THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF MUSIC
Presents THE UNIVERSITY
PHILHARMONIA
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor
Thomas Roggio, Graduate Associate Conductor
Guilherme Leal Rodrigues, Graduate Associate Conductor
featuring Thong Truong, Piano (Winner, 2024 Young Artists Competition)
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Seven-thirty in the Evening Ruby Diamond Concert Hall
Live: wfsu.org/fsumusic
PROGRAM
Deep Underground Roger Zare
I. PIP-II (b. 1985)
II. DUNE
Piano Concerto No. 1
— Florida Premiere
Vine I. (b. 1954)
II.
III.
Thong Truong, piano
Guilherme Leal Rodrigues, graduate associate conductor
INTERMISSION
Má vlast, JB 1:112
Bedřich Smetana II. Die Moldau (1824–1884)
Thomas Roggio, graduate associate conductor
The Planets, Op. 32
Gustav Holst
IV. Jupiter: Bringer of Jollity (1874–1934)
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.
Thong Truong is a Vietnamese-Australian pianist in his first year of Master of Music studies at Florida State University, where he is mentored by Professor Read Gainsford and holds a graduate assistantship in opera accompaniment. Prior to moving to the U.S., he completed his undergraduate studies in piano performance and finance at The University of Melbourne and Monash University. He also served on the piano faculty at St. Margaret’s Berwick Grammar School, where he worked with students from the Preparatory level through Year 12.
Thong’s artistic development has been shaped by a diverse group of teachers and mentors, including A/Prof Jerry Wong, Dr. Tomoe Kawabata, Dr. Aura Go, Anthony Halliday, Jennifer Chou, and Wendy McLean.
Recent performance highlights include solo appearances in Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto with the Monash Academy Orchestra, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with the Preston Symphony Orchestra, and participation in the Amalfi Coast Music & Arts Festival in Italy. During his undergraduate years, Thong received multiple awards, including the 2024 Katharine Kearns Scholarship, the 2024 DW Gardiner Memorial Award, the 2023 Mary Elizabeth McComas Piano Scholarship, the 2022 Margaret Sutherland Bursary Award, the 2022 Anna Chmiel Memorial Prize, the 2021 Eliezer Benedykt Prize, the 2020 Australian Classical Music Prize, and was the winner of the 2020 Monash University Concerto and Aria Competition.
As a performer, Thong excels in various settings, from soloist to chamber musician and collaborative pianist. His expanding repertoire is fueled by a deep passion for the works of Ravel and Scriabin, with a particular focus on bringing lesser-known works to light and collaborating with contemporary composers.
Zare: Deep Underground
Note: The Florida State University Orchestras participated in a consortium that commissioned the composition of “Deep Underground.”
Deep Underground is one of the products of a yearlong residency at Fermi National Accelerator and Laboratory, where I had the incredible opportunity to learn from scientists and technicians about Fermilab’s cutting edge research into the nature of the universe.
The first movement, PIP-II, describes the new particle accelerator that is being built for the new experiments. PIP stands for “proton improvement plan,” and will accelerate protons to 84% the speed of light. I learned when I visited Fermilab that aesthetics and art were always a central facet to the design of the site, and when I saw the still under construction PIP-II buildings, I was struck by a nonrepeating asymmetrical pattern that ran the length of the siding. I found out that these sporadic vertical windows were a representation of the unique spectral lines of hydrogen gas, which the building housed and was the main source of particles that would be sent into the new accelerator. Reading the lines from left to right, I translated them into a rhythm which is heard broadly and heavily in the beginning. Gradually, this rhythm repeats and gets faster, multiplying the energy of the rhythmic and melodic layers. At the end, at breakneck speed, the music imitates a Shepard tone, where pitches seem to limitlessly continue to rise and accelerate.
The immense energy of the first movement immediately dissipates when the high energy proton beam is converted into neutrinos. A strange and difficult-to-study elementary particle, the neutrino is the main focus of Fermilab’s current research. It is a challenge to understand because it so rarely interacts with other particles. They are absurdly plentiful, with approximately 100 trillion of them passing through you every second. Almost none of them end up interacting with you. In order to study their nature, Fermilab is investing in some of the largest detectors ever built, all of which must be cryogenically chilled and flooded with countless neutrinos in order to produce the most occasional interaction with matter. The DUNE project, which stands for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, sends a neutrino stream from PIP-II through a detector on site and then through 800 miles of the earth’s crust into another detector at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.
