THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents
University Philharmonia
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor Nathan Haines, Assistant Conductor
Monday, October 3, 2022 7:30 p.m. | Opperman Music Hall
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PROGRAM
Finlandia, Op. 26 Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)
Aristophanic Suite: “The Wasps” Ralph Vaughan Williams
I. Overture (1872–1958)
II. Entr’acte
III. March-Past of the Kitchen Utensils
IV. Entr’acte
V. Ballet and Final Tableau
Nathan Haines, assistant conductor
Polovtsian Dances (from Prince Igor)
Alexander Borodin (1833–1887)
To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All…
Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.
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Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
Sibelius – Finlandia, Op. 26
The compositions of Jean Sibelius constitute a case study in the capriciousness of musical taste and the power of the artistic avant-garde. Pigeonholed by many as primarily a Finnish nationalist, whose dark, remote music was a shallow representative of Romanticism’s last gasp, Sibelius was nevertheless deemed the champion of American and British conservative musical tastes between the world wars. Typical was Olin Downes, music critic of the Times, whose relentless public support of Sibelius bordered on sycophancy. Likewise, Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, programmed a cycle of Sibelius’s symphonies, and dogged the composer to finish the eighth – which he never did. But, those who favored the avant-garde of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and company—and that included most of continental Europe and American intellectuals—were scathing in their contempt. One respected and well-known critic entitled an essay about Sibelius, “The Worst Composer in the World.” These controversies, and Sibelius’s life-long struggle with alcoholism and depression no doubt played a signal part in his composing nothing of significance from the nineteen thirties until his death in 1957 at the age of 91.
But today Sibelius enjoys a respect, while not approaching the heights of pre-World War II times, that seems to secure his reputation. While he was a prolific composer, and his symphonies enjoy frequent performance, none of his works achieved the popularity of Finlandia. Finland had for centuries languished under the rule of Sweden, and then in the early nineteenth century fell under the control of Russia, becoming by the end of the century a grand duchy of the Russian Empire. After tightening control of Finland by Russia in 1898, the Finns were distinctly unhappy. Surging nationalism manifested itself in variety of ways, including a patriotic melodrama given in 1899 in Helsinki, ostensibly to raise money for a newspaper pension fund. Sibelius contributed incidental music to this enterprise, the last tableau of which was entitled Suomi Herää (Finland Awakens). He reworked the piece into a symphonic tone poem the next year, and renamed it Finlandia. It opens with ominous brass chords, moves on into a tumultuous faster section that seems to parallel a growing national sense of strength, and ends triumphantly with a powerful chorale (heard earlier, in a soft aura of confidence). The chorale has entered the realm of popular church music under the title, “Be Still My Soul,” but it stands alone as the most affirmative statement of the confidence and independence of the Finnish people.
— Wm. E. Runyan © 2015 William E. Runyan
Vaughan Williams - Aristophanic Suite: “The Wasps”
Ralph Vaughan Williams (incidentally, pronounced “Rayf, not Ralf”) is perhaps Britain’s most important and influential composer of the first half of the twentieth century. Prolific in most musical genres, he was an active composer from his student days right up until his death in 1958, at the age of eighty-six. He composed dozens of works that are part of the core repertory of British music of the last century, including the important series of nine symphonies, a variety of other orchestral works, and a wealth of vocal music.
He lived a long life – long enough to have written in a number of rather different styles, all of them authentic and reflective of his changing interests and the times. He was born into an educated, upper middle-class family—related to both the famous Wedgwoods and the Darwins—attended Cambridge University, and studied with eminent musicians and scholars, including a stint with Maurice Ravel. Among his early close friends and fellow students were
such luminaries as Bertram Russell, Leopold Stokowski, and, of course, Gustav Holst. Not a precocious musician, he began modestly, studied diligently, and slowly achieved public recognition as a composer, not publishing until his early thirties. In addition to his copious activities as a composer, he spent his entire life engaged in championing the support of English music, whether as teacher, writer, festival organizer, or conductor – including the most modest levels of amateur music making.
In addition to his early activities as a rising composer, he and Holst were among the leaders in the efflorescence of serious study and collection of English folksong that arose in the late nineteenth century. He and Holst frequently spent time in the countryside tracking the rapidly vanishing body of song, writing them down, and preserving them. He later served as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. And, inevitably, his appreciation of this great literature became a major influence on one facet of his musical style – evidenced by every American band student’s encounter with his English Folksong Suite. An important interest and activity of his early on was his editorship of the English Hymnal (1906), his interest in the great English composer, Henry Purcell, and of all of the music, in general, of the Renaissance in England.
After WW II, his musical stock languished to a large degree, owing to the predominance of radical musical modernism, and it became fashionable to denigrate Vaughan Williams and his British peers as hopelessly passé. Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Holst, Delius, and others were snidely dismissed as “pastoralists,” – composers of lush, beguiling, tuneful, nationalistic music that reeked of nature. Benjamin Britten scornfully deemed them the “cowpat” school. Time has erased that woeful assessment.
