Program notes by David Jensen
BEDŘICH SMETANA
Born 2 March 1824; Litomyšl, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic)
Died 12 May 1884; Prague, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic)
Vyšehrad [The High Castle], T. 110 from Má vlast [My Fatherland], JB 1:112
Composed: September – 18 November 1874
First performance: 14 March 1875; Ludvík Slánský, conductor; Prague Philharmonic
Last MSO performance: 9 November 1991; Zdeněk Mácal, conductor
Instrumentation: piccolo; 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (cymbals, triangle); harp; strings
Approximate duration: 15 minutes
In the summer of 1874, Smetana reported a series of ill portents: he complained of an ulcer, throat trouble, headaches, and even a rash; most alarmingly, a blockage in his ears, followed by a succession of strange noises, prevented him from composing. By August, the local press announced that he was suffering from a “nervous strain,” but within weeks, the writing was on the wall. He had contracted syphilis, which resulted in his total deafness by October. He was forced to resign his directorship of the Provisional Theatre in Prague, a post he had held since 1866 and the high point of a lifelong ambition that had enabled him to stage three of his operas. Unable to work, Smetana’s mental state deteriorated, noting in his journal the following January that “If my disease is incurable, then I should prefer to be liberated from this life.” After ten years of slow decline, he was admitted to an asylum in Prague, where he spent his last days in the throes of insanity.
But the moment of crisis ignited in Smetana a late flowering of artistic ingenuity, and his final decade gave rise to some of his finest and most compelling music, including his two string quartets, three more operas, and the cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast (“My Fatherland”). A blending of Lisztian musical ideals and the burgeoning sense of nationalism pervading concert music in the late 19th century, each movement invokes a particular facet of Bohemia’s cultural identity, whether by means of folklore, scenery, or history. The opening movement, Vyšehrad, refers to both the rock precipice and ancient fortress built upon it, constructed in the 10th century, located in Prague on the on the east bank of the river Vltava (itself the subject of the second poem in the set, “The Moldau”).
Smetana provided a concise synopsis of the music’s programmatic content in a letter to Czech publisher Frantisek Urbánek in May 1879: “The harps of the bards begin; a bard sings of the events that have taken place on Vyšehrad, of the glory, splendor, tournaments and battles, and finally its downfall and ruin. The composition ends on an elegiac note.” Divided into three episodes, the poem begins with an allusion to the mythic bard Lumír, who, after refusing to sing for the victors of the Maidens’ War (the story illustrated in third movement, Šárka), instead sang an ode of praise to the castle before smashing his harp. The main theme, a beautifully harmonized four-note motif representing the castle, is thus introduced by the harp, conferring a sense of the ennobled Bohemian spirit. A battle ensues — a march-like central section harkens back to the majesty and triumph of antiquity before descending whole tone scales interrupt the otherwise martial climax, signaling the collapse of the castle. The opening motto returns, now transformed by the preceding events, as a subdued, nostalgic reflection on the long line of the region’s rich heritage.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Born 25 August 1918; Lawrence, Massachusetts
Died 14 October 1990; New York City, New York
Serenade after Plato’s Symposium
Composed: Late 1953 – 7 August 1954
First performance: 12 September 1954; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Isaac Stern, violin; Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice
Last MSO performance: 13 January 2018; Edo de Waart, conductor; Philippe Quint, violin
Instrumentation: timpani; percussion (bass drum, chimes, Chinese blocks, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tambourine, tenor drum, triangle, xylophone); harp; strings
Approximate duration: 31 minutes
Beloved as one of the most dynamic and original voices of his generation, the contributions Leonard Bernstein made to American classical music during the span of his half-century-long career are without equal. Born to a well-to-do pair of Jewish immigrant parents, he received his earliest musical training after his aunt Clara transferred her upright piano to his parents’ house, prompting him to request his first lessons. He spent summers at his family’s vacation home mounting stage productions with the neighborhood children, attending his first symphonic performance — the Boston Pops Orchestra led by Arthur Fiedler — in May 1932: “To me, in those days, the Pops was heaven itself ... I thought ... it was the supreme achievement of the human race.”
