154 minute read
Concert Programs
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, June 30 | Friday, July 1
TAKÁCS QUARTET PLAYS JOHN ADAMS’ ABSOLUTE JEST
CONDUCTOR: Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTISTS:
Takács Quartet, artists-inresidence
Carlos Simon, Fate Now Conquers (2020) John Adams, Absolute Jest (2012)
I. Adagio - Allegro molto
II. Largo
III. Molto vivace
IV. Allegro con fuoco
The June 30 concert is sponsored by
GORDON AND GRACE GAMM
Fate Now Conquers (2020) Carlos Simon
Born 1986 in Washington, D.C.
The American composer Carlos Simon writes concert music for large and small ensembles as well as film scores with influences of jazz, gospel, and neo-romanticism. The Philadelphia Enquirer described his music as “perfectly engaging and propulsive.” Simon received a B.A. in Music (with concentrations in piano and composition) from Morehouse College and an M.M from Georgia State University. He studied composition with Robert Tanner, Uzee Brown, TJ Anderson, and Nicktas Demos. In 2017, Simon joined the inaugural class of the Gabriela Lena Frank Academy of Music and then went on to be named a Sundance/Time Warner Composer Fellow in 2018; he received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence in 2021. For the 2021-2022 season, he was Composer-In-Residence at the Kennedy Center. Simon has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Washington National Opera. His work has been performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Hub New Music Ensemble, the Asian/American New Music Institute, the Flint Symphony, at the 2021 Ojai Festival by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and at the Hollywood Bowl by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In 2018, Carlos’ string quartet, Elegy, honoring the lives of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, was performed at the Kennedy Center. Upcoming performances of his works include concerts by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, and Sphinx Virtuosi. Simon composed Fate Now Conquers as a response to Gabriela Lena Frank’s request to write a musical response to Beethoven’s Symphonies 4,7, and 8. The piece premiered in September 2020 with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting. Simon commented: “My personal process was to remind myself to just get out of the way and to not think too much. Beethoven is and was a MUSICAL GIANT! I wanted to pay homage to Beethoven but yet remain true to my artistic voice. “This is part of the intent of the piece — releasing one’s expectations and hoping for the best.” Simon has written his own program note: This piece was inspired by a journal entry from Ludwig van Beethoven’s notebook, written in 1815: ‘Iliad. The Twenty-Second Book But Fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share In my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit And that some great deed shall beget that all lives shall inherit.’ Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, I have composed musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate. Jolting stabs, coupled with an agitated groove with every persona. Frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of free-flowing running passages depict the uncertainty of life that hovers over us. We know that Beethoven strived to overcome many obstacles in his life and documented his aspirations to prevail, despite his ailments. Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from the Iliad, in the end, it seems that Beethoven relinquished [himself] to fate. Fate now conquers.
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, June 30 | Friday, July 1
Absolute Jest (2012) John Adams
Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, MA
John Adams is one of the best known and most often performed of America’s contemporary composers. As Andrew Porter wrote in The New Yorker, Adams is the creator of a “flexible new language capable of producing large-scale works that are both attractive and strongly fashioned. His is a music whose highly polished resonant sound is wonderful.”
In the music of his early maturity, Adams showed his discovery of a freer kind of advanced musical thought than he had learned at the University, and he took up many of the techniques and much of the aesthetics of the “minimalist” composers. It was not long, however, before he admitted himself to be “a minimalist who is bored with minimalism” and developed the balanced mixture of sustained repetition with either subtle or bold variation that distinguishes his work.
Absolute Jest, a single-movement concerto scored for string quartet and orchestra, was a commission from the San Francisco Symphony in celebration of its 100th anniversary. “I was suddenly stimulated by the way Stravinsky had absorbed musical artifacts from the past and worked them into his own highly personal language.” Absolute Jest is based primarily on fragments from the scherzos of Beethoven quartets, Op.131 and Op. 135, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and the Grosse Fugue, but unlike Stravinsky, who, in Pulcinella, updated large sections of previously composed material, Adams, in Absolute Jest uses brief, isolated, and originally unrelated fragments as building blocks for his construction. Absolute Jest opens with a bouncing 6/8 pulse that recalls the scherzo of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Adams also uses “the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, Symphony No. 8, and other archetypal Beethoven motives that come and go like cameo appearances on a stage. Upper strings and cowbells join, to a stunning effect. With these, Adams introduces a sonority foreign to Beethoven: the “tintinnabulation” (as Adams called it) of cowbells, harp, and piano all tuned in a special way, which means intonation as opposed to the standard Western tuning used for the rest of the ensemble. After the introduction, the solo quartet enters, picking up the Beethoven motive. Developed by the quartet and the orchestra, the motivic material is transformed into various surprising guises, in brilliantly Adamsian manner, with the quartet balanced against the large orchestra. Adams has explained: “The high-spirited tripletime scherzo to the F-major Opus 135 Quartet enters about a third of the way through Absolute Jest and becomes the dominant motivic material for the remainder of the piece.” In the climactic final section, Adams says “a furious coda features the solo string quartet charging ahead at full speed over an extended orchestral pedal” based on a sequence of chords from the famous ‘Waldstein’ Piano Sonata. In the closing, there is a short duet for cowbells and detuned piano, which Thomas May has called a “final, enigmatic comment.”
When Dvořák came to New York in October 1892, as Director of the National Conservatory of Music, he was already a figure of worldwide reputation. Two months after his arrival in America, Dvořák began to sketch the New World Symphony. Despite or perhaps because of its success, the symphony quickly became the subject of great controversy. Some said that the work was based almost entirely on folk songs of the American Black and Indian peoples, while others found it typically Czech. Modern opinion asserts that Dvořák intended the New World Symphony to set an example for composers in the United States of what they could do with themes that were American in character and style, without actually quoting any folk songs. Regardless, it certainly awakened an American movement toward using homegrown resources. Dvořák quickly became acquainted with music that was characteristically American. One of the most gifted of the eager, young people who flocked to his classes was a Black musician, Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949), who later had a distinguished career as a composer and singer. Burleigh spent hours with Dvořák, singing spirituals and slave songs that completely captivated him and became an important part of his inspiration for the symphony. Shortly before the first performance, the composer said, “I am satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. These can be the basis of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States.” The New World Symphony is a splendid work in which Dvořák applies the musical methods he had learned from his mentor Brahms and his own musical ideas that become a subject for lively debate. In the first movement, this amalgam can be heard in the slow introduction, Adagio, and is present at length in the Allegro molto section. In this movement, the first theme, a melancholy dance, the flute and oboe play together; the second theme, based on Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, the flute introduces. The second movement begins with a hopeful yet nostalgic solo, one of the most famous English horn passages ever composed. Dvořák explained to a pupil of his that a transitional passage in the Largo, marked Un poco più mosso, is an “Indian girl’s sobbing.” Also, in this movement there is an episode where the oboe introduces a skipping new theme over the cello’s accompaniment. Dvořák said he intended to suggest the gradual awakening of animal life on the prairie here. The Symphony continues with a sprightly dance-like movement, Scherzo, Molto vivace, which has been compared to a Native American dance with chanting. In the final Allegro con fuoco, the music seems to become less and less American in inspiration and more Czech with a rich pattern of connecting motives from the whole symphony, building to a tremendous climax near the end.
PROGRAM NOTES Sunday, July 3
FAMILY CONCERT: TUBBY THE TUBA
CONDUCTOR: Maurice Cohn
GUEST ARTISTS:
Carson McTeer, tuba Really Inventive Stuff
George Kleinsinger, Tubby the Tuba Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, Op. 34
Theme: Allegro maestoso e largamente Variation A (flutes and piccolo): Presto Variation B (oboes): Lento Variation C (clarinets): Moderato Variation D (bassoons): Allegro alla marcia Variation E (violins): Brillante Alla polacca Variation F (violas): Meno mosso Variation G (cellos): [L’istesso tempo] Variation H (basses): Comminciando lento ma poco a poco accelerando al Allegro Variation I (harp): Maestoso Variation J (horns): L’istesso tempo Variation K (trumpets): Vivace Variation L (trombones): Allegro pomposo Variation M (percussion): Moderato Fugue: Allegro molto
Tubby the Tuba George Kleinsinger
Born February 13, 1914, in San Bernardino, CA; died July 28, 1982, New York City, NY
George Kleinsinger, an American composer and conductor, is famous for having composed Tubby the Tuba, which became what is probably the most famous children’s symphonic work after Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. In 1941, lyricist Paul Tripp and Kleinsinger attended an orchestral rehearsal of one of their works when their tubist informed them afterward, “You know, tubas can sing too.” That night, Tripp went home and wrote a simple story to be told in music and spoken word, focusing on the plight of the largest, lowest, and usually most disrespected instrument in the orchestra, the tuba. Unfortunately, World War II intervened, and the project was not finished until 1945. Success was not immediate for Tubby, which was issued in 1945 as a tworecord 78 rpm set. Its multi-color cover was charming, depicting all the main characters. Printed on the inner album sleeves was Tubby’s full story, complete with a handful of simple line drawings. Famously, Danny Kaye did another version of the original story in a 1947 recording. His version included an appealing song, “The Tubby the Tuba Song” (“Tubby said, ‘Oh, gosh, oh, gee, wish I had a melody’”) which has become part of “Tubby’s” lasting fame. Originally, Kleinsinger and Tripp conceived the work as a counterpart to Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Besides teaching about the instruments and musical appreciation, the story also conveys some lessons about life. Tubby feels rejected by his fellow instruments, but comes to accept both his size and his sound and feel good about himself as he is.
Born November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft, England; died December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh, England
In 1946, Benjamin Britten, the leading British composer of the 20th century, was asked to compose the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra for a British Ministry of Education film to be used in schools to introduce children to orchestral instruments. He presents each instrument in a highly entertaining way by introducing a theme followed by variations, each of which features a different orchestral instrument or group of related instruments. Britten took his theme, a bright hornpipe, from the incidental music for Abdelazar, or The Moor’s Revenge by the 17th-century English composer, Henry Purcell, whose 250th birthday was being celebrated that year. After a unison statement of the theme, each of the orchestra’s four main sections, woodwinds, (“really a superior variety of pennywhistle,” the composer says) strings, (“scraped with a bow or plucked with the fingers; their cousin, the harp, is always plucked”) brass, (“modern descendants of old trumpets and hunting horns”) and percussion (“includes drums, gongs, tambourines and anything else that is hit”) is showcased. The score features a descriptive text that may be read aloud during the music’s performance. Britten demonstrates each instrument’s expressive appeal, displaying, e.g., the flutes’ playfulness, the oboes’ plaintive sadness, and the trombones’ solemn and stately character, highlighting each individual instrument with its own variation. The Young Person’s Guide premiered October 15, 1946, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting, in Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool.
PROGRAM NOTES Tuesday, July 5
TAKÁCS QUARTET
Takács Quartet, artists-inresidence
I. Allegro moderato II. Menuetto: Presto III. Andante IV. Finale: Vivace
I. Prelude II. Serenade III. Humoresque IV. Minuet and Trio V. Dance
I. Allegro moderato II. Adagio ma non troppo III. Molto vivace IV. Finale. Andante sostenuto -
Allegro con fuoco
Haydn, throughout his life, is said to have written at least eighty string quartets, and thus he amply earned the nickname, “father of the string quartet.” His labors gave the quartet form the shape, timbre, and technique it now has. In Haydn’s hands, the string quartet evolved from a composition basically for a solo violin accompanied by three strings, into a work of a highly organized combination of four strings equally sharing the four cogent parts in a sophisticated structure. In his later years, Haydn concentrated much of his energy on the string quartet form; after his return to Vienna, after his second sojourn in London in 1794-5, he composed little other instrumental music. He wrote the six Erdődy Quartets, Op. 76, in 1797, and two of a set that were intended to be the six Lobkowitz Quartets, Op. 77, in 1799. The Op. 77 quartets were commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz, whose name they bear. By 1803, Haydn finished two movements of another quartet, his last, which he had published in 1806 as Op. 103. It is not understood why Haydn did not finish this projected set of six quartets. Music historians have suggested that Beethoven’s early Op. 18 quartets might have made Haydn worried that his works would suffer in comparison, especially since Prince Lobkowitz also had commissioned the Beethoven quartets; however, the composition and publication dates of the quartets call into question the plausibility of this hypothesis. Another possibility is that Haydn could no longer continue composing the quartets because of failing health and age. The second quartet of Op. 77, in F Major, has wit and subtlety similar to that of his Symphony No.99. As could be expected with one of Haydn’s late works, this quartet is powerfully dramatic and intense as well as imposing, long, and detailed. The first movement, Allegro moderato, in sonata form, is richly textured and thoroughly developed. It is quite subtle, yet it opens with a lengthy theme, which is made up of a disarmingly simple and graceful melody. Snippets of that theme become an accompaniment to the next theme. Each melodic fragment seems to evoke new musical ideas that join or follow it. In the development section, the character of the theme seems to change as it undergoes harmonic change, but by the recapitulation section, it has again returned to its original character, one of straightforward sweetness. The Minuet, with a Presto tempo, has far-ranging harmonies and begins uncharacteristically with the rough and irregular rhythms found in country peasant dances; in the trio, a slower tempo brings more refinement. The long Andante third movement begins unusually with just two instruments playing. It is in rondo form, but each time the rondo theme returns, it is varied. Although the theme undergoes development, embellishment, and modulation in a manner much like that in a theme and variations movement, it remains unaltered and recognizable throughout the movement. The Finale, Vivace assai, a light-hearted, relatively simple sonata-form structure, has a dance-like feel which, because of its very independent parts for each of the players, is very demanding to perform. It is monothematic in that the secondary theme is a varied restatement of the first theme, shifted up a fifth to the dominant. As in the preceding Andante movement, Haydn keeps the original theme evident even while enhancing and varying it with accompanying syncopation and counterpoint.
Born August 15, 1875, in Croydon (London), England; died there, Sept. 1, 1912
slaves from North America, 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. His mother named him after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, reversing the poet’s final two names. His mother and her family were quite musical and taught the young Coleridge-Taylor to play violin and even encouraged him to make a career in music. At age 15, he entered the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Charles Villiers Stanford. Soon after, he began collaborating with the African-American poet and author Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906). Also, very early in his career, he attracted the composer Edward Elgar’s support; Elgar recommended that the Three Choirs Festival commission a piece from him. Coleridge-Taylor was conductor of the Handel Society of London from 1904 until his early death. He also taught at the Croydon Conservatory and was Professor of Composition at Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music as well as violin teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. He was prolific and composed an opera, a symphony, a violin concerto, much orchestral and chamber music, incidental music, and keyboard pieces. Interested in his heritage as the descendant of African-American slaves, he made three tours of the United States, where he became acquainted with African-American and Native American music, which he incorporated into his own music. While in the United States, Theodore Roosevelt invited him to the White House. Jeffrey Green speaks of the legacy Coleridge-Taylor left for musicians of African descent: “By including African, Afro-American, and AfroCaribbean elements in his compositions in melody and in title, as well as by being visibly proud of his 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.” Coleridge-Taylor composed the Five Fantasiestücke for String Quartet in 1895, when he was only twenty and still a student. At that time, his music followed conservative late 19th-century tradition that he learned from his mentor, Charles Stanford, to whom he dedicated the Fantasiestücke.
Fantasiestücke, a title that Robert Schumann had famously used a half-century earlier, means “fantasy pieces.” ColeridgeTaylor’s Fantasiestücke are character pieces; each one is short and introduces a particular mood. The first two, Prelude and Serenade, have moderate tempos, but the final three, Humoresque, Minuet and Trio, and Dance are more spirited and quicker.
String Quartet No. 13 in G Major, Op. 106 Antonin ˇ Dvorák
Chamber music had an important place in Dvořák ’s life. Many of his earliest works were quartets and quintets, modeled after those of Beethoven and Schubert, that he played with his colleagues and friends while developing his craft. String Quartet in G Major, Op. 106, is a late work, which Dvořák wrote in 1895, when he had become one of the world’s most honored composers. In 1892, he had become the head of a new conservatory in New York. It was while there that he wrote some of the best music of his mature years: the New World Symphony and the Cello Concerto, the American String Quartet and a String Quintet in E-Flat. Despite his enthusiasm for the music of the young society in America, he knew that his art was rooted in his own homeland. After spending a five-month leave in his homeland, in 1894, he decided that he could not remain in the United States much longer. In March 1895, he began a string quartet in New York, but he soon put it aside, and in April, he started on the journey back to Prague. His first months in Prague were quiet, but when he began to teach at the Prague Conservatory again in the autumn, his creative urge returned. He completed this String Quartet in less than a month; he was so pleased with his work that he then took up the other quartet that he had begun in New York, and in a few weeks, he had finished that one too. Dvořák ’s chamber music was in great demand, thus both works were quickly published. In the manuscript of the G Major Quartet, Dvořák noted happily, “first composition after second return from America.”
The quartet is a work of warm and spontaneous invention, reflecting Dvořák ’s comfort and happiness at being home. The beginning of the optimistic first movement reflects this joy. Although some find the music of this work sounds very Czech, Dvořák rarely incorporated actual folk songs in his music, but rather composed new melodies that had the style or feeling of folk songs. The main theme of the first movement, Allegro moderato, does not have a conventional melody but instead a complex of carefree melodic motives that explore several keys and add up to something like a bird song; everywhere a rustling undercurrent of sound, like that heard in even the quietest places in nature, is evoked. The second theme is smooth; Dvořák introduces a lilting third theme characterized by flowing triplets. The development makes use of all three themes, with rich harmony and modulation. In the recapitulation, a more delicate counter melody is added to the first theme, while the second theme forms the basis of the coda.
The lyrical slow second movement, Adagio ma non troppo, is a freely formed meditation on a theme that Dvořák elevates to grand and passionate climaxes. It has been singled out as one of the most glorious creations the composer ever achieved. The next movement, Molto vivace, a scherzo, he developed and extended beyond the usual limits of the form. A hopping Czech dance (skočná) provided the rhythmic inspiration for the movement. The quartet ends with a Finale whose brief slow introduction, Andante sostenuto, transforms into the theme of a lively dance in the Czech furiant style, Allegro con fuoco, in the form of an ebullient rondo, during the course of which the first movement is artfully recalled.
