ALPINE GLORY

ALPINE GLORY

Friday, September 30, 2022 at 7:30 pm & Saturday, October 1, 2022 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Christina Naughton, piano

Michelle Naughton, piano

PROGRAM

WYNTON MARSALIS

Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!

FELIX MENDELSSOHN

Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in E major

I. Allegro vivace

II. Adagio non troppo – più mosso

III. Allegro Christina Naughton, piano Michelle Naughton, piano

INTERMISSION

RICHARD STRAUSS

Eine Alpensinfonie [An Alpine Symphony], Opus 64

Night – Sunrise – The ascent – Entering the forest – Wandering by the brook – By the waterfall – Flowery meadows – Alpine pasture – Lost in thickets and undergrowth – On the glacier – Dangerous moments – On the summit – Vision – Rising mists – The sun is gradually obscured – Elegy – Calm before the storm – Thunderstorm, Descent – Sunset – Fading tones (Epilogue) – Night

The MSO Steinway piano was made possible through a generous gift from MICHAEL AND JEANNE SCHMITZ. This project is supported in part by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS. The 2022.23 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND.

The length of this concert is approximately 2 hours.

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

Guest Artist Biographies

Christina and Michelle Naughton

Christina and Michelle Naughton

The first piano duo to receive the Avery Fisher Career Grant presented by Lincoln Center (2019), Christina and Michelle Naughton have been described by The Washington Post as “on a level with some of the greatest piano duos of our time. They have to be heard to be believed.”

The Naughtons have concertized globally; soloing with orchestras such as the Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, New Jersey, Milwaukee, and Houston symphonies, Minnesota Orchestra; as well as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Royal Scottish Philharmonic, Royal Flemish Philharmonic, Netherlands Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and New Zealand Symphony. Some recital highlights include D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series, L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, Boston’s Gardner Museum, Berlin Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal, Zurich’s Tonhalle, Netherlands’ Concertgebouw, France’s La Roque d’Antheron Festival, and Brazil’s Sala Sao Paulo.

The Naughtons’ discography features an exclusive signing with Warner Classics, with two 20th Century albums titled Visions and American Postcard. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, they are graduates of The Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music, where they were each awarded the Festorazzi Prize.

Program notes by J. Mark Baker

A brand-new fanfare heralds the start of a new MSO season. Strauss’s massive final tone poem affords us a trek up and down an Alpine peak. And twin sister pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton help us honor the 175th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s death.

Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis

Born 18 October 1961; New Orleans, Louisiana

Herald, Holler and Hallelujah! Composed: 2021 First performance: 23 January 2022; New Brunswick, New Jersey Last MSO performance: MSO premiere Instrumentation: 6 horns; 4 trumpets; 3 trombones; bass trombone; tuba; timpani; percussion (3 bass drums, cowbell, crotale, cymbals, finger cymbals, glockenspiel, high hat, low tom tom, marimba, medium cowbell, piccolo snare drum, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tam tam, tambourine, vibraphone, xylophone) Approximate duration: 5 minutes

Proclaimed “potentially the greatest trumpeter of all time” by the famed Maurice André, the career of internationally acclaimed musician Wynton Marsalis is the stuff of legend. A composer, bandleader, educator, author, philanthropist, and a leading advocate for American culture, Marsalis is equally adept as a performer in both the classical and jazz idioms. In the latter, he is the first artist to perform and compose across the full jazz spectrum – from its New Orleans roots to bebop to modern jazz. In the former, he has performed as a soloist with the world’s leading orchestras and recorded nearly a dozen classical albums.

Marsalis’s rich body of compositions likewise includes both classical and jazz works. He began recording his original pieces in the 1980s with his various jazz ensembles, and since the 1990s has expanded his reach, writing – among many others – a string quartet; ballet scores for choreographers Twyla Tharp, Peter Martins, and Judith Jamison; a violin concerto for Nicola Benedetti; and four symphonies.

His Herald, Holler and Hallelujah! for brass and percussion is a co-commission from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and those of Baltimore, Cincinnati, Detroit, New Jersey, and Pittsburg, along with Germany’s WDR Symphonieorchester, the Grand Teton Music Festival, and the Colorado Music Festival. As lead commissioner, the New Jersey Symphony gave the premiere in January 2022, under the direction of Xian Zhang.

Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn

Born 3 February 1809; Hamburg, Germany

Died 4 November 1847; Leipzig, Germany

Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in E major Composed: 1823 First performance: 14 November 1824; Berlin, Germany Last MSO performance: MSO premiere Instrumentation: flute; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; strings Approximate duration: 27 minutes

Felix Mendelssohn was born into an affluent German Jewish family, growing up in a home saturated with music, art, and literature – one frequently visited by notable guests. His father was a banker and his grandfather was the esteemed philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His musically and artistically sophisticated mother introduced her multi-lingual children to the piano. When Felix’s musical precocity was recognized, he began study with the well-known composer and teacher Carl Zelter (1758-1832).

Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Two Pianos in E major is the first of two such works by the young composer, written at age 14. (The A-flat major concerto came the following year.) Between 1821 and 1823, Mendelssohn had penned 13 strings symphonies that looked to the Viennese Classical models in their form, structure, and thematic material. In the double piano concertos, however, he is beginning to come of age as a composer, displaying a new maturity.

The Allegro vivace opens with an extensive orchestral introduction, then each of the soloists announces herself with a cadenza-like flourish. Throughout the movement, the principle of musical dialogue holds sway, as phrases are tossed between the two soloists. There are also arresting moments of operatic-like duets, as they play thirds and sixths. This is, stated one writer, “fleet-footed music of quicksilver brilliance.”

Set in C major in an expansive 6/8 meter, the second movement seems an early prototype of Mendelssohn’s well-known Lieder ohne Worte [Songs without Words]. The strings, then the winds, sing their cantabile melodies, which are then decorated by the “first” piano. The “second” piano ushers in the middle section, set in an expressive C minor. It is not until the return of the main theme – back in C major – that the pianists play together. The closing high-speed Allegro, in E major, is a virtuoso showcase that contrasts limpid pianistic passagework, lyrical melodies, and rousing orchestral tutti.

Mendelssohn and his equally talented sister Fanny (1805-1847) premiered the concerto in the Berlin home of Abraham Mendelssohn. Five years later, Ignaz Moscheles – the renowned pianist and conductor – joined the composer for a public performance in London. Oddly, the concerto was set aside and never performed again in his lifetime: the first modern performance was heard in Leipzig in 1959.

Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss

Born 11 June 1864; Munich, Germany

Died 8 September 1949; Garmisch-Partenkirche, Germany

Eine Alpensinfonie [An Alpine Symphony], Opus 64 Composed: 1911-15 First performance: 28 October 1915; Berlin, Germany Last MSO Performance: October 1998; Andreas Delfs, conductor Instrumentation: 4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolo); 3 oboes (3rd doubling English Horn); bass oboe; 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet); E-flat clarinet; 4 bassoons (4th doubling contrabassoon); 8 horns (5th, 6th, 7th and 8th doubling Wagner tuba); 4 trumpets; 4 trombones; 2 tubas; 2 timpani; percussion (bass drum, cowbell, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, tam tam, thunder machine, triangle, wind machine); 2 harps; celeste; organ; strings; offstage: 8 horns; 2 trumpets; 2 tenor trombones Approximate duration: 47 minutes

From his earliest years as a composer, Richard Strauss’s music was held in high regard. The orchestral tone poems he penned in his 20s and 30s – Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, et al. – immediately entered the international repertoire, and remain there to this day. After the turn of the century, opera occupied his interest, with Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) seemingly in the forefront of “modern” music; indeed, the latter gained a certain notoriety for its cacophony.

In 1911, Strauss had his life’s greatest musical success with Der Rosenkavalier. Having completed the score, and awaiting its premiere, he was itching to begin work on his next opera, but his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal was slow to respond. Becoming ever more impatient, Strauss even contacted the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, hoping for a libretto on “an entirely modern subject.” Nothing came of this exchange, so Strauss began, as he put it, “torturing myself with a symphony – a job, when all’s said and done, that amuses me even less than chasing maybugs.” This disagreeable task turned out to be An Alpine Symphony, which would prove to be his final tone poem. It had a long gestation period, because he set it aside for more pressing projects, finally completing it in February 1915.

From his countryside home in Garmisch, the composer had a clear view of the mountains, but there’s also the story of the 14-year-old Strauss who set off with a group of friends to climb the Heimgarten, a 5,780-foot peak in Bavaria. They started out at 2 a.m. and climbed for five hours. After getting lost, the hikers spent three hours finding their way back down. A thunderstorm arose, they got soaked to the skin and, after 12 hours on their feet, cold and hungry, took refuge in a peasant’s hut. Strauss said the experience was “interesting and made a change. The next day I depicted our excursion on the piano. Naturally with colossal tone painting and clangor, à la Wagner.” Decades later, he mapped it out again in the Alpine Symphony.

Set in 22 continuous sections, the work vividly portrays a hike to an Alpine summit, and the subsequent descent. In scoring the work, Strauss throws in everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. In addition to augmented string sections, there’s extensive percussion – including cowbells and wind and thunder machines – organ, eight horns onstage, and 16 brass players for the hunting music heard “from afar” (12 in this evening’s performance).

Rife with melodic, contrapuntal, and harmonic splendor, the work follows an archlike development, with “On the summit” as the central episode. Notice, though, that this is no bombastic climax, and utilizes less than half the orchestra. It is a short-lived victory that melds into a delicate oboe solo above tremolando strings. Throughout the Symphony, Strauss shows himself time again to be a master tone-painter. “I have finally learned to orchestrate!” he declared at rehearsals of the work. Without question, it is a high point (pun intended) of his genius in this regard.

Strauss dedicated the work to the Dresden Court Opera Orchestra and the Dresden Intendant Count Nicolaus Seebach and led the ensemble in the work’s premiere in Berlin. Following that performance, the composer wrote to his friend Hofmannsthal: “You must hear the Alpine Symphony. It is really quite a good piece.”