He received an undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1939, where he studied composition with Walter Piston and met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, who made such an impression on the young Bernstein that he was persuaded to pursue a career in conducting. Graduate studies at the Curtis Institute of Music brought him to the inaugural festival at Tanglewood (then known as the Berkshire Music Center), where he served as assistant to and studied with Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. On 14 November 1943, he made history by replacing an ailing Bruno Walter on the podium at the last minute, leading the New York Philharmonic in a program of works by Schumann, Strauss, and Wagner, launching himself into international stardom.
The serenade came to Bernstein in the middle of a particularly active decade. Having just written his first opera, Trouble in Tahiti, in 1951 and completed the score for the musical Wonderful Town in 1953 (with West Side Story only a few years away), Bernstein was occupied in the summer of 1954 with fulfilling an overdue commission for the Koussevitzky Foundation while honoring a commitment to compose a concertante work for the Ukrainian-American violinist Isaac Stern. Dedicated to “the beloved memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky,” the serenade was inspired by his re-reading of Plato’s Symposium while on vacation to Cuernavaca in 1951, which doubled as a convenient structural framework for Stern’s request. That the work signifies a midcentury revival of interest in the classical world owes an obvious debt to Igor Stravinsky, whose neoclassical scores had been incorporating archetypes and motifs from ancient Greek literature.
Plato’s Symposium presents a series of dialectical arguments — presented as a succession of speeches at a banquet — on the nature of love by seven narrators, who grow increasingly inebriated as the party wears on: Phaedrus (an Athenian aristocrat), Pausanias (a legal scholar), Eryximachus (a physician), Aristophanes (the playwright), Agathon (the tragic poet and host of the banquet), Socrates (Plato’s teacher), and Alcibiades (an Athenian general). Bernstein consciously responded to the thematic substance of the text by including quotations from his own Five Anniversaries, a collection of intimate character pieces for the piano dedicated to his closest friends. Humphrey Burton, Bernstein’s biographer, remarked that the music “can also be
perceived as a portrait of Bernstein himself: grand and noble in the first movement, childlike in the second, boisterous and playful in the third, serenely calm and tender in the fourth, a doomladen prophet and then a jazzy iconoclast in the finale.”
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Composed: Autumn 1955 – Summer 1957; suite compiled in 1960
First performance: 13 February 1961; Lukas Foss, conductor; New York Philharmonic Last MSO performance: 19 June 2016; Jeffrey Kahane, conductor
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; E-flat clarinet; bass clarinet; alto saxophone; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bongos, congas, cymbals, finger cymbals, maracas, police whistle, tambourine, triangle, vibraphone, xylophone); harp; piano (doubling on celesta); strings
Approximate duration: 22 minutes
At the very top of the first page of his copy of Romeo and Juliet, Leonard Bernstein recapitulated one of the most enduring parables of human bigotry in a pithy eight words: “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.” And this is the crux of what remains his most popular, engaging, and vital work: when it premiered on Broadway in September 1957, West Side Story presented the American public with a remarkable melding of two traditions — the historical sophistication of opera and the fluid dynamism of contemporary musical theater — in its portrayal of the doomed romance of two lovers whose fates intersect across ethnic lines. Combined with Jerome Robbins’s electrifying choreography and Stephen Sondheim’s scathing, clear-eyed lyrical commentary on American race relations, the show enshrined Bernstein in the pantheon of American musical celebrity.
The production was hampered by artistic differences, a lack of interest from producers, and logistical obstacles: author Arthur Laurents had invented entirely new slang for the production to avoid any of the language outdating itself by opening night, while Bernstein was under constant pressure to excise portions of his score owing to its perceived difficulties. “And then we had the really tough problem of casting it,” Bernstein recalled, “because the characters had to be able not only to sing but dance and act and be taken for teenagers. ... Some were wonderful singers but couldn’t dance very well, or vice versa ... and if they could do both, they couldn’t act.”
The score brilliantly synthesized elements of Latin, jazz, and Western symphonic music, with John Chapman noting in the New York Daily News the day after the musical’s premiere that “there is the drive, the bounce, the restlessness and the sweetness of our town. It takes up the American musical idiom where it was left when George Gershwin died.” Bernstein arranged the “Symphonic Dances” in 1960 as a display of the most arresting musical moments of the entire production, deftly interwoven such that the momentum from one point in the action dissolves seamlessly into the next. Lukas Foss, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s third music director and Bernstein’s lifelong friend, conducted the suite’s premiere at the “Valentine for Leonard Bernstein” gala held by the New York Philharmonic in February 1961.
