FROM THE NEW WORLD

Thursday 22 April | 8.30pm Saturday 24 April | 2pm

Hamer Hall

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Johannes Fritzsch conductor Owen Morris trumpet

JOAN TOWER For the Uncommon Woman

HOLLY HARRISON Hellbent for Trumpet and Orchestra

(WORLD PREMIERE OF AN MSO COMMISSION)

DVOŘÁK Symphony No.9 From the New World

A musical Acknowledgement of Country, Long Time Living Here by Deborah Cheetham AO, will be performed before the start of this concert. Running time: Approximately 1 hour, no interval.

Johannes Fritzsch conductor

Johannes Fritzsch was appointed Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in February, 2021 having previously served as their Chief Conductor. Since 2018, Johannes has held the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. From 2006–2013 he was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Oper Graz, Grazer Philharmonisches Orchester (Austria). Prior to his appointment in Graz, Johannes held the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Staatsoper Nürnberg. Johannes has conducted many leading orchestras, both within Germany and internationally. He regularly conducts the major Australasian orchestras as well as leading Opera productions. In January 2015, Johannes was appointed Adjunct Professor, The Conservatorium of Music, at the University of Tasmania; in June 2019, he joined the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University as Professor of Opera and Orchestral Studies. In 2017, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra invited him to lead the newly founded Australian Conducting Academy. In 2021, he conducts the Auckland Philharmonia and the Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Tasmanian and West Australian Symphony Orchestras.

Owen Morris trumpet

Owen is currently Principal Trumpet with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, a position which he has held since mid 2019. Prior to this he was Principal Trumpet with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Owen has had extensive orchestral experience including performing as Principal Trumpet with the Australian World Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Philharmonia and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Owen has also performed with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and with other chamber groups such as the Australian Brass Quintet, Omega Ensemble and Sydney Brass. Owen also enjoys performing concertos regularly. Some of his experiences include performing concertos with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Youth Orchestra, Adelaide Wind Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Sinfonia and Seraphim Trio. Owen also performed the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the Sydney Youth Orchestra on their 2017 International Tour to Europe. Owen enjoys teaching at the Melbourne and Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He is a certified Peak Performance Coach, incorporating his knowledge of teaching and performance with an in-depth insight into the mental aspects and training required to perform at an elite level.

Program Notes

JOAN TOWER

(born 1938) For the Uncommon Woman

The composer writes: All four fanfares are dedicated to women who are adventurous and take risks. The first Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman was inspired by Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and is scored for the same instrumentation of 3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba and percussion. This fanfare was premiered by the Houston Symphony as part of their Fanfare Project in 1987 with Hans Vonk conducting. The fourth fanfare is scored for full orchestra and was commissioned by The Kansas City Symphony with funding from AT&T.

Joan Tower © 2021

The MSO will be performing the fourth work from Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. (born 1988) Hellbent for Trumpet and Orchestra Owen Morris trumpet The composer writes: Hellbent is a celebration of the trumpet as a solo voice, written specifically for Owen Morris. The work embraces the versatility of the trumpet, exploring multiple personas ranging from wild and cheeky to sweet and dark to powerful and full-throttled. There’s also a smattering of bluesy-ness! The solo part is continually punctuated by bent notes, sculpted by a plunger mute, which trickles down into the orchestral textures (particularly the brass) as pitch and colour distortions. Zooming out, on a structural level, each section is almost bent out of shape and stretched into the next, morphing material together, with the orchestra bending to the whim of the trumpet. Hear how the trumpet whips them into shape with its persuasive powers! Trumpet is my first instrument and my original avenue into music. Writing the work had hints of ‘retuning to my roots’, allowing me to explore aspects of the trumpet’s sound that initially attracted me to the instrument. At first glance, the title Hellbent may sound aggressive, yet literally refers to the soloist as a determined force against (and with) the orchestra. I vividly recall a moment towards the end of the first draft, telling myself that I was ‘hellbent’ on finishing the piece! I suppose I was determined too.

