POULENC'S GLORIA

Friday, October 25, 2024 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, October 26, 2024 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Jean-Marie Zeitouni, conductor

Joélle Harvey, soprano

Milwaukee Symphony Chorus

Cheryl Frazes Hill, director

PROGRAM

MARIE-JULIETTE “LILI” BOULANGER

D’un matin de printemps [Of a Spring Morning]

MAURICE RAVEL

Shéhérazade, M. 41

I. Asie [Asia]

II. La flûte enchantée [The Enchanted Flute]

III. L’indifférent [The Indifferent One]

Joélle Harvey, soprano

CAMILLE PÉPIN

Aux confins de l’orage [At the Edge of the Storm]

I. Sphères jaune-orange [Yellow-Orange Spheres]

II. Sylphes rouges [Red Sylphs]

III. Jets bleus [Blue Jets]

INTERMISSION

FRANCIS POULENC

Gloria, FP 177

I. Gloria in excelsis Deo

II. Laudamus te

III. Domine Deus, Rex caelestis

IV. Domine Fili unigenite

V. Domine Deus, Agnus Dei

VI. Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris

Joélle Harvey, soprano

Milwaukee Symphony Chorus

The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION.

The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. All programs are subject to change.

Guest Artist Biographies

JEAN-MARIE ZEITOUNI

Jean-Marie Zeitouni is one of the brightest conductors of his generation, renowned for his expressive and eloquent style in a repertoire that ranges from Baroque to contemporary music. He studied at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, most notably under Maestro Raffi Armenian, and graduated in conducting, percussion, and music theory.

Over the years, Jean-Marie Zeitouni has been artistic director of the I Musici de Montréal Chamber Orchestra (2011-2021), music director of the Colorado Music Festival (2014-2019), of the Columbus Symphony (20102015), and of the opera program at the Banff Center (2005-2007), artistic partner of the Edmonton Symphony, assistant conductor and chorus director at the Opéra de Montréal, as well as musical director of their Atelier lyrique, chorus director at the Orchestre symphonique de Québec and at the Opéra de Québec, and musical director of the orchestra and of the opera workshop at Laval University. In his 12 years of fruitful collaboration with Les Violons du Roy, he has alternately held the positions of conductor in residence, assistant conductor, and principal guest conductor. Since 2022, he has been conducting the Orchestre symphonique du Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, as well as the orchestral conducting class.

Highly sought after as a conductor of both symphonic and operatic repertoire, Zeitouni regularly conducts in Europe and across America. Among the many Canadian symphony orchestras Zeitouni has conducted are those of Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, Victoria, Kitchener-Waterloo, and London. No stranger to the international stage, Zeitouni has conducted the symphony orchestras of Tucson, Houston, Oregon, Monterey, San Antonio, Omaha, Honolulu, Huntsville, and Cincinnati, in addition to the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, Pacific Symphony, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonique de Marseille, Xalapa Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony of Mexico, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Arco Ensemble, and Detroit Symphony. He is also a regular at Festival international de Lanaudière, Festival International du Domaine Forget, Elora Festival, Parry Sound Festival, and New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival. Most recently, he made his debut in Moscow with the Russian National Orchestra and at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées of Paris.

As a lyrical director, Zeitouni has conducted numerous productions at the Opéra de Montréal, Opéra de Québec, Glimmerglass Opera, Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, and Opéra national de Lorraine, as well as productions in Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. Recently, he led several opera productions, including Don Giovanni at the Opéra de Québec, the world premiere of Julien Bilodeau’s La beauté du monde at the Opéra de Montréal, Ariane et Barbe-bleue at the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Lorraine, and La bohème with the Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières.

JOÉLLE HARVEY

Acclaimed by the Financial Times as singing one of the “most delectably mellifluous Susanna to have been heard here for some years,” American soprano Joélle Harvey has built a reputation as one of the finest singers of her generation, performing major roles on stages such as the Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne, Royal Opera House, Zurich Opera, Teatro La Fenice, and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

Harvey begins the 2024.25 season with an appearance performing Haydn’s The Creation with Jane Glover and Music of the Baroque. Season debuts include a concert of Ravel and Boulanger with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, her house debut at the Opéra Royal de Versailles playing the title role of Galatea in Handel’s Acis and Galatea, and Anna Trulove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Des Moines Metro Opera. On the concert platform, Harvey will perform Handel’s Messiah with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Houston Symphony Orchestra. She returns to the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin to perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for a concert of Mozart, and will perform a program of Handel with the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston. She will perform Bach’s St. John Passion with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and a concert of Haydn with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Harvey’s recent highlights include a number of appearances with a host of internationally acclaimed organizations, including performances with The English Concert with Harry Bicket, The Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Möst, the LA Philharmonic Orchestra with Gustavo Dudamel, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with Bernard Labadie, Arcangelo with Jonathan Cohen, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester with Robin Ticciati. Ms. Harvey has also performed alongside ensembles such as the Cincinnati Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, the New World Symphony, and the National Symphony Orchestra. On the opera stage, Joélle has performed on the greatest stages worldwide, including performing Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera and the title role in Handel’s Semele at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

A native of Bolivar, New York, Harvey received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in vocal performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). She began her career training at Glimmerglass Opera (now The Glimmerglass Festival) and the Merola Opera Program.

