NEPTUNE & WATER MUSIC

MILWAUKEE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

WATER FESTIVAL

Friday, January 27, 2023 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, January 28, 2023 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, January 29, 2023 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Nicholas McGegan, conductor

Ilana Setapen, violin

Jennifer Bouton Schaub, piccolo

PROGRAM

JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU/ed. Nicholas McGegan Suite from Naïs

1a. Ouverture

2. Entrèe maje steuse des Dieux des Peuplesde la terre

3.Sarabande

4. Gavotte vive

5a. Premièr Rigaudon

5b. Deuxième Rigaudon

6. Entrèe des Lutteurs

7. Chaconne

8. Air de Triomphe

9a. Primier Menuet

9b. Deuxième Menuet

11a. Premièr Tambourin

11b. Deuxième Tambourin

ANTONIO VIVALDI

Concerto in F major for Violin and Orchestra, RV 569

I. Allegro

II. Grave

III. Allegro

Ilana Setapen, violin

INTERMISSION

ANTONIO VIVALDI

Concerto in C major for Piccolo and Orchestra, RV 443

I. Allegro

II. Largo

III. Allegro

Jennifer Bouton Schaub, piccolo

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL

Suite No. 1 in F major from Water Music, HVW 348

Overture [Largo/Allegro] –Adagio e staccato – Allegro

Menuet

Air

Menuet

Bourée

Hornpipe

Allegro [variant]

Hornpipe [variant]

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 recordings (digital only) available at mso.org.

Guest Artist Biographies

NICHOLAS McGEGAN

NICHOLAS McGEGAN

In his sixth decade on the podium, Nic McGegan — long hailed as “one of the finest baroque conductors of his generation” (The Independent) and “an expert in 18th-century style” (The New Yorker) — is recognized for his probing and revelatory explorations of music of all periods. He is music director laureate of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale and principal guest conductor of Hungary’s Capella Savaria.

Highlights of his 2022.23 guest bookings in North America include leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque; return engagements with the St. Louis and Milwaukee symphonies, and his first appearances with the Eugene and Edmonton symphonies; and a performance and recording of Bach’s Mass in B Minor with Cantata Collective. In Europe, he appears with Denmark’s Aalborg Symphony, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the Royal Northern. McGegan’s prolific discography includes more than 100 releases spanning five decades. Having recorded over 50 albums of Handel, McGegan has explored the depths of the composer’s output with a dozen oratorios and close to 20 of his operas. His extensive discography with Philharmonia Baroque includes two Grammy nominations. McGegan has also released two albums with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under the BIS label. This past season, his album of Mozart violin concertos launched with violinist Gil Shaham and the SWR Symphonie Orchester. English-born, McGegan was educated at Cambridge and Oxford. He was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) “for services to music overseas.” Other awards include the Halle Handel Prize; the Order of Merit of the State of Lower Saxony (Germany); the Medal of Honour of the City of Göttingen; and a declaration of Nicholas McGegan Day by the Mayor of San Francisco, in recognition of his work with Philharmonia Baroque.

ILANA SETAPEN

ILANA SETAPEN

Since her solo orchestral debut at age 15, Ilana Setapen has been flourishing as a violinist with a powerful and original voice. She is hailed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a violinist with “a sparkling sound” and “the kind of control that puts an audience completely at ease.” She is currently the acting concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. In recent seasons, Setapen has had solo performances with the Milwaukee Symphony, Festival City Symphony, and the Amarillo Symphony, among others. She held the assistant concertmaster position of the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra in Chicago for six years and is a favorite guest concertmaster with the Chicago Philharmonic. She is currently on the faculty at Center Stage Strings at the University of Michigan, and she performs frequently with Present Music. Solo and chamber music performances have brought her abroad to China, France, Brazil, Holland, England, Monaco, and Italy.

Setapen grew up in Amarillo, Texas. She was a student of Robert Lipsett both at the University of Southern California and at the Colburn Conservatory. She received her Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School as a student of Donald Weilerstein and Ronald Copes. Also a dedicated educator, she has a successful private studio.

JENNIFER BOUTON SCHAUB

JENNIFER BOUTON SCHAUB

Jennifer Bouton Schaub has been a member of the Milwaukee Symphony since 2011. She has performed around the world, including an extended appointment with the Australian Ballet and Australian Opera, and she is a regular substitute with the Chicago Symphony and the Detroit Symphony. Bouton Schaub performed as second flute for Lyric Opera of Chicago from 2014 to 2016, and she was a member of the Virginia Symphony and the Akron Symphony.

