Yale Philharmonia
Peter Oundjian, Principal Conductor Soo Min Ha, oboe Samantha Ege, piano
Robert Blocker, Dean Friday, October 21, 2022 | 7:30 p.m. Woolsey Hall
Program
Ralph Vaughan Williams 1872–1958
Concerto in A minor for oboe and strings (1944)
I. Rondo Pastorale
II. Minuet & Musette
III. Finale (Scherzo)
Soo Min Ha, oboe
Helen Hagan 1893–1964
orch. Soomin Kim
Piano Concerto in C minor (1912)
Samantha Ege, piano
Gustav Mahler 1860–1911
intermission
Symphony No. 1 in D major, “Titan” (1887–1888)
I. Langsam, schleppend – Immer sehr gemächlich
II. Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell, Recht gemächlich
III. Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen
IV. Stürmisch bewegt – Energisch
As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profiles
Peter Oundjian, principal conductor
Toronto-born conductor Peter Oundjian has been an instrumental figure in the rebirth of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra since his appointment as Music Director in 2004. In addition to conducting the orchestra in dynamic performances that have achieved significant artistic acclaim, he has been greatly involved in a variety of new initiatives that have strengthened the ensemble’s presence in the community and attracted a young and diverse audience.
In addition to his post in Toronto, from which he stepped down in 2018, Oundjian served as Principal Guest Conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2010 and played a major role at the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York between 1997 and 2007. In 2012 he was appointed Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Oundjian was the first violinist of the renowned Tokyo String Quartet, a position he held for fourteen years. Since 1981, he has been on the Yale School of Music faculty. He was awarded the School’s Samuel Simons Sanford Medal for distinguished service to music in 2013 and named Principal Conductor of the Yale Philharmonia in 2015. He is Professor (adjunct) of Music and Orchestral Conducting at the School of Music.
Soo Min Ha, oboe
Oboist Soo Min Ha was born and educated in South Korea before she came to the United States to pursue her master’s degrees. Soo Min earned her Bachelor of Music degree from Yonsei University, where she gained admission with the highest distinction. She has received various awards and scholarships in her home country, including First Prize at the 2017 Dong-A Music Competition, which is renowned as the most prestigious competition in Korea. While Soo Min was an undergraduate, she received recognition from Heinz Holliger for being one of the most memorable oboists to perform his Sonata for oboe solo (1956–57, rev. 1999).
As an avid chamber and orchestral musician, Soo Min earned her Master of Music degree in 2021 and Master of Musical Arts degree in 2022 at Yale School of Music under the tutelage of Stephen Taylor, and was awarded the Thomas Daniel Nyfenger Prize for demonstrating “the highest standard of excellence in woodwind playing.”
Soo Min is now pursuing her Professional Degree in Orchestral Performance at Manhattan School of Music with Stephen Taylor and is a substitute oboist for the New World Symphony.
Artist Profiles, cont.
Samantha Ege, piano
Dr. Samantha Ege is an Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, from 2020 to 2022. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of York and a B.A. with honours in Music from the University of Bristol. She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill University as an exchange student. She taught music internationally for almost a decade after graduating from Bristol.
Dr. Ege is a leading interpreter and scholar of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Dr. Ege’s publications and performances shed an important light on composers from underrepresented backgrounds. In 2021, she received the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award for her Black Renaissance Woman recording project. In 2019, she received both the Society for American Music’s Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship for her work on women’s contributions to concert life in interwar Chicago. Dr. Ege’s first book is called South Side Impresarios: Race Women in the Realm of Music (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). She has been contracted as co-author alongside Douglas Shadle of Price (Master Musicians Series, Oxford University Press) and co-editor alongside A. Kori Hill of The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price (Cambridge University Press).
As a concert pianist, Dr. Ege made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a “vivid, revelatory recital” (Michael Church, iNews) in which she gave the UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová’s Sonata Appassionata. In her London debut at the 2021 London Festival of American Music she gave the world premiere of Florence Price’s complete Fantasie Nègre set. In 2018, she made her international lecture-recitalist debut at the Chicago Symphony Center with her event “A Celebration of Women in Music: Composing the Black Chicago Renaissance.” She has additionally presented her research and repertoire at a number of other institutions and venues in the U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Dr. Ege released her debut album in May 2018 with Wave Theory Records called Four Women: Music for solo piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland & Bonds. The album featured the world premiere recording of Bilsland’s The Birthday Party, which led to Dr. Ege preparing an edition of the suite, now published by Faber Music. She released her critically acclaimed second album in March 2021 called Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price with Lorelt (Lontano Records Ltd.). Her third album (also with Lorelt) is out now and called Black Renaissance Woman: Piano Music by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King & Helen Hagan. Her fourth album is a collaborative project with the Castle of our Skins string quartet, called Homage: Chamber Music from the African Continent and Diaspora (Lorelt), out on October 28, 2022.
