POCAHONTAS STATE PARK

Suites for Strings

Metro Series

Valentina Peleggi CONDUCTOR (pg.6-7)

Schuyler Slack CELLO (pg.74)

Thomas P. Bryan Jr. Fund Soloist

Daniel Myssyk CONDUCTOR

Saturday, June 10 @ 8pm

CHRISTOPHER THEOFANIDIS (B. 1967)

Visions and Miracles

I. All joy wills eternity

II. Peace Love Light YOUMEONE

III. I add brilliance to the sun

BAUER (1882-1955)

Suite for String Orchestra, Op. 33

I. Prelude

II. Interlude

III. Finale: Fugue

STEVEN SNOWDEN (B. 1981)

This Mortal Frame

I. Samuel A. Smith Residence

II. The Crossing at Aquia Creek

III. 2nd and Pennsylvania Ave.

IV. Vigilance Committee Office

Schuyler Slack, CELLO

Intermission

BARTÓK (1881-1945)

Divertimento for String Orchestra

I. Allegro non troppo

II. Molto adagio

III. Allegro assai

2:04 approximate program length

Scheherazade

Symphony Series

Valentina Peleggi CONDUCTOR (pg.6-7)

Inbal Segev CELLO (pg.75)

Courtney Collier & Michael Duncan DANCERS FROM THE RICHMOND BALLET (pg.67, 70)

Malcolm Burn CHOREOGRAPHER FROM THE RICHMOND BALLET (pg.66)

JULY 6, 13, 20, 27 @ 6:30pm

Rhythm Hall, Dominion Energy Center

Chamber music masterworks from three centuries performed by members of the Richmond Symphony and friends.

Settle into your seat for just under one enchanted hour.

SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE FOR $100.

SINGLE TICKETS ON SALE ON JUNE 1

RichmondSymphony.com

804.788.1212 x2

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

ANNA CLYNE (B. 1980)

DANCE

I. when you’re broken up II. if you’ve torn the bandage off III. in the middle of the fighting IV. in your blood

V. when you’re perfectly free

Inbal Segev, CELLO

Courtney Collier, DANCER

Michael Duncan, DANCER

INTERMISSION

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908)

Scheherazade, Op. 35

I. Largo e maestoso - Allegro non troppo

II. Lento - Allegro molto

III. Andantino quasi Allegretto

IV. Allegro molto

1:57 approximate program length

Sponsored by:

Fun fact: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Fantasia translates aspects of English sacred choral music into purely instrumental terms.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Ralph Vaughan Williams, the 150th anniversary of whose birth is being celebrated this season, represents one of the central figures of the modern English Renaissance in music. Fittingly, he had his breakthrough success with a work inspired by a giant of the original English Renaissance of the Tudor era, Thomas Tallis (1505-85). The 1910 premiere of the Fantasia at Gloucester Cathedral (as part of the prestigious Three Choirs Festival) brought the name of Vaughan Williams — then in his late 30s — to the attention of a wider public.

The Fantasia sprang from the work in which Vaughan Williams had engaged when he co-edited the English Hymnal in 1906, a milestone in Anglican sacred music. It was in this anthology that he initially encountered the tune by Thomas Tallis that he chose as the basis for the Fantasia. The melody in question is the third of nine tunes gathered from Tallis for another sacred music collection in 1597.

Scored for a string orchestra, the Fantasia translates aspects of English sacred choral music into purely instrumental terms, including its use of spatial effects. Vaughan Williams imitates this by dividing the strings into three groups: a larger string orchestra, a smaller one, and a string quartet (i.e., four solo players: two violins, viola, and cello).

music is often rooted in inspirations from the visual arts, poetry, and dance. The orchestral work COLOR FIELD (2020), for example, pays homage to the painter Mark Rothko. In The Seamstress, Clyne was moved by a poem by William Butler Yeats to write a violin concerto in the form of “an imaginary one-act ballet.”

For DANCE, which features the instrument on which the composer herself was trained, Clyne turned to a five-line poem by the 13thcentury Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (otherwise known simply as Rumi):

Dance, when you're broken open.

Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance, when you're perfectly free.

Clyne says she wanted to create a work in which each movement has “its own personality, its own character” and was drawn to the Rumi poem because “it’s short, has repetition, a clear form of five lines, and a strong physicality … [and] a sense of urgency …”

Did you know?

Dance is inspired by the 13th-century Persian poet Jalāl alDīn Muhammad Rūmī (otherwise known simply as Rumi).