Early in his career, in 1909, not long before the successes that first brought him widespread accolades, he was commissioned to provide incidental music for the Cambridge Greek Play, an old tradition at the University of Cambridge wherein every three years one of the great Greek plays is given entirely in the ancient Greek language. The play chosen in 1909 was Aristophanes’ “The Wasps,” considered one the greatest comedies in theatre. The play is a rousing satire of the Athenian judiciary, with the behavior of elderly jurors generating a comparison with the eponymous insects. Having said that, Vaughan Williams’ music for the play has absolutely nothing to do with wasps or ancient Greece. Rather, it is typical of the composer’s folksong-inflected, cheerful, and witty British style. The music is a suite comprised of an overture, two entr’actes, an eccentric little middle movement called “March Past of the Kitchen Utensils,” and a “Ballet and Final Tableau.” They are all charming, tuneful, and perfect accompaniment to an evening of comedy in ancient Greek for an educated audience. It must be admitted, though, that the opening of the “Overture” is a perfect imitation of swarming wasps, but that little bit of musical onomatopoeia just sets the stage, so to speak, and doesn’t return as a signature musical element. After the opening swarm of wasps, the overture lays out a bustling succession of tunes in the best traditional Vaughan Williams style. His forays with Holst collecting English folksongs bear fruit here, as well as his study with Ravel. But, there’s nothing French about it, simply an eloquent and mellifluous testimony to the composer’s innate musical gifts. The attentive listener will spot any number of Vaughan Williams’ signature stylistic features: pentatonic and modal melodies, broad lyrical tunes combined polyphonically with “dancing” faster tunes – even snatches of later, well-known compositions of his. These, and the rousing ending all are harbingers of his musical maturity, and lasting significance.
— Wm. E. Runyan ©2019 William E. Runyan
Borodin – Polovtsian Dances
Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor should have been his magnum opus. He began it in 1869, abandoned it to work on his Symphony No. 2, returned to it in 1874, and worked on it by fits and starts from then until his death. The opera was completed and orchestrated in part by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov and was first produced in 1890. Prince Igor tells a complicated story of the campaign of Igor Sviatoslavich, the twelfthcentury prince of Novgorod-Seversk, and his military campaign against the Polovtsians, a Tatar tribe. The expedition turns into a disaster, and Igor and his son are taken prisoner. Borodin’s opera ends in a kind of stand-off, with Igor, who has escaped, determined to raise an army for a renewed campaign, and with Khan Kontchak, the Polovtsian leader, about to launch an invasion into Russian territories. The dances and passionately patriotic choruses of the Polovtsians—which we hear tonight in their orchestral versions—are the closing music to Act 2 of Prince Igor.
– ©2019 Michael Steinberg
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Violin I
Madelyne Garnot ‡ Francesco Capitano Gabriel Salinas-Guzman ‡ Bailey Bryant Elizabeth Milan Christopher Wheaton Alexander Roes Sarita Thosteson Daniela Ramirez Sierra Su Sean Hartman Alyssa Donall
Violin II
Hope Welsh* Carlos Cordero
Victoria Joyce Chris Chiarotti Max Warren Elina Mysquist Joan Prokopowicz Michelangelo Woodrich Harshul Mulpuru Ismar Cabrera Wood Simon
University Philharmonia Personnel
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor Nathan Haines, Assistant Conductor
Viola
Keara Henre* Phil Prasse Abby Felde Emily Lombard Tyana McGann Ruth Gray Spencer Schneider Emma Patterson Harper Knopf
Cello Emma Hoster* Noah Hays Liam Sabo Natalie Taunton Abigail Fernandez Caleb Singletary Marina Edwards Luke Ponko Jaden Sanzo Sophie Stalnaker Bass Christian Maldonado* Lucas Kornegay* Layla Feaster Charles Storch Harp Lauren Barfield*
Flute
Peyton Dillon* Moriah Emrich Paige Douglas Piccolo Paige Douglas Oboe Alec McDaniel* Sarah Ward* Loanne Masson Anisa Herbert
English Horn Anisa Herbert
Clarinet Sadie Murray* Jariel Santiago* Reymon Contrera Josh Collins Bassoon Carson Long* Ryder Kaya* Timothy Schwindt Ryan Kegg Horn
Luis Oquendo* Jordan Perkins* Adam Agonoy Clare Ottesen
Trumpet
Easton Barham* Robert Kerr* Thum Rangsiyawaranon Trombone Christian Estades* Jeffrey Welch Masa Ohtake Bass Trombone Masa Ohtake
Tuba Sam Morris*
Percussion Gus Barreda* James Wolff Zach Harris Jackson Kowalczyk Connor Willits Jacob Dell Equipment Manager Sierra Su
Orchestra Manager Heather Simpson
‡ Co-Concertmaster *Principal/Co-Principal
