MOZART OBOE & SYMPHONY
Friday, February 2, 2024 at 7:30 pm Saturday, February 3, 2024 at 7:30 pm ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL Ken-David Masur, conductor Katherine Young Steele, oboe WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, “Haffner” I. Allegro con spirito II. Menuetto III. Allegro spiritoso IV. Presto WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Concerto in C major for Oboe and Orchestra, K. 314 (271k) I. Allegro aperto II. Adagio non troppo III. Rondo: Allegretto Katherine Young Steele, oboe INTERMISSION
MAX REGER Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart, Opus 132 Theme: Andante grazioso Variation I. L’istesso tempo, quasi un poco più lento Variation II. Poco agitato Variation III. Con moto Variation IV. Vivace Variation V. Quasi presto Variation VI. Sostenuto (quasi adagietto) Variation VII. Andante grazioso Variation VIII. Molto sostenuto Fugue: Allegretto grazioso 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 50 minutes. MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
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Guest Artist Biographies KATHERINE YOUNG STEELE Katherine Young Steele is the principal oboe of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, a position she has held since 2012. With the Milwaukee Symphony, she has performed as soloist on several occasions and has frequently collaborated as a chamber musician. Of her performances of Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto with Music Director Edo de Waart, Steele was praised for her “engrossing performance…with a ringing, beautifully centered sound and elegant interpretive direction.” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2/15). Also notably, Steele had the distinct opportunity of performing the first notes in solo performance at the opening of the MSO’s new home, the Bradley Symphony Center, in January 2021. Steele was principal oboe of The Florida Orchestra from 2007 to 2012, where she appeared frequently as soloist and collaborated on the orchestra’s multi-year cultural exchange with musicians in Havana, Cuba. She has also served as guest principal oboe in the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the San Diego Symphony, and the Sarasota Orchestra. From 2003 to 2007, she was a member of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida, and toured with the orchestra to the Accademia de Santa Cecilia in Rome and twice to Carnegie Hall. Since 2008, Steele has been co-principal oboe of the Eastern Music Festival. She has also performed in the music festivals of Tanglewood, Spoleto USA, Banff, Music in the Mountains in Durango, Colorado, and with the National Repertory Orchestra. Steele currently serves on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has previously taught at the University of Tampa, St. Petersburg College, and the New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida. A native of Lancaster, Ohio, Steele holds a Bachelor of Music degree and the prestigious Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music, and a Master of Music degree from Rice University’s Shepherd School. Her primary teachers include Richard Killmer, Robert Atherholt, and Donna Conaty. She resides in Glendale, Wisconsin, with her husband Jonathan and their two sons, Charlie and Jack.
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MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Program notes by Elaine Schmidt WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Born 27 January 1756; Salzburg, Austria Died 5 December 1791; Vienna, Germany
Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, “Haffner” Composed: 1782 First performance: 23 March 1783; Vienna, Germany Last MSO performance: 5 May 2002; Pinchas Zukerman, conductor Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings Approximate duration: 17 minutes
The relationship between Mozart and his father, Leopold, who was a respected musician himself, has long fascinated the music world. The story of the two pieces in Mozart’s catalog that bear the name Haffner shed some light on their father-son dynamic. In 1776, Salzburg’s most prominent family, the Haffners, requested that Mozart write a piece for their daughter’s wedding. The younger Mozart wrote his “Haffner” serenade for the wedding, which is regarded today as one of the finest orchestral serenades ever written. In 1782, by which time Mozart was living in Vienna, the Haffners reached out to Mozart’s father, who was still living in Salzburg, requesting a piece for the occasion of the son’s receiving his title of nobility. This time, Mozart balked at the request. The younger Mozart, whose opera The Abduction from the Seraglio had just met with success in Vienna, was not thrilled by the request. He was scrambling to prepare arrangements of the opera before someone else published them, as there were no uniform copyright laws in Europe at the time. He wrote to his father, “I am up to my eyes in work. By Sunday week I must arrange my opera for wind instruments, otherwise someone will beat me to it and secure the profits instead of me. And now you ask me to write a symphony too! How am I to do it?” Mozart added that he would have to work through the nights on the new piece (a sevenmovement serenade), which he would do for his father. He then used that sacrifice as a bargaining chip to get his father to agree to his marriage to Constanza Weber. Mozart included the melody of the aria “Ha, wie will ich triumphieren!” (Oh, how I shall triumph!) from his aforementioned opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, in the serenade. Mozart’s bargaining chip paid off — Leopold gave the marriage his blessing. Mozart created his Symphony No. 35, or “Haffner” symphony, largely from material he wrote for the Haffners’ second request for a piece of music. Having long complained about the paucity of clarinets in Salzburg, he did not include any clarinets in the original work, which was to be performed in Salzburg. He added them when revising the “Haffner” symphony for a performance in Vienna, where there were plenty of fine clarinetists.
