Colorado Symphony 2017/18 Season Presenting Sponsor:
CLASSICS • 2017/18 TWO TITANS: BERNSTEIN & MAHLER COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor YUMI HWANG-WILLIAMS, violin Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to CU Foundation Sunday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Robert S. Graham
Friday, May 25, 2018, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 26, 2018, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, May 27, 2018, at 1:00 p.m. Boettcher Concert Hall
BERNSTEIN
Overture to Candide
BERNSTEIN Serenade (After Plato’s Symposium) Phaedrus – Pausanias: Lento – Allegro Aristophanes: Allegretto Eryximachus: Presto Agathon: Adagio Socrates – Alcibiades: Molto tenuto – Allegro molto vivace — INTERMISSION —
MAHLER Symphony No. 1 in D major Langsam. Schleppend. Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen Stürmisch bewegt
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES 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 2016/17 season, and began his fouryear appointment in September 2017. Mr. Mitchell concluded his tenure as Associate Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra in August 2017. 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 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 Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra (COYO) from 2013 to 2017, which he led on a four-city tour of China in June 2015, marking the ensemble’s second international tour and its first to Asia. In addition to his work in Cleveland and Denver, Mr. Mitchell is in consistent demand as a guest conductor. Recent and upcoming guest engagements include his debuts at the Grant Park Music Festival in downtown Chicago, with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in Auckland and Wellington, and the San Antonio Symphony, as well as appearances with the Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, National, and Oregon symphonies, The Cleveland Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, among others. He has collaborated with such soloists as Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Rudolf Buchbinder, James Ehnes, Augustin Hadelich, Leila Josefowicz, and Alisa Weilerstein. From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Mitchell led over one hundred performances as Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony, to which he frequently returns as a guest conductor. 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 appointment 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, Mr. 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, Mr. Mitchell most recently led a production of The Nutcracker with the Pennsylvania Ballet in collaboration with The Cleveland Orchestra during the 2016-17 season.
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES In addition to his work with professional orchestras, Mr. Mitchell is also well known for his affinity for working with and mentoring young musicians aspiring to be professional orchestral players. His work with COYO during his Cleveland Orchestra tenure was highly praised, and he is regularly invited to work with the highly talented musicians at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the orchestras at this country’s high level training programs, such as the National Repertory Orchestra, Texas Music Festival, and Sarasota Music Festival. Born in Seattle in 1979, Mr. 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. Mr. 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
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YUMI HWANG-WILLIAMS, violin Yumi Hwang-Williams made her debut at the age of fifteen as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, six years after emigrating from South Korea. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, she is known today 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. Yumi is a frequent soloist with the Colorado Symphony and has soloed with other major orchestras both in the U.S. and abroad, including the Cincinnati Symphony , the Indianapolis Symphony, Sinfonieorchester Basel (Switzerland), and the Bruckner Orchester Linz (Austria), in collaboration with conductors Marin Alsop, Dennis Russell Davies, Hans Graf, Paavo Järvi, and Peter Oundjian. An avid chamber musician, she has performed with Gary Graffman, Ida Kavafian, Jeffrey Kahane, Christopher O’Riley, Jon Kimura Parker, and Andrew Litton. Since 2000 Yumi has been Concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony. She was Concertmaster of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra for twelve years and Guest Concertmaster for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Ottawa, at the invitation of Music Director Pinchas Zukerman. She’s a frequent guest first violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and a faculty member at Denver University’s Lamont School of Music.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990): Overture to Candide Leonard Bernstein was born on August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and died on October 14, 1990 in New York City. Candide was composed in 1956 and first seen in a pre-Broadway tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on October 29, 1956; it opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City on December 1st. