THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF MUSIC
Presents THE UNIVERSITY
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor
Guilherme Leal Rodrigues, Graduate Associate Conductor with Geoffrey Deibel, Alto Saxophone
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Seven-thirty in the Evening Ruby Diamond Concert Hall
PROGRAM
Trois Nocturnes, L. 98
Claude Debussy II. Fêtes (1862–1918)
Guilherme Rodrigues, graduate associate conductor
Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Chamber Orchestra Jeanine Rueff
Allegro molto (1922–1999)
Lent
Vif et bien rythmé
Geoffrey Deibel, alto saxophone
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 84
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Andante-Allegro con anima (1840–1893)
Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
Valse: allegro moderato
Finale: Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace (alla breve)
Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting while performers are playing. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Please turn off cell phones and all other electronic devices. Please refrain from putting feet on seats and seat backs. Children who become disruptive should be taken out of the performance hall so they do not disturb the musicians and other audience members.
Alexander Jiménez serves as Professor of Conducting, Director of Orchestral Activities, and String Area Coordinator at the Florida State University College of Music. Prior to his appointment at FSU in 2000, Jiménez served on the faculties of San Francisco State University and Palm Beach Atlantic University. Under his direction, the FSU orchestral studies program has expanded and been recognized as one of the leading orchestral studies programs in the country. Jiménez has recorded on the Naxos, Neos, Canadian Broadcasting Ovation, and Mark labels. Deeply committed to music by living composers, Jiménez has had fruitful and long-term collaborations with such eminent composers as Ellen Taafe Zwilich and the late Ladisalv Kubík, as well as working with Anthony Iannaccone, Krzysztof Penderecki, Martin Bresnick, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Harold Schiffman, Louis Andriessen, and Georg Friedrich Haas. The University Symphony Orchestra has appeared as a featured orchestra for the College Orchestra Directors National Conference and the American String Teachers Association National Conference, and the University Philharmonia has performed at the Southeast Conference of the Music Educators National Conference (now the National Association for Music Education). The national PBS broadcast of Zwilich’s Peanuts’ Gallery® featuring the University Symphony Orchestra was named outstanding performance of 2007 by the National Educational Television Association.
Active as a guest conductor and clinician, Jiménez has conducted extensively in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, including with the Brno Philharmonic (Czech Republic) and the Israel Netanya Chamber Orchestra. In 2022, Jiménez led the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in a recording of works by Anthony Iannaccone. Deeply devoted to music education, he serves as international ambassador for the European Festival of Music for Young People in Belgium, is a conductor of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute in Massachusetts and serves as Festival Orchestra Director and artistic director of the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan. Jiménez has been the recipient of University Teaching Awards in 2006 and 2018, The Transformation Through Teaching Award, and the Guardian of the Flame Award which is given to an outstanding faculty mentor. Jiménez is a past president of the College Orchestra Directors Association and served as music director of the Tallahassee Youth Orchestras from 2000-2017.
A Washington, D.C. native, Geoffrey Deibel is a leading, innovative voice for the teaching and performance of the saxophone and contemporary music. He maintains a multifaceted career as performer, teacher, and researcher. New projects for 2024-2025 include commissions from Tyshawn Sorey, Amadeus Regucera, and Ingrid Laubrock, performed by Trio Nebbia and a new ensemble with Duo Cortona. His most recent recordings include Iannis Xenakis’ Dmaathen with percussionist Ji Hye Jung, and his debut solo recording, “Ex Uno Plures.” He has performed with contemporary music ensembles such as the Wet Ink Ensemble (“Missing Scenes” recording now available) and the International Contemporary Ensemble at the Park Avenue Armory (NYC) in the full North American Premiere of Louis Andriessen’s De Materie. He has also given recitals throughout the U.S. and in Europe, and been an invited guest lecturer at several conservatories in Europe and many Universities in the US. He has appeared at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, the International Iannis Xenakis Festival in Athens, Greece, and World Saxophone Congresses in the UK, Europe, and Thailand.