The second movement of this piece traces the neutrino beam’s journey from Illinois to South Dakota. We have observed that neutrinos oscillate between three different “flavors,” which is a surprising characteristic, considering each variety has different properties and masses. As a slow and longing melody is heard, numerous other instruments swell in and out to create a halo of sound. These swells represent the initial state of the neutrinos. As the beam progresses through time, a second flavor of neutrino emerges, this time adding a trill to the texture. After more time passes, the third flavor of neutrino is heard as a series of repeated pitches. The music progresses towards a grandiose climax, and afterward,
various groups of musicians are instructed to freely oscillate between the three different representations of neutrinos.
— Roger Zare
Vine: Piano Concerto No. 1
The Piano Concerto of 1997 is one of three large-scale works composed by the Australian composer Carl Vine with pianist Michael Kieran Harvey in mind (the others being Vine’s two piano sonatas). This collaboration has benefited both musicians to an unusual degree - Harvey seems to have found Vine’s works particularly congenial to his own brand of pianism. Perhaps more than in any of Vine’s other works, a crucial starting point for his Piano Concerto is the medium itself. Seasoned listeners will detect references to many sound-worlds associated with the piano as an accompanied solo instrument (not always in overtly formal contexts); as the composer puts it, there is “a conscious and continuous tribute…to the ‘Piano Concerto’ as a medium and historical entity.” The tribute is not to any particular composers or works, and most of the textures evoked are to some extent common property among at least a few of Vine’s predecessors. Crucially, the spirit is not one of parody. Conveniently, there is another piano concerto which elucidates the difference: that in G major by Maurice Ravel. There, the slow movement is based on a single, unbroken melodic line, which is stated, is briefly developed and returns - Ravel’s tribute to the slow movement of Mozart’s quintet for clarinet and strings. It is unequivocally no parody, and no pastiche either - the tribute is very much on Ravel’s own terms. Like Vine’s concerto, Ravel’s is a pluralistic ride through many of the medium’s historical associations, with a more direct tribute at its center. Indeed, Vine’s slow movement sounds not dissimilar to Ravel’s to begin with. It is also a comparatively direct tribute (in a work full of glancing allusions) to a work by a master of the long melodic line: this time, J.S. Bach, and the slow movement of his F minor keyboard concerto (BWV 1056). For most listeners, Vine’s concerto will recall composers rather closer to the present day - besides Ravel, names such as Prokofiev, Gershwin, and Poulenc will be more likely to spring to mind. This is less because of any explicit references than because of certain predilections shared by these composers and Vine himself. All these composers are known for their healthy (but never obsequious) respect for tradition, for their own rather percussive, even at times jazzy, view of the piano (both as performers and composers), and for their rattling good tunes. Vine’s concerto is cast in the familiar three-movement form, with fast outer movements framing a central slow movement. The outer movements share some material (particularly in some lively conversational interchanges between piano and trumpet), and also some typically pianistic glitter across the orchestra, with harp and glockenspiel ensuring that the piano is less of an outsider than might have otherwise been the case. Concerto for Piano was commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
– Carl Rosman
Smetana: “Die Moldau” from Má vlast Má vlast, or “My Fatherland,” is Bedřich Smetana’s tribute to his home. Smetana came from the same musical culture as Antonín Dvořák; they were both Bohemian, or modernday Czech. A great love of the motherland shaped both of their musical careers, but in Má vlast, Smetana gives the world a postcard from Bohemia. This piece is a cycle of symphonic poems steeped in the land, history, and folklore of Bohemia.
What exactly is a symphonic poem? This form, pioneered by Franz Liszt, is a single movement of orchestral music which is somehow programmatic. It can tell a story, follow a poem, or describe an object, place, or event. In this case, it is a musical entryway which takes the listener on a tour through Smetana’s culture and his physical world. The section performed tonight, “Die Moldau,” is descriptive of the Moldau River which runs through Prague, Smetana’s home.
Its original title, however, it not “Die Moldau.” Smetana had the same linguistic problems during publication that would later plague Dvořák: German publishers didn’t like to print Czech. The original title of the movement, as well as the Czech name of the river, is Vltava. Smetana described the movement in his original program:
The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from the two small springs, the Cold and Warm Vltava, to the unification of both streams into a single current, the course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a farmer’s wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night’s moonshine: on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into the St. John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Labe (or Elbe, in German).
The piece starts with the musical depiction of a bubbling stream in the woodwinds and lower strings. He then invokes the mighty river with a traditional Czech folk tune which was hundreds of years old by the piece’s composition in 1874. Smetana probably had no idea that the tune, which would become emblematic of both him and Czechoslovakia, was actually an old Italian folk tune from the sixteenth century called “La Mantovana.” This tune was so popular that it rapidly spread across Renaissance Europe and established itself as a “folk song” from Scotland all the way to Bohemia and would eventually become the tune to the national anthem of Israel.
