Evening Concert Series 2024 – 2025 Season
Helen M. Hosmer Concert Hall Tuesday, November 5th at 7:30 PM
THE CRANE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA JONATHAN GÓVIAS, CONDUCTOR
Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582
arr. Leopold Stokowski
Concerto for Piano No. 2 in C minor Op. 18
I. Moderato
Lt. Kijé: Suite Op. 60
II. Romance
Jack Jiang, piano
J.S. Bach (1685 – 1750)
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Sergei Prokofiev
IV. Troika (1891-1953)
Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances
Aleksander Borodin (1833-1887)
Tonight’s performance is presented without intermission
FLUTE
Emma Fusco
Simone McPartling
David Morelli
Elsie Munsterteiger
OBOE
Annelise Herschbein
Amara Leitner
Mariana Morales
Molly Murphy
CLARINET
Nicholas Derderian
Paige Krebs
Brandon McLaughlin
Jovany Rivers
BASSOON
Maddie Garcia
Liam Hill*
TENOR SAXOPHONE
Megan Henry
HORN
Moriah Clendenin
Ryan Eckl*
Sophia Randazzo
Haley Sullivan
TRUMPET
Molly Collins*
Ethan Cobey
Dillon Niles
TROMBONE
Elliot Borden
Victor Mainetti*
Vivian Redmond
TENOR TUBA
Josh Coldren
TUBA
Zach Barstow
PERCUSSION
Kam Balcom
Tal Millas
Elizabeth Skalski
Drew Spina
Elijah Sutton
Bailey Yerdon*
HARP
Harper Foley
PIANO & CELESTA
John Oswald
VIOLIN I
Madison Ballou
Stephen Borgia
Kaitlyn Caragiulo
Julia Cohen
Vanessa Cruz
John DiSpaltro
Holland Goddard
Elsa Lumia
Carlos Martinez
Olivia Minarich
Maia Regan
Michael Wong*
VIOLIN II
RJAhern-Stetson
Gwendolyn Caro
Laura Chase
Shannon Darby
Lin Engheben
Noelle Gottfried
Paolina Iori
Emma Kuegel*
Jessica Jaworski
Emma Oliveri
Amanda Quintanilla
Alyssa Spina
Morgan Stolz
VIOLA
JacquelineAlonso
EhrenAuer
Ricky Chui*
Sam DiGennaro
Lola Gehman
Nathan Redlein
Finn Sanders
Dylan Slade
Kiersten Wazny
VIOLONCELLO
Olivia Brigham
Emily Buliung
Olivia Charleston
Maggie Christie
Gabriel Cook
Joaquin Fraga
Ollie Hernandez
Maggie King
Serenity Laird
Jayden Miranda
Lauren Pacholec
Miranda Paulino*
Noah Pinto
Mirabel Sasiela
Ryan Seevers
Hannah Tufano
BASS
Charlie Centeno*
Holden Chamberlain
Molly Martellotta
LIBRARIANS
Vanessa Cruz
Lola Gehman
Maggie King
Jack Jiang, piano
Winner of the 2024 Crane Solo Competition, Jack Jiang is a senior Music Theory major with a concentration in piano from Plainview, NY. He is from the studio of Dr. Tak. Jack has performed with the Crane Wind Ensemble and Northern Symphonic Winds. Following graduation, Jack is planning to go to graduate school and become a theory professor in the future. Jack would like to express gratitude to family, friends, and all the professors and teachers he’s had for all the support throughout his journey.
Jonathan Góvias, conductor
A student of Kurt Masur, Marin Alsop and David Zinman, conductor Jonathan Góvias has worked with some of the leading ensembles of the world, including the symphonies of Montréal, Cincinnati, Kansas City, San Diego, the Tonhalle Orchester of Zurich, the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada and the Teresa Carreño Orchestra of Caracas.
In his capacity as Artistic Director and Curator of Symphony of Diversity, an orchestral human rights initiative of international scope and prominence, he has set new standards for powerful, effective advocacy and social action through music in both live and virtual formats. The 2021 production A Thousand Thunderbolts, commemorating the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, garnered invitations from music conferences, music institutions and performing arts centres around the world. In 2022 Symphony of Diversity became a national endeavour, bringing musicians from across the US for a performance at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) in Portland, Oregon, where he was recognized with the conference’s Social Justice and EquityAward in the category of Change Agent.
In addition to a Doctorate in Orchestral Conducting from McGill University, Góvias is the recipient of multiple honours, including the Priddy Fellowship in Arts Leadership, the Reinhard Mohn Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Abreu Fellowship at the New England Conservatory. Now on his third career, as Director of Orchestras at the Crane School, he previously worked as a marketing director for a major symphony orchestra, and as a corporate consultant for a German media multinational before returning to music.
