THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents the
University Philharmonia
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor
Thomas Roggio, Graduate Associate Conductor with Kimberly W. Souther, Guest Conductor
Thursday, November 7, 2024 7:30 p.m. | Opperman Music Hall
PROGRAM
Overture to Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), K. 620
Thomas Roggio, conductor
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Peer Gynt Suite Nos. 1 and 2, Op. 23
Edvard Grieg
The Abduction of the Bride (Ingrid’s Lament) (1843–1907)
Aase’s Death
Morning Mood
Arabian Dance
Anitra’s Dance
Solveig’s Song
Peer Gynt’s Journey Home
In the Hall of the Mountain King
The Firebird Suite (1919)
Kimberly W. Souther, conductor
INTERMISSION
Igor Stravinsky
Introduction – The Firebird and Its Dance – Variation of the Firebird (1882–1971)
The Princesses’ Rondo
Infernal Dance of King Kashchei
Lullaby
Berceuse and Finale
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.
Recording Notice: This performance may be recorded. Please note that members of the audience may at times be included in this process. By attending this performance you consent to have your image or likeness appear in any live or recorded video or other transmission or reproduction made in conjunction to the performance.
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.
Innovative, vibrant, and collaborative, Kimberly W. Souther is building her reputation as a conductor of promise. Recently appointed as Visiting Associate Professor of Orchestras at Clemson University, Souther enjoys incorporating her research in audience engagement with the thriving orchestras at the university as they seek to improve their connection with their community. Prior to her move to South Carolina, She conducted numerous symphonic works, operas, and musical collaborations with the James Madison Symphony Orchestra, James Madison Opera Orchestra, James Madison Chamber Orchestra, and James Madison Musical Pit Orchestra and will conclude her studies in December 2023. During her time in Virginia, Souther served as music director for both the Nelson County Community Orchestra and Shenandoah Valley Youth Concert Orchestra and is the Director of Shenandoah Valley Preparatory Music and instructor of music at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Souther has participated in guest conducting engagements and workshops from Carl Topilow, Donald Schleicher, Larry Rachleff, Carl St. Claire, Erin Freeman, Michelle Merrill, Tom Newall, Christopher Zimmerman, Matthias Elmer, Kevin Süetterlin, and Foster Beyers. Past guest conducting includes performances with Wintergreen Music Festival, Hampton Roads Chamber Players, Sinfonietta Memphis, Peninsula Players and Four County Players.
Souther looks forward with great anticipation to her upcoming season, featuring her new role as Festival Director for the Heifetz International Music Festival, guest conducting experiences with Meredith College and Florida State University, and another full season with the Clemson University Symphony, String, and Musical Orchestras.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
Mozart: Overture to Die Zauberflöte
Die Zauberflöte was given its première in 1791 in Vienna, the last year of Mozart’s life; it is in German, with spoken lines written by his collaborator, Emanuel Schikaneder. It garnered immediate popularity, never diminishing to this day, for any number of ingratiating elements. A varied cast of singers and characters entertain us from the rise of the curtain: a comic, feathery pair of bird/human lovers, an earnest pair of real human lovers, an evil Moor (standard in Viennese drama of the times—the Turks were a very real threat to Europe), a noble high priest and his chorus of priestly followers, an evil queen and her retinue, a pair of ghostly men in armor, trios of boys and virtuous wraith-like women, and to top it all off, enchanted animals. On the stage! Did I mention “magic” flutes and bells? You get the picture—something to please almost anyone.
But it’s not all fun and games—this allegory, like, perhaps, Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream, is a profound exploration of some of life’s deepest and most essential issues. Courage, transfiguration, wisdom, romantic love, illusion and perception, freedom, and brotherhood—all are examined in depth. It has been said that one definition of a masterpiece is that it is rather like an artichoke: one peels tasty layer after layer only to find the best part hidden at the center. And thus it is with this work.
Many significant men of the Enlightenment were Masons, and so were Mozart and Schikaneder. Generations of Masons and scholars have found that The Magic Flute is permeated from beginning to end with Masonic values and symbolism, and we hear it right from the opening chords of the overture: three chords, dominated by three trombones, and in the key of Eb (three flats). This emphasis upon the symbolic three continues throughout the opera,
with a plethora of other symbolic allusions. After the somber opening, the strings zip off in a vivacious fugato (you can hear each section come in one after the other) that takes us to a dramatic ending that sets a perfect introduction to a perfect opera—one that speaks to the common nature of us all.
