11 minute read
BEETHOVEN 5
Friday, September 22, 2023 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, September 24, 2023 at 2:30 pm
ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL
Ken-David Masur, conductor
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
Program
DANIEL KIDANE
Be Still
ELEANOR ALBERGA
The Soul’s Expression
George Eliot: “Blue Wings”
Emily Brontë: “The Sun Has Set”
George Eliot: “Roses”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “The Soul’s Expression”
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Entr’acte No. 2 in D Major from Rosamunde, D. 797
FRANZ SCHUBERT
IIIb., Romanze from Rosamunde, D. 797
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
FRANZ SCHUBERT/orch. Max Reger
Du bist die Ruh’, D. 776; Opus 59, No. 3
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
FRANZ SCHUBERT/orch. Max Reger
Erlkönig, D. 328; Opus 1
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
INTERMISSION
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro
The 2023.24 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION
The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes.
Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra can be heard on Telarc, Koss Classics, Pro Arte, AVIE, and Vox/Turnabout recordings. MSO Classics recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.
Guest Artist Biographies
DASHON BURTON
Hailed as an artist “alight with the spirit of the music” (Boston Globe), Dashon Burton has established a vibrant career appearing regularly throughout the U.S. and Europe. Highlights of his 2023.24 season include multiple appearances with Michael Tilson Thomas, including with the San Francisco Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the San Diego Symphony. Burton also performs Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Washington Bach Consort, sings Handel’s Messiah with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and performs the title role in Sweeney Todd at Vanderbilt University. With the Cleveland Orchestra, Burton participates in a semi-staged version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and he joins the Milwaukee Symphony and Ken-David Masur for three subscription weeks as their artistic partner.
A multiple award-winning singer, Burton won his second Grammy Award in March 2021 for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album with his performance featured in Dame Ethyl Smyth’s masterwork The Prison with The Experiential Orchestra (Chandos). As an original member of the groundbreaking vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, he won his first Grammy Award for their inaugural recording of all new commissions.
His other recordings include Songs of Struggle & Redemption: We Shall Overcome (Acis); the Grammy-nominated recording of Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road (Naxos); Holocaust, 1944 by Lori Laitman (Acis); and Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. His album of spirituals garnered high praise and was singled out by The New York Times as “profoundly moving…a beautiful and lovable disc.”
Burton received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College and Conservatory and a Master of Music degree from Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. He is an assistant professor of voice at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.
Program notes by Elaine Schmidt
DANIEL KIDANE
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.
ELEANOR ALBERGA
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
Entr’acte No. 2 and Romanze from Rosamunde, D. 797
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
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
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.“
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.