PROGRAM NOTES
Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582
Before Johann Friedrich Wender’s organ for the Neue Kirche (New Church) in Arnstadt could be considered finished, the instrument first had to be exhaustively tested. Such a task required someone who was not only a superb organist, but also highly knowledgeable about the manufacture and maintenance of the instruments. For an assignment of this magnitude, the church authorities turned to the 18-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach. On July 13th, 1703, Bach put the instrument through its paces, and so impressive was his test performance that he returned a few weeks later as the official church organist.
The images we possess of Bach from his time depict an older gentleman, in formal wig and dress, with a gravitas (and rotundity) befitting a man of his reputation and social standing. Bach inArnstadt was young, proud, rebellious, ambitious and single, a combination that caused him no end of trouble. Church records note an indiscreet but purely musical liaison with a foreign young woman (alas unnamed); an extended absence without leave (he went to Hamburg for four months to study with Buxtehude); and a street fight with a student (Bach had insulted him with a term so obscene that its reproduction here is forborne). Even his curricular activities came under scrutiny when the congregation of the church complained about their organist’s unusual harmonies and figurations.
Bach’s music defies simple categorization. While the musical trend of the Baroque era was towards clarity and simplicity, Bach’s view was that advancement of the art was achieved through the refinement, if not perfection, of the craft of counterpoint and the exhaustion of the musical possibilities it offered. Bach’s adherence to old forms while actively expanding their potential placed him in the position of simultaneously being both progressive and regressive, with this penchant for mixing old and new the source of both his uniqueness, and the tension between him and the congregation.
The Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor is an excellent example of the paradoxical position Bach’s music occupies. When it was written, most likely for that same unappreciative audience in Arnstadt, the passacaglia as a form was already considered largely obsolete. The structure, one of a theme presented and then repeated, with each iteration elaborated or enveloped by variations of increasing sophistication, is well suited to counterpoint - but counterpoint as the
primary substance of a musical work had already fallen out of fashion. Undeterred, Bach begins Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor in conventional manner, but the work rapidly evolves into a miasma of progressive, if not aggressive, dissonances masterfully sublimated into the larger consonant musical texture. The theme repeats twenty-one times, almost unrecognizably in some incarnations, before its metamorphosis into the subject of a fugue – another obsolete form – but a very natural extension of the music’s entropic progression. Arrangements or orchestrations have fallen out of fashion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but the inherent symphonic nature of the work seems undisputed: there are at least six transcriptions – or perhaps in the case of the organ, transplants? – of this work for full symphony orchestra. In the preface to his orchestration, the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski wrote: “This passacaglia is one of those musical conceptions whose content is so full and significant, that its medium of expression is of relative unimportance. Whether played on the organ, or by the greatest of all instruments – the orchestra – it is one of the most divinely inspired creations ever conceived.” From the stillness of the opening notes to the shattering final chords, the Passacaglia is no mere exercise in contrapuntal technique. It is a journey, an exploration of the fullest musical and emotional potential of just fifteen notes through the Technicolor palette of the orchestra.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
For composers born in the 19th century, the mark of their artistic maturation was the composition and successful début of a full symphony. Like novels were to aspiring authors, the symphony as a large instrumental form was a test of a composer’s capacity to express and explore musical ideas on a scale and with a sophistication most shorter formats could not sustain. Thus, it was entirely natural for the 22 year-old composer Sergei Rachmaninoff to attempt a symphony in 1894-1895, the years immediately following his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory.
The work was not successful. The premiere performance in March 1897 was under-rehearsed, and Rachmaninoff was deeply critical of what he described as the unmusicality of the conductor. The work was vilified by critics, including the dean of Russian composers César Cui, who colorfully dismissed it as worthy of a music conservatory in hell. The failure of the symphony was just one of several incidents that same year that propelled Rachmaninoff into what would now be diagnosed as severe depression.Ahealth scare relating to his kidneys, the
marriage of his childhood crush to a rival, and his own forbidden and forestalled romance with a first cousin all contributed to an eventual breakdown, a threeyear period in which he performed frequently as a pianist and a conductor to acclaim but wrote no new music. In desperate need of an intervention, he turned to the neurologist and hypnotist Nikolai Dahl, at the suggestion of his aunt. Dahl’s methods of autosuggestion were successful, and the result of the treatment was the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, which Rachmaninoff dedicated to his therapist in gratitude.
The first full performance of the work took place on November 9th, 1901 (Gregorian calendar) to rapturous public response, a reception that would be replicated at all future performances. Curiously, despite - or perhaps because of –its immense popular appeal, the concerto still failed to please the contemporary critics, who likened it at best to dross or described it as a pale imitation of Tchaikovsky. History, as always, has served as the final arbiter, and Rachmaninoff’s concerto is now one of the most performed works in the genre of all time.
