172 minute read
Concert Programs
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 1 | 7:30 PM & JULY 2 | 6:30 PM
BEETHOVEN 7 + AUGUSTIN HADELICH
CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTISTS
Augustin Hadelich, violin Artist-in-Residence Aaron Jay Kernis, composer
PROGRAM
Felix Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Allegro molto appassionato Andante Allegretto non troppo Allegro molto vivace
Poco sostenuto - Vivace Allegretto Presto - Assai meno presto Allegro con brio
Tonight’s performance is dedicated to the victims of the King Soopers shooting. Elegy (to those we’ve lost) World Premiere Aaron Jay Kernis
(Born January 15, 1960, in Philadelphia)
Aaron Jay Kernis is among the most esteemed American musical figures of his generation. Each of his works displays his wildly fertile musical imagination and his distinctive voice that encompasses the wide-ranging musical languages of the recent decades. His music contains “rich poetic imagery, brilliant instrumental color, distinctive musical wit, and infectious exuberance.” Kernis began his musical studies on the violin; at age twelve, he began teaching himself piano, and in the following year, composition. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Yale School of Music, working with composers as diverse as John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, and Jacob Druckman. He has taught composition at the Yale School of Music since 2003 and has served as Composer-inResidence for Astral Artists, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Albany Symphony, Minnesota Public Radio, and the American Composers Forum. Kernis’s music figures prominently on orchestral, chamber, and recital programs around the world. He has had and continues to have many commissions: the New York Philharmonic for its 150th Anniversary; American Public Radio; the San Francisco Symphony; the Birmingham [England] New Music Group; violinist Joshua Bell; Pamela Frank and the Minnesota Orchestra; the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Aspen Music Festival; and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Sharon Isbin. Kernis also helped usher in the new millennium with a choral symphony commissioned by the Disney Company. In 1998, Kernis won the Pulitzer Prize for String Quartet No. 2, subtitled musica instrumentalis, a work inspired by Renaissance and Baroque dance music. In 2002, he was the youngest composer ever to win the Grawemeyer Award for Colored Field, a concerto in which he reacts to his visit to Nazi concentration camps. Elegy (for those we lost), originally scored as a piano piece, was written soon after the beginning of the covid pandemic in May 2020 to honor “the families of loved ones who passed away from the coronavirus and to the doctors, nurses, and other health-care professionals who worked so tirelessly to save those loved ones.” Kernis said he wrote the work “when it became clear that the toll of Covid-19 on human lives was truly devastating.” He subsequently arranged Elegy for string orchestra; Kernis also commissioned an accompanying film from director Esther Shubinski. In mid-March 2020 Kernis contracted a mild case of Covid at a gala concert event, yet the experience, he recalled, “was still terrifying, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Not long after that, I read an incredibly forthright piece by Dr. Helen Ouyang in The New York Times that showed unflinchingly what healthcare workers and people perishing from the virus were going through. That suffering, as well as the developing situation in society all around
The July 1 concert is sponsored by
DICK & JANE STEBBINS
The July 2 concert is sponsored by
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 1 | 7:30 PM & JULY 2 | 6:30 PM
us, led to a need for me to sit down and write music, out of empathy and concern. “Reading stories of families unable to be with their loved ones in the hospital and at the time of their passing led me to want to express a wide range of emotions based in grief and sadness through this piece. I wanted to create something that would embody a shared experience of mourning, and give some solace.” His aim was to memorialize, “I hope through this short work that listeners can find a space of solace to reflect, remember and mourn those we have lost — known or unknown to us, and allow us to find compassion to share this time as brothers and sisters together.” Elegy is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings in its full version; we are performing the version with timpani, harp, and strings.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 64 Felix Mendelssohn
(Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg; died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig)
Touted by some as the “perfect” concerto, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto No. 2 has a romantic feeling, melodic polish, and refinement that contribute to making it one of the most performed and beloved of all violin concertos. Mendelssohn wrote this extremely popular work in 1844 for his friend Ferdinand David (1810-1873). The two musicians were born in the same house in Hamburg less than a year apart, but they did not meet until Mendelssohn was sixteen. In 1835, when Mendelssohn became the conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, he appointed David concertmaster, a post he held for thirty-seven years. As far back as 1838, Mendelssohn had written to David, “I should like to write a violin concerto for you next winter. One in E minor is running through my head, and its opening gives me no peace.” Mendelssohn did not compose the concerto that winter. Although David kept pressing him for it, Mendelssohn took five more years to complete the work. During that time, the composer and violinist held many consultations over the details of the work. Mendelssohn sent the score to his publisher in December 1844 but then revised it further. In the end, David was responsible for much of the character of the violin writing, and probably even wrote most of the cadenza. David was, of course, the soloist in the first performance at a Gewandhaus concert on March 13, 1845. Unfortunately, Mendelssohn was ill, and the Danish composer Niels Gade conducted. Two weeks later, David wrote to Mendelssohn, “I should have written you earlier of the success that I had with your Violin Concerto. It was unanimously declared to be one of the most beautiful compositions of its kind.” The concerto has three movements that are played without pause in a continuous flow of music. Mendelssohn’s precedent for this was his own Scottish Symphony where he also went from one movement to another without a break. In this piece, over which he worked for seven years, Mendelssohn deviated from the traditional lineaments of the Classical concerto form with such success that this work influenced the development and evolution of the concerto for the next century. The first movement, a melodious Allegro molto appassionato, begins in a highly original way. Deviating from the traditional convention that the orchestra is the first to introduce the principal themes before the soloist enters, here the violin soloist immediately announces the theme on which the movement is based. Encompassing the highest, most brilliant range of the instrument in the first theme, the violin sings the lowest note in its range in the second theme. Again Mendelssohn changes the established structure of the concerto when he places the solo cadenza not at the very end of the movement as was traditional, but before the return of the first theme. A single, sustained note on the bassoon connects the first movement to the next movement, a simple and beautiful Andante, like one of the Songs without Words that Mendelssohn wrote for piano. In the development section, Mendelssohn introduces a contrasting theme that can only be characterized as darker, as well as restless and agitated when the trumpet and timpani enter. The second and third movements have no pause between them either: the bridge is a small, wistful intermezzo, a brief introduction, Allegretto non troppo, ushers in the brilliant finale, Allegro molto vivace. This final rondo begins with trumpet, horn, bassoon, and timpani with the violin joining in to answer them in arpeggios before declaring the first joyous theme. After the development section, the movement closes with melodic and rhythmic intensity in high spirits. The violinist reaches a high E in the last bar. The orchestral accompaniment of the concerto calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and strings.
(Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna)
Although Beethoven wrote his first six symphonies in the first eight years of the new century, he stopped writing symphonies altogether for four years after that. Unlike many of his other major works, Symphony No. 7 did not occupy Beethoven’s attention for years before it took its final shape. It was completely written in early 1812. In the four years that intervened between the composing of the 6th and the 7th Symphonies, Beethoven had consolidated new styles and techniques: he had enlarged his harmonic scope and intensified the technique of his subjective expression. In April 1813, Symphony No. 7 was performed privately at the residence of Beethoven’s pupil, Archduke Rudolph, and on December 8th, the composer conducted the first public performance of the work. Its premiere was a benefit concert for soldiers wounded in the battle that had failed to stop Napoleon at Hanau earlier that year. Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, Beethoven’s friend and a good musician
as well as a mechanical genius who invented the metronome, organized the fundraiser. Over the course of time, the musical intensity of Symphony No. 7 has been described as transcendent, astonishing, and universal. Critics and other composers have variously tried to explain the movements programmatically, teetering on the edge of absurdity with their analyses. What does bind all of their comments together is finding that many parts of this symphony embody dance and march rhythms, and rhythm itself seems to be the driving force of the work. Each of the movements grows out of a rhythmic figure that characterizes the whole movement in much the same way that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is dominated by its well-known opening rhythmic fournote motto. In emphasizing these aspects, Beethoven seems to have limited the use of melody; some of the rhythmic figures are defined by one note while others are understated, allowing the listeners to concentrate on the rhythmic force. The structures of the movements follow traditional sonata form or sonata-imbued forms, extended in Beethoven’s use with long development sections as well as codas and heroic interpolations. The colorful orchestration of the work strongly emphasizes the use of solo woodwinds, especially flute and oboe. After a long, slow introduction, Poco sostenuto, with a sense of hearkening back to Haydn in its form, the charming melody of the first movement, with its mounting rhythmic tension, evolves into the dancing Vivace that led Wagner to call this symphony the very apotheosis of the dance. The second movement, Allegretto, mostly in minor, is a lovely, varied processional, both peaceful and solemn. It includes languid woodwind-dominated trios. During the 19th century, this movement was very popular; it was also played frequently on occasions of mourning. The movement can be divided into five sections, with the first, third, and fifth encompassing one set of themes and the other sections presenting another theme. What Berlioz labeled a “profound sigh” begins the movement. The second section relieves the tension of the first. From the first trio, a glorious fugue built on the main theme emerges. After the second trio, the movement relaxes into the sigh with which it began. The third movement, in which the winds have a prominent place, is an expanded scherzo, Presto, with extra measures added from time to time that tend to surprise the listener. The contrasting slower trio section repeats. The French composer d’Indy, perhaps correctly, traced its thematic origins to an Austrian pilgrims’ hymn. The finale, Allegro con brio, heavily and often irregularly accented, is a movement of enormous vigor and energy; critics have often labeled it bacchanalian because of its wild and surging rhythmic motion. The theme is embellished with sixteenth-note passagework, which has a feeling of urgency. The coda grows out of two repeated bass notes, again rhythmically defined. The symphony is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 3 | 11:00 AM
FAMILY CONCERT: THE STORY OF BABAR
CONDUCTOR Erina Yashima
GUEST ARTISTS
Really Inventive Stuff
PROGRAM
Leopold Mozart, Toy Symphony in C Major (formerly attributed to Haydn) Allegro Menuetto Finale: Allegro
Francis Poulenc, The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant
This concert is sponsored by
Toy Symphony Leopold Mozart
(Born November 14, 1719, in Augsburg, Germany; died May 28, 1787, in Salzburg, Austria)
No one feels certain who actually wrote the Toy Symphony. Indeed, no one can agree on whether to categorize it as a symphony at all. This child-friendly work was attributed first to Franz Joseph Haydn and then to Leopold Mozart. Leopold Mozart, the father of Wolfgang, was himself a composer, pedagogue, and violinist. It is now disputed whether either Haydn or the elder Mozart actually wrote the piece; it has also been ascribed variously to Michael Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Rainprechter, and most recently to Edmund Angerer. Each of its three movements highlights the sounds of toys and instruments including a trumpet, ratchet, nightingale, cuckoo, drum, and others. One can hear noisemakers rattling throughout the first movement, while in the second movement, sounds of birds, the cuckoo, and nightingale call out; in the third, the trumpets make themselves heard. Composed in the mid-1700s, the Toy Symphony first appeared with only the last name “Haydn” appended to it. A story surfaced that Franz Joseph Haydn had composed the piece after buying several toys at a fair and then playing the work using those toys for his children at a Christmas party. Because the work did not appear in Haydn’s self-assembled catalog of his compositions, however, scholars became suspicious and started trying to figure out who really could have composed it. Despite the uncertainty about its origins, the piece is now, nevertheless, commonly credited to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father and teacher, Leopold, who, it was also thought, may have composed a similar work, The Musical Sleigh-Ride. Throughout his life, Leopold handcopied pieces he admired, thus it came as no big surprise when it was recently established that Leopold’s Sleigh-Ride most likely came from songs written by different musicians from around Berchtesgaden, a city that produced many toy musical instruments at the time. It’s possible that the composer of the Toy Symphony wanted to remain anonymous because he, like the 19th-century composer of the Carnival of the Animals, Camille Saint-Saëns, did not want the work to be considered alongside his more serious compositions. Yet music professor, researcher, cellist, and conductor Seymour Benstock (1922-2015), in a 2013 book Did You Know? A Music Lover’s Guide to Nicknames, Titles and Whimsy, concluded that the work is “partly” by Leopold Mozart “with major contributions” by Franz Joseph Haydn’s younger brother, Johann Michael Haydn (1737-1807). The three movements were listed as part of a Divertimento or Symphonie Burlesque (Hob: II. 47), yet already this, too, is thought to be spurious. Edmund Angerer (1740-1794), was a Benedictine monk, a church musician, and composer in what is today Austria. He is famous for the collection called Berchtolds-Gaden Musick, written around 1765; it was a “hit” of its time, and the Toy Symphony appears in this collection. In 1922, a manuscript was discovered that seems to authenticate his claim to the work, although some argue that even this manuscript might be merely a transcription; nevertheless, Angerer’s Berchtolds-Gaden Musick is the oldest known record of the Children’s Symphony (Kinder-Sinfonie), better known to us as the Toy Symphony. The “toy” instruments featured in it included toy trumpet, rattle, triangle, toy drum, whistle, quail, whistle cuckoo, whistle bird warbler for the nightingale, and an organ stop of highpitched rotating bells (cimbelstern). Unquestionably, such works and such instruments were popular in the area around Salzburg and Berchtesgaden at that time. What is generally known as the Toy Symphony has three movements, but in Leopold’s version, there are actually four additional movements, making a total of seven altogether, which would make the work qualify as a more easy-going multi-movement cassation, popular in southern Germany and Austria at the time. A cassation is related to the
serenade and divertimento in which loosely joined together sets of short movements were played by chamber orchestras in outdoor performances. The reduced version in three movements popularly called the Toy Symphony fits in the symphonic tradition. The Toy Symphony did not appear in published form until 1820. Today’s best research indicates that it is not even a symphony per se; its three movements most likely come from one of the toy cassations written in the 1750s and 1760s in and around the city of Berchtesgaden. The brief, lively work has three movements: Allegro, Menuetto with trio, and Finale: Allegro.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 6 | 7:30 PM
STRING QUINTETS: MOZART AND BRAHMS
GUEST ARTISTS
Calin Lupanu, violin Monica Boboc, violin DJ Cheek, viola Kimberly Sparr, viola Abraham Feder, cello
PROGRAM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Viola Quintet No. 4 in G Minor, K. 516 Allegro Menuetto: Allegretto Adagio ma non troppo Adagio - Allegro
Johannes Brahms, Viola Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111 Allegro non troppo, ma con brio Adagio Un poco allegretto Vivace, ma non troppo presto
This concert is sponsored by
String Quintet No. 4 in G Minor, K. 516 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s four mature string quintets, composed between 1787 and 1791, must be counted among his greatest works. In them, Mozart often writes for different combinations of three of the five instruments, including frequent passages for two violins and viola or for two violas and cello, for example. In the former, the viola becomes a high bass instrument; in the latter, it is a low-voiced lead instrument. Early in April 1788, Mozart placed three advertisements in a Vienna newspaper offering copies of the Quintets K. 406, 515, and 516 for sale by advance subscription, “beautifully and correctly copied,” to be delivered on July 1st. In June, he still hoped to earn an important sum from them, but he was so short of money that he wrote to his Masonic brother who was handling the business arrangements of the subscription sale, requesting a loan against the expected income. The project was not a success; there were so few subscribers that Mozart extended the offer through January 1789. Quintet No. 4, a work of passion and pathos, almost demands to be linked with Symphony No. 40, K. 550, known as the “Great G Minor Symphony,” written a little more than a year later. The quintet has even been called Mozart’s Pathetique, in reference to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, and although Tchaikovsky’s reverence for Mozart is not readily apparent in much of his music, he once wrote about the slow movement of this quintet, “No one else has ever known so well how to interpret so exquisitely in music the sense of resigned and disconsolate sorrow.” The sonority that Mozart harnessed here is tied to his understanding of the uniqueness of the quintet, and, as a result, it represents an increase in tonal mass of the whole work. Because of the possibilities that the five instruments allow him, he is able to produce anguish in a way in which the quartet as a body could not provide. From the very opening of the Allegro first movement, this is the music of troubled passion and bitter tension, the anguish of its themes intensified both by chromatics and by a persistent eighth-note rhythm. The late Charles Rosen commented that Mozart’s concentration on the “tonic area” makes “possible an opening page of a chromatic bitterness and insistence that can still shock by the naked force of its anguish. It is an opening that was unique for the last quarter of the eighteenth century in presenting directly so deeply troubled an emotion, reaching a point of tension by the twentieth measure that all other works hold in reserve until much later.” The Menuetto, Allegretto, displays an extraordinary rhythmic fluidity: accents and harmonically strong chords shift their positions within the measure and create so marked an instability that even the irregularities of the trio section seem strong and stable in contrast. The sad strength of the extraordinary, muted Adagio non troppo movement, too, is without equal anywhere else in Mozart’s works or those of his predecessors and would be challenged only in the late works of Beethoven. After the barely breathed ending of the slow movement, Mozart does not proceed directly to the fast major-key main section of the finale, but instead, first constructs a long, slow introduction, Adagio, a kind of plaintive aria or arioso for the first violin with a sighing and sobbing accompaniment that lessens the shock of contrast with the final Allegro. Although the rhythm suggests cheerfulness, the feeling of joy is understood in contrast to what came before; thus, it delivers an overlay of resignation and acceptance rather than a feeling of triumphant success.
