CLASSICS 2021/22
2021/22 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:
MAHLER SYMPHONY NO. 5 ASHER FISCH, conductor AWADAGIN PRATT, piano Friday, May 13, 2022 at 7:30pm Saturday, May 14, 2022 at 7:30pm Sunday, May 15, 2022 at 1:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall
JOAN TOWER Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman JESSIE MONTGOMERY
Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra — INTERMISSION —
MAHLER Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor Part I Trauermarsch Stürmisch bewegt Part II Scherzo: Kräftig, nicht zu schnell Part III Adagietto Rondo-Finale Yamaha CFX concert grand piano provided by Yamaha Artist Services New York in association with Classic Pianos Denver CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 50 MINUTES WITH A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 7 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT! Friday’s concert is dedicated to Donald and Margery Lagmuir Saturday’s concert is dedicated to Jennifer Heglin & Kenneth and Zoe Barley Sunday’s concert is dedicated to Dr. Mark Myerson and Dr. Shuyuan Myerson PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES ASHER FISCH, conductor A renowned conductor in both the operatic and symphonic worlds, Asher Fisch is especially celebrated for his interpretative command of core German and Italian repertoire of the Romantic and post-Romantic era. He conducts a wide variety of repertoire from Gluck to contemporary works by living composers. Since 2014, Asher Fisch has been the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO). His former posts include Principal Guest Conductor of the Seattle Opera (2007-2013), Music Director of the New Israeli Opera (1998-2008), and Music Director of the Wiener Volksoper (1995-2000). Highlights of Asher Fisch’s 2021-22 season include Otello and Der Rosenkavalier at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Adriana Lecouvreur at the Vienna State Opera, a gala concert at the Hungarian National Opera with Kristine Opolais, as well as concerts with the Colorado Symphony, Naples Philharmonic, and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Fisch’s 2020-21 season featured guest engagements with the Detroit Symphony, Utah Symphony, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Dusseldorfer Symphoniker, and a farewell concert at the Bayerische Staatsoper for long-time director Nikolaus Bachler. Other recent seasons included concert and opera engagements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Festival, Sydney Symphony, Teatro Massimo Orchestra in Palermo, Carmen, Die Zauberflöte, and Parsifal at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Ariadne auf Naxos with the Bayerische Staatsoper at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Tannhäuser at the Tokyo National Theater, and Pagliacci and Schitz at the Israeli Opera. Born in Israel, Fisch began his conducting career as Daniel Barenboim’s assistant and kappellmeister at the Berlin Staatsoper. He has built his versatile repertoire at the major opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and Semperoper Dresden. Fisch has conducted at leading American symphony orchestras including those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia. In Europe he has appeared at the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Orchestre National de France, among others. Asher Fisch’s recent recordings include Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 2019, tenor Stuart Skelton’s first solo album, recorded with WASO and released on ABC Classics in 2018, and a recording of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole with the Munich Radio Orchestra, which won Limelight Magazine’s Opera Recording of the Year in 2017. In 2016, he recorded the complete Brahms symphonies with WASO, released on ABC Classics to great acclaim. His recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle with the Seattle Opera was released on the Avie label in 2014. His first Ring Cycle recording, with the State Opera of South Australia, won ten Helpmann Awards, including best opera and best music direction. Fisch is also an accomplished pianist and has recorded a solo disc of Wagner piano transcriptions for the Melba label.
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES AWADAGIN PRATT, piano Among his generation of concert artists, pianist Awadagin Pratt is acclaimed for his musical insight and intensely involving performances in recital and with symphony orchestras. Born in Pittsburgh, Awadagin Pratt began studying piano at the age of six. Three years later, having moved to Normal, Illinois with his family, he also began studying violin. At the age of 16 he entered the University of Illinois where he studied piano, violin, and conducting. He subsequently enrolled at the Peabody Conservatory of Music where he became the first student in the school’s history to receive diplomas in three performance areas – piano, violin and conducting. In 1992, Mr. Pratt won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and two years later was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Since then, he has played numerous recitals throughout the US including performances at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. His many orchestral performances include appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra and the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Atlanta, St. Louis, National and Detroit symphonies among many others. Summer festival engagements include appearances at Ravinia, Blossom, Wolftrap, Caramoor, Aspen and the Hollywood Bowl. Also an experienced conductor, Mr. Pratt has conducted programs with the Toledo, New Mexico, Vancouver WA, Winston-Salem and Santa Fe symphonies, the Northwest Sinfonietta, the Concertante di Chicago and several orchestras in Japan. Upcoming conducting activities include play/conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh and conducting performances of Porgy and Bess for the Greensboro Opera. A great favorite on college and university performing arts series and a strong advocate of music education, Awadagin Pratt participates in numerous residency and outreach activities wherever he appears. He is also frequently invited to participate on international competition juries, such as the Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Israel, the Cleveland International Piano Competition, Minnesota e-Competition, the Unisa International Piano Competition in South Africa and the Competition for Young Pianists in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz in the Ukraine. Mr. Pratt’s recordings for Angel/EMI include A Long Way From Normal, an all Beethoven Sonata CD, Live From South Africa, Transformations and an all Bach disc with the St. Lawrence String Quartet. His most recent recordings are the Brahms Sonatas for Cello and Piano with Zuill Bailey for Telarc and a recording of the music of Judith Lang Zaimont with the Harlem String Quartet for Navona Records. Awadagin Pratt is also the founder and Artistic Director of the Art of the Piano and produces a festival every spring featuring performances and conversations with well known faculty SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES members and pianists. Through the Art of the Piano Foundation, Mr. Pratt has commissioned seven composers – Jessie Montgomery, Alvin Singleton, Judd Greenstein, Tyshawn Sorey, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Paola Prestini and Peteris Vasks – to compose works for piano with string orchestra and/or A Roomful of Teeth. Mr. Singleton’s work was premiered with the New World Symphony in April 2021 and Ms. Montgomery’s concerto will be performed by a consortium of nine US orchestras, including the St. Louis, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Indianapolis symphonies, in the spring of 2022. Mr. Pratt is currently Professor of Piano and Artist in Residence at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. He also served as the Artistic Director of the World Piano Competition in Cincinnati and the Next Generation Festival. In recognition of his achievements in the field of classical music, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Johns Hopkins University as well as honorary doctorates from Illinois Wesleyan and Susquehanna Universities and delivered commencement addresses at those institutions and at Peabody Conservatory. Awadagin Pratt is a Yamaha artist. For more information, please visit www.awadagin.com.
