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 Deborah Bish, Clarinet
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Seven-thirty in the Evening Ruby Diamond Concert Hall
PROGRAM
Essay No. 1, Op. 12
Guilherme Leal Rodrigues, conductor
Concerto for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 31
Samuel Barber (1910–1981)
Gerald Finzi
Allegro vigoroso (1901–1956)
Adagio ma senza rigore
Rondo: Allegro giocoso
Negro Folk Symphony
Deborah Bish, clarinet
INTERMISSION
William Dawson
1. The Bond of Africa (1899–1990)
2. Hope in the Night
3. O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!
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.
Deborah Bish is Associate Professor of Clarinet at Florida State University. She has performed with orchestras throughout the United States, including the Arizona Opera (most notably in a production of the Ring Cycle), the Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra under the direction of Jeffrey Siegel, the Phoenix Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Arkansas Symphony. Currently, she performs as Principal Clarinetist with the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra.
She has been featured as a recitalist, clinician, and chamber musician at several festivals and conventions including performances at Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall; the Shanghai Conservatory in Shanghai, China; the European Clarinet Association’s Conference in Tilburg; several of the International Clarinet Association’s ClarinetFests, including Dublin, Ostende, Baton Rouge, Lincoln, Austin, Vancouver, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City; the College Band Director’s National Association Convention in Atlanta, Georgia; the Florida Music Educator’s Association Convention in Tampa, Florida; and the Festival Internacional de Inverno in Vale Vêneto, Brazil.
Bish has taught at several summer music festivals, including Interlochen, Aria Academy, and the Lift Academy. She is currently on the faculty at the Belgian Clarinet Academy.
Her biography appears in the twenty-fourth edition of the Marquis Who’s Who of American Women and several editions of Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers. She has received the University Undergraduate Teaching Award at Florida State University and has served as an adjudicator in a variety of competitions, including both the Young Artist’s Competition and the High School Competition for the International Clarinet Association.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
Barber:
Essay No. 1 for Orchestra
Of the handful of 20th century American composers rightly esteemed as genuine practitioners of Romantic compositional styles, Samuel Barber is quite possibly the prime exemplar. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1910, Barber was the prototypical musical wunderkind, setting to work on his first opera at the age of nine. In 1924, he became one of the first students to enroll in the now-renowned Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and a number of his most popular and enduring works, such as The School for Scandal Overture and Dover Beach for voice and string quartet, were written while Barber was still a student at the Curtis Institute.
Barber’s Essay for Orchestra (later re-titled First Essay for Orchestra following returns to the form in 1942 and 1978) was written in 1937, ostensibly at the behest of Arturo Toscanini, and given its premiere the following year, along with Barber’s Adagio for Strings The Italian cellist-turned-conductor was an unusually keen champion of Barber’s music, which contributed significantly to the young composer’s early fame and international recognition. The attention and high praise of Artur Rodzinski and Ralph Vaughan Williams also helped to ensure Samuel Barber’s early place among the pantheon of distinguished American composers.
The musical “essay,” a form of Barber’s own rather clever invention and one with which he had some previous success over a decade earlier in his Three Essays for Piano, is a medium much like its more familiar literary counterpart. As with a written essay, the idea behind a musical essay is the development of a complex, well-reasoned, thoughtful work drawn from a single melodic thesis.
The Essay begins with divided violas and cellos gently stating the work’s main theme in a mournful, languid Andante sostenuto. This same theme is soon taken over by upper strings, while briefly joined by the horns, and is only partially developed by an iridescent brass choir. A short-lived animated section is heralded by oboes, clarinets, horns, and trumpets followed by a restatement of the first theme, this time by the full orchestra. The transition to the work’s frenzied middle section comes as lower strings offer counterpoint to the horn’s repetition of the earlier theme. This middle section contains some of the Essay’s more intricate and animated writing, with strings playing light, nimble rhythmic figures in triple meter evocative of a symphonic scherzo. Soon, woodwinds and piano mimic this pattern while strings accompany with pizzicato quarter notes before returning to the figure they first introduced. Much momentum builds as the piece rushes to an exasperated climax then quickly tapers off. The work ends with a highly unsettling “question” posited by a trio of trumpets and tentatively answered by hushed violins set against a backdrop of grumbling timpani.