Brahms’ two string quintets were his final string chamber works; for them, he chose the Mozartian instrumentation of two violins, two violas, and cello. He composed Quintet No. 1 in F during the summer of 1882 at the mountain resort of Bad Ischl east of Salzburg, a
region of mountains and lakes known for its enchanting scenery. He frequently left Vienna in the summer and composed a considerable amount of music at this particular spa, including this String Quintet No. 2, in 1890. He planned this quintet to be his last work, reportedly saying, “I have worked enough; now let the young people take over.” He spent the summer months sorting out old sketches and ideas and having decided not to compose another symphony, disposed of all his unfinished manuscripts in the River Traun. When he sent the score of the quintet to his publisher, Simrock, a month after its premiere in Vienna, his accompanying note said: “With this letter, you can bid farewell to my music — because it is certainly time to leave off.” His close friend, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, chided him by remarking that his health was excellent and his popularity strong, writing to him about this quintet, “It is the work of a man of thirty.” Compliments did not convince him: Brahms remained adamant that he was no longer going to compose, but after hearing the performances of the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, he was convinced to write again, and not surprisingly, the next summer returned to Ischl and composed more chamber music, beginning with the clarinet works Mühlfeld inspired. Today, the early retirement Brahms intended would feel distinctly premature: he was only 57 when he composed this quintet; the music is that of a mature composer at the height of his powers. The eminent critic, Eduard Hanslick, joined with others, praising this work for “the beautiful warm-hearted solidity of the subject matter, the continuity of the sentiment, and the admirable conciseness of the form.” Brahms’ friend and later his biographer, Max Kalbeck, focused on how much this quintet creates a sense of place, saying it “clearly draws attention to the place of origin through the local accents peculiar to it . . .. It is characteristic of the composer, even more characteristic of his place of residence, in which German sense of humor and Slavic melancholy, Italian vivacity and Hungarian haughtiness have found their compromise.” The first movement of this optimistic-sounding work, Allegro non troppo, ma con brio, in sonata form, projects an evident joy and naturalness as well as much energy. It opens with a rich sound and texture. The cello announces from amidst the foreground of accompanying tremolos a theme that Brahms reputedly composed for a symphony he never completed. In the second more lyrical theme, he features the two violas in a dance-like subject. Kalbeck commented that the music of this movement reminded him of the Prater, Vienna’s amusement park. Brahms answered, “You’ve guessed it! And the delightful girls there.” The passionate, brief second movement, Adagio, includes three free improvisatory-like embellishments, almost variations of the very Brahmsian subject he used for the main theme. The critic Margaret Notley remarks that Brahms based this movement “completely on a type of Viennese popular music: the gypsy café music of the time,” while Hanslick felt it sounded Slavic, and others have credited it with being Hungarian or at least in gypsy style because the rhythms and tremolos imitate the cimbalom (a hammered dulcimer: a type of chordophone composed of a large, trapezoidal box with metal strings stretched across its top), and a soloist emerges from the group to play an elaborate improvisation in which Brahms features the viola. The third movement, Un poco Allegretto, contains a sense of a folk dance like the Ländler, popular in Vienna then, and in the trio section, the rhythm of a waltz. Notley says, “In the Ländlerlike outer dances of the third movement, Brahms has used the socalled gypsy scale, interpreting and reinterpreting its characteristic notes, to some extent adapting the typical form of the scherzo to the harmonic tendencies of the scale, but in any case allowing it to imbue the movement with its color.” The final speedy movement, Vivace ma non troppo presto, reverts to classical style à la Haydn and has light-hearted, playful spirits with a Hungarian csárdás (a traditional Hungarian folk dance, the name derived from csárda, the old Hungarian term for tavern) rhythm. The quintet was premièred in Vienna on November 11, 1890.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 8 | 7:30 PM & JULY 9 | 6:30 PM
BRAHMS 4 + PIANIST STEWART GOODYEAR
CONDUCTOR
David Danzmayr
The Caryl Fuchs Kassoy & David R. Kassoy Conductor’s Podium
GUEST ARTIST
Stewart Goodyear, piano
PROGRAM
Jessie Montgomery, Strum (2006; revised 2012)
Camille Saint-Saëns, Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 22 Andante sostenuto Allegro scherzando Presto
Johannes Brahms, Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98 Allegro non troppo Andante moderato Allegro giocoso Allegro energico e passionato
The July 8 concert is sponsored by
The July 9 concert is sponsored by
Strum Jessie Montgomery
(Born 1981 in New York City)
Jessie Montgomery is a contemporary American composer, violinist, and educator whose work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. The Washington Post has described her work as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life.” Montgomery, who frequently performs as a violinist, began studying violin at the Third Street Music School. She grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father, a musician who managed a music studio, and her mother, a theater artist, and storyteller, were active in the culture of the local community, which gave her formative experiences in performance, education, and advocacy. Throughout her childhood, she was surrounded by many different kinds of music, which have informed her work: African-American spirituals, civil rights anthems, and modern jazz among them. She completed her education at the Juilliard School and New York University. For twenty years, Montgomery has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African-American and Latinx string players; she has served as Composer-inResidence for the Albany Symphony and for the Sphinx Virtuosi and is a founding member of the PUBLIQuartet and member of the Catalyst Quartet; she also has regularly appeared with the Silkroad Ensemble and the Sphinx Virtuosi. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra selected her as a featured composer for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights to women in the United States. She also received the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and has received grants and awards from Chamber Music America, American Composers Orchestra, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization. Strum is the result of many revisions of a work originally for cello quintet written in 2006 for the Providence String Quartet and added guests. In 2008, Montgomery revised it for string quartet. In 2012, she created the final version with a new introduction and ending for the Catalyst Quartet for a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition. Community MusicWorks commissioned the original piece; the Sphinx Organization commissioned its revision. Strum celebrates “American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement,” writes Montgomery. Its title refers to the guitar-like pizzicato plucking of the strings that takes on many roles: floating hum, earthy groove, and even a rapturous thrum. Strum is a purely abstract composition, part of Montgomery’s effort to contribute to a uniquely American sound, which simultaneously makes an impact through the intersection of social justice and the arts. Montgomery feels her music is her “connection to the world,’’ and it challenges her to make clear the things she does not fully understand. She says, “Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.” Strum opens with a compact, sweetly lyrical melody, dubbed by Montgomery as fleetingly nostalgic in sound, framed by strummed pizzicato strings, which contribute to the creation of the texture in all the instruments. Montgomery says, “I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinato that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece.” She continues, “Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound.” Soon after the beginning, the music takes on a warm dancelike tempo, after which a new subject is introduced as the mood becomes more spirited and melodies weave in, over, and between layers of strumming. There are a few piercing harmonics interjected; pizzicato strings emphasize the music’s upbeat tempo as it transforms into ecstatic celebration. Its dramatic conclusion ends with a final, muted sound. Strum may be performed by either a string quartet or string quintet or by a string orchestra.
Saint-Saëns’ greatest contribution was the establishment of the importance of instrumental composition in France, where opera had long been dominant. In April 1868, Anton Rubinstein arrived in Paris suggesting he give a concert with Saint-Saëns. In seventeen days, Saint-Saëns composed music, orchestrated it, copied it, and rehearsed it; on May 6, the composer was soloist, while the visitor conducted the new Piano Concerto No. 2. When Saint-Saëns sent it to Liszt to critique, Liszt said: “The form of it is new and very happy.” Saint-Saëns is known more for his loyalty to the classic spirit than to innovation, but this concerto is a brilliant, colorful piece, and here, his approach is also original. Michael Steinberg commented that in this concerto, the “worlds of Bach’s organ loft and the cabaret meet equitably.” The concerto begins unusually with an expressive slow movement, Andante sostenuto introduced by a solo piano passage, much like a Bach keyboard fantasia, featuring elegant melodies with virtuosic fireworks. Second, comes a fleet Allegro scherzando, in the light-hearted spirit of a scherzo, beginning with a little passage for kettledrums, which must have surprised its first listeners tremendously. The melodic theme starts in the lower strings and bassoons. The Presto finale is a rollicking dance in the spirit of the Italian saltarello.
The score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, with timpani, cymbal, and strings.
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 Johannes Brahms
Brahms spent a large part of his early years wandering from one city to another, meeting many of the important participants in Germany’s decentralized musical life and broadening his artistic horizons. When he was in his twenties, he held a post at the court of a minor principality. He settled in Vienna when he was in his thirties, and like Beethoven before him and Mahler after, he soon began to spend his summers in the country. In winter, Brahms polished his recent compositions and planned his next ones, but the serious business of invention and creation were summer activities for him. Brahms wrote his Symphony No. 4, two movements each summer, during 1884 and 1885, in the Styrian Alps of Austria. Returning from a mountain walk one day, he discovered his lodgings on fire, but fortunately, his friends had been able to carry most of his books and music out of the burning house in his absence before they were destroyed. Fortuitously, the manuscript of this symphony was among the papers saved. Hans von Bülow prepared the orchestra for the first performance of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 at the court of the Duke of Meiningen, and Brahms conducted the première on October 25, 1885. A week later, Bülow had his chance to conduct the new work, and in November, Brahms and von Bülow set off on a concert tour of Germany and the Netherlands with the new symphony in their repertoire. The work was slow to win public favor. Even in Brahms’s own Vienna, the symphony disappointed his friends and delighted his enemies. Twelve years later there was an extraordinary performance of the symphony again in Vienna. Fatally ill with a disease of the liver, Brahms made his last public appearance at a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on March 7, 1897, at which the Symphony No. 4 was played. The composer’s English pupil, Florence May, described the touching scene:
The Fourth Symphony had never become a favorite work in
Vienna, had not gained much more from the general public than the respect accorded there to any important work by Brahms.
Today, however, a storm of applause broke out at the end of the first movement, not to be quieted until the composer, coming to the front of the box in which he was seated, showed himself to the audience. The demonstration was renewed after the second and third movements, and an extraordinary scene followed the conclusion of the work. The applauding, shouting house, its gaze riveted on the figure standing in the balcony, seemed unable to let him go. Tears ran down his cheeks as he stood there, shrunken in form, with lined countenance, strained expression, white hair hanging lank, and through the audience, there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that they were saying farewell. Another outburst of applause, and yet another; one more acknowledgment from the master, and Brahms and his Vienna had parted forever. Considered by some to be Brahms’ most stimulating symphonic work, this symphony is undoubtedly now one of the cornerstones of the symphonic repertoire. This grave work, which has been called an “elegiac” and a “character symphony,” reflects the earnestness and introspection of Brahms’s late years. The first movement, Allegro non troppo, begins lyrically, becomes alternately contemplative and dramatic, and builds to a very dramatic and tension-filled climax. The second, Andante moderato, with its air of nostalgia and serenity, is based principally on an austere theme in the old, ecclesiastical Phrygian mode. The contrasting robust third movement is the symphony’s scherzo, Allegro giocoso, although it is only distantly related in form to the classical scherzo of Beethoven. It is capricious and full of high spirits. The finale, Allegro energico e passionato, is a chaconne, (some call it a passacaglia) a set of continuous variations on an eight-measure theme, based on the chaconne from Bach’s Cantata 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich, and unleashed by the trombones in triple meter. Of magnificent proportions, the movement is full of richly contrasting orchestral colors. After presenting the theme in the wind instruments, Brahms constructs a monumentally powerful series of thirty variations, carefully controlling the ebb and flow of the music, the continuity, and the contrasts in the eight-measure phrases, until a brilliant coda brings the symphony to a close. The score calls for piccolo and two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 11 | 6:30 PM
HAYDN’S LONDON SYMPHONY
CONDUCTOR
David Danzmayr
The Caryl Fuchs Kassoy & David R. Kassoy Conductor’s Podium
GUEST ARTISTS
Angelo Xiang Yu, violin
PROGRAM
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Novelletten for String Orchestra, Op.52 Andante con moto Allegro molto
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, K. 216, “Strassburg” Allegro Adagio Rondeau: Allegro
Franz Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 104 in D Major, “London” Adagio - Allegro Andante Menuetto and Trio: Allegro Finale: Spiritoso
This concert is sponsored by
(Born August 15, 1875, in London, England; died Sept. 1, 1912, in Croydon, England)
The British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the illegitimate child of an Englishtrained physician from Sierra Leone and an English woman. Coleridge-Taylor’s father could not maintain a medical practice in Britain because of his race, so he returned to Africa permanently around the time of Samuel’s birth. The young Coleridge-Taylor sang in a church choir, and a member of that choir, Col. Herbert Walters, took him under his wing and began his musical education. As a child, Coleridge-Taylor also studied violin. He entered the Royal College of Music at fifteen to study composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and had his first music published when he was seventeen. Although he grew up in England, Coleridge-Taylor formed strong ties to the United States and traveled to America three times by his mid-thirties. Soon after, he began collaborating with the African-American poet and author Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). In Britain, Coleridge-Taylor taught at the Croydon Conservatory and was Professor of Composition at Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music as well as a violin teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. In addition to creating a large and varied body of composition, he was conductor of the Handel Society of London from 1904 until his early death from pneumonia in 1912 at the age of thirty-seven. In England, his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast ranked just below Messiah and Elijah in popularity with English choral aficionados early in the 20th century. Jeffrey Green speaks of the legacy Coleridge-Taylor left for musicians of African descent: “By including African, Afro-American, and Afro-Caribbean elements in his compositions in melody and in title, as well as by being visibly and proudly of African descent, the music and the achievements of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had made black concert musicians proud and able to walk tall, especially in America where the compositions of European masters dominated in concert hall programs.” After the first of his trips to the United States, he became interested in African-American music, composing 4 African Dances (1904) and 24 Negro Melodies (1905), transcriptions of spirituals for chamber orchestra, at around the same time he wrote Novelletten. His trips to the United States came at the invitation of the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society for African-American men. In 1910, New York orchestral players referred to him as the “black Mahler,” and President Theodore Roosevelt honored him by inviting him to the White House. These Novelletten have been described as high-quality salon music, a genre popular before World War I, when musical evenings in private homes were popular. The term Novellette originated with composer Robert Schumann who used it for the title of one of his piano cycles. Coleridge-Taylor may have been playing with an English version of this new term’s incorporation of the words “novel” and “novelty,” and even, some believe, extending the punning to his publisher of Novelletten, Novello. Novelletten was composed in 1903 for violin and piano and in an alternate version for string orchestra with tambourine and triangle, an unusual complement to a string orchestra. Novelletten is made up of four modest but graceful character pieces, whose dance-like qualities are reinforced through the use of the triangle and tambourine. All four of the Novelletten have a fairly simple ABA form. Our program includes the last two of the four pieces. An emotional violin solo is highlighted in the pensive third piece, Andante con moto, although the contrasting central section is much more intense and driven. The last of the Novelletten, Allegro molto, is in an entirely different character than the three before it, bringing forth a more hearty adventurous spirit, but the central core of the piece becomes soft and mysterious before the initial music returns for a powerful ending.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 3 in G Major, K. 216, “Strassburg” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
At the height of his career, during his mature years in Vienna, Mozart was admired at least as much for his brilliant piano playing as for his compositions, which were then thought to be only incidental to a virtuoso’s work as a performer. In his youth, Mozart had played the violin in public, too, and was the concertmaster of the Archbishop’s court orchestra in Salzburg, but the young musician always preferred the piano. Leopold Mozart, his father, was a violinist of some distinction whose important instruction book, first published in 1756, was translated into other languages and widely used for at least fifty years. He thought that his son could become the finest violinist in Europe and always regretted Wolfgang’s abandonment of his own preferred instrument; nevertheless, the younger Mozart wrote much music in which he featured the violin, and did not only utilize it for concerti. He gave it a prominent part in chamber music as well as in some of his orchestral serenades and divertimentos, which have long concerto-like solo movements for violin in them. Mozart probably composed his five violin concertos for one of his colleagues, but we really know no more of this concerto’s history than that it, like the two which were to follow it, was written in Salzburg by 1775. As the young concertmaster of the orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart probably composed these concertos for himself or for one of his colleagues to play at the archiepiscopal court concerts. Today, critics think these movements are nearly perfect as they stand, but when they were to be played by Antonio Brunetti, a notorious dullard who was the Archbishop’s favorite and not a very skilled violinist, Mozart needed to replace entire superbly crafted movements to suit Brunetti’s taste and skill. These violin concertos of Mozart offer the listener various charms and delights. Their fluency of discourse, their mastery of rhetoric, their richness of ideas, and their subtlety of wit make them exemplary. After a performance of Concerto No. 3 in Augsburg in 1777, Mozart wrote home to his father that his execution had been “smooth as oil.” The Allegro first movement borrows melodic material, and perhaps something of its mood, from the opera Mozart had composed earlier that same year, Il rè pastore (“The Shepherd King”). The main theme launches forth with a regal, satisfied air. The movement is set in the traditional sonata form with orchestral ritornellos alternating with the exposition, development, and recapitulation of the violin’s themes. Before the recapitulation, the soloist has a recitative-like figure. An extended solo cadenza precedes the coda. The slow cantabile melody of the second movement, Adagio, is of a profundity that the young composer had never attained before, and it has only the very slightest of accompaniments. Like the first movement, the Adagio includes a solo cadenza at the end of the movement. contrasting episodes, begins slowly, in the French style, then takes on a lively Italianate rhythm and quotes the French dances gavotte and musette then fashionable in Strassburg (Strasbourg) recalling the opening music, before it whimsically fades away. Mozart simply breaks off in mid-phrase after giving the last word not to the solo violin, nor even the strings, but to the winds, who, until that point, have sturdily filled in harmonies and not had a prominent role. The score calls for two flutes (in the second movement), two oboes (in the first and third movements), two horns, and strings.
From 1761 to 1790, Haydn was in the service of the Esterházy family, an ancient, noble, Magyar line that had made its fortune by joining the Catholic Emperors of Austria against the Turks. “My prince was satisfied with all my work,” he told his earliest biographer. “As head of the orchestra, I could experiment, observe...take risks. There was no one nearby to serve as model, to challenge me or to make me doubt myself, so I had to be original.” In 1790, when Prince Nicolaus Esterházy died, his successor reduced the size of his musical establishment and pensioned off the fifty-eight-year-old composer. On learning that Haydn had become a free agent, the German violinist Johann Peter Salomon, who had become a successful impresario in London, rushed to Vienna and persuaded him to go to England for a series of concerts. Haydn was to be very much a star attraction, and since musical novelty was greatly valued then, he was to write six new symphonies for performance there. “My arrival caused a great sensation in the city,” Haydn wrote to a friend back home, and, very much like any contemporary touring virtuoso, added, “I made the rounds of the newspapers.” He was lionized, sought out by musicians, pursued by the wealthy and noble, adored by women, even honored with a degree from Oxford University. When Salomon offered a return engagement, he quickly accepted. He made a second journey on January 19, 1794, traveled down the Rhine, and arrived in London on February 4. The Symphony No. 104, composed in London in 1795, was first performed on May 4, 1795, at G. B. Viotti’s Opera Concerts in the King’s Theatre. The Haydn scholar, Karl Geiringer, has made the significance of the connection between Haydn and Mozart very clear in his hypothesis that Symphony No. 104 may have been written in homage to Mozart, whose early death Haydn mourned deeply. Haydn noted in his manuscript that this symphony was “the 12th which I have composed in England.” He had written some of the symphonies for Salomon’s concerts in advance, while still in Vienna, but this one was, in fact, the twelfth that he wrote specifically for English audiences. This symphony is also his last symphony and is now known as the London Symphony, one of his very greatest works in the form. It had a large influence on succeeding generations of COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 43
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 11 | 6:30 PM
symphony composers from Beethoven to Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and even Richard Wagner, who never became a symphonic composer. Wagner, at the age of eighteen, as an educational exercise in the craft of writing for orchestra, copied out every note of Haydn’s score. The symphony opens in the dark minor mode, Adagio, with a slow, solemn introduction, thought by many critics to be the most profound and poignant music Haydn ever composed. It is filled with the interval of a perfect fifth and employs surprising chromatic harmonies that linger on and then move into the major key when the body of the movement begins at a lively new tempo, Allegro. Here Haydn introduces the main theme, drawn from a motive of the gentle melody of the Adagio introduction. This entire sonataform movement is based on this single subject, its opening theme. This use of one theme was an old practice of Haydn’s that he did not always use in his later works. In the development section, Haydn concentrates on this small figure that first appears in the movement’s second and third measures and is characterized by its four repeated notes. It helps to build tension with its relentless insistence. The recapitulation takes the material from the exposition and varies it greatly; Haydn closes with the unusual use of open fifths. The second movement, a peaceful Andante, is written in a simple three-part form (ABA) that closes as it opens with a contrasting section in the middle. This movement, too, is based on a single subject, for the middle section presents no new melodic line, but a minor-key variant of the theme heard at the beginning. In this part of the movement, brass and timpani recall the slow introduction of the first movement. The movement contains many surprises from the centrally placed woodwind lament in the minor, a variant of the opening, to the delicate solo flute passage. The movement ends with additional variations on the theme.
Next comes a powerful Minuet, Allegro, with a contrasting central trio section featuring the woodwinds. It evokes a rustic peasant dance with heavy feet and many jolts of rhythm, which Haydn achieves by putting the accent on the last beat of the measure. Here Haydn is in a jocular mood. The trio has a pastoral section for wind soloists and strings before it modulates into the original key of D Major. The Finale, Allegro spiritoso, is brilliant and witty. Its main theme, first articulated over a long bagpipe type of drone created by the horns and cellos, probably takes its source from folk music, specifically a Croatian folksong. Recent research has identified it as the ballad “Oj Jelena.” Some evidence suggests that the contemporary London street cries of “Hot Cross Buns” and “Live Cod” also inspired Haydn. The subject’s shape resembles that of the first movement’s theme and yet its character is more imposing and sonorous. In the development section, the main theme, divided into two parts, receives a contrapuntal treatment. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets and timpani, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 13 | 7:30 PM
JUILLIARD STRING QUARTET
GUEST ARTISTS
Juilliard String Quartet
PROGRAM
Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F Major Allegro moderato - très doux Assez vif - très rythmé Très lent Vif et agité
Henri Dutilleux, “Ainsi la Nuit” (Thus the Night) (1976) Nocturne Miroir d’espace Litanies Litanies II Constellations Nocturne II Temps suspendu
ˇ Antonín Dvorák, String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, “American” Allegro ma non troppo Lento Molto vivace Finale: vivace ma non troppo
This concert is sponsored by
HAROLD & JOAN LEINBACH
String Quartet in F Major Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel was the son of a distinguished engineer and inventor who, in 1868, patented a self-propelled, steam-powered vehicle that ran for two hours in the streets of Paris. In the 1870s, when the father was working on railroad construction projects in Spain, his first son was born on the French side of the nearby frontier; the family returned to Paris a few months later. At the age of seven, Maurice Ravel began his musical studies; at eighteen, he began to write music; at twenty, he was a published composer. At twenty-seven, however, Ravel was still a student at the Conservatory in Paris, enrolled in the composition class of Gabriel Fauré, trying to win official honors without which a French composer could then hardly expect to have a successful career. He never succeeded in writing the kind of cantata that would secure him the important Prix de Rome, and when he submitted the first movement of this quartet for the Conservatory’s annual composition prize, the faculty committee dismissed it as too labored. Posterity finds this the most conservative of the work’s four movements, but Ravel’s great rhythmic and harmonic freedom was apparently beyond the understanding of the reactionary committee. Only Fauré understood the young composer, who later dedicated the quartet to him, but in the meantime, the faculty dismissed Ravel from the Conservatory, presumably ending his career. Ravel, nevertheless, completed the quartet in 1903 when he was twenty-eight; it premiered in 1904. Ravel, an intellectual, allied himself to a group of young Parisians called Les Apaches, self-declared outcasts, artists, poets, and musicians who strove to follow in the footsteps of Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Corbière, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Chopin, Whistler, Valery, and Debussy, as well as to emulate Russian and Asian art. Many Parisian critics were more perceptive than the Conservatory faculty; the public also immediately recognized Ravel as an important new composer and admired the new textures he produced in this early work. Debussy initially supported Ravel and approved highly of this composition, but after the quartets of the two were inevitably compared, and too many critics contended that Ravel borrowed from and patterned his quartet on that of Debussy, Debussy distanced himself from Ravel, who commented on the situation, “It’s probably better for us, after all, to be on frigid terms for illogical reasons.” Some similarities between the two quartets (Debussy’s was written in 1893, ten years before Ravel’s) do exist. Both contain cells of themes, both embrace cyclicality, both use pizzicato to create color in the second movements, and both use mutes in the third movements. The quartet integrates several of the influences Les Apaches revered, while nevertheless developing its own musical style. Ravel brings together Debussy’s Impressionistic use of varying tone colors as well as the Classicist’s transparent textures and tightly controlled structural organization, and even unusual Eastern tonal effects. The first movement, Allegro moderato — Très doux, quite classical in construction, is based on traditional sonata form, with two contrasting themes, both rich and warm, that become lyrically transformed and developed, and then recalled. The musical material of the first theme reappears in cyclical fashion later in the quartet, tightly interwoven with the subject matter of the succeeding movements. The first violin and viola together introduce the second theme, playing in unison but two octaves apart, which creates an unusual tone color. Second comes a brilliant scherzo, Assez vif — très rythmé, with a colorful pizzicato opening that Ravel used to create something that has been likened to the sound of a Javanese gamelan or the sound of bells. Here Ravel uses cross-rhythms with the outer instruments, the first violin, and the cello, playing in 3/4 meter, and the inner parts, the second violin, and the viola playing in 6/8 meter, using two beats of three eighth notes per beat against them. A contrasting broad section makes up the center, and a short recapitulation of the
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 13 | 7:30 PM
first section concludes the movement. In the slow middle section, echoes of the first movement appear embedded. The next movement, Très lent, very slow, free, and rhapsodic, has frequently changing tempos and, in a cyclic fashion, contains the first theme of the first movement within the new theme. Here again, the tone colors are imaginative and diverse. The spirited finale, Vif et agité, alternates vigorous drive with a calm repose. Historians have suggested that its five-beat rhythm may have Russian inspiration, but regardless, it has an unstable feel. Here again, the first movement theme returns and alternates with lyrical themes and the angry opening motif.
