MENDELSSOHN’S ELIJAH

Friday, March 24, 2023 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, March 25, 2023 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, March 26, 2023 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Sonya Headlam, soprano

Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano

Thomas Cooley, tenor

Dashon Burton, bass-baritone

Milwaukee Symphony Chorus

Cheryl Frazes Hill, director

PROGRAM

Felix Mendelssohn

Elijah, Opus 70

Part One

Intermission

Part Two

This weekend’s concerts are dedicated to the memory of MR. THOMAS L. SMALLWOOD by Julia and David Uihlein.

The 2022.23 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND.

The length of this concert is approximately 2 hours 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 on iTunes and at mso.org. MSO Binaural recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.

Guest Artist Biographies

Sonya Headlam

Sonya Headlam

Praised for her “expressive” singing and the “personal connections” she forms with her audience (Cleveland Classical), soprano Sonya Headlam delights audiences in “dramatically engaged” performances with “sensitive phrasing” (Chicago Classical Review) in repertoire ranging from the Baroque period to the 21st century. She is a member of The Choir of Trinity Wall Street and performs regularly with The Raritan Players, including an appearance on their recently released recording, In the Salon of Madame Brillon (Acis). Recent engagements include appearances with Apollo’s Fire, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Beth Morrison Projects, Grand Rapids Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, and TENET Vocal Artists, among others. She has been a featured soloist at summer festivals such as the 2018 Prototype Festival, the LOUD Weekend 2022, presented by Bang on a Can and MASS MoCA, and the 2022 Chelsea Music Festival. Upcoming projects include a recording of the songs of Ignatius Sancho with The Raritan Players, Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate with the New World Symphony conducted by Jeannette Sorrell, and performing as the soprano soloist in Handel’s Messiah with the Washington Bach Consort and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Headlam holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she has also held a visiting scholar appointment conducting research on the 18th-century composer Ignatius Sancho.

Clara Osowski

Clara Osowski

Mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski is an active soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States and Europe. Recognized for her excellence in Minnesota, Osowski was a recipient of the prestigious 2018-2019 McKnight Artist Fellowships for Musicians administered by MacPhail Center for Music.

The 2022.23 season includes her debut with Chicago’s Music of the Baroque in Handel’s Jephtha led by Dame Jane Glover, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Delaware Symphony, Mozart’s Requiem and Pärt’s Stabat Mater with the South Dakota Symphony, and appearances with the Bach Society of Minnesota, Madison Bach Musicians, National Lutheran Choir, and Bel Canto Chorus of Milwaukee.

In 2017, Osowski became the first-ever American prize winner when she placed second at Thomas Quasthoff’s International Das Lied Competition in Heidelberg, Germany; was a finalist in the Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation Song Competition and was awarded the Richard Tauber Prize for the best interpretation of Schubert Lieder; and won the Houston Saengerbund Competition. She won the Radio-Canada People’s Choice Award and third place in the song division at the 2018 Concours Musical International de Montréal. She was a 2012 Metropolitan Opera National Council Upper-Midwest Regional Finalist, the winner of the 2014 Bel Canto Chorus Regional Artists Competition in Milwaukee, and runner-up in the 2016 Schubert Club

Bruce P. Carlson Scholarship Competition.

In addition to performing, Osowski serves as the artistic director of Source Song Festival, a weeklong art song festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and participates in a number of ensembles, including Lumina Women’s Ensemble and Seraphic Fire.

Thomas Cooley

Thomas Cooley

Praised by The New York Times for his “sweet, penetrating lyric tenor with aching sensitivity” and by San Francisco Classical Voice as “an indomitable musical force,” Thomas Cooley is a singer of great versatility, expressiveness, and virtuosity. Internationally in demand for a wide range of repertoire in concert, opera, and chamber music, Cooley performs regularly with major orchestras and Baroque ensembles worldwide.

