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Tales of Belonging

MAY 16, 2020 • 8:00 PM Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center

MAY 17, 2020 • 3:00 PM George Washington Masonic Memorial

James Ross, conductor Sympatico Groups

PROGRAM

Brian Precht Tribute (world premiere) Commissioned by Classical Movement’s Eric Helms New Music Program

Featuring Students from Sympatico

Three Latin-American Dances

Frank

- INTERMISSION -

Scheherazade, Op. 35

imsky-

orsakov

Claudia Chudacoff, concertmaster

Tribute (world premiere)

Brian Prechtl (b. 1962)

Tribute is a world premiere inspired by the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven and is commissioned by Classical Movement’s Eric Daniel Helms New Music Program for the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra and ASO Sympatico. In this work I have sewn references from Beethoven’s writing into this original piece of music that celebrates the dynamic and dramatic voice that Beethoven brought to the symphony orchestra. I have endeavored to capture the musical landscape of today as an evolution from Beethoven’s seminal orchestral language. We hear emotional motives in Beethoven’s music that evoke fate, bucolic beauty, triumph, and the brother-(and sister)-hood of all people, and I have endeavored to weave these into the fabric of this work as well.

In writing a piece specially designed for the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra and ASO Sympatico, I have made it a special focus to include opportunities for our young musicians to join in this special celebration in the same spirit of community that Beethoven captured in his Ninth Symphony. I look forward to a beautiful celebration on stage for the entire ASO family.

Three Latin-American Dances

Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972)

Gabriela Lena Frank is an American composer who embodies the richness of her many diverse influences. European, South American and Asian elements infuse her music with a special blend of character and meaning. Born in the United States in 1972, Gabriela has family roots in China, Peru and Lithuania. Her Peruvian mother may have had the greatest influence on her. As the composer told an interviewer, “I think my music can be seen as a byproduct of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am.”

Frank has had commissions and performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic and many others. She is closely associated with Yo-Yo Ma’s eclectic chamber group The Silk Road Project; she and the group received a Grammy nomination for their recording of her work Ritmos Anchinos. An accomplished pianist, she was nominated for a Grammy for her performances of the complete works of Leslie Bassett.

Gabriela describes the first of her three dances in this set as “an unabashed tribute to Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Symphonic Dances’ from West Side Story.” For the second dance, “Highland Harawi,” she looks to the Andes Mountains of her mother’s homeland, Peru, for inspiration. The third and final dance, “Mestizo Waltz,” honors the musical traditions of the Mestizo community of western South America.

Scheherezade, Opus 35

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

In the 1850s a group of five young composers, later known as “The Russian Five” or “The Mighty Bunch,” set out to make Russians aware of their unique musical traditions by creating a singularly Russian style of classical composition. Formality, conventionality and especially “German-ness” were eschewed. None of the five had much formal musical training; indeed, when one of the five took a position with a conservatory, the others were highly critical of him. Yet the group was enormously influential, and to this day the recognizable qualities of Russian music stem from The Five’s exploration, inventiveness and originality.

A naval midshipman by trade, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was drawn to the group after meeting composer Mili Balakirev; Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin and César Cui rounded out the group. RimskyKorsakov often found himself helping in the editing and completion of many of the group’s works. Ultimately Rimsky-Korsakov broke from the others, taking up the study and teaching of Western idioms and accepting a position at a conservatory. He created what we now consider to be the modern technique of orchestration: the assigning of musical elements to the instruments of the orchestra. His text is still used in music schools today. His style was virtually self-taught, a product of his own talent and imagination. Whether you’re listening to orchestral music of Igor Stravinsky or John Williams, you are hearing the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov.

The creation of his best-known work, Scheherezade, arose from RimskyKorsakov’s desire to connect Russian sounds with exotic themes. This “orientalism,” as it was called, was a key element in The Five’s stylistic

handbook. Rimsky-Korsakov chose four stories from One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of narratives from Middle Eastern sources. Each story is part of a framework built around the sultan Shahryar and his wife—or should we say his LAST wife—Scheherezade.