(Born January 22, 1916, in Angers, France; died May 22, 2013, in Paris)
The contemporary French composer Henri Dutilleux was always respected as a thoroughly independent composer, not allied with any particular contemporary school, but his music was influenced by the music of his countrymen: Debussy, Ravel, and Roussel. His complex music includes polytonality as well as polyrhythm. He credited Proust’s theory of memory for influencing his complex rendering of time. Over the years, Dutilleux did not compose a large corpus of work, creating only nine major works in the four decades since 1959. Dutilleux studied at the Paris Conservatory between 1933 and 1938. In 1938, he won the Prix de Rome, but the war’s outbreak cut short his tenure in Italy. During the years of World War II, he was a stretcher-bearer, and in 1942, took on the role of the chorus master at the Paris Opéra. After the war and until 1963, he worked for French Radio as director of music productions. In the early 1960s, he began teaching at the Ecole Normale de Musique and then, from 1970, at the Paris Conservatoire. He was a member of the French section of the International Society for Contemporary Music and a committee member of the International Music Council of UNESCO. Madame Koussevitsky commissioned the quartet Ainsi la nuit for the Juilliard Quartet and dedicated it to the memory of Ed Sussman. Dutilleux composed the work between 1973 and 1976, and it premiered in France on January 6, 1977, with the Parrenin Quartet; its American premiere was in April 1978 with the Juilliard Quartet at the Library of Congress in Washington. Before beginning to compose it, Dutilleux studied string techniques because he had not written a work for quartet since his student days. Trying to veer away from classical and romantic patterns, Dutilleux gave the work an unusual structure: it is made up of short sections or movements. In addition to its seven movements, there are short “parentheses” (his term) between the first five movements, which either foreshadow what is to come or provide brief meditations on the material he uses as building blocks for his work. The movements are played continuously without a break with only the brief parentheses in between. The last three movements follow each other directly without parentheses. Dutilleux felt the “convention of splitting a work into movements separated by pauses . . . impairs the power of enchantment.” Dutilleux gave names to the seven brief movements; the most protracted is less than four minutes long, the shortest only a minute, the parentheses even shorter. Dutilleux said that his titles for the movements of this string quartet set up definite contexts; the music establishes a nocturnal mood. A decade before he composed this quartet, he described his philosophy of music: “First, in the realm of form, careful avoidance of prefabricated formal scaffolding, with a predilection for the spirit of variation. Further, a penchant towards a certain type of sonority (with priority given to what might be called ‘the joy of sound.’) An avoidance of so-called program music, or indeed any music containing a ‘message,’ even though I do not, of course, deny in our art a meaning of spiritual order. And finally, at a more technical level, the absolute necessity of choice, of the economy of means.” Unquestionably Dutilleux indicated his fondness here for a strident sound and open strings. The critic Paul Griffiths summed up Dutilleux’s perspective, “While he gradually moved away from regular tonality in favor of a richer harmony, he maintained a powerful sense of direction. In form, too, his music evolved, from closed and abstract symphonic patterns to open-ended, atmospheric stretches within a continuous unfolding of melodic transformation.” Many of the distinguishing characteristics of Dutilleux’s major works are evident in Ainsi la nuit, including what has been frequently referred to as “fan-shaped” writing, in which he outlines a tonal triad in a seemingly atonal work and a resemblance of some of his themes to the modality of Gregorian chant. Describing his feelings about Ainsi la nuit, Dutilleux said “my intention” was to write “strict studies, a series of studies each dealing with the various kinds of string sound; one study in pizzicatos, others in harmonics, dynamic contrasts, oppositions of register and so on. Altogether an experimental field with no poetic impulse behind it.” He explained the title is totally “made up” and not a quotation from something. The music, he says, “tends to follow the titles. Time stops as though suspended. There’s a spiritual side to it.” The untitled introduction features a pivot chord and establishes “D” as the central pitch. In the first movement, Nocturne I, Dutilleux introduces elements of the Gregorian chant. In “Litanies I” Dutilleux gives the music a more lively spirit. The fourth movement, Litanies II, also animated, establishes “F#” as a new central pitch and has a modal theme with similarities to Gregorian chant. The fifth movement, Constellations, is actually the dynamic, textual, and emotional climax of the work, and here “A” becomes the central pitch. Many commentators have noted that the last movement, Temps suspendu, is a metaphorical reference to Proust’s famous novel, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du Temps perdu). For this reason, Ainsi la nuit is often associated with the idea of memory, but Dutilleux tended to make light of the connection.
String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, “American Quartet” ˇ Antonín Dvorák
Dvořák played the violin and organ as a child before moving to Prague to study; he then joined the National Theater Orchestra as a violist (in those days an instrument usually played only by failed violinists), but he was almost thirty before one of his compositions was performed. Eventually, he became a figure of world importance: a professor at Prague Conservatory, a recipient of honorary degrees from Cambridge University in England and the University in Prague, and director of a conservatory in New York. One of the gifted and eager youths who flocked to Dvořák’s classes in New York was an African-American musician, Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949), who was to have a distinguished career as a composer and singer. Burleigh taught Dvořák spirituals and slaves’ work songs, ones he had in mind when he wrote, “The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies. These beautiful themes are the product of the soil, the folk songs of America, and composers must turn to them. All great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people.” Dvořák, inspired by them, later explained, “I tried to write in the spirit of the American folk melodies.” After his first academic year, Dvořák happily left the noise and tumult that even then plagued New York to spend the summer in Spillville, Iowa, a tiny town settled by Czech immigrants, where he felt at home. There he composed two major works in his newly invented “American” style, this Quartet and String Quintet, Op. 97. (The New World Symphony, which he had completely sketched in New York, was orchestrated in Spillville.) Between June 8 and 10, he sketched the entire quartet, noting, “It went quickly, thank God. I am satisfied with it.” On the 23rd, he completed the work. On January 12, 1894, the Kneisel Quartet premiered it in New York. The quartet’s beauty and freshness of expression have less to do with America than with Dvořák’s delight on discovering Bohemia, in Spillville. The syncopated rhythms and the pentatonic scales may possibly suggest the kind of melody that the composer learned from his African-American students, or as is sometimes claimed, from the Native Americans who lived near Spillville, but he would probably not have learned enough of the latter’s style to include it only three days after his arrival there. The simple truth is that many of the music’s characteristics can also be heard in Bohemian folk music and in many works Dvořák wrote long before he arrived in America. The Quartet opens, Allegro, ma non troppo, with a quietly joyous, expansive movement, whose original themes, clearly stated and defined, are classically organized and treated. The Lento slow movement, an extended melancholy duet for violin and cello, has a gently rocking accompaniment. Next comes a scherzo, Molto vivace, in which the predominance of a single theme makes the music seem almost to be a set of free variations. The warbling figure wittily reflects the song of what Dvořák called “a damned bird, red, but with black wings,” perhaps the scarlet tanager. The Finale is a rondo, Vivace, ma non troppo, a jolly romp that pauses only for a brief chorale of the kind that Dvořák improvised at the Spillville church organ.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 15 | 7:30 PM & JULY 16 | 6:30 PM
OLGA KERN + PROKOFIEV’S CLASSICAL SYMPHONY
CONDUCTOR Ludovic Morlot
GUEST ARTIST Olga Kern, piano
PROGRAM
ˇ Antonín Dvorák, Legends, Op. 59 Allegro con moto - Moderato Allegretto grazioso - poco più mosso Andante con moto
Sergei Prokofiev, Symphony No. 1, Op. 25, “Classical” Allegro Larghetto Gavotte: Non troppo allegro Finale: Molto vivace
Franz Joseph Haydn, Piano Concerto in D Major, Hob. XVIII:11 Vivace Un poco adagio Rondo all’ungherese: Allegro assai
Dmitri Shostakovich, Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 35 Allegro moderato Lento Moderato Allegro con brio
The July 15 concert is sponsored by
ARLENE GERWIN IN MEMORY OF JAMES GERWIN
Legends, Op. 59 ˇ Antonín Dvorák
Dvořák came from a humble and non-musical background. In his native village, Dvořák’s father was a butcher and innkeeper, but that did not deter his son from beginning to study the violin and organ. By age sixteen, Dvořák found it necessary to go to Prague to study. By the age of twenty-one, he had shifted to playing the viola, traditionally the instrument taken up by failed violinists, and had joined the orchestra of the National Theater. By that point he was already composing too, initially creating lengthy compositions in the classical forms. He did not become well-known for another decade, except marginally in the local Prague community of musicians. When he was thirty-four, in 1875, Brahms recognized his talent and gave Dvořák significant help to propel him into his successful career. Brahms arranged for Dvořák to receive a generous grant from the Austrian Minister of Culture, which allowed him the freedom to concentrate on creative work in his early maturity. The success of Dvořák’s Duets (see below) led to several commissions from his publisher, Simrock, including the two sets of Slavonic Dances and these of Legends, Op. 59. Dvořák began work on Legends at the very end of 1880, completing the set of ten pieces for piano four-hands (with two people playing one piano) on March 22nd in the following year. The scoring suggested that the publisher was hoping for revenue that would be generated by the sizable domestic music-making market of the time. There was always a significant domestic market for piano duets, which had been exploited by Brahms in his Hungarian Dances as well as by Dvořák in his Slavonic Dances; nevertheless, at his publisher’s request, and in all likelihood because of the favorable response from contemporary critics, Dvořák did orchestrate Legends before the year was out. He dedicated Legends to the critic Eduard Hanslick, saying that the main role in each piece is dedicated to something “miraculous, enchanting.” Brahms, who welcomed the works with great enthusiasm wrote, “They are fascinating, and the fresh, exuberant, rich powers of invention are enviable.” The ten Legends, although not as well known as his two sets of Slavonic Dances, have, in their unassuming way, all the depth of Dvořák’s larger, more well-known pieces. More lyrical and less dance-like than the Slavonic Dances, the pieces demonstrate a skilled interweaving of color. Dvořák’s subtle, imaginative scoring incorporates unpredictable, engaging harmonic shifts. Lyrical in mood, each of the relatively short pieces is imbued with the spirit of Bohemia, Dvořák’s native country. Dvořák did not give the Legends a narrative program, but historians feel it may have been inspired by Liszt’s Legends, composed on the subject of the life of St. Francis. Some musicologists attest that Dvořák’s work is based on meditations on the lives of saints. Regardless, the music is unquestionably intimate, introspective, and serious, even though sections of it have an air of light-heartedness. Each is characterized by a wholesome freshness. Within the pieces, Dvořák’s motifs are generally brief, succinct, and very skillfully shaped.
The July 16 concert is sponsored by
The instruments Dvořák chose to highlight differ for each individual piece. The work premiered in sections in 1882, first at a concert of the Prague Conservatory (Nos. 1, 3, 4), conducted by Antonín Bennewitz, and then three more pieces (Nos. 2, 5, 6) by the Vienna Philharmonic on November 26, 1882, conducted by Wilhelm Jahn. Generally in three-part form, our selection opens with the flowing sixth piece, Allegro con moto, a nocturne with a passionate woodwind trio, which introduces a feel of romantic drama, although the middle section and the ending are gently relaxed and nostalgic. This selection foreshadows parts of the Eighth Symphony with an evocation of woodland and foliage. The seventh, Allegretto grazioso, has a capricious-sounding opening rhythm; the piece begins gracefully in the violins and becomes livelier in the middle section, concluding dramatically featuring the horns and winds. The ninth, Andante con moto, the shortest of the Legend pieces, employs a Bohemian folk dance-like form. Legends is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, timpani, harp, and strings.
Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Op. 25, “Classical” Sergei Prokofiev
(Born April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka; died March 5, 1953, in Moscow)
The marvelous blend of economy, clarity, wit, and whimsy that Sergei Prokofiev gleaned from Haydn and Mozart appears in the Classical Symphony as the direct result of what he learned at conservatory and the special interest that a faculty member, Nicolai Tcherepnin, had in him. Tcherepnin believed that a good understanding of Haydn and Mozart would be valuable to young composers, teaching Prokofiev how the Classical composers used form and achieved grace and fluidity stylistically. In 1916, Prokofiev began to sketch his own symphony in the classical manner, and in 1917, the year of the Czar’s abdication, the October Revolution, and Lenin’s rise to power, he completed it. In his words, the Classical Symphony is “as Haydn might have written it, had he lived in our day.” Prokofiev did not desire to imitate old styles but rather to update them. He sometimes referred to this work as his Symphony No. 1, although he had written and discarded others in 1902 and 1908. He gave this work the title Classical Symphony with the “secret hope that in the course of time it might turn out to be a classic.” Humor is the symphony’s predominant emotion. Prokofiev’s early 20th-century sensibility completely absorbs and transforms classicism, and to Western ears, the music even sounds particularly Russian. Although the symphony unquestionably echoes Haydn’s wit, it also includes an irony that Prokofiev used again in his later symphonies. Much shorter than its Classical antecedents, the symphony includes four movements that play with forms, melodies, phrase structures, and rhythms typical of classicism, twisting them around humorously. The first movement, a perfectly shaped sonata-form, Allegro, begins with the violins enunciating the first theme followed by the flutes’ contributions of additional melody and thematic material. The violins introduce the second subject with the bassoons aiding them. The second movement, Larghetto, is a prepossessing, slow dance in triple meter much like a stately minuet. In the third movement, where Haydn and Mozart usually placed a minuet, Prokofiev writes another dance, a Gavotte, Non troppo allegro, in duple time instead of the minuet’s three, displaying great good humor and grace. In its whimsical trio, low stringed instruments deliver a bagpipelike drone. This movement was especially popular, and as a result, Prokofiev used the same idea again, enlarging it, in the Romeo and Juliet ballet. The speedy sonata-allegro Finale, Molto vivace, closes the work with a great flash of brilliance. The Classical Symphony was first performed on April 21, 1918, in St. Petersburg, with the composer conducting the Petrograd Court Orchestra. It is scored for a classical orchestra: pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and timpani, with a body of strings.
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D Major, H. XVIII, No. 11 Joseph Haydn
Joseph Haydn, known as the father of the symphony, one of the greatest composers in the history of orchestral music, wrote curiously few concertos. The reason is perhaps that although he played the violin and piano with professional competence, he was not as great a virtuoso himself as Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven were. He had no distaste for virtuosity, however, which is evident from the difficulty of his symphonies, his quartets, his piano trios, and his piano sonatas. He wrote hundreds of works in every other important form, but the princely family that employed him for much of his lifetime was quite content with the occasional concerto that he composed for some particularly talented member of the house orchestra, a special occasion, or on commission. His three best and most well-known concertos are a Cello Concerto in D Major, a Trumpet Concerto that is a relatively rare curiosity, and this D Major Piano Concerto. We do not know why he composed this piano concerto or exactly when; probably around 1780 or 1782. It went into circulation quickly, and within a few years, it had been published in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. A Haydn concerto was such a rarity that one reviewer, writing in 1786, wondered if it was an authentic work or, as was the case with many symphonies issued as his, someone else’s composition with the famous composer’s name added by unscrupulous publishers. This Piano Concerto is a brilliant but intimate work in three movements, cleverly and even colorfully written for a small orchestra of two oboes, two horns, and strings. The first movement, Vivace, is based principally on a single lively theme with incidental and accompanying motives functioning as subsidiary material.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 15 | 7:30 PM & JULY 16 | 6:30 PM
Next comes a poetic slow movement in a simple three-part form, Un poco adagio. The high point of the work is its brilliant finale, a Rondo in the Hungarian Style, Allegro assai. Haydn’s own brief cadenzas for the first and second movements are often played in contemporary performances of the concerto. The concerto is scored for pairs of oboes and horns plus strings.
