Program notes by Elaine Schmidt
DANIEL KIDANE
Born 1986; Great Britain
Be Still
First performance: 19 January 2021; Manchester, United Kingdom
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: percussion (crotales); strings
Approximate duration: 8 minutes
Born to a Russian mother and an Eritrean father, Daniel Kidane grew up in Britain. Although Kidane’s official bio says that he began his musical studies on the violin at age eight, he has said in interviews that his first music-making experiences were actually on the recorder as a young boy. He sang in the English National Opera’s children’s chorus, later choosing to focus on composition when he entered the Royal Northern College of Music, from which he graduated in 2012. He also traveled to his mother’s homeland to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
By 2016, Kidane had received a commission from the BBC Philharmonic to create his “Sirens” as one of five short pieces that the orchestra performed to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Various commissions followed, and his works began gaining a wider and wider audience, including his orchestral work, Woke, which received its premiere performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the last night of the Proms in 2019.
Although the COVID-19 shutdown put a halt to live premieres of new works, several of Kidane’s pieces received online premieres while theaters were dark, including The Song of the Thrush and The Mountain Ash, written for the Huddersfield Choral Society.
Be Still, which was commissioned and premiered by the Manchester Camerata on 19 January 2021, is scored for strings and crotales, which are sometimes called antique cymbals.
Kidane wrote of the piece:
“Written towards the end of 2020, Be Still is a reflective piece on the year gone by. In a year where lockdowns became a thing, the idea of time became more apparent to me as everyday markers, such as meeting with friends and family, traveling, or attending concerts vanished.”
Kidane has said that he had the first lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (the first poem of his Four Quartets) in his thoughts:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 17
ELEANOR ALBERGA
Born 30 September 1949; Kingston, Jamaica
The Soul’s Expression
First performance: 22 July 2017; Wales
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: strings
Approximate duration: 17 minutes
Jamaican-born, British composer Eleonor Alberga is the definition of a multifaceted musician. She was just five years old when she announced she wanted to become a concert pianist. By age 10 she was composing piano pieces, and at 19 she won the biennial Royal Schools of Music Scholarship for the West Indies, which allowed her to attend the Royal Academy of Music in London. From this point on, her musical interests began to compete a bit. She studied piano and singing at the Royal Academy of Music, becoming one of three finalists in the International Piano Concerto Competition in Dudley, England. Just a few years later, she landed a position at the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, where she became well known for her improvisations during ballet class. She was eventually commissioned to write works for the company, which led to her becoming the company’s musical director. In that position, she conducted, composed, and performed on many of the company’s tours. Alberga ended her performing career in 2001 to focus her energies on composition.
In Alberga’s music, one can hear elements of her Jamaican background, along with jazz influences, repeated rhythmic patterns, and a good deal of tonal writing. She began to incorporate increasingly atonal elements in her later works. Her works include orchestral, chamber, piano, vocal, and choral pieces, along with scores for film and stage.
The Soul’s Expression, written for baritone and strings, is built upon four poems by Victorian-era, British women: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Soul’s Expression,” Emily Brontë’s “The Sun Has Set,” and “Blue Wings” and “Roses” by George Elliot (the pen name for Mary Ann Evans, the English novelist, journalist, poet, and translator who is well-remembered for her novels: The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch). Within the piece, the four poems are separated by interludes that condemn evil, specifically evil words.
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born 31 January 1797; Vienna, Austria
Died 19 November, 1828; Vienna, Austria
Despite his tragically short life, Austrian composer Franz Schubert produced an astonishing amount of work. Bridging the Classical and early Romantic eras, he wrote more than 600 secular vocal pieces, many of them Lieder (songs), including several song cycles. He completed seven symphonies and wrote a great deal of chamber music, as well as sacred music, operas, and incidental music.
Entr’acte No. 2 and Romanze from Rosamunde, D. 797
First performance: 20 December 1823; Vienna, Austria
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; bass trombone; timpani; strings
Approximate duration: 8 minutes
18 MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Rosamunde, Fürstyn von Zypern (Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus) is a play we would probably not remember had Schubert not written its incidental music. Schubert later used some of his Rosamunde music in other pieces, but the manuscript disappeared until Sir George Grove (Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians) and Sir Arthur Sullivan (the musical half of Gilbert and Sullivan) found the manuscript in a closet while researching Schubert. Rosamunde is the story of a princess raised as a peasant who manages to claim her throne. The lovely Romanze is sung by Rosamunde’s birth mother when Rosamunde returns to Cyprus. Although written for alto, the Romanze lends itself to the baritone voice as well.
Du bist die Ruh’, D. 776; Opus 59, No. 3
First performance: Unknown; first publishing was by Sauer & Leidesdorf in Vienna, 1826.
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes; oboe; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; trumpet; timpani; strings
Approximate duration: 5 minutes
When Schubert set this Friedrich Rückert poem to music, it did not yet have a title, so he used the first line of the poem, “Du bist die Ruh’,” (You are the peace) as the title. Rückert later gave the poem the title “Kehr ein bei mir” (Stay with Me). With this song, Schubert created a feeling of absolute calm.
