Monterey Symphony 2023-2024 Program Book by montereysymphony

2023-2024 SEASON JAYCE OGREN, MUSIC DIRECTOR

CONTENTS Season at-a-glance

Letter from Music Director

Letter from CEO & Board Chair

Monterey Symphony Orchestra

Jayce Ogren Biography

VENTANA Program

Joshua Roman Biography

VENTANA Program Notes

PFEIFFER Program

Christina Mok Biography

Andrew Grams Biography

PFEIFFER Program Notes

PALO CORONA Program

Lara Downes Biography

PALO CORONA Program Notes

SANTA LUCIA Program

Orli Shaham Biography

SANTA LUCIA Program Notes

LOMA PRIETA Program

Sean Panikkar Biography

Daniel Nebel Biography

LOMA PRIETA Program Notes

PINNACLES Program

PINNACLES Program Notes

Alicia Mastromonaco Biography

Symphony Board & Administration

Donor Lists

MONTEREY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

SEASON AT-A-GLANCE 2022-2023 SEASON All Concerts at Sunset Center, Carmel

October 7, 2023 at 7:30 PM October 8, 2023 at 3:00 PM Joshua Roman, cello

November 18, 2023 at 7:30 PM November 19, 2023 at 3:00 PM Andrew Grams, Guest Conductor Christina Mok, violin

February 17, 2024 at 7:30 PM February 18, 2024 at 3:00 PM Lara Downes, piano

March 16, 2024 at 7:30 PM March 17, 2024 at 3:00 PM Orli Shaham, piano

April 20, 2024 at 7:30 PM April 21, 2024 at 3:00 PM Sean Panikkar, tenor Daniel Nebel, horn

May 18, 2024 at 7:30 PM May 19, 2024 at 3:00 PM Mahler Symphony No. 5

MONTEREYSYMPHONY.ORG

2022-2023

SPECIAL EVENTS SEASON OPENER SUPPER CLUB October 8, 2023

Sponsored by: John Enbom

Max Bragado-Darman

Assistant Principal

Caitlyn Smith-Franklin Beth Zare Sadie Glass

TRUMPET Dylan Girard, Principal Owen Miyoshi Curtis Nash

MUSIC DIRECTOR EMERITUS TECHNICAL DIRECTORS Pat Fitzsimmons

(Sunset Center/Sherwood Hall) Sponsored by: Brooks Leffler

Douglas Mueller (Forest Theater)

RECORDING ENGINEER Arman Boyles

TROMBONE Phil Keen, Principal Chase Waterbury

MONTEREY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

JAYCE OGREN M USI C DI RE CTOR

Jayce Ogren has established himself as one of the most innovative and versatile conductors of his generation. From symphonic concerts to revolutionary community service programs to operatic world premieres, he is a leader in breaking down barriers between audiences and great music. Mr. Ogren is Music Director of the Monterey Symphony in Carmelby-the-Sea, California, and Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, where he conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra, Contemporary Directions Ensemble and the Michigan Youth Symphony Orchestra. Additionally, he serves as Principal Guest Conductor of Philadelphia’s new music ensemble Orchestra 2001. Mr. Ogren began his career as Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, an appointment he held from 2006-2009. In the years since, he has conducted many of the world’s most prominent orchestras, including the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, the Dallas and San Francisco Symphonies, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Among the numerous progressive projects Mr. Ogren has conducted are Basil Twist’s The Rite of Spring with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Lincoln Center; the world premiere of David Lang’s symphony for a broken orchestra, bringing together 400 amateur and professional musicians in Philadelphia; 30th anniversary performances of Frank Zappa’s The Yellow Shark with Orchestra 2001; and the world premiere of Jack Perla’s Shalimar the Clown at Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

