Program - Berlioz Symphonie fantastique

2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:

CLASSICS 2021/22

BERLIOZ SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE DOUGLAS BOYD, conductor BROOK FERGUSON, flute Friday, February 11, 2022 at 7:30pm Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 7:30pm Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

MENDELSSOHN

The Hebrides, Op. 26 “Fingal’s Cave”

MOZART Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major, K. 313 I. Allegro maestoso II. Adagio non troppo III. Rondo: Tempo die menuetto — INTERMISSION — BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique, op. 14 I. Rêveries (Passions) II. Un bal (A Ball) III. Scène aux champs (Scene in the Country) IV. Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold) V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath) CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 44 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 8 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT! Saturday’s concert is dedicated in memory of James Mote.

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM I

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES DOUGLAS BOYD, conductor Currently the Artistic Director of Garsington Opera Douglas Boyd has also held the positions of Music Director of L’Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, Chief Conductor of the Musikkollegium Winterthur, Music Director of Manchester Camerata, Principal Guest Conductor of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Partner of St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of City of London Sinfonia. In 2020 he received the highly prestigious Grand Vermeil Médaille de la Ville de Paris for services to music, in recognition of his work as Music Director of L’Orchestre de Chambre de Paris.

Originally an oboist and one of the founding members of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Douglas’s formative musical training was under musicians such as Abbado and Harnoncourt, who remain a significant influence on his style and approach to this day.

In the UK Douglas Boyd has conducted all the BBC Orchestras, the Philharmonia, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, London Mozart Players, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Royal Northern Sinfonia. On the continent he has worked with, amongst others, the Bergen Philharmonic, Basel Sinfoniieorchester, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, as well as Munich Chamber Orchestra and Kammerakademie Potsdam.

Further afield he has conducted the Nagoya Symphony Orchestra in Japan, Hong Kong Philharmonic and with many of the symphony orchestras in Australia including a complete cycle of Beethoven Symphonies with the Melbourne Symphony, returning for the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos with Paul Lewis. He returns to the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in the 2022/23 season.

He appears regularly in North America where he has worked with the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore, Colorado, Dallas, Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Pacific, Sacramento, Seattle and Virginia Symphony Orchestras. In Canada he has appeared with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and National Arts Orchestra in Ottawa.

On the concert platform he enjoys a close working relationship with eminent soloists including Jonathan Biss, Steven Isserlis, Anthony Marwood, Viktoria Mulova, Fazil Say, András Schiff, Mark Padmore, Emmanuel Pahud and Alissa Weilerstein.

Operatic engagements have included Die Zauberflöte for Glyndebourne Opera on Tour, Salieri’s La Grotto di Tronfonio for Zürich Opera and Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito with Opera North. Productions at Garsington Opera have included Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutte, Eugene Onegin, Capriccio, Silver Birch (Roxanna Panufnik, world premiere) as well as

PROGRAM II

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES concert performances of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Haydn’s The Creation with Ballet Rambert and concert performances of Fidelio.

During his tenure as Artistic Director of Garsington Opera he has secured the Philharmonia Orchestra and English Concert as the resident orchestras, forged partnerships with Santa Fe Opera and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is widely recognised for his leadership in shaping the company into a world-class, internationally renowned festival, reflected in their nomination in the 2019 international opera awards.

Douglas Boyd’s recording of the Bach Concerti for DG marked his recording debut as director/ soloist and he has since gone on to build an extensive conducting discography. His recordings with Manchester Camerata of the complete Beethoven Symphonies and Mahler Symphony No 4 (on Avie) and Das Lied von der Erde have received universal critical acclaim. He has also recorded Schubert Symphonies with the St Paul Chamber Orchestra on their own label as well as several recordings with Musikkollegium Winterthur. His recordings with L’Orchestre de Chambre de Paris include ‘Intuition’ with Gautier Capucon for the Erato label, and a disc of Haydn Symphonies which was released in 2021.