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 4 minutes. The Overture was last performed on October 14-16, 2011, with Peter Oundjian conducting. François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) was the leading figure of the French Enlightenment and one of the 18th century’s most vitriolic intellectual iconoclasts. He railed throughout his long career against absolutism and persecution and dogmatism, extolling rationalism and skepticism as the proper foundations for human society. Among the best-known of his vast number of writings is the “philosophical novel” Candide of 1759, a swift and pointed satirical finger in the eye of unthinking convention that flattens the notion that “this” (whenever and wherever “this” is) is “the best of all possible worlds.” One such less-than-best world was created in the United States in the early 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose ideological witch-hunt targeted some of the country’s most creative and independent personalities. Among those who became ensnared in McCarthy’s machinations was the writer Lillian Hellman, who had visited Russia in the 1930s and been involved with Communist activities during the following decade. In 1951, her lover, the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, was called before the congressional committee, refused to answer its questions, and was sentenced to prison. Hellman was subpoenaed, wrote to the committee that she would testify about her politics but no one else’s, and was allowed to remain silent, though she was blacklisted for a time by Hollywood. She vented her rage in an anti-establishment adaptation of The Lark by Jean Anouilh, based on the story of Joan of Arc, for which the young composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein supplied the incidental music. Hellman’s next artistic reaction to her political harassment was a theatrical rendering of Voltaire’s Candide. Lillian Hellman conceived a contemporary stage version of Candide as early as 1950, but it was not until 1956 that the project materialized. She originally intended the piece to be a play with incidental music, which she asked Bernstein to compose, but his enthusiasm for the subject was so great after re-reading Voltaire’s novel that the venture swelled into a full-blown comic operetta; Tyrone Guthrie was enlisted as director and Richard Wilbur wrote most of the song lyrics (after that task had passed through several other hands). Candide was first seen in a pre-Broadway tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on October 29, 1956 (just days after Bernstein’s appointment as co-music director of the New York Philharmonic had been announced for the following season), and opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on December 1st. Reviews in both cities were mixed. All agreed that the production, designed by Oliver Smith, was opulent and attractive, but that the show itself was disjointed and clumsy. (“Three of the most talented people our Theatre possesses — Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein and Tyrone Guthrie — have joined hands transforming Voltaire’s Candide into a really spectacular disaster,” wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune.) Bernstein’s music, however, received nothing but praise, which Guthrie neatly summarized in his autobiography: “Bernstein’s facility and virtuosity are so dazzling that you are almost blinded ... if ever I have seen it, the stuff of genius is here.” Though the show closed after just 73 performances, Godard Lieberson of Columbia Records produced a splendid original cast album that won for Candide, or at least for Bernstein’s score, an inextinguishable following. PROGRAM 4
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES An occasional brave production was mounted during the following years, but it was not until director Harold Prince took the piece in hand in 1973, stripped it of Hellman’s proselytizing text and gave it a riotous new book by Hugh Wheeler based more faithfully on Voltaire’s novel (and with additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) that Candide at last became a popular success, though at the expense of the loss or reshuffling of some of Bernstein’s music as well as the submerging of the dramatic structure and ethical core of the original work. In 1982, the brilliant and eclectic conductor John Mauceri, a Bernstein protégé, revised Candide for performance at the New York City Opera, restoring several cuts, enlarging the orchestration and reworking Wheeler’s book into the conventional two acts. For a Scottish Opera production in 1988, Mauceri prepared with John Wells yet another version of Candide, which included virtually all of the music that Bernstein had written for the show over the years and reassigned numbers to their original intended characters and situations. Bernstein used this Scottish Opera version, with a few additional revisions and restorations, for his London concert performances and his Deutsche Grammophon recording in 1989, just a year before his death. Candide, like its title character, had made a long journey before reaching its settled state. The Overture to Candide was taken almost immediately into the concert hall— Bernstein conducted it with the New York Philharmonic only six weeks after the play opened on Broadway — and it has remained one of the most popular curtain-raisers in the orchestral repertory. Its music, largely drawn from the show, captures perfectly the wit, brilliance and slapstick tumult of Voltaire’s novel. The group of first themes (the work is disposed, like many of Rossini’s overtures, in sonatina form) comprises a boisterous fanfare, a quicksilver galop, and a brass proclamation, used later in the show to accompany the destruction of Westphalia, the hero’s home. Lyrical contrast is provided by a broad melody from the duet of Candide and his beloved Cunegonde, Oh, Happy We. These musical events are recounted, and the Overture ends with a whirling strain from Cunegonde’s spectacular coloratura aria, Glitter and Be Gay.