IV. Adagio – Più andante – Allegro non troppo, ma con brio
The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION
The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes.
Guest Artist Biographies
SUSAN BABINI
Susan Babini was appointed principal cello of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra by Edo de Waart. She has been recognized for her “gorgeous sound and liquid sense of phrasing” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “achingly beautiful” Chopin sonata encore with Emanuel Ax (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and “gorgeous, dark sound” (Milwaukee Shepherd Express).
Babini was formerly principal cellist with the New Century Chamber Orchestra and has performed as guest principal cello with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
In addition to her orchestral duties, Babini regularly performs as a soloist with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. She has also performed as soloist with New Century Chamber Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, and Symphony in C, where she gave the East Coast premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Colored Field for cello and orchestra. She is also featured on Mr. Kernis’s album On Distant Shores. In addition, as an Astral Artist, she has been presented in solo recital by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.
A passionate chamber musician, she has participated in both the Tanglewood and Yellow Barn music festivals, as well as four seasons at the Marlboro Music Festival, where she performed multiple national tours on the Musicians from Marlboro series. In Milwaukee, she has performed with Frankly Music, Milwaukee Musaik, and with the Philomusica String Quartet. She has also performed as guest cellist with the Cavani String Quartet on the Detroit Chamber Music Society series and at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Most recently, Babini has appeared multiple times on the Winterlude series at the Villa Terrace.
Babini enjoys teaching talented young students and has taught orchestral cello repertoire for the National Youth Orchestra and at Northwestern University. She has also spent summers teaching at the Brevard Music Festival, and has served as a guest artist at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, leading their cello intensive week in 2024. She has also taught master classes in chamber music at the Cleveland Institute of Music and chamber music performance at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. She frequently leads master classes at home and abroad.
The daughter of two cellists, Babini began her musical studies at the tender age of three. Babini holds a graduate diploma from The Juilliard School, and Bachelor and Master of Chamber Music degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Bonnie Hampton.
When she’s not playing the cello, Babini can be found either cultivating her garden or working in her kitchen trying to master the art of sourdough bread. She’s getting there.
Program notes by David Jensen
AARON JAY KERNIS
Born 15 January 1960; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Colored Field (Concerto for Cello and Orchestra)
Composed: Spring 1993 – 6 March 1994
First performance: 21 April 1994 (version for English horn); Alasdair Neale, conductor; Julie Ann Giacobassi, English horn; San Francisco Symphony; 17 April 2000 (version for cello); Eiji Oue, conductor; Truls Mørk, cello; Minnesota Orchestra
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (2nd and 3rd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; 3 clarinets (2nd doubling on bass clarinet, 3rd doubling on E-flat clarinet); 2 bassoons (2nd doubling on contrabassoon); 4 horns; 3 trumpets in C (2nd and 3rd doubling on trumpet in D); 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (4 almglocken, 2 bass drums, 5 bell plates, 4 brake drums, castanets, chimes, 4 cowbells, crash cymbal, crotales, glockenspiel, guiro, marimba, 4 nipple gongs, ratchet, rute, sandpaper blocks, slapstick, snare drum, 4 steel pipes, 3 suspended cymbals, 4 tam tams, tambourine, tenor drum, 2 timbales, 2 bongos, 3 triangles, vibraphone, wood blocks, wooden rattle, xylophone); harp; piano (doubling on celesta); strings (divided into 2 string orchestras)
Approximate duration: 41 minutes
Aaron Jay Kernis is one of few American composers whose accessible, superbly crafted music clearly articulates his emotionally intuitive style. His scholarly pursuits took him across the country, training with John Adams at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Charles Wuorinen at the Manhattan School of Music, and Jacob Druckman, Bernard Rands, and Morton Subotnick at the Yale School of Music. He has served as workshop director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s composer lab and as new music advisor, co-founder, and director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute, taught composition at Yale, and received both the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award. It’s little wonder, then, that his mature voice would be consistently described as “eclectic,” integrating everything from midcentury minimalism to the neo-Romantic.
Colored Field, originally the product of a commission from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra on behalf of Hugh and Eugénie Taylor, was tailored to the playing of Julie Ann Giacobassi, the orchestra’s English hornist for a quarter of a century. Her recording on the Argo Records label with Alasdair Neale, who conducted the work’s premiere, and the San Francisco Symphony was awarded the prestigious Diapason d’Or shortly after its release. A few years later, Kernis, who had “originally conceived it vocally,” reworked the piece into a cello concerto, winning the Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition from the University of Louisville in the process.
