YOUTH ORCHESTRAS OF SAN ANTONIO | SPRING CONCERTS
PROGRAM NOTES
compiled by Troy Peters Arthur Missal had a long and varied career as composer, violist, and conductor at universities in New Mexico, Mississippi, and Kansas. His tuneful, charming Lake Country Dances were published in 1994, when he was almost 80 years old. William Hofeldt is one of America’s most successful composers of music for student orchestras. After teaching public school music for 15 years, he began fulltime work as an accountant. Hofeldt composed his Lullaby for violin and piano, later arranging it for string orchestra. A high school orchestra director in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, Kirt Mosier is also a popular and widely performed composer of music for student orchestras. The Dance of Iscariot uses a minor key and descending chromatic scales to capture the menace and villainy of the biblical character, Judas Iscariot. The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes German Baroque master Georg Philipp Telemann as the most prolific composer ever, having left behind more than 3,000 works in all. His Concerto Polonois is a work for string orchestra, probably written at some point in the 1730s. The title refers to Polish musical influence, mainly reflected in a mazurka (a Polish dance) that is not on today’s program. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov spent most of his life as an officer in the Russian Imperial Navy. For his Capriccio Espagnol, written in 1887, Rimsky-Korsakov drew on a book of Spanish folk tunes he had picked up during one of his naval voyages. With his detailed knowledge of orchestration, he crafted a brilliant orchestral tour de force, evoking imagined street parties and dances from the northern Spanish region of Asturias. Franz Schubert had much in common with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of his idols. Both were prodigious talents (having written lots of music while still children), both were stunningly prolific, and both died young (Mozart at 35 and Schubert at 31). In 1816, 25 years after Mozart’s death, Schubert wrote his Symphony No. 5, his most Mozartean orchestral work. The Fifth Symphony is scored for a smaller orchestra than Schubert usually used, creating a lighter texture, and all four movements abound with melody and energy.
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