American Festival Part II | Program Notes

MASTERWORKS • 2014/15 THE AMERICAN FESTIVAL: PART II COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor ANNE AKIKO MEYERS, violin

Friday’s concert is gratefully dedicated to Colonel Philip Beaver and Mrs. Kim Beaver Saturday’s concert is gratefully dedicated to Dr. and Mrs. David Campbell Sunday’s concert is gratefully dedicated to Rosemary and John Priester, Colorado Real Estate Journal

Friday, March 13, 2015 at 7:30 pm Saturday, March 14, 2015 at 7:30 pm Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 1:00 pm Boettcher Concert Hall

GERSHWIN

Cuban Overture, “Rhumba”

BARBER Violin Concerto, Op. 14 Allegro moderato Andante Presto in moto perpetuo — INTERMISSION —

ALBERT RiverRun Rain Music Leafy Speafing Beside the Rivering Waters Rivers End

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MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES

JEFF WHEELER

ANDREW LITTON, conductor Andrew Litton currently serves as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony, Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York City Ballet, Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest and Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth Symphony. He was also Music Director of the Dallas Symphony from 1994-2006. He guest conducts the world’s leading orchestras and has a discography of over 120 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy®, France’s Diapason d’Or, and many British and other honours. Litton has also conducted many of the world’s finest opera companies, such as the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Australian Opera. Besides his Grammy®-winning Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with Bryn Terfel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, he also recorded the complete symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, a Dallas Mahler cycle, and many Gershwin recordings, as both conductor and pianist. For Hyperion Andrew Litton’s recordings include piano concertos by Rachmaninov, Liszt and Grieg with Stephen Hough; by Shostakovich, Shchedrin and Brahms with Marc-André Hamelin; and by Alnæs and Sinding with Piers Lane; Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto and Symphony-Concerto with Alban Gerhardt; Viola Concertos by Bartók and Rózsa with Lawrence Power; the complete symphonies by Charles Ives and orchestral works by Joseph Schwantner. Andrew Litton received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard in piano and conducting. He is an accomplished pianist, and often conducts from the keyboard and enjoys performing chamber music with his orchestra colleagues.

For further information, please visit www.andrewlitton.com

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MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES

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ANNE AKIKO MEYERS, violin Anne Akiko Meyers is celebrated around the world for her artistry and ability to connect with audiences from the concert stage, online, in television, and radio broadcasts. She was Billboard’s top-selling traditional classical instrumental soloist of 2014. Future highlights include the French premiere of Mason Bates Violin Concerto with Leonard Slatkin and the Orchestre de Lyon, performances and a recording celebrating Arvo Pärt’s music with Kristjan Järvi and the MDR Leipzig Orchestra, and a new recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and Keith Lockhart, featuring the Bernstein Serenade and ten world premiere arrangements. Recently, on 24-hour notice, Meyers performed the Mendelssohn Concerto with the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and the Williams Center for the Arts in Pennsylvania. This past fall, eOne Music released The American Masters, Meyers’ 30th release, featuring the world premiere recordings of the Mason Bates Violin Concerto, (a concerto she co-commissioned with the Pittsburgh Symphony and subsequently performed with the Chicago, Detroit, Nashville, and Richmond Symphony Orchestras) and John Corigliano’s ‘Lullaby for Natalie’, written for the birth of Meyers’ daughter. Also featured, the Samuel Barber Violin Concerto, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin. In recent seasons, Anne released the Four Seasons: The Vivaldi Album, and Air, The Bach Album, on eOne Music. Both recordings debuted at #1 on the classical Billboard charts and received great critical acclaim. The Vivaldi Album was the recording debut of the ‘Ex-Vieuxtemps’ Guarneri del Gesu violin, dated 1741, which was recently awarded to Meyers for her lifetime use. This instrument is considered by many to be the finest sounding violin in existence. Anne Akiko Meyers was born in San Diego, California and grew up in Southern California. Her teachers include Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, Josef Gingold at Indiana University, and Felix Galimir, Masao Kawasaki and Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School.

Please visit www.anneakikomeyers.com for more information.