An Evening with Kristin Chenoweth and the Colorado Symphony AUG 12 | FRI 7:30 Boettcher Concert Hall PROGRAM IV
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES JOAN TOWER (born in 1938) Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1 Joan Tower was born September 6, 1938 in New Rochelle, New York. The Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1 was composed in 1986, and premiered by the Houston Symphony Orchestra on January 10, 1987, Hans Vonk conducting. The score calls for an ensemble of four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and percussion. Duration is about 3 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra was May 3, 2003, conducted by Marin Alsop. Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, and went to South America with her family at age nine. Her father was a mining engineer whose assignments necessitated frequent family moves to Bolivia, Chile and Peru, but he always found a piano and a teacher to nurture his daughter’s musical interests. Tower returned to the United States at age eighteen to attend Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition. After finishing her professional training, she taught at Greenwich House, a settlement house in New York, while also composing and performing as a pianist. Since 1972, Tower has taught at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where she is now Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She is also active in working with performing groups and students in residencies throughout the country, and has served as Co-Artistic Director of the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival; she was Composer-in-Residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York from 1999 to 2007, and is Mentor Composer-in-Residence for the Albany Symphony’s 20132014 season. Tower’s many distinctions include awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Massachusetts State Arts Council, as well as the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville in 1990, the first woman ever to receive that honor. Of the Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1 (the first of Tower’s six eponymous works), composed for the Houston Symphony’s sesquicentennial in 1986, the composer wrote, “This work was inspired by Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, and uses in fact the same instrumentation. The original theme resembles the theme in my piece. It is dedicated to women who take risks and are adventurous.”
JESSIE MONTGOMERY (born in 1981) Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra Jessie Montgomery was born December 8, 1981 in New York City. She composed Rounds in 20212022 on a commission from the Colorado Symphony. The work is receiving its world premiere at these performances. The scoring calls for string orchestra. Duration is about 16 minutes. This is the Colorado Symphony Premiere. Violinist, composer and music educator Jessie Montgomery, who began a three-year term as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in July 2021, started studying violin at age four at the Third Street Music School Settlement in her native New York City. She was composing and improvising by age eleven, and while still in high school twice SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES received the Composer’s Apprentice Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Montgomery went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in violin performance at the Juilliard School and a master’s from New York University in film scoring and multimedia; she has also studied composition with Derek Bermel and Steven Burke and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. In 2020, she was appointed to the faculty of the Mannes School of Music in New York. As a performer and educator, Montgomery was a co-founding member of PUBLIQuartet (an ensemble made up of composers and arrangers, featuring their own music as well as that of other New York-based composers), a member of the Catalyst Quartet and Providence String Quartet (dedicated to using music as a means of exploring possibilities for social change in underserved communities in the Providence area), a faculty member of the Apple Hill Center in New Hampshire, Music at Port Milford in Canada, and Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, and a long-time affiliated artist with Sphinx, an organization that supports young African-American and Latino string players, in which she was a two-time laureate; she is also currently an active participant in the New York classical and new music scenes. As a composer, Montgomery has created works for concert, theater and film, and held residencies with the Deer Valley Music Festival, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and Sphinx Virtuosi. Among her rapidly accumulating distinctions are the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. Jessie Montgomery is currently working on a commission for Project 19, the New York Philharmonic’s multi-year celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year, which granted women the right to vote. In September 2021, Montgomery was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera along with two other Black composers — Valerie Coleman and Joel Thompson — to develop new works in collaboration with the Lincoln Center Theater. Montgomery wrote that Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra, commissioned by the Colorado Symphony, was “inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. Text ©T.S. Eliot Reproduced by courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd “In addition to this inspiration, while working on the piece, I became fascinated by fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales) and also delved into the work of contemporary biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, who writes about the interdependency of all beings. Weber explores how every living organism has a rhythm that interacts and impacts with all of the living things around it and results in a multitude of outcomes. “Like Eliot in Four Quartets, beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every PROGRAM VI