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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Born 27 January 1756; Salzburg, Austria Died 5 December 1791; Vienna, Germany
Concerto in C major for Oboe and Orchestra, K. 314 (285d) Composed: 1777 First performance: Unknown Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere Instrumentation: 2 oboes; 2 horns; strings Approximate duration: 21 minutes
For a musicologist, finding a piece of music that was written by a famous composer, but was thought to have been lost over time, is akin to winning Olympic gold. Viennese musicologist Bernhard Paumgartner’s “Olympic gold” occurred while he was doing research in the Mozarteum Library in Salzburg, Austria, in 1920. He came across some orchestral parts for an oboe concerto in C major by Mozart — a concerto that bore a striking resemblance to Mozart’s well-known flute concerto in D major. Thinking the oboe concerto was a transcription of the flute concerto, he began digging for information about it. He discovered that the oboe concerto was not the transcription, but the original concerto. The flute concerto was the transcription. The piece provides us a delightful look at Mozart at work, and a cautionary tale about how easy it for great works of music to disappear. The 21-year-old Mozart wrote his Concerto in C major for Oboe and Orchestra in 1777, in Salzburg, Austria. He wrote it for virtuoso oboist Giuseppe Ferlendis, the newly appointed principal oboist of the Salzburg court. Fast-forward a bit to Mozart’s 1777-78 stay in Paris, where he was concertizing, composing, and hoping to find permanent work that would keep him out of what he considered the provincial backwater of Salzburg. Scrambling to pay his bills, Mozart decided to complete the last few pieces left of a commission from Dutch flutist Ferdinand de Jean for four flute quartets and three concertos. Given Mozart’s dim view of Salzburg and his rather dim view of the flute itself, it’s easy to imagine how it occurred to him to simply recycle the oboe concerto for the flute commission, and make some quick cash. Unfortunately, de Jean recognized the flute concerto as the as the transcription it was and refused to pay for it. Mozart never completed the last pieces for the commission, but he did gift a copy of his oboe concerto to Friedrich Ramm, one the finest oboists in Europe at the time, who loved it. He played it in numerous concerts, inspiring Mozart to call it “Ramm’s warhorse.” Ramm had good reason for being taken with oboe concerto. It is built of elegant, expressive melodies and thrilling virtuosic passages, and it is somehow infused with a sense of joy.
