NEW CENTURY CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

DANIEL HOPE, violin & music director

FRIDAY, MAY 12, 2023 · 7:30 PM

THE BAKER-BAUM CONCERT HALL

JESSIE MONTGOMERY Banner for String Quartet and String Orchestra (b.1981)

BRITTEN Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Opus 10 (1913–1976)

Introduction and Theme

Adagio

March

Romance

Aria Italiana

Bourrée Classique

Wiener Walzer

Moto Perpetuo

Funeral March

Chant

Fugue and Finale

Intermission

MAX RICHTER Recomposed: Vivaldi—The Four Seasons (b.1966)

Spring 0

Spring 1

Spring 2

Spring 3

Summer 1

La Jolla Music Society’s 2022–23 season is supported by The Conrad Prebys Foundation, The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, Banc of California, First Republic Bank, The Lodge at Torrey Pines, ProtoStar Foundation, Vail Memorial Fund, ResMed Foundation, Bright Events Rentals, Ace Parking, Brenda Baker and Steve Baum, Raffaella and John Belanich, Gordon Brodfuehrer, Mary Ellen Clark, Bert and Julie Cornelison, Teresa and Harry Hixson, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Dorothea Laub, Jeanette Stevens, Debra Turner, and Bebe and Marvin Zigman.

Summer 2

Summer 3

Autumn 1

Autumn 2

Autumn 3

Winter 1

Winter 2

Winter 3

This performance marks Daniel Hope and the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s La Jolla Music Society debuts.

The Orchestra

Violin I

Daniel Hope, Music Director & Concertmaster

Deborah Tien Price, Associate Concertmaster

Dawn Harms, Robin Mayforth, Iris Stone, Karen Shinozaki Sor

Violin II

Michael Yokas, Principal

Candace Guirao, Stephanie Bibbo, Kayo Miki, Jory Fankuchen

Viola

Anna Kruger, Principal

Cassandra Lynne Richburg, Jenny Douglass

Elizabeth Prior, Frank Shaw

Cello

Evan Kahn, Principal

Isaac Melamed, Kyle Stachnik, Michael Graham

Bass

Lizzie Burns, Principal

William Everett

Harp

Jacqueline Marshall

Harpsichord

Derek Tam

Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Banner for String Quartet and String Orchestra JESSIE MONTGOMERY

Born December 8, 1981, New York City

Composed: 2014

Approximate Duration: 10 minutes

The daughter of theater and musical artists, Jessie Montgomery learned to play the violin as a child and earned her bachelor’s degree in violin performance from Juilliard and her master’s in composition from New York University. She is currently a Graduate Fellow in composition at Princeton as well as a Professor of Violin and Composition at The New School in New York City. In May 2021 Montgomery began her tenure as composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The composer has provided a program note for Banner: Banner is a tribute to the 200th anniversary of The StarSpangled Banner, which was officially declared the American National Anthem in 1814 under the penmanship of Francis Scott Key. Scored for solo string quartet and string orchestra, Banner is a rhapsody on the theme of The Star-Spangled Banner. Drawing on musical and historical sources from various world anthems and patriotic songs, I’ve made an attempt to answer the question: “What does an anthem for the 21st century sound like in today’s multicultural environment?”

In 2009, I was commissioned by the Providence String Quartet and Community MusicWorks to write Anthem: A Tribute to the Historical Alection of Barack Obama. In that piece I wove together the theme from The StarSpangled Banner with the commonly named Black National Anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing by James Weldon Johnson (which coincidentally share the exact same phrase structure). Banner picks up where Anthem left off by using a similar backbone source in its middle section, but expands further both in the amount of references and also in the role play of the string quartet as the individual voice working both with and against the larger community of the orchestra behind them. The structure is loosely based on traditional marching band form where there are several strains or contrasting sections, preceded by an introduction, and I have drawn on the drum line chorus as a source for the rhythmic underpinning in the finale. Within the same tradition, I have attempted to evoke the breathing of a large brass choir as it approaches the climax of the “trio” section. A variety of other cultural Anthems and American folk songs and popular idioms interact to form various textures in the finale section, contributing to a multi-layered fanfare.