Cooley is known particularly as an interpreter of the works of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Britten. He returns as the tenor soloist at the Carmel Bach Festival for his 12th season in 2023, and he was artist-in-residence for Music of the Baroque from 2015 to 2016. Of his Evangelist with Jane Glover, the Chicago Tribune wrote that he was “an ideal Evangelist, firm of voice and commanding of expression.”

Important recent engagements include the role of Gimoaldo in Rodelinda at the Göttingen Handel Festspiele; Telemann’s Der Tag des Gerichts in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; a recording of the Evangelist in the Johannes-Passion with Nicholas McGegan and the Cantata Collective; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic and Phoenix Symphony; Handel’s Theodora with Philharmonia Baroque; Britten’s War Requiem in Carnegie Hall; and portraying Acis in Acis and Galatea with the Mark Morris Dance Group. A program of Handel arias and duets entitled “As Steals the Morn” with San Francisco’s Voices of Music was selected as the best Early/Baroque performance in the Bay Area in 2019, a selection from which has received nearly two million views on YouTube.

Dashon Burton

Dashon Burton

Dashon Burton has established a vibrant career, appearing regularly throughout the U.S. and Europe. Highlights of his 2022.23 season include returns to The Cleveland Orchestra for Schubert’s Mass No. 6 with Franz Welser-Möst in Cleveland and at Carnegie Hall and to the New York Philharmonic for Michael Tilson Thomas’s Rilke Songs led by the composer. Debut appearances this season include Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Milwaukee Symphony led by Ken-David Masur, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with the Houston Symphony and Juraj Valčuha, the world premiere of Chris Cerrone’s The Year of Silence with the Louisville Orchestra led by Teddy Abrams, and Dvořák’s Requiem with the Richmond Symphony. Burton continues his relationship with San Francisco Performances as an artist-in-residence with appearances at venues and educational institutions throughout the Bay Area.

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 J. Mark Baker

FELIX MENDELSSOHN

Felix Mendelssohn

Born 3 February 1809; Hamburg, Germany

Died 4 November 1847; Leipzig, Germany

Elijah, Opus 70

Composed: 1846

First performance: 26 August 1846; Birmingham, England

Last MSO performance: March 1999; James Paul, conductor; Joanna Johnston, soprano; Marietta Simpson, mezzo-soprano; John Aler, tenor; Richard Zeller, baritone

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; organ; strings

Approximate duration: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Along with Handel’s Messiah and Haydn’s The Creation, Mendelssohn’s Elijah remains near the summit of the oratorio mountain. The main story comes from I Kings chapters 17 and 18, but sentences are taken from many parts of the Old Testament (Deuteronomy, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Malachi, the Psalms, et al.), and even from St. Matthew’s gospel.

Elijah was commissioned by the Birmingham Festival, for whom Mendelssohn had conducted his oratorio St. Paul (1836) in 1837. He had begun work on the piece years earlier, but it fell by the wayside when he encountered differences in artistic vision with his librettists. With Birmingham’s proposal on the table, he returned to the work – whose texts came from Luther’s translation of Die Bibel – rejuvenated. There was a huge caveat, however: the English audience expected the oratorio to be sung in their native tongue.

Though fluent in English himself, Mendelssohn turned to William Bartholemew, requesting a singing translation as near as possible to the King James Bible (1611). The two men worked closely together on the project. Though today’s performance will be sung in the original German, the Bartholemew translation serves as the source for the supertitles at this concert.

From its first performance, the oratorio was a smashing success. The Times reported: “The last note of Elijah was drowned in a long-continued unanimous volley of plaudits, vociferous and deafening. It was as though enthusiasm, long-checked, had suddenly burst its bonds, and filled the air with shouts of exaltation. Mendelssohn, evidently overpowered, bowed his acknowledgments, and quickly descended from the conductor’s rostrum; but he was compelled to appear again, amidst renewed cheers and huzzas.” In the spring of 1847, the composer returned to England to conduct six further performances. Sadly, by that autumn, he would be dead. Mendelssohn, the boy genius, passed away at the much-too-young age of 38. A performance of Elijah he had intended to conduct in Vienna on 14 November 1847 instead became a memorial concert.