Program Notes
Oboe Concerto in A minor vaughan williams Patrick Campbell JankowskiThe oboe has long been used in music to invoke the pastoral, the melancholic, and to the distant past. With its resemblance to shepherd pipes and the Ancient Greek aulos, the instrument recalls a natural, bygone setting. Hector Berlioz, in his influential treatise on instrumentation, noted the instrument’s “rustic character, full of tenderness, …even of shyness.” Vaughan Williams captures all of the oboe’s distinctive qualities in this concerto. It begins—in a Rondo Pastorale, appropriately enough— with a modal theme in an unhurried tempo, with the oboist leading the way. Waves of intensity rise and fall, organically following the instrument’s range as well as volume. The oboe’s timbre naturally cuts through its sonic environment especially in its highest range, and Vaughan Williams takes advantage of this as he builds to climactic moments. The composer carefully chooses when to reduce the number of accompanying strings, keeping the texture light and transparent during most solo passages. However, when both soloist and full strings play together, the effect is powerful, like a wave cresting.
The form of the concerto is unconventional in that its slower passages reside in the outer movements, and it lacks a true slow movement. The central Menuet & Musette capitalizes on the interplay between sprightly staccatos and flowing passage of vocalise. The Scherzo is the most rhythmically and stylistically dynamic of the three movements, and it is also by far the most substantive.
Its origins in the sketches of the composer’s Fifth Symphony may have something to do with this. The caffeinated, bubbly nature of the opening melody gradually exhausts its energy, leading to a tender, reflective close.
Piano Concert in C minor hagan
Lucy Caplan (Black Renaissance Woman: Piano Music by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King & Helen Hagan © Lorelt, 2022)
Lauded by none other than Nora Holt for her “extraordinary attainments,” not to mention her “supple wrist” and “forearms of steely construction,” Helen Hagan achieved considerable renown as a pianist during the early twentieth century. Born in New Hampshire in 1891, Hagan studied composition and piano at the Yale School of Music. Following her 1912 graduation, she traveled to France, where she pursued further studies and interacted with a number of eminent composers (Saint-Saëns, Debussy, D’Indy); she returned to Europe to perform for American troops during World War I. A gifted composer whose Romantic, virtuosic style reflects her own skill as a pianist, Hagan later turned her attention to music education. She worked as a choral director; taught at conservatories and colleges including Chicago’s Mendelssohn Conservatory of Music and Bishop College in Marshall, Texas; and opened a music studio in New York. Hagan’s accomplishments went underrecognized for years; in 2016, a headstone was placed at her Connecticut gravesite in honor of her remarkable legacy.
Program Notes, cont.
From its first impassioned measures, Hagan’s Piano Concerto is a tour de force. A bold C-minor theme, marked “maestoso,” immediately situates the piece within a late-Romantic legacy. The mood becomes tempestuous: thundering chords in the instrument’s lower reaches, with flashes of ornate passagework above. A contrasting second theme, expansive and sonorous, is an opportunity to showcase the pianist’s more delicate sensibilities. Saturated with snaky chromatic harmonies, and propelled forward by intricate sequential writing, the one-movement work exudes confidence and ambition. Hagan composed the concerto in 1912 and performed it as a soloist with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra that same year. She went on to perform the work multiple times in a two-piano arrangement, garnering widespread praise for her virtuosic skill. Because the concerto is thought to be the only surviving work among Hagan’s compositions, it takes on outsize importance as the primary evidence that remains of her dazzling creativity.
Symphony No. 1 in D major, “Titan” mahler Jordan Kuspa
Gustav Mahler rose to musical prominence as one of the most important and innovative conductors of opera in the late nineteenth century. His conducting career included appointments at opera houses in Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, and Hamburg, leading up to his ten-year residency as director of the Vienna Hofoper. At the end of his life, Mahler came to New York, where he led both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. This busy schedule
made it impossible for Mahler to devote his full energies to composition during the concert season, forcing him to write mainly in periodic bouts of feverish activity. The demands on his time notwithstanding, he crafted the small but powerful catalog of his works that survive today.