For over a decade, Mr. Ogren has been closely associated with the Leonard Bernstein Office, conducting the New York premiere of Bernstein’s only opera, A Quiet Place, at Lincoln Center; the European premiere of the film with live orchestra version of West Side Story at London’s Royal Albert Hall; and the world premieres of new orchestrations of Fancy Free and Dybbuk with Lost Dog New Music Ensemble. A longtime collaborator of singer/songwriter/composer Rufus Wainwright, Mr. Ogren conducted the U.S. premiere of his opera Prima Donna at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Scandinavian premiere at the Royal Swedish Opera, and led its recording with the BBC Symphony on Deutsche Grammaphon. Mr. Ogren and Mr. Wainwright have since appeared together throughout the world, with ensembles such as the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France in Paris and the Toronto Symphony. A devoted educator, he was invited by renowned poet Paul Muldoon to create an interdisciplinary studio class at Princeton University for the 2017-2018 academic year. He has worked with students at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, Brevard Music Center, Cleveland Institute of Music, the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Music Academy of the West and Verbier Festival. In 2016, he presented a unique workshop in orchestral rehearsal techniques for music teachers at Carnegie Hall in collaboration with the Carnegie Hall Weill Music Institute and the Juilliard School Pre-College. As a composer, Mr. Ogren has received commissions from ensembles throughout the United States. His Symphonies of Gaia for symphonic wind ensemble has been performed extensively throughout the world, and is published by C. Alan Publications. Jayce Ogren holds degrees from St. Olaf College, New England Conservatory and the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar with Alan Gilbert and Jorma Panula. His wife, Carly Berger Ogren, is an architect, and together they have an adventurous 5 year old son, Alistair. An avid athlete, he has competed in the Big Sur, Boston and New York City marathons, the JFK 50 Miler trail run, and the Ironman Lake Placid triathlon. As an individual member of 1% for the Planet, Mr. Ogren is proud to connect his artistic work with his deep love of nature and concern for the environment.

JAYCE OGREN BIOGRAPHY

V ENTA N A OCTOBER 7 & 8, 2023 SUNSET CENTER, CARMEL

Jayce Ogren, Music Director and Conductor Joshua Roman, cello Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla

Mikhail Glinka

[running time 5’]

(1804-1857)

Colonial Song [6’]

Percy Grainger

Cello Concerto [25’]

Mason Bates

(1882-1961)

I: Con moto-GraziosoCon moto II: Serene III: Léger INTERMISSION

(b. 1977)

[20’]

Variations on a Shaker Melody [5’]

Aaron Copland

Concerto for Orchestra [30’]

Béla Bartók

I: Introduzione. Andante non troppo-Allegro vivace II: Giouco delle coppie. Allegro scherzando III: Elegia. Andante non troppo IV: Intermezzo interrotto. Allegretto V: Finale. Presto

(1900-1990)

(1881-1945)

The October concert will be rebroadcast on KAZU’s HD2 Classical station on October 28, 2023, and October 29, 2023, both at 4 PM.

VENTANA CONCERT

JOSHUA ROMAN C E LLO

Joshua Roman is a cellist, accomplished composer and curator whose performances embrace musical styles from Bach to Radiohead. Before setting off on his unique path as a soloist, Roman was the Seattle Symphony’s principal cellist - a job he began at just 22 years of age and left only two years later. He has since become renowned for his genre-bending repertoire and wide-ranging collaborations. Roman was named a TED Senior Fellow in 2015. His live performance of the complete Six Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach on TED’s Facebook Page garnered nearly one million live viewers, with millions more for his Main Stage TED Talks/Performances, including an improvisational performance with Tony-winner/MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Bill T. Jones and East African vocalist Somi. A Gramophone review of his 2017 recording of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Cello Concerto (written for Roman) proclaimed that “Roman’s extraordinary performance combines the expressive control of Casals with the creative individuality and virtuoso flair of Hendrix himself.” Recent highlights include performing standard and new concertos with the Colorado, Detroit, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, and San Francisco Symphonies. In addition to his other orchestral appearances Roman has collaborated with the JACK, St. Lawrence, and Verona Quartets and brings the same fresh approach to chamber music projects to his own series, Town Music at Town Hall Seattle. Joshua Roman’s adventurous spirit has led to collaborations with artists outside the music community, including creating “On Grace” with Tonynominated actor Anna Deavere Smith. His compositions are inspired by sources such as the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K. Smith, and the musicians he writes for, such as the JACK Quartet, violinist Vadim Gluzman, and conductor David Danzmayr. Roman’s endeavors outside the concert hall have taken him to Uganda with his violin-playing siblings, where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers and displacement camps. joshuaroman.com