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, July 7
CONDUCTOR: Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTIST:
Jan Lisiecki, piano
I. Allegro con brio II. Largo III. Rondo. Allegro
I. Allegro con brio II. Largo III. Rondo: Allegro
This concert is sponsored by
Ralph Vaughn Williams had a rigorous classical musical education, studied composition in Berlin with Max Bruch, and, even after he had earned his doctorate from Cambridge University, went to Paris to polish his technique under the tutelage of Maurice Ravel. The Fantasia is a free treatment of a melody that Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505-1585), a member of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal, published in 1567 when he composed eight melodies each based on one of the eight ecclesiastical modes. Vaughan Williams chose a setting of the third mode that begins, according to the first edition, as a melody that “doth rage [and] roughly brayeth.” A setting of the Second Psalm, it begins, in the King James Version, “Why do the heathen rage?” Tallis set to music the Archbishop of Canterbury’s English verse translation, which still appears in the English Hymnal. Vaughan Williams composed his Fantasia for the Three Choirs Festival of 1910, where it made its premiere in the Gloucester Cathedral on Sept 6, but it was not published until 1921. Richly written for the strings, the work uses a solo quartet, a small string orchestra, and a large one. “The three bodies of strings,” the composer said, “are used in various ways, sometimes playing as one, sometimes antiphonally, sometimes accompanying one another.” The composition succeeds in being an inspired re-creation of the rich polyphonic style of Tallis’s time. As the composer wanted to preserve the ecclesiastical character of the melody, he used its original harmonies. “With the Norman grandeur of Gloucester Cathedral in mind and the strange quality of the resonance of stone,” the composer’s wife later wrote, “the echo idea of three different groups of instruments was well judged. It seemed that his early love for architecture and his historical knowledge were so deeply assimilated that they were transferred and absorbed into the texture and the line of the music.”
Throughout his lifetime, Beethoven was acknowledged to be a formidable pianist whose skills and technical virtuosity few others could match; it was rare to find a pianist who had the drama, the expression of feeling, or the musicality his playing possessed. Like Mozart, Beethoven was an expert at improvisation at the keyboard, a skill much in demand at the end of the 18th century. Early in his career, when he performed concerti publicly at concerts, he took Mozart’s concerti as his models and expanded their form somewhat, often with his improvisations, but his listeners were often disturbed with the innovations his early concerti evidence. The Czech composer, Václav Tomásek, admired Beethoven’s bold improvisations, but criticized the “frequent daring deviations from one theme to another, which destroyed the continuity and gradual development of his ideas.” He went on, “Evils of this nature, springing from a too exuberant fancy, often mar his greatest compositions . . .. The singular and original seem to be his chief aim in composition . . ..” By much later in his career, when he was writing his mature compositions, Beethoven made important alterations in the classical structures, for example in Piano Concerti Nos. 4 and 5, but after the age of forty, he abandoned the piano concerto form; thus, the later innovations listeners hear in his piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies have no counterpart in his piano concerti. Beethoven once wrote of Piano Concerto No. 1, “It is one of my first, and therefore not one of the best of my compositions,” yet it is one of young Beethoven’s most lyrical works. It contains memorable melodies that bear the recognizable stamp of Beethoven’s originality, even though he was only twenty-eight when he composed the work. Today’s listeners will find it milder than Beethoven’s contemporaries did and will not be able to fathom the
objections that Tomásek made to this fairly unadventurous (to 21st century ears) piano concerto. The pleasing, mellifluous concerto opens Allegro con brio, with a pleasant and delicate theme that slowly metamorphoses into one with more assertiveness when the orchestra joins in the exposition. The movement expresses a sturdy character as well as subtlety in the way that themes and their development move back and forth between orchestra and soloist. The movement follows Classical form and includes a piano cadenza just before the end. The middle movement, Largo, a poetically ornamented nocturne, has such poignancy that it evoked tears in Beethoven’s first audiences. This movement’s orchestration is notable because of its variety and the solo clarinet’s special precedence. In the finale, a witty, robust Rondo, Allegro scherzando, some of Beethoven’s “irregularities” are a bit more apparent. Also prominent is the feeling of dance music in the middle of the movement. The piano soloist has two short, almost mini-cadenzas in this movement.
Beethoven’s first three piano concerti are amplifications and, to a degree, modernizations of Mozart’s piano concerti. The last two concerti would be entirely different, constructed with great freedom and originality and looking far ahead into the 19th century, not back to the 18th. Beethoven completed Piano Concerto No. 3 in manuscript in 1800 when he was only thirty years old, using material that he had been gathering in his sketchbooks for several years. He did not make final revisions and write out the solo part until its first performance on April 3, 1803; it was not published until 1804. The concerto stands on the brink because there is still much of Mozart and the Classical tradition to be heard in it, but it also shines forth with much of the individuality of the mature Beethoven. Thus, this is one of the works that marks the end of the first period and the beginning of the second of the three creative periods into which Beethoven’s work is usually divided. Generally, by what has been called Beethoven’s middle period, and it is evident in this concerto too, Beethoven’s writing has become bolder than it had been earlier, distinguishing it from the writing in his first two concerti. In the handling of the interrelationship of piano and orchestra Beethoven begins to explore new paths. Another innovation in this work is his use of the timpani. Until Beethoven used them here, in the first movement, as participants in the exposition of a theme, they had never been given the opportunity to take part in the thematic statement. Before, the timpani had only been used to beat time and to emphasize the home key and its dominant to which they had traditionally been tuned. At a concert given in Vienna on April 5, 1803, this concerto, Symphony No. 2, and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives all had their premieres. In the rush of preparation, Beethoven spent the whole night before the first rehearsal writing down on paper all the music that was already complete in his mind, but he did not bother to note all the details of the piano part since he was to play it himself. At that time, it was traditional for the pianist to perform in concert with the sheet music in front of him. Beethoven asked a musician friend, Ritter von Seyfried, to turn pages for him at the concert, but many pages were blank or had only a few hastily scribbled unreadable notes on them; nevertheless, Beethoven nodded his head periodically as a signal and was greatly amused by his friend’s anxiety about when to make the almost unnecessary page turns. In the first dramatic movement of the concerto, Allegro con brio, the traditional Classical long and full orchestral exposition of the themes comes before the soloist announces his presence with a series of powerful rushing scales. Some years later, Beethoven wrote out a solo cadenza for this movement, but experts doubt whether it can be compared to what Beethoven improvised when he was himself the soloist. The work was, in all likelihood, written out for the Emperor’s youngest son, Archduke Rudolf, who was Beethoven’s gifted pupil and generous and faithful friend, but he was not equally talented as a pianist. After the cadenza, the themes are not repeated again, but the brilliant closing coda includes unexpected harmonic innovations. In the slow movement, Largo, a solemn theme in a remote key is richly developed in a dialogue for piano and orchestra. The movement is distinctive for its beautiful and sensuous thematic material and its expressive second cadenza at the conclusion. The finale is a vigorous rondo, Allegro, in which the main theme recurs in alternation with contrasting episodes. At one point, Beethoven reminds us of the slow movement by wrenching the main theme back into its distant key. In the final episode, he turns to a sprightly new rhythm and the bright key of C Major. The harmonic changes in this movement foreshadow Beethoven’s later style. A feature that is very characteristic of Beethoven in this movement, and which he was to repeat in many finales, is the combination of sonata form with rondo form. Another cadenza comes near the end of the movement. After it, the conclusion of the concerto comes swiftly, but Beethoven takes the listener there with a new meter and a new tempo. The work is dedicated to Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, an amateur musician, whom Beethoven met at the house of Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz.
PROGRAM NOTES Friday, July 8
CONDUCTOR: Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTIST:
Jan Lisiecki, piano
Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Wasps Overture
I. Allegro moderato II. Andante con moto III. Rondo: Vivace
This concert is sponsored by
The Wasps Overture Ralph Vaughan Williams
After a long and undistinguished period of music composition in England, a new school of interesting nationalist composers came into existence there in the early years of the 20th century. In their music, they gave traditional and historical English music a new place in musical life. They systematically collected and studied their country’s folk music and revived the great works that their countrymen had written from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Vaughan Williams was the greatest of these activist-composers who also wrote, taught, played, and conducted in concert halls, churches, theaters, and schools. Vaughan Williams received a rigorous classical and musical education, studied in Berlin with Max Bruch, and, even after he had earned his doctorate from Cambridge University, went to Paris to polish his technique under the tutelage of Ravel. In the course of his long career, he composed nine symphonies, five operas, and a large number of works in almost every imaginable musical form. In 1909, the Greek Play Committee at Cambridge University commissioned him to write incidental music for a production of Aristophanes’ satirical play, The Wasps. He composed an overture and seventeen pieces for tenor and baritone soloists with male chorus and small orchestra, which he later arranged for full symphony orchestra. Only the Overture, a brilliant compendium of many tunes in the style of folk songs, which begins with onomatopoeic buzzing, is now frequently played. The music debuted at the performance of the play on November 26, 1909, when it was a big success. A few years later, Vaughan Williams extracted what he called an Aristophanic Suite from his incidental music; the Suite premiered on July 23, 1912, with the composer conducting the New Symphony Orchestra at Queens Hall, London. Generally, the only part of the Suite that has remained in the repertory is the Overture. At the overture’s beginning, the angry wasp sound indicates the dicasts (an ancient Athenian performing the functions of both judge and juror at a trial. A dicast was an Athenian citizen whose eagerness for litigation was reinforced by the pay he received for sitting on the judge’s bench.) The buzzing is followed by a sequence of upbeat melodies before more restrained music is introduced, but suddenly the wasps reappear as the tempo speeds up again. The melodies of the opening return as the overture closes in a spirited manner. Even though the music contains no actual folk songs, it is infused with the spirit of English folk song. Vaughan Williams also could not include any ancient Greek scales or quotations from Greek music as they are no longer extant. A hint of the use of the whole tone scale is evident, but that can perhaps be accounted for because of the modal influence of folk-song. The musical themes derive from the characters in the play, and the overture, overall, is in sonata form.
Early in his career, Beethoven took Mozart’s piano concerti as his model, expanding and adapting their form and idiom into his own style of execution and for the newly improved instrument that the piano of his time had become. Carl Czerny (1791-1857), Beethoven’s pupil and Liszt’s teacher, who is remembered now only as the composer of piano study material, wrote, “Beethoven’s playing was notable for its tremendous power, unheard of bravura and facility. He had practiced day and night during his youth and worked so hard that his health suffered. Beethoven’s playing of slow and sustained music made an almost
magical impression on the listener and, so far as I know, has never been surpassed.” Beethoven viewed himself as Mozart had, as both pianist and composer. Today both listeners and scholars understand Beethoven’s first three piano concerti as amplifications and modernizations of Mozart’s concerti. When young Beethoven made his first public appearance in Vienna, on March 29, 1795, at a concert for the benefit of the Widows and Orphans Fund of the Society of Musicians, he played this concerto in its first version. He had probably begun to work on it in 1793 or earlier, but two days before the concert, according to an account of the event by one of his friends, he had still not written out all the musical revisions. He worked on the last movement “while suffering from a severe colic, which frequently afflicted him. I relieved him with simple remedies as best I could, while in the next room sat four copyists to whom we handed page after page of music” from which they hurriedly prepared the parts for the accompanying orchestra. After the premiere, Beethoven revised the concerto and finalized its form into its present version for his visit to Prague in 1798. Although it actually came first in order of composition, it is known as Piano Concerto No. 2 because it was second in order of publication. It was not published until 1801. Beethoven often played it in later years, too, and around 1809, he wrote out a long first-movement solo cadenza, which, until then, he had usually improvised at each performance. Beethoven undervalued this charming concerto, which may have been why he held it back until after his later concerto had had a public hearing. He told his publisher, “I don’t consider it one of my best works.”
The first movement is a long and thoroughly developed Allegro con brio, in which the piano does not enter until after the orchestral exposition. After a traditional virtuoso display opportunity for the piano and an interesting dialogue between piano and orchestra in which they interact with exchanges of fragments of themes, just before the end of the first movement, is a substantial and demanding cadenza for the piano, which Beethoven wrote out completely. In the second movement, a serious and expressive Adagio, the soloist and orchestra share a pensive dialogue on a single subject. A syncopated refrain that returns several times dominates the highly rhythmic final rondo, Molto allegro.
In Beethoven’s fertile creative life, no time was more productive than the years 1805 and 1806. During these two years, in his mid-thirties, Beethoven proved he was not just another young composer of great promise but the mature possessor of musical powers without precedent. He completed Piano Concerto No. 4 sometime around the middle of 1806; he performed as soloist in its March 1807 premiere in one of a pair of private concerts devoted entirely to his music at the palace of his generous friend, Prince Lobkowitz. In August 1808, the concerto was published with a dedication to Archduke Rudolph, the Emperor’s youngest son, who had been studying piano and composition with Beethoven since 1804. Beethoven was eager to give a public performance of the concerto, but he had difficulty in getting a hall on a good date. A single official of the Imperial Court was both director of theaters and supervisor of charities; he finally gave Beethoven free use of the Theater-an-der-Wien on December 22, 1808, in exchange for his services at three benefit concerts. Concerto No. 4 had difficulty joining the standard repertoire. Its immediate antecedent, Piano Concerto No. 3, is easier to play, and Piano Concerto No. 5 is more imposing. Both overshadowed this work, but finally, about a decade after Beethoven’s death, Mendelssohn established a place for Concerto No. 4 in the concert repertoire in his second season as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus (Draper Hall) Orchestra. On November 3, 1838, Robert Schumann wrote, “Today Mendelssohn played the G-Major Concerto of Beethoven with a power and polish that transported us all. I took a pleasure in it such as I have never before enjoyed, and I sat in my seat without moving a muscle or even breathing.” The enormously difficult concerto differs greatly from the usual virtuoso concerto of this time, as the purpose of all its difficulties is to express the composer’s complex ideas and not to show off the pianist’s skills. The orchestra does not just fill musical time and space around the soloist but participates fully and equally in a dialogue between orchestra and piano. The first movement, Allegro moderato, does not open with the conventional orchestral exposition of the principal ideas, which until that time the soloist traditionally restated, weighted somewhat differently. Instead, here the piano begins with an ambiguous phrase, almost as though in mid-sentence. The orchestra answers, and only then begins the main theme. Phrases and musical sentences in piano and orchestra are often telescoped, run together as though in a rush to proceed to a new idea before having finished the old one. The ideas are warm, personal, witty, heroic, and severe, as the conversation takes many turns. This movement, by defying audience expectations, came as a shock to the audiences of the time; some even asserted that they were listening to ravings of a lunatic. The second movement, Andante con moto, is also startlingly original. The piano persistently answers loud and forceful statements of the orchestra’s strings until the orchestra is calmed, as the alternations of solo and tutti draw closer together. The piano develops the musical ideas with passion and depth. A cadenza comes at the end of the movement; the music then runs without pause into the taut Rondo finale, Vivace. Characterized by a very rhythmic theme, the finale demonstrates how a simple subject can yield many rich variations and how masterfully, yet unpredictably, the piano and orchestra can relate to each other.
PROGRAM NOTES Sunday, July 10
JAN LISIECKI PLAYS BEETHOVEN’S EMPEROR CONCERTO
CONDUCTOR: Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTIST:
Jan Lisiecki, piano
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 5 in D Major
I. Preludio II. Scherzo III. Romanza IV. Passacaglia
I. Allegro II. Adagio un poco mosso III. Rondo. Allegro ma non troppo
This concert is sponsored by
Symphony No. 5 in D Major Ralph Vaughan Williams
Symphony No. 5, which critics extolled as the peak of Vaughan Williams’ achievement as a symphonist, has a much gentler, more contemplative aspect than its predecessor. Perhaps he intended it to bring comfort and solace to Britain in war, or maybe he thought of it as a prophecy of the peace to come. A Preludio, Moderato, begins the symphony with a horn call answered by a string figure, and the two short motives soon become the thematic foundation of the whole work. The brief rhapsodic Scherzo, Presto has lightness and subtlety, with two contrasting sections. The third movement, Romanza, Lento, begins with a quotation from The Pilgrim’s Progress: “Upon this place stood a cross, and below a sepulchre. Then he said, ‘He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by His death.’” The last movement, Passacaglia, Moderato, contains a set of continuous variations on a repeated ground bass. The music grows in power and jubilation until, as an early reviewer said, “it seems to fill the whole world with its song of good will.” The Symphony is lightly scored for an orchestra of two flutes, oboe and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.
Beethoven wrote his final piano concerto, Piano Concerto No. 5, known by its subtitle ‘Emperor,’ in Vienna during the time that Napoleon’s troops occupied the city. While Beethoven was composing this work, he felt tortured by the noise of the shell of howitzers at a time when he was already suffering from hearing loss. Except for the first orchestral chords, the soloist begins the Allegro first movement. The piano introduction is a huge rhapsodic flourish, a kind of cadenza, that Beethoven wrote out completely rather than leaving it to the soloist’s invention. The orchestra later introduces the thematic subject matter of the movement. Ofen, the orchestra has the task of developing the themes, with the difficult piano part an accompaniment, a musical mannerism that Brahms would later adapt. Breaking tradition, Beethoven wove the cadenzas into the score as an integral part, giving the music continuity, while denying the soloist opportunity for impromptu virtuosic display. The slow movement, Adagio un poco mosso, has muted strings playing a hymn-like melody, which the piano answers. At the center of the movement, the strings announce a sequence of quasi-variations on the theme. Finally, the piano quietly plays a figure that gives intimations of the exuberant theme of the last movement, but then suddenly transforms it into the joyous main theme of the Rondo finale, Allegro, ma non troppo, which begins without a break. In this finale, the piano delivers and develops the exhilarating themes in what has been called the “most spacious and triumphant of concerto rondos.” Beethoven here has written a combination of sonata and rondo forms. At the end, the kettledrums quietly mark the rhythm of the first subject to accompany the piano’s soft chords. The Emperor Concerto is Beethoven’s last piano concerto, although he continued to compose for another twenty years. Some believe that perhaps he never composed any more piano concerti because his days as pianist had forcedly come to an end because of his deafness.