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: Serenade (after Plato’s “Symposium”) for Solo Violin, String Orchestra, Harp and Percussion Bernstein composed Serenade in 1954 and conducted its premiere on September 12, 1954 at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice with Isaac Stern as soloist. The score calls for solo violin, timpani, percussion, and harp. Duration is about 33 minutes. Serenade was last performed on April 2 and 3, 2010, with Karen Gomyo playing the violin solo and Andrew Litton on the podium. By 1954, when the Serenade was written, Leonard Bernstein had firmly established himself on the American musical scene as both conductor and composer. He had served as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Music Director of the New York City Symphony and Musical Advisor to the Israel Philharmonic. As a composer, he had won the New York Music Critics Circle Award for his “Jeremiah” Symphony, and had completed his Second Symphony (The Age of Anxiety), the ballets Fancy Free and Facsimile, and the scores for two Broadway shows (On the Town and Wonderful Town). During the mid-1950s, he was on the staffs of Brandeis University and the Tanglewood Music Festival, and much in demand as a guest conductor in Europe and America, having created a sensation in December 1953 when he became the first American to conduct at La Scala. Bernstein’s Serenade, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, was dedicated “To SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES the Beloved Memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky.” On August 8, 1954, the day after he completed the score, Bernstein wrote the following description of its literary origin: “There is no literal program for this Serenade, despite the fact that it resulted from a rereading of Plato’s charming dialogue, The Symposium. The music, like the dialogue, is a series of related statements in praise of love, and generally follows the Platonic form through the succession of speakers at the banquet. The ‘relatedness’ of the movements does not depend on common thematic material, but rather on a system whereby each movement evolves out of elements in the preceding one. “I. Phaedrus — Pausanias (Lento — Allegro). Phaedrus opens the symposium with a lyrical oration in praise of Eros, the god of love. (Fugato, begun by the solo violin.) Pausanias continues by describing the duality of lover and beloved. This is expressed in a classical sonata form, based on material of the opening fugato. “II. Aristophanes (Allegretto). Aristophanes does not play the role of clown in this dialogue, but instead that of bedtime storyteller, invoking the fairytale mythology of love. “III. Eryximachus (Presto). The physician speaks of bodily harmony as a scientific model for the workings of love-patterns. This is an extremely short fugato scherzo, born of a blend of mystery and humor. “IV. Agathon (Adagio). Perhaps the most moving speech of the dialogue, Agathon’s panegyric embraces all aspects of love’s powers, charms and functions. This movement is a simple three-part song. “V. Socrates — Alcibiades (Molto tenuto — Allegro molto vivace). Socrates describes his visit to the seer Diotima, quoting her speech on the demonology of love. This is a slow introduction of greater weight than any of the preceding movements; and serves as a highly developed reprise of the middle section of the Agathon movement, thus suggesting a hidden sonata-form. The famous interruption by Alcibiades and his band of drunken revelers ushers in the Allegro, which is an extended Rondo ranging in spirit from agitation through jig-like dance music to joyful celebration. If there is a hint of jazz in the celebration, I hope it will not be taken as anachronistic Greek party-music, but rather the natural expression of a contemporary American composer imbued with the spirit of that timeless dinner-party.” The musical processes of the Serenade seem a bit abstruse in Bernstein’s above description, but are really a logical counterpart to the spoken conversation they represent. An initial theme is given out, just as an idea, spoken, opens a conversation. The first speaker pursues his thought until another converser puts forth his own idea engendered by what he has just heard. The conversation goes on, unwinding, fueled by the interchange and development of its basic ideas — in the case of Plato’s Symposium, the aspects of love. In Bernstein’s Serenade, one theme gives rise to another, to which the first may, for example, then become an accompaniment. Each musical idea, like each conversational statement, leads logically to another, related to it, yet different according to the thought and the speaker. Bernstein’s “conversational” composition is brought round full circle when the opening theme from the first movement reappears in the closing pages.
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911): Symphony No. 1 in D major Gustav Mahler was born July 7, 1860 in Kalischt, Bohemia and died May 18, 1911 in Vienna. He composed the Symphony No. 1 between 1883 and 1888, and revised the orchestration in 1892 and 1893. He led the Orchestra of the Royal Opera of Budapest in the work’s premiere on November 20, 1889. The score calls for four flutes (second, third and fourth doubling piccolo), three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), seven horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 60 minutes. Marin Alsop conducted the last performance by the orchestra on November 1 and 2, 2014. “To write a symphony means, to me, to construct a world with all the tools of the available technique,” wrote Gustav Mahler. The World in a Symphony — the experiences, qualities and meaning of life enfolded in tone. Mahler, the most ardent of the Romantics in his belief in the bond between human existence and music, spent his career pursuing this lofty aim. He once said, “My whole life is contained in them [i.e., the first two symphonies]: I have set down in them my experience and my suffering.... To anyone who knows how to listen, my whole life will become clear, for my creative works and my existence are so closely interwoven that, if my life flowed as peacefully as a stream through a meadow, I believe I would no longer be able to compose anything.” Mahler certainly had a full share of rocks and rapids in the stream of his life: deaths of loved ones, including a child, only weeks apart; a critical heart condition that precipitated his premature death at the age of fifty; severe bouts of depression that led him to seek the counsel of Sigmund Freud; and great difficulties in finding acceptance for his works. Though these experiences were still in the future when he wrote this First Symphony, Mahler nevertheless embodied profound thoughts and emotions in this early work. Written during his tenure as conducting assistant to