Deibel has commissioned new works by a wide range of composers, including Drew Baker, Caleb Burhans, Viet Cuong, Nathan Davis, Claudio Gabriele, Martin Iddon, Ingrid Laubrock, Robert Lemay, Marc Mellits, Joseph Michaels, Forrest Pierce, David Rakowski, Amadeus Regucera, David Reminick, Jesse Ronneau, Tyshawn Sorey, and Eric Wubbels. He has also premiered the music of Louis Andriessen, Georges Aperghis, Jason Eckardt, Hiroyki Itoh, Pierre Jodlowski, Marc Mellits, Elliott Sharp, Jagoda Szmytka, Mari Takano, Hans Thomalla, and Amy Williams.
Deibel is a member of the critically acclaimed h2 quartet, first prize winners at the Fischoff Competition and NASA Quartet Competitions, finalists at the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and recipients of multiple Aaron Copland Fund Grants. The American Record Guide has hailed h2 as a group of “artistic commitment...boasting superb blend, solid technique, [and] tight rhythm.” h2 has seven recordings available, and maintains a non-profit organization to promote the creation of new works for the saxophone quartet. Deibel is also a seasoned orchestral performer, and serves as principal saxophonist with the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra. He previously served in the same capacity with the Wichita Symphony, and has also performed with the New World Symphony and Grant Park Symphony.
Deibel holds degrees in history and music from Northwestern University, and a doctoral degree from Michigan State University. His principal teachers have included Joseph Lulloff, Frederick Hemke, Leo Saguiguit, and Reginald Jackson. Deibel has held teaching positions at the University of Florida and Wichita State University, where he was the recipient of the 2015 College of Fine Arts Award for Scholarly and Creative Activity, and
the 2016 WSU Faculty Award for Excellence in Creative Activity. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Saxophone at Florida State University, where he was awarded a SEED Grant to fund projects from 2024-2027. He also serves on the faculty of the Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Great Plains Saxophone Workshop. Deibel is a Yamaha, Vandoren, and LefreQue performing artist, and performs on Yamaha Saxophones, and Vandoren reeds, ligatures, and mouthpieces exclusively.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
Debussy: “Fêtes” from Trois Nocturnes
The three movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes for orchestra were composed during 189799. Their early reception was not wholly enthusiastic, by any means, and they continued to receive mixed reviews for most of the next decade. It took quite a while before they gained their position as a respected part of the standard orchestral repertoire. He had composed earlier works for orchestra as a developing composer, but of them, only his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (published in 1895) is widely familiar to concert audiences, today.
Debussy’s three movements are entitled Nuages, Fêtes, and Sirènes. He left us specific comments about them, so we understand rather well what he had in mind in each. The second movement, Fêtes (festival), depicts not a specific place and time, but rather the idea of a universal one, with dancing rhythms and splashes of comet-like light. A sonorous procession (listen for the muted trumpets) interrupts in the middle, but the splashy, vivacious mood of the beginning returns.
— © 2015 William E. Runyan
Rueff: Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Chamber Orchestra
In her Concertino, Op. 17 (1951), Jeanine Rueff exhales an unabashed warmth, sincerity, and joy that belies the trauma suffered by her native Paris over the previous three decades. The work is a true paradigm of the neoclassical music that was a rejection of late Germanic romanticism, the perceived formlessness of Debussy’s symbolist music, and of modernist expressionism. Following inventor Adolphe Sax’s death, who unsuccessfully advocated for well-known composers to write for the saxophone, the instrument had been assimilated into the jazz and vaudeville music that had become popular in both America and Europe. The 1942 appointment of Marcel Mule as saxophone professor at the Paris Conservatory—a position vacated by Sax seventy years earlier—inaugurated an era of formalized study and professionalization of the saxophone, and the development of an original repertory thanks to the practice of commissioning notable French composers to write pieces for the conservatory’s yearly concours or exit exams. Irreproachable in his professional contributions and musicianship, Mule was nonetheless conservative even within the orthodox environment of the conservatory and felt obliged to correct what he perceived to be an ignoble public perception of his chosen instrument; the in-vogue neoclassicism of his composer colleagues provided a symbiotic and fruitful partnership.