JOSHUA ROMAN BIOGRAPHY

PROGRAM NOTES By Dr. Alicia Mastromonaco OCTOBER 7-8, 2023

VENTANA (Window) The Ventana Wilderness part of the Santa Lucia Range in Los Padres National Forest, was established as part of the Endangered American Wilderness Act in 1978. It is named for the Ventana Double Cone peak which is said to have once had an arch that looked like a ventana (Spanish for “window”). Like that geological ventana, this program provides a window into composers’ use of folk melodies, whether endemic to their country of origin, or as an imagined folk music of their homeland, as in Grainger’s Colonial Song. A 21st-century folk vocabulary is found in the music of Mason Bates, who incorporates elements of American vernacular music, such as blues, jazz and techno in his lively Cello Concerto.

Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla

Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857) was one of the first composers within his country to gain popularity and recognition as a classical composer, so much that he was named one of the most influential composers by the Mighty Handful as well as Tchaikovsky. Glinka came from a noble background and had an extensive education in Russia and abroad. In St. Petersburg he studied with the Irish composer, John Field, and then Charles Mayer. He spent time in Italy where he studied composition with Francesco Basili in Milan, as well as in Berlin, where he studied composition with Siegfried Dehn. He also was deeply inspired by the Italian operas of Donizetti and Bellini and desired to do for his country’s musical oeuvre what those composers did for Italian opera.

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Colonial Song

Percy Grainger (1882-1961)

When he returned to Russia, Glinka worked on his first opera, A Life for the Tzar, which was well-received. He then began on Ruslan and Ludmilla from 1837-42. He wanted Pushkin to write the libretto, unfortunately the young writer died an untimely death by duel.

“... he was named one of the most influential composers by the Mighty Handful as well as Tchaikovsky...” So, he started composing without a libretto. Eventually he completed the opera with a few different librettists, and the work as a whole received a somewhat tepid response at first. The overture, however, is among Glinka’s most famous and recognizable works. The blazing virtuosity of the string runs combined with the folk song interpolations make this work a showstopper.

George Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was an AustralianAmerican composer, pianist, and collector of folksongs. He was born in Victoria, Australia, and moved to Europe to pursue his musical education on the piano in Frankfurt and then London. During his tours as a concert pianist, Grainger would collect folksongs on his phonograph, one of the earliest people to do so (starting in 1906). These folksongs would form the basis of, or at least the inspiration for, many of his future compositions. Colonial Song was composed between 1905-1912, as the first of his “Sentimentals” series; this being the only composition. It was originally a piano piece written as a gift to his mother, Rose. Grainger wanted to write a melody that sounded as if it came from the people who colonized his homeland of Australia. He drew inspiration from collections of British folksongs, as well as the songs of the American composer, Stephen Foster. The piece is a folksong from Grainger’s own musical imagination. Colonial Song was not well-received at first in England, with Sir Thomas Beecham famously remarking, “My dear Grainger, you have achieved the almost impossible! You have written the worst piece of modern times.” However, Grainger wrote several arrangements of the piece, including one for military band, which has become quite a popular piece among wind bands in the United States. The version on this program is Grainger’s orchestral arrangement.