Within Mahler’s oeuvre only two genres are represented: the symphony and the lied. Despite the vast chasm that separates the intimate sentiment usually found in art song from the public utterances of the great symphonies, Mahler creates in his work a synthesis of these musical antipodes. His orchestrated song cycles, particularly the late Das Lied von der Erde, approach symphonic scope and construction, while many of his symphonies incorporate vocal soloists, choruses, and, as is the case in the First Symphony, material from Mahler’s own songs.
Two of the songs from Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen are reused extensively in the First Symphony. After the vast opening of the first movement, in which birdcalling woodwinds and off-stage trumpets emerge out of the haze of strings playing the note A across seven octaves, the cellos introduce the melody of the song “Ging heut Morgen übers Feld” (“I Went This Morning over the Field”), and the bulk of the movement is derived from this song. Similarly, in the third movement, a funeral march that begins with the round most commonly known as “Frère Jacques,” Mahler introduces much of the song “Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz” (“The Two Blue Eyes of my Beloved”).
However, unlike many of Mahler’s later symphonies, these songs are not performed by vocalists, and therefore are stripped of their explicit textual meaning. Mahler provided a programmatic explanation for the symphony at one of its earliest performances, but this too was excised. Ultimately, it seems that Mahler decided it best to leave the interpretation of the work in the hands of the listener. We must believe that he would have been open to multiple readings of this work, for it was he who said, “A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.”
About the Yale Philharmonia
Staff manager
The Yale Philharmonia is one of America’s foremost music-school ensembles. The largest performing group at the Yale School of Music, the Philharmonia offers superb training in orchestral playing and repertoire.
Performances include an annual series of concerts in Woolsey Hall, as well as Yale Opera productions in the Shubert Theatre. The Yale Philharmonia has also performed on numerous occasions in Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York City and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Jeffrey M. Mistri
assistant manager
Samuel Bobinski
assistant conductor Samuel Hollister
office assistant Marty Tung
stage crew Shania Cordoba Ryan Goodwin Riana Heath Makana Medeiros Jackson Murphy Xinyun Tu
Amber Wang Declan Wilcox Kean Xiong Lucas Zeiter library Darius Farhoumand Stephanie Fritz Nicholas Hernandez Guan-Ru Lin Freya Liu Jaimee Reynolds
Yale Philharmonia Roster
Peter Oundjian, principal conductor
violin i
Anna Lee Andrew Samarasekara Herdís Guðmundsdóttir Emma Meinrenken Charlie Lovell-Jones Ladusa Chang-Ou Freya Liu Alexander Goldberg Albert Steinberger Guan-Ru Lin Chaewon Kim Xingzhou Rong Tzau-Yan Ou Yang Kenneth Naito violin ii Gregory Lewis Amy Oh Jeein Kim Yiqing Fu Emma Carleton Yan Li Sophia Steger Katherine (Kit Ying) Cheng Miranda Werner In Ae Lee Riana Heath Tiffany Wee
viola
Katie Liu Joseph Skerik Emily Rekrut-Pressey Serena Hsu
Cassia Drake Colin Laursen
Matthew McDowell Wanxinyi Huang Brian Isaacs
Wilhelm Magner cello
Benjamin Lanners Thomas Hung Jakob Taylor Ga Eun Lee William Suh Kyeong Eun Kim Hans Emil Sollesnes
Amanda Chi double bass Dylan Reckner Nicole Wiedenmann
Xinyun Tu Chelsea Strayer Esther Kwon Nicholas Hernandez
flute
Jarrett May ² Daniel Fletcher ¹ Michael Huerta Nadira Novruzov oboe Michelle Oh ¹ Rachel Ahn Mickenna Keller ²
Jini Baik Alec Chai William Stevens clarinet Kean Xiong ¹ Nikki Pet ² Amer Hasan Zikang Wang Jonathan Lopez bassoon Ryan Goodwin ¹ Anjali Pillai ² Lucas Zeiter horn William Sands ¹ Kate Warren ² Franco Ortiz Corey Schmidt Stephanie Fritz Amber Wang Xin He Jaimee Reynolds
trumpet Eric Evans ¹
Lizbeth Yanez ² Joshua Bialkin Shania Cordoba trombone
Addison Maye-Saxon Chandler McLaughlin ² Declan Wilcox tuba Bridget Conley
timpani Makana Medeiros ¹ ² Mingyu Son percussion Sijia Huang ² Yukiko Nakamura Jessie Chiang harp Mia Venezia ²
Principal on Hagan ² Principal on Mahler
¹
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