The Prologue, with its finger-snaps and syncopated bass lines, thrusts us into the heart of New York City as tensions simmer between the white American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks before fading into the opening bars of Somewhere, a tender intermezzo marked by sweeping string sections. A brief, effervescent Scherzo breaks into the Mambo, excerpted from the sensationally kinetic dance sequences staged as the rival gangs face off at the gymnasium, before the Cha-cha and Meeting Scene liquidate motifs from “Maria,” sketching a musical impression of the lovers’ first contact. Cool sees Riff leading the Jets in preparation for battle by threading together melodic fragments into a jazzy, restless fugue, which is interrupted by the Rumble that leaves both Riff and Bernardo dead in the street. The Finale returns to the haunting strains of Somewhere as Maria mourns the needless death of her lover, Tony.
BÉLA BARTÓK
Born 25 March 1881; Nagyszentmiklós, Austria-Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania)
Died 26 September 1945; New York City, New York
Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Opus 19, Sz. 73, BB 82
Composed: October 1918 – May 1919; revised April – November 1924 and 1926 – 1931; suite compiled in February 1927
First performance: 27 November 1926 (ballet); Eugen Szenkár, conductor; Cologne Opera; 15 October 1928 (suite); Ernst von Dohnányi, conductor; Budapest Philharmonic Society
Last MSO performance: 8 May 2004; Gregory Vajda, conductor
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (2nd doubling on 2nd piccolo, 3rd doubling on 1st piccolo); 3 oboes (3rd doubling on English horn); 3 clarinets (2nd doubling on E-flat clarinet, 3rd doubling on bass clarinet); 3 bassoons (3rd doubling on contrabassoon); 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, soprano snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam tam, triangle, xylophone); harp; celesta; piano; organ; strings
Approximate duration: 20 minutes
In the very first years of the 20th century, a young Béla Bartók was busy sowing the seeds of a budding intellectual pursuit. Along with Zoltán Kodály, whom he had befriended during his student years at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, he had begun roaming the countryside and transcribing peasant songs in 1904. He had just completed his formal studies — it was presumed he would find a career as a pianist and compose only secondarily — but within a few years, the two were using an Edison phonograph and gathering data using analytic parameters developed expressly for their undertaking; within 15, Bartók had collected thousands of examples of folk music from Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak sources, furnishing him with the materials necessary to establish himself as a leading figure in the newly-defined discipline of ethnomusicology.
The Miraculous Mandarin, Bartók’s third and final work for the stage, blends this traditional vernacular with his own distinctly expressionist musical language, taking its scenario from Hungarian author Melchior Lengyel’s short story of the same name, which was first published in the literary magazine Nyugat (“West”) in 1916. A particularly gruesome plot involving deception, theft, violence, and murder prevented the production from being staged until 1926, and after only a single performance, the work was forcibly withdrawn and banned by German authorities. Eugen Szenkár, having conducted the premiere, recalled that the performance concluded with “a concert of whistling and catcalls! ... The uproar was so deafening and lengthy that the fire curtain had to be brought down.”
A whirlwind of scales in the strings and punctuations from the brass introduce the pantomime’s seedy urban setting. Three degenerates, desperate for money, force a young girl to stand by the window of a brothel and dance for passersby in hopes of ensnaring and robbing them. She dances a Lockspiel (a “decoy” or “seduction game”) as an attractive melody unwinds in the clarinet, first catching the attention of an old man, caricatured by glissandi in the trombone, then a young man, played by the oboe. Neither have any money, and the delinquents throw them both out. But the third time’s the charm: as the tune in the clarinet grows increasingly elaborate, a mysterious “mandarin” (or imperial bureaucrat) appears, heralded by trombones, cymbals, and bass drum, his gaze fixed on the young girl. Terrified, the three tramps force her to dance, and as the mandarin’s excitement mounts, he chases her as the music erupts in a thrillingly rhythmic fugue.
The suite, which contains only about two-thirds of the one-act ballet’s music, concludes here — probably to avoid the sexual violence presented in the story’s denouement. The three men accost the wealthy foreigner, strip him of his riches, and attempt to suffocate him to no avail. Still staring at the girl, they stab him repeatedly with a rusty sword, but he staggers toward her. They finally hang him from a lamp, but even this proves fruitless: as his body collapses to the ground, it begins to glow with an otherworldly light. As the thugs begin to panic, the girl realizes what must be done. She orders the release of the mandarin, who throws himself at her, and as she accepts his embrace, his wounds begin bleeding as he finally dies.
