads and circles. I feel that a composer should be true to his own innate instincts and tastes, and develop these to the best of his ability, no matter what the present vogue may be.... I am not interested in music, or any work of art, that fails to stimulate the appreciation of life and, more importantly, pride in life.” Though it became Herrmann’s most famous score, and one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest commercial successes, Psycho almost never reached the movie screen. Hitchcock made the film, based on a grisly novel by Robert Bloch, as an experiment in what he wryly termed “black comedy” on a tight budget and in stark black-and-white. Paramount Studios and Hitchcock both disliked the first cut of the film and thought that it should be edited to one hour and “got rid of” as a television show. When Hitchcock screened that initial version for Herrmann in December 1959, however, the composer had an idea, and he told the director to “go away for your Christmas holidays, and when you come back we’ll record the score and see what you think.” Herrmann’s idea was to match the tense, shocking images and the monochrome look of the film with music for strings alone, “to complement the black-and-white photography of the film with a black-and-white score” (and to fit Hitchcock’s tight budget restrictions). With Herrmann’s score heightening the movie’s drama and providing it with continuity, Psycho not only created a sensation when it was released the following year, but quickly became an icon of Hollywood film-making. Herrmann’s score has lost none of its power to disturb and to shock, and Psycho still offers one of the most chilling experiences available to the movie-goer. The present suite for strings provides both an example of the composer’s technique of developing short motives into substantial blocks of music and an emotional distillation of several of the film’s most memorable scenes. (Herrmann’s screaming violins, which mirror Janet Leigh’s terror during the murder-inthe-shower sequence, make one of the scariest sounds ever created. Hitchcock, by the way, reportedly helped the actress’ reaction at the crucial moment in that scene when he had ice water pumped, unannounced, through the plumbing.) “33% of the effect of Psycho was due to the music,” Hitchcock calculated.
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937): Mother Goose (complete ballet) Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France and died December 28, 1937 in Paris. Mother Goose was originally composed in 1908 as a suite of five pieces for piano, four-hands. It was first heard in that form on April 20, 1910 at the Salle Gaveau in Paris as part of the inaugural concert of the Société Musicale Indépendant, performed by the child pianists Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony. In 1911, Ravel orchestrated and expanded the piano suite into a ballet, which was premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Arts on January 28, 1912; Gabriel Grovlez conducted. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, two horns, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp, and strings. Duration is about 30 minutes. Duration is about 30 minutes. The complete ballet was last performed on January 16-18, 2004, with Thierry Fischer leading the orchestra. “I would settle down on his lap, and tirelessly he would begin, ‘Once upon a time ...’ It was Beauty and the Beast and The Ugly Empress of the Pagodas, and, above all, the adventures of a little mouse he invented for me. I laughed a great deal at this last story; then I felt remorseful, as I had to admit it was very sad.” So Mimi Godebski reminisced in later years about the visits of SOUNDINGS
2018/19
PROGRAM 5
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Maurice Ravel to her family’s home during her childhood. Ravel, a contented bachelor, enjoyed these visits to the Godebskis, and took a special delight in playing with the young children — cutting out paper dolls, telling stories, romping around on all fours. Young Mimi and her brother Jean were in the first stages of piano tutelage in 1908, and Ravel decided to encourage their studies by composing some little pieces for them portraying their favorite fairy stories. Ravel based his music on four traditional tales: Sleeping Beauty, Hop o’ My Thumb, Empress of the Pagodas and Beauty and the Beast. To these he added an evocation of The Fairy Garden as a postlude. In 1911, he made a ravishing orchestral transcription of the original five pieces, added to them a prelude, an opening scene and connecting interludes, and produced a ballet with a scenario based on the Sleeping Beauty story for the Théâtre des Arts in Paris. The production, though it quickly disappeared from the boards, was successful at the premiere, and its warm charm led the celebrated dancer Nijinsky, who was in the audience, to tell Ravel, “It’s like dancing at a family party.” Such child-like miniatures as comprise Ma Mère l’Oye were much to Ravel’s impeccable taste. Hardly over five feet tall, he was most comfortable in surroundings that were small in scale, and precisely managed. Lawrence Davies wrote, “The suite can be regarded as the equivalent of the dwarf trees, tiny glass models and china ornaments that filled the composer’s diminutive room [in his home].” Especially in the dazzling translucence of the orchestral transcription that the composer provided for the ballet, these tiny tone paintings display the polish, balance and logic that led Stravinsky to admiringly describe their creator as “a Swiss watchmaker.” To properly evoke the youthful naïveté of the fantasy tales, Ravel composed in a deliberately simplified style, characterized by suave melody and luscious, atmospheric harmony untouched by rhythmic or textural complexities. The opening Prelude and Dance of the Spinning Wheel present the Princess Florine, who pricks her finger on a spindle and falls into a deep sleep. The tiny Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty, only twenty measures long, summons the Good Fairy, who watches over the Princess during her somnolence. An interlude leads to the Conversations of Beauty and the Beast. Ravel prefaced this scene with lines from the tale as interpreted by Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1757: “ ‘When I think how good-hearted you are, you do not seem to me so ugly.’ ‘Yes, I have, indeed, a kind heart; but I am a monster.’ ‘There are many men more monstrous than you.’ ‘If I had wit, I would invent a fine compliment to thank you, but I am only a beast.’ ‘Beauty, will you be my wife?’ ‘No, Beast!’ ‘I die content since I have the pleasure of seeing you again.’ ‘No, my dear Beast, you shall not die; you shall live to be my husband!’ The Beast had disappeared, and she saw at her feet only a prince more beautiful than Love, who thanked her for having broken his enchantment.” This piece, influenced by a certain Satie-esque insouciance, is among the most graphic in Ravel’s output. The high woodwinds sing the delicate words of the Beauty, while the Beast is portrayed by the lumbering contrabassoon. At first the two converse, politely taking turns in the dialogue, but after their betrothal, both melodies are entwined, and finally the Beast’s theme is transfigured into a floating wisp in the most ethereal reaches of the solo violin’s range. Following an Interlude, Hop o’ My Thumb treats the old legend taken from Perrault’s anthology of 1697. “A boy believed,” noted Ravel of the tale, “that he could easily find his path by means of the bread crumbs which he had scattered wherever he passed; but he was very much surprised when he could not find a single crumb: the birds had come and eaten everything up.” The strings meander through scales as the boy wanders through the woods, with a few of his aviary nemeses returning to scavenge for the last morsels of bread. Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas depicts a young girl cursed with ugliness by a wicked PROGRAM 6