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES single action and moment. I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work — action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift. “Structurally, with these concepts in mind, I set the form of the work as a rondo, within a rondo, within a rondo [i.e., a form based on a returning refrain, separated by contrasting episodes]. The five major sections are a rondo; section ‘A’ is also a rondo in itself; and the cadenza — which is partially improvised by the soloist — breaks the pattern, yet, contains within it, the overall form of the work. “To help share some of this with the performers, I’ve included the following poetic performance note at the start of the score: Inspired by the constancy, the rhythms, and duality of life, in order of relevance to form: Rondine — AKA Swifts (like a sparrow) flying in circles patterns Playing with opposites — dark/light; stagnant/swift Fractals — infinite design “I am grateful to my friend Awadagin Pratt for his collaborative spirit and ingenuity in helping to usher my first work for solo piano into the world.” - Jessie Montgomery (February 2022) Commissioned by Art of the Piano Foundation for pianist Awadagin Pratt Co-commissioned by Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, IRIS Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911) Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860 in Kalist, Bohemia, and died May 18, 1911 in Vienna. He composed the Symphony No. 5 in 1901-1902, and revised it through 1911. He conducted the premiere on October 18, 1904 in Cologne with the Gürzenich Orchestra. The score calls for three piccolos, four flutes, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 68 minutes. This orchestra last played this piece April 30-May 3, 2015, conducted by Andrew Litton. In November 1901, Gustav Mahler met Alma Schindler, daughter of the painter Emil Jacob Schindler, then 22 and regarded as one of the most beautiful women in Vienna. Mahler was 41. Romance blossomed. They were married in March, and were parents by November. Their first summer together (1902) was spent at Maiernigg, Mahler’s country retreat on the Wörthersee in Carinthia in southern Austria. It was at that time that the Fifth Symphony was composed, SOUNDINGS
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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES incorporating some sketches from the previous summer. He thought of this work as “their” music, the first artistic fruit of his married life with Alma. But more than that, he may also have wanted to create music that would be worthy of the new circle of friends that Alma, the daughter of one of Austria’s finest artists and most distinguished families, had opened to him — Gustav Klimt, Alfred Roller (who became Mahler’s stage designer at the Court Opera), architect Josef Hoffmann and the rest of the cream of cultural Vienna. In the Fifth Symphony, Mahler seems to have taken inordinate care to demonstrate the mature quality of his thought (he was, after all, nearly twice Alma’s age) and to justify his lofty position in Viennese artistic life as director of the Court Opera, a circumstance that brought about a radical change in his creative language. The musical style that Mahler initiated with the Fifth Symphony is at once more abstract yet more powerfully expressive than that of his earlier music. In his study of the composer, Egon Gartenberg noted that the essential quality differentiating the later music from the earlier was a “volcanic change to modern polyphony,” a technique of concentrated contrapuntal development that Mahler had derived from an intense study of the music of Bach. “You can’t imagine how hard I am finding it, and how endless it seems because of the obstacles and problems I am faced with,” Mahler confided to his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner while struggling with the Symphony’s third movement. Free of his duties at the Opera between seasons, he labored throughout the summer of 1902 on the piece at his little composing hut in the woods, several minutes walk from the main house at Maiernigg. So delicate was the process of creation that he complained that the birds bothered him because they sang in the wrong keys (!). The composition was largely completed by early autumn when the Mahlers returned to Vienna, but Gustav continued to tinker with the score for, literally, the rest of his life. Mahler grouped the five movements of the Fifth Symphony into three parts. Thus, the opening Trauermarsch (“Funeral March”) takes on the character of an enormous introduction to the second movement. The two are further joined in sharing some thematic material. The giant Scherzo stands at the center point of the Symphony, the only movement not linked with another. Balancing the opening movements are the Adagietto and the Rondo-Finale of Part III, which have the quality of preface and summation. The structures of the individual movements of the Symphony No. 5 are large and complex, bearing allegiance to the classical models but expanded and re-shaped, with continuous development and intertwining of themes. The Trauermarsch is sectional in design, alternating between music based on the opening trumpet summons and an intensely sad threnody presented by the strings. The following movement (“Stormily moving. With great vehemence”) resembles sonata form, with a soaring chorale climaxing the development section only to be cut short by the return of the stormy music of the recapitulation. The Scherzo juxtaposes a whirling waltz in the style of a folkish Austrian Ländler with trios more gentle in nature. The serene Adagietto serves as a calm interlude between the gigantic movements surrounding it. The closing movement (Rondo–Finale) begins as a rondo, but interweaves the principal themes with those of the episodes as it unfolds in a blazing display of contrapuntal craft. The triumphant chorale that was snuffed out in the second movement is here returned to bring the Symphony to an exalted close. ©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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