MUSIC OF MONTGOMERY & DVOŘÁK

Friday, March 3, 2023 at 11:15 am

Saturday, March 4, 2023 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Jonathon Heyward, conductor

James Ehnes, violin

JESSIE MONTGOMERY

Records from a Vanishing City

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Opus 63

I. Allegro moderato

II. Andante assai

III. Allegro, ben marcato

James Ehnes, violin

IN TERMISSION

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

Symphony No. 8 in G major, Opus 88

I. Allegro con brio

II. Adagio

III. Allegretto grazioso

IV. Allegro ma non troppo

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

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 on iTunes and at mso.org. MSO Binaural recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.

Guest Artist Biographies

JONATHON HEYWARD

Jonathon Heyward is forging a career as one of the most exciting conductors on the international scene. He is music director designate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (beginning in 2023.24) and chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie.

Heyward’s recent U.K. guest conducting highlights include debuts and re-invitations with the London Symphony, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain at the BBC Proms. In continental Europe, recent debuts include the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, Basel Symphony, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Brussels Philharmonic, SymfonieOrkest Vlaanderen, Antwerp Symphony, Philharmonie Zuidnederland, and Kristiansand Symphony. In 2022.23, Heyward debuts with the Musikkollegium Winterthur, Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, Lahti Symphony, MDR-Sinfonieorchester, and the National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin, Ireland. Most recently in his native United States, Heyward debuted at Grant Park and Mostly Mozart music festivals and with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. In 2021, he made his Wolf Trap debut conducting the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C., and this was followed by further debuts with the Atlanta, Detroit, and San Diego symphony orchestras.

Heyward made his Royal Opera House debut with Hannah Kendall’s Knife of Dawn, having also conducted Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as the world premiere of Giorgio Battistelli’s Wake in a production for the Birmingham Opera Company.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Heyward began cello lessons aged ten and started conducting while at school. He studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music, where he became assistant conductor of their opera department and the Boston Opera Collaborative. He received postgraduate lessons from Sian Edwards at London’s Royal Academy of Music. Before leaving the Academy, he was appointed assistant conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, where he was mentored by Sir Mark Elder and became music director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra.

Heyward’s commitment to education and community outreach work deepened during his three years with the Hallé and has flourished since he started as chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie. He is equally committed to including new music within his imaginative concert programs.

Guest Artist Biographies

JAMES EHNES

James Ehnes has established himself as one of the most sought-after musicians on the international stage. Gifted with a rare combination of stunning virtuosity, serene lyricism, and an unfaltering musicality, Ehnes is a favorite guest at the world’s most celebrated concert halls. Recent orchestral highlights include the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony, NHK Symphony, and Munich Philharmonic. Throughout the 2022.23 season, Ehnes continues as artist in residence with the National Arts Centre of Canada.

Alongside his concerto work, Ehnes maintains a busy recital schedule. He performs regularly at the Wigmore Hall (including the complete cycle of Beethoven Sonatas in 2019.20 and the complete violin/viola works of Brahms and Schumann in 2021.22), Carnegie Hall, Symphony Center Chicago, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Ravinia, Montreux, Verbier Festival, Dresden Music Festival, and Festival de Pâques in Aix. A devoted chamber musician, he is the leader of the Ehnes Quartet and the artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

Ehnes has an extensive discography, and he has won awards, including two Grammys, three Gramophone Awards, and 11 Juno Awards. In 2021, Ehnes was announced as the recipient of the coveted Artist of the Year title in the 2021 Gramophone Awards, which celebrated his recent contributions to the recording industry, including the launch of a new online recital series entitled Recitals from Home, which was released in June 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closure of concert halls. Ehnes recorded the six Bach sonatas and partitas and six sonatas of Ysaÿe from his home with state-of-the-art recording equipment and released six episodes over the period of two months.

Ehnes began violin studies at the age of five, became a protégé of the noted Canadian violinist Francis Chaplin aged nine, and made his orchestra debut with L’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal aged 13. He continued his studies with Sally Thomas at the Meadowmount School of Music and The Juilliard School, winning the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music upon his graduation in 1997. He is a Member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Manitoba, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, where he is a visiting professor. Ehnes plays the “Marsick” Stradivarius of 1715.