(Born September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg; died August 8, 1975, in Moscow)
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 and his Piano Concerto No. 1 are works that established his worldwide reputation as a formidable Russian composer. He wrote the Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1933, and he played the solo part himself when it was performed for the first time at a concert of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic on October 15, 1933. This extremely virtuosic concerto attests to the composer’s exceptional technical facility. A film from the 1930s survives, showing his playing the Finale of the concerto at such an incredible speed that other players found virtually impossible; very few interpreters have played it with such haste. The concerto is a compact four-movement work written for an orchestra of strings and solo trumpet. It marks Shostakovich’s foray into a more popular, more melodic, and less dissonant style than he had been using prior to his composition of this work. It has neo-Classical elements and a light feel with crisp texture brought about by the two-voiced counterpoint. It has occasional percussive sections that recall the works of Prokofiev. The first movement, in sonata-allegro form, Allegro moderato, opens, with a simple muted trumpet melody with the accompaniment of ascending and descending scalar figures in the piano. The piano introduces the lyrical first theme, to be taken up by the violins. The piano subsequently introduces the second rather rhythmic theme with the strings and the trumpet then joining in a quick Allegro vivace. The development is frequently contrapuntal, ending with a restatement of the first theme set against the trumpet. The first theme is contemplative in character; the second faster theme is witty and gay; the two-part form is classical in character. The second movement, in ABA form, Lento, is modal in feeling with muted strings bringing on the main theme, a long sustained melody, with the piano introducing a counter-theme. It provides a contrast to the first movement with its sad, slow waltz. The trumpet softly intones the main theme over the strings. This movement has a passionate climax. The third movement is a brief Intermezzo, Moderato, featuring two cadenzas for the piano, one, unaccompanied; the other, with accompaniment, is improvisatory in character. There is a short middle section for strings alone. The fourth and last movement, Allegro con brio, brilliantly mixes witty tunes, beginning with the piano accompanied by the bass strings in a short prelude, after which the whole orchestra takes up the main theme. Soon the piano re-enters, and the trumpet, with a significant part in rollicking good spirits, joins in. Shostakovich playfully parodies the melodic musical material of classical sonatas, and then toward the end, he writes a long piano cadenza, based on the quotation of a melody from Beethoven’s well-known rondo for piano solo entitled Rage over a Lost Penny. A lively coda follows with the trumpet playing a melody reminiscent of a theme from a Haydn piano sonata. The work is scored for piano, trumpet, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 18 | 6:30 PM
CONRAD TAO PERFORMS MOZART
CONDUCTOR Ludovic Morlot
GUEST ARTIST
Conrad Tao, piano
PROGRAM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Idomeneo Ballet Music, K. 367 Chaconne Pas seul
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488 Allegro Adagio Allegro assai
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550 Molto allegro Andante Menuetto: Allegretto Allegro assai
This concert is sponsored by
Chaconne and Pas seul from Idomeneo: Ballet Music, K. 367 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart composed his tenth opera, Idomeneo, in late 1780 and the first weeks of 1781, at the age of twenty-five, at which point he had already been a professional musician for twenty years. Idomeneo made its premiere at the Residenztheater in Munich on January 29, 1781. Its serious and ambitious music captured attention for Mozart when he was a still relatively unknown composer. Musicians have always admired this opera; Brahms called it “in general a miracle.” The first time Mozart traveled alone without one of his parents accompanying him, was when he journeyed to Munich to prepare the production of Idomeneo, an opera seria with roots in a play based on ancient legends. For his subject, Mozart chose an old French libretto by Danchet that André Campra had set in 1712; Mozart asked the Salzburg Court Chaplain, Giambattista Varesco, to adapt the story and translate it into Italian. Idomeneo, the king of Crete, survives a storm at sea and thanks Neptune for his good fortune by promising to offer in sacrifice the first living being he encounters on land. This unlucky person turns out to be his own son, Idamante. Neptune sends a monster to cause destruction when Idomeneo does not comply with the agreement, but Idamante kills the monster. In the final act, Idomeneo is about to sacrifice his son when the son’s beloved Ilia intervenes, offering her own life instead. Neptune decrees that Idomeneo must yield the throne to Ilia and Idamante, and the people call upon the god of love and marriage to bless the royal pair and bring peace. In Mozart’s time, operas frequently ended with a ballet, and Idomeneo was no exception, although it is not known what scenario was used for its choreography. The opera’s story and Mozart’s music make commentators believe that the ballet was intended to depict festivities held at the coronation of Prince Idamante. The music Mozart composed for the ballet includes a group of five dances. Mozart’s ballet music is unquestionably marvelous, but at least once when writing a letter home, he referred to this ballet music as “these accursed dances.” This extended ballet’s first two dances are the “Chaconne” and the “Pas Seul (de Mr. LeGrand).” The highlight of the five is the powerfully majestic “Chaconne,” brilliantly ceremonial and quite varied in its moods. The chaconne is a dance that probably originated in post-conquest Mexico; it traveled first to Spain, then to Italy, and finally to France. It most typically includes a set of variations on a repeated pattern of harmonies or over a repeated bass, but in the 17th and 18th centuries, a chaconne often was a piece in which a refrain of the theme returns after each variation (almost like in a rondo with the main theme alternating with other ideas). In Mozart’s elaborate chaconne, each episode, Allegro, is followed by a refrain, which is interrupted by a slower section, Larghetto. Mozart borrowed the chaconne theme from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide of 1774, which the late musicologist Michael Steinberg postulated Mozart did perhaps as an homage to Gluck or because the theme was so recognizable that it was, in effect, common property. Most likely the corps de ballet danced the refrain, but individual dancers were featured in the episodes, especially since the interludes are marked as “Pas seul,” meaning solo dance. (Mozart even listed the soloists’ names at the head of each section.) The Munich ballet master, Monsieur LeGrand, gave himself the biggest solo portion, an independent pas seul (solo dance), which follows the “Chaconne” without a pause. Monsieur LeGrand’s “Pas seul” is a movement in four parts, each part quicker than the preceding one. The Ballet Music from Idomeneo is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, and two bassoons; two horns and two trumpets; timpani, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 18 | 6:30 PM
Piano Concerto No.23 in A Major, K. 488 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
K. 488 is the most charming of the trilogy of piano concertos Mozart wrote in 1785-86. The themes are delightful, and the writing is captivating. During the winter and spring of 1785-1786, Mozart wrote three piano concertos, The Marriage of Figaro and the little one-act operatic comedy, The Impresario. The Concerto in A Major was the second of the concertos; he completed it on March 2, 1786. He planned to perform all these works at his Lenten concerts when the opera and theaters were closed for the solemn season and there was little other entertainment for the Viennese. After several years of experience, Mozart had learned how to appeal to his public, and his reputation assured him of a good audience if he had a big new work for each event. Sometime earlier, he had written in a letter to his father that his new concertos were “a very happy medium between too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural. There are special passages from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction, but I believe that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, even without knowing why.” If the A-major Concerto made concessions to public taste, they were in the direction of poignant beauty and intense expression. The elegant, plastic themes lend themselves perfectly to Mozart’s skillful manipulation of the musical forms current in his time. Although sometimes he completely worked out pieces in his head before writing them down on paper, he changed his mind several times about this one. Surviving sketches show that he began to write an entirely different slow movement and then made two false starts on the finale before he developed his ideas into the finished work. The first movement, Allegro, is one of the few in which Mozart’s bountiful invention is presented with the simplicity and regularity that became textbook models. He leaves nothing to chance. Even the soloist’s cadenza, which would have been left open for improvisation or written down separately at another time, he writes out in full in the score. The second movement is marked Adagio, slow and leisurely, even though Mozart often said that his concertos’ second movements were always to be played Andante, at a moderate walking pace. The movement is not long, but expresses deep emotion, and is full of the uniquely beautiful kind of woodwind writing that Mozart had created in 1784 for his concerto-like Quintet for Piano and Winds. The last movement is a rondo, Allegro assai, in which new melodies pour out, one after another, in alternation with a humorous main theme that the unaccompanied piano first announces. The piece is scored for flute, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and strings. This concerto and the preceding one, K. 482, were Mozart’s first with clarinets, which he used in place of the usual pair of oboes.
An anonymous critic of this symphony once wrote, “There are few things in art that are perfect. The G minor Symphony is one of them.” In two months of the summer of 1788, at a time of terrible misfortune and disappointments, Mozart wrote this and two other symphonies, which were the three last symphonies he composed. It was a particularly hard time for him because his wife was ill and his always troubled finances had never been worse. He made every effort he could to ward off great despair; he even wrote his friend Puchberg for a loan explaining that he was in a period “prey to gloomy thoughts which I must repel with all my might.” Instead of reflections of the composer’s unhappy condition, the three symphonies are powerfully assertive works. Perhaps Mozart’s troubles had caused him to turn inward and to discover within himself, consciously or unconsciously, music of an emotional depth that no one had ever before imagined possible. Mozart presumably had none of the usual reasons for writing the symphonies he had had in the past because there were no commissions and no promises of concert dates, nor a publisher waiting to receive them. At that time, composers rarely wrote solely from inspiration, and some historians believe these three symphonies were conceived purely from an inner, emotional, expressive impulse. No record exists of when any of Mozart’s last three symphonies were first performed; the only evidence that the Symphony in G minor may possibly have been played during Mozart’s lifetime is the fact that he later re-orchestrated it, adding two clarinets to the orchestra and revising the two oboe parts to fit the enlarged wind section. The occasion for the revision may have been the pair of concerts, given at the Imperial and Royal Court Theater for the benefit of the widows and orphans of musicians, performed on April 16 and 17, 1791, less than eight months before Mozart’s own death. Among the prominent performers included his sister-in-law and Vienna’s leading clarinetists, the Stadler brothers. The unidentified symphony that opened the program may have been this one, in its clarinet version. The musical director of the event was Antonio Salieri. As Mozart also changed the orchestration of two passages of the second movement, his recent biographer, Robert Gutman, believes that such modifications could have only followed from the results of specific performances such as this one. Gutman thus concludes that the popular idea that Mozart never heard his last three symphonies is a myth. In describing this work, Pitts Sanborn noted: “There is no doubt that this symphony is touched with the ineffable sadness that sometimes crosses like a summer cloud the radiance of Mozart’s sun-god temperament. And along with this, there are moments of celestial tenderness. Yet, at the same time, this Symphony has its capricious and sprite-like quality, which comes out in the ascending and descending pairs of thirty-second notes in the Andante echoed distantly in the whimsicality and waywardness of certain measures of the Finale.” This symphony’s first movement, Molto allegro, full of melancholy passion, begins with its first theme in octaves in the violins. There
is a strong and forceful subsidiary theme before the second wistful theme enters. The poise, elegance, and beautiful proportions of the second movement, Andante, is initiated with an elegiac first theme in the violins, which emerges from the rhythmic figure of the opening measures. Unlike most slow movements of symphonies, this movement is in sonata form. Mozart called the third movement Minuet and marked it Allegretto, but the movement is not a graceful ballroom minuet. Instead, the Minuet is vigorous and animated, full of syncopated rhythms and clashing dissonance, with a contrasting central Trio that is relaxed and direct. The final Allegro assai is the most spirited of the symphony’s four movements. Also in sonata form, it opens with a theme whose first eight notes are identical to the first eight notes of the initial theme of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, but the rhythm is so different that the ear does not easily sense the similarity. The strings and then the woodwinds introduce the lyrical second theme. The work is scored for one flute with pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns with strings.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 20 | 7:30 PM
ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET: DEBUSSY, HAYDN, AND JOHN ADAMS
GUEST ARTISTS
St. Lawrence String Quartet
PROGRAM
Franz Joseph Haydn, Quartet in D Major, Op. 20, No. 4 Allegro di molto Un poco adagio affettuoso Allegretto alla zingarese Presto (scherzando)
John Adams, String Quartet No. 1, First Quartet (2008) Movement I Movement II
Claude Debussy, String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10 Anime et tres decide Assez vif et bien rythme Andantino doucement espressif Tres modere - Tres mouvemente et avec passion
The St. Lawrence String Quartet appears by arrangement with David Rowe Artists www.davidroweartists.com
The St. Lawrence String Quartet is Ensemble-in-Residence at Stanford University
www.slsq.com
This concert is sponsored by
Quartet in D Major, Op. 20, No. 4 Joseph Haydn
The Opus 20 quartets by Haydn are the first great masterpieces—by any composer—for the medium of two violins, viola, and cello. In addition to solidifying the formal four-movement structure of the string quartet, for the first time in a small ensemble context one can hear the democratic participation of four truly equal voices. Haydn draws on an immense range of emotional expression in Op. 20, with brilliant compositional flourishes to match. He synthesizes the very pinnacle of baroque-era counterpoint with his distinctive wit, whimsy, pathos, and the groundbreaking use of silence as “topic”. It is these six quartets specifically that threw down the gauntlet and which inspired every major later composer to compose their most profound utterances for the medium of string quartet. The calm pastoral theme that opens this musical story gives no hint of the virtuosic, brilliant and quicksilver music that follows without warning. This movement is a tale of two distinct characters—one serene, one excited—that interact and interrupt each other throughout. The slow movement is perhaps Haydn’s most deeply felt and emotional theme and variations. It sustains an almost painful affettuoso, culminating in an extended final variation and coda that explodes in anguish, and then ends with quivering pain. A dance follows: a jubilant minuet in the Hungarian Gypsy style. Here Haydn is playing on the knowledge and expectation of the minuet rhythm. One can almost hear him chuckling as players and the dancing audience stumble. In contrast, the “trio” (the middle section) could not be a more perfectly symmetrical, danceable and proper cello solo. The emotional release from the adagio continues with an effervescent Rondo finale. Scherzando throughout—musical laughter with a hint of bluegrass. - St. Lawrence String Quartet
String Quartet No. 1 John Adams
Adams composed String Quartet No.1 in 2008 for the St. Lawrence Quartet. It was Adams’ second full-size work for the medium and his first without electronics. It follows an earlier string quartet titled John’s Book of Alleged Dances, written in 1994 for the Kronos Quartet and for performance with the pre-recorded sounds of a prepared piano. A five-minute second string quartet, Fellow Traveler, written a year before this work, was a 50th-birthday present for director Peter Sellars, with whom Adams has collaborated on several major stage works over the past three decades. It was a particularly compelling St. Lawrence String Quartet performance of John’s Book of Alleged Dances and Beethoven’s Op. 132 that led directly to the commission for this string quartet. Chris Costanza of the St. Lawrence Quartet tells it like this: “I recall him saying to us (and I paraphrase slightly), ‘I really loved that Beethoven! Can I write you a string quartet??!!?’ Well, no hesitation on our part - we gave him a super enthusiastic ‘yes!!!,’ and in short order, the commission was set up. Adams said, ‘I’ve got about 10 other things that I should be doing, but I dove right in.’” For Quartet No. 1 Adams focused primarily on the scherzo movements from two late Beethoven quartets, saying he was originally motivated to use Beethoven in this way after admiring how Stravinsky joined the music of Pergolesi with his own in his ballet, Pulcinella. What Adams says he admires most in Beethoven is his “combination of deep feeling, vitality, and energy.” String quartet writing is one of the most difficult challenges a composer can take on,” Adams once said. He is not a string player and views the medium of quartet writing as “a matter of very long-term ‘work in progress.’” His ongoing collaboration with the St. Lawrence
String Quartet has resulted in three substantial, half-hour works that occupy a significant corner of a large catalog. The two most recent were both completed in 2014 after a long gestation: a Second Quartet and Absolute Jest, for quartet and orchestra, both based on fragments of two of Beethoven’s late quartets and commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony to celebrate its centennial season. Costanza outlines some of the information the SLSQ learned from Adams: “He did tell us that he was listening quite a lot to the string quartets of Ravel and Debussy while writing his quartet. I suspect listeners will hear that influence very clearly, not in a way that is imitative but as an honest Adams approach to a very wide range of string sounds, drawing on the vast beauty of tone colors one associates with the great Impressionist composers. Adams commented: “This piece was inspired by this wonderful quartet, the SLSQ. I was reminded how much the sound of the string quartet is like elevated human discourse. It’s like speech brought to the highest, most sublime level in the hands of a great composer. So I wanted to attempt to express my own voice in the medium of the quartet.” The First Quartet has two movements, with the initial movement more than twice as long as the second. “I started out as a young composer very influenced by American minimalism and you can still hear vestiges of this in the quartet,” Adams said at the Canadian premiere of the piece at the Banff Centre. “You can hear a very strong sense of beat. The first movement starts in a very ticking, energized way, and then lyrical shapes start filtering in and out. That basic sense of pulsation— a regular ticking—is present throughout the piece.” The opening movement is essentially a four-movement structure in one, played without a break. The movement begins in a rhythmically driven way, quietly animated, with the instruments passing the subject from one to another. The next part of the movement is slow and filled with pauses with individual instruments making recitative-like declamations, appearing from within more reflective group sections. Next, there is “a crazy little scherzo” (Adams’ words), marked scherzando, that soon fades away as the energy of the beginning returns for a pulsing conclusion that finally slows down. The second movement has a structure akin to a rondo; it begins with an energetic rhythmic figure (“Morse code” is what Adams calls it), then tension builds before the music returns to the Morse code. Before the movement ends, there’s a fast coda. The quartet premiered at the Juilliard School of Music on January 31, 2009. It was commissioned by The Juilliard School with the support of the Trust of Francis Goelet, Stanford Lively Arts of Stanford University, and The Banff Centre.
String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10 Claude Debussy
(Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye; died March 25, 1918, in Paris)
Debussy finished his only String Quartet in February 1893 and then traveled to Ghent to visit the playwright Maeterlinck, whose Pelléas et Mélisande he wanted to adapt as an opera. He stopped in Brussels to show some of his works to the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe; in Paris in December, the Ysaÿe Quartet, to whom this quartet is dedicated, debuted this masterpiece. The music initially puzzled everyone: the audience, the conservative critics, and those in the vanguard, too. Perhaps the trouble was that Debussy had arrived at too advanced a solution to a problem not yet known to ordinary listeners. He was grappling with how to reconcile classical forms of chamber music in which a high degree of independence among the movements exists, with his use of cyclical forms in which musical ideas are carried forward from one movement to the next. The master of cyclical form, César Franck, found Debussy’s Quartet too nervous, “all pins and needles,” he said, perhaps because the structure of the quartet fuses cyclical and variation form with a minimum of thematic development. Debussy makes great formal advances in this work. Even though this quartet is his only published work in a specific key (because it has a key signature), it never really looks backward. Debussy reuses fragments of melody in successive movements to give unity to the whole; he bases all four movements on a single theme plainly stated at the outset. The simplicity of this idea shocked early listeners who failed to grasp the nature of the piece. The execution of the idea was not simple because it places an enormous burden on the creative imagination. Debussy begins with a theme both original and striking, which the listener can retain and follow through its transformations and displacements, its dismemberment, and its re-assembly, tracing it through changes of tempo and of mood. At the end, the listener feels the unitary power Debussy has created. Yet Debussy’s ideas are brief, taking up only one or two measures; he relies more on allusive connections than on repetition. Also, Debussy adapts procedures from other sources, especially from Wagner and the Russians, whose music he heard during his travels. He casts four movements in forms not very different from those of past masters, dressing his new ideas in warm colors and rich harmonies. His writing is intricate and elegant. With this work, Debussy moves chamber music into a new era of ambiguous impression and suggestiveness that he evokes again a year later in Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.). After the quartet, Debussy composed no more chamber music until 1915, and never wrote another string quartet. He objected to the term impressionism, but it accurately defines his aesthetic. In this quartet, Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune and his opera, Pelléas and Mélisande, he frees musical language from tradition in his search for music that he said is “supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.” Paul Griffiths contends that Debussy’s quartet influenced the future of the string quartet by “indicating that new sounds could be achieved by forgetting the old conversational mode” as a result of the use of flexible speeds with many tempo changes within a section. Debussy also achieves a wide variety of textures by joining instruments together in different ways in a search for “fluidity, for constant alteration.” The first movement, Animé et très décidé, is firmly declarative, by turns vigorously rhythmic and gracefully lyrical. The main theme COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 55
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 20 | 7:30 PM
and the principal harmonic setting are based on the Phrygian mode. Debussy introduces many tempo changes, some unusually swift, as well as frequent rhythmic and modal recasting of the germinal theme. Then comes a playful scherzo, Assez vif et bien rythmé, in which a motif from the opening theme, speeded up, is restated repeatedly (an ostinato or repeated figure) with virtuosic pizzicatos. The germinal theme almost disappears from the slow, somewhat funereal third movement, Andantino doucement expressif, but frequent subtle hints of its elements remain. Debussy enhances the tone with mutes. As Griffiths notes, this movement is less innovative and more conventionally Romantic than the others. The repeated motif reappears in the finale’s slow introduction, Très modéré, and dominates the concluding movement, Très mouvementé et avec passion, which accelerates to the quartet’s end.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 22 | 7:30 PM
BEETHOVEN OP. 131 + HANNAH LASH’S WORLD PREMIERE
CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian
The Caryl Fuchs Kassoy & David R. Kassoy Conductor’s Podium
GUEST ARTISTS
Ji Su Jung, marimba Hannah Lash, composer
PROGRAM
Hannah Lash, Forestallings (World premiere commission) (2019-2020) I. ♪ = 84 II. ♪ = 63
Kevin Puts, Concerto for Marimba “...terrific sun on the brink” “...into the quick of losses” “...logarithms, exponents, the damnedest of metaphors”
Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131 (orch. Peter Oundjian) Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo Allegro molto vivace Allegro moderato Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile Presto Adagio quasi un poco andante Allegro
This concert is sponsored by
Forestallings (2020) World premiere (Colorado Music Festival commission) Hannah Lash
(Born November 22, 1981, in Alfred, NY)
Hannah Lash is a renowned harpist and one of the most acclaimed and sought-after composers today. She received a BA in composition from the Eastman School of Music in 2004, a performance degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2008, a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music in 2012. She has received commissions from The Fromm Foundation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Chamber Music Northwest, (Form and Postlude), the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, (Eating Flowers,); American Composers Orchestra (Concerto No. 1 for Harp and Chamber Orchestra), Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, The Naumburg Foundation, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Arditti Quartet, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival (Concerto No. 2 for Harp and Orchestra, and the Aspen Music Festival and School. Her awards have included the Rappaport Prize for Music Composition (2018), ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2011), a Charles Ives Scholarship (2011) and Fellowship (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Barnard Rogers Prize in Composition, the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize in Composition, and numerous academic awards. More recent premieres include the multi-movement orchestral work The Voynich Symphony by the New Haven Symphony, a new Requiem for the Yale Choral Artists, How to Remember Seeds for The Calidore String Quartet, Three Shades Without Angles, for flute, viola, and harp, by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Two Movements for violin and piano, commissioned by the Library of Congress for Ensemble Intercontemporain, and a new chamber opera, Beowulf, for Guerilla Opera, as well as several new orchestral works: Chaconnes, for the New York Philharmonic’s Biennial; Nymphs, for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra; and This Ease, for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In 2019, her work was featured at the Presteigne Festival in Wales, and her The Nature of Breaking is slated to be performed at the Alba Festival in Alba, Italy. This year her music will also be featured in a Composer Portrait in Mainz, Germany, where several of her works will be performed over a week. She has appeared as a soloist in her concertos for harp that were premiered by the American Composers Orchestra and the Colorado Music Festival. Her music has been hailed by the New York Times as “striking and resourceful…handsomely brooding,”
Marimba Concerto Kevin Puts
(Born January 3, 1972, in St. Louis, Missouri)
Winner of numerous prestigious awards, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his debut opera Silent Night, Kevin Puts’ works have been commissioned, performed, and recorded by leading ensembles and soloists throughout the world. His orchestral work, The City, was co-commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in honor of its 100th anniversary and by Carnegie Hall in honor of its 125th anniversary. His new vocal work Letters From Georgia, written for Soprano Renée Fleming and orchestra, based on the personal letters of Georgia O’Keeffe, had its world premiere in New York. His first chamber
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 22 | 7:30 PM
opera, an adaptation of Peter Ackroyd’s gothic novel The Trial of Elizabeth Cree commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, premiered in September 2017, followed by performances with Chicago Opera Theater in February 2018. A former Composer-in-Residence of Young Concerts Artists, Puts is currently a member of the composition department at the Peabody Institute and the Director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer’s Institute. He was a Young Concert Artists’ Composer-in-Residence and became the first composer officially to join the YCA management roster. In addition to the Pulitzer, Puts’ national and international honors include the 2003 Benjamin H. Danks Award for Excellence in Orchestral Composition of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2001 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a 2001-2002 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the 1999 Barlow International Prize for Orchestral Music. Puts composed the Marimba Concerto in 1997 for marimbist Makoto Nakura as a joint commission from the Vermont Symphony and the Kobe Ensemble of Japan. The work had its premiere in September 1997 in Japan with the Kobe Ensemble and in October 1997 with Nakura and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra with Kate Tamarkin conducting. The composer has supplied the following note: “Marimba Concerto reflects my love of Mozart’s piano concertos, works with instrumentation similar to that of this concerto, i.e. a keyboard instrument with chamber orchestra. I decided to write a piece that is lyrical throughout and to feature the marimba in both melodic and ornamental roles. The influence of Mozart lies mainly in the relationship between the soloist and orchestra, one of near equality in which the marimba continually interacts with the instruments of the orchestra. “The work is comprised of three movements - fast, slow, fast - like a Mozart concerto, and each movement bears a subtitle taken from the poetry of my aunt, Fleda Brown. They are: I. “...terrific sun on the brink” (Flowing); II. “...into the quick of losses” (Broad and Deliberate); and III. “...logarithms, exponents, the damnedest of metaphors” (Presto non troppo). The overriding message is one of optimism and exuberance.” The concerto is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, one trumpet, xylophone, strings, and solo marimba.
