20230422_University Symphony Orchestra

THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents

Members of the

University Symphony Orchestra

Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor Sebástian Jiménez, Graduate Associate Conductor with special guest

Noël Wan, Harp

Saturday, April 22, 2023 7:30 p.m. | Ruby Diamond Concert Hall

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PROGRAM Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

El Dorado for Harp and String Orchestra

Sebastián Jiménez, conductor

Noël Wan, harp

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Marjan Mozetich (b. 1948)

INTERMISSION Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 Allegro con brio Andante con moto Scherzo: Allegro Allegro-Presto

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All… Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.

Recording Notice: This performance may be recorded. Please note that members of the audience may at times be included in this process. By attending this performance you consent to have your image or likeness appear in any live or recorded video or other transmission or reproduction made in conjunction to the performance.

Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun While others, notably Franz Liszt, were on the forefront of stylistic change during the nineteenth century, it is surely Claude Debussy who forever established entirely new ways of thinking about the fundamental ways of defining and composing music in Western culture. More than anyone, he truly was the father of much of the philosophical basis for the complete turnover in musical art that defined the twentieth century. And, along the way, he composed some of the most original, creative, and dare we say, beautiful music in the repertoire. His name, of course, is indelibly linked with what is popularly called “musical impressionism,”—a term he deplored--but that doesn’t really specifically tell you much. What you may say is that he largely worked within a musical style that made little use of so many of the characteristics of a musical tradition that really dominated the concert halls of the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of us are familiar with concepts such as sonata form; development; key relationships; major and minor tonalities, with their respective scales, counterpoint, fugues, and especially “developing” musical ideas in an ongoing linear fashion.

As dominant as these procedures were, Debussy saw other ways of creating and working with musical ideas. His specifically French way of looking at things was quite a contrast to the ideas and methods of the German-speaking composers (all names we know so well!) that had dominated concert halls for several centuries. There was opera, to be sure, and Italians had always held sway there, but in abstract music (no words) the Germans were generally king.

Along comes Debussy with a refreshing alternative æsthetic.

In a nutshell, Debussy was not much interested in systems of musical composition, wherein each part—large or small—had a rational, expected, and traditional relationship to every other part. Rather, he focused upon listening to musical sounds in new ways—considering them just for their intrinsic sound, and not how they might fit into a hierarchy as a mere building block. He opened up new ways of composing and listening, and the musical world was changed forever.

He adored painting and poetry, and his deep immersion in those arts is fundamental in searching for meaning in his personal musical style. His æsthetic was rooted in the French nineteenth-century literary movement known as “symbolism.” While most educated Americans today know and speak glibly of “impressionism,” and associate our composer with that style in painting, it is with the much less familiar concept of “symbolism,” specifically that in French literature, that informed almost all of Debussy’s music. Symbolism is traced by most to the poet, Charles Baudelaire, as well as to the imagery and themes of Edgar Allen Poe, whose works in French translation were of great popularity and influence in France. Later, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine were the central figures of the movement, and whose influence on Debussy it would be difficult to overestimate.

Taken from the poetry of Stèphane Mallarmé, L’après-midi d’un faune (1876), is the subject of Debussy’s onemovement “tone poem,” and is his most recognized work. While the text concerns the awakening of a faun from a drowsy mid-afternoon nap, and his reflections on his memories of his adventures with nymphs that morning, the narrative is not straightforward and linear—and neither is Debussy’s score. A faun, of course, is a creature that is half goat and half man, symbolic in literature of untrammeled natural spirits, and nymphs are young, free spirits who sing and dance their way to amorous freedom.

His Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), from the immortal opening languid, sensuous flute solo, creates an episodic series of feelings, atmospheres, and reflections rather than a story. For these thoughts and moods Debussy crafted perfect orchestral colors, melodies, and harmonies. While not a follower of Brahms—nor, on the other hand, of Liszt, Wagner, and Strauss, either--Debussy, with this first great success, opened the door to the twentieth century in music, and it was never the same thereafter.

– ©2021 William E. Runyan Mozetich: El Dorado for harp and strings Winner of the SOCAN Jan V. Matejcek Concert Music Award, Marjan Mozetich is one of the most performed and broadcast Canadian composers of today. His music is beautiful, lush, and romantic. The music is in a postmodern perspective with touches of the driving minimal, the spiritual and the new age. Many of his works have been recorded on CBC Records, Centrediscs, BIS, Chandos, BRT Radio (Belgium). His music has been used by many dance companies, on several radio programs, movies, and even on the national airline. It is compellingly beautiful music that captivates the listener.

The beautiful and compelling piece, El Dorado, by Marjan Mozetich was composed in 1981 for harp and strings. This work is like listening to music of the Baroque for the language is very much the same. This is not to say the music is not new; the first few bars will tell you that. But it is constructed from the same building blocks as were the works of the Baroque masters, except the repetitions and sequences are longer and within a much more lush romantic vein.