VENTANA PROGRAM NOTES

Cello Concerto

Mason Bates (b. 1977) and Bates was composer-in-residence. Bates wrote, “that shotgun wedding left me mesmerized at his unmatched musicianship and technique, and soon I was composing a fiendishly difficult solo work for him to premiere on his series at Town Hall. He played it from memory.” From there, Bates and Roman decided to collaborate on a concerto.

Bay Area-based composer Mason Bates (b. 1977) has developed a compositional style known for pushing the boundaries between classical and electronic musics, for blurring the lines between genres, and developing a new symphonic folk style. In addition to working as a composer with major orchestras, Bates also spins records as DJ Masonic, and co-founded an immersive classical-music-meets-clubscene performance series, Mercury Soul, which presents classical music alongside DJ sets to audiences throughout the Bay Area. The impetus for the cello concerto stemmed from a chance collaboration between Bates and cellist Joshua Roman. The two were paired together to improvise an electro-acoustic duo at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City at the inaugural YouTube Symphony Orchestra summit in 2009, where Roman was a soloist

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The cello concerto was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Columbus Symphony Orchestra, with funding from the Johnstone Fund for New Music. It premiered in December 2014 with Roman and the Seattle Symphony, conducted by Mirga Gražintyė-Tyla. In true Bates fashion, in addition to the extended virtuoso techniques for the cello, Bates employs his own vernacular. Like the other composers on this program, it is Bates’s version of 21st century American musical folk idioms. In this case, it is the music of electronic dance music, rock, blues, and jazz.

“Bates has developed a compositional style known for pushing the boundaries between classical and electronic musics ...”

Variations on a Shaker Melody

Concerto for Orchestra

Aaron Copland

Béla Bartók

(1900-1990)

(1881-1945)

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s (18811945) work as an ethnomusicologist influenced his compositions. The Concerto for Orchestra was one of the final works Bartók completed before his death in 1945. American composer Aaron Copland’s (1900-1990) music has become synonymous with the American landscape, sometimes referred to as “American pastoral.” His works are enduringly popular, and among the most popular is his Pulitzer Prize-winning ballet Appalachian Spring, originally written for Martha Graham’s dance company between 1943-44. The piece has been arranged and excerpted multiple times, including into this version, Variations on a Shaker Melody, which is sometimes alternatively titled Variations on Simple Gifts. The titular melody is “Simple Gifts,” written by Joseph Brackett Jr. in 1848. The tune was not known outside of Shaker communities until well into the 20th century, but by 1996, the Music Educators National Conference noted “Simple Gifts” was a song that every American should know. The melody has been performed at three presidential inaugurations (Reagan in 1985, Clinton in 1993, and Obama in 2009). Listeners familiar with Appalachian Spring will note many similarities between the two pieces, but this version is the more distilled iteration of the now-famous tune that Copland brought from relative obscurity into the American musical canon.

In 1943 Bartók was suffering from leukemia and was approached by Conductor Serge Koussevitzky. He offered the composer $1,000 from his Foundation to write a work in honor of his late wife. Bartók used sketches in which he eschewed the more standard 4-movement symphonic form in favor of a more palindromic 5-movement structure. Bartók characterized the work as evolving from the “sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.” Bartók’s interest in European peasant music is evident in the second movement, Gioco delle coppie. Bartók had compiled a book of Serbo-Croatian folksongs and was fascinated by the Dalmatian practice of paired singing of chromatic tunes in two parallel parts, often separated by the interval of a second or seventh. Thus, the movement’s “game of pairs” was created, in which each instrument is paired off to play the cheeky rhythm. The premiere took place in 1944 at Carnegie Hall, with Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The American public enjoyed the work, although Bartók was persuaded to change the abrupt ending to a longer finale. Today the piece is one of Bartók’s most popular works, and one of the most performed 20th century orchestral works.