– J. Anthony McAlister
Finzi: Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra
The music of English composer Gerald Finzi embraces a rich variety of moods, from elegiac lyricism, spiritual reflection, a neo-Baroque purity, to radiant joy. Although his output is comparatively small it includes many gems, from ravishing string works and choral miniatures, to some of the finest and most sensitive settings of British poetry— especially his four song-cycles utilizing poems by Thomas Hardy. Finzi’s music also encompasses folk songs (the finale of this beautiful Clarinet Concerto is a prime example), strident dissonance redolent of Walton and Britten, the pastoral yearning of Vaughan Williams, as well as a contrapuntal simplicity that harks back to Purcell.
The Concerto for Clarinet and Strings was written upon commission for the lauded Three Choirs Festival in 1949, which illustrates Finzi’s particular empathy for this solo instrument. Here the clarinet’s equal facility for sustained legato melody and rapid virtuosic figuration is supported by—and interacts with—his ever-imaginative writing for the strings. This marvelous Concerto breathes an air of fresh spontaneity and the composer is not afraid to shift much of the fiendishly difficult writing one associates with a concerto to the orchestral accompaniment. The first movement opens with searing intensity from the strings before the soloist enters with a calmer, more wistful melody. The music passes through many key centers and meters and, as Diana McVeagh comments, “the fast outer movements sound as fluent as the Adagio is beautiful. For all Finzi’s retiring nature, he had his fierce, obdurate side, and this can be sensed in the opening movement of the Concerto.”
Following the pithy first movement Finzi places a divine Adagio second, which is the heart-and-soul of the Concerto. The longest of the work’s three movements, this central meditation possesses a slumberous growth and alternates mini-cadenzas and recitatives with a melody transferred from his choral work Lo, the full, final sacrifice (1947). This intriguing music oscillates between passion and withdrawal—hallmarks of Finzi’s life— and comes to rest in a state of heavenly repose, when time itself seems to stand still. This music is about endless longing with no solution.
A Rondo completes the Clarinet Concerto whose main theme is a lithe and catchy folk song. The second theme is in a flowing triple time though the main Rondo theme is never far from earshot. Aching echoes of the first movement are recalled towards the end of the finale, and Finzi concludes this loveable Concerto with a display of corporate virtuosity.
– Huw Edwards
Dawson: Negro Folk Symphony
“I’ve not tried to imitate Beethoven or Brahms, Franck or Ravel—but to be just myself, a Negro,” William Dawson remarked in a 1932 interview. “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.’”
Two years later, Leopold Stokowski led the New York Philharmonic in the premiere of Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Critics and audiences alike hailed it as a masterpiece. Given this overwhelmingly positive reception, Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, which at the time he thought of as the first of several future symphonies, should have been heard “again and yet again.” But it was not. Despite Stokowski’s advocacy and the stellar reviews, within a few years both the music and its composer had faded into relative obscurity. Dawson never composed another symphony, although he did continue writing and arranging music—primarily spirituals, which he preferred to call “Negro folk songs”—for the rest of his long career.
Dawson wrote that his symphony was “symbolic of the link uniting Africa and her rich heritage with her descendants in America,” and gave each of its three movements a descriptive title. Dawson explained in his own program note: “The themes are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals. 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.” Musicologist Gwynne Kuhner Brown observes, “The themes are handled with such virtuosic flexibility of rhythm and timbre that each movement seems to evolve organically,” creating a “persuasive musical bridge between the ‘Negro Folk’ and the ‘Symphony.’”
In “The Bond of Africa,” Dawson opens with a horn solo. The dialogue between the horn and the orchestra recalls the call-and-response format of most spirituals. The horn solo repeats, usually in abbreviated form, a number of times throughout this movement, and serves as a musical “bond” holding the work together.
