THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents the
Members of The University Symphony Orchestra
Alexander Jiménez, Music Director and Conductor
Thomas Roggio, Graduate Associate Conductor
With special guests
Karen Large and Mary Matthews, Flute
Thursday, October 30, 2025 7:30 p.m. | Opperman Music Hall
Serenade for Strings, Op. 20
PROGRAM
Edward Elgar
Allegro piacevole (1857–1934)
Larghetto
Allegretto
Concerto for Two Flutes and Orchestra
Steven Stucky
Elegy: Largo (1949–2016)
Games: Allegro giocoso
Hymn: Adagio
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21
INTERMISSION
Ludwig van Beethoven
Adagio molto—Allegro con brio (1770–1827)
Andante cantabile con moto
Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
Adagio—Allegro molto e vivace
Thomas Roggio,
conductor
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.
Associate Professor of Flute Karen McLaughlin Large teaches flute lessons, flute ensemble, low flutes, Baroque flute, and Wind and Percussion Pedagogy at the FSU College of Music. Large is passionate about helping students navigate their unique paths in the music world. She does this in her lessons and classes through activities in areas such as music entrepreneurship, audition and competition preparation, community outreach, and grantwriting. Large previously served as Associate Professor of Flute and Music Theory at Kansas State University.
Large enjoys performing in concerto, solo, chamber, and large ensemble settings. She plays regularly with Traverso Colore: Baroque Flute Ensemble, Tornado Alley Flutes, and the Florida Flute Orchestra. She also previously performed with the Konza Wind Quintet, Topeka Symphony Orchestra, Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra, Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra, and Pensacola Symphony Orchestra. As a guest artist, she has enjoyed performing and teaching at universities in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Florida.
Large’s research interests include flute transcriptions of Romantic music, creation of the world’s first Virtual Flute Choirs, Baroque flute performance practice, and the intersection of music theory and flute performance. In Spring 2018 she released her first solo CD which featured her original transcriptions, entitled, String to Silver: Flute Transcriptions of Works in the Romantic Tradition. Large regularly performs and presents her research at national and international conferences.
Large earned the DM, MM, and BM degrees from Florida State University studying with Eva Amsler, Stephanie Jutt, and Joshua Carter.
Flutist Mary Matthews enjoys an active career as an international soloist, chamber musician, orchestral flutist, and pedagogue, and has performed on four continents in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Severance Hall, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Fundação Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina, Festival Goethe Institut Música Nueva, and Cité Internationale des Arts. Matthews is an Assistant Professor of Flute at Florida State University’s College of Music; prior to her appointment at FSU, she served as Associate Professor of Flute at Tennessee Tech’s School of Music. She currently serves as second flute of the Tallahassee Symphony, and she performs regularly with orchestras such as the Nashville Symphony, Knoxville Symphony, and Chattanooga Symphony, among others.
An active studio musician and recording artist, Matthews can be heard on soundtracks for film, TV, and video games on Netflix, HBO, and Disney. She has released four albums including Intersections on the Ravello Records label, Three-Nine Line on the MSR Classics label, Charuhas on the Naxos Label, and Preludes & Recitations on the Tonsehen Records label.
An avid performer of new music, Matthews has premiered over 50 new works. She is known for her command of extended techniques and her adventurous programming. She is half of Duo Rossignol with soprano Hillary LaBonte, and the two have been featured at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the New Music Gathering, the Dairy Arts Center’s Soundscape series, and the National Flute Association convention. She also performs as a member of Khemia Ensemble, a 12-member ensemble dedicated to the programming of diverse and innovative repertoire. Khemia Ensemble is 2023 winner of the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant with composer Anuj Bhutani. They have been featured at venues and festivals including National Sawdust, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, Strange Beautiful Music, New Music Gathering, Latin IS America, the Missouri Summer Composition Institute, and the Biennial New Music Festival in Córdoba, Argentina. Passionate artist educators, Khemia has also held residencies at more than a dozen universities in North and South America.
