Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra: “From the Mountaintop”
I. Con rubato, molto cantabile – Subito poco più mosso
II. Cadenza: Liberamente
III. Moderato, con moto
Todd Levy, clarinet
INTERMISSION
CHARLES IVES
Symphony No. 2
I. Andante moderato
II. Allegro molto (con spirito)
III. Adagio cantabile
IV. Lento maestoso
V. Allegro molto vivace
The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION.
The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. All programs are subject to change.
Guest Artist Biographies
TODD LEVY
Principal clarinet of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra and participant in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, four-time Grammy Award-winner Todd Levy has performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall, Mostly Mozart, with the Israel Philharmonic, and at the White House, among many other venues. An active chamber musician, Levy has appeared with members of the Guarneri, Juilliard, Orion, Ying, Miro, and Miami string quartets, and with James Levine, Christoph Eschenbach, and Mitsuko Uchida. He has also been a participant at the Marlboro Music Festival for four summers and was a member of the Naumburg Award-winning Aspen Wind Quintet.
In demand as guest principal clarinet with the top American orchestras, Levy has played principal clarinet with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and frequently for Seiji Ozawa and Riccardo Muti in Japan with Tokyo Opera Nomori and the Mito Chamber Orchestra. An avid supporter of new music, he has performed world premieres of concerti and chamber works by composers such as John Harbison, Joan Tower, Peter Schickele, Paquito D’Rivera, Morton Subotnick, Magnus Lindberg, Marc Neikrug, and Outi Tarkiainen. He performs on the new release of Marc Neikrug’s Through Roses with violinist Pinchas Zukerman, actor John Rubenstein, and the composer conducting.
Levy’s new CD for Avie, Rhapsodie, features 20th-century classics for clarinet. He has also recorded the Brahms clarinet sonatas and Schumann’s romances and Fantasiestücke for Avie, as well as three educational CDs of clarinet competition works entitled The Clarinet Collection for G. Schirmer and Hal Leonard. In 2021, he compiled a book of French repertoire for publisher Alphonse Leduc called French Music for Clarinet. In addition, Levy has recorded and edited the new exclusive editions and CDs of the Bernstein clarinet sonata and Gerald Finzi’s five bagatelles for Boosey and Hawkes in addition to more than 20 other orchestral and chamber music CDs on the Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, and Decca labels. He performs on Vandoren reeds, mouthpieces, and ligatures, and Selmer Signature clarinets. Levy serves on the clarinet faculty at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University and at UW-Milwaukee. Levy is a graduate of The Juilliard School and an alum of the New World Symphony.
LAURA SNYDER
Laura Snyder began her musical training at the prestigious High School of Music and Art in New Your City as well as the Dalcroze School of Music, studying with New York Philharmonic bassist Homer Mensch. She went on to Indiana University, studying bass and voice. She joined the MSO in 1970 and retired in December 2020. An avid teacher of hundreds of students, Snyder has given private lessons for more than 40 years. She has served on the faculties of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music, Carroll College, Wisconsin Lutheran College, and UW-Milwaukee. Snyder is the recipient of multiple awards including the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Civic Music Association of Milwaukee and the Black Excellence in Music from the Milwaukee Times.
Program notes by David Jensen
AARON COPLAND
Born 14 November 1900; New York City, New York
Died 2 December 1990; North Tarrytown, New York
Lincoln Portrait
Composed: February – April 1942
First performance: 14 May 1942; Andre Kostelanetz, conductor; Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
Last MSO performance: 19 January 2013; Francesco Lecce-Chong, conductor; Tom Barrett, narrator
It was in the first days of 1942 that the Russian-born popular music conductor Andre Kostelanetz approached “the dean of American composers” with a commission for a musical portrait of an esteemed personage from American history. It was an effort to bolster the minds and hearts of a citizenry that suddenly found itself at war to a degree previously unthinkable: the strike at Pearl Harbor had taken place only a few weeks before, thrusting America into what remains the most violent and destructive conflict in recorded history.