This is part of the attraction of El Dorado, the magic that lies in its capacity to remain illusive. Its motoric drive propels the listener on a journey of distant yearnings and memories, a paradox of the palpable and yet unattainable.

The work was commissioned by New Music Concerts with the assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. Audiences have always loved the work.

– Canadian Music Centre Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 “…music like that ought not to be written.”

So was verdict of Berlioz’s former teacher and mentor Jean-François Lesueur after attending a performance of Beethoven’s 5th symphony in Paris in 1828. Lesueur was not reacting as negatively as his famous quote would suggest, he was simply echoing the sentiments of a European musical establishment that was at once shocked, inspired, awestricken, and dumbfounded. The writing was on the wall: this was no mere entertainment for the enlightened classes of crumbling European nobility, but rather a profound statement concerning universal pain and passion, only through which love and joy are truly possible.

Twenty years earlier - December 22, 1808 - the first performance of the monumental work took place in Vienna, conducted by Beethoven himself. The program of that concert included the Piano Concerto No. 4 and the 6th symphony, a decidedly dissimilar work whose premier occurred less than three hours earlier than that of the 5th symphony. The entire night seems to have been bedeviled with problems; the heating system had broken down just hours before the concert, leaving the audience to shiver their way through four hours exposed to the bitter Vienna winter. The orchestra had played poorly, a result of having only one rehearsal prior to mounting not one but two major orchestral premiers. Additionally, toward the end of the frigid evening, Beethoven was forced to stop and restart his Choral Fantasy due to a performer’s error.

Opening with what is arguably the most famous motive in Western musical history, Beethoven immediately commands the listener’s attention via the dichotomy between the urgency of the short eighth notes and the ominous, sudden stasis of the held longer note. This motive, placed firmly within the listener’s psyche within the first few seconds of the work, unifies the entirety of the forty-plus-minute-long symphony. The first theme of the work is clearly derived from this opening motive, but only the more careful listeners will be able to recognize this as the bass accompaniment to the more relaxed, lyrical secondary theme.

The second movement, marked Andante con moto, is a set of double variations. Two distinct themes are presented and then varied in alternation before an elongated coda. Here again we see Beethoven’s revolutionary approach to the symphonic genre. Using a form that was generally associated with musical amateurism, that of ‘theme and variations,’ Beethoven transcends commonality by employing variations that are tender and lyrical, or majestic and bombastic.

Listen carefully to the second of the two themes for the reappearance of the opening motive, this time cloaked in quasi-military garb and handled by the winds.

The third movement is a dark, brooding scherzo and trio that is at times a virtuoso display for the basses and cellos.

Beethoven presses the traditional dance movement of the symphony into the highest of gears, evoking images of a ghoulish pantomime and macabre march that makes use of the opening theme. Beethoven doesn’t close the scherzo, instead he mires it in a murky haze that is permeated by distant drums and only bits of the remembered melodies.

These melodic bits resist their otherworldly relegation to strive upward with repetitive insistence, gradually emerging to the C-major triumph that is the fourth and final movement without pause.

The shock of the direct segue between the final movements is compounded by the additional force of trombones and piccolo. This amassing of almost unprecedented orchestral forces is appropriate for the finale of such a grand and intense work. Beethoven will, before all is said, suddenly stop the finale and reintroduce material from the scherzo in the quietest of manners, thereby accentuating the sheer force of the orchestra when it reenters. The coda contains many of the themes in a temporally compressed form, and Beethoven ends this tour de force with no less than 29 bars of tonic, C-major chords played fortissimo.

–Reprinted from Matthew McAllister

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Members of the University Symphony Orchestra Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor Sebástian Jiménez, Graduate Associate Conductor Violin I MaryKatherine Brown‡ Stacey Sharpe Masayoshi Arakawa Maria Mendez Tomasso Bruno Miranda Rojas

Bass Gene Waldron, III* Alejandro Bermudez Alex Gay

Violin II Alyssa Orantes* Darrian Lee Tyler Tran Rebeca Masalles Rosalee Walsh

Flute Samantha Donnel* Kaitlyn Calcagino Rachael Lawson

Viola Hunter Sanchez* Ahdiayah Horton Jeremy Hill Joshua Singletary Anna Laldin Caroline Bruns Cello Marina Burguete-Diago* Mitchell George Arabella Schwerin Grace Lege

Harp Isabelle Scott

Oboe Alec McDaniel* Jennifer McHenry Andrew Swift, EH Clarinet Connor Croasmun* Trey Burke Bassoon Emmalee Odom* Abigail Whitehurst Carson Long (contra)

Horn Jordan Perkins* Cory Kirby Isaac Roman AC Caruthers Trumpet Vance Garven* Sawyer Prichard Trombone Justin Hamann* Will Roberts Jonah Zimmerman Timpani/Percussion Chris Baird Orchestra Manager Madeline Hoth Equipment Manager Alejandro Bermudez Librarians Nate Haines Sebastian Jimenez Administrative Assistant Amanda Frampton