String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131 (orch. Peter Oundjian) Ludwig van Beethoven
(Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna)
After a fifteen-year hiatus from composing a string quartet, Beethoven finally became very involved with quartets again. In 1825 and 1826 he wrote little else other than the five quartets that are his last compositions. String Quartet No. 14 is one of his ultimate masterpieces. He was simultaneously considering writing large works with chorus, like an oratorio, a requiem, or an opera, but when he had completed a commission for three quartets, he went on instead to compose two more, this one and Op. 135, his last work.
Beethoven made his earliest sketch for Op. 131 during the last few days of 1825; he quickly completed it in July 1826. The writing of the quartet required an intense effort at a time when he was already totally deaf and deeply troubled by his failing health as well as by the misadventures of his nephew. He was the family guardian for his nephew, who was threatening to commit suicide. Beethoven’s concern for this young man while he was writing this work was so great that he changed the dedication, which he had intended for a personal friend, and inscribed it instead to Lieutenant Field Marshal Baron Joseph von Stutterheim, who took Beethoven’s nephew into one of his regiments as an officer cadet. In late summer, when he gave the completed score of the quartet to his publisher, he commented to him that it was “stolen and assembled from various bits of this and that.” The publisher, in alarm, wrote to him demanding assurance that the quartet was in fact a new and original work. The publisher had apparently not looked at the music, for if he had, he would certainly have understood Beethoven’s ironic jest. There could not have been anything as new as this quartet. It was totally without precedent. It was huge in size and cast in entirely original shapes invented in the course of the writing, the final example of how far Beethoven had outgrown the forms he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. To invent and assemble all this in six or seven months had been an astonishing creative feat. Beethoven was juggling huge amounts of material: his notes and sketches for the work occupy three times as much paper as the finished work. This quartet seems somehow to be a leap forward into the expressive world of the early 20th century. Although only four instruments play it, it creates much of the same kind of grandeur and profundity that the larger works of Strauss and Mahler achieve in their huge orchestral scores. In 1860, a German conductor even made a full orchestral version of the quartet, with the good intention of expanding the audience for this great music, but it proved to be a clumsy travesty; the arrangement has disappeared. Peter Oundjian’s notes provide his perspective on the quartet:
This seven-movement epic, played without interruption, conjures up every imaginable human expression: the darkest fury, gentle serenity, yearning, resignation, and transcendence. The music alternates between two realms; on one hand the confrontation with reality, on the other the search for the divine and the spiritual. The opening fugue depicts both the anguish and the sense of longing that occupy Beethoven‘s consciousness in this final period of his life. The theme itself contains within it the nucleus of the broadest gesture of the entire work, the first two notes rising, prayerfully reaching up for something, only to be jarringly denied by the overwhelming sforzando of the dropping interval, followed by a tail of simple notes that flow in resignation.
Yearning, defeat, acceptance. These gestures will ultimately give
way to a world of transcendent beauty, only hinted at in this first movement. After an extraordinary journey through five different keys, each corresponding to one of the following movements, the fugue is finally halted by two rising unison octaves on C-sharp, which feel more inquisitive than final. Indeed Beethoven responds with a favorite shift of tonality, rising a half-tone to D-major and taking us into a dreamy world of unfettered joy. The feeling of this second movement is one of reflection on the purity of childhood, replete with fun, games, and even teasing, yet all stated with an elegance and delicacy that assures a sense of joyous reminiscence. As the movement closes, we find ourselves again asking a question. This time the response is haughty and formal; the third movement, a recitative, is ominous in character as if a group of messengers bears unfavorable news. (In this arrangement these lines are given to solo instruments.) The last statement, however, expressed more slowly and on the viola, introduces the real message: one of hope, tenderness, and fantasy, the contents unveiled by a soaring first violin cadenza. The composer has prepared us for the heart of our journey, a vision of a world beyond his own. The theme and variations (4th movement) which follow touch us as deeply as any music I can imagine with simplicity, purity, warmth, tenderness, contentment, and transcendent beauty. The theme itself is played in a conversation between the two violin sections, depicting poignantly a longing to share intimate thoughts and feelings, something impossible for Beethoven except in the language of music since he had been completely deaf for over a decade at the writing of this composition. Alternately, the variations are playful or even banal in nature and then full of wisdom and profundity. The spiritual climax of the entire piece arrives as the hymn variation pulses its way to indescribable heights, a simultaneous depiction of joy and sorrow powerful enough to convey equal faith in both emotions. Music of such rapture can only be conceived in response to extreme adversity. The variations feel interrupted momentarily by a return of our messengers. Lyrical this time, they bring us gently back to our own world where trills and accelerated rhythms open the door to a delicate clockwork village band, giving us our original theme one last time in a completely different guise. The fifth movement, Presto, overflows with childlike playfulness, bringing us, for the first time in the piece, a feeling of complete abandon. Its function as a resting place in our journey is extremely valuable, for the movement which follows will be heartbreaking. At the very end of the scherzo, Beethoven uses an effect that had almost never been formally employed in string music before: playing sul ponticello, or on the bridge. This creates an eerie, almost scratchy sound; it is startling to hear the scherzo theme suddenly distorted in this way at the end of the movement it is as if the music is suddenly dissipating. The sixth movement wrenches our hearts with a weighty and tragic theme, first heard in the violas. Sorrow and reluctant resignation, stated three times until the composer’s fury can be contained no longer. The final movement crashes upon us with relentless power. Wagner described it as “the dance of the whole world itself, wild joy, the wail of pain, love’s transport, utmost bliss, grief, frenzy, riot, sufferings.” But, despite the anger, the bitterness, and the frustration, Beethoven will find a path to a lifeaffirming conclusion. Defiantly, in the final moments, he ascends a C-sharp major scale and then a leaping arpeggio, culminating in three giant C-sharp major chords, a proud manifestation of his unfathomable courage. © Peter Oundjian, 2021
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 23 | 7:30 PM
KALEIDOSCOPE: MUHLY, JARRETT, AND BOLCOM
GUEST ARTISTS
Violin: Alice Hong, Chi Li, Calin Lupanu, Claude Sim; Viola: Colin Sorgi, Kimberly Sparr; Cello: Sung Chan Chang, David Morrissey; Percussion: Joseph Petrasek, Gerald Scholl, Peter Wilson
Christopher Taylor, piano Ji Su Jung, marimba
PROGRAM
Nebojsa Zivkovic, Trio per Uno (1995/1990)
Peter Klatzow, Concert Marimba Etudes (2013)
Derek Bermel, Turning (1995)
Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert (Part IIC) (1975)
Leigh Howard Stevens, Rhythmic Caprice (1989)
William Bolcom, Piano Quintet No. 2 (2011) Allegro con fuoco Adagio espressivo Scherzo nero Vivo, con passione
This concert is sponsored by
Trio Per Uno (1995/1990) Nebojsa Zivkovic
(Born July 5, 1962, in Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia)
Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic has greatly influenced the international percussion scene during the last two decades as both a masterful composer and virtuoso performer and one of the world’s most performed composers of percussion music. He tours extensively throughout Europe and performs frequently in the USA, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Latin America, Russia, and Scandinavian countries. His symphonic works have been performed internationally by such orchestras as the National Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Orchestra di Santa Cecilia, Rome, The Northern Sinfonia in Newcastle, UK, and the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra. He has been commissioned frequently by many soloists, orchestras, and institutions, including two commissions from the German Ministry of Culture (Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg). Zivkovic completed his master’s degrees in composition, music theory, and percussion in Mannheim and Stuttgart, Germany, where he has resided since 1980. He is a professor of percussion at the Music and Arts University in Vienna, Austria (former Vienna Conservatory) and also at the University of Novi Sad, in his native Serbia. Trio per Uno, a three-movement work, is scored for three players playing a shared bass drum. In addition, player one plays bongos, two gongs, and crotales (small cymbals); player two plays bongos, two gongs, vibraphone, low tom, high tom, and snare drum, while player three plays bongos, two gongs, low tom, high tom, and snare drum. In the opening, a bass drum, lying flat, is played by all three performers with timbale sticks. In addition, each player also uses a pair of bongos and china gongs. The outer movements share some stylistic similarities, with many commentators noting they might represent “some perfection of wildness in an archaic ritual cult.” Initially, the trio creates energetic excitement as the work begins with a simple unison rhythm and then evolves into a more ritualistic groove in which the percussionists explore dramatic extremes in tempo, texture, and dynamics. The central movement contrasts with its unique lyrical and contemplative feel. It is based on a contemplative melody in crotales accompanied by meditative patterns from the vibraphone played by the other two members of the trio. This middle movement forms a contrasting sphere of quiet between the two volcanic outer movements. The last movement returns to speed and energy with two tom-toms and one snare drum being played by each performer. A large number of different rhythmic patterns are sounded, mostly in unison, but sometimes divided among the performers. The composer has written that the principle of “three bodies, one soul” inspired the structural and formal principles of Trio Per Uno.
(Born August 26, 1981, in Randolph, Vermont)
The American composer Nico Muhly has composed a wide body of work for ensembles and soloists including the American Ballet Theater, American Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony, pianist Simone Dinnerstein, violinist Hilary Hahn, Gotham Chamber Opera, designer/illustrator Maira Kalman, choreographer Benjamin Millepied, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Paris Opéra Ballet, soprano Jessica Rivera, The Royal Ballet, Saint Thomas Church in New York City, and Seattle Symphony. The Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center Theater, and the English National Opera commissioned Muhly’s first full-scale opera, Two Boys, in 2011. Two Boys chronicles the true story of a police investigation of an online relationship and its ensuing tragedy; it premiered in London in spring 2012.
Muhly graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. In 2004, he received a Masters in Music from the Juilliard School, where he studied under Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano. From his sophomore year of college, Muhly worked for Philip Glass as a MIDI programmer and editor for six years. Big Time is a work for string quartet and percussion (1 player) commissioned by the Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival for its 20th anniversary in 2012. It premiered August 25, 2012, at the Chandler Music Hall in Randolph, Vermont, in a concert given by the Lark Quartet and Yousif Sheronick, percussion. Muhly has written a note for his piece:
Big Time begins with an exploration of a single scale, antagonized and harmonized by the other string instruments. Eventually, more melodic passages emerge, and the governing principle of the piece becomes one of longer lines competing with more jagged rhythmic passages. After a slow, sinuous chorale, the scales return, reframed and ecstatic. I tried to organize the rhythms of the piece in large cycles of oblong beats — which is to say, units of 17 and 13, divided unevenly, rather than the more standard 4s and 6s. The title reflects this endeavor.
Six Concert Marimba Etudes (2013) Peter Klatzow
(Born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa, in 1945)
One of the few renowned South African composers to gain international acclaim, Peter Klatzow has become a very prominent composer for keyboard percussion, and specifically for marimba, over the last thirty years. Several of his works have found their way into the standard repertoire for percussion. Klatzow moved to London in 1964 to study composition at the Royal College of Music under a scholarship sponsored by the Southern African Music Rights Organization for composers. While in London, he became the youngest recipient to win the Royal Philharmonic competition. From London, Klatzow traveled to Italy and France on an Octavia Traveling Scholarship from the Royal College. In Paris, he studied with the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger before his return to South Africa, where he worked for the South African Broadcasting Corporation as a music producer. In 1973 he became a faculty member at the University of Cape Town where he continued to teach until his retirement in 2010, at which point he became a Professor Emeritus. Robert Van Sice, principal timpanist of the Cape Town Symphony, requested Klatzow to compose the concerto for marimba in 1984. This collaboration led Klatzow to compose many works for marimba. Klatzow is very fond of the instrument especially for its ability to change timbre and articulation. The Six Concert Etudes, completed in 2013, began as a project suggested to Evelyn Glennie in the late 1990s. The project was not completed then, but the one completed etude was salvaged as Song for Stephanie and was named for Sice’s daughter. More than a decade later, Daniel Heagney proposed that Klatzow return to the project to compose the other five etudes; Heagney was instrumental in collecting a group of ten percussionists from around the world. Klatzow’s works are technically very demanding, but also quite often challenging to interpret. The composer described the structure of the set of etudes: “The overall structure of the set (which I am sure you must have noticed) is that the musically lightweight pieces are in book 1 (Etudes 1-3), and then develop in stature and then (I think) musical depth in book 2 (Etudes 4-6) leading toward the variations. This argues against playing them individually, just as the titles imply their individual self-sufficiency.” The first etude, Juggler, is an expansion of a passage from the 3rd movement of Klatzow’s earlier marimba concerto, designed to be performed with two mallets rather than the usual four to challenge the performer. The etude requires articulation and clarity in the whole of the marimba’s range with many quick timbre and dynamic changes. The brief second etude, called Play of Triads, is lively and based on constant triads in triple meters for three mallets. The third etude, Melodic Mirage, also brief in length, explores the marimba’s many timbral possibilities; it is a study of fioritura, (flowery embellished melodies) articulations, and contrasting timbres. It has a flowing slow melody. No. 4, Incantation, contains the most various challenges to the performer of this set of six etudes with its extreme contrasts in timbre and passages of two-againstthree polyrhythms, complicated by the non-aligning ostinatos, as well as simultaneous octaves in both hands. Using the whole range of the marimba, the etude also features extremes of dynamics. The penultimate etude, originally titled Metronomics, was finally called Dazzle. The composer wanted to put an emphasis on accuracy within rhythmic intricacies, explaining, “I have a fascination with fractal art.” The new title emphasizes showmanship and a brisk tempo. The piece has a technically challenging five-against-four polyrhythm; Klatzow uses syncopation as well, in order to create variation, and again, here, uses non-aligning ostinatos. The final etude, Whisper of Silences, Play of Water centers on measured tremolos of a clear rhythm. Within this etude, there are many technical and rhythmic challenges as it uses the whole range of the five-octave marimba and a wide range of dynamics and articulations. It is an homage to the works of Franz Liszt. Klatzow has written: “Liszt is a great hero of mine, but my piece is not about pianos, it is about presence and mood. The only sounds at the Villa these days are church bells from the valley below and also from the little church next to the Villa where Liszt used to attend Mass very early every morning (taking his blanket with him!). So I wrote the piece and the poem.”
Ambient Resonances
The cypresses are old. Guardians at a dying cemetery, Immovable but still lamenting. They are not silent in the Passing breeze. He heard them too, and sang their lonely song, The fountains, too, spurt upwards, creating graceful arcs. Liquid cathedrals, resisting gravity, slowly falling back. He saw them too, and played their harmonious rippling.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 23 | 7:30 PM
And now I sit where he sat, on the same cold stone seat. I listen and look, nibble a sandwich, sip on some juice. There is no distant piano and a lesson in progress, No probing fingers searching for the harmonies of evening.
Too much history has passed through here. Where music Once sounded, there is silence, tangible and deep.
But here I hear the past. It deafens me, infinite and vast.
Turning (1995) Derek Bermel
(Born October 14, 1967, in New York City)
Derek Bermel is an American composer, clarinetist, and conductor whose fresh, creative music blends various facets of world music, funk, and jazz with classical performing instruments and musical vocabulary. Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, he is also curator of the Gamper Festival at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, Director of Copland House’s emerging composers institute Cultivate, and recently enjoyed a fouryear tenure as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. Bermel has become recognized as a dynamic and unconventional curator of concert series that spotlight the composer as performer, including ACO’s SONIC Festival. He is involved in international studies of ethnomusicology and orchestration, and thus an ongoing engagement with other musical cultures has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language, in which the human voice and its myriad inflections play a primary role. He has received commissions from the Pittsburgh, National, St. Louis, and Pacific Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, WNYC Radio, La Jolla Music Society, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, eighth blackbird, Guarneri String Quartet, Music from Copland House and Music from China, Orkest De Ereprijs (Netherlands), violinist Midori, and electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans, among others. His many honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, Guggenheim, and Fulbright Fellowships, American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations, Meet the Composer, and Cary Trust; and residencies at Yaddo, Tanglewood, Aspen, Banff, Bellagio, Copland House, Sacatar, and Civitella Ranieri.
Turning is a major piano work, a marvelous set of variations on an invented Protestant-style hymn tune. Christopher Taylor commissioned and premiered the work at Studio Raspail, Paris. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times commented that Bermel is “equally at ease in a New York City nightclub or a dusty village in West Africa and with a keen enthusiasm for rap, Messiaen, klezmer or Monk” and that “he is comfortable with any manifestation of the human soul.” Bermel has been deeply inspired by African-American music: jazz, blues, R&B, and hip-hop have all influenced his writing. Gospel music especially forms a cornerstone for many of Bermel’s works.
Bermel contributed the following description of Turning:
Turning was written at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1995, where I studied with Henri Dutilleux. The work is dedicated to him and to Christopher Taylor, who premiered the work at
Studio Raspail in Paris in June 1996 and who edited the work for this publication. Turning is written in theme and variations form, opening with a simple song-hymn in the key of B major.
The hymn is followed by a pentatonic echo in the piano’s high register, a mirror of my musical consciousness (East vs. West) that I experienced when I returned from studying Lobi gyil (xylophone) music in Ghana. In “Nightmares and Chickens,” the first variation, the hymn is pecked out, culminating in a schizoid frenzy of pointillistic clucking, and eventually evaporating into the top register of the piano. “Kowië at Dawn,” the second variation, is a portrait of a small village in Northwest Ghana. It begins with the sound of distant bells, but soon the town wakes and is drawn into a lively dance, evocative of gyil music. The third variation “Passage,” harmonizes the pentatonic theme chromatically, and the hymn slowly re-emerges tinged with a gospel slant. In the fourth variation, “Carnaval Noir,” Latin music mixes with the occasional ragtime twist. The carnival segues into the coda, in which an inverted rendition of the hymn returns in the top registers of the piano. The pentatonic echo returns as the work spirals backwards into a hazy reflection of the opening song
Turning, which was completed in 1995, and premiered in June 1996 in Paris with Christopher Taylor performing.