Jeanine Reuff was a conservatory graduate and newly appointed piano assistant to Mule’s saxophone class.
A gifted composer, she had already won several prestigious prizes for her work, including a Second Grand Prix de Rome and the Favareille-Chailley-Richez prize. She would later be appointed as a Professor at the CNSM, first of solfège and later in Harmony. At the request of Mule, she composed the Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra for the concours in 1951. Comprised of three movements, the work is characterized by a genuine optimism that abounded during France’s economic rebuilding in the 1950s, enabling the social transformation that redefined the country’s identity during its transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic. In the first movement, “Allegro molto,” Rueff seems to ridicule the inglorious recent past of France’s military exploits; a soft pizzicato texture tentatively introduced by the strings provides a backdrop for the protagonist soloist, who alternates between sputtering, insecure fanfares and virtuosic passages that create a more fluid and florid texture. Yet the entire affair is in an awkward, asymmetric time signature, and only seems to truly resolve at the end of the movement. Rueff provides space for us to contemplate and reflect during the “Andante” second movement. An elongated da capo aria is built on a sumptuous phrase developed by the saxophone and echoed back by the strings, with the middle section jumping into a more animated motion that constantly shifts in searching, angular harmonies. In the third movement “lively and rhythmic,” Rueff sheds all the guilt, doubts, and existential dread of what has come before. Amid sparkling dance-like sections and jazz-influenced virtuosity, she enthralls us with a quintessential French sentiment that is simple yet enduring: the magical joie de vivre.
— Geoffrey Deibel
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E Minor
Tchaikovsky completed six symphonies during his lifetime, the last three of which have long been concert staples. The three, while exhibiting both the tangible and intangible characteristics of the composer that endear him to music lovers everywhere, are each unique expressions of his musicianship and personality. Symphony No. 4 (with good reason associated with “fate”) came out of an especially troubled time in his life with regard to his ill-starred (and short) marriage—among other factors was his attempted suicide. Symphony No. 6 was, of course, his last one (he died of cholera nine days after its première), and its title bore the French equivalent of “pathos.” And its tragic pianississimo ending truly evokes the finality of his great personal anguish. So, where does that leave us with No. 5?
In some ways, we find ourselves in a similar kettle of fish. The sixth symphony was composed and premièred in 1888, when the composer was 48 years old, and it too— based upon the composer’s own testament—more or less is concerned with “fate.” He was already in contemplation of death: many close friends had recently died, he was in poor mental and physical health and had made out his will in contemplation of his demise. But the preoccupation on fate in the fifth symphony is perhaps not the hammering fate of the fourth symphony, but rather a more acquiescing acceptance of what Tchaikovsky
called “providence.” The first movement starts right out with the so-called fate motive, played by both clarinets, ominously down in their lowest register; this motive will be easily heard in all four movements, and is a strongly unifying element in the composition. The movement begins with a dark march—with a characteristic Tchaikovskian stuttering syncopation—initiated by solo clarinet and bassoon, accompanied by pizzicato strings. The whole movement centers around this theme, but there are others, most notably a winsome waltz-like theme. Although the movement moves through a variety of intense, dramatic (read loud) utterances, it ends in soft darkness—just as it began.
The second movement is perhaps the most well-known of the four movements, owing to its use in a pop arrangement by Glenn Miller and others, shortly before World War II— luckily time has faded most of that particular memory. The melody is primarily a solo for the principal horn, and a glorious, beautifully spun-out affair it is. A related idea for solo violin follows shortly. The middle of the movement generates considerable interest from its vivid harmonic surprises, a new theme in the clarinet, and a general sense of unrest and instability. But then, the so-called fate motto from the first movement interrupts, and we’re back at a return to the lovely first theme, although with changed orchestration and a dramatic buildup of emotion before quietly subsiding.