Program notes by Elaine Schmidt

MARIE-JULIETTE “LILI” BOULANGER

Born 21 August 1893; Paris, France

Died 15 March 1918; Mézy-sur-Seine, France

D’un matin de printemps [Of a spring morning]

Composed: 1917 – 1918

First performance: 13 March 1921; René-Emmanuel Baton, conductor; Orchestre des Concerts Pasdeloup

Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; contrabasson; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; percussion (castanets, piccolo snare drum, suspended cymbals, triangle); harp; celeste; strings

Approximate duration: 5 minutes

Sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger were quite something in the Paris music world during the early years of the 20th century, with Lili dubbed “one of the most exciting composers” of the era. The Boulangers were an exceptional family. The girls’ mother was a Russian princess who attended the Paris Conservatory, where she met and later married one of her teachers: conductor and composer Ernest Boulanger, whose mother was a notable singer and father was a famous cellist. It’s not a surprise that music ran in the sisters’ veins, but it is a surprise that two young women made such a profound mark on the classical music world at a time when few women were allowed in any professions.

Nadia would become one of the most sought-after music teachers in the world. Her tutelage shaped the lives and careers of many 20th-century musicians, including Daniel Barenboim and Americans Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Virgil Thompson, and Quincy Jones.

But Lili’s life story would play out much differently than her sister’s. Almost six years younger than Nadia, Lili was just two years old when composer Gabriel Fauré, a Boulanger family friend, noticed the child had perfect pitch and was able to sing melodies perfectly after hearing them. That same year, Lili contracted bronchial pneumonia, which impacted her health for the rest of her life. Despite her physical fragility, she excelled at singing and playing the piano, violin, cello, and harp, as well as at composing. Like Nadia, she studied at the Paris Conservatory, one of few women to do so at the time. At age 19, she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome competition.

Lili wrote D’un matin de Printemps (“Of a Spring Morning”) from her sickbed in Mézy-sur-Seine in 1918, having fled the German encroachment upon Paris with her mother and sister. The piece is full of sparkling musical lines and transparent orchestrations. It also exists in a version for flute instead of violin. D’un matin de Printemps would prove to be one of the last pieces Lili completed. Listeners will hear elements of Impressionism, along with crisp rhythms and an evocative sense of musical storytelling.

MAURICE RAVEL

Born 7 March 1875; Ciboure, France

Died 28 December 1937; Paris, France

Shéhérazade, M. 41

Composed: 1903

First performance: 17 May 1904; Alfred Cortot, conductor; Jeanne Hatto, soprano; Société nationale de musique

Last MSO performance: 6 October 2012; Olari Elts, conductor; Karen Wierzba, soprano

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle); 2 harps; celeste; strings

Approximate duration: 17 minutes

Aristotle believed art imitates life. Centuries later, philosophers told us life often imitates art. But in the case of Maurice Ravel’s Shéhérazade, art actually imitated other art — several times. In 1888, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote a symphonic suite entitled Scheherazade (performed by the MSO earlier this season), inspired by the One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of stories compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age (the 8th through 13th centuries). The French poet Tristan Klingsor (nom de plume for author and painter Arthur Leclère) heard Rimsky-Korsakov’s musical telling of the story and wrote a collection of free-verse poetry inspired by it. Klingsor and French composer Maurice Ravel were both members of Les Apaches (“the Hooligans”), a group of creatives in Paris. When Klingsor read some of his Shéhérazade poems to the group, Ravel was inspired to write a song cycle based on them. He titled it, not surprisingly, Shéhérezade. Ravel also wrote an overture by the same title, which was not published until 1975. And yes, there are two spellings of the name Scheherazade at play here: Rimsky-Korsakov’s is the German spelling, while Ravel’s is the French spelling. The original story of the Arabian nights is about a woman who marries a sultan who had been betrayed by a previous wife. From then on, he had been spending a wedding night with each new wife, and then ordering her execution the following day, thus preventing her from being unfaithful to him. But when Scheherazade marries the sultan, she has a plan to survive not only the wedding night, but into the future. She tells him a terrifically involving story on their wedding night, waiting until the sun begins to rise to tell the sultan she will finish the story the following night. She does finish it the next night, but then starts a new story, promising to finish it the following night. The plan serves her well for 1,001 nights, by which time the sultan has fallen in love with her and they have three children together. The “and they lived happily ever after” ending is implied.