Program notes by J. Mark Baker

JESSIE MONTGOMERY

Born 8 December 1981; New York, New York

Records from a Vanishing City

Composed: 2016

First performance: 27 October 2016; New York, New York

Last MSO performance: MSO premiere

Instrumentation: flute; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet); 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings

Approximate duration: 14 minutes

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African-American and Latinx string players. Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral music. She holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University. Last season, the MSO was one of several co-commissioners of Rounds, a concerto fashioned for pianist Awadagin Pratt.

The composer has said that Records from a Vanishing City was inspired by her childhood on New York City’s Lower East Side. That was during the 1980s and ’90s, when that neighborhood was a vital center of the City’s artistic community, prior to its present-day gentrification. Montgomery explains that the term “records” takes two meanings:

1) a varied assemblage of old LPs she inherited from James Rose, a departed family friend; 2) her personal memories of the music she heard while growing up. She has also cited the timbral world of Bartók and Britten –as well music of the Big Band Era – as influences on this eclectic work. She expounds further:

I had this imagery of the city vanishing, and as the piece goes from beginning to end, there’s a sense that these themes are evaporating. In the last section, in the winds, there are solos, and the themes are swirling around each other, weaving in and out of each other … An idea will be stated, and then it evaporates, and then another one comes in, and it evaporates in relation to it … Throughout the course of the piece, there’s a section that’s super structurally obvious, and then the material begins to split apart and vanish as it gets toward the end.

Commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and dedicated to the memory of James Rose, it was premiered at Carnegie Hall.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

Born 23 April 1891; Sontsovka, Ukraine

Died 5 March 1953; Moscow, Russia

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Opus 63

Composed: 1935

First performance: 1 December 1935; Madrid, Spain

Last MSO performance: March 2013; Edo de Waart, conductor; Ilana Setapen, violin

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; percussion (bass drum, castanets, cymbals, triangle, snare drum); strings

Approximate duration: 26 minutes

In the last years of Tsarist Russia, Sergei Prokofiev, still in his 20s, made his name as a composer of music both weighty and sardonic. Following the Revolution, making his home mainly in the United States and then Paris, his mode of expression progressively became more settled and, one might say, more polished. He spent the last 17 years of his life back in the Soviet Union, however, both spurred on and restrained by the cultural policies of Stalin’s regime. Throughout his life, he occupied himself with music for the stage and was one of the 20th century’s most distinguished creators of symphonies, concertos, and piano sonatas.

The second violin concerto dates from about the same time as two of Prokofiev’s best-known works: the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1938) and that favorite of children’s concerts, Peter and the Wolf (1936). He had only recently repatriated himself to Russia, and his Opus 63 would be his last commission from the West – from the French violinist Robert Soetens, who had played the 1932 premiere of Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins with Samuel Dushkin.

The concerto’s basic layout is traditional, with two fast movements surrounding a slow one. The soloist states the main theme of the opening sonata-form Allegro moderato, alone and unequivocally in G minor. Muted violas and basses enter in the distant key of B minor, but the tonic is soon restored, and the lyrical second theme is cast in the relative major B-flat. Elegant in its simplicity, the Andante assai is set in 12/8 meter in E-flat major. Though there are ample opportunities for bravura, the soloist’s chief demand is to spin out seamless cantabile phrases over pizzicato strings and staccato woodwinds. A set of continuous variations, it is a prime example, stated British music writer Hugh Ottaway, of “Prokofiev’s endearing blend of innocence and sophistication.”

The finale – Allegro, ben marcato – recalls the sort of peasant rondo we know from several wellknown violin concertos of the 19th century. Its principal sections are set in 3/4 meter, with forte chords from the soloist. In the coda, the soloist cavorts frenetically in 5/4 above a bass line and percussion. The concluding whirlwind is marked tumultuoso, and the castanets remind us that the work’s premiere was scheduled for Madrid.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

Born 8 September 1841; Nelahozeves, Bohemia

Died 1 May 1904; Prague, Bohemia

Symphony No. 8 in G major, Opus 88

Composed: 1889

First performance: 2 February 1890; Prague, Bohemia

Last MSO performance: September 2014; Edo de Waart, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo); 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn); 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; strings

Approximate duration: 34 minutes

We wouldn’t be far off the mark if we called Antonín Dvořák the most versatile composer of the Romantic era. The Czech master’s list of works includes operas, chamber music, choral music and songs, symphonies, concertos, tone poems, and other orchestral music.