There are those who opine that no one equaled Tchaikovsky in walzes—even the Strausses—and I concur. The third movement is a series of incredibly elegant waltzes that make you wish that we all still danced to them. But before they start, a soft, but ominous series of chords in the strings lures you into thinking that the dark mood of the ending of the first movement will prevail. But a wonderful modulation brings us to the novel and beguiling key of D major. The waltzes commence. The middle of the movement provides some relief from the waltzes in the form of a short scherzo in duple meter, contrasting nicely with all the ONE-two-three of the waltz. It’s a frenetic affair, not so much unlike the suggestion of little rodents scampering around when they should be gracefully waltzing. The scampering continues for a while when the waltzes return, signaling the end of the movement—but not before the low clarinets menacingly interrupt for a moment with the motto that opens the whole symphony, and which we will hear in abundance imminently in the last movement.
A sure-fire spiritual narrative in art during the romantic period—or any period, for that matter—is the journey from darkness to light, from defeat to victory, and perhaps death to transfiguration. Beethoven, Brahms, and other great composers wrote any number of works with this theme, and it is Tchaikovsky’s and ours in this symphony. The long introduction to the last movement is based upon the motto theme of fate, but now opens in E major, the happy key of redemption. But victory cannot be won so easily, so the main movement returns to E minor to begin the battle, and Tchaikovsky works it out with a dramatic review of familiar materials, as we gradually find our way into the world of light. The victory is hammered out in the motto of fate by stentorian unison brasses, and a tumultuous gallop to the end wraps up the triumph.
– © 2015 William E. Runyan
University Symphony Orchestra Personnel
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor
Violin I
Jean-Luc Cataquet‡+
Masayoshi Arakawa+
MaryKatherine Brown+
Ioana Popescu*
Barbara Santiago
Gabriel Guzman
Keat Zhen Cheong
Hope Welsh
Francesca Puro
Emily Palmer
Madelyne Garnot
Angel Andres
Stacey Sharpe
Violin 2
Nicole Vega*+
Hannah Jordan+
Alyssa Donall+
Elizabeth Milan+
Alex Roes
Harshul Mulpuru
Mari Stanton
Carlos Cordero
Tori Joyce
Joan Prokopowicz
Christopher Wheaton
Hayden Green
Bailey Bryant
Viola
Jeremy Hil*+
Abby Felde+
Maya Johnson+
Keara Henre
Emelia Ulrich
Spencer Schneider
Tyana McGann
Harper Knopf
Cello
Mitchell George*+
Turner Sperry+
Angelese Pepper+
Liam Sabo
Emma Hoster
Noah Hays
Abbey Fernandez de Castro
Natalie Taunton
Lucas Ponko
Ryan Wolff
Bass
Maximilian Levesque*+
Christian Maldonado
Kent Rivera+
Layla Feaster
Alex Lunday
Harp
Ava Crook
Noa Michaels
Flute
Emma Cranford*
Taylor Hawkins
Nikkie Gallindo
Oboe
Steven Stamer*
Nic Kanipe
Andrew Swift
Clarinet
Anne Glerum*
Travis Irizarry*
Audrey Rancourt*
Brad Pilcher
Bassoon
Cailin McGarry*
Georgia Clement*
Ryder Kaya
Horn
Eric On*
Jordan Perkins*
Giovanni Pereira*
Thomas Langston
AC Caruthers
Trumpet
Schlevin Robinson*
Noah Solomon*
Johniel Najera
Trombone
Connor Altagen*
Grant Keel
Nik Morosky
Tuba
Colin Teague
Orchestra Manager
Melody Quiroga
Orchestra Stage Manager
Carlos Cordero
Orchestra Librarians
Guilherme Rodrigues
Thomas Roggio
Library Bowing Assistant
Victoria Joyce
‡ Concertmaster
* Principal / Co-Principal + Rueff Strings