VENTANA PROGRAM NOTES

PF EIF F E R NOVEMBER 18 & 19, 2023 SUNSET CENTER, CARMEL

Andrew Grams, Guest Conductor Christina Mok, violin Pivot*

Anna Clyne

Les Préludes [16’]

Franz Liszt

[running time 6’]

(b. 1980)

INTERMISSION

(1811-1886)

[20’]

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 [38’] I: Allegro non troppo II: Adagio III: Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace— Poco più presto

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

* Monterey Symphony is participating in the inaugural California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. Along with more than 95 participating music organizations, we are celebrating the Golden State’s legacy of experimentation and free-spirited artistry, showcasing music created in the last five years. Learn more: cafestival.org The November concert will be rebroadcast on KAZU’s HD2 Classical station on December 9, 2023, and December 10, 2023, both at 4 PM.

PFEIFFER CONCERT

CHRISTINA MOK V I OLI N

An active performer, violinist Christina Mok has become a familiar figure in the classical music scene in Northern California. She devotes herself equally to solo performance, chamber recitals, and orchestral leading. She has appeared as a soloist with the Russian Federal Symphony Orchestra, the Janacek Philharmonic, the Seoul Symphony Orchestra, and Symphony Silicon Valley, among others. The San Jose Mercury declared of one of her concerto performances, “She was a spellbinder as she dug in and let it fly…There was no need to long for Itzhak Perlman or Gil Shaham.” As a chamber musician she has performed in Korea, Japan, England, Norway, Hong Kong, and the United States. Her recitals have been broadcast on the BBC and RTHK. Ms. Mok is the Concertmaster of the Stockton Symphony and the Monterey Symphony and the Associate Concertmaster of Symphony Silicon Valley. She has played with many British Orchestras, such as the Royal Philharmonic, the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Bournemouth Symphony. She has played in the Evian Festival, the Proms, Mainly Mozart Festival and Midsummer Mozart Festival. She is the winner of numerous competitions including the BBC Young Artists’ Forum Audition, the Sutton Chamber Music Competition, the Warshaw Violin Competition, the Korean Music Association Scholarship, and was named Young Promising Performer of the Year by the Seoul Arts Center. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London with a full scholarship and was also honored with a British Council Fellowship. Her principal teachers include Soon-Chung Suh, Yfrah Neaman, and Rodney Friend.

ANDREW GRAMS G U E ST CON DUCTOR

With a unique combination of intensity, enthusiasm and technical clarity, American conductor Andrew Grams has built a reputation for his dynamic concerts, connection with audiences, and orchestra building. He’s the winner of 2015 Conductor of the Year from the Illinois Council of Orchestras and has led orchestras throughout the United States including the Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, and the Houston Symphony. Andrew Grams became Music Director of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra in 2013 and recently concluded his tenure there after eight seasons. His charismatic conducting and accessibility have made him a favorite of Elgin Symphony audiences. A frequent traveler, Grams has worked with orchestras, including the symphony orchestras of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, the Orchestre National de France, Hong Kong Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra London, the symphony orchestras of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and Het Residentie Orchestra in The Hague, Netherlands. He has led performances of New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker® and the first performances of The Nutcracker for the Norwegian National Ballet in Olso. Mr. Grams has worked with the Curtis Institute of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University, Roosevelt University, the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland, and the Amsterdam Conservatorium. Grams began studying the violin when he was eight years old. In 1999 he received a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance from The Juilliard School, and in 2003 he received a conducting degree from the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied with Otto-Werner Mueller. From 2003-2004 he studied with David Zinman, Murry Sidlin and Michael Stern at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. Grams served as Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra from 2004-2007 where he worked under Franz Welser-Möst.

CHRISTINA MOK | ANDREW GRAMS BIOGRAPHIES

PROGRAM NOTES By Dr. Alicia Mastromonaco NOVEMBER 18-19, 2023

PFEIFFER (Whistler) The Pfeiffer family were settlers in the Big Sur region who loved the land so much that they eventually sold it to the State of California to turn into a State Park. The pieces in this program also show a connection to place and draw from philosophical and poetic ideals; Clyne borrows from a Scottish fiddle tune and finds inspiration from her experiences in Edinburgh, Liszt draws from poems by Autran and Lamartine, and Brahms utilizes the style hongrois (the “Hungarian style”) in homage to his friend and collaborator, the Austro-Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, in his violin concerto.