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MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
MAX REGER
Born 19 March 1873; Brand, Bavaria Died 11 May 1916; Leipzig, Germany
Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart, Opus 132
Composed: 1914 First performance: 5 February 1915; Berlin, Germany Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere Instrumentation: 3 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; harp; strings Approximate duration: 35 minutes German composer and conductor Max Reger was known in his time as a virtuoso organist and pianist, as well as a respected teacher (he counted Hungarian-born conductor and composer George Szell among his students). His name is still prominent among organists, who continue to play many of his organ works today, but the concert-going public and even many orchestral musicians know little about him or his works. Growing up in Weiden, Germany, Reger showed an aptitude for music at a young age, which his father, an amateur musician, happily fed and watered. He taught his son what he could and then found the best possible teachers for the boy. As a young man, Reger served in the military, which took an enormous toll on his physical and mental health. He moved back into his parents’ home in 1898, at age 25, to convalesce. As his strength returned, so did his passion for music. Reger became a prolific composer, a sought-after performer, and a man of strong opinions and a mercurial temperment like Beethoven’s. The fact that Reger wrote no symphonies is probably part of why he is not better known today. He began working on his first symphony in his early forties, leaving it unfinished when he died at age 43. Reger was an outspoken opponent of program music — music intended to convey descriptions or narratives without the use of words. Such pieces as Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration and Don Juan, as well as Franz Liszt’s cycle of 13 symphonic poems, were still considered progressive, modern music until about the beginning of World War I. Although Reger favored the non-descriptive, non-narrative, “absolute” music of Mozart or Brahms to program music, he made great use of the harmonic colors and effects that were so much a part of the sounds of the modern era. Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart goes to the heart of Reger’s aesthetic, mixing expressive, colorful harmonies with a theme and form of the past. After completing the orchestral version of this piece, Reger created an arrangement for two pianos, changing the beautiful eighth variation significantly. Several performances of the two-piano version can be heard on YouTube.
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CELLOS Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair Nicholas Mariscal, Assistant Principal* Shinae Ra, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair) Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus Madeleine Kabat Peter Szczepanek Peter J. Thomas Adrien Zitoun
CONTRABASSOON Beth W. Giacobassi
BASSES Jon McCullough-Benner, Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair* Andrew Raciti, Associate Principal Nash Tomey, Assistant Principal (3rd chair) Brittany Conrad Teddy Gabrieledes** Peter Hatch* Paris Myers
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
TIMOTHY J. BENSON Assistant Chorus Director
HARP Julia Coronelli, Principal, Walter Schroeder Harp Chair
FIRST VIOLINS Jinwoo Lee, Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster Alexander Ayers Yuka Kadota Elliot Lee** Ji-Yeon Lee Dylana Leung Allison Lovera Lijia Phang Yuanhui Fiona Zheng
FLUTES Sonora Slocum, Principal, Margaret and Roy Butter Flute Chair Heather Zinninger, Assistant Principal Jennifer Bouton Schaub
TROMBONES Megumi Kanda, Principal, Marjorie Tiefenthaler Trombone Chair Kirk Ferguson, Assistant Principal
2023.24 SEASON KEN-DAVID MASUR Music Director Polly and Bill Van Dyke Music Director Chair EDO DE WAART Music Director Laureate RYAN TANI Assistant Conductor CHERYL FRAZES HILL Chorus Director Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair
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 Alejandra Switala** Mary Terranova VIOLAS Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Principal Viola Chair Georgi Dimitrov, Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair Samantha Rodriguez, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)* Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair) Elizabeth Breslin Nathan Hackett Erin H. Pipal Helen Reich
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PICCOLO Jennifer Bouton Schaub OBOES Katherine Young Steele, Principal, Milwaukee Symphony League Oboe Chair Kevin Pearl, Assistant Principal Margaret Butler
HORNS Matthew Annin, Principal, Krause Family French Horn Chair Krystof Pipal, Associate Principal Dietrich Hemann, Andy Nunemaker French Horn Chair Darcy Hamlin Kelsey Williams**
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
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* Madison Freed**
PIANO Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair
E-FLAT CLARINET Benjamin Adler*
PRODUCTION Tristan Wallace, Technical Manager & Live Audio Supervisor Paolo Scarabel, Stage Technician & Deck Supervisor
BASS CLARINET Taylor Eiffert* Madison Freed** BASSOONS Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Bassoon Chair Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal Beth W. Giacobassi
MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
PERSONNEL MANAGER Françoise Moquin, Director of Orchestra Personnel LIBRARIANS Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, Anonymous Donor, Principal Librarian Chair Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist
* Leave of Absence 2023.24 Season ** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2023.24 Season