Did you know?

Scheherazade is a major female character and the storyteller in the famous narrative of the Middle Eastern collection of tales known as The Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights

Fun fact:

Inbal Segev is performing a series of concerts this year to honor the 20th anniversary of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship (TACF), which Marin Alsop founded to encourage other female conductors to follow their career path.

The theme itself, comprising two parts, is amenable to being fragmented and then reassembled in new transformations and different configurations of the string ensembles. For example, in the final part Vaughan Williams reprises the theme in a version for solo violin and viola against the full orchestra. Dramatic contrasts of volume and changes in meter are also significant elements in the soundscape of the piece.

Anna Clyne: DANCE

When the cellist Inbal Segev was first introduced to Anna Clyne by the pioneering conductor Marin Alsop, the composer’s “juxtaposition of old and new” intrigued her. Segev remarks that Clyne’s music “has an old-soul sensibility but is fresh and modern at the same time.” The cellist commissioned the concerto DANCE, premiering it in 2019 and releasing her acclaimed recording of the work the following year.

These performances of DANCE are part of a series of concerts Segev is performing this year to honor the 20th anniversary of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship (TACF), which Alsop founded to encourage other female conductors to follow their career path — including music director Valentina Peleggi, a TACF alumna.

Born in London in 1980 and a resident of the United States since 2002, Clyne was nominated for a Best Contemporary Classical Composition Grammy Award in 2015 for another of her concertos, the double violin concerto Prince of Clouds.

For these performances, Choreographer Malcolm Burn and dancers Courtney Collier and Michael Duncan from the Richmond Ballet join with the Richmond Symphony, adding another dimension to DANCE. Collaborative creativity is a signature of Clyne’s artistic practice. Her

Each of DANCE’s five movements corresponds to a line of the poem, beginning with “tender and delicate music” to depict “the fragility of being shattered apart.” In contrast, the solo cello drives the aggressive, rapid-paced second movement. Like Vaughan Williams, Clyne has a gift for evoking the sense of a timeless past. Reminiscent of the Baroque, the slow third movement uses a recurring melody to conjure a moment of frozen time. The expansive fourth movement presents another though very different example of repeating patterns as the strings sequentially take up each line presented by the solo cello in a kind of looping process. The final movement (the first part of the piece Clyne wrote) unfolds as a quest for melody of pure simplicity — and, with its suggestion of Jewish folk music, pays tribute to the composer’s father, to whom she dedicated the concerto.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade, Op. 35

Night is the ideal time for weaving fantasies and spinning tales, and it was during the night that Scheherazade told her famous series of stories that came to symbolize “the exotic East” for generations of children eager to learn about Sinbad, Ali Baba, and Aladdin. Collected under the title The Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights, these stories have inspired countess painters, dramatists, and composers like Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His four-movement symphonic suite named after the heroine was a hit at its premiere in St. Petersburg in 1888 and has delighted audiences ever since.

As the general framework for his orchestral suite, Rimsky provided this scenario, borrowing the frame that unifies the collection together:

“The Sultan Shahriar, convinced of the deceitfulness and infidelity of all women, had sworn an oath to put each of his wives to death after their first night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by the expedient of arousing the Sultan’s interest in a series of tales she recounted over a period of 1001 nights … Driven by curiosity, the Sultan postponed the execution of his wife from day to day, and eventually renounced his bloody plan.”

From this scenario, Rimsky developed a kind of concerto for orchestra or suite (with elements of a violin concerto). He initially included suggestive descriptions for each movement but later decided to omit them: “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” (I), “The Kalendar Prince” (II), “The Young Prince and the Young Princess” (III), and “Festival at Baghdad. The Sea. The Ship Breaks against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman" (IV).

Scheherazade establishes a stark contrast between the cruel Sultan and the masterful narrator from the outset. Aggressive, brass-laden music is associated with the unyielding the Sultan. This is followed by a series of dreamy chords, the curtain-raiser to a sweetly melancholy violin solo representing the voice of his new wife Scheherazade, teller of tales. This contrast serves as a prelude but also returns, in varied forms, throughout what follows, with Scheherazade’s violin music threading the movements together.

One of the great musical evocations of the sea in the first movement is followed by a movement loosely based on the principle of theme and variations. The tender simplicity of the lyrical and songful third movement gives way to a widely varied final movement that showcases Rimsky-Korsakov’s flair for orchestral color and textural contrast. Dramatically, musically, and emotionally, this music stages the long-delayed closure.