Pivot

Anna Clyne (b. 1980)

English composer Anna Clyne (b. 1980) composed, Pivot, for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2021, where it was premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Dalia Stasevska conducting. It was co-commissioned by

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the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, who premiered the work in November 2021 with David Danzmayr conducting. Pivot was written for string quintet and orchestra and embodies the celebratory and sometimes frenetic atmosphere that only a festival can provide. Pivot is a series of multiple musical vignettes that take the listener through various styles and genres. As the title suggests, the piece pivots between several different styles, Clyne’s nod to the wide array of performances she enjoyed at the Edinburgh festival. The boundaries between each segment sound like a musical doppler effect—the last bits and pieces from the previous segment are smeared into the next, like the sound bleed from neighboring stages at a music festival.

Interpolated between the various segments is the fiddle tune The Flowers of Edinburgh, a traditional 18th century Scottish fiddle tune that is also popular with American fiddlers. Clyne writes that this is one of the bridges she creates to connect to both Edinburgh and St. Louis. The fiddle tune sounds as if it is being heard through layers of fabric, and the listener has to hear between and beyond what might be at first apparent.

“Pivot ... embodies the celebratory and sometimes frenetic atmosphere that only a festival can provide.”

Les Préludes

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was both a composer and, more importantly at the time, a virtuoso concert pianist. His fans were so obsessed with him that it set off a craze known as “Lisztomania.” But Liszt was also an accomplished composer who heavily influenced the composers in his world. Some of his important contributions to the musical repertoire are his symphonic poems. Liszt is credited with coining the term symphonic poem in order to equally emphasize the importance of music and extra-musical program. Liszt’s symphonic poems are usually a one-movement

orchestral work, of which Les Préludes is the third (and most famous) of thirteen. Liszt’s symphonic poems general have a title that is literary, artistic, or philosophical in nature. Les Préludes was first performed at a benefit concert at the Weimar Hoftheater on February 23, 1854, with Liszt conducting. It was dedicated to Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s paramour for several decades. Sketches for Les Préludes date back as early as 1844, but Liszt put the work through multiple revisions before its premiere. The subtitle at the premiere was “d’apres Lamartine,” in association with poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine’s “Les Préludes” from his Nouvelles meditations poétiques. However, the piece was originally composed as an overture to Les Quatre Élémens, a choral cycle based on four poems by Joseph Autran before it was revised beginning in 1853 as an independent symphonic poem. Multiple musicologists have problematized the apparent ex-post-facto application of Lamartine’s poetry onto a piece written with Autran’s poetry in mind, but the more important idea is that the music bears allusions to extra-musical ideas, not that it exactly and clearly depicts them. Even without any conception of the program, the music from Les Préludes is a powerful evocation of the many tone colors, thematic transformations, and hyperemotional expressivity that are hallmarks of Liszt’s compositions.

PFEIFFER PROGRAM NOTES

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Brahms sent several passages to Joachim for editing, bowing, and his general opinions. Although he did not always heed Joachim’s feedback (after all, Joachim said of Brahms that he was, “egoism incarnate, without himself being aware of it. He will not make the smallest sacrifice of his intellectual inclinations.”) Still, the two worked on the concerto together, and the cadenza most often played today is Joachim’s.

German composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote his Violin Concerto for his good friend, the Austro-Hungarian violinist, composer, and conductor Joseph Joachim. Brahms and Joachim met in Göttingen 1853 and enjoyed each other’s company so much that Brahms returned the next summer to play music and compose together. Brahms wrote several pieces dedicated to Joachim in addition to the concerto, including his first violin sonata, the Scherzo in C for violin and piano, and the F-A-E- Sonata, written with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich for Joachim. The Double concerto, written in 1887 for violin and cello, served as a sort of peace offering to Joachim after Brahms sided with Joachim’s ex-wife, Amalie, during their divorce proceedings in 1881. Brahms also arranged several of Joachim’s pieces for piano and piano four hands. It goes without saying that the two had a close friendship and working relationship.