Regardless of its multicultural roots, Má vlast was heralded as a true example of the potential of Czech music, and Smetana dedicated the cycle to his home city of Prague. Despite the fact that he was completely deaf by the 1882 premier, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear the unending applause. The audience stood in ovation for all six movements. – Reprinted from Matt Henson
Holst: “Jupiter: Bringer of Jollity” from The Planets
What an astonishment the Age of Aquarius would have been to Gustav Holst (18741934). Its focus of attention on astrology can almost certainly be credited with the renewal of interest in his orchestral suite, The Planets. And since the British composer was distressed at the immediate success of the seven-movement work when it was introduced in 1919 - he never considered it one of his best efforts - its rebirth could only cause him further chagrin. Come to think of it, he might also find it a little embarrassing to be told that his suite is shy one planet, although had he kept up with astronomical findings he would have learned of the discovery of the planet Pluto in 1930.
Holst began composing the work in 1914, yet, in spite of the first section’s title, “Mars, the Bringer of War,” it is not a war piece, for Holst was into it before the first world war started. The composer, a man of intellect and wide-ranging interests, found musical inspiration in diverse places. “As a rule,” he said, “I only study things that suggest music to me. That’s why I worried at Sanskrit.” (When he became interested in Hindu literature through translations, he proceeded to learn the original Sanskrit and wrote several Hindu-inspired works including two operas, Sita and Savitri.) “And then,” he concluded, “recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me.”
In his preface to The Planets, Holst advised that there is no program in the pieces and that the subtitles should be sufficient to guide the imagination of the listener. Holst’s own imagination had been stimulated by many things, not the least of which was the great literature of English folk songs, introduced to him by his life-long friend, Ralph Vaughan Williams. A stronger influence perhaps was that of Stravinsky, whose music had greatly impressed Holst before he took on the universe, the effects of which in The Planets can be seen in the very large Firebird and Petrushka kind of orchestration, in insistent rhythms, and also in striding rhythmic shifts. Holst’s musico-spatial explorations may not be cosmic, but they are brilliant, dramatic, and picturesque enough to fit into almost anyone’s concert hall horoscope.
“Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,” is the most thoroughly English section of the work, with Jupiter’s high spirits projected through a broad, infectiously energetic melody. A stately, more serious processional theme then enters, its royal dignity fully intact, after which the vigorous melody returns.
– Orrin Howard
University Philharmonia Orchestra Personnel
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor
Thomas Roggio, Graduate Assistant Conductor
Violin I
Amanda Marcy ‡
Rose Ossi
Max Loesener
Myra Sexton
Christina Leach
Will Purser
Mariana Reyes Parra
Noah Johnson
Eden Rewa
Olivia Leichter
Violin 2
Abigail Jennings*
Samuel Ovalle
Grey Graham
Sam Brewer
Violet Lorish
Quinn French
Sean Hartman
Ruby Moore
Elina Nyquist
Viola
Mary Boulo*
Abigayle Benoit
Jonathan Taylor
Tian Sanchez-Ballado
Julia Fire
Angeleena Jackson
Emma Patterson
Cello
Param Mehta*
Jason Tejada-Chancay
Kensington Manross
Jaden Sanzo
Sophie Stalnaker
Sydney Spencer
Tia Stajkowski
Addison Miller
Daniel Jimenez-Gaona
Jake Reisinger
Bass
Connor Oneacre*
Garner Brant
Emma Waidner
Paris Lallis
Charlotte Woolridge
Harp
Aiden Sowers
Flute
Adeline Belova*
Allison Acevedo
Piccolo
Kendall Smith
Talley Powell
Oboe
Sarah Ward*
Loanne Masson
Jordan Miller
Haley O’Neill
Clarinet
Nicholas Mackley*
Reymon Contrera
Ava Raposo
Dawson Huynh
Leah Price
Bassoon
Hannah Farmer*
Dakota Jeter
Susanna Campbell
Diego Crisostomo
Horn
AC Caruthers*
Vincent Aldoretta
Emma Brockman
David Pinero
Wesley Vaden
Davis Craddock
Trumpet
Sharavan Duvvuri*
Robert Kerr
Max McLaughlin
Nathan Reid
Trombone
Landon Ellenberg*
Sarah Castillo
Tristan Goodrich
Euphonium
Anthony Gonzalez
Tuba
Sophia Farfante
Percussion
JJ Baker*
Drew Jungslager
Caitlin Magennis
Ian Guarraia
Gabby Overholt
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