Подпоручик Киже, (Lieutenant Kijé) Suite Op. 60
Within insecure totalitarian regimes, whether Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, or academia, it often proves safer to institutionalize errors than attempt to correct them. Soviet author Yury Tynyanov based his successful 1927 novella
Подпоручик Киже (Lieutenant Kijé) on one such absurdity, an anecdote from the brief reign of Emperor Paul I in which a misread word in a dispatch and a misplaced stroke of a clerk’s pen brings a “Lt. Kijé” into official existence. The fictitious officer becomes a convenient scapegoat for a disturbance that rouses the vengeful Emperor late one evening, and the novel traces the subsequent administratively fabricated history of Lt. Kijé, including his punishment, promotions, marriage and finally, his paper death when the now-distinguished bureaucratic creation is summoned to appear at the royal court. Subject matter ridiculing the excesses or follies of Imperial Russia was readily approved by post-revolution Soviet censors, and Tynyanov’s book was well-received. Five years after its publication it became the basis for a film directed by Aleksander Faintsimmer, who asked Sergei Prokofiev to provide the score.
Prokofiev had enjoyed success early as both a composer and pianist, and his reputation earned him the opportunity to travel abroad in the years immediately
following the Russian Revolution, with the full permission of the governing faction. For much of the 1920s he worked in Western Europe and the United States, completing multiple major commissions for ballets and opera. With the onset of the Great Depression, his sources of income as a composer began to evaporate and he turned increasingly to the recently constituted Soviet Union for employment. Film with synchronized sound was an exciting new medium, and Faintsimmer’s offer came at an opportune time. After the film’s premiere, Prokofiev reworked the score into a five-movement suite, expanding the orchestration from the original small ensemble into a large symphonic setting. The two selections performed tonight represent the two movements of the suite originally scored for baritone vocalist, with tenor saxophone substituted by Prokofiev in his instrumental versions. The fourth movement, Troika, with its energetic pulse, upbeat melody, and chiming sleigh bells, has become intrinsically associated with Christmas despite its original context. In the film, three extremely drunk Imperial officers, singing ribaldly, embark on a sleigh ride in an effort to find the fictitious lieutenant. The scene is unquestionably festive –perhaps just more in the metaphorical or euphemistic sense.
Князь Игор (Prince Igor): Polovtsian Dances
Before the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan sweptAsia from Kamchatka to the steppes of Ukraine, the Kipchak people (also known as the Polovetsy) dominated a territory ranging from Kazakhstan to Hungary. In the late twelfth century, the Rus’prince Igor Svyatoslavich attempted to curtail the aggressive incursions of this nomadic tribe by leading a raid against one host and their leader, Khan Konchak, who were active in the catchment of the Don River, a region to the north of the Black Sea. The military operation was an abject failure. The Rus’ army was routed, Prince Igor was captured, and the entire unhappy episode would form the basis of a 12th Century epic poem entitled The Lay of the Host of Igor. The ethnic exoticism of the subject matter combined with strong nationalistic elements made the poem a natural source of operatic inspiration for the Russian composerAleksander Borodin, who along with his colleagues in “The Mighty Five” (or “The Mighty Handful”) was working to develop for Russia what Richard Wagner had accomplished in Germany, or what Bedřich Smetana andAntonin Dvořák were doing in Bohemia.
Music, for Borodin, was regrettably only a sideline. His primary source of income was as a chemist, a profession in which he was quite distinguished while
alive. He was active in his field as a researcher and professor, and progressive in his views of education, instituting courses and ultimately founding a school of medicine for women in St. Petersburg. Given the extent of his scientific activities, he was unable to offer full attention to composition, and the opera Prince Igor remained unfinished at the time of his death. His colleagues Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov andAleksander Glazunov, both admirers, took it upon themselves to complete the opera, preserving Borodin’s musical vision and style as best they could. The Polovtsian Dances were finished by Rimsky-Korsakov and constitute the grand finale ofAct II, in which Prince Igor has been captured by the Kipchaks. Their leader Khan Konchak proves a gracious captor, offering comforts to his royal prisoner while the Polovetsy people dance and sing paens to the Khan’s glory.
Advances in chemistry have relegated Borodin’s legacy in the scientific field to the second (and therefore lesser) half of a hyphenated name for a reaction involving the production of organic halides. There is no mention of his achievements in chemistry on his tomb in St. Peterburg’s Tikhvin cemetery, but the major theme from Polovtsian Dances is one of three of his melodies that grace his sepulcher – an object lesson for all those who pursue a career in science over the vocation to a life in music.
Program notes by Jonathan Góvias