Recent and future highlights include concerts with the Aalborg Symfoniorkester, Auckland Philharmonia, BBC Symphony, Philharmonic and National Orchesta of Wales Orchestras, Philharmonia Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Kammerakademie Potsdam and Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine.

The 21/22 season includes debuts with the Potsdam Winteroper conducting Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, with the Gävle Symphony Orchestra and Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier as well as re-invitations to L’Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, Musikkollegium Winterthur, North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, Slovenian Philharmonic as well as a new production of Rusalka for Garsington.

SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM III

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES BROOK FERGUSON, flute Hailed by The Washington Post as “brilliantly virtuosic,” flutist Brook Ferguson is a versatile solo and orchestral artist. The Miami Herald praised Ferguson’s performance of Carl Nielsen’s Concerto for Flute with the New World Symphony as “soaring, fraught with emotion, possessing sterling technique with pure tone, showing herself fully in synch with Nielsen’s enigmatic world, putting across the playfulness, passing shadows and sheer strangeness of this music with strong impact.” First prize winner of the 2009 National Flute Association Young Artist Competition, Ferguson has performed as a concerto soloist with the Colorado Symphony, the New World Symphony, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. She has appeared at the prestigious Aspen Music Festival, Marlboro Music Festival and Tanglewood Music Center—as both an orchestral fellow and New Fromm Player.

Ferguson was appointed Principal Flutist of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in 2010 and has been Principal Flutist of the innovative River Oaks Chamber Orchestra since 2012. Previously, she completed a three-year fellowship with the New World Symphony, where she had the privilege of experiencing the musical mentorship of Michael Tilson Thomas. She has made Principal appearances with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Chamber Symphony, Aspen Festival Orchestra, Grand Teton Festival Orchestra, Seattle Symphony and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Prior to her appointment with the New World Symphony, Ferguson was the Acting Principal Flutist of the Knoxville Symphony and the Principal Flutist of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra. Ferguson is a William S. Haynes Co. artist.

In 2013, Ferguson was a featured soloist on Jacques Ibert’s Concerto for Flute with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Douglas Boyd. An enthusiastic performer of new music, she performed Michael Gandolfi’s Geppetto’s Workshop multiple times in Jordan Hall at the composer’s invitation and gave the Tanglewood premiere of his Three Pieces for Solo Flute. Her performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra was commercially released on Yarlung Records and her live performance of David Amram’s Red River Valley Variations is available on the Newport Classic LTD label. Ferguson can be heard regularly in her musical contributions to Colorado Public Radio.

PROGRAM IV

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Op. 26 Felix Mendelssohn was born on February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, and died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig.

He began The Hebrides on August 7, 1829 and completed the first version in Rome on December 16, 1830. Both before and after the premiere, at Covent Garden, London, given by the Philharmonic Society Orchestra and conductor Thomas Attwood on May 14, 1832, the work was revised. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes.

This piece was last performed with conductor Adam Flatt for the 2003-2004 Youth Concerts. The last time it was performed on a Classics program was September 8-10, 1998 with conductor En Shao.

Felix Mendelssohn was in England in the summer of 1829 for the first of the nine visits he made to that country during his brief life, and receiving great acclaim as composer, conductor and pianist. He had just turned twenty. Between engagements, Mendelssohn, an avid traveler, undertook a walking tour of Scotland with a friend, the poet Carl Klingemann. Mendelssohn, who once wrote that “it is in pictures, ruins and natural surroundings that I find the most music,” was fruitfully inspired by his trip — Mary Queen of Scots’ Holyrood Castle gave rise to the “Scottish” Symphony (No. 3) and the wild Hebrides Islands off the rugged west coast of the country sparked the atmospheric Hebrides Overture.

The most famous spot in the Hebrides is the awesome, sea-level Fingal’s Cave, named for a legendary Scottish hero, on the tiny island of Staffa. Klingemann described the site: “A greener roar of waves surely never rushed into a stranger cavern — its many pillars made it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, and absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea within and without.” Mendelssohn was rowed to the mouth of the cave in a small skiff and sat spellbound before the natural wonder. As soon as he got back to land, still inspired by the experience, he rushed to his inn and wrote down the opening theme for a new piece. He included a copy of the melody in a letter to his sister, Fanny, in Berlin so that she would know, as he told her, “how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me.”