The proposal had been issued to two other composers, Virgil Thomson and Jerome Kern, who had chosen Fiorello La Guardia, then the mayor of New York City, and Mark Twain as their subjects. Aaron Copland had initially thought of Walt Whitman, “the patron poet of all composers,” but when Kostelanetz explained that Kern had already decided on a literary figure, he was relegated to the “inevitable” choice of a wartime stateman. “With the voice of Lincoln to help me,” he wrote, “I was ready to risk the impossible.”
Despite whatever personal reservations Copland might have harbored, progress was swift and assured. He began sketching his ideas in February, completing the portrait on 16 April and molding its orchestration in the weeks leading up to its premiere with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra on 14 May. The music was entirely original apart from the inclusion of two nineteenthcentury tunes: Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” and the ballad “On Springfield Mountain,” which were not directly transcribed, but adapted freely, much like his treatment of cowboy and folk song in his ballet Billy the Kid.
In Copland’s own words, “The composition is roughly divided into three sections. In the opening section I wanted to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality. Also, near the end of that section, something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit. The quick middle section briefly sketches in the background of the times he lived in. This merges into the concluding section where my sole purpose was to draw a simple but impressive frame about the words of Lincoln himself.” The text of the narration is extracted from Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, making use of an excerpt from the Gettysburg Address only briefly at the work’s conclusion.
Somewhat ironically, Copland was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for his leftist political leanings during the Red Scare of the 1950s, having previously supported the Communist Party in the 1936 presidential election and the Progressive Party in 1948. Like dozens of other leading notables in the performing arts, he was blacklisted, and his Lincoln Portrait was withdrawn from President Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural concert in 1953.
RICHARD DANIELPOUR
Born 28 January 1956; New York City, New York
Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra: “From the Mountaintop”
Composed: 2013
First performance: 20 January 2014; James Freeman, conductor; Anthony McGill, clarinet; Orchestra 2001
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes (2nd doubling on English horn); 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 3 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; timpani; percussion (bass drum, chimes, cowbell, crash cymbal, floor toms, glockenspiel, guiro, high hat, slapstick, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, tom-toms in three pitches, triangle, vibraphone, wood block, xylophone); harp; piano (doubling on celesta); strings
Approximate duration: 28 minutes
Writing in The Muse that Sings, a compilation of essays by living composers, Danielpour cited Leonard Bernstein as having influenced not only his development as a composer, but his perspective on living a life in music: “[He] once told me that in the end, what a composer really does is share love.”
With a career spanning more than 40 years, Richard Danielpour carries every pedigree of which an American composer might dream. Born to Iranian Jewish parents in New York City, he studied piano and composition at Oberlin College, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Juilliard School, where he received his doctoral degree under the tutelage of Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin. He has received awards and fellowships from Columbia University, the American Academy in Berlin, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, taught at the Manhattan School of Music, UCLA, and the Curtis Institute of Music, and even collaborated with Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison on his 2005 opera Margaret Garner
His clarinet concerto was the result of a joint commission by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Orchestra, and Orchestra 2001. Danielpour wrote the solo clarinet part with Anthony McGill, Principal Clarinet for the New York Philharmonic, in mind, envisioning a “minister in a Southern Baptist church” with the orchestra as its congregation. The concerto honors the life and labors of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired in part by his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” King’s words to that Memphis crowd in April 1968 carried an unusual gravity as he spoke of racial justice, political unity, and the means to those ends — but his closing remarks would prove tragically oracular:
We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.
He would be assassinated the following day, indelibly altering the trajectory of American history. The music itself draws upon the pulsing, incisive rhythms of mid-century jazz, with the score calling for a battery of percussion instruments, which provide the soloist with a diverse variety of vividly textured backings. The clarinet winds its way through a panoply of orchestral colors and neo-Romantic harmonies, invoking an enormous spectrum of emotions — from the ebullient optimism of the flourishing civil rights movement to the shock and despair which resounded throughout the nation on that fateful afternoon.