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES GEORGE GERSHWIN: Cuban Overture George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1898 and passed away in Beverly Hills, California in 1937. The Cuban Overture, originally called “Rhumba”, was composed in 1932. The piece is scored for three flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings. Duration is 11 minutes. Last performance by the orchestra was on November 9 and 11, 2001, with Doc Severinsen conducting the orchestra.

George Gershwin was arguably the most successful and talented of America’s composers of popular music. However, the importance of so-called “serious” or “classical” musical interests and training in his life is quite unprecedented for someone who enjoyed Gershwin’s kind of success.

He certainly was not some sort of untutored musical genius who later sought “legitimacy” after having proven himself in the popular world. Rather, early on, as a young boy, he studied and performed under traditional piano teachers the music of composers such as Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy. He had begun the study of music theory, orchestration and musical form with a teacher at the age of seventeen, and youthful compositions from that time include a string quartet and a modest opera. Before the Rhapsody in Blue première he accompanied a classical singer at a major recital of standard concert vocal repertoire, and did so again a few years later.

In 1928 he journeyed to Paris, visited with the famed teacher of composition, Nadia Boulanger, as well as Maurice Ravel. However, both rejected him as a student, more or less afraid to compromise the genius evident in his burgeoning success. While in Paris he met and admired the music of eminent composers such as Prokofiev, Poulenc, and Milhaud. Long after he had achieved the kind of success that any popular composer would have envied, he assiduously studied formal composition with established teachers, including Wallingford Riegger and Henry Cowell. In 1932, after his smashing successes with Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and the Concerto in F, he began composition lessons with Joseph Schillinger, whose esoteric, mathematically based system of musical composition was somewhat the rage at the time.

It is at that time, after a vacation in Cuba, that Gershwin wrote the orchestral piece, Rhumba, a reflection, not only of his encounter with the traditional musical styles of the country, but also of the burgeoning popularity of Hispanic music in the U.S. in general — think of Aaron Copland’s works in this context, as well. It was a big hit at one of his outdoor concerts in New York City’s Lewisohn Stadium. While carefully written, its popularity may have surprised him, so he re-titled it as the somewhat more sophisticated “Cuban Overture.” It’s crafted in a straight-forward fashion: fast section, slow interlude, and return to the beginning, with the chief melody in the fast section making a strong reference to a very popular Cuban song. There’s also a somewhat truncated allusion to the immortal La Paloma. The slower, meditative middle part will remind many of similar materials in An American in Paris, rather than a visit to Havana, but it’s of no matter—it’s all pure Gershwin with a southern lilt.

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES SAMUEL BARBER: Violin Concerto, Op. 14 Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 9, 1910 and died January 23, 1981 in New York City. The concerto was composed in 1939-40. It is scored for solo violin, two flutes (second doubling piccolo), pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano, and strings. Duration is 25 minutes. The last performance by the Colorado Symphony was on February 23-25, 2007, with Yumi Hwang-Williams as the violin soloist and Christian Arming conducting.

Perhaps no major American composer of the twentieth century was a more ardent and eloquent champion of a lyrical, accessible, yet modern idiom than Samuel Barber. His musical style is founded in the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century, whose harmonic language and formal structures were his point of departure. Unlike so many of his peers, he was not powerfully swayed by the modernism emanating from Europe after World War I, but pursued his own path.

He had an innate gift for vocal music, composing two major operas, Vanessa (1956), and Antony and Cleopatra (1966), and devoted almost two-thirds of his life’s work to song. Though his choral music and solo vocal music are concert mainstays, it is an instrumental work that is his best-known composition — the Adagio for Strings, championed by Toscanini when Barber was only twenty-eight years old. The vocally inspired lyricism of that immortal composition is emblematic of all that Barber wrote, even in the most vigorous of his works. His violin concerto is grounded in that fundamental aspect of his style, which accounts for much of its popularity.

The concerto has lived a somewhat checkered existence on its way to a solid position in the standard repertoire for solo violin. Its genesis began in 1939 when a young concert violinist, Iso Briselli, financially supported by the great Philadelphia philanthropist, Samuel Fels, commissioned a violin concerto from Barber. Briselli was a friend of Barber and had been his classmate in the first graduating class of the famed conservatory, the Curtis Institute of Music.

Barber went right to work, and by October of that year had finished the first two movements.