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The concerto was premiered on New Year’s Day, 1879 in Leipzig, with Joachim playing and Brahms conducting. The concert opened with the Beethoven Violin Concerto (also in D major). The concerto is more of a symphonic work with a solo violin than a virtuoso concerto. The piece shares much in common with Brahms’s second symphony, written in 1877, which both open in D major in ¾ time, on triadic themes. In some ways, it is a companion piece to the symphony and bears many of the hallmarks of a symphony over the virtuosic showmanship of many concertos of the time.

“The concerto was premiered on New Year’s Day, 1879, with Joachim playing and Brahms conducting.”

The second movement opens with a beautiful oboe solo, so beautiful that violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate refused to play the concerto because he did not want to “stand on the rostrum, violin in hand and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio.” The third movement is written in the style hongrois, or the Hungarian style, partially in tribute to Joachim, who grew up in Pest and was familiar with the musical lexicon from Hungarian folk music mixed with Roma music. Brahms was drawn toward the style hongrois also because of his fascination with irregular rhythms, rubato, and triplet figures which are all an important part of the playing style. Brahms and Joachim were good friends, and Joachim had been a student of Liszt’s earlier in his life. The musical world in the wake of Beethoven’s death in 1827 was having an identity crisis, and the two sides of the debate had strong opinions on the value of programmatic versus absolute music. An interesting connection between Liszt and Brahms is precisely their lack of connection; Brahms took such umbrage with Liszt’s literary-oriented music that he wrote a manifesto with Joachim, stating that Liszt’s program music ran “contrary to the inner spirit of music.” Brahms thought that music needed to progress “according to its own logic.” In other words, music should be absolute, without any program. Unfortunately, this manifesto was leaked to the press while it was still being circulated for signature, and Brahms suffered an immense amount of ridicule for his thoughts. He never again publicly expressed his opinions on artistic matters. In the end, both sides have won out, and we can hear the beautiful results of opposite 19th-century compositional ideals on the same program and appreciate them both equally.

PALO CORONA FEBRUARY 17-18, 2024 SUNSET CENTER, CARMEL

Jayce Ogren, Music Director and Conductor Lara Downes, piano Yamaha CFX concert grand piano provided by Yamaha Corporation of America

Overture to Der Freischutz

Carl Maria von Weber

The Great Migration: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra [20’]

John Wineglass

[running time 9’]

(1786-1826)

(b. 1972)

I: Strange Winds to Alien Shores II: Planes, Trains and Automobiles III: Resilience of a People INTERMISSION

[20’]

blue cathedral [12’]

Jennifer Higdon

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 [30’] I: Poco sostenuto—Vivace II: Allegretto III: Presto—Assai meno presto IV: Allegro con brio

Ludwig van Beethoven

(b. 1962)

(1770-1827)

The February concert will be rebroadcast on KAZU’s HD2 Classical station on March 9, 2024, and March 10, 2024, both at 4 PM.