The Hebrides Overture does not tell a story. Rather it sets a scene and describes a mood that Charles O’Connell noted “evokes the mysterious spirit that seems to pervade the place, the feeling of restlessness and contrary motion, a strange and wild and beautiful atmosphere.” The work opens with the theme inspired from Mendelssohn as he bobbed about in the small dinghy at the mouth of Fingal’s Cave. Not really a complete melody at all, it is simply a one-measure motive that recurs over colorful, changing harmonies. The broad complementary theme, “the greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote,” according to Sir Donald Tovey, is presented in the rich hues of bassoons and cellos. A martial closing theme ends the exposition. The development section, built largely upon the main theme, rises to a ringing climax before a brilliant flash of lightning from the flutes ushers in the recapitulation. The second theme provides a brief emotional respite before the agitated mood of the opening returns in the extended coda. The storminess subsides, and the Overture concludes with a soft, eerie whisper from the flute.

 SOUNDINGS

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PROGRAM V

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 -1791) Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major, K. 313 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, and died on December 5, 1791 in Vienna. He composed this work in Mannheim in January or February 1778. The date of the first performance is unknown. The score calls for strings and pairs of oboes and horns. Duration is about 25 minutes.

During his stay in Mannheim early in 1778, Mozart met “a gentleman of means and a lover of all the sciences,” one Willem Britten de Jong who numbered among his accomplishments a certain ability on the flute. De Jong had heard of the 21-year-old musician’s extraordinary talent for composition from a mutual friend, Johann Baptist Wendling, the flutist with the Mannheim orchestra, and he commissioned Mozart to write three concertos and three quartets with strings for his instrument. Since he was, as always, short of money, Mozart accepted the proposal to help finance the swing he was then making through Germany and France in search of a permanent position. The next leg of the journey was to lead from Mannheim to Paris, and these flute pieces would help to pay the bills.

Mozart could not generate much enthusiasm for the project. Already the trip was six months old, and he had not had so much as a hint of a firm job offer. He was flustered over a love affair recently hatched with a local singer, Aloysia Weber (whose sister he eventually married when this first choice became unavailable), and letters from his father in Salzburg persistently badgered him about his lack of a dependable income. Most of all, however, these flute works took time that he wanted to spend composing opera, the most alluring avenue to success for an 18th-century musician. He vented his frustration on the closest target — the flute — and vowed how he disliked it, and what a drudgery it was to have to write for an instrument for which he cared so little, and how he longed to get on with something more important. Still, Mozart was too full of pride and good taste to make hack work of these pieces, and he wrote to Papa Leopold, “Of course, I could merely scratch away at it all day long: but such a thing as this goes out into the world, so it is my wish that I need not be ashamed that it carries my name.” He managed to finish all three quartets but completed only two of the concertos (the second one is actually just a transposition of the Oboe Concerto from the preceding year) by the time he left Mannheim. He settled with De Jong for just less than half of the original fee, and let it go at that. Despite his disparagement of the instrument, Mozart’s compositions for flute occupy one of the most delightful niches of his incomparable musical legacy — Rudolf Gerber characterized them as combining “the perfect image of the spirit and feeling of the rococo age with German sentiment.”

The opening movement of the G major Concerto is one of Mozart’s flawlessly calculated sonata-concerto forms. The orchestra presents the principal thematic material in quick order in its introduction: a stately melody in the violins, an ingratiating phrase with a falling close in slower rhythm, and a step-wise motive with a bustling rhythmic underpinning. The soloist then assays each of these themes in tastefully elaborated versions. The central section of this movement is less a true development of what has preceded than a free fantasia displaying the agility of the solo flute. After a recapitulation that subtly manipulates the themes from the

PROGRAM VI

C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES exposition (simple repetition was anathema to Mozart), the soloist is given an opportunity for a cadenza. A brief galop home concludes the movement. The slow movement is remarkable for the depth of sentiment engendered by its many harmonic felicities. Its rich texture and elevated spirituality recall Gluck’s famous “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Orfeo et Euridice. The finale is a rondo in the rhythm of a minuet, already a staid and old-fashioned dance in Mozart’s time. It has a certain air of frolic hiding behind formality for which this is the perfect expression.

 HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803-1869) Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14a Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803 in Côte-Saint-André, France, and died on March 8, 1869 in Paris. The Symphonie fantastique was composed in 1830 and revised the following year.

The first performance was given on December 5, 1830 at the Paris Conservatoire, conducted by François Habeneck. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, two cornets, two trumpets, three trombones, tenor and bass tubas, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings. Duration is about 49 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra was September 22-24, 2017 with Brett Mitchell.

By 1830, when he turned 27, Hector Berlioz had won the Prix de Rome and gained a certain notoriety among the fickle Parisian public for his perplexingly original compositions. Hector Berlioz was also madly in love. The object of his amorous passion was an English actress of middling ability, one Harriet Smithson, whom the composer first saw when a touring English theatrical company performed Shakespeare in Paris in 1827. During the ensuing three years, this romance was entirely onesided, since the young composer never met Harriet, but only knew her across the footlights as Juliet and Ophelia. He sent her such frantic love letters that she never responded to any of them, fearful of encouraging a madman.

Berlioz was still nursing his unrequited love for Harriet in 1830 when, full-blown Romantic that he was, his emotional state served as the germ for a composition based on this “Episode from the Life of an Artist,” as he subtitled the Symphonie Fantastique. In this work, the artist visualizes his beloved through an opium-induced trance, first in his dreams, then at a ball, in the country, at his execution and, finally, as a participant in a witches’ sabbath. She is represented by a musical theme that appears in each of the five movements, an idée fixe (a term Berlioz borrowed from the just-emerging field of psychology to denote an unhealthy obsession) which is transformed to suit its imaginary musical surroundings. The idée fixe is treated kindly through the first three movements, but after the artist has lost his head for love (literally — the string pizzicati followed by drum rolls and brass fanfares at the end of the March to the Scaffold

SOUNDINGS

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES represent the fall of the guillotine blade and the ceremony of the formal execution), the idée fixe is transmogrified into a jeering, strident parody of itself in the finale. Berlioz did in fact marry his Harriet-Ophelia-Juliet in 1833, but their happiness faded quickly, and he was virtually estranged from her within a decade.

Berlioz wrote of the Symphonie fantastique, “PART I: Reveries and Passions. The young musician first recalls that uneasiness of soul he experienced before seeing her whom he loves; then the volcanic love with which she suddenly inspired him, his moments of delirious anguish, of jealous fury, his returns to loving tenderness, and his religious consolations. PART II: A Ball.

He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant fête. PART III: Scene in the Country. One summer evening in the country he hears two shepherds playing a ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue; this pastoral duet, some hopes he has recently conceived, combine to restore calm to his heart; but she appears once more, he is agitated with painful presentiments; if she were to betray him! ... One of the shepherds resumes his artless melody, the other no longer answers him. The sun sets ... the sound of distant thunder ... solitude ... silence ... PART IV: March to the Scaffold. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death, and led to execution. The procession advances to a march that is now somber and wild, now brilliant and solemn. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for an instant, like a last love-thought before the fatal stroke. PART V: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. He sees himself at the Witches’ Sabbath, amid ghosts, magicians and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies. He hears strange noises, groans, shrieks. The beloved melody reappears, but it has become an ignoble, trivial and grotesque dance-tune; it is she who comes to the Witches’ Sabbath.... She takes part in the diabolic orgy ... Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies Irae [the ancient ‘Day of Wrath’ chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead]. Witches’ Dance. The Witches’ Dance and the Dies Irae together.”

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

PROGRAM VIII C O L O R A D O SY M P H O N Y.O R G