PROGRAM NOTES Tuesday, July 12
ATTACCA QUARTET
GUEST ARTISTS: Attacca Quartet
John Adams, John’s Book of Alleged Dances (1994)
- Toot Nipple - Alligator Escalator - Pavane (She’s So Fine) - Stubble Crotchet
Flying Lotus, Clock Catcher (2010); Remind U (2019); Pilgrim Side Eye (2019) Anne Müller, Drifting Circles (2019) Louis Cole, Real Life (2018) Philip Glass, String Quartet No. 3, “Mishima” (1985)
- 1957-Award Montage - November 25-Ichigaya - 1934-Grandmother and
Kimitake - 1962 Body Building - Blood Oath - Mishima/Closing
Caroline Shaw, The Evergreen (2020)
- Moss - Stem - Water - Root
Gabriella Smith, Carrot Revolution (2015)
John’s Book of Alleged Dances (1994) John Adams
Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, MA
In John’s Book of Alleged Dances, consisting of eleven short pieces, Adams combines from genres and epochs, creating something novel but within a work that still has a familiar sound. John’s Book of Alleged Dances was a commission by the California Center for the Arts for the Kronos Quartet, which gave its world premiere in Escondido, California, on November 19, 1994. For its premiere, Adams prepared a piano, attaching screws, bolts, rubber erasers, weather stripping, and other material to its strings. The key playing a given string would then produce a particular altered sound rather than a note. The composer sampled the prepared keys, organized the sound into loops, and set them up as short rhythm tracks. The idea was that a member of the quartet would trigger these loops to perform them for the six dances in which this sound is required, but this technique was too complex, so Adams recorded them. Now quartets frequently perform this piece with the pre-recorded prepared piano loops. The order of movements used in recording the work sometimes dictates the order of movements in live performances, but essentially, Adams has prescribed no fixed order for these exuberant but technically demanding pieces. The overall effect is humorous, attractive, and sometimes wild. Adams describes these eclectic works: “These dances, dedicated to my friends in [the Kronos Quartet], are ‘alleged’ because the steps for them have yet to be invented. They cuss, chaw, hock hooeys, scratch, and talk too loud. They are also, so I’m told, hard to play. The general tone is dry, droll and sardonic.” In this concert, four selections without prepared piano sound will be performed. Adams wrote the descriptions of the works. Toot Nipple: “‘Mrs. Nipple...You probably don’t remember her husband, Toot. When he was young, he was a big fellow, quick and clever, a terror on the dance floor.’” (From Postcards by E. Annie Proulx.) “Furious chainsaw triads on the cello, who rides them like a rodeo bull just long enough to hand them over to the viola.” Alligator Escalator: “The long, sluggish beast is ascending from the basement level of the local Macy’s all the way to the top of the store and then back down again. Slow slithering scales, played flautando and sul [ponticello], leave invisible tracks on the escalator, splitting the octave in strange reptilian ways. Mothers are terrified, children fascinated.” Pavane: “She’s So fine: A quiet, graceful song for a budding teenager. She’s in her room, playing her favorite song on the boom box. Back and forth over those special moments, those favorite progressions. She knows all the words. On her bed are books and friendly animals. High, sweet cello melodies for Joan Jeanrenaud [cellist of the Kronos Quartet when the piece was written], who’s so fine.” Stubble Crotchet: “A sawed-off stump of a piece. Dry bones and hardscrapple attacks (“at the frog” as stringers like to say). An early morning shave with an old razor.”
Clock Catcher (2010); Remind U (2019); Pilgrim Side Eye (2019) (Three-Song Suite) Flying Lotus, a.k.a. Steven Ellison
Born October 7, 1983, in Los Angeles, CA
The Three-Song Suite by Steven Ellison, known professionally as Flying Lotus, was arranged by Nathan Schram, violinist in Attacca Quartet. Flying Lotus, sometimes called FlyLo, is an American record producer, DJ, and rapper from Los Angeles. Violist Nathan Schram says, “Because it’s instrumental music, it’s extremely dynamic, it’s super intelligent and sophisticated. And it was such a perfect fruit to try to dig into.” COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 43
PROGRAM NOTES Tuesday, July 12
Ellison’s recording sessions for these songs began in 2008 in his apartment in Los Angeles. Ellison used a laptop, a sampler, and a drum machine along with live instruments: harp, bass, strings, live drums, saxophone, trumpet, and keyboard. The laptop and sampler were used to produce and manipulate samples. Ellison calls this music a “map of the universe” and a “space-opera,” in which he fused 20th- and 21st-century music. The music he created was inspired by lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, and lucid drugs like mescaline and DMT.
The Suite consists of Flying Lotus’ re-imaginings of songs. Clock Catcher features fast, “fierce,” off kilter hi-hats. Hi-hats consist of a matching pair of small to medium-sized cymbals mounted on a stand, with the two cymbals facing each other. The quartet musicians intimately amplify the emotional resonances of Flying Lotus’s Remind U. Their goal of successfully blending musical worlds and breaking down barriers of genre succeeds in creating a distinctive, unique sound. The Attacca Quartet used all sorts of technology on the recording: overdubbing, adding electronic effects and enlisting some EDM producers, like TOKiMONSTA, to work with them.
Drifting Circles (2019) Anne Müller
Born in Berlin, Germany
Composer-cellist Anne Müller is based in Berlin, Germany. She was a cellist in many of Berlin’s symphonies before choosing a different path with her music. Her debut solo album, Heliopause, was released in 2019. The lifeaffirming composition Drifting Circles appears on the album, which is named after the boundary where “the sun’s wind ceases to have influence. It is ultimately the border of our solar system. Heliopause marks the end of a long journey but also the start of voyages to explore strange new worlds.” Two moods or arrangement types characterize this music of experimental minimalism: a drone-like ambience, either floating calmly or creating an epic vastness; and rotating arpeggio arrangements that drift slowly around a chord structure or motif. Drifting Circles merges these two styles together with Müller’s voice, which provides a spacious aural layer behind it. Drifting Circles provides “an orchestra of looped cellos and vocals” and references the style of work of contemporary composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
Real Life (2018) Louis Cole
Born in Los Angeles, CA
Louis Cole is an American multi-instrumentalist and singersongwriter and the co-founder of the electronic/avant-pop/jazzfunk duo Knower. His music contains elements from various contemporary music genres, including jazz, funk, pop, avantgarde, electronic, early lo-fi, and grindcore. Traditionally, lo-fi has been characterized by the inclusion of elements normally viewed as undesirable in professional contexts, such as misplayed notes, environmental interference, or phonographic imperfections. Grindcore is an extreme fusion of heavy metal and hardcore punk that originated in the mid-1980s and takes its inspiration from abrasive-sounding musical styles, such as thrashcore, crust punk, hardcore punk, extreme metal, and industrial. Cole is known for using unusual, counterintuitive chord progressions; his lyrics often include humor and vulgarity, Real Life, the title track of Cole’s 2018 album, features propulsive beats that are offset by chordal strings; the song’s melody is doubled in octaves. Its pulsating, manic energy blurs electronic and acoustic sounds and forces the body to move, in effect, asking the question: What can and should classical string quartet music be in the 21st century? Among other things, Cole has been influenced by video game sounds and visuals. Cole has said of the effect of games on him, “That music really dug its way deep into my developing brain. There are a lot of imaginative chord changes, pretty melodies, heavy funk grooves, modulations, insane synth trumpet hits and really cool sounds in those games. I still, to this day, strive to include those kinds of things in my music.”
Born January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, MD
Philip Glass is one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Since Glass’s music repeated and varied a very small number of basic musical ideas, the term “minimalism” was applied to his idiosyncratic style, and a number of other composers who were experimenting along the same lines helped turn the style into a movement.
Although Glass’s music is frequently described as minimalist, he prefers the term ‘theatre music.’ He often utilizes a constant beat and subtly shifting rhythms over a static harmonic structure, which tends to hypnotize the listener. Instead of the expected development sections, he uses increasingly complex repetitions and overlapping lines. The lush and undulating String Quartet No. 3 was composed in 1985 as music for Paul Shrader’s film on the life of the novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima. It is the only Glass quartet that has an explicit program, with each movement clearly labeled. The film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters portrays the life of this famous contemporary Japanese novelist. The scenes for quartet were shot in black and white, composed for childhood flash-back scenes. These nostalgic “scenes” often have a wistful, sometimes joyful, carefree feel. Glass said, “I anticipated the String Quartet section would be extracted from the film score and made into a concert piece in its own right.” The pensive first movement, 1957-Award Montage, conveys a melancholic atmosphere. It is made up of variations of a repeated minor key harmonic progression with undulating figures. The second movement, November 25-Ichigaya, is slower and has similar metrical structures and harmonic ideas to the first movement.
The third movement, 1934-Grandmother and Kimitake, is spirited and vigorous with rhythmic irregularities. The fourth movement, 1962 Body Building, begins tenaciously but becomes more energetic, using musical material from the first movement. The penultimate movement, Blood Oath, alternates between pulsed chords and polyphony, moving with a kind of springy positivity. The last movement, Mishima/Closing, features a sumptuous violin line, which contains fast arpeggiations and a two-note cell that creates an emotionally moving melody with a kind of softness underpinned by familiar chord progressions.
The Evergreen (2020) Caroline Adelaide Shaw
Born 1982 in Greenville, NC
New York-based composer Caroline Adelaide Shaw made history in 2013 when she became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Partita for 8 Voices. Shaw trained as a violinist, earning degrees in violin performance from Rice University and Yale University. She is a doctoral fellow in composition at Princeton University. She continues to maintain an active freelance performance career as both a violinist and a singer, and currently sings with the contemporary vocal octet Roomful of Teeth (for whom she composed her Pulitzer-winning Partita) and plays violin with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. When Shaw won the Pulitzer Prize, she professed her dislike of the specificity of notation, constantly searching for ways to subvert its exactitude. Sometimes, she achieves this by simply instructing the performers not to adhere too closely to the notation: “What’s written is just a guideline - not exact.” In her four-movement The Evergreen, composed in 2020, she draws on the rich textures of the landscape, naming the movements Moss, Stem, Water, and Root. Shaw has written a note for the piece: One day in January 2020, I took a walk in an evergreen forest on Swiikw (Galiano Island), British Columbia, Canada. I found myself slowing down. My steps were shorter, less frequent. I stopped trying to get to my destination with any real intention or speed. Eventually I stopped moving altogether. I looked, and listened, and felt and smelled and breathed. Like a thousand thousand creatures before me there, some of them also human, I paused and wondered and thought, “There’s wisdom in these trees.” It’s been said before, in ways more eloquent and complex than my little story here. Still. This piece, the Evergreen, is my offering to one particular tree in that forest. I started writing music years ago as gifts for people (whether they knew it or not), or as companions to a piece of art or food or idea. It was a way of having someone hold my hand through the writing process, a kind of invisible friend to guide me through. This tree is towering, craggy, warped and knotted wrapped in soft green, standing silently in a small clearing where the shadows are more generous to the narrow streams of sunlight that try to speak up in late morning. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that it’s still alive, or that it’s not actually an ancient deciduous tree that has tacitly agreed to be covered in moss. But still, it feels like an evergreen friend, and so I wrote some music for it and have called it the Evergreen. For the soft moss that covers it, for its strong stem that reaches up, for the gentle chaos of dripping water that surrounds it, and for the roots below, ever seeking and nourishing and building.
Carrot Revolution (2015) Gabriella Smith
Born December 26, 1991, in Berkeley, CA
Gabriella Smith is a composer and environmentalist. Her music comes from a love of play, as well as exploring new sounds on instruments, building compelling musical arcs, and connecting listeners with the natural world.
Her music has been performed throughout the U.S. and internationally by eighth blackbird, Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, PRISM Quartet, Aizuri Quartet, and yMusic, among others. Currently she is working on a version of Lost Coast for cello and orchestra to be premiered by Gabriel Cabezas and Los Angeles Philharmonic in May 2023, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. She has written her own note for Carrot Revolution:
I wrote Carrot Revolution in 2015 for my friends the Aizuri Quartet. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for their exhibition The Order of Things, in which they commissioned three visual artists and myself to respond to Dr. Barnes’ distinctive “ensembles,” the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture. While walking around the Barnes, looking for inspiration for this string quartet, I suddenly remembered a Cézanne quote I’d heard years ago (though which I later learned was misattributed to him): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” And I knew immediately that my piece would be called Carrot Revolution. I envisioned the piece as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet – a 250-year-old genre – as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, July 14
JOHN ADAMS + TIMO ANDRES’ WORLD PREMIERE
CONDUCTORS:
Peter Oundjian John Adams, composer-inresidence
GUEST ARTISTS:
Timo Andres, Dark Patterns (world premiere commission) Samuel Adams, Chamber Concerto (2017)
I. Prelude: One by One II. Lines (after J) III. Slow Movements IV. On/Off V. Postlude: All Together
Now
John Adams, City Noir (2009)
- The City and its Double - The Song is for You - Boulevard Night
This concert is sponsored by
Chamber Concerto (2017) Samuel Adams
Born December 30, 1985, in San Francisco, CA
Samuel Carl Adams is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. His inventively orchestrated and atmospheric works draw from traditional forms, noise, and digital culture. His work has been called “mesmerizing” and “music of a composer with a personal voice and keen imagination” by The New York Times, “canny and assured” by The Chicago Tribune and “wondrously alluring” by The San Francisco Chronicle. Adams has received commissions from Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Emanuel Ax, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. In 2015, Adams was named a Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; while there, he created new works for the orchestra and co-curated the criticallyacclaimed MusicNOW series. In 2019, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Adams grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, where he studied composition and electroacoustic music, receiving his bachelor’s degree at Stanford University while also active as a jazz bassist in San Francisco. Prior to working in New York City between 2010 and 2014, Adams received a master’s degree in composition from The Yale School of Music. Chamber Concerto, written in 2017 for violinist Karen Gomyo, was premiered in May 2018 by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as part of MusicNOW. Adams admits he is wary of the concept of a traditional concerto, which he finds “a bit suspect.” He says, “I am not particularly drawn to lopsided musical hierarchies, and the ‘hero’ narrative found in the standard nineteenth and twentieth century romantic warhorses doesn’t seem altogether relevant in the twenty-first century.” Adams chose the chamber concerto form, but has given it a twist. As he writes, “The result is a contemporary take on old ideas, a concerto that attempts to translate baroque formal devices into psychological archetypes, finding their meaning in the twenty-first century.” While Adams keeps the violin as a “solo” voice, it is used more as a spark or, as he puts it, a “waking voice”; the ensemble is its “collective unconscious.” The Chamber Concerto is an exploration of expression, primarily communicating feeling and emotion, rather than form and function. Reviewing the West Coast premiere of Adams’s Chamber Concerto, critic Charles Donelan of The Independent said that the concerto “left no doubt that this second generation of Adams composers has what it takes to move music forward. Mesmerizing, soulful, and structurally sound, the piece will enter the standard repertoire.”
City Noir (2009) John Adams
Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, MA
The contemporary American composer, John Adams, spent his formative years in his native New England, where the performers and composers at the artistic and intellectual institutions there had a significant influence on him. His clarinet teacher and the conductor of the orchestra in which he played as a young musician were both members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Adams became proficient enough on his instrument to appear as the soloist in the concerto of his neighbor, composer Walter Piston, and he studied composition at Harvard with the successor to Piston’s faculty chair, Leon Kirchner. After his graduation, Adams settled in San Francisco, where he taught at the Conservatory for ten years; he founded and directed the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s series “New and Unusual Music,” and was composer-in-residence with the orchestra from 1982 to 1985. In the music of his early maturity, Adams showed his discovery of a freer kind of advanced musical thought than he had previously learned, taking up many of the techniques and much of the aesthetics of the “minimalist” composers. It was not long, however, before he
admitted himself to be “a minimalist who is bored with minimalism” and developed the balanced mixture of sustained repetition with either subtle or bold variation that still often distinguishes his work. Dedicated to then Philharmonic President Deborah Borda “in celebration of a long friendship,” City Noir is the final panel in Adam’s Californian Triptych of orchestral works that “have as their theme the California experience, its landscape, and its culture.” The composer has written the following note about City Noir: City Noir was first suggested by my reading the so-called “Dream” books by Kevin Starr, a brilliantly imagined, multi-volume cultural and social history of California. In the “Black Dahlia” chapter of his Embattled Dreams volume, Starr chronicles the tenor and milieu of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s as it was expressed in the sensational journalism of the era and in the dark, eerie chiaroscuro of the Hollywood films that have come to define the period sensibility for us: “. . . the underside of home-front and post-war Los Angeles stood revealed. Still, for all its shoddiness, the City of Angels possessed a certain sassy, savvy energy. It was, among other things, A Front Page kid of town where life was lived by many one the edge, and that made for good copy and good film noir. Those images and their surrounding aura whetted my appetite for an orchestral work that, while not necessarily referring to the soundtracks of those films, might nevertheless evoke a similar mood and feeling tone of the era. I was also stimulated by the notion that there indeed exists a bona fide genre of jazz-inflected symphonic music, a fundamentally American orchestral style and tradition that goes back as far as the early 1920s (although, truth to tell, it was a Frenchman, Darius Milhaud, who was the first to realize its potential with his 1923 ballet La création du monde, a year before Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York.) The music of City Noir is in the form of a 30-minute symphony. The formal and expressive weight of its three movements is distributed in pockets of high energy that are nested among areas of a more leisurely – one could even say “cinematic” – lyricism. The first movement, The City and its Double, opens with a brief, powerful “wide screen” panorama that gives way to a murmuring dialog between the double bass pizzicato and the scurrying figures in the woodwinds and keyboards. The steady tick of a jazz drummer impels this tense and nervous activity forward – a late-hour empty street scene, if you like. After a broad and lyrical melodic passage in the strings, the original scorrevole movement returns, charged with increasingly insistent impulse and building up steam until it peaks with a full-throttle orchestral tutti. A surging melody in the horns and cellos punctuated by jabbing brass “bullets” brings the movement to a nearly chaotic climax before it suddenly collapses into shards and fragments, a sudden stasis that ushers in the second movement.