The central slow movement, “Hope in the Night,” also features a unifying solo. Here an English horn sounds Dawson’s own spiritual-inspired melody, which he described as an “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.” Underneath the plaintive tune, the orchestra provides a dirgelike accompaniment that builds to an ominous repetition of the solo for tutti orchestra. This episode is offset by an abrupt change of mood, and we hear a lighthearted, uptempo reworking of the original tune (the “hope” of the movement’s title). These two contrasting interludes alternate throughout the rest of the movement. Toward the end, Dawson reworks the harmony, which has been grounded in minor keys up to this point, and tiptoes towards major tonalities without fully embracing them. Musically, this device works as a powerful metaphor for the importance and elusive nature of hope to sustain people through traumatic circumstances.
The closing section, “Oh, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!” imagines a world in which the hopes of the previous movement are fully realized. Dawson creates this musical utopia through rhythm. The central melody showcases accented off-beat exclamations from various solo instruments and sections throughout, as the rhythms layer increasingly complex parts over one another. Dawson revised this movement in the early 1950s after he encountered the intricate polyrhythms of West African music during a trip to Africa. The interlocking parts and the sounds of African percussion instruments captured Dawson’s ear; when he returned to America, he added these elements. Eventually, all these rhythmic strands come together in a final buoyant exclamation from the orchestra.
– Elizabeth Schwartz
University Symphony Orchestra Personnel
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor
Guilherme Leal Rodrigues, Graduate Assistant Conductor
Violin I
Masayoshi Arakawa‡
MaryKatherine Brown
Anna Kirkland
Francesca Puro
Barbara Santiago
Jean-Luc Cataquet
Stacey Sharpe
Angel Andres
Keat Zhen Cheong
Hannah Jordan
Gabriel Guzman
Hope Welsh
Madelyne Garnot
Violin II
Emily Palmer*
Mari Stanton
Bailey Bryant
Tori Joyce
Christopher Wheaton
Hayden Green
Elizabeth Milan
Carlos Cordero
Alyssa Donall
Harshul Mulpuru
Joan Prokopowicz
Delaney Reilly
Sarita Thosteson
Viola
Jeremy Hill*
Harper Knopf
Emelia Ulrich
Keara Henre
Tyana McGann
Maya Johnson
Abby Felde
Spencer Schneider
Cello
Thu Vo*
Noah Hayes
Mitchell George
Abbey Fernandez de Castro
Angelese Pepper
Emma Hoster
Turner Sperry
Lucas Ponko
Natalie Taunton
Ryan Wolff
Bass
Alex Lunday*
Maximilian Levesque
Kent Rivera
Christian Maldonado
Lucas Kornegay
Harp
Ava Crook
Flute
Taylor Hawkins*
Moriah Emrich
Paige Douglas
Oboe
Rebecca Johnson*
Steven Stamer*
Sarah Ward
Andrew Swift
Clarinet
Travis Irizarry*
Audrey Rancourt*
Andrew Prawat
Brad Pilcher
Hannah Faircloth
Bassoon
Cailin McGarry*
Josie Whiteis*
Hunter Fisher
Georgia Clement
Horn
Eric On*
Giovanni Pereira*
Thomas Langston
Jordan Perkins
Trumpet
Noah Solomon*
Johniel Najera*
Schlevin Robinson
Trombone
Connor Altagen*
Grant Keel
Bass Trombone
Brent Creeknoore
Tuba
Colin Teague
Timpani and Percussion
Miranda Hughes*
Darci Wright
Ian Guarraia
Caitlin Magennis
Gabby Overholt
Orchestra Manager
Melody Quiroga
Orchestra Stage Manager
Carlos Cordero
Orchestra Librarians
Guilherme Rodrigues
Thomas Roggio
Library Bowing Assistant
Victoria Joyce ‡ Concertmaster
* Principal / Co-Principal