The concerto was one of several works defined by their pointed political narratives which occupied Kernis in the 1990s. His second symphony was a direct response to the Gulf War; Still Movement with Hymn a reaction to the Bosnian genocide; the Lament and Prayer for violin and orchestra commemorated the 50th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. Colored Field, for its part, was directly inspired by his visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1989: while observing a child sitting on the ground and chewing on a blade of grass, he was overwhelmed by the recognition that the leaf had grown in a field soaked in innocent blood.
The first movement, which bears the same name as the concerto itself, is made up of lengthy, probing melodies, incorporating the rhapsodic elements of the Jewish cantorial tradition and giving the impression of a sinister, almost oppressive lullaby. An unremittingly aggressive battery of musical ideas dominates in the central scherzo, “Pandora Dance,” which takes the image of “little black things slithering out of a box” as its point of departure. The final movement returns to the heartsick solemnity of the first: the “tablets” to which its title refers are both those that mark our graves and the laws that Moses bore during his descent from Sinai, commentary on the futility of legal means (themselves a constructed thing) to protect the innocent.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born 7 May 1833; Hamburg, Germany
Died 3 April 1897; Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68
Composed: 1855 – September 1876
First performance: 4 November 1876; Felix Otto Dessoff, conductor; Großherzogliches Hoftheater Orchestra, Karlsruhe
Last MSO performance: 18 November 2017; Michael Francis, conductor
As the second half of the 19th century unfolded, Johannes Brahms found himself at the heart of one of music history’s greatest divides. Concert music in Western Europe had come to a crossroads: on the one hand, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner were testing the limits of instrumental color, tonal harmony, and the clearly-defined formal structures they’d inherited, articulating extramusical narratives in their so-called “programmatic” music, while on the other, conservative artists like Clara and Robert Schumann and Brahms himself continued to model their works upon the previous century’s principles of restraint, balance, and otherwise conventional harmonic principles as exemplified by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, composing “absolute” music which referred to nothing outside of its own contents.
Brahms not only revered Beethoven, but was acutely self-conscious of having inherited his mantle. He was already being compared to the late master by his early twenties, and the self-imposed pressure of elaborating upon the German symphonic tradition in the wake of Beethoven’s ninth effectively paralyzed him. He had already begun to test his mettle with a draft of a symphony in D minor as early as 1854, but uncertain of its worthiness, its contents were eventually recycled into his first piano concerto. The following year saw drafts of a first movement, which would be laid aside until 1862 as Brahms refined his sense of orchestration while composing his two serenades in the late 1850s. By the time Brahms completed his first symphony, more than 20 years had passed between its earliest incarnation and its premiere.
Brahms’s first symphony is the product of a composer simultaneously looking to the past for inspiration and, on the level of posterity, toward the future. The choice of C minor as the primary key center, working its way toward the parallel major by the fourth movement, clearly alludes to the tonal scheme of Beethoven’s landmark fifth. Unlike Hector Berlioz or Wagner, whose music was continually advancing the orchestra’s timbral possibilities, his instrumentation, too, is essentially Beethovenian, consisting of doubled woodwinds, brass, timpani, and strings — a limited palette better suited to his polyphonic approach, which alternately emphasized both the outer and inner voices of the music. But formally, he left his fingerprint on the symphonic structure: the greatest weight is given to the outer movements, marked by their intensity of expression, the slow second movement remains an essentially Classical feature, and the third
deviates from the typical scherzo completely, substituted by a uniquely Brahmsian allegretto. The comparisons to Beethoven by the musical public were, of course, immediate. The influential — and notoriously conservative — Austrian music critic Eduard Hanslick, for whom music was idealized by the Classical paradigm of symmetry, pattern, and internal thematic unity, gave a highly favorable review, declaring it “one of the most individual and magnificent works of the symphonic literature.” Hans von Bülow, a former pupil of Liszt, referred to it as “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Despite his conscious effort to pay musical homage, the repeated associations annoyed Brahms, eventually prompting him to respond to the observation that the main theme from his finale bore a resemblance to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” with the terse assertion that “Any dunce could see that.”
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