The title, The City and its Double, is a backward glance to the French playwright Antonin Artaud, who in his writing is said to have “opposed the vitality of the viewer’s sensual experience against [a conventional concept of] theater as a contrived literary form.” Hence my “city” can be imagined not just as a geographic place or even as a social nexus, but rather as a source of inexhaustible sensual experience. As a child watching the early days of television, I remember well the program that always ended with the familiar tag line, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one.” As a relief to the frenzy of the first movement’s ending, The Song is for You, takes its time assembling itself. Gradually a melodic profile in the solo alto sax emerges from the surrounding pools of chromatically tinted sonorities. The melody yearns toward but keeps retreating from the archetypal “blue” note. But eventually the song finds full bloom in the voice of the solo trombone, a “talking” solo, in the manner of the great Ellington soloists Lawrence Brown and Britt Woodman (both, fittingly enough, Angelenos). The trombone music picks up motion and launches a brief passage of violent centripetal energy, all focused on a short obsessive idea first stated by the sax. Once spent of its fuel, the movement returns to the quiet opening music, ending with pensive solos by the principal horn and viola.
Boulevard Night is a study in cinematic colors. Sometimes, as in the moody Chinatown trumpet solo near the beginning, it is languorous and nocturnal; sometimes, as in the jerky stop-start coughing engine music in the staccato strings, it is animal and pulsing; and other times, as in the slinky, sinuous saxophone theme that keeps coming back, each time with an extra layer of stage makeup, it is in-your-face brash and uncouth. The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of David Lynch film – the kind who only come out to strut their stuff very late on a hot night.
PROGRAM NOTES Friday, July 15
KALEIDOSCOPE: ROAD MOVIES
GUEST ARTISTS:
Timo Andres, piano Tessa Lark, violin Timothy McAllister, saxophone MEMBERS OF THE COLORADO MUSIC FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA: Violin: Jonathan Carney, Alice Hong, Ka-Yeon Lee, Joseph Meyer, James ZabawaMartinez; Viola: DJ Cheek, Jacquelyn O’Brien; Cello: Chava Appiah, Jeremy Crosmer, Susie Yang; Bass: Matt Heller; Percussion: Zachary Crystal, Joseph Petrasek, Rajesh Prasad, Gerald Scholl; Flute: Viviana Cumplido Wilson; Clarinet: Lou DeMartino; Oboe: Zachary Hammond; Piano: Vivienne Spy; Bassoon: Adam Trussell; Horn: Catherine Turner
David Skidmore, Ritual Music Stacy Garrop, Reborn in flames (from Phoenix Rising) (2016) Osvaldo Golijov, Last Round Valerie Coleman, Red Clay & Mississippi Delta for Wind Quintet
— Timo Andres, Honest Labor (2021) Roshanne Etezady, Recurring Dreams: For violin, cello, alto sax, and piano (2017) John Corigliano, STOMP (2011) Philip Glass, Etude No. 6 (2003) John Adams, Road Movies (1995) - First movement: relaxed groove - Second movement: meditative - Third movement: 40% swing
This concert is sponsored by
ARLENE GERWIN IN MEMORY OF JAMES GERWIN
Ritual Music David Skidmore
Born 1982 in Plano, TX
David Skidmore is a Grammy-Award-winning percussionist, Grammy-nominated composer, and musical entrepreneur. His work includes a tremendous range of genres, including classical, pop, hip hop, film scores, rock, ambient, experimental, and the avant-garde. He has received commissions from many of the world’s leading percussionists and percussion pedagogues. In 2005, Skidmore co-founded Third Coast Percussion, an ensemble that has performed hundreds of concerts across the country and internationally, also teaches musicians of all ages and experience levels, and has commissioned dozens of new works. It won a Grammy award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in 2017. Ritual Music is an energetic, tribal percussion quartet. It was premiered in collaboration with the Chicago-based Raizel Performances in the spring of 2005 and became a staple of Third Coast Percussion’s repertoire when the quartet was formed that year. This early Skidmore work, an “overture for percussion,” includes timbral, melodic, and rhythmic elements. It was conceived as variations on the numbers 2 and 4; in contrast to the raw energy of the music’s character in performance, the pitch content in the marimba, rhythmic motifs, and the structure of phrases were all determined numerically.
Born 1969
Stacy Garrop has received numerous awards and grants including an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fromm Music Foundation Grant, Barlow Prize, and three Barlow Endowment commissions, along with prizes from competitions sponsored by many orchestras and ensembles throughout the country. She taught composition and orchestration at Roosevelt University from 2000-2016. She earned a B.M. in music composition at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, an M.A. at the University of Chicago, and a D.M. at Indiana University-Bloomington. Garrop has supplied the following note for Reborn in Flames (2016): Legends of the phoenix are found in stories from ancient Egypt and Greece. While each culture possesses a range of stories encompassing the phoenix myth, these tales tend to share similar traits: a sacred bird with brilliantly colored plumage and melodious call lives for typically five hundred years; then the bird dies in a nest of embers, only to be reborn among the flames. In Egyptian stories, the phoenix gathers scented wood and spices for its funeral/rebirth pyre, then collects the ashes from its earlier incarnation and flies them to the temple of the sun in Heliopolis to offer as a tribute to the sun god. In Greek myths, the phoenix was approximately the size of an eagle and was adorned with red and gold feathers; it would fly from either India or Arabia to Heliopolis to give its offering. The bird’s association with immortality and resurrection are particularly intriguing aspects of these tales, giving numerous writers (including William Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling) a rich resource for their own stories. Phoenix Rising consists of two movements. I. Dying in embers represents an old phoenix who is settling on top of a pile of embers and breathing its last breath; II. Reborn in flames depicts the newly born phoenix getting its first taste of flight. Phoenix Rising was commissioned by saxophonist Christopher Creviston. I subsequently made arrangements for flute, clarinet, and violin.
Last Round Osvaldo Golijov
Born December 5, 1960, La Plata, Argentina
Osvaldo Golijov grew up surrounded by classical chamber music and Jewish liturgical and klezmer music. He studied with Gerardo Gandini, a student of Alberto Ginastera (1916-1981), who established the Argentinean nationalist classical music idiom. He also absorbed other Argentinean music, including the tangos of Astor Piazzolla. From Argentina, he moved to Israel and then to the United States, where he worked with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Loyola Professor of Music at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he has taught since 1991, and he is also on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory. Last Round joins Golijov’s past and present, mixing his memory of Piazzolla with his own distinctive, evolving style. The music reveals his wide interests: film and literature, different kinds of popular culture from all over the world, and his Eastern European Jewish heritage. He originally scored Last Round for two string quartets with a double bass, but later also scored it for string orchestra. Piazzolla’s terminal illness directly inspired the composition of the slow movement of the work. With the encouragement from the St. Lawrence Quartet, Golijov finished the work in 1996, preceding the slow movement with a fiery, fast movement. Golijov conceived the piece, reminiscent of Bartok’s settings of eastern European dances, “as an idealized bandoneon.” The first movement, Movido, urgent – Macho, cool, and Dangerous, is propulsive; it combines nuevo tango gestures and Piazzolla’s rhythmic obsessions. The pulsing bass provides a steady tango rhythm as the two string bands battle increasingly wildly. It represents a “violent compression of the instrument.” The very slow second movement, “Muertes del ángel,” (Death of an Angel) Lentissimo, is a tango elegy, introspective and impassioned, rich in emotion and in effects. It is a seemingly endless sigh, a fantasy over the refrain of the song “My Beloved Buenos Aires” composed by Carlos Gardel in the 1930s. Its subtitle is an homage to Piazzolla’s groundbreaking tango La muerte del ángel from the 1960s. The brief crescendos, clustered chords, and portamenti (slides) sound together like chords being squeezed wheezingly out of a bandoneon. Golijov has given it a warm and rich sound that often borders on the melancholy.
Born 1970 in Louisville, KY
Flutist, composer, educator and founder of the Imani Winds, Valerie Coleman began her music studies in the third grade. By the age of fourteen, she had written three symphonies and had won several local and state competitions. She received a double Bachelor’s degree in Theory/Composition and Flute Performance from Boston University and a Master’s Degree in Flute Performance from Mannes College of Music in New York. She has served on the faculty of The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program and Interschool Orchestras of New York. Currently, she is on the advisory panel of the National Flute Association.
Coleman’s music infuses contemporary orchestration with jazz, Afro-Cuban traditions, various distinct sonorities from within Africa, and inspiration from her African-American musical heritage. The composer has contributed: Red Clay is short work that combines the traditional idea of musical scherzo with living in the South. It references the background of my mother’s side of the family that hails from the Mississippi delta region. From the juke joints and casino boats that line the Mississippi river, to the skin tone of kinfolk in the area: a dark skin that looks like it came directly from the red clay. The solo lines are instilled with personality, meant to capture the listener’s attention as they wail with “bluesy” riffs that are accompanied (‘comped’) by the rest of the ensemble. The result is a virtuosic chamber work that merges classical technique and orchestration with the blues dialect and charm of the south.
Honest Labor (2021) Timo Andres
Born March 17, 1985, in Palo Alto, CA
The composer and pianist Timo Andres grew up in rural Connecticut. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is on the composition faculty of the Mannes School of Music.
Among his notable works are Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican by Andres and David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
Andres writes: “Honest Labor is a short piece which attempts to uncover a kind of Transcendental satisfaction in routine tasks. A simple contrapuntal process gives rise to increasingly elaborate and expressive gestures, finally evaporating in an ambiguous haze.”
Born 1973
As a child, Roshanne Etezady studied piano and flute, developing an interest in many styles of music. Hearing Philip Glass and his ensemble perform marked the beginning of her interest in contemporary classical music, as well as her interest in becoming a composer herself. She was educated at Northwestern University, Yale University, and the University of Michigan, and she has worked intensively with numerous composers, including William Bolcom, Martin Bresnick, Michael Daugherty, and Ned Rorem. She is a professor at the University of Michigan.
PROGRAM NOTES Friday, July 15
Recurring Dreams is a piece written for saxophone, violin, cello, and piano. Intensely melodic, it connects the instruments through runs passed from one instrument to another. Later in the piece, the instruments create a contrasting feeling with a rhythmic forward section. Further on, the cello is featured in a lyrical solo, which is passed to the violin. The strings and saxophone then present a homophonic section, before the piano becomes the driving force in the final energetic section.
STOMP (2011) John Corigliano
Born February 16, 1938, in New York, NY
John Corigliano studied composition at Columbia University with Otto Luening and privately with Paul Creston and Vittorio Giannini. His more than 100 compositions have won him the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, four Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award. Corigliano serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name. Corigliano has written the following about his work: Stomp poses its player three problems; of ear, style, and coördination. First, the violin’s outer two strings are tuned to non-standard pitches. This mis-tuning (scordatura) deepens the instrument’s range, and replaces the usual perfect fifths between strings with grating dissonances high and low. Second, the piece is modeled not on classical precedents, but on American fiddle music — bluegrass and jazz. And third, as in fiddle playing, the violinist must periodically stomp with his or her foot along with the music. So Stomp demands a theatrical mind, an unerring ear, and a delight in making music with the entire body. It is supposed to be fun for the audience, and a workout for the soloists. In Stomp, Corigliano has specifically written when the foot must be “stomped” and when the foot must be “tapped” throughout the piece.
Etude No. 6 (2003) Philip Glass
Born January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, MD
Philip Glass has made an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of our time. He discovered his love for music as a child in his father’s radio repair shop and record store, began flute lessons early at the Peabody Conservatory, and, at fifteen, entered the University of Chicago. Composition teachers include Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger. After he had completed this thorough education in Western musical practice, he developed an interest in non-European music and especially, the Indian sitarist, Ravi Shankar. While in Paris, he earned money by transcribing the sitar player Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. Upon his return to New York in 1967, he applied these Eastern techniques to his own music. After his time in Paris, Glass traveled in Africa and India, before returning to New York to organize a group of sympathetic performers into the Philip Glass Ensemble for the performance of music in a new style he was developing. Glass’s music features repeats and variations of a small number of musical ideas, giving birth to the term “minimalism” to describe his idiosyncratic style. He never approved of the term and prefers to say he composes “music with repetitive structures.” He utilizes a constant beat with subtly shifting rhythms over a static harmonic structure, often hypnotizing the listener. Instead of development sections, Glass continually investigates ways to forge a new musical vocabulary that integrates the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic in original ways. Glass began writing a series of relatively short piano pieces, Etudes, in 1992 with the goal of becoming a better pianist and improving his own keyboard technique by honing his skills. Completed nearly two decades later in 2012, the set of twenty diverse and intricately melodic Etudes records the evolution of his musical voice as a composer and charts his deeply personal connection to the piano. In these etudes he explores textures, tempi, and techniques. The etudes incorporate an immense range of moods, techniques, melody, and harmony and demonstrate his deeply personal relationship to his instrument as they record his evolving style.
Road Movies (1995) John Adams
Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, MA
Adams has noted that the title Road Movies is “total whimsy’ suggested by the “groove in the piano part” which propels the music forward in a “swing mode.” Adams describes the opening movement, Relaxed Groove, as “a relaxed drive down a not unfamiliar road.” He goes on to explain that his “material is recirculated in a sequence of recalls that suggest a rondo form.” The piano sounds many tones from which the violin chooses a three-note motif. As the piece continues, other notes adhere to the initial violin motif, and complex lines result. The second movement, entitled Meditative, is, in contrast, spare. Adams tells us it “is a simple meditation of several small motives. A solitary figure in an empty desert landscape.” The third and last movement, 40% Swing, takes its title from a reference to the setting on a MIDI sequencer through which the desired level of swing can be calibrated with accuracy. Adams explains it “is for four-wheel drives only, a big perpetual motion machine.” He comments that “40% provides a giddy, bouncy ride somewhere between a Charles Ives ragtime and a spectacular rideout chorus by the Benny Goodman Orchestra, circa 1939.” The movement requires concentration and excellent technique. Adams cautions, “It is very difficult for violin and piano to maintain over the seven-minute stretch, especially in the tricky cross-hand style of the piano part. Relax, and leave the driving to us.”
PROGRAM NOTES Sunday, July 17
MUST THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD TUNES?
CONDUCTORS:
Peter Oundjian John Adams, composer-inresidence
GUEST ARTIST:
Jeremy Denk, piano
Gabriella Smith, Tumblebird Contrails (2014) John Adams, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2019)
I. Gritty, funky, but in Strict
Tempo; Twitchy, Bot-like II. Much Slower; Gently,
Relaxed III. Piu mosso: Obsession
Swing
Christopher Rouse, Symphony No. 6 (2019)
I. Desolato II. Piacevole III. Furioso IV. Passacaglia
Guest artist sponsored by
Tumblebird Contrails (2014) Gabriella Smith
Born December 26, 1991, Berkeley, CA
Gabriella Smith is a composer and environmentalist. Her music comes from a combination of a love of play, exploring new sounds on instruments, building compelling musical arcs, and connecting listeners with the natural world. Her music is described as “high-voltage and wildly imaginative” (Philadelphia Inquirer), and “the coolest, most exciting, most inventive new voice I’ve heard in ages” (Musical America). Her music has been performed throughout the U.S. and internationally by eighth blackbird, Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, PRISM Quartet, Aizuri Quartet, and yMusic, among others. Recent highlights include the premiere of her organ concerto, Breathing Forests, written for James McVinnie and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen; the release of her first full-length album, Lost Coast, with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, named one of NPR Music’s “26 Favorite Albums Of 2021” and a “Classical Album to Hear Right Now” by The New York Times; and performances of Tumblebird Contrails by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in January 2019, conducted by John Adams. Currently Smith is working on a version of Lost Coast for cello and orchestra to be premiered by Gabriel Cabezas and Los Angeles Philharmonic in May 2023, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. She has written a note for Tumblebird Contrails:
Tumblebird Contrails is inspired by a single moment I experienced while backpacking in Point Reyes, sitting in the sand at the edge of the ocean, listening to the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific (the keening gulls, pounding surf, rush of approaching waves, sizzle of sand and sea foam in receding tides), the constant ebb and flow of pitch to pitchless, tune to texture, grooving to free-flowing, watching a pair of ravens playing in the wind, rolling, swooping, diving, soaring — imagining the ecstasy of wind in the wings—jet trails painting never-ending streaks across the sky. The title, Tumblebird Contrails, is a Kerouac-inspired, nonsense phrase I invented to evoke the sound and feeling of the piece.
Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, MA
The contemporary American composer, John Adams, spent his formative years in his native New England, where the performers and composers at the artistic and intellectual institutions there had a significant influence on him. In the music of his early maturity, Adams showed his discovery of a freer kind of advanced musical thought than he had previously learned, taking up many of the techniques and much of the aesthetics of the “minimalist” composers. It was not long, however, before he admitted himself to be “a minimalist who is bored with minimalism” and developed the balanced mixture of sustained repetition with either subtle or bold variation that still often distinguishes his work. Adams’s works include several of the most performed contemporary classical pieces today: Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, Chamber Symphony, Doctor Atomic Symphony, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and his Violin Concerto. His most often performed stage works, include Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic. Adams has long favored catchy titles. “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” is Adams’ third piano concerto, after Eros Piano (1989) and Century Rolls (1996). He explains that the title “came from an article about Dorothy Day in a very old copy of The New Yorker. In the same way that I first encountered the name ‘Hallelujah Junction’ and knew that I had to write a piece with that title, when I saw the phrase ‘Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?’ I thought to myself, ‘that’s a good title just waiting for a piece.’ The phrase suggested
PROGRAM NOTES Sunday, July 17
a ‘Totentanz,’ only not of the Lisztian manner, but more of a funkinvested American-style.” Written for pianist Yuja Wang, the single-movement work combines “devilish,” (in more than one sense of the term) solos with toe-tapping melodies. It is a percussive, highly-rhythmic, and technically fearsome piano part in an excitable, satisfying, boisterous piece. While the concerto is written in one continuous movement, it is made up of three seamlessly connected sections that follow the traditional concerto structure of fast-slow-fast alternation. The piano, again much like in a traditional concerto, is highlighted throughout the sections. The work, suffused with driving syncopations and a plethora of orchestral color, opens with a repeated piano bass motive. Written in 9/8 meter, it has the feeling of an unbalanced stagger that the orchestra adopts as it also ascends and speeds. The piano continues as both soloist and extension of the larger body of instruments. The theme is marked “twitchy, bot-like”; it has been said to echo and distort Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” as the piano is joined by a detuned honky-tonk piano. After a series of questioning chords that are exchanged in dialogue between piano and orchestra, the second section emerges with suspended strings over the delicately ornamented piano solo. Its serenity is deep but short-lived, with the restless piano part exploring a leaping melody. In the meditative central section, the piano solo is delicately embellished, but its peace passes quickly as the piano explores a more angular, vaulting theme. The third and final part of this work, again fast, with the piano having some touches of jazz, is marked “Obsession, swing.” As Sarah Cahill, writing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s debut performance of this work put it, “The virtuosity and playfulness here are familiar from other Adams finales, with the interplay between rollicking syncopation, chirping wood-winds, offbeat accents of brass, loping stride bass, a battery of percussion, and a brilliantly energetic piano part ranging across the entire keyboard which, after three mysterious, brief interruptions of a held octave D in the orchestra, propels the concerto to a boisterous close.” The catchy melody in the last section makes it evident that the Devil does not have all the good tunes!