The Star-Spangled Banner is an ideal subject for exploration in contradictions. For most Americans the song represents a paradigm of liberty and solidarity against fierce odds, and for others it implies a contradiction between the ideals of freedom and the realities of injustice and oppression. As a culture, it is my opinion that we Americans are perpetually in search of ways to express and celebrate our ideals of freedom—a way to proclaim, “We’ve made it!” as if the very action of saying it aloud makes it so. And for many of our nation’s people, that was the case: through work songs and spirituals, enslaved Africans promised themselves a way out and built the nerve to endure the most abominable treatment for the promise of a free life. Immigrants from Europe, Central America, and the Pacific have sought out a safe haven here and, though met with the trials of building a multi-cultured democracy, continue to find rooting in our nation and make significant contributions to our cultural landscape. In 2014, a tribute to the U.S. National Anthem means acknowledging the contradictions, leaps and bounds, and milestones that allow us to celebrate and maintain the tradition of our ideals. —

Jessie Montgomery

Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Opus 10 BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, England

Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England

Composed: 1937

Approximate Duration: 30 minutes

In 1937 England’s best string orchestra, the Boyd Neel Orchestra, was invited to perform at the Salzburg Festival, and Neel wanted to use the occasion to perform music by an English composer. Pressed for time, he turned to 23-yearold Benjamin Britten. The young composer sketched out an entire piece in just ten days and had the score complete on July 12; Neel led the première in Salzburg six weeks later, and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge instantly became part of the repertory.

For Neel, Britten wrote a set of variations on a theme by his own teacher, English composer Frank Bridge (1879–1941). The theme comes from Bridge’s second Idyll for String Quartet (1911), and Britten takes this gentle, unpromising melody through a stunning series of transformations. The resulting music is exciting, witty, and beautifully written for strings, a remarkable achievement by a very young composer. Sharp pizzicato chords open the introduction, and soon Bridge’s theme is presented very quietly by solo string quartet; the interval of the falling fifth that opens Bridge’s theme will figure centrally in Britten’s variations. The theme is briefly extended by full orchestra before leading directly into the Adagio first variation, where violins rise and fall back over a somber chorale of lower voices. The March is very quick indeed (Presto alla marcia), and its dotted rhythms press forward to a great climax that subsides to a nearly inaudible close. The Romance features a gorgeous tune for unison violins that soars high and then ends on sustained harmonics; Bridge’s original theme is part of the bass-line pizzicato accompaniment here.

The fifth movement is hilarious. It is a witty sendup of an Italian opera aria, and Britten misses no chance to turn the knife in this wicked parody: First violins take the part of the prima donna soprano, who sings, primps, and trills; below her coloratura line, accompanying strings strum a pizzicato accompaniment quasi chitarra (“like a guitar”). Britten follows this with Bourrée Classique, in the style of Bach and Vivaldi’s violin music; the open-string crossings here echo the fifths of Bridge’s theme. Next come Wiener Walzer, a parody of Viennese waltz style that has been compared to Ravel’s La Valse, and Moto Perpetuo, one of the shortest and most brilliant variations.

The character of the music, so vivacious to this point, changes completely in the next two variations. In the grim Funeral March, keening violins rise high in their range; far below, the falling fifths in the cellos and basses echo the sound of muffled drums. The icy Chant takes its color from the violins’ artificial harmonics while muted violas have the theme, now an almost static progression of chords.

The last movement begins with a fugue (Allegro moto vivace) whose subject is derived from the first measures of Bridge’s theme. This grows to a complex climax with the orchestra divided into fifteen separate voices—Bridge’s original theme is played once again by solo string quartet as the fugue dances busily around it. At the very end, full orchestra stamps out the theme—now in D major—before the powerful close on a unison D.

