Program notes by David Jensen
AARON COPLAND
Born 14 November 1900; New York City, New York
Died 2 December 1990; North Tarrytown, New York
Suite from Appalachian Spring (1945)
Composed: June 1943 – 1944; suite compiled in May 1945
First performance: 30 October 1944 (ballet); Louis Horst, conductor; Martha Graham Dance Company; 4 October 1945 (suite); Artur Rodziński, conductor; New York Philharmonic
Last MSO performance: 19 June 2016; Jeffrey Kahane, conductor
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; timpani; percussion (bass drum, claves, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tabor, triangle, wood block, xylophone); harp; piano; strings
Approximate duration: 24 minutes
Deeply affected by the political circumstances of his time, Copland spent the late 1930s and early 1940s frankly addressing the social concerns of his generation. In response to the Great Depression and the clouds of war looming on the world’s horizon, he produced a series of works for the stage distinguished by their simple, accessible musical aesthetics and direct narratives with the aim of reaching the general public, including his opera The Second Hurricane and the ballets El Salón México and Billy the Kid. Accused by his contemporaries of indulging popular tastes, Copland replied that “The composer who is frightened of losing his artistic integrity through contact with a mass audience is no longer aware of the meaning of the word art.”
During the last years of World War II, he began collaborating with the American dancer Martha Graham, who had been commissioning new scores for her all-female ensemble during the 1930s. Her scenarios had centered primarily around American cultural history, but her first request was for an adaption of the Medea mythology, which Copland declined. Eric Hawkins, the first male dancer to join the Martha Graham Dance Company, approached Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge the following year to negotiate better funding. Doubling his fee and offering him a joint premiere with the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, Copland agreed to the project, and by summer, Graham was mailing him new scripts from New York for consideration.
Copland, then frequenting the West Coast and scoring Hollywood productions, composed the music from a continent away as the two finessed the particulars of the plot. A proposal entitled “House of Victory” was twice revised for a total of three working scripts, which eventually yielded character archetypes common to the American imagination: a pioneer woman, a young couple, and a revivalist preacher and his disciples. Taking place over the course of a wedding day in an antebellum American settlement, the lovers’ reverie is interrupted by a presentiment of war. Gathering in prayer, the community finds solace in a revival meeting, the confidence of the townspeople is restored, and the newlyweds come to rest in their new home.
The rustic, pared-down music features what composer Virgil Thomson described as “plain, cleancolored, deeply imaginative” orchestration; a stipulation of the original commission had limited Copland to a chamber orchestra of 13 musicians. The Shaker melody “Simple Gifts” permeates the score, which, supported by Copland’s spacious, glowing harmonies, invokes the atmosphere of a simpler, preindustrial America. Copland revised and rearranged the ballet several times, but the orchestral suite he prepared in May 1945, heard on this weekend’s program, enjoys the most enduring popularity. Appalachian Spring earned Copland the Pulitzer Prize the same week as the ballet’s New York premiere, which took place just days after the Allied Nations declared victory over Germany in Europe.
KEVIN PUTS
Born 3 January 1972; St. Louis, Missouri
Marimba Concerto
Composed: 1997
First performance: September 1997; Jamie Laredo, conductor; Makoto Nakura, marimba; Vermont Symphony Orchestra
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: flute; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; bassoon; contrabassoon; 2 horns; trumpet; percussion (xylophone); strings
Approximate duration: 21 minutes
Kevin Puts has, without question, secured his place in the firmament of American composers. A graduate of Yale University and the Eastman School of Music, his music has been premiered by the preeminent musical institutions of North America, including the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has served as composer in residence for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, received commissions from the Aspen Music Festival, the Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco symphonies, and held professorships at both the University of Texas at Austin and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinner, his 2011 opera Silent Night, a dramatization of the 1914 “Christmas truce” between enemy forces during World War I, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, while his 2023 triple concerto for two violins, bass, and orchestra, Contact, received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
The first of his concertante works, the marimba concerto was composed while Puts was still a graduate student at the Eastman School of Music, the product of a joint commission from the Vermont Symphony Orchestra (who premiered the piece and subsequently toured it around Vermont) and the Kobe Ensemble of Japan. The concerto was written with marimba virtuoso Makoto Nakura in mind — collaborations between the two had already resulted in several pieces of solo and chamber music during Puts’s student years, and Nakura would serve as soloist at the premiere in September 1997. Puts has observed that the music is characteristic of his “most direct and unguarded voice as a composer” and noted that the concerto, scored in the key of E-flat major, is inspired by and modeled upon several of Mozart’s piano concerti in the same key. The titles for each of the three sections are extracted from the poetry of his aunt, the American author Fleda Brown.