Symphony No. 6 (2019) Christopher Rouse
Born February 15, 1949, in Baltimore, MD; died there September 21, 2019
Christopher Rouse was a prominent composer of orchestral music whose works won a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award. Rouse created a body of work that has been hailed for its emotional intensity and depth and its colorful orchestration. The New York Times called it “some of the most anguished, most memorable music around.” Rouse was a member of the composition faculty at The Juilliard School, and from 2012 to 2015, he was the Marie-Josée Composer-inResidence with the New York Philharmonic. He also had residencies at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Symphony, Helsinki Biennale, Pacific Music Festival, Tanglewood Music Festival, and Aspen Music Festival. Rouse’s music was performed by major orchestras in the U.S. and internationally. His final work, Symphony No. 6, notable for its dark, expressive sound world, received its posthumous world premiere with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Louis Langrée on October 18, 2019, shortly after his death. The symphony was commissioned for the Cincinnati Symphony’s 125th anniversary season. Rouse treated this symphony as his final musical statement, writing this program note, typing from his bed in hospice care: In my earlier years I found the task of writing a program note for a new work a comparatively easy, even pleasant, one. More than a few of my pieces had some sort of quasi-programmatic basis, and I found that I could often say much about the sources of inspiration in hopes that my observations might help the listener better understand my intent. In more recent years, however, I find that my new pieces fall into one of two categories: (a) scores that, while always placing emotional expression at the forefront of my intent, had no particular story or triggering event that led to the work’s composition, or (b) works that were so deeply personal that I found myself reluctant to share intimately private sources of motivation. In both cases, though, it seemed that there wasn’t much I could say. My Sixth Symphony inhabiting the second of these two groups, I hope listeners will not be disappointed if I limit myself to more “objective” observations about the music. Commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, this twenty-five-minute symphony was completed at my home in Baltimore on June 6, 2019. The first challenge I face when planning a new piece is to settle upon a beginning and an ending and to decide the number and order of movements; in this case, I (rather unusually for me) chose a more-or-less standard four-movement structure with the outer movements being slow in tempo and elegiac in mood. The two middle movements are faster and the third, in particular, is meant to be highly dramatic. As is usual in my music, each movement connects to its successor without a break. In each of my symphonies I’ve also chosen to use an instrument or instrumental combination that might be seen as somewhat unusual in a symphonic context. My First Symphony, for example, requires a quartet of Wagner tubas. Here I have chosen to make use of the fluegelhorn, a larger and more mellow member of the trumpet family, and it is the fluegelhorn that presents the symphony’s opening melodic material; it returns later in the first movement and again near the end of the entire work as a way of bringing the music “full circle.” The scoring comprises two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets (second doubling of bass clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets (first doubling on fluegelhorn), three trombones, tuba, harp, timpani, percussion (two players), and strings. As is also my wont, the harmonic language traverses areas of substantive dissonance as well as sections much more consonant (especially near the end of the symphony). I know the “meaning” of this work in my own mind but wish to leave it to each listener to decide for him or herself what this could be. My main hope is that it will communicate something sincere in meaning to those who hear it.
PROGRAM NOTES Tuesday, July 19
FLAVORS OF OLD RUSSIA: TCHAIKOVSKY, GLINKA & BORODIN
MEMBERS OF THE COLORADO MUSIC FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA: Josh Baker, bassoon Jonathan Carney, violin DJ Cheek, viola Steve Hanusofski, clarinet Alice Hong, violin Jenny Kwak, cello Kimberly Sparr, viola Vivienne Spy, piano Susie Yang, cello
Alexander Borodin, String Sextet in D Minor
I. Allegro II. Andante
I. Allegro moderato II. Scherzo. Vivacissimo III. Largo IV. Allegro con spirito
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Souvenir de Florence, String Sextet in D Minor, Op. 70
I. Allegro con spirito II. Adagio cantabile e con moto III. Allegro moderato IV. Allegro con brio e vivace
String Sextet in D Minor Alexander Borodin
Born November 12, 1833, in St. Petersburg; died there February 27, 1887
The chamber music tradition in Russia goes back to the 18th century when Catherine the Great brought some of Western Europe’s best musicians to her court. Later, Beethoven wrote some of his greatest quartets on commission from two Russian noblemen who had refined musical taste, Count Andre Razumovsky and Prince Nicolas Galitzin. Russia’s own first accomplished composer, Mikhail Glinka, (1804-1857) fell under the spell of this genre of music from the West soon chamber music occupied an important place in Russian musical life.
Alexander Borodin was one of Russia’s major 19th-century composers, but music was only his avocation, and thus his works are few in number. A distinguished scientist, physician, and chemist, who studied in Heidelberg, he even founded and directed a medical school for women. All this scientific commitment gave him limited time for musical composition, but he wrote two fine symphonies, the great opera, Prince Igor, and a number of other works that are still performed. He had a problem finalizing his work and completed some of it only when his friends forced him to do so. Legend has it that these friends even finished some compositions for him. This sextet was written in Heidelberg and not published until the late 20th century. Only two movements are extant, but Borodin scholars, notably Igor Belza who wrote a biography of Borodin, think that there originally must have been four movements either written or intended for this work.
The first movement, Allegro, begins with the first violin introducing the principal theme, which before the movement concludes, appears in all six parts. This harmonically not complex movement shows the influence of German music, especially that of Mendelssohn, as well as Borodin’s interest in Russian folksong. Composed in sonata form, it has a very short development section, and its recapitulation is not a literal one. The voicing changes and the principal theme appears in both the major and the minor modes. The second movement, Andante, a freer structure, begins with the principal theme in the violin with chordal accompaniment of the other instruments. Borodin startled his listeners and musical theorists by juxtaposing different keys without traditional preparation. The ending quietly fades away with the cellos playing in octaves, giving support to the idea that Borodin did not intend this movement to be the finale of the work.
Born June 21, 1804, in Novosspaskoye, Russia; died February 15, 1857, in Berlin
At the beginning of the 19th century, the West dominated Russia’s musical life; indigenous Russian music was that of the church and the peasants. Glinka, who became known as the founder of Russian concert music, came from a noble family, and was educated for a life in government service, not music. When he visited the Caucasus in 1823, he discovered Russian folksong, which inspired him to become a professional musician, but before he turned to music full-time, he spent four tedious years from 1824 to 1828 employed by the Ministry of Roads and Communications. In 1830, impelled by poor health and drawn by the romance he found in travel books, he journeyed to Milan and Berlin, where he studied their national musical styles, acquiring technical knowledge that made him a skillful composer. In Italy, he met opera composers Donizetti and Bellini, whose influence can be heard in this quite un-Russian sounding work. Speculations about the trio’s origin still persist, with most musicologists asserting it refers COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG 53
PROGRAM NOTES Tuesday, July 19
to an unrequited romance, as Glinka had several love affairs in 1832. The words he appended to the score are highly suggestive: “I have known love only through the pain it brings,” yet the overall mood of the music is more genial than tragic. In 1834, Glinka returned home, determined to create a Russian national style. He succeeded brilliantly, inspiring many of the Russian composers that followed him: the Mighty Five, a group of Russian composers (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov) particularly responded to his music based on Russian themes.
Although Glinka originally wrote Trio Pathétique for clarinet, bassoon, and piano, he created a version for violin, cello, and piano as well. Russian musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky felt this trio “reflects the cultured Westernized fashions of the upper classes in feudal Russia” before the “Russianization” of Glinka’s music.
The trio has four movements, but it has the character of a throughcomposed single-movement; the first three movements are played without a break. The Allegro moderato movement’s main theme resembles the music of early Romanticism; it is an arching, cantabile melody that becomes increasingly more passionate with its repeated appearances. After a pause and a passage of triplets, a luxuriant, lyrical second subject is presented. In the center of the brief, melodic, quite playful Scherzo, Vivacissimo, a memorably beautiful cello melody appears; the lilting trio complements the scherzo. The piano particularly sparkles in this movement. Ominous chords lead to the moving Largo, which conveys deeply felt emotion, with the clarinet first featured lyrically, followed by the cello’s restatement and variation of the theme; then, the two join two together. The short Finale returns to material heard previously in the tragic Largo. Glinka introduces another wistful, elegiac motif in the passionate coda before the work reaches its dramatic conclusion. Throughout, Glinka showcases the technical virtuosity of the piano.
Souvenir de Florence, Sextet in D Minor, Op. 70 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia; died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg
Tchaikovsky was particularly attracted to Italy and went to Rome in 1880 to visit his brother, who had an apartment there. While there, during the carnival season, Tchaikovsky was inspired to write Capriccio Italien. A decade later, he spent the first three months of 1890 in Florence where he completed his opera The Queen of Spades and began the ebullient, high-spirited sextet, Souvenir de Florence. In May, he wrote to the composer, Ippolitov-Ivanov, that his projects for the summer were to finish orchestrating the opera and to write a string sextet. In July, he completed the sextet and confided his satisfaction with his achievement to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck: “What a sextet, and what a fugue at the end; it is a pleasure, it’s frightening the degree to which I am pleased with myself!” Furthermore, he said he had accomplished it “with pleasure and enthusiasm, and without the least exertion.” Its spirit of warm 54 2022 CONCERT SEASON BOULDER, CO
nostalgia and good nature pays tribute to the sunny climate and friendly atmosphere he experienced in Italy. Tchaikovsky never wrote much chamber music; this work, his final chamber work, must be included in the small group that also comprises three string quartets, one string quartet movement, and a trio. To write a sextet was an unusual choice for him since the entire repertoire of string sextets was neither large nor old. The first two in that configuration of any importance are those that Brahms worked on from the mid-1850s to 1860s. Tchaikovsky and Brahms used to enjoy each other’s company when they met during their concert tours. Each cordially respected the professionalism of the other, yet neither of them really liked the other’s music; nevertheless, when Tchaikovsky began to work at writing fluently and interestingly for a sextet, he almost certainly looked to Brahms’s two youthful sextets as models. Unlike Brahms, Tchaikovsky reduced his writing to the simple texture of melody with accompaniment, but the very existence of Souvenir de Florence is unimaginable without Brahms’ work. The music of Dvořák, Brahms’s disciple, may actually have been more instrumental, indirectly transmitting the sextet tradition to Tchaikovsky. The Czech Dvořák and the Russian Tchaikovsky had become good friends in 1888; the Slavic heritage they shared gave them a strong sense of kinship. Tchaikovsky took the sextet to St. Petersburg when he went there for the rehearsals of The Queen of Spades that autumn. It was performed there in private for some of his friends, who included two young composers, Glazunov and Liadov, whose comments persuaded Tchaikovsky to revise the scherzo and the finale. The work received its first public performance on Dec. 7, 1892, at a concert of the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society, to which it is dedicated. When it was published, Tchaikovsky appended the descriptive title, Souvenir de Florence. Tchaikovsky’s other “Italian” work, Capriccio Italien, is a souvenir of the sounds he heard in Rome, but the Sextet is not a “souvenir of Florence” in the same sense. It expresses not so much his pleasure in the place as his satisfaction at having worked so well on his opera there; it also indicates his cheery optimism about the future. The highspirited music is charming, rich in quite varied colors, and full of lyrical melodies and vital rhythms. The first two movements are models of elegant Italianate, almost classical, restraint: the rather lengthy first movement, Allegro con spirito, is a loosely assembled serenade in a kind of extended sonata form. The first violin introduces both the first and the second themes: the first has a sense of drive, while the second is more lyrical. The second movement, Adagio cantabile e con moto, is a lovely song that begins with a series of chords before the first violin announces the melodic line over a pizzicato accompaniment. The brief central section is characterized by many dynamic changes; the initial material returns to round off the movement. The last two movements are unabashedly Russian in subject matter and in mode of expression: the third is a somewhat scherzo-like Allegro moderato, in ternary form. The mid-section has a faster tempo than the beginning and end. In the last movement, Allegro con brio e vivace, Tchaikovsky turns a peasant dance tune into the subject of a fugue. The movement comes to a climax with a fugal treatment of the initial theme.
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, July 21 | Friday, July 22
SIBELIUS’ SECOND SYMPHONY + VIOLINIST RANDALL GOOSBY
CONDUCTOR: Ryan Bancroft
GUEST ARTIST:
Randall Goosby, violin
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Ballade in A Minor, Op. 33 Florence Price, Violin Concerto No. 2 Camille Saint-Saëns, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28
Jean Sibelius, Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43
I. Allegretto II. Andante ma rubato III. Vivacissimo. Lento e suave IV. Allegro moderato
The July 21 concert is sponsored by
ANNE AND HENRY BEER
Born August 15, 1875, in Croydon (London), England; died there, Sept. 1, 1912
In the 21st-century, many neglected composers are finally receiving the recognition they have long deserved; among them are many African-American composers, such as Florence Price as well as international composers of African heritage, such as Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Coleridge-Taylor was the child of an English-trained physician from Sierra Leone and an English woman. His father could not maintain a medical practice in Britain because of his race; he returned to Africa permanently around the time of Samuel’s birth. Coleridge-Taylor studied violin and attended the Royal College of Music to study composition with Charles Villiers Stanford. Soon after, he began collaborating with the African-American poet/ author Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906). In addition to creating a large and varied body of composition, Coleridge-Taylor was conductor of the Handel Society of London from 1904 until his early death. He taught at the Croydon Conservatory and was Professor of Composition at Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music as well as violin teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. In 1898, a year after finishing his studies, Coleridge-Taylor received his first commission. His editor and mentor at the music publisher Novello was A. J. Jaeger, a friend of Edward Elgar; Elgar immortalized Jaeger in the “Nimrod” variation of his “Enigma” Variations. Jaeger introduced Elgar to Coleridge-Taylor’s music. Soon thereafter, Elgar, too busy to produce a new piece for the annual Three Choirs Festival, recommended the 23-year-old Coleridge-Taylor receive the commission which had been offered to him. Coleridge-Taylor thus received the bid to produce a new orchestral work for the Festival’s 1898 season. Elgar wrote that Coleridge-Taylor “still wants recognition but is far away the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men.” To fulfill this commission, Coleridge-Taylor composed the Ballade in A Minor, which was very warmly received. As important as this early success was for him, it was followed by the premiere of Coleridge-Taylor’s cantata, two months later, which Jaeger described as “the biggest success Novello’s has had since Mendelssohn’s Elijah.” British historian Jeffrey Green speaks of the legacy of Coleridge-Taylor for all 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.” During his lifetime, Coleridge-Taylor was very popular in the United States, where he was celebrated as “the Black Mahler.” He toured the country three times and was received by President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House in 1904. He died at the age of 37, reportedly from a combination of exhaustion and pneumonia. Unfortunately, his work almost completely disappeared from concert halls after World War II; recently, a revival of interest in his music has occurred.
Ballade in A Minor adheres to the Romantic tradition of Dvořák, who was a major influence on the young composer. Ballade begins with a dramatic flourish designed to command attention with trilling flutes above unison strings. Woodwinds introduce a strutting theme; the whole orchestra joins in the muscular, declamatory opening, punctuated by timpani and cymbals. A second theme is tender and much more lyrical. As the work continues, the two disparate moods alternate, climaxing in the orchestra’s iteration of the melodic romantic theme before the opening music returns for a dramatic ending. Ballade is scored for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, and strings.
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, July 21 | Friday, July 22
Violin Concerto No. 2 Florence Price
Born April 9, 1887, in Little Rock, AR; died June 3, 1953, in Chicago, IL
The early 20th-century African-American composer Florence Price spent her professional career in Chicago, where, because of her extraordinary musical talent and her family’s affluence, she was able, despite her race and her gender, to study at the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory. Later, 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, church organist, and theater accompanist. However, she is best remembered as the first African-American woman to have 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 Works Project 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. It was the first work by an AfricanAmerican woman to be performed by a major symphony orchestra in the United States.
Price completed Violin Concerto No. 2 in 1952, the year before her sudden death at age sixty-six. The manuscript was never published and was considered lost. The concerto, along with some other music and personal papers, was discovered by accident in 2009 when renovators opened up an abandoned house Price once owned some 70 miles south of Chicago. The concerto is in one movement, divided into four sections. Each section contains an introductory, as well as the principal and secondary themes, which, when they reappear in each subsequent section, are set to different textures. Price’s repetition of the themes in new contexts reflects her adherence to standard elements of the genre of spirituals. The lighthearted and melodic principal theme features rhythmic and harmonic elements from juba dance, (originally known as Pattin’ Juba, it is an African American dance that involves stomping as well as slapping arms, legs, chest, and cheeks) while the secondary theme reflects Price’s own distinctive, novel style. For the secondary theme, the orchestra is used as a duet partner for the soloist, pairing strings and brass joined with a warm timbre, featuring Price’s unique ways of bringing familiar material into new polyphonic settings. The work opens with a serious orchestral introduction with jarring chords of D major and F minor, that create an unstable harmonic environment. The music pauses to allow the solo violin to make its serpentine entrance. Price’s harmonies include some dissonance; the concerto, overall, is richly chromatic. The solo music, almost Romantic in feel, has a rhapsodic tone and is reminiscent of the music of Samuel Barber and other melody-driven American violin concertos of the 1930s. Of this lyrical, challenging but terse concerto, Alex Ross of the New Yorker writes, “This terse, beguiling piece has an autumnal quality reminiscent of the final works of Richard Strauss.