the great Arthur Nikisch at Leipzig, the D major Symphony reflects Mahler’s concerns with romantic love, with establishing himself as a creative artist, and with finding a musical language proper to express his inner turmoil. Though he did not marry until 1902, Mahler had a healthy interest in the opposite sex, and at least three love affairs touch upon the First Symphony. In 1880, he conceived a short-lived but ferocious passion for Josephine Poisl, the daughter of the postmaster in his boyhood home of Iglau, and she inspired from him three songs and a cantata after Grimm (Das klagende Lied) that contributed thematic fragments to the Symphony. The second affair, which came early in 1884, was the spark that actually ignited the composition of the work. Johanne Richter possessed a numbing musical mediocrity alleviated by a pretty face, and it was because of an infatuation with this singer at the Cassel Opera, where Mahler was then conducting, that not only the First Symphony but also the Songs of the Wayfarer sprang to life. The third liaison, in 1887, came as the Symphony was nearing completion. Mahler revived and reworked an opera by Carl Maria von Weber called Die drei Pintos (“The Three Pintos,” two being impostors of the title character), and was aided in the venture by the grandson of that composer, also named Carl. During the almost daily contact with the Weber family necessitated by the preparation of the work, Mahler fell in love with Carl’s wife, Marion. Mahler was serious enough to propose that he and Marion run away together, but at the last minute she had a sudden change of heart and left Mahler standing, quite literally, at the train station. The emotional turbulence of all these encounters found its way into the First Symphony, especially the finale, but, looking back in 1896, Mahler put these experiences into a better perspective. “The Symphony,” he wrote, “begins where the love affair [with Johanne Richter] ends; it is based on the affair which preceded the Symphony SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES in the emotional life of the composer. But the extrinsic experience became the occasion, not the message of the work.” The “message” of this work, and of all Mahler’s symphonies, is that life comprises a countless number of feelings and sensations, a ceaseless ebb and flow of sentiments gliding together, combining, then disappearing in the marvelous complex of the emotional life of the individual. In each of his symphonies, this world of experience is mirrored in a wide spectrum of musical styles, from child-like simplicity to transcendent profundity — folksong beside fugue, parody beside pathos, tempest beside tranquility. Mahler spread wide the boundaries of the symphony as a form, as had Beethoven a century earlier, to include an unprecedented wealth of emotion within a single work. Of his initial foray into the genre, he wrote, “My First Symphony will be something of which the world has never heard the like before.” The Symphony begins with an evocation of a verdant springtime filled with the natural call of the cuckoo (solo clarinet) and the man-made calls of the hunt (clarinets, then trumpets). The main theme, which enters softly in the cellos after the wonderfully descriptive introduction, is based on the second of the Songs of a Wayfarer, Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld (“I Crossed the Meadow this Morn”). This engaging, folk-like melody, with its characteristic interval of a descending fourth, runs through much of the Symphony to provide an aural link among its movements. The first movement is given over to this theme combined with the spring sounds of the introduction in a cheerful display of ebullient spirits into which creeps an occasional shudder of doubt. The second movement, in sturdy triple meter, is a dressed-up version of the Austrian peasant dance known as the Ländler, a type and style that finds its way into most of Mahler’s symphonies. The simple tonic-dominant accompaniment of the basses recalls the falling fourth of the opening movement, while the tune in the woodwinds resembles the Wayfarer song. (Note particularly the little run up the scale.) The gentle trio, ushered in by solo horn, makes use of the string glissandos that were so integral a part of Mahler’s orchestral technique. The third movement begins and ends with a lugubrious, minor-mode transformation of the European folk song known most widely by its French title, Frére Jacques. It is heard initially in an eerie solo for muted string bass in its highest register, played above the tread of the timpani intoning the falling-fourth motive from the preceding movements. The middle of the movement contains a melody marked “Mit Parodie” (played “col legno” by the strings, i.e., tapping with the wood rather than the hair of the bow), and a simple, tender theme based on another melody from the Wayfarer songs, Die zwei blauen Augen (“The Two Blue Eyes”). The mock funeral march of this movement was inspired by a woodcut of Moritz von Schwind titled How the Animals Bury the Hunter from his Munich Picture Book for Children. The finale, according to Bruno Walter, protégé and friend of the composer and himself a master conductor, is filled with “raging vehemence.” The stormy character of the beginning is maintained for much of the movement. Throughout, themes from earlier movements are heard again, with the hunting calls of the opening introduction given special prominence. The tempest is finally blown away by a great blast from the horns (“Bells in the air!” entreats Mahler) to usher in the triumphant ending of the work, a grand affirmation of joyous celebration. “The Symphony has the typically unique power,” summarized Bruno Walter, “which the youthful work of genius is able to exert by means of its superabundance of emotions, by the unconditional and unconscious courage to use new ways of expression, and by the wealth of invention. It is alive with musical ideas and the pulse beat of fervent passion.” ©2018 Dr. Richard E. Rodda PROGRAM 8
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