– William E. Runyan
Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites
Edvard Grieg was the most significant Scandinavian composer during the years leading up to the beginning of the twentieth century. He was a prolific composer of songs and music for the piano, small lyric compositions being his obvious forte. In addition to his songs, he wrote a large number of choral works, many for unaccompanied male voices, and some of them remain evergreen favorites. While he did compose in other genres, achieving notable success with his only piano concerto and his string quartet, the latter were exceptional. He was educated at the Leipzig conservatory, where his early models were Schubert and Schumann, and he spent much time in Copenhagen. Like all of his fellow countrymen of that generation, he was oriented to Denmark, the Danish language, and Danish culture in general. Later, in his early twenties, under the influence of the great Norwegian violinist, Ole Bull, he developed an affinity for Norwegian peasant culture. That effected a major change in his musical outlook, and for the rest of his life he plumbed the depths of Norwegian folk music and literature. It became a major part of his musical style and placed him firmly in the ranks of the nationalist composers so characteristic of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even when not directly quoting folk materials, the harmonies, rhythms, and melodic nuances of that tradition deeply inform his musical style.
In 1874 Grieg was asked to write incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play, Peer Gynt. Initially, Grieg thought that it would be a short and easily completed project, but it stretched into some twenty-six separate pieces, which he completed by July 1875. Later, the composer extracted eight of these movements to comprise two, four-movement suites. The play and the music premiered in 1976, but the play, a rather strange and almost bizarre affair, has not garnered the success of Grieg’s music. While the average listener probably conjures up visions of Nordic vistas and quaint, folkish sagas, that is not what the picaresque play and Grieg’s atmospheric music is about, at all. Rather, it tracks an improbable and less-than-sympathetic rogue in a variety of adventures in places like Egypt and Morocco. The ubiquitous “morning” scene takes place in the Arabian desert, where our hero awakens after having been robbed by the seductress, Anitra. Anitra’s dance is that of the daughter of an Arabian chieftain, whom Gynt attempts unsuccessfully to seduce; Grieg weaves a wonderfully oriental atmosphere for her tantalizing charms. “Solveig’s Song” is from the last act of the play, where Gynt’s beloved sings of her steadfast faithfulness during his absence, even to her old age, not knowing whether he is alive or not. Originally, it was sung in the play, but here is played by the solo violin. The “Hall of the Mountain King” is a depiction of a really ridiculous scene that takes place after Gynt has gotten smashing drunk with three dairymaids who were waiting to be courted by trolls. In the ensuing hangover he knocks himself out accidentally and dreams that he is challenged by the troll king over a paternity question. The music cleverly depicts Gynt’s escape after having witnessed the dance of the pig-faced trolls, and his subsequent insult to the troll king’s daughter. Grieg’s “incidental music” for the play is evocative of his mastery of the short character piece, and one can understand why it has met the test of time far better than Ibsen’s wild morality tale.
—William E. Runyan
Stravinsky: Firebird Suite (1919)
It’s intriguing to speculate how the history of music in the last century would have been altered if the extraordinary ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev had not decided to gamble on the young, relatively unknown Stravinsky. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—which the émigré Russian had established in Paris—was just starting to take the West by storm, and Diaghilev wanted a splendid new production for the climax of its season in 1910. His initial plans for better-known composers fell through, so Diaghilev, on a hunch, gave the commission to Stravinsky, then in his late 20s. It was a risk for everyone concerned, since The Firebird would be the first production by the emerging ballet company to feature an entirely new score.
Stravinsky was handed a scenario (devised in part by choreographer Michel Fokine) that drew on old Russian folklore. The Firebird tells of the downfall of a powerful, ogre-like figure of evil, Kastchei the Deathless, who seizes young princesses as captives while turning the knights who arrive to rescue them into stone. The protagonist Crown Prince Ivan enlists the Firebird, so called for her beautiful feathers that glitter and flicker like flames, to help destroy Kastchei and free his victims.