Things started to unravel at that point. Briselli was consulting closely with a violin coach in New York, and under the latter’s Svengali-like influence, Briselli conveyed to Barber that his efforts were not sufficient for his needs. The criticisms were direct: not “gratifying for a violinist to perform,” not sufficiently virtuoso enough, “childish in details,” and that Briselli would be “undertaking a great risk to perform it.” Briselli’s coach “graciously” offered to perform a “surgical operation” to improve it. Needless to say, Barber demurred.

Things got worse when Barber finally delivered the last movement — late — in November.

Briselli and the coach didn’t like it at all — too lightweight for a major work, too short, and inappropriate in form. “Fix it and I’ll still play the première with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra” seemed to be Briselli’s attitude. It never happened. Barber stuck to his guns and by what he had composed, Briselli relinquished all rights to it, and Barber never received the second half of his commission payment. Controversy did not end at that point, however.

Widespread acceptance of the concerto was slow over the years before it garnered the respect and admiration that it now receives, and during that time an unfortunate slander was associated with it. It had become received knowledge that Briselli had deemed the last movement as “unplayable,” and that is why he rejected it. That bit of calumny seemed to live on for decades everywhere — from program notes to history books. However, recent archival scholarship has completely disproved it — Briselli was far too much of a virtuoso violinist for that canard to have SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES been true, and simply didn’t like the movement. But, it is a mark of the character of both Briselli and Barber that they remained lifelong friends, through it all.

And what of the concerto, itself? Even its early detractors admitted that it was a beautiful, romantic piece; Barber’s lyrical style ensured that. The first movement is in a moderate tempo, with the solo violin heard from the very beginning. Elegant, meditative melodies flow in abundance, meshed into lush orchestral textures, interrupted from time to time by more rhythmic, intense moments. Carrying it all is Barber’s mastery of integrating the orchestra and various soloists within as almost equal partners with the violin soloist. The clarity of the orchestration literally “sails” his ideas aloft during the peaks of intensity. There’s an almost embarrassing succession of ideas as the movement evolves. Pensive woodwind solos mark the movement’s quiet conclusion.

The solo oboe spins out a pensive opening to the slow movement, followed by other solo woodwinds over the rich string texture. Finally, the solo violinist seems to just float out of the horn sonority, followed shortly by a little rhythmic interjection by the trumpets that is heard from time to time in varying contexts as a bit of punctuation throughout. And as in the first movement, Barber weaves an elegant contrapuntal texture between soloist and orchestra.

Those familiar with his Adagio for Strings will enjoy again the composer’s magical ability to weave scintillating brilliance as the weft of themes climbs higher and higher in the climax of the movement. It all ends tranquilly in Barber’s characteristic quietude, the solo violin sinking low into the pianissimo sea of strings.

The last movement is designated as in “perpetual motion” — and that it surely is, a frenetic flurry of absolutely nonstop rhythmic motion by both the soloist and the orchestra. No one is spared from the challenges of relentlessly driving ahead. It doesn’t last long at all—and how could it? — for the intensity would be impossible to sustain for much longer that it lasts.

The orchestration absolutely sparkles, and the onward hurdle, as all careen to the end, firmly ensconces this movement in company with some of the most impressive scherzos in all the orchestral literature.

It is difficult now to understand what all the fuss was about in the early life of this work. It has taken its place in the standard repertoire of violin concertos. What is different, perhaps, is that now we understand more fully that great art, while most often conceived in the context of tradition, nevertheless poses its own questions, and crafts its own answers. Great composers, and that company surely includes Samuel Barber, seek their own paths, and make their own ways.

o

PROGRAM 6 SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES Stephen Albert: Symphony No. 1, RiverRun Stephen Albert was born in New York City in 1941, and died in Truro, Massachusetts, in 1992.

RiverRun was composed in 1984. Duration of the piece is 33 minutes. It is scored for three flutes (with piccolo and alto flute doubles), two oboes and English horn, four clarinets (with E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet doubles), alto sax, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, piano, and strings. This is the first performance of the work by the Colorado Symphony.