Camille Saint-Saëns’ talents were multiple: he was a composer, conductor, pianist, author of eleven books on music, collections of poetry, and scientific studies in astronomy and archaeology. He traveled almost all over the world on concert tours and for pleasure. He visited the United States twice; he made his South American debut at the age of eighty-one. “He has,” Romain Rolland wrote in 1915, “a clarity of thought, an elegance and precision of expression, and a quality of mind that make his music noble.” His greatest contribution to the musical life of his time was the establishment of the importance of instrumental composition in France, where opera had been long supreme. Saint-Saëns wrote two of his three violin concertos and a number of shorter violin pieces for the great Spanish virtuoso, Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1890), an impeccable technician whose performing style stressed beauty of tone and grace of manner. He gave the first performance of the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso at a concert in Paris on April 4, 1867. Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso is a charming work made up of a melancholy opening section and a rondo whose main theme’s syncopated rhythms illustrate its “capriciousness.” It closes with a solo cadenza and a coda of dazzling brilliance.
Symphony No. 2, in D Major, Op. 43 Jean Sibelius
Born December 8, 1865, in Hämeenlinna, Finland; died September 20, 1957, in Järvenpää
Jean Sibelius was an international traveler who never composed in isolation in his native country. After musical studies in Helsinki, he received a government stipend upon successfully composing a string quartet, allowing him to continue his studies in Berlin. He also studied in Vienna; his music was published in Leipzig. He made concert tours to the principal cities of Europe; he also frequently went to England, where his works were very popular. He taught for a while at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In the last decades of his life, he retired from international exposure, seeking seclusion in his native Finland. He did no composing in the last thirty years before his death. Sibelius’s originality in this symphony is a result of his formal structural technique. Instead of introducing full-blown themes, he first presents fragments, short melodic kernels that he later combines to make up larger thematic units. This musical technique is very innovative because it reverses the usual classical procedure in which the composer begins with statements of complete themes, which are then broken up in the development section. Sibelius
himself explains his practice poetically, “It is as if the Almighty had thrown down the pieces of a mosaic from Heaven’s floor and asked me to put them together.” In the first movement, Allegretto, he begins with what seem to be unrelated fragments, which then metamorphose into extended long themes in the development section, the part of the movement where traditionally composers break themes down into their components; later, he dissolves and disperses the material again in the recapitulation. The slow second movement, Andante ma rubato, opens with an accompaniment figure in the low strings and a multitude of fragments of melody, beginning in the bassoons. Sibelius eventually extends the fragments so they come together as two themes, one melancholy and one lyrical. The third movement is more conventional, a tumultuous scherzo, Vivacissimo, with the woodwinds introducing fragments of melody. After a contrasting middle section, Lento e suave, whose main theme starts very unusually and boldly with the oboe’s repetition of a single note nine times, the movement is joined to the last movement without a pause. The finale, Allegro moderato, has a stately and ceremonious feel with its principal theme setting the mood and establishing the character of the whole movement. This flowing melodic line also is the product of a series of fragments that Sibelius strings together. Gray’s comments about Sibelius’s concluding movement indicate that he feels the composer has “achieved the state of spiritual serenity, optimism and repose” which makes it possible for him to conclude this work in a triumphant manner with a large crescendo leading to a tremendous climax. He composed the symphony in 1901 in Italy; it premiered in Helsinki on March 8, 1902 in a concert conducted by the composer.
PROGRAM NOTES Sunday, July 24
MOZART’S PIANO CONCERTO NO. 27
CONDUCTOR: Ryan Bancroft
GUEST ARTIST:
Albert Cano Smit, piano
I. Allegro II. Andante III. Minuet and Trio IV. Allegro
I. Allegro II. Larghetto III. Allegro
I. Adagio - Allegretto II. Andante con moto III. Menuetto (Allegretto) IV. Allegro
This concert is sponsored by
Mozart wrote more than a dozen serenades for performance on special festive occasions in the grand houses of Salzburg and Vienna. When wind ensembles were called for, serenades were probably intended for outdoor performance at garden parties. Whatever the immediate occasion for the Serenade, Mozart’s depth stemmed from his discovery of Bach and Handel’s music. Their music was a revelation to him, for in it he discovered that counterpoint and fugue could greatly expand his musical vocabulary. This Serenade has only four basic movements and loosely follows symphony form with its firm structures and fully developed ideas. The Serenade’s intensely developed first movement, Allegro, has a stormy rather explosive opening. It begins with a huge main theme, more than twenty measures long. Its first four notes are a simple but powerful statement of the C minor chord played by all the instruments, and the rest of the theme supplies several motives that are fully developed in the course of the dark-toned, gloomy music-drama that follows. The Andante is a compact sonata-like movement with a plaintive hymn as its main subject. The Minuetto and Trio in Canone uses the style of canons, a procedure Haydn had made popular. The Trio is a reverse or inverse canon in which the melody is turned upside down in its successive entrances. The final Allegro is a theme and eight variations that continually increase in intensity until, after a momentary relaxation, the key changes from minor to major, to bring the Serenade to an optimistic conclusion.
Mozart completed Piano Concerto No. 27 on January 5, 1791, during the last year of his life. It was his last piano concerto and his last public performance. Critic, Eric Blom, described it as a “truly valedictory work, with a kind of chastened mood occasionally verging on a feeling of oppressive foreboding.” This Piano Concerto contains hints of what a later Mozart style might have become. Overall, this concerto utilizes a basic musical palette, one purified and refined, elemental and skeletal, as well as monumental, and all at the same time. A sophisticated beauty permeates the first movement, Allegro. The themes are not Mozart’s most glorious extended melodic inventions, nor do they have the grace and charm of his early piano concertos, but they share the attributes of both. Mozart composed this initial movement in sonata form; its development section has both originality and subtlety. The themes of the second and third movements take the style of what were then popular songs, almost certainly chosen to offer contrast and relief from the more grandiose Allegro first movement. The second movement, Larghetto, has an apparent simplicity within a symmetrical structure, but that simplicity only results from the skill and subtlety with which Mozart composed. The serenity of this music is undeniable. The principal theme of the rondo finale, Allegro, derives from a folk song from the Swabian region of southwestern Germany. Mozart used this theme again for the first of three songs he entered in his catalog nine days after the concerto. The folk song’s title is “Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling” (“Yearning for Spring”) and the first words are “Komm, lieber Mai...” (“Come, dear May, and make the trees go green again”), a text that Robert Schumann set to music in 1849 for his Album of Songs for Young People, Op. 79. This last movement has a cheerful enough theme but feels, nevertheless, tinged with yearning.
Mozart died nine weeks after the first performance of The Magic Flute, at the end of a year that began with the composition of this concerto and concluded with the mysteriously commissioned uncompleted Requiem that many historians feel Mozart sensed would be his own. Within two years, an important composer in Berlin jealously complained of the “inordinate fuss” being made about Mozart’s music. Publishers energetically mined the huge collection of his works still in manuscript. His widow engaged musicians to finish compositions left incomplete and to assemble whole pieces out of fragments. The first attempt to publish a uniform edition of his complete works began in 1800. Mozart had quickly become, in the words of Alfred Einstein, “the universal composer who transcends history.”
Mozart composed the great trilogy of his last symphonies in a remarkably short time between June 26 and August 10, 1788. Until then, he had composed at least one symphony almost every year since he was eight, but after these three, no more followed in the three and a half years that remained of his short life. Further, no record of any performances of these symphonies during his lifetime exists, and no mention of their first performances has been preserved. Even more mysterious is why the composer would be prompted to write three symphonies in such short order when there is no evidence of a commission for any of them. If he did not compose them for financial reasons, could an inner compulsion to express his musical thoughts have been the sole reason for their writing? Regardless of why Mozart composed the work, Symphony No. 39 has received kudos from commentators for the last two centuries and has become one of Mozart’s best-loved and most recognized symphonies. The composer Richard Wagner could not praise it too highly: The longing sigh of the great human voice, drawn to him by the loving power of his genius, breathes from his instruments. He leads the irresistible stream of richest harmony into the heart of his melody, as though with anxious care he sought to give it by way of compensation for its delivery by mere instruments, the depth of feeling and ardor which lies at the source of the human voice as the expression of the unfathomable depths of the heart. The E-flat Symphony is different from the other two symphonies contemporaneous with it. Regardless of the circumstances in which Mozart found himself during the period of its composition, most of the symphony breathes a spirit of joy and gaiety, especially in the latter half. Also, the scoring of this symphony departs from the usual. Mozart had been becoming increasingly interested in the clarinet, although the famous clarinet quintet and the clarinet concerto were yet to be written, and in place of oboes, Mozart uses two clarinets in this symphony. The clarinets appear throughout the work but have a special effect in the trio of the minuet, where the first clarinet establishes the melodic theme and the second clarinet embellishes that line with arpeggios. This ebullient symphony has a slow introduction, Adagio, that is meditative and solemn in character but harmonically audacious, a favorite device of Haydn, but relatively uncommon in Mozart. It expands the proportions of the vigorous Allegro first movement, an intense, dramatic and romantic opening to a serious work. The violins introduce the first theme, which is restful and melodious. The second subject is a cantabile melody of beauty and grace, divided between the violins and clarinets. The development section is relatively short and does not manipulate the principal musical material very intensively. The slow movement, Andante con moto, is not very slow but is one of the longest movements in all of Mozart’s symphonies. It begins with a simple folksong-like subject; the second part has a passionate theme. At the close of the theme, there is a harmonically interesting section in which the bassoons play an important part. The end of the development of the themes recalls a style familiar from the twelve great piano concertos of 1784 to 1786. The Minuet, Allegretto, begins cheerfully and has fluent writing for the still new and “modern” instrument, the clarinet. The rustic sounding dance may be musically related to or even derived from the kind of dance music that Mozart was then composing. The symphony comes to an end with a brilliant and light-hearted Finale, Allegro, an extended movement built, like some of Haydn’s, on a single theme, in this case made up of nine notes. In this movement the composer allows his humor and fancy to play freely, especially in the merry development in which he expresses a variety of gay, sunny thoughts. The themes of the movement are less important than the fanciful, elaborate structure for which they function as foundation. The movement ends dramatically and suddenly.
PROGRAM NOTES Tuesday, July 26
BRAHMS’ CLARINET QUINTET
MEMBERS OF THE COLORADO MUSIC FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA: Jonathan Carney, violin DJ Cheek, viola Viviana Cumplido Wilson, flute Lou DeMartino, clarinet Jenny Kwak, cello Joseph Meyer, violin Ryan Murphy, cello Karen Pommerich, violin Kimberly Sparr, viola
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Flute Quartet in D Major, K. 285
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Rondeau Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Movement for String Trio ˇ Antonín Dvorák, Terzetto in C Major, Op. 74
I. Introduzione: Allegro ma non troppo II. Larghetto III. Scherzo: Vivace. Trio: Poco meno mosso IV. Tema con Variazioni
I. Allegro II. Adagio III. Andantino - Presto non assai, ma con sentimento IV. Con moto
Mozart completed his first quartet (K. 285) in Mannheim on Christmas Day of 1777. It is a compact work, light in spirit, and probably well suited to the temperament of De Jong, for whom it was written. The flute part is really little different from the first violin part of a string quartet of the time, but it is given a somewhat more conspicuous role of leadership in the ensemble. It contains very lovely idiomatic writing for the flute. This quartet is the longest, most substantial of the four flute quartets Mozart wrote. The first movement is a spirited Allegro, in fully-developed, classical sonata-form with the flute carrying the melodic line. The first theme is charming and contrasts with the second, which has a poignant feeling. In the center of the movement, there is some use of chromatic lines, and the flute enters into a dialogue with the strings. The next movement is a beautiful and poetic Adagio, in which the flute sings long, embellished lines above the plucked accompaniment of the strings. The noted early 20th-century musicologist Alfred Einstein praised the second movement in this quartet as one “suffused with the sweetest melancholy,” and declares it is “perhaps the most beautiful accompanied flute solo that has ever been written.” It leads directly into the jolly final Rondo, Allegretto. This energetic movement is, like the preceding one, simple in its construction and very charming, with brief contrasting episodes, characteristic of a rondo.
Born June 14, 1932, in New York City, NY; died March 9, 2004, in Chicago, IL
The career of innovative American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson spanned the worlds of jazz, dance, pop, film, television, and classical music. His works showcase his unique blend of Baroque counterpoint, American Romanticism, elements of blues, spirituals, and black folk music, and his own unique rhythmic ingenuity. He received his B.A. at Manhattan School of Music, and after completing his M.A. in composition, he studied conducting at the Berkshire Music Center and at the Salzburg Mozarteum. From 1965 to 1970, he was co-founder and associate conductor for the Symphony of the New World and served as its acting music director during the 1972–73 season. At various times, he also served as music director or composer-in-residence for the Negro Ensemble Company, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and for productions at the American Theatre Lab, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Perkinson composed Movement for String Trio, a slow, melancholy Bach-like aria, just before his death. It was published posthumously in 2021. This short composition’s simplicity distinguishes it from the more complex musical structures of his other works. The cello plays a repeated chromatic descent characteristic of operatic lament basses, while the violin and viola carry on a dialogue as they embellish a minor-mode theme. In this most poignant movement, Perkinson plays with the rhythm, periodically adding or subtracting a single sixteenth note from a measure. His deliberate counterpoint in this work evokes Bach, who was one of the earliest and most enduring influences on his unique compositional style.
Terzetto in C Major, Op. 74 ˇAntonín Dvorák
Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves; died May 1, 1904, in Prague
In January 1887, Antonín Dvořák composed the Terzetto in C Major for the unusual trio combination of two violins and viola, for the express purpose of amateur music making. At the time, a young chemistry student who loved the violin was renting rooms in Dvořák’s house, and Dvořák thought it would be fun to take up the viola once again to play with him. In his early adulthood, Dvořák had made a living as a violist, and on this occasion, he decided to compose a work scored for himself, the young student, and his violin teacher. Unfortunately, both of the Terzetto’s violin parts proved excessively difficult for enthusiastic, but not technically proficient, amateurs. Dvořák, still wishing to play with them, wrote another piece in the following week for them to play together. This second piece became Op. 75a, a work he called Terzett, the German form of the word terzetto. This original setting was not published until 1945. The Terzetto is a charming and sweet work in four movements. The first movement, Introduzione, Allegro ma non troppo, has an innocent main theme, playfully tossed between the players. In the Larghetto, a slow movement in three-part form, cherubic tenderness dominates. Dvořák creates the impression of a new countermelody when the original melody is stated a second time, simply by taking the middle voice and moving it up to the top voice. The Vivace, Scherzo is a wonderful movement built along the same vigorously rhythmic thematic lines that Dvořák uses in the scherzos for larger ensembles. The rhythm has the feel of the exuberant Bohemian folk dance, the furiant, which Dvořák often uses in his music. In the theme and variations finale, Tema con variazioni, Dvořák utilizes a melody that hovers precariously between major and minor tonalities; each of the variations has a distinct character, encompassing rhythmic, lyric, and dramatic possibilities.
In the 1890s, the fashionable Alpine resort town of Bad Ischl had become Brahms’s second home. There, in 1891, on his 58th birthday, he drew up his will. He subjectively felt old, worried his creative powers were leaving him, and that it was time to prepare for the end. He even feared that perhaps he would write no more. Two months later, however, he sent a new piece to a friend, a trio with clarinet, that he said was “twin to an even greater folly.” The “greater folly” was to be one of his most moving works, this Clarinet Quintet. The clarinet had never had an important place in his music before this final burst of inspiration; nevertheless, his last four pieces of chamber music, the Trio, this Quintet and two Sonatas for Clarinet, all resulted from his admiration for a particular clarinetist. This clarinetist, a man Brahms first met in 1891 and called a “dear nightingale,” was Richard Mühlfeld (1856-1907). Mühlfeld was trained as a violinist and taught himself to play the clarinet. In 1873, he joined the violin section of the fine orchestra that the Duke of Meiningen maintained at his court, and in 1876, he became its first clarinetist. In March 1891, Brahms went to Meiningen as an honored guest to hear von Bülow conduct some of his works. On one of the programs Mühlfeld played a Weber concerto for clarinet. “The clarinet cannot be played better,” Brahms, known to be sparing of praise, wrote to his close friend, Clara Schumann. In July, when he had completed both the trio and the quintet, he reported to Clara, “I look forward to returning to Meiningen if only for the pleasure of hearing them. You have never heard a clarinet player like the one they have there. He is absolutely the best I know of.” Clara read through the score of the Clarinet Quintet at the piano with her daughter and wrote back that it was a “heavenly work.” When she heard Mühlfeld play it in 1893, she wrote to Brahms, “I am not feeling very well, but I must write you a line after having heard your exquisite Quintet at last. What a magnificent thing it is, and how moving! Words are inadequate to express my feelings. He plays so wonderfully, he must have been born for your music.” If Brahms had not encountered Mühlfeld when he did, perhaps some other performer or instrument would have caught his interest and sparked the fire of invention again. There is no way to know, but posterity is grateful to Mühlfeld for these last glorious works, and for the Clarinet Quintet most of all. The music is mellow and warm, even sensuous, but it is also a touching valedictory, introspective and retrospective, a calm, beautiful farewell. The movements of the quintet are interrelated, as had become usual in Brahms’s late chamber music, by patterns, motives, and turns of musical phrase that appear and reappear in the long course of the work. At the very end, in the coda to the finale, the music that opens the work comes back to round out the score with great elegance. After the gentle melancholy of the Allegro first movement comes a remarkable Adagio in a simple three-part form. It begins with a floating melody in the clarinet, richly but quietly accompanied by the muted strings. A contrasting middle section does not introduce new material but instead turns the first theme into a dark, wild gypsy rhapsody. The third movement opens as a simple and gentle Andantino with two themes, which Brahms soon transforms into a scherzo-like Presto non assai, ma con sentimento that starts quietly in the strings alone. Despite the apparent great change in tempo, Brahms writes the music so that, although it looks and feels as though it is going by at a great rate, the actual beat is very nearly the same as that of the opening music. The last movement, Con moto, is a masterly, Mozartian set of variations on a theme that seems reminiscent of the first and third movements. As it proceeds, the opening theme from the first movement reappears as part of and in combination with the music that is new here, as though it were itself new.