You can readily hear how Stravinsky’s own imagination must have caught fire (he even set aside his work on a bird of a different feather—the fairy-tale opera The Nightingale) when he took up Diaghilev’s invitation. The Firebird’s score blends the orchestral wizardry Stravinsky had learned as a student of Rimsky-Korsakov with the vitality of Russian folk music to yield a dazzling, evocative atmosphere. Throughout his later career, Stravinsky remained especially fond of The Firebird, returning to create three concert versions that he himself conducted tirelessly (a savvy financial move on the composer’s part). The most popular is the second of these suites, introduced in 1919, which uses less than half of the original ballet score and simplifies some of its orchestration.
The Firebird’s musical language shifts between chromatic gestures to illustrate the supernatural dimension (including a powerful non-Western scale that would later feature in The Rite of Spring’s harmonic vocabulary) and the singsong simplicity of folk song for the mortals. The suite opens with a spooky conjuring, low in the strings, of Kastchei’s magical realm. In his illusory garden, Prince Ivan encounters the Firebird, which is depicted with opulent colors and radiant trills. (Diaghilev spared no expense in the similarly gorgeous costumes Léon Bakst designed for this creature.)
A calmly pastoral section follows, featuring Stravinsky’s already characteristically imaginative scoring for woodwinds. Prince Ivan observes the princesses who have been captured by Kastchei performing their ritual Khorovod, or round dance, and falls in love with the one destined to be his bride.
To protect Ivan, the Firebird casts a spell over Kastchei and his monstrous aides. Whipped into motion by Stravinsky’s frenetic rhythms, they are compelled to dance themselves to exhaustion in a savage “Infernal Dance.” Their paroxysms subside, while a serene lullaby (“Berceuse”) lulls the hypnotized Kastchei to sleep, its lazy tune first given by the bassoon. Ivan is instructed to destroy the giant egg containing the ogre’s soul, and Kastchei’s power vanishes. A solo horn, intoning the score’s most famous folk tune, announces the joyful arrival of sunlight. Together with Ivan and his betrothed, the rescued captives celebrate with music that swells and rings out in glorious triumph. The Firebird clearly shows Stravinsky on the cusp of a new world, mixing the orchestral mastery of his Russian mentors with the rhythmic vitality of the revolutionary about to burst out of his shell.
—Thomas May
Violin 1
Amanda Marcy‡
Peter Fenema
Abigail Jennings
Christina Leach
Myra Sexton
Noah Johnson
Will Purser
Rose Ossi
Max Loesener
Eden Rewa
Samuel Ovalle
Ryan Yom
Violin 2
Mariana Reyes Parra*
Sam Brewer
Olivia Leichter
Violet Lorish
Elina Nyquist
Quinn French
Sarita Thosteson
Kali Henre
Sean Hartman
Grey Graham
University Philharmonia Personnel
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director
Thomas Roggio, Assistant Conductor
Viola
Mary Boulo*
Abigayle Benoit
Angeleena Jackson
Jonathan Taylor
Emma Patterson
Julia Fire
Cello
Param Mehta*
Kensington Manross
Sydney Spencer
Jason Tejada-Chancay
Caroline Keen
Addison Miller
Daniel Jimenez-Gaona
Zoe Thornton
Jaden Sanzo
Sophie Stalnaker
Jake Reisinger
Bass
Connor Oneacre*
Emma Waidner
Charlotte Woolridge
Garner Brant
Paris Lallis
Harp
Noa Michaels
Flute
Paige Douglas*
Kathryn Lang
Cameron McGill
Oboe
Sarah Ward**
Alec McDaniel**
Samantha Osborne
Alejandro Lopez
Clarinet
Leah Price*
Nicholas Mackley
Dawson Huynh
Bassoon
Timothy Schwindt**
Hannah Farmer**
Diego Crisostomo
Robert Kennedy
Horn
Allison Kirkpatrick*
Vincent Aldoretta
Emma Brockman
Clare Ottesen
Trumpet
Sharavan Duvvuri*
Robert Kerr
Trombone
Landon Ellenberg*
Sarah Castillo
Kevin Li
Tuba
Levi Vickers
Percussion
Ian Guarraia*
Gabby Overholt
Will McCoy
Piano/Celesta
Zhen Zhang
Orchestra Manager
Za’Kharia Cox
Orchestra Stage
Manager
Sierra Su
Orchestra Librarians
Guilherme Rodrigues
Tom Roggio
Library Bowing
Assistant
Victoria Joyce
‡ Concertmaster * Principal
** Co-Principal