The Köln Concert (Part IIC) (1975) Keith Jarrett
(Born May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania)
Keith Jarrett is an American jazz and classical music pianist and composer. 2020 marks the 45th anniversary of his landmark concert album, The Köln Concert, which included solo piano improvisations that he performed at the Cologne (Germany) Opera House on January 24, 1975. The album received critical acclaim and became the best-selling solo album in jazz history; it is still the best-selling piano album of all time. An avid jazz fan, a young German student, Vera Brandes, then only seventeen and a part-time promoter, was responsible for organizing the concert. At Jarrett’s request, she had arranged for a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano to be provided for the show, but unfortunately, the opera house staff wheeled out a different piano, a much smaller Bösendorfer baby grand. To make matters worse, it was a piano used for opera rehearsals and was not only in poor condition but also badly out of tune.
Jarrett, who had perfect pitch, was fastidious about his pianos. He found this instrument an abomination as some keys did not release properly, the pedal was deficient, and the tonal balance was totally unsatisfactory to him. As there was no time to get a replacement piano, Jarrett threatened to cancel the show. Brandes refused to give in and managed to pacify him while technicians spent several hours trying to make the piano playable. They managed to tune it, although they could do very little to improve its tone and timbre, which was defined by jangly high notes and a less than resonant bass register. Jarrett, who was suffering from back problems, went onstage wearing a back brace to give him extra spinal support, beginning the concert at the late hour of 11:30 p.m., as it was scheduled to follow an opera performance when the hall became free; nevertheless, he managed to give a memorable concert. Recorded as one continuous concert at the Cologne Opera House in 1975, the album is divided into four sections: “Part I”; “Part IIA”; “Part IIB”; and “Part IIC.” The Köln Concert began with a 26-minute improvised piece that begins in a meditative mood; at certain points, Jarrett could be heard singing the melodies while playing. Besides jazz, the piece draws on folk, classical, Latin, gospel hymns, and even country music, all bound together seamlessly in what could be described as the musical equivalent of a stream-of-consciousness outpouring. The second piece, “Part II” is more urgent than “Part I”, driven by propulsive left-hand chords. Part II is all rhythm initially, with a short motif in the left hand repeated over and over while scales break out in the right hand. With very small harmonic variations, Jarrett conjured up different genres: rock ‘n’ roll, hoedown, gospel, minimalist music. “Part IIC” is actually the performance’s encore and sounds, in comparison to the rest of the work, simple and sweet like a familiar song. Jarrett’s encores for concerts of this type tended to be made up of shorter pieces that seem song-like in structure. “Part IIC” of The Köln Concert is catchy and yet offers an emotional depth. It was different than the rest of the work; it was not improvised; some students from Boston published the piece in 1975 in a music booklet. For Jarrett, playing a prepared encore wasn’t unusual. He used to end his concerts with established pieces, sometimes even cover songs. It was not a secret that this piece was composed earlier, yet by naming it “Part IIC,” it was not differentiated from the other pieces included in the concert. It was, however, based on a pre-composed tune, the form, and melody of which can be found in some Real Book compilations as Tomasz Trzcinski’s “Memories of Tomorrow.”
Rhythmic Caprice (1989) Leigh Howard Stevens
(Born March 9, 1953, in Orange, New Jersey)
Leigh Howard Stevens’ Rhythmic Caprice has been considered the ultimate virtuosic showpiece for a solo marimbist. Stevens’ influence extends beyond his contributions to marimba technique, as he is a performer, educator, composer, publisher, and inventor, as well as a successful entrepreneur. Stevens played drum-set in various rock and jazz bands in the New York metropolitan area during high school, including one called Tiger Tails, managed for a short time by Max Weinberg, who later became the drummer with Bruce Springsteen. “I wanted to rock, and he wanted to become a musician,” Weinberg recalled. As a young drummer, Stevens studied with Joe Morello, who, Stevens said, “explained technique to me in terms of physiology and physics. It was a revelation.” When he entered Eastman School of Music in the fall of 1971, Stevens planned to pursue a career as a drum-set player, although he had already been exposed to marimba in high school. Stevens recalled a series of “mistakes” that became the foundation of his career: “Number one, I had the notion that since many chords required four pitches, all mallet players would naturally play with four mallets,” he said. “The second mistake I made was to sustain the C and G notes with my left hand while playing a scale with the right.” His attempt to imitate a pedaled chord on a piano-led him to the now-infamous one-handed roll. Years before, he had listened to a Vida Chenoweth recording, so he looked her up and found her living on the other side of the globe. “During my freshman year, I sold my drum-set to pay for an airplane ticket to New Zealand,” he says. “Vida’s biggest influences on me had to do with how to practice and how to memorize.” A conflicting view from his teacher John Beck at Eastman also affected Stevens profoundly: “Chenoweth and Morello were trying to get me to be someone who specialized on one instrument,” Leigh reflects, “while John was always trying to get me to be more of a generalist—a total percussionist. Although it’s all centered on the marimba, it wasn’t just performing. I got involved with the pedagogy of the instrument, composition, design—I know more about machines and drill bits than I ever expected to know!” Stevens served as Professor of Marimba at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, from 1997-2004. He encouraged students to push the boundaries of their performance by establishing one of the first international solo marimba competitions. His first “composition” may be one of the most popular marimba books of all time: Method of Movement for Marimba. The book, now in its sixth (25th-anniversary) printing, is an internationally accepted curriculum for studying marimba. It is a compilation of the exercises Stevens customized for his students, plus a detailed description of all aspects of his grip and strokes. In the 1980s, he began writing what he called a “demonstration piece” to show composers possible techniques and sound effects. “I wanted a virtuosic, bring-thehouse-down kind of piece, so I performed for every composer who would listen,” he says. “I never got that piece, so I ended up writing it myself.” It was Rhythmic Caprice and was premiered in 1989; it continues to be one of his most popular encores. Stevens’ s Rhythmic Caprice is a staple of virtuosic marimba music, incorporating simple modal motives, complex rhythmic passages, and numerous colorful effects as well as many unconventional effects. Rhythmic Caprice primarily expresses rhythmic momentum, colored with three “col legno” (with wood) effects: 1) The birch handle is used on the edge of the bar; 2) The mallet head and the handle are used simultaneously (dubbed a “marimshot” by Stevens’
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 23 | 7:30 PM
students); 3) Clusters with the whole length of both handles (dubbed a “Stevens splash” by his students). Stevens wrote: “The very limited melodic and harmonic materials of the piece rhythmically evolve from simple, to complex, to polyrhythmic, to driving, to spasmodic, ultimately returning to simple rhythm in the six-measure codetta.”
Piano Quintet No. 2 (2011) William Bolcom
(Born May 26, 1938, in Seattle, Washington)
National Medal of Arts-, Pulitzer Prize-, and multiple Grammy Award-winner William Bolcom is an American composer of chamber, operatic, vocal, choral, cabaret, ragtime, and symphonic music. Named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America, Bolcom is also a highly acclaimed solo pianist and concert artist with his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris. His music, from ragtime to theater and from chamber to symphonic works, has gained worldwide prominence. Bolcom has composed nine symphonies, twelve string quartets, four operas and three theater operas, and one zarzuela. His operas have been presented at the Metropolitan Opera, Washington National Opera, Portland Opera, Music Academy of the West, Indiana University, Aspen Music Festival, Opera Hagen (Germany), Landestheater Linz (Austria), and the Rome Opera (Italy). Commissions Bolcom has received include ones from the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony, the National Symphony, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Boston “Pops” Orchestra, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Pacific Symphony, and the MET Orchestra, and from Placido Domingo, Isaac Stern, James Galway, Marilyn Horne, Joyce Castle, and Ursula Oppens, among others. Chamber commissions include works for Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, Emerson and Guarneri Quartets, Pro Arte Quartet, the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, the Haydn Festival Eisenstadt, and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. When Bolcom was only eleven, he entered the University of Washington to study composition privately with John Verrall; his later studies were with Darius Milhaud at Mills College and the Paris Conservatoire. Bolcom received a Master’s Degree from Mills College and the first Doctor of Music Degree from Stanford University. Various additional honors include the 2006 National Medal of Arts, two Guggenheim fellowships, two Koussevitzky Foundation grants, six honorary doctorates, and the Marc Blitzstein Award for Musical Theater. Bolcom now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he taught at the University of Michigan for 35 years until his retirement in 2008. The Pro Arte Quartet, which since its inception has championed and commissioned music of contemporary composers, commissioned Piano Quintet No. 2 in celebration of their centennial anniversary in 2012. The group, with pianist Christopher Taylor, premiered it at the Wisconsin Union Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, on March 24, 2012. Pairing the pianist with the quartet made the composer even more enthusiastic about his commission. “The Pro Arte is one of the icons of the string quartet world and I’m thrilled to write for them,” Bolcom says. “I’ve also known Christopher Taylor since he was a boy, so it has been a real delight to write this piece thinking of them in combination.” Taylor is a UW-Madison professor, as well as an acclaimed pianist known for tackling immensely difficult works. Bolcom remarked, “Taylor had already recorded my 12 New Etudes splendidly; I’d first seen his work when at age 10 he sent me his own very creditable piano rag.” “It is a very broad and passionate piece, and very emotional,” says Bolcom. “It’s a kind of warning, even a lament perhaps, about what we’ve become in our lives today,” he says. He feels it serves a combined social and artistic purpose. Bolcom further explained his conception of the work: “The quintet made up of a piano and a string quartet has an almost orchestral feel, versus a trio of violin, cello, and piano, which has a whole other atmosphere. The piano quintets most emblematic of this are those by Schumann and Brahms, especially Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor. I’d like to invoke and evoke the expansive feelings those pieces exude.” The first movement, Allegro con fuoco, in fast 3/4 time, is in a modified sonata-allegro form, which opens with solo piano and a tumultuous bass line contrasting with long notes in the strings. Bolcom described it as having “a stormy mood and grand rhetoric,” referring again to quintets by Schumann and Brahms. The second movement strongly contrasts in tempo and feeling; it is a lyrical Adagio espressivo that projects a sad character. The third movement, Scherzo nero (which some might translate as “dark humor,” is literally a “black scherzo”); it has violent outbursts of energy and leads without pause into the finale, Vivo, con passione, a dissonant rondo finale.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 25 | 6:30 PM
JOAN TOWER: MADE IN AMERICA + WORLD PREMIERE
CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian
The Caryl Fuchs Kassoy & David R. Kassoy Conductor’s Podium
GUEST ARTISTS
Alisa Weilerstein, cello Joan Tower, composer
PROGRAM
Joan Tower, Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 5 (1993)
Joan Tower, Made in America (2004)
Joan Tower, Duets (1994)
Joan Tower, A NEW DAY (World premiere commission) (2021) Daybreak Working Out Mostly Alone Into the Night
This concert is sponsored by
BECKY ROSER & RON STEWART
Made in America Joan Tower
The New Yorker magazine has called Joan Tower “one of the most successful woman composers of all time.” Tower has had a career spanning more than fifty years and made lasting contributions to music in the United States as a composer, performer, conductor, and educator. Her works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir quartets; soloists Evelyn Glennie, Carol Wincenc, David Shifrin, and John Browning; and the orchestras of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., among others. Tower grew up in South America, where her father was an engineer, before returning to the United States to study at Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was the first woman to receive the Grawemeyer Award in Composition in 1990 and was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences at Harvard in the fall of 2004. On October 2, 2005, the Glens Falls (NY) Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Made in America, which was completed in 2004; subsequently, orchestras all over the nation performed the work during the 2005-06 concert season. This project is the only one of its kind to involve smallbudget orchestras as commissioning agents of new work by a major composer. Plymouth Philharmonic and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra shared the New England premiere. Tower has frequently been composer-in-residence at numerous universities, and orchestras and chamber music ensembles perform her music throughout the country. In 2004-5, she was in residency at both Vanderbilt University and Eastman School of Music and as well as residencies at the Bloch, Deer Valley, Aspen, and Menlo Park festivals. Tower has recently added “conductor” to her list of accomplishments with engagements at the American Symphony, the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, the Scotia Festival Orchestra, the Anchorage Symphony, and Kalisto Chamber Orchestra. Her bold and energetic music, with its striking imagery and novel structural forms, has won large, enthusiastic audiences. From 1969-1984, she was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her works. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, quickly entered the repertory, with performances by orchestras including St. Louis, New York, San Francisco, Minnesota, Tokyo, Toronto, the National Symphony, and London Philharmonia. A choreographed version by The Royal Winnipeg Ballet toured throughout Canada, Europe, and Russia. Her tremendously popular five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman has been performed by more than 400 different ensembles. Since 1972, Tower has taught at Bard College where she is Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She continues as composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a title she also held for eight years at the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Tower was the first composer to be chosen for the Made in America commissioning program, a collaboration of the League of American Orchestras (then called the American Symphony Orchestra League) and Meet the Composer. Tower wrote the following about Made in America:
I crossed a fairly big bridge at the age of nine when my family moved to South America (La
Paz, Bolivia), where we stayed for nine years. I had to learn a new language, a new culture, and how to live at 13,000 feet! It was a lively culture with many saints’ days celebrated through music and dance, but the large Inca population in Bolivia was generally poor and there was little chance of moving up in class or work position. When I returned to the
United States, I was proud to have free choices, upward mobility, and the chance to try to become who I wanted to be. I also enjoyed the basic luxuries of an American citizen that we so often take for granted: hot running water, blankets for the cold winters, floors that
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 25 | 6:30 PM
are not made of dirt, and easy modes of transportation, among many other things. So when I started composing this piece, the song “America the Beautiful” kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme for the work. The beauty of the song is undeniable and I loved working with it as a musical idea. One can never take for granted, however, the strength of a musical idea as Beethoven (one of my strongest influences) knew so well. This theme is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, interjecting, unsettling it, but “America the Beautiful” keeps resurfacing in different guises (some small and tender, others big and magnanimous), as if to say, “I’m still here, ever-changing, but holding my own.” A musical struggle is heard throughout the work. Perhaps it was my unconscious reacting to the challenge of how do we keep
America beautiful. The main theme of the one-movement work is based on the song “America the Beautiful”; the piece celebrates America. The work, however, has some dark, ominous sections that contrast with the celebratory music, putting the affirming Made in America parts in relief. The work concludes ambiguously, seeming to intimate that the future of our country’s ideals may be in question. In October 2005, the Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra presented the world premiere of Made in America. Between 2005 and 2007, Made in America was performed in every state in the country. The work is scored for an orchestra of two flutes, (doubling piccolo,) two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, and strings.
Duets Joan Tower
Tower’s infrequently performed Duets, composed in 1994, was commissioned by and is dedicated to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, who performed its premiere at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in West Los Angeles. It is in one continuous movement divided into four sections (slow-fast-slow-fast). Tower has written a brief program note of Duets: “In three of my concertos for flute, clarinet, and violin, I explored the idea of pairing the soloist with the corresponding first chair player in featured cadenzas (an idea I got from Schumann’s Cello Concerto). In Duets, I developed that idea within the orchestra, concentrating on pairs of cellos, flutes, horns, trumpets, and to a lesser degree violins, oboes, clarinets, and percussion, creating an overall concerto grosso-like effect.”
A New Day for cello and orchestra was commissioned by the Colorado Music Festival for a premiere in July of 2021 with the extraordinary cellist Alisa Weilerstein and Peter Oudjian conducting the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra. Tower writes: “This work was written for Alisa. It is dedicated with love to Jeff, my partner and friend for the last 48 years who turned 94 in 2021. “I guess that as we get older, we begin to treasure and value every day that is given to us. This feeling becomes even stronger when we are able to get past 90. I am not quite there yet but my husband Jeff is and the closer I get to his passing, the more I treasure every new day. I can’t imagine life without him. “I want to thank Peter for making this piece happen and the multitalented Alisa for taking it on.” A New Day is in four movements: Daybreak Working Out Mostly Alone Into the Night Tower adds, “These movements are loosely related to what a normal day might be like in our lives. There is a range of emotions from peaceful (and loving) to tumultuous (and anxious) but music always has its own narrative and need not necessarily be connected to those ‘external’ associations.”
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 27 | 7:30 PM
BEETHOVEN QUINTET AND SEPTET
GUEST ARTISTS
Claude Sim, violin Colin Sorgi, viola Abraham Feder, cello Matt Heller, bass Olav Van Hezewijk, oboe Steve Hanusofski, clarinet Louis DeMartino, clarinet Josh Baker, bassoon Adam Trussell, bassoon Catherine Turner, horn Vivienne Spy, piano
PROGRAM
Ludwig van Beethoven, Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat Major, Op. 16 Grave - Allegro, ma non troppo Andante cantabile Rondo: Allegro, ma non troppo
Ludwig van Beethoven, Septet in E-flat Major, Op. 20 Adagio - Allegro con brio Adagio cantabile Tempo di Menuetto Tema con Variazioni: Andante Scherzo: Allegro molto e vivace Andante con moto alla Marcia - Presto
This concert is sponsored by
In the 1780s when Mozart was at the height of his career in Vienna, he began to write a new kind of chamber music with piano: two quartets with strings and a quintet with winds. These works realized for the first time the new idea that every instrument in such a mixed ensemble could be of equal importance. The young Beethoven, who revered the memory of Mozart and looked to his works for models, cast his Op. 16 after Mozart’s K. 452, a Quintet in E-Flat for piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. It is Mozartean in its transparency and clarity. Although written in concertante style, its structural proportions show it to be the work of a composer of a later generation. Beethoven’s Quintet is dedicated to Prince Schwarzenberg, a wealthy music-lover who maintained a fine wind band and knew Mozart’s wind music very well. One of Beethoven’s early works, it was written in Vienna at the end of 1796 or the beginning of 1797 and first performed there on April 6, 1797, with Beethoven at the piano. Mozart’s Quintet was also circulated in an arrangement made by someone in the Mozart circle as a quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello. As a practical man, Beethoven decided that if there were money to be made from alternate versions of a work of this kind, he would make it himself. When he published Op. 16 in 1801, there was provision for the piano to be joined by either four winds or three strings. The wind version is the primary one, but there are no significant differences between the two versions. The music became so popular that in later years a Vienna publisher issued a third version, for string quartet, by some anonymous arranger. Beethoven was fond of this work and in later years, often played it in public. His pupil, Ferdinand Ries, described a performance that was given in the Lobkowitz Palace in December 1804: “In the finale, there are several pauses before the return of the theme. At one of these, Beethoven suddenly began to improvise on the Rondo theme, which entertained him and the audience for a considerable period of time – but not the other musicians. They were displeased and even angry. It was truly comical to see them raise their instruments when they expected to resume playing, and then put them down again. When Beethoven finally returned to the Rondo, the audience was transported with delight.” An interlude of improvisation was an indulgence the composer could allow himself, but he forbade others to tinker with his writing. Another pupil, Carl Czerny, wrote about a performance in 1816 at which “in the spirit of carefree youth, I made many changes and added many difficulties to the music. Beethoven, quite rightly, took me to task in the presence of the other musicians. The next day I received [a letter in which he wrote], ‘I exploded yesterday, and I was very sorry afterward, but you must forgive a composer who would rather hear his work exactly as he wrote it – no matter how beautifully you played otherwise.’” The work begins with a broad and fully developed introduction, Grave, both stately and slow. The winds are pitted against the piano, which hints at the principal theme of the Allegro ma non troppo to come in a lighter tone. In this introduction, the combined winds alternate with the solo instrument. Later, the piano contrasts in color and material with the winds. The main part of the movement is much lighter than is expected from the serious opening. It is a happy movement in a waltz rhythm. The expressive middle movement, Andante cantabile, is exquisitely melodic, a set of rondo-variations in which the piano plays the principal theme three times in increasingly ornate form. In between the reappearances of the dominant piano passages are two episodes for the wind instruments that provide some of the most poignantly beautiful moments in the entire composition. The finale, another Rondo, Allegro ma non troppo, is the most jolly, lively, and carefree of the three movements.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 27 | 7:30 PM
Septet for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello and Bass in E-flat Major, Op. 20 Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven’s Septet is an early work whose great popularity became a difficult obstacle for his later compositions to compete with. Public and critics asked over and over again why he did not write more music that gave such easy satisfaction and was so readily comprehensible as this Septet and Symphony No. 1 were. When this septet became Beethoven’s singularly most popular work, he began denouncing it for lacking adequate seriousness as he compared it with his own later compositions, saying, “That damn work; I wish it could be burned!” He even reputedly went so far as to say to an enthusiastic admirer that Mozart had written the work. Beethoven composed the cheerful and optimistic, elegant Septet at the end of 1799; it was first publicly performed in April 1880 and dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa. The ensemble consists of clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass, an extremely unusual choice; scholars are not sure whether it was the composer’s desire to use those instruments or the wishes of the unknown person who commissioned the work. It is Beethoven’s only chamber work to include double bass, but he does not give the instrument much solo material; usually, he uses the bass to double the cello part or to provide the harmonic line when the cello has thematic material. The Septet, Symphony No. 1, and an early piano concerto had their first public performances at Beethoven’s first concert in Vienna at the Court Theater, on April 2, 1800, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa. A reviewer called it “truly the most interesting concert in a long time” despite the poor quality of the orchestral playing. This particular concert, known as an Akademie, initiated a concert series that Beethoven gave episodically throughout his career for two purposes: to raise money and to introduce new compositions. The Septet attained such popularity that before long it was published in arrangements for other instruments by other hands: as a piece for large wind band, as a string quintet, as a piano sonata, and in many other forms. By 1803, Beethoven was thinking of making this piece into a trio also.