Stephen Albert was an impressively talented American composer who studied with luminaries, achieved great recognition early on, and produced an impressive body of work before his untimely death at the age of fifty-one in 1992. That said, it does little justice at all to the remarkable musician and thoughtful human being that he was. His reflections upon the artistic process, what it means to create art that speaks to our collective humanity, and the relationship between the musical past and contemporary music were extraordinarily articulate and cogent. As both composer and critic he poked holes in the received values of the classical musical world with alacrity. He sincerely believed — and his craft is eloquent testimony thereof — that much of the art music of the last century failed to reach out and speak authentically to most of the artistic community. Like many of his young — and not so young — contemporaries, he began his career firmly ensconced in the academic camp of the atonal serialists. But, after a series of “successful,” but personally unsatisfying, efforts in that austere style, so popular after WW II, he made a sea change into a completely different musical approach.

That to which he deeply objected in the mainstream of classical musical culture (and our training of young composers) was a pronounced disconnect with the great musical traditions of the past. He believed that music that survived the test of time, and that which touched hearts and minds was musical art that communicated coherence — especially harmonic coherence — and which grew organically out of melodic material, scales, and harmonies chosen for that purpose. He was dedicated to color and textures that are obviously connected with much of the Romantic tradition, and in general consciously took much of Brahms, Mahler, Bartok, and early Stravinsky as artistic models. Or at least, as points of departure for a truly contemporary direction that was nonetheless based in a coherent tradition. So, critics laud him for his protoRomantic, at times lush, music that garnered broad acclaim from professionals and the general public alike for its singular voice.

He studied early on with a variety of well-known composers and teachers, and in his twenties began to enjoy recognition from all of the prestigious foundations, eventually receiving commissions from major orchestras. His Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, RiverRun (later also called his first symphony) sealed his position as one of America’s first-rate young composers.

Shortly after his death in a tragic automobile accident, he posthumously received a Grammy for his Cello Concerto, written for Yo-Yo Ma. A deep and informing interest of his were the works of James Joyce — especially Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, and they figure prominently in four of his major compositions. In the years 1983-84 he was working simultaneously on the important song cycle TreeSong and the symphony, RiverRun (the title of the latter coming from the first line in Finnegan’s Wake). Both of Albert’s compositions are inspired by allusions in Finnegan’s Wake to the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde, and broader themes of mankind’s fall, as well repeating cycles of human SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 7

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES existence. The symphony openly is derived from the song cycle, and the two works enjoy a “coupled relationship.” But, more specifically, the symphony’s four movements are conceived as reflections of images in the novel of the River Liffey in four different settings — in reality and metaphorically. The river flows through the center of Dublin before entering the Irish Sea, and, like the Mississippi River, has immense cultural significance. Albert spoke at length of the importance of Joyce’s imagery evoked by the river, and its direct basis for the four movements of the symphony — even alluding to the river as “speaking to the city of Dublin like a lover.” While it is tempting to search for a story, or “program,” to hang upon what we hear in RiverRun — Albert makes pellucidly clear that, as in Joyce’s novel, there is no straightforward narrative thread.

Joyce’s work informs the structure of Albert’s music, but one will search in vain for that clear thread. Both are largely episodic and abstract. In other words: it’s just about refracted images of the Irish river, inspired by the turgid and abstract episodes of the novel.

The first movement, “Rain Music,” evokes the beginning of the river as streamlets, rising in Liffey Head Bog. While The Moldau of Smetana may come to mind, the composer is adamant that it shouldn’t! Fair enough. “Leafy Speafing” stems from perhaps the most famous chapter in Finnegan’s Wake, described by the author as “a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone.” They are discussing two ancestors who were in love — who, obscurely, were Tristan and Isolde, but who are also metaphors for the city and river as lovers.

In the third movement, “Beside the Rivering Waters”, Albert is inspired by his vision of children playing (there’s a nursery tune) juxtaposed with a wake replete with a funeral dirge. An allusion to a drinking song undergirds the adults’ — and all humanity’s — desire to block thoughts of death. And then we return to the children, just as all would like to return to childhood. Finally, “Rivers End” is just that: the river’s inexorable passage down to the sea, broadening as it glides to the ocean’s darkness, mystery, and finality.

o — Wm. E. Runyan

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Student Outreach

We’re excited to offer student tickets for the upcoming season when single tickets go on sale August 3. For students with valid school I.D. Limitations apply.

30,000 Students K-12

attend Youth Concerts at Boettcher Concert Hall each year.

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