GERSHWIN'S SECOND RHAPSODY

MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

GERSHWIN’S SECOND RHAPSODY

Friday, February 4, 2022 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, February 5, 2022 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, February 6, 2022 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Aaron Diehl, piano

PROGRAM

CHARLES IVES/ed. James B. Sinclair (Ives Society)

Three Places in New England

I. The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common

II. Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut

III. The Housatonic at Stockbridge

FLORENCE PRICE

Piano Concerto in D minor (In One Movement)

Aaron Diehl, piano

INTERMISSION

SAMUEL BARBER

Symphony No. 1 (In One Movement), Opus 9

I. Allegro ma non troppo

II. Allegro molto (Scherzo)

III. Andante tranquillo IV. Con moto (Passacaglia) [played without pause]

WILLIAM GRANT STILL

Out of the Silence

GEORGE GERSHWIN

Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra

Aaron Diehl, piano

The 2021.22 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND.The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra can be heard on Telarc, Koss Classics, Pro Arte, AVIE, and Vox/Turnabout recordings. MSO Classics recordings (digital only) available on iTunes and at mso.org. MSO Binaural recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.

Guest Artist Biographies

AARON DIEHL

AARON DIEHL

Piano

Pianist and composer Aaron Diehl mystifies listeners with his layered artistry. At once temporal and ethereal, his expression transforms the piano into an orchestral vessel in the spirit of beloved predecessors Ahmad Jamal, Erroll Garner, and Jelly Roll Morton. Following three critically-acclaimed leader albums on Mack Avenue Records – and live appearances at historic venues from Jazz at Lincoln Center and The Village Vanguard to New York Philharmonic and the Philharmonie de Paris – the American Pianist Association’s 2011 Cole Porter fellow now focuses his attention on what it means to be present within himself. His forthcoming solo record promises an expansion of that exploration in a setting at once unbound and intimate.

Diehl conjures three-dimensional expansion of melody, counterpoint, and movement through time. Rather than choose one sound or another, he invites listeners into the chambered whole of his artistry. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Diehl traveled to New York in 2003, following his success as a finalist in JALC’s Essentially Ellington competition and a subsequent European tour with Wynton Marsalis. His love affair with rub and tension prompted a years-long immersion in distinctive repertoire from Monk and Ravel to Gershwin and William Grant Still. Among other towering figures, Still in particular inspires Diehls’s ongoing curation of Black American composers in his own performance programming, unveiled this past fall at 92nd St. Y.

Diehl has enjoyed artistic associations with Wynton Marsalis, Benny Golson, Jimmy Heath, Buster Williams, Branford Marsalis, Wycliffe Gordon, Philip Glass, and multi Grammy® Award-winning artist Cecile McLorin Salvant. He recently appeared with the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra as featured soloist.

Diehl holds a Bachelor of Music in jazz studies from Juilliard. A licensed pilot, when he’s not at the studio or on the road, he’s likely in the air. Follow both his earthbound and aerial exploits via Instagram @aaronjdiehl.

Program notes by J. Mark Baker

American composers are on display this weekend, as we continue our celebration of the 1930s. The MSO’s artistic partner Aaron Diehl returns to play Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody and Florence Price’s long-neglected Piano Concerto. Top-notch works by Ives, Barber, and Still flesh out the program.

Charles Ives

CHARLES IVES

Three Places in New England

Born 20 October 1874; Danbury, Connecticut

Died 19 May 1954; New York, New York

Three Places in New England Composed: 1903-14

First performance: 10 January 1931; New York, New York

Last MSO performance: October 1972; Kenneth Schermerhorn, conductor

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes (2nd doubling on English horn); 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (snare drum, bass drum with attached cymbals, gong); 2 harps; piano; celeste; strings

Approximate duration: 19 minutes

Unquestionably one of America’s greatest composers, Charles Ives was a heroic figure in experimental music during the first half of the 20th century. Though as an undergraduate he studied composition at Yale with Horatio Parker (1863-1919), his music was constrained neither by academicism nor adherence to European tradition: He made his fortune in the insurance business, so he was free to write music as he pleased. Musical “success” came only in the last decades of his life.