This work, in the light style of Mozart and Haydn, is reminiscent of divertimento form with its six short movements, yet its structure is idiomatically that of Beethoven, and the work alternates slow and fast tempi throughout. Barry Cooper, in his biography of Beethoven, comments: “The six movements seem disparate and self-contained, as in a divertimento, yet they are all (except perhaps the Scherzo) related by themes that outline or decorate a falling and rising semitone, resulting in greater coherence than might be expected.”) The septet begins with a slow, stately introduction, Adagio, in the style of a serenade that leads to a cheerful first-movement sonata form Allegro con brio with a four-note subject. The second movement is a graceful and rather profound Adagio cantabile. The popular third movement is a Tempo di Menuetto, whose principal theme Beethoven used in a slightly different form in his Clarinet Trio, Op. 11, his Piano Sonata, Op. 49, No. 2 and his Piano, Violin and Cello Trio, Op. 38. The fourth movement, Tema con Variazioni, Andante, is a simple, charming theme with five variations. Some critics contend that the theme originated in a folk song from Germany’s lower Rhine Valley, but no specific source has ever been pinpointed. The fifth movement, a rapid Scherzo: Allegro molto e vivace, is very lyrical; it is especially noteworthy because, in this work, Beethoven has given us both a Minuet and a Scherzo, indicating the progression in form he is in the process of then making between the two. Soon he would include only the Scherzo, leaving the more Classical form of the Minuet behind. A sudden change of mood follows in the Andante con moto alla marcia, which serves as a transition to the sixth movement, a final, spirited Rondo, Presto.
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 29 | 7:30 PM & JULY 30 | 6:30 PM
HADELICH PLAYS BEETHOVEN’S VIOLIN CONCERTO
CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTIST
Augustin Hadelich, violin Artist-in-Residence
PROGRAM
Carl Maria von Weber, Oberon Overture
Zoltán Kodály, Dances of Galánta Lento Allegro moderato Allegro con moto, grazioso Allegro Allegro vivace
Ludwig van Beethoven, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 Allegro ma non troppo Larghetto Rondo: Allegro
The July 29 concert is sponsored by
The July 30 concert is sponsored by
HENRY & ANNE BEER
Oberon Overture Carl Maria von Weber
(Born November 18, 1786, in Eutin, Germany; died June 5, 1826, in London)
Weber, with roots in 18th-century Classicism, initiated the German Romantic tradition of composition. His classical roots were solid and palpable: first, his older brother, who had studied briefly with Joseph Haydn, taught him the basics of his musical education, and then later, he had lessons from Haydn’s younger brother, Michael. Not important musically, but of interest, is the fact, too, that Weber was related, as a first cousin, to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s wife, Constanze. His seven romantic operas gave him a significant place in music history and, from their fame, he earned the title “Father of German (Romantic) Opera.” Generally, now only the overtures of the operas are performed. In Oberon, or The Elf King’s Oath (1826), Weber incorporated pageantry and a supernatural, exotic location with damsels in distress, knights in shining armor, and marauding pirates. The work has an ineffable sweetness, as it depicts the mysteries of the country of the elves and the life of the spirits of the air, earth, and water. The Overture joins many themes from the opera in a sonata form structure with lyricism, warm coloration, and vibrant rhythmic figures. Music historian Donald Tovey regarded the overture as “a gorgeous masterpiece of operatic orchestration.” It begins with a slow introduction placing it in fairyland, a mysterious forest where horn calls, linked with Oberon’s call to the fairies, and atmospheric muted strings, skittering flutes, and clarinets abound. The energetic brass theme, indicating the world of the knights, is linked to the clarinet’s lyrical prayer theme by a brief reprise of the introduction; also introduced are Rezia’s grand aria, “Ocean! Thou mighty monster!” and a stamping rhythm identified with the elves, Puck and Droll. The overture’s brilliant conclusion is majestic yet tumultuous. The overture is scored for two flutes, two clarinets, two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones (alto, tenor and bass), strings, and timpani.
Dances of Galánta Zoltán Kodály
Zoltán Kodály, the son of amateur musicians, spent time in his early childhood in the village of Galánta in western Hungary (present-day Slovakia). There he had his first experience with music as he heard and learned the songs and ballads the other children sang, and as he listened to the gypsy bands that played there. In 1905 he and Hungary’s other great composer of the time, Béla Bartók, began the systematic collection and analysis of Hungarian folk music that was to be the most powerful single influence on their creative work. Kodály went back to Galánta the year he began working with Bartók and recorded about one hundred and fifty folk songs, some sung by his old childhood friends. The music he collected on this trip was the basis of his doctoral dissertation, a study of the structure of Hungarian folk song texts. One of the principal aims of his and Bartók’s research was to distinguish the music of the Hungarian peasants from that of the Gypsies. Peasant music generally permeates their compositions, but in the Dances of Galánta, as Kodály explains in a preface to the score, the inspiration comes from the Gypsies. Kodály wrote:
Galánta is a small Hungarian market-town on the road from Vienna to Budapest where the composer spent seven years of his childhood. In those days the town had a Gypsy band which has since disappeared, whose music was the first orchestral sound he heard as a child. The ancestors of these Gypsies were known more than a hundred years ago. Around COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 69
PROGRAM NOTES JULY 29 | 7:30 PM & JULY 30 | 6:30 PM
1800, some books of Hungarian dances were published in Vienna, one of which contained music from the Gypsies of Galánta. They preserved the old tradition. Kodály turned to this old volume when he was asked to compose this dance suite. Wanting to preserve the customs he found there, he took these melodies and set them in traditional harmonies and colorful orchestrations. Kodály composed these musical recollections for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, in 1933. The five dances are each separate, but Kodály used recurring material to create continuity among them; some think of the work as a suite of dances, but it is really made up of a single movement cast in five episodes. Among the pieces Kodály included were dance melodies, including ones used for celebrating victories through dancing. The verbunkos was often used to accompany the induction of men into the military. Dances of Galánta includes a chain of five connected dances, gradually accelerating in tempo, upon which Kodály imposed an original structure. His work is an expanded verbunkos (from the German werben, to recruit. Verbunkos were common in 18th- and 19th-century Hungary. The dance verbunkos traditionally consisted of two sections, the lassú (literally, “slow”) and the friss (“fresh”). Musically, the verbunkos is distinctive for its syncopation, wide melodic skips, dotted rhythms, and alternation of fast and slow figures. In it, Kodály also incorporated the brilliant performing style of the gypsy violinists. Kodály’s Dances of Galánta consists of a three-part lassú made up of the slow orchestral introduction, Lento, which contains a haunting gypsy motive to set the mood. The clarinet is then showcased in a cadenza after which it announces the majestic theme of the first dance. This theme is heard as the refrain throughout the whole first half: it is a rondo whose ideas generate new dances. The subsequent Andante maestoso followed by the friss, Allegro Moderato, which is then followed by four different fast dances, separated by brief references to the Andante maestoso. The fourth dance, Allegro, includes its own contrasting little march, somewhat slower. The fifth and final dance, Allegro vivace, is a spirited, lavishly embellished dance with brilliant orchestral colors. Suddenly the motion stops, and in the short coda, the rondo briefly returns before the whirling, stomping dancing returns to conclude the piece. Dances of Galánta premiered on October 23, 1933. The dances are scored for two flutes, two clarinets, two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion (orchestral bells, snare drum, triangle) and strings.
Violin Concerto, Op. 61, D Major Ludwig van Beethoven
Late in 1806, Beethoven paused while working on Symphony No. 5 to write a violin concerto for the Viennese violinist Franz Clement (1780-1842). He had known Clement since 1794 when he was himself just one of many brilliant young pianists in Vienna and had sent the fourteen-year-old violinist a letter of endorsement and encouragement. By the time of the writing of the concerto, Clement had played in London under Haydn, acquired an official position at court, and had been appointed leader (that is concertmaster and conductor) of the important new Theater an der Wien. We no longer know what Clement’s playing was like then, but Beethoven presumably did, for Clement had led the orchestra in the first production of Fidelio in 1805, and the Violin Concerto was almost certainly written to suit his style and skills. However, there are clear signs that Clement did not live up to his former performance level or his reputation and that he ultimately disappointed Beethoven. In 1813, when Weber became head of the Prague Opera, he hired Clement, but quickly found his playing unsatisfactory. In 1824, Beethoven took great pains to avoid having him as concertmaster for the first performance of the Ninth Symphony. Clement died in poverty. Beethoven usually assembled his serious works slowly and painstakingly, but he wrote the Violin Concerto quickly, even hurriedly, for a performance at a concert Clement gave on December 23, 1806. The work was not finished until the last moment, too late for the soloist to rehearse it with the orchestra, but Clement had no doubt familiarized himself with his part during the writing. As shocking as that may seem now, it was not an uncommon situation for the work only to be finished just before its first performance, although even then, it was acknowledged to be an undesirable practice. Other common practices of the time would also surprise the modern concertgoer: the first movement of a concerto was played before intermission and the others after. For a real showpiece, Clement played a work of his own composition, holding the violin upside down! After the first performance, one reviewer wrote, “Concerning Beethoven’s Concerto, the judgment of connoisseurs is unanimous. Its many beauties must be conceded, but it must also be acknowledged that the endless repetition of certain commonplace passages may become tedious. It must be said that Beethoven could better employ his talents by giving us works such as the First [and Second] Symphonies, the charming Septet and others of his earlier compositions.” [Abridged] One wonders if the critic then took into account that he heard this difficult new composition in a hasty reading rather than a studied performance. The Concerto, for whatever reasons, was slow in making its way into the world. It was not until years later, when Joseph Joachim began to play it all over Europe, that it became an accepted and respected staple of the repertoire, recognized as the masterpiece it is. Beethoven headed his manuscript with a punning inscription that can be rendered in English as “Concerto clemently written for Clement,” but he published the work in 1808 with a dedication to a childhood friend, Stephan von Breuning. In 1807, the Italian composer-pianist Muzio Clementi, who had become a wealthy publisher and instrument-maker in London, persuaded Beethoven to rewrite the Violin Concerto’s solo part for piano, which he said would be much easier to sell, but that version of the work has never become popular.
The Violin Concerto is a huge work, longer than anything Beethoven had written until then except the Eroica Symphony. Its number of musical ideas is not large, but each is considered at such great length that the whole assumes a monumental size. The five strokes of the timpani that open the first movement, Allegro non troppo, are at once a quiet demand for attention, the start of the opening theme, and a motto-like rhythmic element that pervades the movement. The slow movement, Larghetto, is a set of variations on a theme that can sound like a halting recitative or a flowing melody. The movement runs without pause into the final rondo, Allegro, a brilliant, exuberant virtuoso piece. The score calls for flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 1 | 6:30 PM
COPLAND’S LINCOLN PORTRAIT
CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTISTS
Steven Banks, saxophone Chris Christoffersen, narrator
PROGRAM
Aaron Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man
Florence Price, String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor (1935) Andante cantabile
Alexander Glazunov, Saxophone Concerto in E-flat Major, Op. 109
Jacques Ibert, Concertino da Camera Allegro Larghetto - Animato
Aaron Copland, Lincoln Portrait
THIS CONCERT IS SPONSORED BY LAURA AND STEPHEN SANFORD IN LOVING MEMORY OF PATRICIA MAGETTE, COLORADO MUSIC FESTIVAL BOARD PRESIDENT (2000-2004)
Fanfare for the Common Man Aaron Copland
Eugene Goosens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra commissioned Copland’s noble Fanfare for the Common Man during World War II; it premiered on March 14, 1943. The Cincinnati Symphony opened each concert that season with a fanfare, a format Goosens designed as a morale-boosting project. “It is my idea,” Goosens said, “to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.” Unlike most fanfares, which derive from the traditional bugle call, Copland’s fanfare is declamatory, resembling his other music. It begins with a short, dramatic introduction for percussion; three trumpets then announce the theme, unaccompanied. The trumpets and horns restate the theme in two-part harmony, then in three parts, with the addition of two trombones. Finally horns, trumpets, trombones, and tuba, massively spaced, join together. With this fanfare, completed in 1942, Copland honored ordinary people fighting in the ranks and working on the home front. Years later, he commented, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.” In 1946, he adapted the music for use in the last movement of his Symphony No. 3. Fanfare for the Common Man is scored for four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, and tam-tam.
(Born April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas.; died June 3, 1953, in Chicago, Illinois)
The early 20th-century African-American composer Florence Beatrice Price spent her professional career in Chicago, where, because of her extraordinary musical talent and her family’s affluence, she was able, notwithstanding her race and gender, to study at the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory; further, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she majored in organ and piano. After graduating with two degrees, Price worked as a college professor, a church organist, and a theater accompanist. Today, she is best remembered as the first African-American woman to have had a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra played her Symphony in E minor. That orchestra also premiered her Piano Concerto the following year. In the 1930s and early 1940s, music groups sponsored by the WPA (the Works Projects Administration) in Illinois and Michigan performed some of Price’s longer works. Price’s groundbreaking Symphony in E minor was the first prize winner of the 1932 Rodman Wanamaker Music Contest and was premiered in 1933 by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Price wrote more than 300 musical compositions. Some of her works have been lost, and others are unpublished, but her piano and vocal music are still heard in concert halls. Contralto Marian Anderson brought her historic 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial to its conclusion with Price’s “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.” Since then, Price’s art songs and spiritual settings have been favorites of artists who specialize in African-American concert music. During the 1930s, musicians all over the U.S. suffered from the effects of the Depression, partly because the rise of radio in the 1920s had decreased opportunities for performing musicians. Sound film, beginning at the end of the 1920s, made musicians’ work in movie
theaters become obsolete. In fact, between 1929 and 1934, 70% of America’s musicians were unemployed, and it was not until the WPA began, that musicians, and especially Black musicians, received some relief. Some of Price’s most important works were composed during the WPA years, a time when the African-American nationalist movement in music became predominant. Outside Chicago, Price became acquainted with musicians in the Michigan WPA and benefited especially from the Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra. Valter Poole, its conductor, premiered her Symphony No. 3 on November 6, 1940, at the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts in a program that also featured the composer as piano soloist in her own Piano Concerto. J.D. Callaghan, writing for the Detroit Free Press, was very enthusiastic about the symphony’s regional Americanism: “Mrs. Price, both in the concerto and in the symphony, spoke in the musical idiom of her own people, and spoke with authority.” Quartet No. 2 was composed in 1935. Its second movement, Andante Cantabile, sounds familiar even though it is not, necessarily. The opening theme of this movement straddles the worlds of AfricanAmerican folk music and the music of the European Classical tradition, displaying influences of both with comfort and authority. The gentle, rocking lyricism, even in the repeating two-note pattern in the second violin, helps listeners experience a variety of emotions from the innocent and comforting to passionate yearning. The melodic and harmonic turns bring the melancholy beauty of the African-American influence into the tradition of the string quartet, employing extensive dissonances that are more a part of the modernist idioms of the early 20th century than they are of traditional African American culture.
Concerto for Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra, in E-flat Major, Op. 109 Alexander Glazunov
(Born August 10, 1865, in Saint Petersburg; died March 21, 1936, in Paris)
Adolphe Sax, a member of a Belgian family that developed many new instruments, invented the saxophone in the 1840s. His invention consisted basically of a long, conical brass tube, bent into graceful curves; instrumentalists produced its sound by blowing on a thin reed attached to the mouthpiece with a key system opening and closing holes in the tube, effectively varying its length and producing different pitches. Sax’s original idea, basically unchanged today, was probably to provide a new, flexible instrument for military brass bands, but several classical composers used it in their music too, and in the 20th century, it became one of the most used instruments in jazz and popular music. When the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov settled in Paris, where he heard the saxophone-rich band of the Garde Républicaine, he became interested in the saxophone, and in 1934, he wrote this brilliant, difficult concerto for the German-born virtuoso Sigurd Raschèr, to whom it is dedicated. Raschèr had studied classical clarinet in Berlin, but also played saxophone in the city’s jazz clubs. The concerto is completely classical and makes it seem as if Glazunov had not heard the saxophone in the jazz that was so popular in Paris at the time. The concerto does, however, include some of the mildly folk-like themes in a single movement both lyrical and melancholy, rhapsodic in character, with many changes of tempo. The music begins with the main theme of the work, which reappears frequently in its course, sometimes in varied guise. The saxophone displays legato, cantabile playing in the many slow sections with control across a large range of dynamics as the theme ascends and descends the scale. There are some involved, demanding, animated passages, requiring nimble fingering and effective glissandos. In the middle, Glazunov provides a protracted solo cadenza that comes to its conclusion with a sighing gesture. This section is followed by a lively fugato with the main theme as an interwoven countermelody. The concerto ends with bravura, laden with trills. The score calls for an alto saxophone soloist and a body of strings.
Concertino da Camera for Alto Saxophone and Chamber Orchestra Jacques Ibert
(Born August 15, 1890, in Paris; died there February 5, 1962)
Jacques Ibert, who first began to study music from his mother, was a pupil of Fauré. Conscripted into the Navy during World War I, he served at Dunkirk in 1917-18 in battles against German submarines to protect shipping lanes between Britain and the European continent. He returned to the Conservatory after the War, and in 1919, won the Prix de Rome for composition, which granted him three years of study in Italy. There, in 1922, he composed one of his best-known works, Escales... (Ports of Call), a musical journey to the Mediterranean cities of Rome, Tunis, and Valencia. Overall, Ibert is best known for a small number of colorful, often witty, high-spirited orchestral works. He was the first musician to become Director of the French Academy at Rome, a position in which he served with distinction from 1937 to 1960. Ibert composed Concertino da Camera for German-born Sigurd Manfred Raschèr in the early 1930s. Raschèr, who gave the premiere performance in December 1935, taught at conservatories in Denmark and Sweden. Strongly opposed to Adolf Hitler’s regime, he moved to the United States in 1938 and lived here until his death in 2001. In the words of an early French review, the concertino is distinguished for its “clarity, delicacy, balance, fantasy and impeccable style.” This pithy technically challenging and lyrical concertino has two movements with the second consisting of a slow and fast section, giving the piece the effect of being in three movements. Ibert showcases the jazzy urban sound of the alto saxophone with lavish use of syncopation, expressive timbres, the technique of flutter tonguing, and a diminished scale. It also contains whole-tone scales, chromaticism, melodic fragments, and complicated rhythms. The fast first movement, Allegro con moto, features a virtuosic dialogue between the soloist and accompaniment and has an energetic and strongly rhythmic main theme, contrasted with a COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 73
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 1 | 6:30 PM
beautifully melodic second theme. A short orchestral introduction sets the stage for the saxophone to jump in and climb its way up to a high register all requiring much technical prowess, especially in the very lively finale. The opening of the second movement, Larghetto Animato Molto, for the saxophone alone in a kind of recitative, serves as an introduction to a sustained lyrical melody, a bluesy saxophone ballad, with string support. A small group of winds develops the melody, which afterward the strings restate. Ibert returns suddenly to the energetic feel of the first movement, as a climax is achieved in a virtuosic cadenza before the tempo speeds to the end. The accompaniment may be played by an ensemble of only eleven instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, two violins, viola, cello, and double bass, but the work is frequently performed with a larger body of strings.