In June of 2021 she released her first method book, co-authored by Nicole Chamberlain, Beatboxing and Beyond. The book is published by Spotted Rocket and was reviewed as “a revelation – it’s a worthy addition to all our libraries” (Flutist Quarterly). She was awarded the 2022 Scholastic Research Award from Tennessee Tech University for the book, and the National Flute Association named Beatboxing & Beyond a finalist in the 2022 Newly Published Music awards.
A native of Rochester, NY, Matthews began her formal flute studies at the Eastman School of Music’s Preparatory Program. She holds the Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from The Hartt School, the Master of Music Degree from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, and the Bachelor of Music Degree from the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music. Her primary teachers include Jan Angus, George Pope, and Janet Arms.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
Elgar: Serenade for Strings
Elgar composed this work in March 1892. The first complete performance was in Antwerp, in July 1897. Elgar was one of the leading figures in what has come to be known as the “second English Renaissance” and he was the first English composer since Henry Purcell (d. 1695) of truly international standing. But all of that still lay in the future when he wrote the Serenade heard here. Elgar was a fine violinist and spent most of his early career as a performer, but beginning in the late 1880s, he began to focus increasingly on composition. His reputation grew slowly, until the triumphant premieres of his Enigma Variations (1899) and the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius (1900). The Serenade is a much smaller work and seems to have been a revision of an earlier set of pieces he had composed in 1888, Much of his earliest orchestral music is light fare intended for small salon and dance orchestras, but this is a much more substantial piece, in the tradition of the earlier Brahms and Dvořák serenades. Years later, Elgar described it as one of his personal favorites.
Elgar’s background as a violinist allowed him to write particularly effective and idiomatic music for strings, and he described the Serenade—with tongue firmly in cheek—as “very stringy in effect.” It is in three movements, beginning with wistful music marked Allegro piacevole (a “pleasing” Allegro). There is an underlying note of sadness in the main theme heard at the outset, and Elgar sets against this a more lilting middle section with brief solo turns for the principal violin. The long central Larghetto begins with an introduction that adapts ideas from the opening movement, but Elgar then introduces a gorgeous Romantic theme that is spun out in the same patient way as in his
more famous “Nimrod” movement from the Enigma Variations. There is a brief contrasting interlude before this theme returns in the full orchestra. The movement ends in a whisper. The brief closing movement (Allegretto) returns to the Serenade’s opening mood, but in a more dance-like character.
– J. Michael Allsen
Stucky: Concerto for Two Flutes and Orchestra
Stucky was commissioned to write the Concerto for Two Flutes and Orchestra by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for which Stucky had served as composer-in-residence and then New Music Adviser. The premiere was given in Los Angeles in 1995 under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen and performed by flutists Janet Ferguson and Anne Diener Giles. According to Stucky:
Like Classical concertos, this concerto is in three movements, but it is less usual in some other respects. For one thing, the tempo sequence is reversed: slow-fast-slow instead of the usual fast-slow-fast. For another, the opening slow music is not merely an introduction but rather a substantial slow movement that constitutes the emotional heart of the work an elegy for the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, who died only a few months before I began writing the work. He was not only my own mentor and friend but a beloved colleague of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its Music Director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Yet the first movement is not so much an expression of grief as it is an homage to the beauty and greatness of spirit Lutosławski’s music embodies, and an attempt to honor him on his own terms by concentrating on the harmonic and melodic aspects of music that he held dear.
