Program - Gershwin Concerto in F conducted by Brett Mitchell

CLASSICS

2018/19

2018/19 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSORS:

GERSHWIN CONCERTO IN F CONDUCTED BY BRETT MITCHELL COLORADO SYMPHONY BRETT MITCHELL, conductor JOYCE YANG, piano TIMOTHY MCALLISTER, saxophone Friday, September 28, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 29, 2018, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, September 30, 2018, at 1:00 p.m.

Boettcher Concert Hall

ELLINGTON Three Black Kings orch. Henderson King of the Magi King Solomon Martin Luther King, Jr. GERSHWIN Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra

Allegro

Adagio - Andante con moto

Allegro agitato — INTERMISSION —

JOHN ADAMS City Noir The City and Its Double The Song Is for You Boulevard Night

Friday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to t he Chill Foundation Saturday's Concert is Gratefully Dedicated to Mr. John F. Estes III

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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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.

Mr. 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. Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. Mitchell completed a highly successful five-year appointment as Music Director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra.

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.

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 tenure as Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra from 2013 to 2017 was highly praised, and included a four-city tour of China in June 2015, marking the orchestra’s PROGRAM 2

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES second international tour and its first to Asia. Mr. Mitchell 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, Sarasota Music Festival, and Interlochen Center for the Arts.

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.

For more information, please visit www.brettmitchellconductor.com

JOYCE YANG, piano Pianist Joyce Yang came to international attention in 2005 when she won the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

The youngest contestant at 19 years old, she also took home the awards for Best Performance of Chamber Music and of a New Work. A Steinway artist, in 2010 she received an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Yang has performed with New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and BBC Philharmonic, among many others, working with such distinguished conductors as James Conlon, Edo de Waart, Manfred Honeck, Lorin Maazel, Leonard Slatkin, and Jaap van Zweden. She has appeared in recital at New York’s Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Museum, Washington’s Kennedy Center, Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and Zurich’s Tonhalle. In the 2017/2018 season, Yang embarks on a series of debuts, collaborations, and premieres. Highlights include her debut with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Edo De Waart performing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in five New Zealand cities, a performance with Albany Symphony at Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. featuring works by Michael Torke (Three Manhattan Bridges, written expressly for Yang and commissioned by Albany Symphony) and Joan Tower (Still/Rapids), a reunion with Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for three performances of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, and her first collaboration with Aspen Santa Fe Ballet on a new work for dancers and solo piano choreographed by Jorma Elo which will receive its world premiere in Aspen this March. Yang will also perform alongside Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Lexington Philharmonic, Eugene Symphony, Santa Rosa Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Reno Philharmonic, Allentown Symphony, Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Vancouver Symphony, and Asheville Symphony. She will continue her enduring partnership with longtime collaborators Alexander String Quartet with performances of works by Schumann and Brahms in California and New York. Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1986, Yang received her first SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES piano lesson from her aunt at age four. In 1997 she moved to the United States to study in the pre-college division of The Juilliard School. After winning The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Student Competition, she performed Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with that orchestra at just twelve years old. Yang appears in the film In the Heart of Music, a documentary about the 2005 Cliburn Competition. www.PianistJoyceYang.com www.facebook.com/PianistJoyceYang

TIMOTHY MCALLISTER, saxophone Timothy McAllister is one of today’s premier wind soloists, a member of the renowned PRISM Quartet, and a champion of contemporary music credited with more than forty recordings and two hundred premières of new compositions by eminent and emerging composers worldwide.

McAllister has appeared with more than forty of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and ensembles in over twenty countries, and he has the distinction of being only the second saxophone soloist to appear in the 120-year history of the BBC London Proms concerts. He is featured on two GRAMMY® Award-winning recordings of the music of John Adams and Gavin Bryars on Nonesuch and ECM, respectively, and also appears on the AUR, Albany, Berlin Philharmonic Recordings, Centaur, Deutsche Grammophon, Equilibrium, Innova, Naxos, New Focus, New Dynamic, Parma, Soundset, Stradivarius, Summit, and XAS/Naxos labels. A revered teacher of his instrument, McAllister is Professor of Saxophone at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance, following renowned American saxophone pedagogues Larry Teal and, his mentor, Donald Sinta. For complete information, see: www.timothymcallister.com

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES EDWARD KENNEDY “DUKE” ELLINGTON (1899-1974): Three Black Kings Orchestrated by Luther Henderson (1919-2003) “Duke” Ellington was born April 29, 1899 in Washington, D.C., and died May 24, 1974 in New York City. Three Black Kings was composed in 1973 and premiered in August 1976 at ArtPark in Buffalo, New York by the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, drum kit, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 19 minutes. Marin Alsop was on the podium when the piece was last performed by the orchestra on September 18 and 19, 1998.

Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington performed in jazz and ragtime bands in his native Washington, D.C. as a teenager. (He acquired his nickname from, he said, a friend “who liked to dress well.... I think he felt that in order for me to be eligible for his companionship I should have a title. So he named me Duke.” It perfectly suited Ellington’s fastidious manner and regal personality, and remained with him for the rest of his life.) In 1923, Ellington moved to New York, where he played in and composed for a small combo before founding the big band that he led for the next half century. Four years later he and the band were booked into Harlem’s Cotton Club, the city’s best-known and swankiest club offering black entertainment to wellhealed white customers, beginning a five-year run that established Ellington’s legendary status in American music. The success of his Mood Indigo in 1930, Ellington’s first hit record, brought him world-wide fame, which led to appearances in Hollywood films, tours across America and Europe, and more than 200 recordings. In the mid-1940s, he began writing large-scale compositions in jazz style for his own band and for concert orchestra, including a series of suites, music for film and stage, and, in his last decade, sacred works. For his contributions to the world’s musical life, Ellington received literally hundreds of awards (their listing occupies thirteen pages in his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress), including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honorary degrees from Columbia, Brown, Howard, Yale and eleven other colleges and universities, and membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His total creative catalog contains some 2,000 items: songs, short instrumental pieces, incidental music, musicals, ballets, scores for six films, two dozen suites for jazz and symphony orchestras (one of which is an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker), and many sacred works for voices and instruments.

He was working on an opera at the time of his death. “The impact of Duke Ellington,” wrote Frank Tirro in Jazz: A History, “is not easily measured, for in his long and prolific career he set standards in so many areas: as a composer, harmonic innovator, ensemble leader, recording artist, arranger, patron of aspiring jazz musicians, and spokesman for black Americans and black American culture.” In an article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, André Hodier assessed that “‘Duke’ Ellington is generally recognized as the most important composer in jazz history.”

Ellington began composing Three Black Kings in 1973 as a ballet for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, but had not finished the work at the time of his death the following year. He and his son, Mercer, discussed Three Black Kings frequently, however, and Mercer was able to complete the score; Luther Henderson, one of the Ellington band’s arrangers, did the orchestration. The premiere was given as by the Alvin Ailey Dance Company at ArtPark in Buffalo, New York in August 1976. The three kings that Ellington evoked in his music reflect both his deep spirituality and his interest in the civil rights movement: King of the Magi (Belthazaar, associated with the Nativity); King Solomon; and Martin Luther King, Jr. SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937): Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra George Gershwin was born September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, and died July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California. He composed the Concerto in F in 1925, and was the soloist in the premiere on December 3rd at New York’s Carnegie Hall; Walter Damrosch conducted the New York Symphony. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes. The Concerto in F was last performed on April 15-17, 2016, with Jeffrey Kahane both soloist and conductor.

Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony and one of this country’s most prominent musical figures for the half-century before World War II, was among the Aeolian Hall audience when George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue exploded above the musical world on February 12, 1924. He recognized Gershwin’s genius (and, no doubt, the opportunity for wide publicity), and approached him a short time later with a proposal for another large-scale work.

A concerto for piano was agreed upon, and Gershwin was awarded a commission from the New York Symphony to compose the piece, and also to be the soloist at its premiere and a half dozen subsequent concerts. The story that Gershwin then rushed out and bought a reference book explaining what a concerto is probably is apocryphal. He did, however, study the scores of some concertos of earlier masters to discover how they had handled the problems of structure and instrumental balance. He made the first extensive sketches for the work while in London during May 1925. By July, back home, he was able to play for his friends large fragments of the evolving work, tentatively entitled “New York Concerto.” The first movement was completed by the end of that month, the second and third by September, and the orchestration carried out in October and November, by which time the title had become simply Concerto in F. He gave the premiere with Damrosch the following month in Carnegie Hall.

