11 minute read
OPENING NIGHT GALA
Saturday, September 23, 2023 at 7:00 pm
ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL
Ken-David Masur, conductor
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
Program
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Carnival Overture, Opus 92
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
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 Opening Night Gala is presented by LAURA AND MIKE ARNOW. This evening’s performance is presented by TONY AND VICKI CECALUPO and NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL. The Music Director’s performance is presented by U.S. BANK. 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 15 minutes with no intermission.
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.
KEN-DAVID MASUR, MUSIC DIRECTOR
Hailed as “fearless, bold, and a life-force” (San Diego UnionTribune) and “a brilliant and commanding conductor with unmistakable charisma” (Leipzig Volkszeitung), Ken-David Masur is celebrating his fifth season as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony’s Civic Orchestra. He has conducted distinguished orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, l’Orchestre National de France, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, the National Philharmonic of Russia, and others throughout the United States, France, Germany, Korea, Japan, and Scandinavia.
Masur’s tenure in Milwaukee has been marked by innovative thematic programming, including a festival celebrating the music of the 1930s, when the Bradley Symphony Center was built, and the Water Festival, which highlighted local community partners whose work centers on water conservation and education. He has also instituted a multi-season artist-in-residence program, and he has led highly-acclaimed performances of major choral works, including a semi-staged production of Peer Gynt. This season, he begins a residency with bass-baritone Dashon Burton, and leads the MSO in an inaugural city-wide Bach festival, celebrating the diverse and universal appeal of J.S. Bach’s music in an ever-changing world.
Last season, Masur made his New York Philharmonic debut in a gala program featuring John Williams and Steven Spielberg. He also debuted at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, and at Classical Tahoe in three programs that were broadcast on PBS, and he led the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Branford Marsalis, and James Taylor at Tanglewood in a 90th birthday concert for John Williams. The summer of 2023 marked Masur’s debuts with the Grant Park Festival and the National Repertory Orchestra; later this season, he returns to the Baltimore Symphony and the Kristiansand Symphony.
Previously, Masur was associate conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During his five seasons there, he led numerous concerts at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood. For eight years, Masur served as principal guest conductor of the Munich Symphony, and he has also served as associate conductor of the San Diego Symphony and as resident conductor of the San Antonio Symphony.
Music education and working with the next generation of young artists are of major importance to Masur. In addition to his work with Civic Orchestra of Chicago, he has conducted orchestras and led masterclasses at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts, New England Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, Boston University, Boston Conservatory, Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan Chamber Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, and The Juilliard School, where he leads the Juilliard Orchestra this fall.
Masur is passionate about contemporary music and has conducted and commissioned dozens of new works, many of which have premiered at the Chelsea Music Festival, an annual summer festival in New York City founded and directed by Masur and his wife, pianist Melinda Lee Masur. The Festival, which celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2024, has been praised by The New York Times as a “gem of a series” and by TimeOutNY as an “impressive addition to New York’s cultural ecosystem.”
Masur and his family are proud to call Milwaukee their home and enjoy exploring all the riches of the Third Coast.
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.
Dashon Burton appears by arrangement with Colbert Artists Management, Inc., 180 Elm Street, Ste I, #221, Pittsfield, MA 01201-6552.
Program notes by Elaine Schmidt
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Carnival Overture, Op. 92
First performance: 28 April 1892; Prague, Czech Republic
Last MSO performance: 3 January 2010; Stuart Chafetz, conductor
Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (cymbals, tambourine, triangle); harp; strings
Approximate duration: 10 minutes
Czech composer Antonín Dvořák was just six when he showed great aptitude on the violin. He was in his late teens and working for his butcher/innkeeper father when he received an Austrian state scholarship for “young, poor, and talented musicians in the Austrian half of the Hapsburg Empire,” which allowed him to chase his musical dreams. What he did not know at the time was that composer Johannes Brahms was on the committee that awarded him the scholarship. Some years later in 1877, music critic Edward Hanslick gave Dvořák’s music to Brahms to look it over. Brahms was so impressed with the music that he championed Dvořák to Simrock, which in turn led to the publication of some of Dvořák’s music by the esteemed publisher.
Thanks in great part to Brahms’s belief in him, Dvořák went on to become one of the best-loved composers in his corner of Europe and then earned global fame. He served for a time as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in America in New York City. While working in the U.S., Dvořák wrote his two most famous orchestral pieces: his Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World,” and his Cello Concerto.
Among Dvořák’s output of orchestral music are several program pieces, meaning pieces intended to express or depict an extra-musical, or non-musical, topic or narrative (think Richard Strauss’s tone poems, such as An Alpine Symphony or Don Juan). Dvořák wrote program music at various points in his career, including the summer 1891, when he penned a cycle of three overtures that he collectively titled Nature, Life, and Love, intending them as his Opus 91.
Dvořák eventually decided the three overtures should each stand alone. He retitled them In Nature’s Realm Overture, Opus 91, Carnival Overture, Opus 92, and Othello Overture, Opus 93. In the Carnival Overture, Dvořák depicted a clamorous, busy carnival atmosphere, going so far as to describe a soft passage as “a pair of straying lovers.” Brahms described the overture as “merry” and predicted that music directors would be thankful to him for publishing the three overtures.
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 that 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.
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.