Erlkönig, D. 328; Opus 1
First performance: 7 March 1821, Vienna, Austria
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: flute; oboe; 2 clarinets; bassoon; 2 horns; timpani; strings
Approximate duration: 5 minutes
Erlkönig (Erl-king) is one of Schubert’s most famous Lieder. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic poem, which was also set by about 35 other composers, tells of a father racing by horseback to get help for his ailing son, who he cradles in his arms as he rides. The boy describes his fever-dreams to his father, one of which is of an Erl-king who wants to take the boy. The father finally arrives at his destination, only to find that his son has already died. Schubert’s setting not only captures the drama of the poem, but the voices of the father, his son, and the Erl-king. The racing figures in the accompaniment capture the motion of the running horse.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born 17 December 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died 26 March 1827; Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
Premiere: 22 December 1808; Vienna, Austria
Last MSO performance: 23 April 2017; Anu Tali, conductor
Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; timpani; strings
Approximate duration: 31 minutes
The opening bars of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 are among the most recognized bits of music in the symphonic repertoire. The entire piece is certainly well-loved by audiences around the world, and it remains one of the most often-played pieces in today’s orchestral repertoire. But the bold short-short-short-long theme that opens the piece and recurs throughout it seems to have been fated to take on a life of its own. Interestingly, Beethoven called the piece his Schicksalssinfonie (fate symphony), and German author E.T.A. Hoffman, who penned the story on which The Nutcracker ballet is based, referred to the theme as “fate knocking at the door.“
MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 19
Beethoven wrote his Symphony No. 5 between 1804 and 1809, working on it as Napoleon was waging war on Austria and the country was hoping and praying for victory. About 20 years later, having nothing to do with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, American inventor Samuel Morse and several colleagues developed a code of short and long electrical impulses that could be transmitted by wire over great distances, assigning a short-short-short-long pattern of pulses to the letter V (the letter U is short-short-long). Fast forward a century to World War II, during which the Allied troops relied on Morse code to communicate. The short-short-short-long of the letter V led the Allies to adopt the opening bars of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 for all Allied radio broadcasts, as a “V for Victory” rallying cry in the most destructive war the world had ever known. For those in the Allied nations who had lived through the war, and certainly for those who had fought in the war or had lost loved ones to it, hearing Beethoven’s Napoleonic-era Symphony No. 5 remained a deeply stirring experience throughout their lives.
In 2022, shortly after the Russian military began its relentless war against Ukraine, orchestras around the world began performing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 as a means of showing solidarity with Ukraine. Quite a few orchestras have performed the symphony on programs that also included Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s “Prayer for Ukraine,” which will be performed by the MSO on September 29 and 30.
20 MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
2023.24 SEASON
KEN-DAVID MASUR
Music Director
Polly and Bill Van Dyke
Music Director Chair
EDO DE WAART
Music Director Laureate
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
Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster
Alexander Ayers
Yuka Kadota
Elliot Lee**
Ji-Yeon Lee**
Dylana Leung
Allison Lovera
Lijia Phang
Yuanhui Fiona Zheng
SECOND VIOLINS
Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair
Timothy Klabunde, Assistant Principal
John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)
Glenn Asch
Lisa Johnson Fuller
Paul Hauer
Hyewon Kim
Alejandra Switala**
Mary Terranova
VIOLAS
Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Principal Viola Chair
Georgi Dimitrov, Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri
Viola Chair
Samantha Rodriguez, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)*
Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)
Elizabeth Breslin
Nathan Hackett
Erin H. Pipal
Helen Reich
CELLOS
Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair
Nicholas Mariscal, Assistant Principal *
Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus
Madeleine Kabat
Shinae Ra
Peter Szczepanek
Peter J. Thomas
Adrien Zitoun
BASSES
Jon McCullough-Benner, Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair *
Andrew Raciti, Associate Principal
Nash Tomey, Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)
Brittany Conrad
Teddy Gabrieledes **
Peter Hatch *
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
CLARINETS
Todd Levy, Principal, Franklyn Esenberg Clarinet Chair
Benjamin Adler, Assistant Principal, Donald and Ruth P. Taylor Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair *
Taylor Eiffert*
Madison Freed**
E-FLAT CLARINET
Benjamin Adler *
BASS CLARINET
Taylor Eiffert*
Madison Freed **
BASSOONS
Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Bassoon Chair
Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal
Beth W. Giacobassi
CONTRABASSOON
Beth W. Giacobassi
HORNS
Matthew Annin, Principal, Krause Family French Horn Chair
Krystof Pipal, Associate Principal
Dietrich Hemann, Andy Nunemaker French Horn Chair
Darcy Hamlin
Kelsey Williams**
TRUMPETS
Matthew Ernst, Principal, Walter L. Robb Family Trumpet Chair
David Cohen, Associate Principal, Martin J. Krebs Associate Principal
Trumpet Chair
Alan Campbell, Fred Fuller Trumpet Chair
TROMBONES
Megumi Kanda, Principal, Marjorie Tiefenthaler Trombone Chair
Kirk Ferguson, Assistant Principal
BASS TROMBONE
John Thevenet, Richard M. Kimball Bass Trombone Chair
TUBA
Robyn Black, Principal
TIMPANI
Dean Borghesani, Principal
Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal
PERCUSSION
Robert Klieger, Principal
Chris Riggs
PIANO
Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair
PERSONNEL MANAGERS
Françoise Moquin, Director of Orchestra Personnel
Constance Aguocha, Assistant Personnel Manager
LIBRARIANS
Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, Anonymous Donor, Principal Librarian Chair
Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist
PRODUCTION
Tristan Wallace, Technical Manager & Live Audio Supervisor
Paolo Scarabel, Stage Technician & Deck Supervisor
* Leave of Absence 2023.24 Season
** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2023.24 Season
MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 21