Cheerful, lyrical, and optimistic, Antonin Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony takes its inspiration from the Bohemian folk music the composer so greatly loved. In his handling of symphonic form, Dvořák shows the influence of his friend Brahms, but he has filled the work with melodies that have an unmistakable Czech flavor in their tunefulness and rusticity.

Though set in the key of G major, the first movement (Allegro con brio) opens with a melody in G minor before a birdlike flute melody takes us to the home key. Listen throughout for harmonic shifts between major and minor, à la Schubert. The Adagio begins with a lovely clarinet duet. Like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the movement is inspired by peaceful landscapes and depicts a summer day interrupted by a thunderstorm, but ends contentedly. For the third movement, Dvořák wrote a melancholic waltz in 3/8 time. The middle section is rife with yearning, Czech-inspired melodies.

The finale opens with a trumpet fanfare that soon gives way to a beautiful cello melody before plowing headlong into the Allegro ma non troppo. The movement progresses through an agitated middle section, modulating between major and minor throughout. Following a slow, lyrical section, the symphony concludes with great exhilaration, aided by brass and timpani.

2022.23 SEASON

KEN-DAVID MASUR

Music Director

Polly and Bill Van Dyke

Music Director Chair

EDO DE WAART

Music Director Laureate

YANIV DINUR

Resident Conductor

CHERYL FRAZES HILL

Chorus Director

Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair

TIMOTHY J. BENSON

Assistant Chorus Director

FIRST VIOLINS

Ilana Setapen, Acting Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker

Concertmaster Chair

Jeanyi Kim, Acting Associate Concertmaster (2nd Chair)

Alexanders Ayers, Acting Assistant Concertmaster

Yuka Kadota

Ji-Yeon Lee**

Dylana Leung

Allison Lovera

Lijia Phang

Margot Schwartz*

Alexandra Switala**

Yuanhui Fiona Zheng

SECOND VIOLINS

Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair

Timothy Klabunde, Assistant Principal

John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)

Glenn Asch

Lisa Johnson Fuller

Paul Hauer

Hyewon Kim

Shengnan Li*

Laurie Shawger

Mary Terranova

VIOLAS

Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Principal Viola Chair

Samantha Rodriguez, Acting Assistant Principal, Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair

Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)

Elizabeth Breslin

Nathan Hackett

Erin H. Pipal

Helen Reich

CELLOS

Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair

Nicholas Mariscal, Assistant Principal

Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus

Madeleine Kabat

Peter Szczepanek

Peter J. Thomas

Adrien Zitoun

BASSES

Jon McCullough-Benner, Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair

Andrew Raciti, Associate Principal

Nash Tomey, Assistant Principal (3rd Chair)

Brittany Conrad

Peter Hatch

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

Benjamin Adler, Assistant Principal, Donald and Ruth P. Taylor Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair

Taylor Eiffert

E FLAT CLARINET

Benjamin Adler

BASS CLARINET

Taylor Eiffert

BASSOONS

Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Bassoon Chair

Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal

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

Kelsey Williams**

TRUMPETS

Matthew Ernst, Principal, Walter L. Robb Family Trumpet Chair

David Cohen, Associate Principal, Martin J. Krebs Associate Principal

Trumpet Chair

Alan Campbell, 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

TIMPANI

Dean Borghesani, Principal

Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal

PERCUSSION

Robert Klieger, Principal

Chris Riggs

PIANO

Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair

PERSONNEL MANAGERS

Françoise Moquin, Director of Orchestra Personnel

Constance Aguocha, Assistant Personnel Manager

LIBRARIAN

Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, Anonymous Donor, Principal Librarian Chair

PRODUCTION

Tristan Wallace, Technical Manager & Live Audio Supervisor

Paolo Scarabel, Stage Technician & Deck Supervisor

* Leave of Absence 2022.23 Season

** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2022.23 Season