PALO CORONA CONCERT

LARA DOWNES P I AN O

Pianist Lara Downes has been called “a musical ray of hope” by NBC News and “an explorer whose imagination is fired by bringing notice to the underrepresented and forgotten” (The Log Journal). An iconoclast and trailblazer, her dynamic work as a sought-after soloist, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, a producer, curator, arts activist and advocate positions her as a cultural visionary on the national arts scene. She was honored as 2022 Classical Woman of the Year by Performance Today. Downes’ recent and upcoming onstage adventures include guest appearances with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Pops, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra, and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, with recitals and residencies at Ravinia, the Gilmore Festival, Washington Performing Arts, Caramoor, and the Cabrillo Festival, among many others. Her creative collaborations with diverse artists including Rhiannon Giddens, Thomas Hampson, Judy Collins, Daniel Hope, Yo-Yo Ma and the Miró Quartet explore shared creative perspectives across genres and traditions. Lara’s forays into the broad landscape of music have created a unique series of acclaimed recordings, including her most recent release “Love at Last’ on the Pentatone label, which debuted at the top of the Billboard and Amazon charts and was featured on an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Downes’ transformative album America Again was selected by NPR as one of “10 Albums that Saved 2016” and hailed as “a balm for a country riven by disunion” by the Boston Globe. Lara is a highly visible media presence in her role as the creator and host of AMPLIFY with Lara Downes, an NPR Music video series soon launching its third season in partnership with Classical California. She is the creator and curator of Rising Sun Music, a label dedicated to making first recordings of music by Black composers from the 18th century to the present day. LaraDownes.com

LARA DOWNES BIOGRAPHY

PROGRAM NOTES By Dr. Alicia Mastromonaco FEBRUARY 17 & 18, 2024

PALO CORONA (Crown Tree) Palo Corona is a concert about transformation, transcendence, salvation, and overcoming personal setbacks. Der Freischütz is a story about the redeeming power of love. Higdon’s blue cathedral represents one’s travels over a lifetime and toward the afterlife. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 embodies bacchic dance qualities, to the extent that Richard Wagner called it “The Apotheosis of Dance.” All of these pieces reveal the deep the and sometimes mystical connections between the natural and supernatural worlds.

Overture to Der Freischütz

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)

At its core, the opera Der Freischütz is a story about the lengths one will go to for the sake of love. German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) wrote the work with the goal of creating a uniquely German opera from both a musical and dramatic perspective.

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The plot centers around two main characters, Max and Agathe, who are held apart from marrying each other only by one obstacle; a marksmanship competition. Fearing what will happen if he loses the competition for her hand, Max makes a deal with a nefarious marksman, Kaspar, and by proxy, an evil spirit, Samiel. After forging magical bullets, nearly killing Agathe in the process, and being found out for his deceit, Max promises to stay on the straight and narrow for a year if he and Agathe can marry at the end of that time period. All’s well that ends well in this sylvan opera that ushered in an era of German romantic opera.

The Great Migration Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

John Wineglass (b. 1972) Commissioned by the Monterey Symphony for my dear friend, American classical pianist and cultural activist Lara Downes. This work is dedicated to those who survived and escaped the severe Jim Crow Era laws of oppression of the Post-Civil War segregated farm-country South and their descendants. The Great Migration was the movement of some 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest and West between 1910-1970. Cities impacted by this migration were some of the then-largest cites in the United States (New York City, Newark, NJ, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Washington, D.C.). Poor economic conditions for African American people due to prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states were the primary causes. And even though many like my very own parents who migrated to Washington, DC faced social and economic inequities along with segregated water fountains and firehose assaults during the Civil Rights Movement, it was a far cry from the severely imposed Jim Crow laws which upheld physical lynching, beatings and constant social oppression at every turn. This chain of migrations eventually changed the course of American history by collective agency causing a ‘declaration of independence’ by their very own actions. The first movement entitled, Strange Winds to Alien Shores is another musical homage by the composer to the original

displacement of Africans through the Middle Passage where they were uprooted from their homelands and brought into slavery onto the shores and plantations of the Americas. From the cascading forte arpeggios of the piano to the rolling instances of the winds and strings against the bombastic brass countermelodies, the opening of this movement is a stark reminder of those ‘white ships with black cargo’ that led to horrible life conditions that provided free labor for centuries. The second movement, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is largely a celebratory jazz score marking a more optimistic free pursuit of a better life in the North by various modes of Post-Civil War transportation unlike the secret migration collectively known as the Underground Railroad some 100 years prior, guided by an icon of courage and freedom – