Program - Opening Weekend: Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 - Colorado Symphony

Colorado Symphony 2017/18 Season Presenting Sponsor:

CLASSICS • 2017/18 OPENING WEEKEND: BEETHOVEN’S SYMPHONY NO. 5 COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor MASON BATES, electronica This Weekend’s Performances are Gratefully Dedicated to Mary Rossick Kern and Jerome H. Kern Saturday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Mr. John F. Estes III and Mrs. Norma Horner Sunday’s Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. Seth Weisberg

Friday, September 15, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 16, 2017, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, September 17, 2017, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall KEVIN PUTS

Millennium Canons

MASON BATES The B-Sides: Five Pieces for Orchestra and Electronica Broom of the System Aerosol Melody (Hanalei) Gemini in the Solar Wind — Temescal Noir — Warehouse Medicine — INTERMISSION — BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 Allegro con brio Andante con moto Allegro Allegro

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES BRETT MITCHELL, conductor Hailed for delivering compelling performances of innovative, eclectic programs, Brett Mitchell begins his tenure as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony with the 2017-18 season. Prior to this four-year appointment, he served as Music Director Designate during the 2016-17 season.

Mr. Mitchell’s recently announced inaugural season as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony features such guest artists as Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a significant commitment to a broad range of American music, from Copland, Bernstein, and Gershwin to Kevin Puts, Mason Bates, and Missy Mazzoli. Other highlights include Mahler’s First Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé, and Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Mr. Mitchell will also lead Handel’s Messiah, Wagner/Maazel’s The Ring without Words, and a two-part celebration of the music of John Williams, featuring a program of Mr. Williams’s concert works and a live-to-film performance of his score for Jurassic Park.

Mr. Mitchell is also currently in his fourth and final season as a member of The Cleveland Orchestra’s conducting staff. 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 leads the orchestra in several dozen concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Center, and on tour. From 2013 to 2017, Mr. Mitchell also served as the Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, performing full subscription seasons at Severance Hall, and leading the orchestra on a four-city tour of China in 2015, marking the ensemble’s second international tour and its first to Asia.

In addition to these titled positions, Mr. Mitchell is in consistent demand as a guest conductor.

Recent and upcoming guest engagements include the orchestras of Columbus, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Oregon, Rochester, Saint Paul, San Antonio, and Washington (National Symphony Orchestra), among others. His Summer 2017 festival appearances include the Blossom Music Festival with The Cleveland Orchestra, the Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago, the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge, the Sarasota Music Festival, and the Texas Music Festival in Houston. He has collaborated with such soloists as 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

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES 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.

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 in 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. brettmitchellconductor.com

MASON BATES, electronica Recently named the most-performed composer of his generation, Mason Bates serves as the first composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His music enlivens imaginative narrative forms with innovative orchestral writing, the harmonies of jazz and the rhythms of techno, and it has been the first symphonic music to receive widespread acceptance for its unique integration of electronic sounds. Leading conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Leonard Slatkin have championed his diverse catalogue. He has become a visible advocate for bringing new music to new spaces, whether through institutional partnerships such as his residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, or through his club/classical project Mercury Soul, which transforms spaces ranging from commercial clubs to Frank Gehry-designed concert halls into exciting, hybrid musical events drawing over a thousand people. Mason Bates’ music’s novel realization of narrative forms has recently attracted the attention of artists in opera and film. He made his film composition debut in 2015 with the feature-length The Sea of Trees by director Gus Van Sant. He premiered an opera on the topic of Steve Jobs at Santa Fe Opera in 2017. Last season the Kennedy Center premiered Mason Bates’ new work celebrating the centennial of John F. Kennedy. The work juxtaposes the poetry of longtime JFK confidant Robert Frost with excerpts of the President’s own words. Other recent highlights include performances of Liquid Interface and Garages of the Valley by the National Symphony Orchestra, Alternative Energy with the Philadelphia Orchestra and performances by the Fort Worth Symphony of Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, which was recently recorded by Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony. For more info, go to www.masonbates.com and www.mercurysoul.org.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES KEVIN PUTS (B. 1972): Millennium Canons Kevin Puts was born January 3, 1972, in St. Louis. His Millennium Canons was composed in 2001 and premiered on June 19, 2001, by the Boston Pops, conducted by Keith Lockhart. The score calls for two flutes, piccolo, three oboes, three clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 7 minutes.

This is the first performance by the Colorado Symphony.

Kevin Puts, born in 1972 in St. Louis, received his bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music (1994), his master’s degree from Yale (1996), and his doctorate from Eastman (1999); his composition teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Samuel Adler, and David Burge. He also participated in the 1996 Tanglewood Festival Fellowship Program, where he worked with Bernard Rands and William Bolcom. Puts taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1999 until the fall of 2006, when he joined the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Kevin Puts has accumulated an impressive array of distinctions: the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his acclaimed opera Silent Night, based on the 2005 French film Joyeux Nöel and premiered by Minnesota Opera in November 2012; from 1996 to 1999, he served concurrently as Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony (which premiered three of his works) and Young Concert Artists, Inc. in New York; he has received commissions from the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Minnesota Orchestra, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, Eroica Trio, Ying Quartet, and other noted ensembles and organizations; he was the first undergraduate to be awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he has received grants and fellowships from BMI, ASCAP, Tanglewood, the Hanson Institute for American Music, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Benjamin H. Danks Award for Excellence in Orchestral Composition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Barlow International Prize for Orchestral Music; and in 2007, he was Composer-in-Residence with both the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and Forth Worth Symphony. His recent projects include The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, whose libretto Mark Campbell based on the Gothic novel by Peter Ackroyd, premiered by Philadelphia Opera in September 2017.

The “canon” — a piece in strict imitation with all the lines derived from a single melody according to a given instruction (“canon” derives from the Latin for a “rule”; Row, Row, Row Your Boat is a canon) — is one of music’s most demanding forms. The technique dates to at least the 14th century and flourished during the Renaissance and Baroque, the great ages of polyphonic composition. Thereafter, it took on a largely pedagogical function (Mozart and Beethoven tossed off several of them just for fun) and occasional use as a development technique in larger compositions. Kevin Puts made remarkable use of the ancient imitative procedure in his celebratory Millennium Canons, composed in 2001 for the Boston Pops. “I wrote Millennium Canons,” he said, “to usher in a new millennium with fanfare, celebration and lyricism. The work’s rising textures and melodic counterpoint are almost always created through use of the canon, which also provides rhythmic propulsion at times.”

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES MASON BATES (B. 1977): The B-Sides for Orchestra and Electronica Mason Bates was born on January 23, 1977, in Philadelphia. He composed The B Sides in 2009; it was premiered on May 20, 2009, by the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. The score calls for two flutes (1st doubling piccolo), two oboes (2nd doubling English Horn), E-flat clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), two clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, electronica, harp, piano (doubling celesta), and strings. Duration is about 20 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the orchestra.

Mason Bates brings not only his own fresh talent to the concert hall but also the musical sensibilities of a new generation — he is equally at home composing “for Lincoln Center,” according to his web site (www.masonbates.com), as being the “electronica artist Masonic® who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York City, where he was a lounge DJ at such venues as The Frying Pan — the floating rave ship docked off the pier near West 22nd Street.”

Bates was born in Philadelphia in 1977 and started studying piano with Hope Armstrong Erb at his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. He earned degrees in both English literature and music composition in the joint program of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, where his composition teachers included John Corigliano, David Del Tredici and Samuel Adler, and received his doctorate in composition from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 as a student of Edmund Campion and Jorge Lidermann. Bates was Resident Composer with the California Symphony from 2008 to 2011, Project San Francisco Artist-in-Residence with the San Francisco Symphony in 2011-2012, and Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2012-2013; he held a residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2010 to 2015; and serves as the first-ever Composer-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., during the 2017-2018 season.

Bates’ rapidly accumulating portfolio of orchestral, chamber, vocal, theatrical, and electronic compositions includes commissions and performances by the major orchestras of London, Lisbon, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Toronto, Phoenix, San Francisco, Oakland, Annapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, and Detroit; the Tanglewood, Aspen, Cabrillo; and Spoleto USA festivals; Biava Quartet, Chanticleer, and New Juilliard Ensemble. In 2010, Bates was commissioned to write Mothership for the second concert of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble composed of musicians from around the world who were selected through on-line auditions by Michael Tilson Thomas, the project’s director and conductor, and assembled in Sydney, Australia, for rehearsals and a live concert on March 20, 2011, streamed on the internet; the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra concert was held in New York in 2009. Among his recent works is The (R) evolution of Steve Jobs, premiered by Santa Fe Opera in July 2017. Bates’ many honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship, Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, ASCAP and BMI awards, a Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, and a two-year Composer Residency with Young Concert Artists.

Bates wrote of The B-Sides, commissioned in 2009 by the San Francisco Symphony, “It was between Tchaikovsky and Brahms that [SFS Music Director] Michael Tilson Thomas, surprisingly mellow in his dressing room during one intermission, broached the idea of a new work. Fresh off

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES the podium after the concerto, and apparently undistracted by the looming symphony in the second half, he suggested a collection of five pieces focusing on texture and sonority — perhaps like Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. Since my music had largely gone in the other direction — large works that bathed the listener in immersive experiences — the idea intrigued me. I had often imagined a suite of concise, off-kilter symphonic pieces that would incorporate the grooves and theatrics of electronica in a highly focused manner. So, like the forgotten bands from the flipside of an old piece of vinyl, The B-Sides offers brief landings on a variety of peculiar planets, unified by a focus on fluorescent orchestral sonorities and the morphing rhythms of electronica.

“The first stop is the dusky, circuit-board landscape of Broom of the System. To the ticking of a future clock, our broom — brought to life by sandpaper blocks and, at one point, an actual broom — quietly and anonymously keeps everything running, like a chimney-sweep in a huge machine. The title is from a short-story collection by David Foster Wallace, though one could place the fairy-like broom in Borges’ Anthology of Fantastic Zoology.

“The ensuing Aerosol Melody (Hanalei) blooms on the north shore of the island of Kauai in Hawaii, where a gentle, bending melody evaporates at cadence points. Djembe [a rope-tuned, skin-covered, goblet-shaped drum played with the hands] and springy pizzicati populate the strange fauna of this purely acoustic movement. The lazy string glissandi ultimately put the movement, beachside, to sleep.

“Gemini in the Solar Wind is a re-imagination of the first American spacewalk, using actual communication samples from the 1965 Gemini IV voyage provided by NASA. In this re-telling, clips of words, phrases and static from the original are rearranged to show Ed White, seduced by the vastness and mystery of space, deliriously unhooking from the spacecraft to drift away blissfully.

“White’s final vision of the coast of Northern California drops us down close to my home.

The initial grit of Temescal Noir, like the Oakland neighborhood of the title, eventually shows its subtle charm in hazy, jazz-tinged hues. Unbothered by electronics, this movement receives some industrious help in the rhythm department from a typewriter and an oil drum. At its end, the broom returns in a cameo, again altering the tempo, and this propels us into Warehouse Medicine. An homage to techno’s birthplace — the empty warehouses of Detroit — the final stop on The B-Sides gives no quarter. Huge brass swells and out-of-tune pizzicati emulate some of the visceral sonorities of techno, and on this pounding note The B-Sides bows out.”

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827) Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770, in Bonn and died on March 26, 1827, in Vienna. The Fifth Symphony was composed between 1804 and 1808, and premiered on December 22, 1808, in Vienna, conducted by the composer. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo and contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes. The piece was last performed on December 5-7, 2014, with Jun Märkl conducting the orchestra.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the archetypal example of the technique and content of the form. Its overall structure is not one of four independent essays linked simply by tonality and style, as in the typical 18th-century example, but is rather a carefully devised whole in which each of the movements serves to carry the work inexorably toward its end. The progression from minor to major, from dark to light, from conflict to resolution is at the very heart of the “meaning” of this work. The psychological progression toward the finale — the relentless movement toward a life-affirming close — is one of Beethoven’s most important technical and emotional legacies, and it established for following generations the concept of how such a creation could be structured, and in what manner it should engage the listener.

The opening gesture is the most famous beginning in all of classical music. It establishes the stormy temper of the Allegro by presenting the germinal cell from which the entire movement grows. The gentler second theme derives from the opening motive, and gives only a brief respite in the headlong rush that drives the movement. It provides the necessary contrast while doing nothing to impede the music’s flow. The development section is a paragon of cohesion, logic and concision. The recapitulation roars forth after a series of breathless chords that pass from woodwinds to strings and back.

The second movement is a set of variations on two contrasting themes. The first theme, presented by violas and cellos, is sweet and lyrical in nature; the second, heard in horns and trumpets, is heroic. The ensuing variations on the themes alternate to produce a movement by turns gentle and majestic.

The Scherzo returns the tempestuous character of the opening movement, as the fournote motto from the first movement is heard again in a brazen setting led by the horns. The fughetta, the “little fugue,” of the central trio is initiated by the cellos and basses. The Scherzo returns with the mysterious tread of the plucked strings, after which the music wanes until little more than a heartbeat from the timpani remains. Then begins another accumulation of intensity, first gradually, then more quickly, as a bridge to the finale, which arrives with a glorious proclamation, like brilliant sun bursting through ominous clouds.

The finale is jubilant and martial. The sonata form proceeds apace. At the apex of the development, however, the mysterious end of the Scherzo is invoked to serve as the link to the return of the main theme in the recapitulation. It also recalls and compresses the emotional journey of the entire Symphony. The closing pages repeat the cadence chords extensively as a way of discharging the work’s enormous accumulated energy. ©2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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MOZART’S REQUIEM

WAGNER:

THE RING WITHOUT WORDS

Mozart’s Requiem

Wagner: The Ring Without Words

OCT 13-15

APR 20-22 FRI-SAT 7:30 n SUN 1:00

FRI-SAT 7:30 n SUN 1:00

Jun Märkl, conductor Yulia Van Doren, soprano Abigail Nims, mezzo Derek Chester, tenor Andrew Garland, baritone Colorado Symphony Chorus, Duain Wolfe, director Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24 R. STRAUSS MOZART Requiem, K. 626 After leading a lauded performance of our 2014 All-Beethoven program, Jun Märkl returns to Boettcher Concert Hall to conduct the internationally praised Colorado Symphony Chorus in Mozart’s immortal Requiem. Ironically, Mozart died before finishing his Requiem, and supposedly wrote instructions for completion on since-lost “little scraps of paper.” However mythical the conclusion of this masterpiece may be, its dramatic and captivating spirit endures. Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration — a tone poem depicting the death of an artist — complements the immortal Requiem in a program that proves the longevity of brilliance.

Brett Mitchell, conductor WAGNER/ arr. Maazel The Ring Without Words Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung notoriously takes days to perform in its entirety. In this unique treatment created by conductor and composer Lorin Maazel, Music Director Brett Mitchell leads the orchestra through the fundamental sequences of Wagner’s Ring cycle in a once-in-a-lifetime performance. (Mitchell will describe the leitmotifs in a musical demonstration at the top of the concert, preceding a condensed performance without words.)

This is an illuminating and rare performance of The Ring that will resonate with all audiences.

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