Holly Harrison © 2021

(1841–1904) Symphony No.9 in E minor, Op.95 From the New World

I. Adagio – Allegro molto

II. Largo

III. Scherzo (Molto vivace)

IV. Allegro con fuoco In his last and most celebrated symphony, Antonín Dvořák mingles excitement at the sights and sounds of America with downright homesickness for his native Bohemia. Dvořák had arrived in New York in September 1892 to become director of the National Conservatory of Music, and the symphony was composed between January and May of the following year. Apart from the diplomatic cantata, The American Flag, it was his first composition in the USA. A Czech-American pupil, Josef Jan Kovarík, who travelled with Dvořák to New York, has recounted that when he was to take the score to Anton Seidl, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, for its first performance, the composer paused at the last moment to write on the title page ‘Z Nového sveta’ (From the New World). Significantly, written in Czech rather than the German or English that Seidl or his American audience would have understood, the inscription implied no suggestion that the new work was an ‘American’ symphony (Kovarík was adamant about this) but meant merely ‘Impressions and greetings from the New World’.

The ‘impressions’ that crowded Dvořák’s mind as he wrote the symphony were, of course, the frenetic bustle of New York, the seething cauldron of humanity in the metropolis, and the folk caught up in its impersonal whirl — the AfricanAmericans and Native Americans. Above all, he developed a fascination for what he was able to hear of the music of these two races — the plantation songs of Stephen Foster; spirituals sung to him on several occasions by Harry T. Burleigh, a Black student at the National Conservatory; transcriptions he was given of some Native American songs, and others he heard at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Dvořák claimed in a newspaper interview that the two musics were nearly identical and that their fondness for type of pentatonic scale made them remarkably similar to Scottish music. But it must be acknowledged that his acquaintance with the songs — those of the Native Americans in particular — was distinctly superficial. Dvořák’s fascination with these people stemmed from his reading, some thirty years earlier, Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha in a Czech translation. Although he did not persevere with ideas he had for writing an opera on the subject of America, the Hiawatha concept nevertheless surfaced to some extent in this symphony. The great Dvořák scholar, Otakar Sourek found the physical manifestations of America embodied mainly in the surging flow and swiftly changing moods of the first and last movements, soaring at times to heights of impressive grandeur. It is in the Largo and Scherzo that Dvorák is said to have admitted drawing on The Song of Hiawatha — Minnehaha’s bleak forest funeral in the slow movement, and the wedding feast and Indians dancing in the Scherzo. The music goes far beyond such flimsy poetic inspiration, however, for the Largo positively aches with the composer’s nostalgia and homesickness, while the Trio of the third movement is an unmistakable Czech dance.

Ultimately, the symphony as a whole is far more Czech than American.

The very familiarity of the music to most listeners, the facility with which wellremembered tunes appear and reappear, is apt to blur the subtleties of Dvořák’s 33

writing and symphonic construction. Most notable is the way themes for each movement recur in succeeding movements, often skilfully woven into climaxes or codas. Unlike Beethoven, however, in whose Ninth Symphony the ideas of the first three movements are reviewed, only to be rejected and transcended in a towering finale, Dvořák uses his earlier thoughts as a force of structural and spiritual unity, so that in combination they transcend themselves and each other.

In the miraculous Largo, the famous and elegiac melody first stated by the solo cor anglais — the melody that later became ‘Goin’ home’ — culminates grandly on trumpets against festive recollections of the two main themes from the first movement. Both first movement themes recur again in the coda of the Scherzo, the first of them (somewhat disguised) actually appearing three times earlier in the movement as well — at the end of the Scherzo section and twice in the transition of the Trio.

The development section of the finale contains allusions to the main themes of both Largo and Scherzo, and in the masterly coda the main themes of all three preceding movements are reviewed, that of the fast movement finally engaging in dialogue with the finale’s main subject until cut off by an urgent rush of highly conventional chords. Unexpectedly these lead to a delicate pianissimo wind chord with which the symphony ultimately soars heavenward, freed from earthbound shackles.

Anthony Cane © 1994