Bouton Schaub has been a featured guest artist in numerous American and international festivals, including the Arizona Music Festival, National Repertory Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival (Piccolo Fellowship), Sunflower Music Festival, Artosphere Festival Orchestra, and AIMS Summer Festival Orchestra in Graz, Austria. In 2012, she was a prize-winner in the National Flute Association’s Piccolo Artist Competition.

A committed educator, Bouton Schaub has held faculty positions at Carthage College, Wisconsin Lutheran College, and Carroll University. Other academic affiliations include contributing editor, interview subject, and columnist for Flute Talk Magazine and The Instrumentalist; competition judging for the National Flute Association and the Chicago Flute Club; and founding member of Arts and Community Education (ACE) ensemble for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. In 2009, Bouton Schaub was an assistant editor and research assistant for the publication of the revised edition of Jeanne Baxtresser’s essential book, Orchestral Excerpts for Flute (Presser).

Bouton Schaub received a Certificate in Advanced Flute Studies and Master of Music degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Music degree from the Peabody Conservatory. Her teachers include Jeanne Baxtresser, Alberto Almarza, and Marina Piccinini. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Bouton Schaub enjoys being active outdoors with her husband and two young daughters.

Program notes

by J. Mark Baker

JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU

JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU

Baptized 25 September 1683; Dijon, France/ Died 12 September 1764; Paris, France

Suite from Naïs

Composed: 1749

First performance: 22 April 1749; Paris, France (complete)

Last MSO performance: November 2001; Nicholas McGegan, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes (1st and 2nd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 2 bassoons; 2 trumpets; timpani; percussion (tambourine, tenor drum, wind machine); harpsichord; strings

Approximate duration: 23 minutes

The leading French composer of his time, Jean-Philippe Rameau was a close contemporary of J.S. Bach, G.F. Handel, Domenico Scarlatti, and G.P. Telemann. A member of the “smart set,” he counted Voltaire as a friend. His output of music for the stage is prodigious, and his writings on music theory show him to be a product of the Age of Reason. Traité de l’harmonie [Treatise of Harmony, 1722] is his most important and influential work in that sphere. Seeking to explain music in scientific terms, he maintained that it is founded on harmony, which arises from natural causes. It is to him that we owe the terms “tonic,” “dominant,” “subdominant,” “supertonic,” etc. to describe the role each chord played in a particular key’s hierarchy. Rameau’s stage work Naïs falls into the category of a pastorale héroïque, set in a prologue and three acts. More ballet than opera and more descriptive than dramatic, it relates the story of Neptune, Roman god of the sea, who disguises himself as a mortal to win the affection of the fair nymph Naïs. When two rivals for her affections attempt to attack the incognito god, he summons huge waves to drown them. Neptune then discloses his identity to Naïs. Taking her to his underwater palace, he there turns her into a goddess. The spectacle – with a libretto by Louis de Cahusac (1706-59) – includes athletic contests, dancing shepherds, flotillas afire, battles in heaven, and underwater palaces. It bears the subtitle Opéra pour La Paix, referring to the fact that the work was composed to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the 1749 treaty that ended the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48). (Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks was written for the same occasion.) The selections we’ll enjoy today display a wide range of moods, from the courtly (e.g., gavotte) to the popular (e.g., rigaudon) – and employ richly varied orchestral timbres. As the French philosopher Denis Diderot (171384) noted, Rameau possessed the keen ability to distinguish the tender, the voluptuous, the impassioned – even the lascivious.

ANTONIO VIVALDI

ANTONIO VIVALDI

Born 4 March 1678; Venice, Italy / Died 28 July 1741; Vienna, Austria

Concerto in F major for Violin and Orchestra, RV 569

Composed: unknown

First performance: unknown

Last MSO performance: MSO premiere

Instrumentation: 2 oboes; bassoon; 2 horns; harpsichord; strings

Approximate duration: 15 minutes

As one of the greatest composers of concertos – and certainly the most prolific, as more than 450 still survive, for various solo instruments and combinations thereof – Antonio Vivaldi hardly needs an introduction. The four violin concertos that comprise The Four Seasons are ubiquitous. He was the first composer to use ritornello form habitually in fast movements. (In a ritornello, the music of the opening tutti recurs in whole or part between solo parts and again at the end.)