CAMILLE PÉPIN

Born 17 November 1990; Amiens, France

Aux confins de l’orage [At the edge of the storm]

Composed: 2020 – 2021

First performance: 18 September 2021; International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors; Chloé Dufresne, Deun Lee, and Jong-Jie Yin, conductors; Orchestre National de Lyon

Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; English horn; 3 clarinets; 3 bassoons (3rd doubling on contrabassoon); 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 2 trombones; bass trombone; tuba; timpani, percussion (bass drum, glockenspiel, suspended cymbals, medium suspended cymbals, tam-tam, large tam-tam, tom-toms in 3 pitches, low tom-tom, tubular bells, vibraphone); harp; celeste; strings

Approximate duration: 15 minutes

French composer Camille Pépin has been called “nothing if not prolific” for the many pieces she has written for orchestras and ensembles of various sizes. Her biography begins, “Born in 1990, Camille Pépin is one of the most successful rising composers of her generation.” It also states, “Her distinctive sound-world finds its inspiration in nature or painting. Her art of color is expressed with as much science of orchestration as poetic imagination.”

Living up to her biography, Pépin’s Aux confins de l’orage (“At the Edge of the Storm”) is atmospheric both in its haunting, dynamic sounds and in its musical depiction of what happens high in our planet’s atmosphere, invisible to us on the earth’s surface, during the formation of a storm. Clearly versed in meteorology, she has written a description of the piece in her native French, in which she explains that the work was inspired by “three transient light phenomena” that precede a storm. To depict them with orchestral sounds, she imagined orchestral colors specific to each one of the phenomena, using hybrid terms such as “chord-spheres.”

“The yellow-orange spheres are disks of light propagating through space in concentric circles. Born from an electromagnetic impact in the ionosphere, they change color during their propagation, going from yellow to orange-red. I represented this transformation by chordspheres traveling from one desk (music stand) to another.”

Her descriptions of the phenomena and the storm are exquisite, employing phrases such as “liquid and incandescent filaments flowing towards the earth” and “the flamboyant sky glows a little more before calming down and returning to the slow and cold texture of the beginning of the work.”

The entire explanation of the piece is too long to include here, but having read a bit of it should give you license to imagine a brilliant light show playing out in the nebulous regions of our upper atmosphere. The impending storm swells into grand, climactic moments and ebbs to quieter, sometimes quite busy, sometimes ethereal, and sometimes foreboding passages, until we finally hear, in the last moments of the piece, the storm’s arrival on earth.

FRANCIS POULENC

Born 7 January 1899; Paris, France

Died 30 January 1963; Paris, France

Gloria, FP 177

Composed: 1959 – July 1960

First performance: 21 January 1961; Charles Münch, conductor; Adele Addison, soprano; Boston Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Pro Musica

Last MSO performance: 12 February 2017; Christoph König, conductor; Yulia Van Doren, soprano; Milwaukee Symphony Chorus Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling on 2nd piccolo); piccolo; 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; harp; strings

French composer Francis Poulenc is remembered today as one of “the most original and sincere voices of the 20th century.” He is also remembered as a man of many contradictions, which he came by honestly due to the many contrasting influences on his life. He was born to privilege, thanks to his father’s family-owned pharmaceutical business and its growth into a giant corporation. His love and understanding of the arts came from his mother, who descended from a long line of Parisian artists and craftspeople.

Born in 1899, Poulenc began studying piano at five, and was soon engrossed in the music of Debussy, Schubert, and Stravinsky. His musical training was curtailed by his parents’ death and the outbreak of World War I (Poulenc served as a typist late in the war and into the post-war period), which combined to prevent him from entering the Paris Conservatory. Poulenc took his education to the streets, frequenting a Paris bookshop at which many authors and poets gathered. He later set some of their poetry to music, earning recognition as “the finest writer of art songs of the 20th century.” He absorbed any music wherever he heard it — liturgical, folk, jazz, pop, and more. He was included in Les Six — a group of six diverse composers who challenged and supported one another’s work.

Poulenc was eclectic in his musical tastes and compositional style. He wrote in many genres, including sacred music, combining profundity, beautiful melodies, borrowings from other musical genres, and his trademark, prankster humor. His 1959–1960 setting of the Gloria, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and written for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, showcases Poulenc’s eclecticism and still sounds fresh and inventive to 21st-century ears. He included beautiful melodies, such as an elegant “Domine Deus,” and a rollicking “Laudamus te” that includes some profoundly serene moments. Among the unexpected elements of the piece are faux syncopations, created by cleverly placed accents. Like its composer, the piece is full of seeming contradictions, moving from exquisite beauty to unexpected humor, alongside some soaring passages.

Poulenc died less than three years after completing the Gloria, leaving instructions to play only the music of Bach at his funeral.