YOUTH ORCHESTRAS OF SAN ANTONIO | SPRING CONCERTS
PROGRAM NOTES
compiled by Troy Peters David Hinds conducts the Amarillo College Chamber Orchestra and Suzuki Orchestra. His work as a composer shows his experience with student musicians at early levels. His Incantations, published in 2009, is built on a moody, minor key melody, reminiscent of Jewish folk music. Richard Meyer is not only a widely performed composer of music for young string players, but also teaches middle school orchestra in the Los Angeles suburb of Temple City. His 1999 Shadow Dance is a waltz and a canon (a round, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”), with different sections of the orchestra playing “follow the leader” with the melody. Deborah Baker Monday teaches cello and bass in the Logan City School District orchestra program in Utah and is widely known as a composer and arranger for young string ensembles. Shortnin’ Bread Blues is her bluesy adaptation of the popular American tune. Although many people assume Shortnin’ Bread is a traditional Southern folksong, it was actually written in 1900 by James Whitcomb Riley, an Indiana author of poetry for children. Dutch flutist Frans Vester was a remarkably versatile musician, an early pioneer in “historically informed performance” of Baroque music (in the 1950s) and also a champion of ultramodern composers like Arnold Schoenberg. In Five Pieces for Three Flutes, Vester arranged charming and elegant miniatures by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for young flutists; we will hear two of these pieces today. Flutist Niccolò Dôthel grew up in the 1720s in Lorraine, a region that freely mixed Germanic and French cultures. He spent most of his musical career in the bustling Tuscan city of Florence, where he performed and composed for decades. His Trio in E minor is a good example of his characteristic blending of the French flute ensemble tradition (in the style of Bosimortier) with more virtuosic elements borrowed from the violin style of Italian Baroque composers like Nardini and Tartini. A longtime high school band director in Princeton, New Jersey, and a busy flutist, Ricky Lombardo has also been an active composer and arranger for flute ensembles for several decades. His 1995 composition Cedar Ridge is a charming portrait of a campground in northwestern New Jersey where the composer spent time. Gustav Holst was hospitalized when he wrote his sunny Brook Green Suite in 1933. It was intended for his students at St. Paul’s Girls School where he had taught for two decades. Holst was in a nostalgic mood when he wrote this music, taking the title from the location of his 1901 wedding. He heard the world premiere in March 1934—the final concert he attended before he died in May of the same year. The prolific German Baroque master Georg Philipp Telemann composed his orchestral suite based on Cervantes’ 1605 novel, Don Quixote, in 1761. Telemann had just finished writing an opera on the same subject, so he decided to recycle some of the musical themes in a “programme overture,” a set of short pieces gathered together to depict episodes from the novel.
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