2024.25 SEASON
KEN-DAVID MASUR
Music Director
Polly and Bill Van Dyke
Music Director Chair
EDO DE WAART
Music Director Laureate
BYRON STRIPLING
Principal Pops Conductor
Stein Family Foundation Principal Pops Conductor Chair
RYAN TANI
Assistant Conductor
CHERYL FRAZES HILL
Chorus Director
Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair
TIMOTHY J. BENSON
Assistant Chorus Director
FIRST VIOLINS
Jinwoo Lee, Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair
Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster, Thora M. Vervoren First Associate Concertmaster Chair
Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster
Alexander Ayers
Autumn Chodorowski
Yuka Kadota
Sheena Lan**
Elliot Lee**
Dylana Leung
Kyung Ah Oh
Lijia Phang
Yuanhui Fiona Zheng
SECOND VIOLINS
Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Second Violin Chair
Ji-Yeon Lee, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
John Bian, Assistant Principal (3rd chair)*
Hyewon Kim, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Glenn Asch
Lisa Johnson Fuller
Clay Hancock
Paul Hauer
Janis Sakai**
Mary Terranova
VIOLAS
Robert Levine, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Principal Viola Chair
Samantha Rodriguez, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Viola Chair
Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Elizabeth Breslin
Georgi Dimitrov
Nathan Hackett
Erin H. Pipal
CELLOS
Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Cello Chair
Shinae Ra, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus
Madeleine Kabat
Peter Szczepanek
Peter J. Thomas
Adrien Zitoun
BASSES
Principal, Donald B. Abert Bass Chair
Andrew Raciti, Acting Principal
Nash Tomey, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Brittany Conrad
Omar Haffar**
Paris Myers
HARP
Julia Coronelli, Principal, Walter Schroeder Harp Chair
FLUTES
Sonora Slocum, Principal, Margaret and Roy Butter Flute Chair
Heather Zinninger, Assistant Principal
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
PICCOLO
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
OBOES
Katherine Young Steele, Principal, Milwaukee Symphony League Oboe Chair
Kevin Pearl, Assistant Principal
Margaret Butler
ENGLISH HORN
Margaret Butler, Philip and Beatrice Blank English Horn Chair in memoriam to John Martin
CLARINETS
Todd Levy, Principal, Franklyn Esenberg Clarinet Chair
Jay Shankar, Assistant Principal, Donald and Ruth P. Taylor Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair
Besnik Abrashi
E-FLAT CLARINET
Jay Shankar
BASS CLARINET
Besnik Abrashi
BASSOONS
Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family Bassoon Chair
Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal
Beth W. Giacobassi
CONTRABASSOON
Beth W. Giacobassi
HORNS
Matthew Annin, Principal, Krause Family French Horn Chair
Krystof Pipal, Associate Principal
Dietrich Hemann, Andy Nunemaker
French Horn Chair
Darcy Hamlin
Scott Sanders
TRUMPETS
Matthew Ernst, Principal, Walter L. Robb Family Trumpet Chair
David Cohen, Associate Principal, Martin J. Krebs Associate Principal Trumpet Chair
Tim McCarthy, Fred Fuller Trumpet Chair
TROMBONES
Megumi Kanda, Principal, Marjorie Tiefenthaler Trombone Chair
Kirk Ferguson, Assistant Principal
BASS TROMBONE
John Thevenet, Richard M. Kimball Bass Trombone Chair
TUBA
Robyn Black, Principal, John and Judith Simonitsch Tuba Chair
TIMPANI
Dean Borghesani, Principal
Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal
PERCUSSION
Robert Klieger, Principal
Chris Riggs
PIANO
Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair
PERSONNEL
Antonio Padilla Denis, Director of Orchestra Personnel
Paris Myers, Hiring Coordinator
LIBRARIANS
Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, James E. Van Ess Principal Librarian Chair
Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist
PRODUCTION
Tristan Wallace, Production Manager/Live Audio
Lisa Sottile, Production Stage Manager
* Leave of Absence 2024.25 Season
** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2024.25 Season