SYNOPSIS Part One

As the orchestra intones dark-hued D-minor chords, Elijah’s motif, the eponymous prophet takes center stage, announcing an impending drought. Listen, too, for descending tritones – the “curse” motif (both will recur). A fiery, contrapuntal overture ensues, depicting the people’s pain and suffering, then leads directly into their cry for Adonai’s help. The soprano and alto soloists continue the lament. The prophet Obadiah cites the reason for the famine: Elijah, following

God’s command, had sealed the heavens because of their worship of idols and false gods. If they repent and seek the one true God, they will be forgiven. The people, however, are unconvinced, believing that they are cut off from God’s mercy. (Listen for the “curse” motif in their agitated outpouring.)

An angel appears to Elijah, instructing him to go into the desert. The double quartet of angels, assuring the prophet of God’s protection, is surely one of the most beautiful moments in the entire oratorio. What follows is a dramatic scena between Elijah and a widow in Zarephath. The prophet wakes her son from death, and the final line of their duet melds into a rapturous chorus.

Several years of drought elapse, and Elijah – echoing the music that opened the oratorio –returns to confront King Ahab, who accuses the prophet of being the source of Israel’s travails. Elijah turns the tables on Ahab, maintaining that the king and his subjects have incurred Jehovah’s wrath by forsaking the one true God, turning instead to the god Baal. The people are summoned to Mount Carmel to witness a showdown between the pagan god and Adonai. They have laid logs and bushes on two altars, agreeing that whosoever brings fire upon the altar is to be worshipped as the true God. As they seek to attract Baal’s attention, cutting themselves with knives and jumping upon the altar, their impassioned pleas become ever more urgent.

Elijah, a solitary prophet facing hundreds of Baal worshippers, calls upon the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. The fire descends from heaven and Elijah allows Baal’s prophets to be slain by the throng. In the final tableau of Part One, Obadiah entreats Elijah to help the people of Israel, still suffering under drought conditions. In a touching scene with a young boy, Elijah thrice entreats the Lord to send rain. Before long, the skies darken, the wind howls, there is a deluge of water, and the people burst into a paean of praise.

Part Two

Part Two opens with an extensive soprano aria, set in two parts – Adagio in B minor, Allegro maestoso in B major – enjoining the people to trust the Lord’s comfort; the theme of hope is taken up by the chorus. Elijah again reproves Ahab for the worship of Baal. Hearing of this, Queen Jezebel, enraged, calls for Elijah’s death. Obadiah warns Elijah to flee to the wilderness. Dejected over his inability to convert the people and longing for death, Elijah sings an affective aria – accompanied by a poignant cello solo. Unaccompanied treble-voiced angels sing over the sleeping prophet. We then hear one of the best-known of all choral movements, “He, watching over Israel” [Siehe, der Hüter Israels], notable for its sheer loveliness.

An angel appears, instructing Elijah to go to Mount Horeb, where the Lord will appear to him; she sings an aria of consolation, then warns him to veil his face. In a dramatic chorus, the presence of the Lord is portrayed – earthquakes, fire, and upheaval of the seas – but there soon follows seraphic music: “…there came a still, small voice, and in that still voice, onward came the Lord.”

Following Jehovah’s leading, Elijah feels empowered to return to the faithful and continue his work. In a stalwart recitative and aria, the old prophet gives thanks to God for his renewed strength. “Then did Elijah the prophet break forth like a fire,” the Scriptures tell us, “a fiery chariot with fiery horses, and he went by a whirlwind to heaven.” A consoling tenor foretells the happy fate of the righteous and a quartet enjoins us to seek God to slake our spiritual thirst. The final chorus is a mighty fugue, a celebration of the light of God shining upon His people.