The shorter second and third movements move from this dark beginning towards brighter, more optimistic music. The second movement, ‘Games,’ is a scherzo in near-perpetual motion, whose materials (including lots of major and minor triads) are playful and sometimes quirky. The last movement, ‘Hymn,’ proceeds along two parallel tracks, almost as if two pieces were being played at once. The strings and horns play the ‘hymn’: slow, serious, sustained, lyrical music that climbs during the course of the movement out of the depths of the double basses into the treble regions. At the same time, though, the solo flutes play another music entirely, a fast, capricious descant seemingly at odds with its sober surroundings. As the movement goes on, the soloists win more and more of the orchestra over to their livelier music, until by the end the hymn has disappeared entirely, absorbed into the joyful clamor of the descant. Why ‘Hymn’? Partly because the technical structure of the music has something in common with certain medieval church music, but mostly because it expresses hope and praise inspired in my case not by religious feelings, but by the pleasure of spending my life making music and the privilege of collaborating with great musicians.
– Alexander Jiménez
Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 in C Major
Beethoven’s first two symphonies inhabit the world Haydn and Mozart. Admittedly, they push the boundaries, but it is not until his third symphony, the Eroica, that he bursts into a new world of his own. However, this is in hindsight. For those who first heard these symphonies—and for us, if we can put aside comparisons with his later works and think of his predecessors—they were brilliant, passionate and surprising symphonies by a young genius. The First Symphony, influenced as it was by Mozart and Haydn, was in a familiar musical language, so that Beethoven’s idiosyncrasies and surprises were highlighted all the more. This is felt right from the famous opening chords, which, rather than establishing the key of the piece as one would expect, leave it momentarily ambiguous.
The First Symphony received its premiere on April 2, 1800 at the Burgtheater in Vienna in a concert which Beethoven put on for his own benefit. The program also included works by Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven appears to have worked on ideas for this symphony for several years, but the main task of composing it took place during the six months before the premiere. The dedication is to the Baron van Swieten, the patron and connoisseur who had helped introduce Beethoven to Vienna society and the man who had introduced Haydn and Mozart to the music of Bach and Handel. The premiere was a great success with both public and critics and considerably boosted Beethoven’s reputation. In Leipzig, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung wrote, “…this was truly the most interesting concert we have heard for a long time…[The symphony] contained much art, many new things and a wealth of ideas.”
The autograph of the First Symphony is lost, as are preparatory sketches that Beethoven may have written. We must rely therefore on the earliest printed edition, which, though published during the composer’s lifetime, was most likely prepared without his involvement or guidance. Since that early edition has been the basis of a long performing tradition, it is interesting to see recent efforts to go back and take a fresh, critical look at that first edition, at the apparent errors in it, and at the publisher’s corrections.
– Martin Pearlman
Violin 1
Jean-Luc Cataquet ‡
Masayoshi Arakawa
Bailey Bryant
Mari Stanton
Emily Palmer
Francesca Puro
Will Purser
Violin 2
Stacey Sharpe *
Christopher Wheaton
Tori Joyce
Noah Johnson
Carlos Cordero
Katherine Ng
Rose Ossi
Viola
Hannah Jordan *
Jonathan Taylor
Spencer Schneider
Abygail Benoit
Yey Mulero
Cello
Mitchell George *
Param Mehta
Noah Hayes
Jake Reisinger
Ryan Wolff
Jaden Sanzo
Members of the USO Personnel
Bass
Kent Rivera *
Connor Oneacre
Paris Lallis
Flutes
Pamela Bereuter *
Kaitlyn Calcagino
Oboe
Gracee Myers *
Steven Stamer
Clarinet
Jenna Eschner **
Carlotte MacDonald **
Bassoon
Georgia Clement *
Hannah Farmer
Horn
Eric On *
Allison Hoffman
Trumpet
Johniel Nájera **
Noah Solomon **
Wayne Pearcy
Trombone
Elijah Can Camp-Goh
Timpani and Percussion
Darci Wright *
Ian Guarraia
Matthew Korloch
Harp
Noa Michaels
Piano and Celesta
Cristian Dirkhising
Manager
Za’Kharia Cox
Librarian
Thomas Roggio
Assistant Librarian
Tori Joyce
Stage Manager
Carlos Cordero
Administrative
Assistant
Chelsea Blomberg
‡ Concertmaster * Principal ** Co-Principal