The Atlanta Chamber Winds “Lineage”

Concerts @ First presents

The Atlanta Chamber Winds “Lineage”

The Atlanta Chamber Winds Lineage April 3 , 2022 3:00 p.m.

Robert J. Ambrose, Music Director and Conductor Ellie Anderson, Guest Conductor

Serenade in E-flat Major, K. 375 (1781)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

I. Allegro maestoso II. Menuetto III. Adagio IV. Menuetto V. Allegro

Contrafacta Hungarica (1977)

Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000)

I. Basse Danse II. Gagliarda III. Passamezzo IV. Saltarello V. Andante espressivo VI. Heiduckentanz The Death of Pierrot (2000)

Fredrik Söderberg (b. 1966)

I. The lost tango II. The death of Pierrot III. Into the light Ellie Anderson, conductor Slavonic Dance No. 8, Op. 46, No. 8 (1878) Slavonic Dance No. 15, Op. 72, No. 7 (1886)

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) Arr. By Patrick Clements

THE ATLANTA CHAMBER WINDS Sarah Kruser Ambrose, Kelly Via – flute Lara Dahl, Christina Gavin – oboe Miranda Dohrman, Katherine White – clarinet Jason Eklund, Julie Gerhardt – horn John Grove, Dan Worley – bassoon Robert J. Ambrose – conductor Ellie Anderson – guest conductor ABOUT THE ATLANTA CHAMBER WINDS The Atlanta Chamber Winds is the premiere ensemble of its type in the Southeastern United States. Founded by Robert J. Ambrose in 2006, the group comprises many of the finest professional wind players in Atlanta including members of the Atlanta Opera and Ballet Orchestras and Georgia State University faculty. The ensemble’s core instrumentation consists of pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, with additional musicians joining the group as the repertoire demands. As the only chamber wind ensemble in the metropolitan area, the Atlanta Chamber Winds provides a unique voice in the cultural landscape of the city.

The ensemble has released two recordings on the Albany Record label. The first, Music from Paris features six previously unrecorded works by French composers. This recording was widely praised and received strong reviews in the American Record Guide and Gramophone Magazine. Their latest recording Wind Music was released in 2021 and features six works by American composers including Pulitzer Prize-winner Leslie Bassett, Ezra Laderman, Tim Jansa, Robert Spittal, Esther Ballou, and Daniel Pinkham.

The Atlanta Chamber Winds are an Ensemble-In-Residence at Georgia State University.

PROGRAM NOTES SERENADE IN E-FLAT MAJOR, K. 375 – WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART On November 3, 1781, Mozart wrote to his father from Vienna: At eleven o'clock last night I was serenaded by two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons playing my own music. . . . These musicians had the front gate opened for them, and when they had formed in the courtyard, they gave me, just as I was about to undress for bed, the most delightful surprise in the world with the opening E-flat chord.

The nighttime disturbance that delighted Mozart at his apartment window more than two centuries ago—and would, no doubt, incur the wrath of many a condominium board today—is one of the landmarks of the literature. It was Mozart's earliest masterpiece for wind ensemble and the first great work of its kind by any composer. The six musicians gathered beneath Mozart's window—“poor wretches who play together quite nicely all the same”—were the same men who had given the first performance of the serenade on October 15 at the Vienna home of court painter Joseph von Hickel.

Mozart told his father that he wrote it “rather carefully” in the hopes that it would impress Joseph von Strack, a regular guest of the von Hickels who happened to be the valet and personal cellist for the emperor and might pass along a favorable report on Mozart's music. Later learning that the emperor had established a wind octet as his house “band,” Mozart added two oboe parts to the score the next summer, while he was putting the final touches on his new opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. That, too, proved futile, at least from the point of view of securing a court performance, because the emperor was more interested in hearing potpourri suites from popular ballets and operas than important new works. In any event, it is in the version for wind octet, rather than its original scoring for sextet, that Mozart's E-flat serenade has come down to us. (Mozart couldn't get to first base with the emperor: even his transcription of music from The Abduction from the Seraglio didn'get played at court because someone else managed to arrange it for wind octet first.)

The Allegro maestoso opens with solemn repeated chords (the resounding E-flat “fanfare” that echoed in Mozart's courtyard that night) which serve as an architectural pillar throughout the movement, returning at important structural moments in the standard sonata form blueprint—to mark the development and recapitulation sections, as well as the coda.