Gershwin provided a short analysis of the Concerto for the New York Tribune: “The first movement employs a Charleston rhythm. It is quick and pulsating, representing the young, enthusiastic spirit of American life. It begins with a rhythmic motif given out by the kettledrums, supported by other percussion instruments and with a Charleston motif introduced by bassoon, horns, clarinets and violas. The principal theme is announced by the bassoon. Later, a second theme is introduced by the piano. The second movement has a poetic, nocturnal atmosphere that has come to be referred to as the American blues, but in a purer form than that in which they are usually treated. The final movement is an orgy of rhythms, starting violently and keeping the same pace throughout.”

Though Gershwin based his Concerto loosely on classical formal models, its structure is episodic in nature. His words above do not mention several other melodies that appear in the first and second movements, nor the return of some of those themes in the finale as a means of unifying the work’s overall structure.

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES JOHN ADAMS (B. 1947): City Noir John Adams was born February 15, 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts. City Noir was composed in 2009 and premiered on October 8, 2009 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with Timothy McAllister as soloist. The work is scored for piccolo, three flutes (third also doubling piccolo), three oboes, English horn, three clarinets (third also doubling bass clarinet), bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, saxophone, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, jazz drummer, piano, celesta, two harps and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes. This is the first performance of the piece by the orchestra.

John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career: a recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he received the University of Louisville’s distinguished Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was the focus of the New York Philharmonic’s Composer Week, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America magazine; he has been made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 1999, Nonesuch released The John Adams Earbox, a critically acclaimed ten-CD collection of his work; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and was also recognized by New York’s Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work titled “John Adams: An American Master,” the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted at Lincoln Center; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society” and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, which included residencies and teaching at Northwestern University; he was a 2009 recipient of the NEA Opera Award; he has been granted honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music (London), Juilliard School and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities, honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and the California Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

Adams wrote that City Noir “is a symphony inspired by the peculiar ambience and mood of Los Angeles ‘noir’ films, especially those produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s. City Noir was first suggested by my reading Kevin Starr’s brilliantly imagined, multi-volume cultural and social history of California. In the ‘Black Dahlia’ chapter of his Embattled Dreams volume, Starr chronicles the tenor and milieu of the late 1940s and early 1950s as it was expressed in the sensational journalism of the era and in the dark, eerie chiaroscuro of the Hollywood films that have come to define the period sensibility for us: ‘… the underside of home-front and post-war Los Angeles stood revealed. Still, for all its shoddiness, the City of Angels possessed a certain sassy, savvy energy. It was, among other things, a Front Page kind of town where life was lived by many on the edge, and that made for good copy and good film noir.’

“The music of City Noir is in the form of a thirty-minute symphony. The first movement, The City and Its Double, opens with a brief, powerful ‘wide screen’ panorama that gives way to a murmuring dialogue between double bass pizzicato and scurrying figures in the woodwinds

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES and keyboards. After a broad and lyrical melodic passage in the strings, the original scorrevole [flowing, gliding] movement returns, charged with increasingly insistent impulse and building up steam until it peaks with a full-throttle orchestral tutti. A sudden stasis ushers in the second movement.

“The Song Is for You takes its time assembling itself. Gradually a melodic profile in the solo alto sax emerges from the surrounding pools of chromatically tinted sonorities. Eventually the song finds full bloom in the voice of the solo trombone. Once spent of its fuel, the movement returns to the quiet opening music, ending with pensive solos by the principal horn and viola.

“Boulevard Night is a study in cinematic colors, sometimes, as in the moody ‘Chinatown’ trumpet solo near the beginning, it is languorous and nocturnal; sometimes, as in the jerky, stop-start coughing engine music in the staccato strings, it is animal and pulsing; and other times, as in the slinky, sinuous saxophone theme that keeps coming back, each time with an extra layer of stage makeup, it is in-your-face brash and uncouth.” ©2018 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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