Elgin Symphony Orchestra Joyce Yang Plays Grieg Program

Joyce Yang Plays Grieg Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 7:30 PM Sunday, November 10, 2024 at 2:30 PM Hemmens Cultural Center, Elgin, IL Chad Goodman, Conductor Joyce Yang, piano

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR

Overture to The Song of Hiawatha

GRIEG

Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16 Allegro molto moderato Adagio— Allegro moderato molto e marcato Joyce Yang, piano

~ Intermission ~

DVOŘÁK

Symphony No. 7 in D minor, op. 70 Allegro maestoso Poco adagio Scherzo: Vivace Finale: Allegro

This program is supported, in part, by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency Este programa es apoyado, en parte, por un subsidio de la Agencia del

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL/PERSONAL DE LA ORQUESTA Violin I Isabella Lippi Concertmaster Eleanor Bartsch** Associate Concertmaster Gerald Loughney Kate Carter Eric Pidluski Joseph Malmquist Susan Carlson Carol Dylan Helen Kim Lee Wendy Evans Carmen Abelson Jennifer Leckie Violin II Daniela Folker Principal Robbie Herbst Assistant Principal Caroline Slack Maria Arrua Susan Thorne Steve Winkler Cristina Buciu Elizabeth Huffman Kelvin Lin Meg Lanfear Kathryn Siegel

Viola Rebecca Swan Principal Loretta Gillespie Assistant Principal Josef Fischer++ Jason Butler Erin Rafferty Sava Velkoff Susan Posner Cello Matthew Agnew Principal Nazar Dzhuryn Assistant Principal Kerena Fox Mark Kuntz Robert Weber Elizabeth Start Sara Sitzer Double Bass Timothy Shaffer** Principal Jeremy Attanaseo Assistant Principal Susan Sullivan Greg Heintz Jason Niehoff Adam Attard++

**On Leave 2024-2025 ++Season Substitute

Flute Jean Bishop Principal Scott Metlicka Piccolo Scott Metlicka Oboe James Kim Guest Principal Joseph Claude English Horn Joseph Claude Clarinet Gene Collerd Principal Trevor O’Riordan Bassoon Vincent Disantis Principal Collin Anderson French Horn Greg Flint Principal Steven Replogle Sharon Jones Mary BuscanicsJones

Trumpet Extra Musicians Ross Beacraft Principal Violin Joanna Nerius, Lisa Michael Brozick Fako, Erik Liljenberg David Gauger Assistant Principal Viola Robert Switala, Becky Coffman, Rebecca Miller Trombone Reed Capshaw Bass Lauren Pierce, David Principal Scholl Adam Moen Bass Trombone Mark Fry Tuba Charles Schuchat Principal Timpani Robert Everson Principal Percussion Brian Oriente Principal Michael Folker

Flute Cindy Fudala Clarinet Barbara Drapcho Horn Mary Jo Neher, Peter Jirousek, Renée Vogen Trumpet Greg Fudala Timpani Richard Janicki Percussion Jon Johnson

Harp Lillian Lau Guest Principal

Stage Managers David Goldman and Eric Block

ADMINISTRATION/ADMINISTRACIÓN Chief Executive Officer, Marc Thayer Vice President of Artistic Planning & Operations, Eric Gaston-Falk Director of Finance & Administration, Rebecca DeWane Director of Marketing, Chuck Kocal Director of Development, Leslie Antoniel Orchestra Librarian and Digital Marketing Manager, Macauley Manzano Community Partnerships & Orchestra Personnel Manager, Greg Heintz Public Relations Manager, Donna Lake Patron Services Manager, Luiza Moraes Corporate Development Manager, Betty Briceño Box Office Manager, Erica Warszewik Development Coordinator, Jonathan Horn In Harmony Program Coordinator, LaTrisha Williams Translator, Elsa Jimenez

MUSIC DIRECTOR / DIRECTOR MUSICAL Chad Goodman has received widespread praise for thrilling conducting that combines “precision, agility and fervor” (N. Stanić Kovačevic, South Florida Classical Review) and for displaying the “pitch perfect combination of abandon and subtlety” (L. Budman, South Florida Classical Review) The 2024/25 season marks Goodman’s 2nd season as Music Director of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra—only the fifth leader in the orchestra’s prestigious seven-decade history. Concerts with the ESO include Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.6, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with Stella Chen, Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 coupled with Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto performed by Samuel Vargas and Holst’s masterpiece, The Planets.

Goodman holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music and a Master of Music degree from San Francisco State University. His mentors include Michael Tilson Thomas and Alasdair Neale.

GUEST ARTIST/ARTISTA INVITADA Grammy-nominated pianist Joyce Yang is known for her “poetic and sensitive pianism” (The Washington Post) and “wondrous sense of color” (San Francisco Classical Voice). She rose to prominence in 2005, winning silver at the Van Cliburn Competition at age 19, and made her New York Philharmonic debut in 2006.

Yang has performed with prestigious orchestras like the Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Hong Kong Philharmonic, and received the 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant. Her chamber music recordings with violinist Augustin Hadelich earned a Grammy nomination.

A champion of new music, Yang has premiered works by Michael Torke, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Reinaldo Moya. Her discography includes Collage and Wild Dreams (Avie Records) and a live Tchaikovsky recording with the Odense Symphony Orchestra.

As a chamber musician, she has collaborated with the Takács Quartet and the Emerson String Quartet. Yang served as Guest Artistic Director for the Laguna Beach Music Festival and worked with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet on Half/Cut/Split.

This season, she is Artist-in-Residence at the Grant Park Music Festival and performs in over 30 cities. Born in Seoul, Yang studied at The Juilliard School, where she earned the Arthur Rubinstein Prize. She is a Steinway artist.

PROGRAM NOTES Written by - Daniel Maki Overture to The Song of Hiawatha Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a composer who would frequently be called the “Black Mahler”, was born in London to an English mother and a father from Sierra Leone who was a practicing physician. The couple was not married and when the father returned to Africa because of frustration with racial prejudice (he was unaware of the pregnancy), the child was raised by the mother and her family. She named her son after the distinguished poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (without the hyphen, which was apparently added much later due to a printer’s error). There were musicians on the mother’s side of the family, and the boy quickly benefited from the instruction, displaying extraordinary ability. At the age of fifteen he entered the Royal College of Music where he would study with one of England’s prominent composers, Charles Villiers Stanford.

By his early twenties he was an established composer and in 1898 completed the work which would bring him international fame, a cantata entitled Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on Longfellow’s poem. Deeply fascinated by the poem (he would name his own son Hiawatha), he would add two more cantatas making a trilogy under the overall title, The Song of Hiawatha. This work would become wildly popular in England, rivaling such established choral classics as Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Largely on the basis of this work, Coleridge-Taylor made three trips to the United States in the early 1900’s, where he conducted many performances. Among his honors was a visit to president Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a rare occurrence for a person of color at the time. He was lionized especially by the American black community, with the creation of a 200-voice chorus in Washington. D.C., named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society.

Several public schools were named after him, including some in Baltimore and Louisville.

The overture was written after Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and eventually would become known as an independent work. Its colorful orchestration, melodic interest, and rhythmic excitement accomplish what a good overture does, grabbing the attention of the audience and preparing them for what is to come.

The work begins with a slow introduction which gives fragments of what will eventually become the main theme, accompanied by colorful harp chords. The main body of the overture is based on two main themes, the first being a rough approximation of the spiritual, “Nobody knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”, and the second a fervently lyrical accompanying melody.

The themes are developed according to traditional symphonic practice and followed by a jubilant coda, which brings the overture to a dramatic conclusion.

The composer wrote that the overture is “an attempt to reproduce, or at least, to suggest, the impressions received by the composer on reading Longfellow’s poem.” *

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Piano Concerto for in A minor, op. 16 Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) It has been said that in certain creative fields such as lyric poetry and mathematics the mind works best while young.

Occasionally too in music a young composer will produce a masterpiece of such freshness and spontaneity that it can never be repeated. Such apparently was the case with Grieg’s Piano Concerto, written when he was twenty-five years old. It would remain one of a kind, the only large-scale orchestral work in classical form which he would undertake. Like his idol Chopin, Grieg was essentially a miniaturist, working most comfortably in the small lyrical forms, and it was in that direction that he would turn after writing the concerto. Although he would do subsequent distinguished work, no other single work would capture the public’s imagination like the concerto.

At the peak of its popularity the concerto was one of the most frequently performed works in the repertoire and was pronounced by no less an authority than Serge Rachmaninoff to be one of the greatest of all piano concertos. As critic Michael Steinberg has suggested, it is well worth keeping in mind that Grieg’s work, premiered in 1869, came before the concertos of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, which now seem to epitomize in the public mind the glamorous late romantic piano style. (Tchaikovsky also waxed ecstatic over the work.) Although the concerto has lost some of the prestige that it once enjoyed, perhaps through sheer overexposure,

it still deserves an honored place in the repertoire for its beautiful melodic writing and solid craftmanship.

The thunderous opening chords in the piano remain one of the most instantly recognizable passages in all of music. As many commentators have pointed out, this and many other features of the work are modeled after Robert Schumann’s piano concerto, also in A minor, which Grieg heard in Leipzig during his student days.

After the introduction comes the famous first theme, which made it to the top of the charts as a pop song during the 1940’s. The fervent second theme is introduced in the cellos, against the advice, incidentally, of Franz Liszt, who urged the young composer to change the orchestration and give the solo to the trumpet.

(It is now generally agreed that Liszt should have minded his own business.)

The tender and occasionally Chopinesque slow movement leads without pause into the whirlwind finale, whose main theme is based on the halling, a Norwegian folk dance in 2/4 time. After a lyrical interlude, the dance theme returns once again and is finally transformed into a triple meter dance. A majestic chorale-like section brings the concerto to a dramatic conclusion. * * * Symphony No. 7 in D minor, op. 70 Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) Musicians, like members of other professions, have their little jokes. One of the oldest, now quite hoary with age, has been applied to various composers but when referring to Dvořák reads as follows: how many symphonies did Dvořák write? Answer: Three.

Numbers 7, 8, and 9. The joke depends, of course, upon the fact that the composer’s last three symphonies have come to be seen as the summit of his symphonic achievement and, especially in this country, have become so popular as to overshadow the earlier ones. (This is particularly unfortunate with the Sixth Symphony, which happens to be a delightful, beautifully constructed work that deserves to be heard more often.)

In any case, it was indeed the Seventh Symphony which formed a major milestone in Dvořák’s development as a symphonic composer. For various reasons, it was his first effort at writing a symphony in the grandest possible manner and one that deliberately sought to emulate the loftiest works in the great German

tradition. Here the composer would try to show the world that he was not merely a Czech nationalist composer but one who was capable of incorporating his natural Slavic musical tendencies into a more international (read German) style. Although it would be the Ninth Symphony, the famous “New World” Symphony, that would become the most popular of all and has all too often overshadowed all of his other works, among many musicians and scholars it is the Seventh that has pride of place as Dvořák’s greatest achievement in symphonic form.

The impetus for the new symphony was a commission from the Philharmonic Society of London. Dvořák’s success in London in 1884 as a conductor of his own music resulted in his election as an Honorary Member of the Society and was a significant opportunity to enlarge upon his growing international reputation. The commission would require a new symphony that would be due the following year and would be a great opportunity to present himself as a world figure. As he wrote to a friend in December of 1884, “a new symphony for London occupies me, and wherever I go I think of nothing but my work, which must be capable of stirring the world, and God grant me that it will!”

The primary musical inspiration for Dvořák’s new work was the hearing of the Third Symphony of his close friend, mentor, and musical hero, Johannes Brahms, in Vienna in December of 1883. For Dvořák, Brahms’ new work was the pinnacle of musical achievement and something to be aspired to. As he wrote to his publisher, “I don’t want to let Brahms down.”

Although the London premiere in April of 1885 was deemed a success, early performances of the symphony were not as warmly received as some of the composer’s earlier work. The reason would appear to be that audiences were expecting the rather more cheerfully ethnic Dvořák of works such as the popular Slavonic Dances or the joyful D major Sixth Symphony rather than the somber new symphony in the dark key of D minor. Nevertheless, over time the Seventh Symphonic would take its place as one of the major works of the symphonic repertoire. As the redoubtable English scholar Donald Francis Tovey once wrote, “I have no hesitation in setting Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony along with the C major Symphony of Schubert and the four symphonies of Brahms, as among the greatest and purest examples in this art-form since Beethoven.”

Dvořák’s biographers have speculated about the reason for the unusually intense and heroic quality of the symphony, which

some commentators have gone so far as to call his “Tragic” Symphony. Possible factors may have been the death of the composer’s mother several years earlier, as well as his concern over the failing health of his mentor Bedřich Smetana, who died in 1884.

Perhaps more to the point, though, is the fact that Dvořák seems to have been going through a personal crisis having to do with his identity as a Czech musician. He was deeply patriotic, proud of his Czech heritage, and strongly supportive of the growing movement of Czech nationalism, which reacted strongly against any perceived oppression or condescension from the German speaking part of the Hapsburg Empire with its center in Vienna. As Dvořák’s international reputation grew, however, he felt the inevitable pull to become more German in his musical thinking, to write operas on German rather than on Slavic subjects, and perhaps even to move to Vienna, the epicenter of the Austro-German musical universe. Though a minor point, his disagreement with his German publisher Simrock over whether his scores should use the German form Anton rather than the Czech form Antonín were symptomatic of the problem. It seems that in the Seventh Symphony Dvořák shows his determination to work out a solution to his internal conflict, writing music that was at once true to his Czech heritage and yet employing the timehonoured forms and procedures of the great Austro-German tradition.

Given that background, it is not surprising that Dvořák said that the opening theme of the first movement came to him at the Prague railroad station as a train brought in several hundred antiHapsburg protesters from Hungary to attend a program at the National Theater Festival in support of the movement for greater Czech independence. The darkness and turbulence of this opening theme is only temporarily relieved by a lovely second theme in the woodwinds, as the intense drama continues throughout the first movement. Particularly striking is the sense of compact development, as one passage seems to lead inevitably to the next.

After a great climax, the movement winds down and ends quietly with the opening theme restated.

The beautiful slow movement begins with a chorale-like theme of great serenity, but a darker mood soon intrudes. In a note written on the sketch of the movement, Dvořák wrote “from the sad times”, probably a reference to the death of his mother and the premature deaths of his first three children.

The remarkable scherzo movement is one of the most effective since the symphonies of Beethoven. It has some of the

characteristics of the furiant, a fiery Czech dance employing cross rhythms. The middle section or trio, as such a contrasting section of a dance movement is usually called, provides variety by being in a major key before leading back to the fiery opening section.

The stormy finale features a feeling of constant forward motion, a feeling of energy which the composer said reflected the strong spirit of the Czech people toward political repression.

Although at the very end of the movement the music turns into a major key as many nineteenth-century minor key symphonies do, it is not the clearly triumphant sort of conclusion that works such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony present. To this listener at least, this remarkable symphony leaves the impression that further struggle lies ahead.

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