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, July 28 | Friday, July 29
PROKOFIEV 5 + GABRIELA MONTERO PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY
PRINCIPAL GUEST CONDUCTOR:
Jean-Marie Zeitouni
GUEST ARTIST:
Gabriela Montero, piano
Modest Mussorgsky, Night on Bald Mountain (arr. RimskyKorsakov) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23, TH55
I. Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso - Allegro con spirito II. Andantino semplice -
Prestissimo - Tempo I III. Allegro con fuoco - Molto meno mosso - Allegro vivo
I. Andante II. Allegro marcato III. Adagio IV. Allegro giocoso
The July 28 concert is sponsored by
The July 29 concert is sponsored by
Born March 21, 1839, in Karevo; died March 28, 1881, in St. Petersburg
Mussorgsky wrote his Night on Bald Mountain, dedicated to the composer Mili Balakirev, in several different forms. Around 1886, a Russian publisher issued the score of Night on Bald Mountain as a “posthumous work completed and orchestrated by N. Rimsky-Korsakov,” and for around eighty years, until a version of Mussorgsky’s original was published, it was the only known version of this popular, short tone-poem. Mussorgsky was twenty-one when he received a commission to write Night on Bald Mountain, in which he set music to one act of the drama, The Witch by Baron Mengden, after Nicolai Gogol’s story, Saint John’s Eve. In Russian folklore, the legendary Witches’ Sabbath and Black Mass is held annually on Mount Triglav near Kiev in the Ukraine, the “bald mountain” on June 23rd, the night before the Feast of St. John the Baptist. On this night, the black god Chernobog, or perhaps the Devil in the form of a black goat, supervises the revelry of devils, witches, sorcerers, and other malevolent spirits. A letter to Rimsky-Korsakov, written about ten days after he finished the work, shows that Mussorgsky consciously used special techniques to achieve his effects, from the “witches glorifying Satan — stark naked, barbarous and filthy” to “funny, fiery and brisk.” Later in another letter, he writes, “My music is Russian and independent in form and character, fiery and disorderly in tone.” Rimsky-Korsakov improved the orchestration and adjusted the harmonies after Mussorgsky’s death, although in the process he made so many changes from the original score that his version of the piece is distinctly different from the original. The original Mussorgsky version is very occasionally still performed, but the more well-known of the two is the Rimsky-Korsakov emendation. Mussorgsky described the four main sections: 1) Assembly of the witches, their talk and gossip; 2) Satan’s journey to the mountain; 3) The Black Mass, with witches circling Satan’s throne and singing his praise; and 4) the Sabbath, in which Satan takes as partners the witches who have caught his fancy.
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia; died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 is one of the great works of Russian Romanticism, distinguished for its melodiousness, colorful instrumentation, and brilliant writing. It is difficult to imagine the composer as the young man he was at the time of his composition of this work: generally unknown and trying desperately to make a living writing music. In 1874, he was teaching at the Moscow Conservatory and writing music criticism for a local journal, earning only a very modest income. His real desire was to write music, but he lacked the time necessary to produce a sizeable body of work. At year’s end, he began a piano concerto in the hope of having great enough success with it to enable him to leave his teaching post at the Conservatory. Nicholas Rubinstein, the Director of the Conservatory, had become young Tchaikovsky’s mentor when the composer began teaching there. Tchaikovsky was usually eager for Rubinstein’s advice on his works-in-progress, but when Tchaikovsky played him his newly completed Piano Concerto No. 1, Rubinstein was surprisingly negative and presented his opinion in harsh terms. Rubenstein’s reaction has become legendary, as a result of Tchaikovsky’s willingness to share information about it. Three years after Rubenstein’s comments, Tchaikovsky could still narrate them vividly in a letter to a friend, (here abridged): A torrent then poured from his mouth, gentle at first, then bursting out with the force of a thundering Jupiter. My Concerto was worthless, unplayable; the passagework fragmented
and clumsy beyond salvation; the music trivial and vulgar; stolen, in places, from others. Perhaps one or two pages were salvageable; the rest was to be thrown away or completely rewritten. An impartial witness would have concluded that I was an untalented idiot, a hack who had submitted his rubbish to a great man. “I shall not change a single note,” I answered. “I shall publish it just as it is,” and I did. The bold complexity of the concerto initially shocked Rubinstein, but he eventually admitted his error and even, eventually, began to play the work as part of his repertory. Before that, with determination and resilience, Tchaikovsky sent his new concerto to the brilliant German pianist and conductor, Hans von Bülow, who gave the work its world premiere in Boston on October 25, 1875, and became the work’s dedicatee. “Think what appetite for music the Americans have,” Tchaikovsky wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov. “After each performance, Bülow had to repeat the entire finale. That could never happen here.” When Tchaikovsky went to New York in 1891 for the opening of Carnegie Hall, he conducted a performance of the concerto at one of the gala inaugural concerts. This concerto is now so familiar that listeners often overlook its several interesting features. The first of these is the broadly paced, stunning opening section, Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso, which is not just an introductory flourish common in so many concertos of the time. The movement itself is a protracted and brilliant discussion between piano and orchestra. Each theme becomes so thoroughly developed that Tchaikovsky never gives them a recapitulation. The composer adapted the principal theme of the Allegro con spirito section of the first movement from a beggar’s street song. The second movement, Andantino semplice and Prestissimo, combines a slow movement and the scherzo, whose waltzing theme Tchaikovsky derived from a French popular song. The finale, Allegro con fuoco, contrasts lyrical and boisterous Slavic elements before arriving at its imposing close.
Sergei Prokofiev was born in a remote Ukrainian village where his agronomist father managed a large estate. His mother, an excellent pianist and teacher, gave him his first music lessons. Prokofiev began to compose when he was only five years old. By the end of his student years, he had already written almost one hundred compositions, but the great majority of his early works were never published. He studied at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg where he became a brilliant and successful pianist, winning the concerto competition in his final year there. After the Revolution, he came to America and then settled in Paris where he was an influential figure until his return to Russia in 1933. Symphony No. 5 was a product of the time Prokofiev spent in a “rest home,” an artists’ colony environment where composers, considered valued citizens of the U.S.S.R. during the Second World War, were moved from dangerous parts of the country. The intent was for them to compose in a relatively secure place, creating works to help keep public morale high. A decade and a half passed between Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 4 and his Symphony No. 5. Prokofiev said, “The Fifth Symphony was written out in a month during the summer of 1944. It took another month to orchestrate it, and in between I wrote the score for Eisenstein’s film, Ivan the Terrible.” Prokofiev explained that the score was “very important to [him], since it marked [his] return to the symphonic form after a long interval.” Prokofiev said that he had written “a symphony about the freedom and happiness of mankind, a hymn to its mighty powers, its pure and noble spirit. I cannot say that I chose this theme. It was born in me and clamored for expression. The music grew within me and filled my spirit.” Almost immediately, the symphony was hailed as a celebration of victory because of its optimistic character. Just before Prokofiev conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 5 on January 13, 1945, in Moscow, at a festive concert celebrating his 100th published composition, the victory of the Red Army was announced. The premiere was a total success for Prokofiev but sadly marked his last appearance as a conductor. Three weeks later, he fell down a flight of stairs and suffered a heart attack and brain concussion. For the last eight years of his life, his physical activities were curtailed, although he went on to produce more powerful symphonies. Symphony No. 5 is an epic in the Russian symphonic tradition, using classical structures in all four of its movements, bound together into a whole by subtle musical references from one movement to another. The first movement, Andante, is in sonata form, has large proportions, and includes three long subjects. Although this movement has a relatively broad tempo, it has a very lyrical, dance-like feel. Although Prokofiev did not shun counterpoint in its composition, he wrote a piece so lyrical that critics called the memorable melodies “singable.” The second movement, a scherzo, Allegro marcato, has an energetic rhythmic pulse, accentuated by a generous use of percussion. In the central trio section, a melodic subject with syncopation breaks the relentless meter of the movement. This lively scherzo is both light-hearted and wry yet it concludes stridently. The third is a three-part slow movement, Adagio, again lyrical, beginning with an elegant clarinet melody. It continues with great, long themes that build in intensity. The symphony ends with another sonata-form movement, a brilliant Allegro giocoso, that not only quotes the main subject of the first movement in its introduction, but has rhythms much like those of the second movement but more march-like in feel in this context. The cumulative driving intensity is similar to that of the third movement, but here Prokofiev shows his grotesque and mocking side as well. The movement is full of energy, dazzling the listener.
PROGRAM NOTES Sunday, July 31
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM WITH JOHN DE LANCIE
PRINCIPAL GUEST CONDUCTOR:
Jean-Marie Zeitouni
GUEST ARTISTS:
Jennifer Bird-Arvidsson, soprano John de Lancie, actor Marnie Mosiman, actor Abigail Nims, mezzo soprano Emelie O’Hara, actor Members of the Boulder Children’s Chorale
Jessie Montgomery, Starburst (2012) Georges Bizet, Symphony No. 1 in C Major
I. Allegro vivo II. Adagio III. Allegro vivace IV. Allegro vivace
Overture
II. L’istesso Tempo
III. Lied mit Chor
IV. Andante
V. Allegro Appassionato
VI. Allegro
VII. Con moto tranquillo VIII. Andante VIIII. Wedding March Finale
Starburst (2012) Jessie Montgomery
Born 1981 in New York City, NY
Jesse 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. She 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. Starburst was commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and was premiered by Sphinx Virtuosi in 2012. This short piece was originally scored for string orchestra. About it, Montgomery writes: “This brief one-movement work for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst: ‘the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly’ lends itself almost literally to the nature of the performing ensemble who premieres the work, The Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.”
Symphony No. 1 in C Major George Bizet
Born October 25, 1838, in Paris; died June 3, 1875, in Bougival, France
Bizet composed this Symphony in C Major when he was only seventeen and still a student at the Paris Conservatory. It has a youthful feel, rich in both freshness and charm. He composed it in 1855, but then allowed it to disappear, unperformed, into the archives of the Conservatory. It was not rediscovered until 1933 and was first performed on February 26, 1935, in Basel, under the direction of Felix Weingartner, who prepared the first edition for publication that year. Bizet’s symphony opens, Allegro vivo, with a brief, sturdy rhythmic subject that is followed by a relaxed, placid second subject highlighting oboes and flutes. The second movement, Adagio, begins with an introduction that uses an accompanying figure derived from the rhythmic subject of the first movement. The main body of the movement is a haunting and lovely song for solo oboe; it has an interesting slow fugal central section, based on the figure that accompanies the introduction. The third movement, a scherzo, Allegro vivace, begins with a spirited rhythmic first theme. In the central trio section, the thematic material is placed over a rustic sounding drone bass accompaniment. The finale, also Allegro vivace, is a sprightly construction with perpetual-motion and march-like passages that lead to the second subject, a soaring lyrical melody of great beauty. The symphony concludes with a display of colorful virtuosity.
Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg; died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig
When FelixMendelssohn was a teenager, Shakespeare’s plays were becoming very popular in Germany in translations by a relative of the Mendelssohn family. In the summer of 1826, when he was seventeen, he and his sister Fanny spent many afternoons in the garden of their Berlin home reading Shakespeare aloud and sometimes acting out the roles. They were especially captivated by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a complicated fairy tale that is a rare combination of high poetic beauty and low comedy. In July and August, the young composer wrote a brilliant piece that is a perfect reflection of these qualities; he called it A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. In its first version, the work was a piano duet that he and Fanny played. In December, he orchestrated it, and in February, the work had its premiere at a symphonic concert. Many years later, in 1843, King William IV asked Mendelssohn to write incidental music to be played during a theatrical performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the theater of his new palace. For the composer, the first performance of the work, which he conducted on October 14 of that year, was not a happy experience. The royal guests insisted on long intermissions, which they turned into noisy social gatherings, completely destroying the atmosphere Mendelssohn intended his music to create in the theater.
One of the great marvels of Mendelssohn’s genius is the perfect match, in style and spirit, of the Overture he wrote when he was seventeen and the music he wrote for the play when he was exactly twice that age. The match that the music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes to his earlier Overture springs from the way that Mendelssohn was able to mine his own Overture for ideas, and in the subtle relationships he then created between its elements and the play itself. Asked by his publishers, the composer recalled how he had written A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “It is impossible for me to outline. . . the sequence of ideas that gave rise to the composition. . . It follows the play closely, however, so that it may be very proper to indicate the outstanding situations of the drama in order that the audience may have Shakespeare in mind or form an idea of the piece. I think it should be enough to point out that the fairy rulers, Oberon and Titania, appear throughout the play with all their people. . . At the end, after everything has been settled satisfactorily and the principal players have joyfully left the stage, the elves follow them, bless the house and disappear with the dawn. So the play ends. . . ” Mendelssohn composed music not only for the Shakespearean songs in the play, but also for the substantial entr’actes and he created long stretches of background music as well as dances, marches, and fanfares. There are twelve numbers in all in addition to the Overture. The lively Scherzo with its spirited flute solo is a delightful portrait of Puck, who makes his first appearance soon after the curtain rises before Act II. It is the first of the fairy scenes, written in a loose sonata form. It has much the same character of impishness that the Overture has, except that in this section the woodwinds begin the thematic statement, and the strings initiate the second thematic exposition. The next section is “Over the hill, over the Dale,” followed by the “March of the Fairies” in which Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, come on stage to light and airy music. The fourth section is a song with chorus, “You Spotted Snakes with Double Tongue,” which is, perhaps surprisingly, a lullaby. In Act II, Scene 2, Titania lies down in the woods and asks her attendants to sing her to sleep. They guard her rest with this song, followed by the slow, “What thou see’st when thou dost wake” and the Allegro, “Help me Lysander, help me!” When Oberon and Puck cast spells that will make Titania fall in love with the grotesque Bottom and end Lysander’s love for Hermia, the passionate Intermezzo, “On the ground sleep sound” between Acts II and III is played. The following Nocturne is an interlude between Acts III and IV. The four young lovers, their relationships confused by fairy magic, fall asleep in the woods. Puck pours a magic potion on Lysander’s eyes that is instrumental in bringing the couples together again. Oberon then releases his Queen from her enchanted dream. This section has distinctive solo passages for the French horns, enriched by the addition of the bassoons and the clarinets. The famous Wedding March, which begins with a processional, introduces Act V and the celebration of the triple wedding of Hermia to Lysander, Helena to Demetrius, and Hippolyta to Theseus. The Fanfare and Funeral March, played by a handful of instruments, is the music for the rustic clowns’ play-within-the-play. The Dance of the Clowns functions as music for the Bergamasque that Quince, Bottom, and their companions dance after they perform the comedy Pyramus and Thisbe for the Duke and his palace guests in Act V. The music is based on the donkey “hee-haw” that first occurs in the Overture.
The Finale, with music that begins and ends like the Overture, accompanies the short scene in which the fairies come to bestow their blessings on the newly-married couples. Mendelssohn assigns Oberon’s words to the women’s chorus and Titania’s to a solo voice.
Women’s Chorus: Through the house give glimmering light By the dead and drowsy fire; Every elf and fairy sprite Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty after me Sing and dance it trippingly.
Soprano: First, rehearse your song by rote, To each word a warbling note: Hand in hand, with fairy grace, Will we sing, and bless this place.
PROGRAM NOTES Tuesday, August 2
DANISH STRING QUARTET
Purcell, Chacony in G Minor (arr. Britten)
I. Allegro II. Andante con moto III. Scherzo. Allegro molto IV. Presto — Prestissimo
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Purcell: Born September 10, 1659, in Westminster, England; died there November 21, 1695 Britten: Born November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft, England; died December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh, England
Henry Purcell, one of the most renowned composers in England’s history, was the organist at the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, where he is buried. He wrote for the church, for the theater, and for every kind of private performance. Like Mozart and Mendelssohn, he had a long and productive career that was condensed into a lifetime of only thirty-six years. He was the only composer before J. S. Bach whose work is included in the repertory of the symphony orchestra. Purcell is best known to today’s audiences for the cameo appearance his music makes in Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Between 1690 and 1695 alone, Purcell composed music for almost fifty plays; the music was so extensive, in some cases, as virtually to convert the plays into operas. His instrumental music includes eight suites and many short pieces for harpsichord, two sets of trio sonatas published in 1683, and later, a collection of Fantasias which he wrote around 1680. Purcell composed the Chacony for an ensemble of viols, bowed stringed instruments with frets, typically held vertically like cellos or double basses. Unfortunately, the date when Purcell composed this Chacony, an independent work, is not known, but perhaps it formed part of some incidental music he wrote for a play or some other specific occasion. A chacony (Fr. chaconne It., ciaccona) consists of a series of variations over a repeated bass line figure known as ostinato. The work’s title is unusual and seems to be unique: it would have been expected to call the composition ‘chaconne’ after the French. Purcell’s most sincere admirer was Benjamin Britten, who adapted this expressive Chacony in part to familiarize players and audiences with his distinguished predecessor’s music. An eight-measure bass statement that the lower strings introduce serves as the foundation for eighteen variations. In some of the variations, the bass figure appears in the higher-voiced instruments. Purcell became the last major figure to explore this particular format. He created his music at the transitional moment when the older viol family of instruments was beginning to yield to the more brilliant timbre of violins. Britten completed the arrangement for string quartet in 1948 and revised it for string orchestra in 1963. He chose not to alter Purcell’s original order of notes, but, quoting Philip Lane, devised a “credible dynamic structure and consistency of dotted rhythms and distribution of parts.” Britten wrote: “The theme, first of all in the basses, moves in a stately fashion from a high to a low G. It is repeated many times in the bass with varying textures above. It then starts moving around the orchestra. There is a quaver [eighth note] version with heavy chords above it, which provides the material for several repetitions. There are some free and modulating versions of it, and a connecting passage leads to a forceful and rhythmic statement in G minor.” According to Britten, the work concludes with “a pathetic variation, with dropping semi-quavers (sixteenth notes), and repeated ‘soft’—Purcell’s own instruction.”
Chacony is scored for strings in four parts.
