GUEST
CONDUCTOR / DIRECTOR INVITADO
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 2023/24 season marks Goodman’s inaugural season as Music Director of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra only the fifth leader in the orchestra’s prestigious seven-decade history. Upcoming concerts include Strauss’ Four Last Songs with soprano Christine Brewer, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Orli Shaham and Beethoven’s Symphonies No. 2 and No. 9.
Goodman also serves as Artistic Director of IlluminArts, Miami’s art song and chamber music concert series. In this role, he curates site-specific classical music programs in collaboration with the leading museums, art galleries, and historic venues of Miami.
From 2019 to 2023, Goodman was the Conducting Fellow of the New World Symphony. In addition to leading the orchestra in more than fifty performances, he created the educational program “SPARK: How Composers Find Inspiration,” which blended engaging audience participation with captivating light design and videography.
From 2018 to 2023, Goodman served as an Assistant Conductor to the San Francisco Symphony, working alongside Michael Tilson Thomas, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Manfred Honeck, Daniel Harding, Pablo Heras-Casado, Simone Young, and James Gaffigan, among others. He has recently made debuts with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco
Chamber Orchestra, and Orquesta Sinfónica del Estado de Puebla (OSEP).
As Founder and Artistic Director of Elevate Ensemble, Goodman’s ambitious vision for concert programming resulted in the pairing of music from Bay Area composers with underappreciated gems of the 20th and 21st centuries. Under his leadership, Elevate Ensemble established a Composer-in-Residence program and commissioned fifteen new works.
Goodman also leads workshops that teach young musicians the business skills needed to successfully navigate the music world. Forbes praised the conductor’s bold strides both on and off stage and hailed him as “An entrepreneur bringing innovation to classical music.” Last year, he published the book "You Earned a Music Degree. Now What?”
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 INVITADO
Violinist Isabella Lippi, who has been called “A standout, even among virtuosos,” began performing in public at the age of 10 when she made her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She has since performed in numerous recitals and has appeared as guest soloist with orchestras in the United States, Mexico, Europe and the Far East.
In 1989, Isabella Lippi won the St. Louis Symphony Young Artist Competition, so impressing Maestro Leonard Slatkin, that for the first time in the 55-year history of the competition, the winner (Ms. Lippi) was invited to perform with the symphony
in subscription concerts under Maestro Slatkin. Of this program, the St. Louis Post Dispatch declared, “Lippi introduced rhythmic subtleties into the music of the like that haven’t been heard since the heyday of Heifetz.”
Ms. Lippi has won a number of competitions and awards including First Place in the Young Musicians Foundation National Debut Competition, Highest Honors in the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Talent Search, the Henryk Szerying International Competition, and the Illinois Young Performers Competition where she performed again with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a live television broadcast under Maestro Hugh Wolff. She was also named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts.
Born in Chicago, Isabella Lippi’s teacher have included Robert Lipsett at the University of Southern California, Dorothy Delay at the Juilliard School and Almita and Roland Vamos in Chicago.
PROGRAM NOTES
Written by - Daniel Maki
Janitzio
Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)
Despite a sadly shortened life, Silvestre Revueltas made a significant and lasting contribution to Mexican music. He was born on the last day of the nineteenth century in Santiago Papasquiaro in Durango into a family with artistic interests. The family moved to Mexico City where Revueltas enrolled in the National Conservatory, and he then pursued studies in the United States, first at St.Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, and then at the Chicago Musical College. His training prepared him as a violinist and conductor, as well as a composer.
In his twenties Revueltas made much of his living as a violinist, playing recitals, chamber music, and sometimes playing in movie theater orchestras for silent films. He had caught the attention of Mexico’s most influential musical figure, composer Carlos Chávez, who took him on as a protégée. In 1929 Chavez invited him to join the faculty at the National Conservatory and to become his assistant conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico. The two men eventually had a falling-out, but for some years they were the major force in defining what Mexican music was. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 had left the country searching for its identity, not only politically but also culturally. Revueltas developed a style that, in its color, rhythmic interest, and sudden changes of mood, appropriately evoked the spirit of Mexican culture. Though he very rarely quoted them literally, he effectively exploited folk songs, blending them into a Mexican soundscape. Inspiration came from other places as well, including African rhythms and European music such as that of Igor Stravinsky, and such fashionable French composers as Eric Satie, Francis Poulenc, and Edgard Varèse.
After his split with Chávez, he tried to start a rival orchestra which failed in short order. In 1937, he put his leftist political views into practice by traveling to Spain in order to support the Republican cause in the Civil War. After Franco’s victory, Revueltas returned to Mexico to confront two problems that he had struggled with for some time: poverty and alcoholism. He died of pneumonia complicated by alcoholism.
Revueltas composed in many genres, including chamber music, vocal and piano music, and ballet and film scores. (He appeared as a bar piano player in the 1935 film, Let’s go with Pancho Villa, for which he wrote the music. When shooting starts while he is playing La Cucaracha, he holds up a sign which reads, Se supplica no tirarie al pianista. “Please don’t shoot the piano player.")
The composer’s most representative works, however, are his colorful orchestral pieces, of which Janitzio is a wellknown example. This work falls into the category of program music, i.e., music which illustrates a literary, pictorial, or some other extra-musical idea. In this case the music presents a kind of travelogue of Janitzio Island in Lake Pátzcuaro, a popular tourist destination. In a brief program note, Revueltas reveals both his mordant sense of humor as well as his left-wing outlook of bourgeois consumerism: "Janitzio is a small fisherman’s island in Lake Pátzcuaro. Lake Pátzcuaro stinks. Romantic and sentimental travelers have embellished it with verses and music of the picture-postcard type. Not to be outdone, I too add my grain of sand in an infinite yearning for glory and renown. Posterity will undoubtedly reward my contributions to tourism.”
Janitzio is set in a simple three-part ABA form, beginning with a joyously raucous section marked con brio (with vigor) which uses fragments of popular music from that region. The middle section, marked Lento espressivo (slow and expressive), provides contrast with a beautifully reflective melody heard first in bassoon and clarinet. The final section returns to the exuberance of the beginning with one interruption near the end: a brief waltz reminiscent of
19th century salon music which, after that nostalgic historical reminiscence, returns soon enough to the excitement of the present.
Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, K. 218
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91)
As a performer, Mozart is usually first thought of as one of the greatest pianists of his time, someone who wrote some 30 concertos for that still relatively new-fangled instrument, many of them for his own use. It should come as no surprise, however, that as the son of Leopold Mozart, a fine violinist and the author of one of the most widely used violin method books of its time, Wolfgang was also a fine violinist. As Leopold, ever the proud papa, once wrote to his son, “You yourself do not know how well you play the violin…when you play with energy and with your whole heart and soul, yes indeed, just as though you were the first violinist in all of Europe.”
The violin was an important part of his life during his teenage years as he was a paid court musician in the service of the ruler of his hometown of Salzburg, PrinceArchbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, a boss, incidentally, whom Mozart despised and who would eventually fire him. In his late teenage years Mozart would write five violin concertos, probably for his own use, the first coming in 1773, and then, in the space of a few months, the remaining four in 1775. These works show a remarkable insight into the mind of the teenaged genius as he grows in skill and confidence from one work to another.
The Fourth Concerto looks strongly toward Italian models such as concertos by Luigi Boccherini. Considerable virtuosity is required, making it a popular showpiece in the repertoire.
Set in the standard three movement layout, the work opens with a stock fanfare-like figure which gives a brisk, march-like
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character at the beginning. Eventually, though, Mozart presents several other charming and graceful melodies. The slow movement gives a foretaste of Mozart as opera composer, as the violin soars above the orchestra like a soprano aria.
As is common in concerto finales, the third movement is a rondo, i.e., a movement with a recurring refrain. The main theme is in two parts, the first a graceful tune in 2/4 time which then breaks into a gigue-like theme in 6/8 time. In the middle of the movement there is a folk-like section with a drone bass which had associations with Strasbourg, causing Mozart to call this his Strasbourg concerto. The movement ends coyly and quietly.
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, op. 100
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Sergei Prokofiev spent the summer of 1944 near the small town of Ivanovo, some 50 miles outside Moscow, at the “Composers’ Home,” which had been given by the Soviet government to the Composers’ Union. Working with great gusto, he completed the Fifth Symphony by the time he returned to Moscow for the fall season. The new work would prove to be the composer’s most successful attempt at large-scale symphonic composition and a major addition to the twentieth century repertoire.
The premiere took place in Moscow on January 13, 1945, under dramatic, indeed melodramatic circumstances. Just as Prokofiev, who was himself conducting the work, raised his baton to begin, a thunderous roar of artillery was heard in salute to the Red Army, which had just won a decisive victory at the Vistula and was crossing into Germany. According to Prokofiev’s official biographer Israel Nestyev, “Prokofiev’s compelling music perfectly suited the mood of the audience," which was a feeling of elation that the tide of the war had turned decisively.
*
* *
Despite such apparent close connections to the fortunes of war, and despite the fact that many of his fellow composers at Ivanovo had been busy producing “war’’ symphonies and “victory” cantatas, Prokofiev denied that his symphony had any direct programmatic connection to the war. It was, he said, simply “an expression of the greatness of the human spirit,” and a work in which he “wished to glorify man as free and happy.”
Prokofiev’s bad -boy image as a lover of dissonant harmony, deliberate “wrong notes,” and driving, hyperkinetic rhythms has frequently drawn attention to the satiric and grotesque aspect of his style. It should not be forgotten, however, that he had a lyrical gift of a very high order and that he was quite capable of producing long, soaring melodies in the tradition of Russian romanticism, albeit with a twentieth century twist. In the Fifth Symphony, it is the first and third movements that are wonderful examples of this kind of lyricism. The second movement, on the other hand, is one of Prokofiev’s best-known scherzos and is filled with the sardonic humor for which he is so well-known. The finale begins with a restatement of the main theme of the first movement but soon breaks into a boisterous, whirlwind rhythm. Again, it is Prokofiev as parodist, and although beautifully reflective passages interrupt several times, the mocking laughter and motor energy carry the day and drive the work to a rollicking conclusion.
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