Recomposed: Vivaldi—The Four Seasons MAX RICHTER

March 22, 1966, Hamelin, Germany

Composed: 2012

Approximate Duration: 45 minutes

Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons may be the most popular piece of classical music ever composed. It was a recording of The Four Seasons that opened the door to the revival of interest in baroque music after World War II, it has been recorded hundreds of times since then, and every violinist on the planet knows and plays The Four Seasons. Even people who know nothing about classical music recognize this music and can hum along with it.

But that in itself is a problem. The Four Seasons, glorious as it is, has become numbingly over-familiar: We hear it in elevators, in supermarket checkout lines, in ringtones. English composer Max Richter, who grew up listening to his parents’ recording of The Four Seasons, had the inevitable reaction: “I grew to hate it. In a way I stopped being able to hear it as music at all.” And so, Richter decided to do something about it. He has described his method: I needed to resolve the love/hate relationship I had with the work—call it an exorcism—and reclaim Vivaldi’s original as a musical object rather than a sonic irritant. The best way to do that, I decided, would be to take a voyage through Vivaldi’s landscape and to make new discoveries there.

As I looked into the score I saw there was a natural meeting point between his baroque language and my own. Vivaldi’s work is very pattern-based, and he generates his effects by juxtaposing contrasting kinds of material. That’s very much the way post-minimal music and electronic dance music operates, and I found plenty of touchpoints that enabled me to dive into his material in a natural, sculptural and architectural way. The result . . . succeeded in letting me encounter The Four Seasons afresh and laying the ghost of many hours of enforced listening to tinny 30-second loops of Spring while on hold waiting to speak to my bank.

Richter has said that he threw out about three-quarters of Vivaldi’s original and then “re-composed” the rest of it, and this involved a number of different approaches. Sometimes he added electronics. Sometimes he took Vivaldi’s rhythms as a starting point. Sometimes he quoted Vivaldi literally. Sometimes he wrote music of his own and superimposed it on elements of Vivaldi’s. He described his method as “throwing molecules of the original Vivaldi into a test tube with a bunch of other things, and waiting for an explosion.”

What resulted was not an explosion in the destructive sense, but a re-imagining of Vivaldi’s music. Richter begins with a movement he titles Spring 0, a forty-second overture that introduces the language of the re-composition. This proceeds directly into Spring 1, and the journey begins. There follow the twelve movements of Vivaldi’s original score in correct order, each of those movements re-created in a different way. The result is not a desecration—it is not “an explosion”—but an attempt to get at the essence of Vivaldi’s cycle by a composer working three hundred years later who loves that music and hears it in his own way. At its best, Richter’s composition should make us re-think and re-hear (with twenty-first century ears) music we have heard all our lives—perhaps too many times.

ON MAX RICHTER: Born in Germany, Max Richter grew up in England, attended the University of Edinburgh and Royal Academy of Music, and later studied privately with Luciano Berio. He has been active as a composer, pianist, producer, and organizer, and his music can show features of minimalism, postmodernism, and electronic music. Richter has produced ten very successful albums, and these often include voices; their topics range from protests against war to tracing the effects of migration and displacement on refugees. Richter has also written music for a vast number of films and television series. Among the movies he has scored (or which make use of his music) are Waltz with Bashir, Hostiles, Arrival, Shutter Island, and Prometheus. Among the television programs that have used Richter’s music are The Handmaid’s Tale, Peaky Blinders, and The Queen. Richter wrote the music for the first season of The Leftovers, and alert listeners may recognize the reappearance of some of that music in Autumn 1 of Recomposed—Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

PRELUDE 6:30 PM

Interview hosted by Molly Puryear

Support for this program provided by members of the Dance Society and presenting sponsors:

Elaine Galinson and Herbert Solomon

Bebe and Marvin Zigman