Shahryar had learned that his brother’s wife had been unfaithful; he was shocked to learn that his own wife had been even more flagrant in her dalliances. He had her killed; in his despair he determined that all women are deceitful. He ordered his vizier to line up some virgins to marry; after each blissful wedding night he had his bride beheaded. Of course, eventually the vizier could find no more virgins—but his own daughter, Scheherezade, bravely stepped forward. After their wedding feast, Scheherezade began telling the sultan a remarkably compelling story with a real cliffhanger of an ending, which she refused to share unless Shahryar allowed her to live until the next evening. She repeated this trick 1,001 times, until finally she was pardoned.

Much like Wagner’s leitmotiv, Rimsky-Korsakov helps us keep track of each story’s progress by assigning musical themes and gestures to characters. The bombastic music we hear at the start is a portrayal of the sultan himself; later we are introduced to the bride Scheherezade through the sweet, soulful voice of the solo violin. The composer uses themes conversationally, passing them from one instrument to another to help the listener imagine the storytelling.

Avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson on hearing and seeing stories…

“Switch the article ‘the’ to ‘a’ and the world changes. Mystery is embraced.” “Books were there for me as a tiny kid; they were a world…I can still walk into a book and be there, but it’s in a different way now, and I really wish I could still do it as a child. But I wish I could do a lot of things as a child: to be as innocent as I was, and to be hopeful as I was, and to be sure that I came from the sky and knew all sorts of things that I have forgotten over my lifetime.” “Secretly, I do think that stories can cure you … but you have to find out what’s wrong first.”

Our final program is made up of stories that kids and wives and mothers tell: bedtime stories, stories of heritage, stories to keep living, stories to tell the world you are here. When we adults ask kids what they’d like to be when they grow up, I always sense behind the question a somewhat desperate search for new ideas. What can the fabric of the young lives of our Sympatico musicians offer us as unconscious guidance and direction for our city and country and world? Ostensibly, we are helping their young lives by offering this program, but since life is what it is, we are also receiving something invaluable through this act of support…a live connection not just to their future but to ours.

Gabriela Lena Frank tells of dancing as a vital half of her hybrid heritage. Even though each of her tales would begin with once upon a time for violin, Scheherazade ended each of her nighttime stories halfway through in order to insure that she would be alive the next day to continue. What can we strategically leave undone today that will help fuel us to live more fully and richly tomorrow? A picture is worth a thousand words. Music is worth a thousand pictures.

Brian Prechtl, composer

Percussionist Brian Prechtl has been a member of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2003. Before joining the BSO, he was a member of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic in Fort Wayne, Indiana for 14 seasons. Previous to that appointment, he held Principal Percussion positions in both the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.

He graduated with high distinction from the University of Michigan in 1984 with a Bachelor of Music degree and went on to earn his Master’s of Music degree from Temple University in 1986. There he studied with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and performed as a substitute player in Philadelphia.

Mr. Prechtl spends his summers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming as a performer in the Grand Teton Music Festival where he has been a member of the percussion section since 1992.

An active composer, Mr. Prechtl has had world premiere performances at the Grand Teton Music Festival, at the Eastman School of Music and in Baltimore. He has won composition prizes from the Percussive Arts Society and the College Music Society. He has also served as the composer-in-residence for the Community Concerts at Second Chamber Music Series in Baltimore since 2011.

Mr. Prechtl’s music is characterized by rhythmic drive as well a rich harmonic and melodic palette. He has written extensively for chamber percussion and percussion with other instruments. He recently completed a set of pieces, which are settings of the poetry of Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass. Mr. Prechtl is also accomplished as an orchestral composer and arranger having had world premiere performances with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the BSO OrchKids Program and the Minnesota Orchestra. Tribute is his newest work for orchestra and El Sistema-inspired ensembles.