FEBRUARY 23, 24

Concerts of Thursday, February 23, 2023 8:00 PM

Friday, February 24, 2023 8:00 PM

RYAN BANCROFT, conductor

CONRAD TAO, piano ZOLTÁN KODÁLY (1882–1967) Háry János Suite (1926) 22 MINS

I. Prelude: The Fairy Tale Begins

II. The Viennese Musical Clock

III. Song

IV. The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon

V. Intermezzo

VI. Entrance of the Emperor and his Court MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937) Piano Concerto in G Major (1931) 23 MINS

I. Allegramente

II. Adagio assai

III. Presto Conrad Tao, piano INTERMISSION 20 MINS

WILLIAM DAWSON (1899–1990) Negro Folk Symphony (1934, rev. 1952) 32 MINS

I. The Bond of Africa

II. Hope in the Night

III. O Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!

Thursday’s concert is dedicated to RICHARD H. DELAY & DR. FRANCINE D. DYKES in honor of their extraordinary support of the 2021/22 Annual Fund.

The use of cameras or recording devices during the concert is strictly prohibited. Please be kind to those around you and silence your mobile phone and other hand-held devices.

by Noel Morris

Program Annotator

Háry János Suite The Háry János Suite is scored for three flutes (all doubling piccolo) two oboes, two clarinets, e-flat clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, celeste, cimbalom and strings.

At the start of World War I, Zoltán Kodály was a citizen of AustriaHungary, the second largest country in Europe. Within six years, his homeland would be dismantled. The Paris Peace Conference aspired to redraw the European map to diffuse further conflict. In truth, it ossified winners and losers. For Hungary, the price of peace was high: the Treaty of Trianon sheared off more than 70 percent of its territory, leaving three million ethnic Hungarians outside its borders. With the stroke of a pen, a nation whose boundaries had remained virtually unchanged for 1100 years was abolished for millions of citizens. Six years later, Zoltán Kodály set out to write an opera in his native tongue. As a youth, Zoltán had been drawn to literature. At the same time, making music was an everyday part of family life. He played violin, piano, and cello and served as a choir boy at the local cathedral. He was still a schoolboy when he started writing music. At the age of 18, he headed off to the University of Sciences in Budapest. But that lasted for only two years when he transferred to the Academy of Music. At the age of 22, Zoltán Kodály embarked upon a project that galvanized an academic field and staved off the loss of a rich musical tradition. With Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder phonograph in tow, he traveled into remote areas of Hungary, moving from village to village to record, notate, and preserve what had been a strictly oral tradition of folk music. Unlike the popular tunes of the urban Romani, which had been circulating through cafes under the label “Hungarian,” the traditional music of rural Hungary had remained unknown and untouched by the world at large. Together with his friend and fellow composer Bela Bartók, Kodály preserved thousands of songs. In 1906, he earned his Ph.D. with a thesis titled “Strophic Construction of Hungarian Folk Song” (this essentially describes a song with multiple verses). Soon after graduation, he joined the faculty.

First ASO performance: November 23, 1964 Henry Sopkin, conductor Most recent ASO performances: September 20–22, 1995 Yoel Levi, conductor

WIKIMEDIA

In 1926, Kodály issued a comic opera based on János Garay’s epic poem The Veteran. The story paints a portrait of a braggadocious barfly who likes to spin a yarn about his own military and romantic exploits. In the opera, Háry explains that he once wooed Empress Marie Louise, wife of Napoleon, and singlehandedly defeated her husband’s army. He goes on to describe his former life as a wealthy and powerful man. “That his stories are not true is irrelevant,” wrote Kodály. “For they are the fruit of a lively imagination, seeking to create, for himself and for others, a beautiful dream world.” Háry János opens with a great orchestral sneeze—a gesture, according to Hungarian tradition, that verifies the teller’s tale. Of course, Kodály uses the sneeze with a wink. The beauty of the bedraggled Háry János is not his heroism but his capacity to be “a king in the kingdom of his dreams.” Adding atmosphere to his rumination, the opera resounds with Hungarian folk songs (notice, in the third movement, the use of the cimbalom, a Hungarian dulcimer). In 1927, the composer extracted six movements to create the present orchestral suite. Because most singers are not trained to sing in the Hungarian language, the suite from Háry János is heard far more often than the opera.