Lincoln Portrait Aaron Copland
Copland completed A Lincoln Portrait in three months in 1942; it is one of three American portraits commissioned by conductor Andre Kostelanetz in direct response to the Pearl Harbor bombing of December 7, 1941. Kostelanetz asked Copland to compose a musical portrait of a great American to express patriotism at a time of great national trial. “My first thought was to do a portrait of Walt Whitman, the patron poet of all American composers, ” Copland responded, but a literary figure, Walt Whitman had already been chosen by Jerome Kern. Kostelanetz suggested Copland choose a statesman. Copland felt Lincoln seemed ideal: “On discussing my choice with Virgil Thomson, he amiably pointed out that no composer could possibly hope to match in musical terms the stature of so eminent a figure as that of Lincoln. Of course, he was right. But secretly I was hoping to avoid the difficulty by doing a portrait in which the sitter himself might speak. With the voice of Lincoln to help me, I was ready to risk the impossible.” Copland included two songs of Lincoln’s time: “Camptown Races” by Stephen Foster and an 1840 ballad first published under the title of “The Pesky Sarpent,” but better known as “Springfield Mountain.” Copland divided the composition into roughly three sections. In the opening section, Copland aimed to suggest “the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality”; the noble theme is solemn, containing a hint of a funeral march. Near the section’s end, he wanted to add “something of Lincoln’s gentleness and simplicity of spirit.” A clarinet introduces the second theme, based on “Springfield Mountain,” played at half speed. The joyful faster central section briefly sketches the background of Lincoln’s time, including a phrase from “Camptown Races,” which Copland noted was adapted as a campaign song for Lincoln in 1860. In the final section, Copland aimed to “draw a simple but impressive frame about the words of Lincoln himself.” He chose quotations from Lincoln’s letters and lesser-known speeches, except for the final quotation from the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln Portrait had its premiere on May 14, 1942, with the Cincinnati Symphony conducted by Andre Kostelanetz.
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 3 | 7:30 PM
BROOKLYN RIDER
GUEST ARTISTS Brooklyn Rider
PROGRAM
Caroline Shaw, Schisma (2018)
Osvaldo Golijov, Tenebrae (2002)
Franz Schubert, String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D.810, “Death and the Maiden” Allegro Andante con moto Scherzo. Allegro molto Trio Presto
This concert is sponsored by
Schisma (2018) Caroline Shaw
(Born 1982 in Greenville, North Carolina)
Schisma is a reference to the phrase “in the cleft of the rock,” which appears in many scriptures including the Song of Solomon and Isaiah. In the Book of Exodus (33:22), there is a beautiful line which reads: “I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.” It is essentially a promise of safety, of a makeshift refuge within a crack in something as hard and unforgiving as mountain rock, until the danger has passed. It is a kind of nest, a home. I have always felt that Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang (third movement of Opus 132) uses a nest-like architecture in a unique and profound way. The return of the dance-like Neue Kraft fühlend section always feels like a warm homecoming, a place of hope and shelter and deep comfort. The choice to title this piece with the modern Greek word schisma (a translation of the Hebrew נִקְרַת, or “cleft”) is a reference to the islands in today’s Greece which have become harsh refugee camps for Syrians seeking asylum from the war. It also points to the nature of war, of the break between peoples, and of the search for hope and new growth within the breaks and crevices. —Caroline Shaw Schisma was commissioned for Brooklyn Rider by Madeline Island Chamber Music in honor of Caroline Marshall. First performance, June 29, 2018 - Madeline Island, Wisconsin
Tenebrae (2002) Osvaldo Golijov
(Born on December 5, 1960, in La Plata, Argentina)
I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar”, the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem. © Osvaldo Golijov. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Given Franz Schubert’s undeniable stature in the pantheon of musical luminaries, it is a challenging exercise more than two hundred years later to imagine him as greatly underappreciated within his own lifetime. There was much left to be published of his work upon his death, spread out in the hands of his circle in Vienna. He was known in his day as a composer of mere hausmusik; part songs, lieder and various pieces for piano. Almost none of his large scale works were known by the Viennese public, much less outside of Vienna. Schubert himself was not a virtuoso performer- he wrote no concertos, so his cause was not COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 75
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 3 | 7:30 PM
advanced by the popular virtuosos of the era. Italy was all the rage: the incomparable and devilish violinist Paganini was enormously popular, as was the music of Rossini. To further make life difficult, there was the ever-persistent and smothering shadow of the immortally beloved Beethoven to contend with for any self-respecting composer of the time. And so it was left mostly to Schubert and his intimate circle of friends to organize evenings of informal performances comprised mostly of lieder and part songs with the ink still drying, referred to as Schubertiaden. It took later figures such as Robert Schumann, who was an extremely prescient observer of the musical landscape, to elevate Schubert’s status to a wider audience. Schumann’s description from an 1840 essay on Schubert’s 9th Symphony for the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik could easily apply to the String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden,” - “And this heavenly length, like a fat novel in four volumes by Jean Paul- never-ending, and if only that the reader may go on creating in the same vein afterwards. How refreshing is their sense of inexhaustible wealth where with others one always fears the ending, troubled by the presentiment of ultimate disappointment.” Jumping to the present day, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden string quartet (1824) surely needs little introduction from myself- it is one of the most beloved works in the chamber music literature. In particular, the famed theme and variations movement uses the composer’s own1817 song of the same name as the source material. Schubert’s quartet is emblematic of the larger fact that so much instrumental music has been inspired by song. Today, we celebrate the role of the human voice in chamber music, pairing the Schubert with new works by Lisa Bielawa and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky. These new compositions are both great examples of how the vocal tradition that Schubert excelled in continues to be reinvented and celebrated in the present day. Additionally, Philip Glass is known to be an ardent admirer of Schubert’s music, and much of his trademark style seems to borrow from Schubert’s driving harmonies and gossamer-like, layered textures- both of which are on display in the restless undulation of the Death and the Maiden string quartet. Notes by Nicholas Cords
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 5 | 7:30 PM
BEETHOVEN’S EROICA + JOEL THOMPSON’S WORLD PREMIERE
CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTISTS
Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., narrator Joel Thompson, composer
PROGRAM
Joel Thompson, World premiere commission (2021)
Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55, “Eroica” Allegro con brio Marcia funebre: Adagio assai Scherzo: Allegro vivace Finale: Allegro molto
This concert is sponsored by
World premiere commission (2021) Joel Thompson
(Born 1988)
Atlanta-based composer, conductor, pianist, and educator Joel Thompson is best known for the choral work, Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, which the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club premiered in November 2015. Recently, Thompson was a composition fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and School where he worked with composers Stephen Hartke and Christopher Theofanidis and was awarded the 2017 Hermitage Prize. His works have been performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Master Chorale, Los Angeles Master Chorale, EXIGENCE, and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. Thompson taught at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta 2015-2017 and also served as Director of Choral Studies and Assistant Professor of Music at Andrew College 2013-2015. He received his B.A. in Music as well as his M.M. in Choral Conducting from Emory. He is currently pursuing his D.M.A. in composition at the Yale School of Music.
Beethoven wrote the Eroica Symphony for the most part in 1803, but its history goes back to 1798 when a minister of France’s revolutionary government arrived in Vienna. The news this minister brought of a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte, whose democratic ideals matched his military genius, fired Beethoven’s imagination. For five years, he thought of ways in which music could reflect the new republican Europe that might follow the Revolution in France. Then, between May 1803 and some time early in 1804, he composed his great new symphony. By this time, Napoleon had become the leader of the French government. Beethoven wrote Napoleon’s name at the head of the music, but it was not to remain there long. In May 1804, Napoleon had himself named Emperor of France. When the news reached Vienna, Beethoven was enraged. “So he is just like all the rest, after all,” the angry composer shouted. “He will stamp out human rights and become a greater tyrant than the others,” and he ripped up the first page of his score. He had a new copy made, with the heading, “Grand Symphony, entitled Bonaparte” but then he erased the last two words. Sometime later he decided on the title Sinfonia Eroica, which appeared (in Italian) on the cover of the first edition, in 1806, as Heroic Symphony, Composed in Memory of a Great Man. Napoleon still had fifteen more years on earth, but for Beethoven, his greatness had passed. In 1809, when Vienna was occupied by Napoleon, Beethoven led a performance of the Eroica as an act of defiance. Napoleon himself was out of the city on the day of the concert, and there seems to have been no reaction from the authorities. Beethoven’s heroic Symphony No. 3 is the work with which he outgrew the 18th century and finally abandoned the limitations of form and style that had dominated music from the time of Haydn and Mozart. He told one of his pupils when he was writing his symphony, “I am unsatisfied with my work up to now. From here on, I take a new course.” It is a completely new kind of symphony, of and for the 19th century, a huge work, double the length of his Symphony No. 1, written only three years before. Its size was so tremendous that some early critics thought it could never become popular. This great symphony, first performed in public on April 7, 1805, in Vienna, puzzled many early listeners. One critic called it a “wild Fantasy.” Beethoven’s friends said that the public simply was not yet ready for his advanced musical thought. Others found it strange and violent, and another critic wrote, “If Beethoven continues on his present path, his music could reach the point where one would derive no pleasure from it.” Beethoven himself was COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 77
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 5 | 7:30 PM
unmoved by all the complaints. He made no changes in his work and is reported to have replied to complaints about its length by saying, “If I write an hour-long symphony, it will be short.” The nearest he came to admitting the possibility of anything problematic was a note in the first edition saying, “Since this Symphony lasts longer than usual, it should be played nearer the beginning than the end of the concert, for if heard later, the audience will be tired from listening to other works, and the Symphony will not make its proper effect.” The first movement of the symphony, Allegro con Brio, opens with two smashing chords, after which all the formal elements, except the size, are familiar. The whole movement embodies tension as the theme is developed but seems to search perennially for a resolution. The peak of the development explodes with bold harmonic dissonance and syncopated rhythms that can still surprise our modern ears. This innovative gesture greatly upset the music critics of Beethoven’s day and those for many years after. The second movement is a solemn Funeral March, (Marcia funebre) Adagio assai, with a contrasting central section. This music of heroic grief may originally have been intended to honor Napoleon’s soldiers who died in battle. When he heard of Napoleon’s death in 1821, Beethoven said that he had already written the appropriate music, referring to this movement. The third movement contrasts strongly with the movement before it. Full of life and humor, it is a long, brilliant Scherzo, Allegro vivace, with a contrasting central Trio section that features the orchestra’s three horns. One of the most distinguishing features of this movement is the creative rhythm Beethoven employs. The great Finale, Allegro molto, is a theme-and-variations movement that seems to personify the creative vitality of the human spirit. The theme is the tune of a light ballroom dance Beethoven had written sometime around 1801. He also used it as a subject for variations in the allegorical ballet he wrote that year, The Creatures of Prometheus, and in 1802, it reappeared in his Fifteen Piano Variations, Op. 35. The variations in the Symphony No. 3 are the most original and the most profound. After a rushing introduction, plucked strings articulate the theme. Later this turns out to be only the harmonic foundation of the main theme itself, which is not revealed until the woodwinds play it in the third variation. The last variations are slow, and then, as the symphony draws to a close, there is a sudden change to a very fast tempo, Presto, for a brilliant ending. The score calls for an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 7 | 7:30 PM
FESTIVAL FINALE: BEETHOVEN 5
CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian
PROGRAM
Giovanni Gabrieli, Canzon septimi toni à 8 (No. 2) arr. R.P. Block
ˇ Anton Dvorák, Serenade for Wind Instruments in D Minor, Op. 44 Moderato quasi marcia Minuetto: Tempo di minuetto Andante con moto Finale: Allegro molto
Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 Allegro con brio Andante con moto Allegro Allegro
This concert is sponsored by
GORDON & GRACE GAMM
Canzon septimi toni à 8 (No. 2) from Sacrae symphoniae, C.171 Giovanni Gabrieli, arr. R.P. Block
(Born in l557, in Venice; died there August 12, 1612)
Venice was a great musical center for at least 500 years, with an important part of its musical life centered on the church of its patron saint, St. Mark. Giovanni Gabrieli studied under his uncle Andrea, organist at San Marco’s for more than twenty-five years; he also studied with Orlando di Lasso at the Bavarian court in Munich from 1575 to 1579, during which years Venice was devastated by a plague. He eventually assumed his uncle’s position, holding it for twenty-seven years. At the end of the Renaissance, Venice grew even bolder in its musical experimentation. San Marco’s architecture lends itself to the innovational, widely separated placement of ensembles of voices or instruments performing independently. These cori spezzati (“choruses spaced apart”) contributed to the growth of extremely splendid polychoral vocal and instrumental music as composers created new effects for its space with different numbers and kinds of instruments in groups, using question-and-answer or echo effects. (A century later, these transformed into the concerto grosso.) Gabrieli was an innovator in style, technique, and expression; he worked with original harmonic ideas to create dramatic sacred music. Having composed works in many musical genres, he seems to have been the first composer to use the term “sonata,” to describe instrumental works that did not have any other established form. His most well-known works were included in the monumental 1597 compendium of his work at San. Marco’s called Sacrae symphoniae (“Sacred Symphonies”). The title Canzon septimi toni refers to the mode or scale on which the piece is based. It is symmetrical and has three sections, each of which ends with a tripla (in 3) and a tutti (unison) in duple time, in which the basses move in canon (i.e., like a round). It begins, as most of Gabrieli’s canzonas, with repeated notes in a dactylic rhythm (long-short-long). The first two sections begin with the first choir, the last with the second choir. The lovely opening melody sounds almost like a carol; the second choir replies with a vigorous leaping figure. The canzon’s body consists of the exchange of contrasting themes. Canzon septimi toni is scored for a small brass ensemble.
Serenade for Winds, Cello and Double Bass in D Minor, Op. 44 ˇ Antonín Dvorák
(Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves; died May 1, 1904, in Prague)
Until he was more than thirty, Antonín Dvořák was unknown as a composer outside a small circle of musicians in Prague with whom he played through his first efforts at writing chamber music. Then, in 1875, his talent came to the attention of Brahms, who launched Dvořák on his career with a generous grant from the Imperial government in Vienna and a profitable arrangement with a major publisher in Berlin. Brahms was full of praise for this Serenade, writing to his friend, the renowned violinist Joseph Joachim: “Take a look at Dvořák’s Serenade for Wind Instruments; I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do...It would be difficult to discover a finer, more refreshing impression of really abundant and charming creative talent. Have it played to you; I feel sure the players will enjoy doing it!” In the 1870s, Dvořák, like Brahms at about the same point in his life, wrote two serenades, but not for a conventional instrumental body. Brahms omitted violins from his Serenade No. 2, and Dvořák here dispensed with the violas, too. The low strings, cellos, and basses were probably retained because suitable bass wind instruments were not always available then. Dvořák conducted his Serenade’s premiere at a concert devoted to his own works on November 17, 1878, in Prague. The word “serenade” takes its name from sera, which means “late” in Latin and “evening” in Italian, and was originally the name given to nocturnal street songs. In the 18th century, a serenade was COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 79
PROGRAM NOTES AUGUST 7 | 7:30 PM
a composition in several movements that mixed symphonic structures with marches and dances and was played by an instrumental ensemble at evening entertainments. By the late 19th century, composers used the serenade as a catch-all for almost any composition light in tone and not rigid in structure. The music is classical in style, simple in form, and charming. In Mozart’s day, serenades began with a procession of musicians playing a little march; Dvořák, in the same vein, wrote his first movement, Moderato quasi marcia. He called the second movement, as was traditional, Minuetto: Tempo di minuetto, but it is more like later composers’ scherzos. Some of the melodies have the style of such Czech folk dances as the souseská (“the neighbor’s dance’’) and the furiant, which he uses in the Trio. The lyrical slow movement, Andante con moto, which is actually not very slow, is a lyrical interlude. In the rousing Finale, Allegro molto, the folk dance spirit is again evident; a bit of the opening march returns before the brilliant ending.
Fellow composer Robert Schumann gave Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 the greatest praise possible when he wrote that although it is often heard, it “still exercises its power over all ages, just as those great phenomena of nature that, no matter how often they recur, fill us with awe and wonder. This symphony will go on centuries hence, as long as the world and world’s music endure.” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 has always been popular and recognizable because of the famous four-note phrase with which it opens. Since Beethoven composed the symphony, critics and commentators have attempted to give that phrase some programmatic significance. Beethoven’s not altogether trustworthy friend, Anton Schindler, presumably quoted the composer as saying it represented Fate knocking at the door. Schindler, however, had a reputation for not letting facts get in the way of a good story, and the conversation in which he quoted Beethoven took place years after Beethoven finished the symphony, which makes it a bit suspect anyhow. Accounts also say that Beethoven would say nearly anything to rid himself of annoying questioning about his compositions. Nevertheless, this statement began a never-ending stream of interpretations of the symphony. Whether it has a programmatic significance or not, unquestionably the phrase has definite importance musically, as it recurs throughout the entire symphony. The repetition of this phrase differs from a later named technique called “cyclical form” in which a well-defined melody is stated in one movement, and, retaining its original identity, is quoted and reused in another. Beethoven’s method is to use his musical phrase as a germinal idea that generates new phrases, which resemble the original but are not identical with it. He begins with G and E-flat for the notes of the opening motive: these are two of the three notes that make up a C minor chord. This way he establishes the key of his symphony, and he announces a rhythmic motif, which repeats throughout the work, uniting the symphony’s four movements. Beethoven began to compose Symphony No. 5 in 1804, just after 80 2021 CONCERT SEASON BOULDER, CO
finishing Symphony No. 3 but put it aside to finish Symphony No. 4, and after that, worked simultaneously on the next two symphonies. He completed Symphony No. 5 early in 1808 and Symphony No. 6 in autumn of the same year. On December 22, 1808, he gave a concert in which his latest works were premiered. The program included Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6, the concert aria Ah, Perfido!, a Latin hymn, the Sanctus from the Mass in C Major, a fantasia for piano solo, the Choral Fantasy, Op. 80, for piano, chorus, and orchestra, and Piano Concerto No. 4. Beethoven conducted and also played the solo piano parts for this monumentally long concert. Since he completed Symphony No. 5 almost exactly when he also finished the F major Symphony No. 6, the Pastorale, at the premiere, the Pastorale bore the number 5. A contemporary observer said the concert lasted for over four hours. The occasion was memorable and stressful: the theater was unheated, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the soprano soloist had a bad case of stage fright. The orchestra stopped mid-composition several times, and the soprano who sang the aria was given a sedative for her nerves; nevertheless, Symphony No. 5 soon gained its designation as a masterwork. Somewhere between performance and publication, Beethoven renumbered the two symphonies. The C minor became Symphony No. 5, and the F Major became Symphony No. 6, and they remain thus today. Beethoven perhaps intended the opening movement, Allegro con brio, to be mysterious yet powerfully dramatic. The thematic statement of the famous four-note motif appears first in the clarinet and violins; in the recapitulation, the whole orchestra joins in with the same figure. An unexpected oboe cadenza at the end of the movement, according to the late musicologist Michael Steinberg, has a special function, serving both to disrupt and to integrate. The contrasting slow movement, Andante con moto, plainly and distinctly sets forth a long melody as its principal subject; a series of variations then follow. Mystery dominates again in the third movement, a scherzo, Allegro, which runs without pause directly into the noble finale, Allegro which introduces the sound of the trombone to the orchestra for the first time in the history of music. Piccolo and contrabassoon also participate in the finale. Steinberg described the last movement as a motion “into the sureness and daylight” with the transition into the major key. He summed up Beethoven’s achievement succinctly, “The victory symphony was a new kind of symphony, and Beethoven’s invention here of a path from strife to triumph became a model for symphonic writing to the present day.” Over the years, two critics, in particular, have in some way grasped the essence of this symphony with few words. Amadeus Wendt wrote: “Beethoven’s music inspires in its listeners awe, fear, horror, pain, and that exquisite nostalgia that is the soul of romanticism.” E.T.A. Hoffmann called the symphony “one of the most important works of the master whose position in the first rank of composers of instrumental music can now be denied by no one... It is a concept of genius, executed with profound deliberation, which in a very high degree brings the romantic content of the music to expression.” The Symphony No. 5 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. The piccolo, contrabassoon, and trombone only play in the last movement, where they greatly enrich the sound of the orchestra.