CHARLES IVES
Born 20 October 1874; Danbury, Connecticut
Died 19 May 1954; New York City, New York
Symphony No. 2
Composed: 1897-1901; revised 1909-1910
First performance: 22 February 1951; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; New York Philharmonic
Last MSO performance: 1 October 1978; Kenneth Schermerhorn, conductor
If the adjective “visionary” could accurately describe a composer in a given time and place, it would be Charles Ives. A descendent of the founding colonists of Connecticut, Ives was steeped in American musical language from his boyhood; his father George, a bandleader during the American Civil War, led concerts in the Danbury town square with his son in tow, taught him harmony and composition, and exposed him to the music of Stephen Foster, the leading composer of American parlor music during the middle nineteenth century. By 14, he was working as an organist, composing his own hymns for use in church services.
He enrolled at Yale in 1894, studying under Horatio Parker, but — perhaps sensing his own radical inclinations would hardly be financially sustainable — opted for a career in the insurance industry following his graduation. Despite composing in seclusion for most of his life, he was constantly experimenting with polytonality, aleatoric (or “chance”) components, and tone clusters, preceding the most radical American composers by decades. Drawing on an enormous body of aesthetic inspiration, his principal skill as a composer lay not merely in integrating American folk, sacred, and popular music into his compositions, but assimilating those elements so completely that they became indistinguishable from his own musical thoughts.
He began plotting the second symphony sometime around 1897 while still a student at Yale, which may account for its “softer” quality relative to his later surrealist ventures. There is a conscious melding of American and European traditions as the sprawling five-movement work carefully weaves in allusions to American popular and folk song in counterpoint to excerpts from Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner. It was completed around 1901, and Ives continued his tinkering nearly a decade later, but it wasn’t until 1951 that Leonard Bernstein gave the world premiere with the New York Philharmonic. Ives, for reasons unknown, had chosen not to attend, but was coaxed into listening to a radio broadcast at a neighbor’s home. In his typically inscrutable fashion, it was reported that, at the concert’s conclusion, he stood, spat in the fireplace, and walked out of the room.
Despite the success of the premiere in igniting national interest in Ives as a prototypically American artist, it later came to light that Bernstein’s score contained hundreds of errors — including unauthorized revisions of Bernstein’s own. It wasn’t until 2000 that the Charles Ives Society published a critical edition of the score, restoring Ives’s original intentions. It was Kenneth Schermerhorn, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s second music director, who had the distinction of producing the first recording of that edition with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.
2024.25 SEASON
KEN-DAVID MASUR
Music Director
Polly and Bill Van Dyke
Music Director Chair
EDO DE WAART
Music Director Laureate
BYRON STRIPLING
Principal Pops Conductor
Stein Family Foundation Principal Pops
Conductor Chair
RYAN TANI
Assistant Conductor
CHERYL FRAZES HILL
Chorus Director
Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair
TIMOTHY J. BENSON
Assistant Chorus Director
FIRST VIOLINS
Jinwoo Lee, Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair
Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster, Thora M. Vervoren First Associate Concertmaster Chair
Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster
Alexander Ayers
Autumn Chodorowski
Yuka Kadota
Sheena Lan**
Elliot Lee**
Dylana Leung
Kyung Ah Oh
Lijia Phang
Yuanhui Fiona Zheng
SECOND VIOLINS
Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair
Ji-Yeon Lee, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)*
Hyewon Kim, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Glenn Asch
Lisa Johnson Fuller
Clay Hancock
Paul Hauer
Janis Sakai**
Mary Terranova
VIOLAS
Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair
Samantha Rodriguez, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Elizabeth Breslin
Georgi Dimitrov
Alejandro Duque
Nathan Hackett
Erin H. Pipal
CELLOS
Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair
Shinae Ra, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus
Madeleine Kabat
Peter Szczepanek
Peter J. Thomas
Adrien Zitoun
BASSES
Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair
Andrew Raciti, Acting Principal
Nash Tomey, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Brittany Conrad
Omar Haffar**
Paris Myers
HARP
Julia Coronelli, Principal, Walter Schroeder Harp Chair
FLUTES
Sonora Slocum, Principal, Margaret and Roy Butter Flute Chair
Heather Zinninger, Assistant Principal
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
PICCOLO
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
OBOES
Katherine Young Steele, Principal, Milwaukee Symphony League Oboe Chair
Kevin Pearl, Assistant Principal
Margaret Butler
ENGLISH HORN
Margaret Butler, Philip and Beatrice Blank English Horn Chair in memoriam to John Martin