Likewise, his frequent use of the familiar three-movement layout (fast-slow-fast) became a model for subsequent composers.

Though Vivaldi was a Roman Catholic cleric (his vibrant hair color earned him the sobriquet “The Red Priest”), soon after his ordination he refused to say mass. Nevertheless, he remained pious –outwardly, at least. From 1703 to 1740, with a few interruptions for travel and service elsewhere, Vivaldi labored as a violin teacher, concert director, and choirmaster at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, a multi-functional institution: part music school for girls, part orphanage, part conventschool, and part nunnery. Much of his music was composed for faculty colleagues and student ensembles there.

With its use of two oboes and two horns, the Violin Concerto RV 569 is especially colorful. The outer movements, both set in F major, exploit the full ensemble, often pairing like instruments. The sparse middle movement is cast in D minor in a graceful compound meter (12/8); accompanied only by strings and harpsichord, the solo violin sings a melancholy operatic aria.

ANTONIO VIVALDI

Concerto in C major for Piccolo and Orchestra, RV 443

Composed: 1728-29

First performance: unknown

Last MSO performance: February 2014; Francesco Lecce-Chong, conductor; Jennifer Bouton, piccolo

Instrumentation: harpsicord; strings

Approximate duration: 12 minutes

For biographical information on Antonio Vivaldi, please see the article above. Nowadays, in this country, we usually group members of the recorder family into the same categories as the four choral voice types: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. Rarer recorders are the sopranino, the great bass, and the double bass. The concerto at hand was penned for flautino (sopranino recorder), one of only three such works Vivaldi created for the instrument. Most likely the piece was fashioned for the girls in his charge at the Ospedale della Pietà. The flautino’s notes resonate an octave higher than the alto instrument, the one that got the lion’s share of solo work in the 18th century (including Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2).

In the same vein, the piccolo (in Italian, the very word itself means “small”) sounds an octave higher than the concert (C) flute. And, like the flautino, its printed music is written an octave below the sounding pitch. Vivaldi’s Concerto in C major, RV 443, sounds entirely idiomatic on

this more modern instrument – one we’re more accustomed to hearing in the final moments of “Stars and Stripes Forever” or the exuberant concluding measures of Beethoven’s Ninth.

Displaying high spirits, in the quick outer movements there’s wit and a sense of humor: the instrument chirps merrily in its highest register, and the soloist is given opportunity for virtuosic display. As in RV 569, the contemplative slow movement employs a minor key and compound meter.

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL

Born 23 February 1685; Halle, Germany / Died 14 April 1759; London, England

Suite No. 1 in F major from Water Music, HWV 348 Composed: 1717

First performance: 17 July 1717; Thames River, England

Last MSO performance: April 2018; Yaniv Dinur, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 oboes; bassoon; 2 horns; harpsichord; strings

Approximate duration: 30 minutes

England’s King George I was in need of some good PR. The country’s first monarch from the House of Hanover, he spoke little to no English, leading his subjects to regard him as something of a dolt. As any savvy politician of our own time might do, he chose to go on the offensive in a flashy display. In the summer of 1717, he summoned his adviser Baron Kielmansegge and ordered him to arrange for a musical entertainment on the Thames. Not surprisingly, Kielmansegge called upon court composer G.F. Handel to provide the music for this extravaganza.

On a pleasant Wednesday evening in July, a large number of the nobility made their way to the riverfront, where they boarded open barges and cruised up the Thames to Chelsea to enjoy a lavish dinner. According to a report in the Daily Courant on 19 July, one of the barges “was employ’d for the Musick, wherein were 50 instruments of all sorts who play’d…the finest Symphonies, composed express for this Occasion, by Mr. Handel; which his Majesty liked so well that he caus’d it to be play’d over three times in going and returning.” A private report from Friedrich Bonet, the Russian Resident in London, provides further information: The instruments included trumpets, hunting horns, oboes, bassoons, transverse flutes, recorders, violins, and basses; each of the three performances lasted an hour. Apparently, the soiree was such a smashing success that the festivities lasted until 3:00 am; the king made it back to the palace at 4:30 am.

The now-familiar Water Music fulfilled its purpose on two fronts – entertainment for the nobility and favorable advertisement for George I. Making stylish use of characteristic Baroque-suite dance forms, the music is hummable and pleasing to hear. “In his resourceful scoring, designed to keep the royal ear from tiring,” writes NPR’s Ted Libbey, “Handel combines festivity and finesse in perfect measure.” Verily!