First ASO performance: Piano Concerto in G Major January 10, 1963 In addition to the solo piano, this concerto is scored

Henry Sopkin, conductor for piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, e-flat Philippe Entremont, piano clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, trombone, Most recent timpani, percussion, harp and strings.

ASO performances: At the end of World War I, the 369th Infantry Regiment May 2–4, 2019 set off an artistic revolution in France. Nicknamed Lionel Bringuier, conductor the Harlem Hellfighters, the regiment gained a reputation Lise de la Salle, piano for ferocity on the battlefield, and for circulating a new and beguiling kind of music called jazz. Marching thousands of miles through the French countryside, the Hellfighters ‘band captivated civilians with their syncopated rhythms and peculiar style. After the War, many jazz pioneers settled in Montmartre where they could work and thrive beyond the clutches of Jim Crow. And their music acquired a level of respectability that had not been possible in the United States. By 1928, jazz was part of French nightlife. When composer Maurice Ravel traveled to New York, he was eager to make a musical

pilgrimage to Harlem and enlisted the company of the local celebrity George Gershwin. The 29-year-old Gershwin had been a guest at Ravel’s 53rd birthday party where he trotted out one of his most popular party tricks— he sat at the piano and played his Rhapsody in Blue. Ravel was bowled over. Together they made several jaunts to the jazz clubs of Harlem. At the same time, Ravel published an essay in Musical Digest, scolding his American hosts: “You Americans take jazz too lightly,” he wrote. “You seem to feel that it is cheap, vulgar, momentary. In my opinion it is bound to lead to the national music of the United States.”

Ravel’s American tour of 1928 took him to more than twenty cities where he played and conducted his works. The following year, he began composing the Piano Concerto in G Major. Much has been made of the jazz influence in this and other interwar compositions by Ravel, to which he replied, “What is being written today without the influence of jazz?” In truth, Ravel was a cosmopolitan. To that point, he acknowledged the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns in this piece. It seems he also made a hearty nod to jazz and to Gershwin, and even included a Basque folk tune (Ravel had toyed with the idea of writing a Basque piano concerto before the war). More than anything, the Concerto in G Major reflects the spirit of an age when creative people from around the world converged in Paris, a decade which F. Scott Fitzgerald christened the “Jazz Age.”

Negro Folk Symphony Negro Folk Symphony is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, e-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings.

The story of composer William Dawson parallels a dramatic chapter in American history. His father was born into slavery and never learned to read. Young William left home at 13 to enter a precollegiate program at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. There, he became a multi-instrumentalist while pursuing academic studies under the guidance of the school president, the famed educator and intellectual Booker T. Washington. As a teen, Dawson supported himself as a field hand until he earned his bachelor’s degree from Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City. He earned

WIKIMEDIA

First ASO performance: March 24, 1966 Henry Sopkin, conductor Most recent ASO performance: March 3–5, 2005 Robert Spano, conductor

a master’s degree from the American Conservatory of Music in

Chicago. All along, he gained a reputation as a serious composer.

In 1931, he returned to the Tuskegee Institute to organize and head up the School of Music and direct the school’s vocal ensembles. In the 1931–1932 catalogue, he outlined the choir’s role at the school, stating that “Much stress is put on the interpretation and singing of Negro melodies and other folk music. The choir rehearses daily and sings in the Institute Chapel every Sunday morning and evening, and on other important occasions.” In 1932, the Tuskegee Choir sang at the grand opening of Radio City Music Hall in New York City and then at Carnegie Hall. After performing for President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, they headed southward, stopping to give concerts in Philadelphia and at the White House in Washington, D.C. After the tour, Dawson turned his attention to completing his Negro Folk Symphony. On November 20, 1934, Dawson returned to Carnegie Hall, this time for the world premiere of the Symphony with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. The next day, Olin Downes of the The New York Times wrote: “The audience reserved its enthusiasm for the symphony of William Dawson . . . The end of the concert saw a majority of them remaining to applaud long and lustily, and call Mr. Dawson several times back to the stage.” Stokowski conducted the piece several times and even performed it for a national radio broadcast. Then, the work was forgotten for many years until he recorded it in 1963. For Dawson, his Negro Folk Symphony was personal. He aspired in this piece to celebrate his heritage—the spiritual. “To me, the finest compliment that could be paid my symphony when it has its premiere is that it unmistakably is not the work of a white man. I want the audience to say, ‘Only a Negro could have written that.’” In the program note, he explained: “In this composition, the composer has employed three themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother’s knee.”