The Danish String Quartet has chosen both British and Nordic tunes for this selection. They have chosen folk music, which they have found in “all the small places. It is local music, but as such is also the music of everywhere and everyone.” In these old melodies, they have found “immense beauty and depth” and have made arrangements, so that they might, in their words, “sing them through the medium of our string quartet” with “the idea of marrying two simple but powerful things, folk music and the string quartet.” Further, “We found a bunch
of amazing tunes – and we hope you will enjoy what we did to them.” Specifically, in speaking of the Nordic melodies, the DSQ has found this music to be “simple, with a touch of exotic melancholy.”
Schubert was not unknown during his short lifetime, but never really had an important place in public musical life. He died only sixteen months after Beethoven’s death, but the two composers inhabited different Viennas. Schubert, unlike Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, had no support from wealthy families. Although he had some influential friends, he lived mostly as a lower class Viennese, and his simple lifestyle might be termed “Bohemian.” He congregated with friends his age, many talented and some from wealthy families, and they attended public musical events and admired the famous musicians, especially Beethoven, from a distance. Quartet No. 14, known as “Death and the Maiden,” was first performed in January 1826 in the Viennese home of two amateur musicians, Karl and Franz Hacker. This beautiful quartet, which Schubert wrote, or at least began in 1824, is exciting for its rhythm and scope, but it was not particularly successful at first. In fact, the first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh of the famed Schuppanzigh Quartet which premiered many of Beethoven’s quartets, had trouble playing the first violin part because of his advanced age and complained to Schubert after the play-through, “Brother, this is nothing at all, let well alone: stick to your Lieder.” Yet Schubert, who wrote fifteen string quartets in all, composed one more after this one. Although he sent it along with two other quartets, three operas, a mass, and a symphony to the publisher Schott, Schott returned them all, replying that Schubert’s price was much too high, and that he should “send them something less difficult in easier keys.” The result: the quartet was not published until after Schubert’s death. One contemporary review from the Weimar Musikalische Eilpost in 1826, at least, was short and sweet noting that in performance the piece had “the highest artistic endeavor, . . . clearly expressed. Profound feeling, force and charm, significance and vitality and poetic fire characterize [it].” The long first movement, Allegro, demonstrates great power and is both dramatic and tragic. In it, Schubert also displays his mastery of modulation. Because it contains so many ideas, Paul Griffiths has commented on the triplet figure, which shapes the thematic motives. Each of the triplet figures functions like a link to connect the musical thought from one idea to the next. Schubert diverged from classical structures quite innovatively, and in this restless sonata form opening movement of this quartet, he extends the second subject material. Thus, both the exposition of the theme and its recapitulation have very large scopes, partly because each also includes some of its own development. The development itself is, therefore, brief and takes the listener to the coda, which grows to a climax before the movement ends quietly. Although Schubert had used the theme and variations form in his Trout Quintet, he never used it again in any quartet except in this quartet’s second movement, Andante con moto, and here it suits his expressive purpose admirably. The quartet takes its subtitle, “Death and the Maiden,” from this theme, which is a slightly altered version of the piano introduction to Schubert’s song, Der Tod und das Madchen (“Death and the Maiden”), written in 1817. The Mattias Claudius text is carried on as a dialogue, in which the maiden begs Death to pass her by, and he replies, “I do no harm. Come, sleep peacefully in my arms.” (While Schubert was being buried only a few yards from Beethoven, a small band of wind instruments played these five variations.) Grief and desolation are most evident in this movement. Schubert’s choice of thematic material for the quartet was, however, presumably prompted by a request from friends who loved the melody, rather than, as some commentators have contended, because he was thinking about mortality. The energetic third movement takes much of its rough vigor from the displaced accents of its syncopated theme and is Schubert’s first scherzo, Allegro molto, in a quartet. For it, he borrows from his own German Dance, D. 790. The Scherzo’s binary structure follows that of the Classical minuet with both sections being repeated. The trio provides a contrast and contains a warm lyrical theme. The Scherzo returns to end the movement.
The last movement, Presto, has characteristics of the form and the rhythm of the tarantella, a Neapolitan folk dance in 6/8 rhythm; it binds the other movements together tonally as well as brings the quartet to a stormy, galloping close. Here Schubert took elements of Rondo form and sonata form, using the characteristics of the tarantella to join them together. Interpretations of this movement with its return to the D minor tonality have focused on its being a dance of death, but music historians have no evidence that suggests that this analysis has any basis in Schubert’s intentions. Less controversial is the fact that the modulations and dynamics strongly reinforce the movement’s the Romantic character.
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, August 4
STRAVINSKY’S FIREBIRD + CLARINET STAR ANTHONY MCGILL
CONDUCTOR: Peter Oundjian
GUEST ARTISTS:
Wang Jie, composer Anthony McGill, clarinet
Wang Jie, Flying On the Scaly Backs of Our Mountains (world premiere commission) Carl Maria von Weber, Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 73
I. Allegro II. Adagio ma non troppo III. Rondo. Allegretto
Claude Debussy, Première Rhapsodie for clarinet and orchestra Igor Stravinsky, Firebird Suite (1919)
I. Introduction - The Firebird and its dance - The
Firebird’s variation II. The Princesses’ Khorovod (Rondo, round dance) III. Infernal dance of King
Kashchei IV. Berceuse (Lullaby) V. Finale
This concert is sponsored by
Born 1980 in Shanghai
The composer has supplied the following note: Sometime between 1050 and 1100 AD, the celebrated polymath Su Dongpo traveled, journaled, and left few minds unstirred for centuries to come. “The true face of Mount Lu is lost to my sight, for it is right in this mountain that I reside.” Travel poetry during his time radiated metaphors. They were never just about the scenery. This poem concluded that the decision to live “in” a mountain risks losing the sight of the true face. Maybe it’s also the big picture. I struggle with this idea. Dongpo also lived during a time when being a polymath meant fame and glory. Today, he has a Wikipedia page in twenty-four languages. The list of his achievements goes on: calligrapher, gastronome, painter, pharmacologist, poet, politician, and writer. Moreover, he was a notoriously strong personality in all parts of public life. Unlike today, they used to dig big personalities, those Chinese living in the Song Dynasty. Reverence and envy aside, I suspect one thing about him most people haven’t thought about. He didn’t rock climb. I do that. He didn’t feel the true faces of the mountain under his fingertips. I feel that - all the wrinkle and dimple as the mountain releases its past to the little me.
There is nothing we rock climbers wouldn’t sacrifice to lose ourselves right “in” the mountains, groove upward, and top out. Nothing. Not even life. When we succeed, we get to watch from above, a nod of approval from mother earth. The true face reflective of a universe bigger than the biggest picture men can ever dream of. With Eldorado Canyon as my courage, I’d like to add a verse to Dongpo’s legendary poem: The true face of Mount Lu is lost to my sight, For it is right in this mountain that I reside. Our spirit resides at the summit, For it is the only place that we fly, On the scaly backs of our mountains. The truth unleashes from the sky.
Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 73 Carl Maria von Weber
Born November 18, 1786, in Eutin; died June 5, 1826, in London
Weber, the first great German Romantic composer, had a direct influence on Wagner and even on Strauss and Mahler, yet his own music had its roots in the 18th-century Viennese classicists. His first teacher, his older brother, had studied with Joseph Haydn. He studied with Haydn’s younger brother Michael in Salzburg. In 1811, Weber spent several months in Munich, where the first clarinetist in the court orchestra, Heinrich Bärmann (1784-1847), impressed him greatly. Weber called Bärmann ws “a truly great artist and a splendid man.” On April 3, 1811, Weber completed a clarinet concertino, and on April 5th Bärmann gave it its first performance. The King found the music so pleasing that he immediately commissioned two clarinet concertos from Weber that he completed in April and May. As the story goes, Weber wrote the first movement of Concerto No. 1, and even orchestrated it, in a single day! The concerto follows a conventional three-movement form. The dramatic first movement, Allegro, although it follows sonata form, unusually gives the first theme to the orchestra and only the second one to the soloist. The cellos introduce the first subject which is based on a rising and descending minor triad, while the clarinetist introduces the poignant second
theme, con duolo. Bärmann’s cadenza comes soon after a return of the opening theme. The short recapitulation brings back the initial theme before the clarinet plays some sparklingly brilliant virtuosic runs. The movement subsides quietly and somewhat mysteriously. The central movement, Adagio ma non troppo, strongly contrasts with the preceding movement; it is very lyrical, with its aria-like solo lines played over rocking string chords. A more dramatic central section intervenes to disturb the calm songfulness, but only temporarily, as a passage of remarkable beauty for the soloist and horns intervenes. The lyrical opening theme returns before the soloist and horns bring the movement to a gentle close. The last movement, a spirited, dance-like rondo, Allegretto, gives the soloist plenty of opportunities for virtuosic display. The episodes provide interesting contrasts. The first is in a minor key, and recalls, slightly, the turbulent first movement. The second episode contains a delightful dialogue between the oboe and the soloist. The work concludes in a lively, optimistic mood.
Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain; died March 25, 1918, in Paris
In 1909, Debussy was appointed to the Supreme Council of the Music Section of the Paris Conservatory; he composed two test pieces for its clarinet competition of 1910. One was this Rhapsody, which all contestants were required to prepare. The other was a Petite Pièce, which was to be read at sight. Debussy originally composed both with piano accompaniment and later orchestrated the rhapsody. Debussy once described the Clarinet Rhapsody as “one of the most pleasing pieces I have ever written.” The composer-conductor Pierre Boulez finds it “hesitating between reverie and scherzo, very much the work of Debussy at ease. The virtuosity [of the solo part] is not the kind that shows itself off in a vainglorious way, nevertheless [there are] a good number of snares for the soloist, all in good humor. He can also demonstrate refinements of tone and phrasing with the dreamy, slow melodies.”
Firebird Suite (1919) Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, Russia; died April 6, 1971, in New York City, NY
When the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev was planning a ballet on the old Russian legend of the Firebird for his 1910 Paris season, he commissioned a score from the composer Anatoly Liadov (18551914). Three months later, when Liadov was asked how the work was progressing, he replied, “Marvelously! I’ve already bought the music paper.” Impatient at the unexpected delay, Diaghilev withdrew the commission, and late in the summer of 1909, decided to give it instead to Igor Stravinsky. The year before, Diaghilev had heard two of Stravinsky’s early orchestral works; subsequently, he gave him some orchestration assignments and liked what he did with them. Diaghilev was quite certain that the young composer could handle the responsibility of writing an original score for a new ballet. Stravinsky was a bit nervous about the commission because the music had to be ready so quickly. He immediately set to work and completed the score in May in time for the première at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910. Thus began the Stravinsky-Diaghilev association that led later to the creation of Petrushka, the Rite of Spring, Le Rossignol, and Pulcinella. In the 1960s, Stravinsky recollected, “Like all ‘story’ ballets, [The Firebird] demanded ‘descriptive’ music of a kind I did not want to write. Some years later, I asked [Debussy] what he really thought of The Firebird. He said, ‘What difference does it make? You had to begin with something.’ Honest but not flattering. The Parisian audience wanted a taste of avant-garde, Ravel said, and The Firebird was, according to Ravel, just that. To this I would add that while it is more vigorous than most of the ‘composed’ folk music of the period, it is also not too original — good conditions for a success. I was prouder of some of the orchestration than of the music itself. The Firebird has been a mainstay in my life as a conductor. I made my debut with it in 1915 in Paris, and since then I have performed it nearly a thousand times, though ten thousand would not erase the memory of the terror I suffered that first time.” Diaghilev’s lush 1910 production of The Firebird allowed Stravinsky to score the ballet for a huge orchestra, giving the young composer a rich palette of musical colors with which to paint his pictures. In 1911, the composer drew a suite of excerpts from the successful ballet, but later, fearing that the expense of engaging so many musicians was preventing the piece from being performed, he prepared a shorter suite of excerpts for a smaller orchestra. The shorter version is the popular 1919 Suite. Stravinsky’s remarkable orchestration for The Firebird, even in the reduced orchestration of the 1919 Suite, creates sounds that are quite astonishing and marvelous, foretelling what would come later in Stravinsky’s oeuvre. The scenario of The Firebird tells the story of the Firebird, who, with Prince Ivan’s help, struggles against the evil magician, Kashchei. Interestingly enough, many considered the composition of the twenty-seven-year-old Stravinsky to be musically so interesting that it could be better appreciated in concert performance without having to deal with the distraction of the complicated events that take place on the stage when the work is danced. Nevertheless, even when listening to the music without seeing the ballet, it is helpful to know the story on which the music is based. Prince Ivan finds himself one night wandering through the garden of King Kashchei, an evil magician and monarch whose power is contained in a magic egg that he keeps in an elegant box. While in Kashchei’s garden, Prince Ivan captures a Firebird, but is willing to spare the bird’s life if it gives him one of its magic tail feathers. The Firebird submits, willingly. The Prince continues onward and encounters thirteen enchanted princesses. The most beautiful of them, who has fallen under Kashchei’s spell, leads him to a place where Kashchei’s evil guards can capture him. Before he can be enchanted, the Prince uses the power of the magic tail feather to
PROGRAM NOTES Thursday, August 4
summon the Firebird. The Firebird reveals the secret of the magic egg from which Kashchei derives his power. The Prince is able to locate and destroy the egg, breaking the spell of evil enchantment. He can now marry the Princess, who is no longer in thrall to Kashchei. The suite opens with the low strings introducing Kashchei’s magical realm. The sudden trembling (tremolo) of the string section announces the arrival of the Firebird. In depicting the Firebird, Stravinsky’s use of chromatic lines helps create the shimmering sound that indicates the firebird’s glittering feathers. Trills further depict the firebird. Stravinsky uses syncopation to help create the sense of the bird’s movement in the Firebird’s Dance to variations on a Russian song. The Princess Khorovod movement, which follows, brings calm. The prince sees the princess with whom he is destined to fall in love; high woodwinds punctuate her dance. He also watches the young women performing folk dances, including the Khorovod, a round dance. Next comes the Infernal Dance of King Kashchei. In his dance, Kashchei and his retinue are forced to dance themselves into exhaustion. In this savage dance, Stravinsky incorporates simultaneous combinations of different rhythms to bring forth an unsettling and disorienting effect as well as to suggest general frenzy. In the Berceuse, a tender lullaby, a solo violin is highlighted. As the Firebird lulls the monsters to sleep, both the sound of the bassoon and soft, diminishing string tremolos enhance the effect. Finally, after a solo horn plays a folk tune, there is a prominent harp glissando. With the evil spells broken, the Finale depicts a stunning wedding processional for the Prince and his Princess with all the instruments joining together to celebrate the union and to conclude this brilliantly orchestrated fantasy.
PROGRAM NOTES Sunday, August 7
MAHLER’S FIFTH SYMPHONY
CONDUCTOR: Peter Oundjian
Wynton Marsalis, Herald, Holler and Hallelujah! (Colorado premiere, co-commission) Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor
Part 1
I. Trauermarsch. In gemessenem Schritt. Streng.
Wie ein Kondukt II. Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter Vehemenz
Part 2
III. Scherzo: Kräftig, nicht zu schnell
Part 3
IV. Adagietto. Sehr langsam V. Rondo-Finale. Allegro -
Allegro giocoso. Frisch
SPONSORED BY STACEY STEERS AND DAVID BRUNEL IN LOVING MEMORY OF FILMMAKER PHILLIP SOLOMON, WHO CHERISHED MAHLER’S 5TH
Born October 18, 1961, in New Orleans, LA
Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!, a fanfare for brass and percussion, is a co-commission from symphony orchestras of New Jersey, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Germany’s WDR Symphonieorchester. This performance marks the work’s Colorado premiere. Its World Premiere was January 22, 2022, with the New Jersey Symphony conducted by Xian Zhang. Wynton Marsalis, trumpet virtuoso, educator, and composer, is supremely comfortable in big band jazz, gospel, Afro-Caribbean, and classical music. Marsalis has created works for string quartet, ballet, and orchestras, as well as for jazz ensembles. Herald, Holler and Hallelujah! is scored for six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, bass trombone, tuba, a large percussion section requiring four players, and timpani.
Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor Gustav Mahler
Born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia; died May 18, 1911, in Vienna
Symphony No. 5 was begun in the summer of 1901 just around the time he met Alma Schindler, a brilliant and beautiful twenty-year-old composer. They married in March 1902. Mahler spent that summer completing Symphony No. 5 and devoted the autumn and winter in Vienna to orchestrating it. The audience was enthusiastic at the premiere, but Mahler said, “Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance fifty years after my death.” Mahler designated the symphony’s three parts in the score, with five movements dispersed among the three parts. The first movement begins with a Trauermarsch (Funeral March) with trumpet fanfares recalling the military bands of Mahler’s childhood. This march sporadically erupts with violence and yields to a defiant trio with its outburst of grief, before returning. After a nightmare-like climax, the movement closes with the trumpet call. The second movement, Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter Vehemenz (“Tempestuously, with great vehemence”) includes demonic music that resolves into a hymn-like chorale. This movement is related to the first both emotionally and thematically. It is turbulent, angry, and savage, quelled by quieter passages. Close to the movement’s end, there is an optimistic brass chorale, but it falters, only to recur at the symphony’s end. The great central Scherzo, the third movement, immediately caused problems when rehearsals began. He wrote to Alma: “The scherzo is the very devil of a movement. I see it is in for a peck of troubles! Conductors for the next fifty years will all take it too fast and make nonsense of it; and the public—oh, heavens, what are they to make of this chaos of which new worlds are forever being engendered?” The Scherzo is the longest movement Mahler ever composed.It features his peculiar juxtaposition of ländler and waltz as an ebullient dance of life. The ethereal fourth movement, the Adagietto, Sehr langsam (“Very slowly”) is the most famous part of the symphony and is frequently performed alone. Associated with death and mourning, Mahler intended it, however, as a love song for Alma. It is for strings and harp alone. The melody is related to the composer’s Rückert song setting “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world … I live alone in my heaven, in my loving, in my song”). In the finale, Mahler combines rondo and sonata form. The final climax is marked by a return of themes from earlier movements, heightened by a triple fugue. Near the end, the brass chorale from the second movement reappears, an expressive metamorphosis from grief and death to joy and life.