C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES fairy. According to Ravel’s inscription, “She undressed herself and went into the bath. The pagodas [grotesque little figures made of porcelain, crystal or precious jewels] began to sing and play on instruments; some had theorbos [large lutes] made of walnut shells; some had viols made of almond shells; for they were obliged to proportion the instruments to their figures.” This tale, too, has a happy ending in which the Empress’ beauty is restored. The music, introduced by a lovely interlude featuring the harp, is decidedly oriental in character, and is playable in the original version almost entirely on the black keys of the piano. The rapt, introspective splendor of the closing Fairy Garden is not derived from a particular story, but is Ravel’s masterful summation of the beauty, mystery and wonder that pervade Ma Mère l’Oye. Its tranquil, shimmering serenity is matched among Ravel’s works only by some pages from the opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges, his other masterwork inspired by a vision of childhood. During this final scene of the ballet, Prince Charming awakens Princess Florine with a kiss, and all the characters gather around the royal couple as the Good Fairy bestows her blessing. Roland-Manuel, the composer’s friend and biographer, wrote of Ma Mère l’Oye, “By virtue of a privilege which he shared with the greatest creative artists, the composer never lost, in his obstinate determination to acquire technical mastery, that fresh sensibility which is the privilege of childhood and is normally lost with advancing years. He retained intact a freedom of imagination and an artless power.... Ma Mère l’Oye shows us the secret of his profound nature and the soul of a child who has never left fairyland, who does not distinguish between the natural and the artificial, and who appears to believe that everything can be imagined and made real in the material world, if everything is infallibly logical in the mind.”
©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
DANNY ELFMAN (B. 1953): Concerto for Amplified Violin and Orchestra, “Eleven Eleven” Danny Elfman was born on May 29, 1953 in Los Angeles. He composed his Violin Concerto in 2017. It was premiered on June 21, 2017 at the Smetana Hall in Prague by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Mauceri with Sandy Cameron as soloist. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes. This is the first performance by the orchestra. Any new piece of classical music will inevitably be judged and described in terms of other works. “What does it sound like?” is the question people ask. Only after getting to know that work, does it become a thing unto itself. Danny Elfman’s violin concerto, “Eleven Eleven” is a good case in point. What is important about the music of Danny Elfman—music that has evolved from darkly dangerous rock and roll to full symphonic compositions—is his unique genius for melody, a willingness to be playful, and an empathetic resonance with the music of his time. And, unlike other composers who come to the concert hall or opera house from outside their domains, he always sounds like Danny Elfman. To this we now can add a deep river of emotion, first heard in the second movement of his Serenada Schizophrana (2004), and taken to even greater depths in the third movement of the violin concerto. Danny is, after all, a funny and serious guy, whose SOUNDINGS
2018/19
PROGRAM 7
CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES emotions live beneath the surface. Danny Elfman is world famous as a film composer. Successful scoring for a picture requires many things, but the “hook” of a tune that takes on a life that is controlled by an edited visual drama requires a certain kind of composition that would not prove relevant to a stand-alone concerto. As a result, you might be immediately struck by how Danny has created melodies for this work that are free of any overt story, and have the potential to support long forms—in this case, a four-movement concerto lasting over forty minutes. There is darkness from the beginning and a sense of completion at the concerto’s end with its achingly beautiful elegiac conclusion. An electrical charge soon takes over the first movement and continues for the rest of the work. There is a fun-house and devilish homage to Bernard Herrmann in the second movement, and an inadvertent kinship to the desolation of Act Three of Tristan in the third. Mind you, that dramatic use of an upward string melody followed by a deadly pause was Elfman’s idea. What Danny was expressing was the unknown echo of a gesture he had somehow found inside himself. And yes, you may laugh out loud when, in the last movement, you hear a quotation of the medieval chant of the dead, Dies Irae, so often quoted by others like Mozart, Rachmaninoff, and Berlioz. Danny himself had used it in his score to The Nightmare Before Christmas. In this new guise, it has been transformed for the first time in history into the major mode: a joyous acceptance of death. How perfectly Danny Elfman! As a composer, he grows every day. In that sense he reminds one of George Gershwin, who started out in Tin Pan Alley and, in a matter of fifteen years, composed two piano rhapsodies, a piano concerto, a tone poem, and a three-act operatic masterpiece—while always sounding like George Gershwin. Those of us privileged to know Danny Elfman and perform his music can only look forward to whatever comes next. The violin concerto, with its wide embrace of the human condition, is a story well told in unique language you already know, and yet … © 2019 John Mauceri Mr. Mauceri is a conductor, writer, producer, and educator. He led the Elfman Violin Concerto’s world premiere with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in 2017, and its world premiere recording with the Royal Scottish National Symphony Orchestra in 2019. He is the author of Maestros & Their Music – the Art and Alchemy of Conducting.