Dawson’s Symphony is uniquely American. As music scholar John Andrew Johnson wrote: “It fuses previously established sociocultural hierarchies: so-called high-brow and low-brow, black and white, American and European, sacred and secular.” But as the title implies, it is more specifically about the Black American experience. The first movement is titled “The Bond of Africa” and contains an

original melody that runs throughout the Symphony. Dawson called this tune, heard at the opening, his “missing link” motive, referring to the moment when “the first African was taken from the shores of his native land and sent to slavery.” There follows a spiritual “M’ Littl Soul Gwine-a Shine.” As the first movement unfolds, Dawson invokes the rhythmic vitality of the juba dance, which is traditionally performed with hand clapping and foot stomping. In the second movement, titled “Hope in the Night,” Dawson contrasts the quiet of nighttime with the toil of daytime. In his own description, he wrote that it represents the “atmosphere of the humdrum life of a people whose bodies were baked by the sun and lashed with the whip for two hundred and fifty years; whose lives were proscribed before they were born.” The finale takes its title from the spiritual “Oh, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!” and develops this theme alongside the spiritual “Hallelujah, Lord I Been Down into the Sea.”

B. EALOVEGA RYAN BANCROFT, CONDUCTOR

Ryan Bancroft grew up in Los Angeles and first came to international attention in April 2018 when he won both First Prize and Audience Prize at the prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen. Since September 2021, Bancroft has been Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Following his first visit to work with the Tapiola Sinfonietta in Finland Bancroft was invited to become their

Artist in Association from the 21/22 season onwards. In 2021,

Bancroft was announced as Chief Conductor Designate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. He will take up the Chief Conductor position in September 2023. Bancroft has made debuts with a number of leading European orchestras including the Philharmonia, London Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Orchestre Nationale du Capitole de Toulouse, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, among others. He has worked with the Toronto Symphony, Baltimore Symphony and Houston Symphony and has debuts in the 22/23 season with the Dallas Symphony and Minnesota Symphony, as well as at Suntory Hall with the New Japan Philharmonic and Midori, at the Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia and Sir Stephen Hough, and at the Concertgebouw with the Netherlands Philharmonic. Bancroft will also return to the City of Birmingham Symphony, Malmö Symphony, and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestras. Bancroft studied trumpet at the California Institute of the Arts, alongside additional studies in harp, flute, cello, and Ghanaian music and dance. He then went on to receive an MMus in orchestral conducting from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He continued his conducting studies in the Netherlands and is a graduate of the prestigious Nationale Master Orkestdirectie run jointly by the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. As a student, his main mentors were Edward Carroll, Kenneth Montgomery, Ed Spanjaard and Jac van Steen.

CONRAD TAO, PIANO

Conrad Tao has performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony. As a composer, his work has been performed by orchestras throughout the world; his first large scale orchestral work, Everything Must Go, received its world premiere with the New York Philharmonic. He is the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and was named a Gilmore Young Artist—an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation. This season, Tao performs Mozart with the New York Philharmonic. He returns to the San Francisco Symphony as a soloist in Gershwin’s Concerto in F major at Davies Symphony Hall, and as curator for their Soundbox series. In Washington, DC, he debuts with the National Symphony Orchestra performing Shostakovich with Dalia Staveska, and, following Atlanta Symphony’s premiere of his Violin Concerto with Stefan Jackiw in 2021, he will appear as soloist performing Ravel with Ryan Bancroft. Tao will re-unite with Hannu Lintu to perform Tchaikovsky with the Naples Philharmonic, and return to Finland to open the season with the Tampere Philharmonic and Santtu-Matias Rouvali.

Tao was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1994. He has studied piano with Emilio del Rosario in Chicago and Yoheved Kaplinsky in New York, and composition with Christopher Theofanidis.

KEVIN CONDON