The compositional timeline for Ives’s Three Places in New England is somewhat convoluted. The work was written mainly between 1911 and 1914 – about the same time as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – but sketches date as far back as 1903 and final revisions were made in 1929. Nicholas Slonimsky conducted his Boston Chamber Orchestra in the premiere, at Town Hall in New York City. It has become one of Ives’s most frequently performed compositions, exhibiting several signature traits of his style: layered textures with multiple, sometimes simultaneous melodies, some of which are familiar hymn or marching tunes; masses of sound, including tone clusters; sudden shifts of orchestral texture. Each of the three programmatic movements depicts a specific location.

The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment) is a tribute to the Union Army’s first Black regiment – the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts. The composer had long admired Augustus St. Gaudens’ bas-relief in Boston Common, part of a monument near City Hall. At first elegiac, the music accumulates power and textural complexity and the pace increases. Listen as Ives depicts the stumbling gait of men marching uphill.

Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut – the winter quarters of General Israel Putnam during Revolutionary War days – describes a child’s Fourth-of-July fantasy. According to Ives, the boy imagines the marching and countermarching of the army. It also recalls an occasion when the composer heard two bands enter from different side of the park simultaneously. A tour de force for the orchestra, it is a prime example of Ives’s multi-layered pieces.

The Housatonic at Stockbridge recalls a Sunday morning stroll that Ives and his new wife, Harmony, took in June 1908. “We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.”

Florence Price

FLORENCE PRICE

Piano Concerto in D minor (in one movement)

Born 9 April 1887; Little Rock, Arkansas

Died 3 June 1953; Chicago, Illinois

Piano Concerto in D minor (in one movement)

Composed: 1932-34

First performance: 1934; Chicago, Illinois

Last MSO performance: MSO premiere

Instrumentation: flute; oboe; 2 clarinets; bassoon; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 trombones; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum); strings

Approximate duration: 18 minutes

Florence Beatrice Smith Price grew up in a middle-class household in Little Rock, Arkansas, where her father was a well-respected dentist, inventor, and published author. Her mother, from whom she took her first piano lessons, was an elementary school teacher and enterprising businesswoman. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music, then returned home to teach and raise a family. Life in Arkansas was harsh for African-Americans, and lynchings were commonplace. When she moved to Chicago with her family in 1927, her horizons broadened. She divorced her abusive husband and made a new life for herself.

In the Windy City, Price became established as a concert pianist, organist, teacher, and composer. Her earlier output was mostly songs, short pieces, and music for children, but now she started to write in larger symphonic and concerto forms. Her compositional catalogue lists over 300 works, including 20 orchestral pieces and 100+ art songs and spiritual arrangements. (Marian Anderson sang Price’s arrangement of “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Easter Sunday 1939.) In 1932, she attracted major attention when she won first prize in the Wanamaker Music Compositions Contest for her Symphony in E minor. Frederick Stock, a conductor of rare broad-mindedness, led its premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in June 1933.

Price’s Piano Concerto dates from the same time as her award-winning Symphony. Though it is said to be “in one movement,” there are actually three, all played without a break. Following an orchestral introduction, the soloist has a cadenza. Throughout the Andantino, one senses the influence of Romantic-era composer-pianists such as Liszt and Chopin; the orchestra often delineates the themes, as the pianist weaves arpeggios around them. The second section, Adagio cantabile, is everything that heading implies: slow, soulful, songlike; it is set in D major. The final, joyous Allegretto is in B-flat major. It’s a juba, a dance from Southern plantation days, accompanied by rhythmic hand-clapping and slapping of the arms, knees, and thighs.

Samuel Barber

SAMUEL BARBER

Symphony No. 1 (In One Movement)

Born 9 March 1910; West Chester, Pennsylvania

Died 23 January 1981; New York, New York

Symphony No. 1 (In One Movement), Opus 9

Composed: 1935-36; revised 1942-43

First performance: 13 December 1936; Rome, Italy 18 February 1944; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (revision)

Last MSO performance: September 2007; Andreas Delfs, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, suspended cymbals); harp; strings

Approximate duration: 21 minutes

In the spring of 1935, the Prix de Rome was awarded to the 25-year-old Samuel Barber, citing him as “the most talented and deserving student of music in America.” He was granted two years of study at the American Academy in Rome with a yearly stipend of $1400, residence at the Academy, and a free studio. He arrived in October of that year.