Two minuets frame the great central adagio. The first is somewhat stately; the second overflows with hearty, folk-song melodies. With the intimate, deeply expressive Adagio, we leave behind the world of festive, public serenades for the personal confidences of the opera stage. This movement shares more than proximity with the opera Idomeneo (only nine numbers earlier in the Kochel catalog), which is rich in expressive woodwind writing and characterized with moments in which the winds sing out, as if they are ready to join the human voices on stage. As Richard Wagner later wrote, Mozart “inspired his instruments with the ardent breath of the human voice to which his genius was overwhelmingly inclined.” In Idomeneo, Mozart had uncovered the dramatic potential of the operatic ensemble in the celebrated quartet “Andro ramingo e solo,” also in E-flat. Now, in this serenade, that same instinct produces an adagio quartet of operatic dimensions, with the oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn stepping forward to the footlights, singly and in various combinations, while the action freezes.

The Finale, breezy and lighthearted (despite an impressive fugue-like section) but never superficial, is a sure-fire crowd pleaser. The night of its “premiere” at the von Hickels, the musicians performed the serenade two more times—“as soon as they finished playing it in one place,” Mozart wrote, “they were taken off somewhere else and paid to play it.”

Program note by Phillip Huscher CONTRAFACTA HUNGARICA- FERENC FARKAS Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000) was one of Hungary's most important 20th-century composers. His works include over seven hundred opuses. He composed in all genres, opera, ballet, musicals and operettas, orchestral music, concertos, chamber music and sacred music. His wide literary culture enabled him to set words to music in 13 languages, stemming from about 130 writers and poets. The three components of Farkas's very personal musical language are Italian neoclassicism, Hungarian folk music and twelve-tone serialism. His style is characterized by melodic invention, clear forms, a sense of colour and proportion, and lively and spontaneous rhythm.

Contrafacta Hungarica was composed in 59 7 7 and premiered on May 59th of that year in Bern, Switzerland by the Bern Wind Octet. The title Contrafacta refers in this instance to a designation used not so much in the music but rather in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance “… the medieval poetry is, in fact, a world of variants, of contrafacta . . . creative imitation was one of the basic principals of the aesthetics of late Humanism . . . (Tibor Kardos, The Humanism of Balint Balassi, 1954).

The six movements are based on Medieval and Renaissance dances.

THE DEATH OF PIERROT – FREDERIK SÖDERBERG Frederik Soderberg is a Swedish composer of orchestra and chamber music as well as music for theatre and visual art forms. Soderberg is a French horn player and draws inspiration for his compositions from his experience as a performing musician. He has a large catalogue of works. His most recent project is the music for a dance performance at the festival “La Mama Moves” in New York City.

Of the piece Death of Pierrot, the composer writes: “Is the theater character Pierrot dead - or is he just pretending? That the composer and musician Fredrik Soderberg is active primarily in theater music can be seen in his octet The Death of Pierrot. The piece is adventurous and surprising. The music flirts with the kind of entertainment music that the royal courts arranged in the 18th century and is thus in dialogue with Mozart's Gran Partita. The piece was premiered by the Swedish Serenade Ensemble in 2000 at Musikaliska in Stockholm.”

SLAVONIC DANCES NO. 8 AND NO. 15 – ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK The Slavonic Dances are a series of 16 orchestral pieces composed by Antonín Dvorak in 1878 and 1886 and published in two sets as Op. 46 and Op. 72 respectively. Originally written for piano four hands, the Slavonic Dances were inspired by Johannes Brahms’s own Hungarian Dances and were orchestrated at the request of Dvorak's publisher soon after composition. The pieces, lively and full of national character, were well received at the time and today are considered among the composer's most memorable works, occasionally making appearances in popular culture. “Contrary to what the title might suggest, the dances are not so much inspired by Slavic folk music generally, but specifically by styles and forms from Bohemia. In these pieces, Dvorak never actually quotes folk melodies, but evokes their style and spirit by using traditional rhythmic patterns and structures in keeping with traditional folk dances.”

Prior to the publication of the Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, Dvorak was a relatively unknown composer and was of modest means. Consequently, he had applied for the Austrian State Prize fellowship (German "Stipendium") in order to fund his composing work. After he won the prize three times in four years (1874, 1876 and 1877), Johannes Brahms, as one of the members of the committee responsible for awarding the stipend, referred Dvorak to his own publisher, Fritz Simrock. The first of Dvorak's music to be published by Simrock was the Moravian Duets, which attained widespread success; encouraged, Simrock asked the composer to write something with a dance-like character.

Unsure how to begin, Dvorak used Brahms's Hungarian Dances as a model—but only as a model; there are a number of important differences between the two works.[4] For example, whereas Brahms made use of actual Hungarian folk melodies, Dvorak only made use of the characteristic rhythms of Slavic folk music: the melodies are entirely his own. Simrock was immediately impressed by the music Dvorak produced (originally for piano four hands), and asked the composer for an orchestral version as well. Both versions were published within the year, and quickly established Dvorak's international reputation. The enormous success of the Op. 46 dances led Simrock to request another set of Slavonic Dances in 1886; Dvorak's subsequent Op. 72 dances met with a similar reception.

Program note from Wikipedia

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