The lush, sweeping opening melody, according to Puts, was “probably inspired by my hearing a pianist warming up on the stage of the Eastman Theater as I passed through it on the way to a class.” The simple harmonic progression introduced at the beginning serves as the foundation for all of the soloist’s elaborations throughout the first movement, which draws to a close as an intimate, shimmering cadenza dissolves into a simplified restatement of the opening theme played by solo strings. Choral, four-voice textures supplied by the strings predominate in the solemn, introspective inner section as the soloist continually weaves glistening embroidery. The final movement, “an athletic moto perpetuo,” begins with distinctly articulated figures in the marimba and winds before gradually reintegrating the opening theme of the concerto, making for a cyclic design as the musical material coalesces in a particularly fresh and vibrant show of dexterity.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born 17 December 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died 26 March 1827; Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Opus 60
Composed: Summer – Autumn 1806
First performance: March 1807; Ludwig van Beethoven, conductor; Palais Lobkowitz, Vienna
Last MSO performance: 20 November 2016; Edo de Waart, conductor
Instrumentation: flute; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings
Approximate duration: 34 minutes
Nestled between the revolutionary “Eroica” and the brazenly emotive fifth symphony, Beethoven’s fourth has suffered unfairly from its proximity to two of the most intensely inventive monoliths in the whole of Western music. A footnote in the literature of musicologists and historians, the fourth welds together what has come to be described as Beethoven’s “symphonic ideal” — the newly expanded musical structures, the assimilation of musical materials across multiple movements, the psychological profiles implied by the imposing stature of the music — with a relentless optimism that pervades every page of the score.
Emerging from a protracted struggle to complete his only opera, Fidelio, Beethoven spent the summer of 1806 in Silesia at the country estate of his patron, Prince Lichnowsky. It was to be an extraordinarily productive period in his life, a swift succession of works flowing from his pen one after another (and often simultaneously). A note included in the margins of his sketches from that summer offers an illuminating perspective on his state of mind: “Just as you plunge yourself here into the whirlpool of society, so in spite of all social obstacles it is possible for you to write operas. Your deafness shall be a secret no more, even where art is involved!”
Lichnowsky introduced Beethoven to Count Franz von Oppersdorff, who, impressed by his private orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s second symphony, offered him a handsome sum to compose a new work for him, although the premiere would ultimately be given at the home of Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna the following spring (along with the overture to Coriolan and the fourth piano concerto, both products of that inspired season), another wealthy patron to whom Beethoven would eventually dedicate the fifth and sixth symphonies. As far as Lichnowsky is concerned, his patronage of that notoriously temperamental artist collapsed that same year when Beethoven, refusing to play for French soldiers visiting the nobleman, nearly smashed a chair over his head.
Belying the symphony’s spirited character, a tonally unsteady introduction wanders through distantly related key centers before erupting, triumphantly, in an unabashedly vivacious sonataallegro first movement. Hector Berlioz, in his essay on Beethoven’s symphonies, remarked that the ensuing adagio, in rondo form, was written by the archangel Michael, “so pure are the forms, so angelic the expression of the melody and so irresistibly tender…” The following scherzo breaks with the traditionally threefold minuet-and-trio design, with two iterations of the trio surrounded by three of the scherzo, the last of which is condensed. The finale, impelled by the perpetual motion of semiquaver figures in the strings, is capped by a rhythmic augmentation of the main theme played at half tempo, punctuated by several Haydnesque pauses, before rounding off with an electrifying fortissimo gesture.
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 Principal Viola Chair
Samantha Rodriguez, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair
Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Elizabeth Breslin
Georgi Dimitrov
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
CLARINETS
Todd Levy, Principal, Franklyn Esenberg Clarinet Chair
Jay Shankar, Assistant Principal, Donald and Ruth P. Taylor Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair
Besnik Abrashi
E-FLAT CLARINET
Jay Shankar
BASS CLARINET
Besnik Abrashi
BASSOONS
Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Bassoon Chair
Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
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
Scott Sanders
TRUMPETS
Matthew Ernst, Principal, Walter L. Robb Family Trumpet Chair
David Cohen, Associate Principal, Martin J. Krebs Associate Principal Trumpet Chair
Tim McCarthy, 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, John and Judith Simonitsch Tuba Chair
TIMPANI
Dean Borghesani, Principal
Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal
PERCUSSION
Robert Klieger, Principal
Chris Riggs
PIANO
Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair
PERSONNEL
Antonio Padilla Denis, Director of Orchestra Personnel
Paris Myers, Hiring Coordinator
LIBRARIANS
Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, James E. Van Ess Principal Librarian Chair
Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist
PRODUCTION
Tristan Wallace, Production Manager/ Live Audio
Lisa Sottile, Production Stage Manager
* Leave of Absence 2024.25 Season
** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2024.25 Season