Barber’s intention was to continue work on his first symphony, which he had begun in Maine that summer. He was sidetracked, however, by a burst of inspiration to write songs; by early January 1936, he had composed seven new ones. He then resumed work on the Symphony in One Movement, completing it on 24 February 1936 in the French alpine village of Roquebrune. Dedicated to Gian Carlo Menotti, the work is – in Barber’s words – “a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony.”

It was premiered in Rome, but soon made its way to the United States (Cleveland, 23 January 1937) and even to the Salzburg Festival 1937, conducted by Artur Rodzinsky, the first time in the history of the Festival that a symphonic work by an American composer was performed. Rodzinsky was on the podium for the Symphony’s New York premiere – Carnegie Hall, 24 March 1937. On that occasion, the program notes included Barber’s own description of his Opus 9:

It is based on three themes of the initial Allegro ma non troppo, which retain throughout the work their fundamental character. The Allegro ma non troppo opens with the usual exposition of a main theme, a more lyrical second theme, and a closing theme. After a brief development of the three themes, instead of the customary recapitulation, the first theme in diminution forms the basis of a scherzo section (vivace). The second theme (oboe over muted strings) then appears in augmentation, in an extended Andante tranquillo. An intense crescendo introduces the finale, which is a short passacaglia based on the first theme (introduced by cellos and basses), over which, together with figures from other themes, the closing theme is woven, thus serving as a recapitulation for the entire symphony.

William Grant Still

WILLIAM GRANT STILL

Out of the Silence

Born 11 May 1895; Woodville, Mississippi

Died 3 December 1978; Los Angeles, California

Out of the Silence Composed: 1940

Last MSO performance: MSO premiere

Instrumentation: flute; piano; strings

Approximate duration: 5 minutes

Known as the “Dean of African-American composers,” William Grant Still penned over 150 works, including eight operas and five symphonies. Until the 1950s, the Afro-American Symphony, one of his best-known works, was the most frequently performed symphony written by an American. Born in Mississippi, he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas and received his college education in Ohio – first at Wilberforce University and later at Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

In 1939, Still married Verna Arvey (1910-1987), an American concert pianist, author, and librettist. (Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants.) The following year, he wrote Seven Traceries for her, a set of piano solos that he later orchestrated. According to Arvey, these pieces were intensely personal for the composer: “abstractions bearing the imprint of mysticism,” she said. His daughter, Judith Anne Still, went ever further, explaining that the Traceries were “seven faces” of Divinity; each is based on rudimentary motifs and each developed according to its potential.

Out of the Silence is the fourth, and central, piece of the set. Modestly scored for piano, flute and strings, its outer – somewhat dissonant – sections bookend a central interlude of stunning beauty. Of this movement, Verna, who provided descriptions for each piece, said “Only in meditation does one discover delicate beauties remote from the problems of the world.”

George Gershwin

GEORGE GERSHWIN

Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra

Born 26 September 1898; Brooklyn, New York

Died 11 July 1937; Hollywood, California

Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra Composed: 1931

First performance: 29 January 1932; Boston, Massachusetts

Last MSO performance: MSO premiere I

nstrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (glockenspiel, xylophone, cymbals, drum set, bass drum, snare drum, wood block); harp; strings

Approximate duration: 15 minutes

George Gershwin, along with his lyricist brother Ira, gave us some of the most beloved songs in the history of popular music. “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” “The Man I Love,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Fascinating Rhythm” – these are just a few of their contributions to the Great American Songbook.

In 1930, George and Ira were invited to Hollywood to provide the music for the film Delicious. Janet Gaynor stars as Heather Gordon, a Scottish immigrant. In America, she is pursued by immigration officers through a series of absurd situations, including a dream sequence in New York, with dark shadows and ominous scenes. For this portion of the movie, George composed

music that he called New York Rhapsody. In the end, much of this scene ended up on the cutting room floor. Of the songs he and Ira wrote, only four – “Blah, Blah, Blah,” “Delishious” [sic], “Katinkitschka,” “Somebody from Somewhere” – made it into the film.

When he went back to New York in February 1931, Gershwin decided to repurpose the music from the six-minute dream sequence and expand it into a concert piece. As he labored on the work, radically rearranging and rescoring the music written in California, he called it Rhapsody in Rivets, but later could not decide between New York Rhapsody and Manhattan Rhapsody. By May, he had completed a 14-minute piece, choosing a much simpler title, Second Rhapsody. The composer was at the keyboard for premiere, with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.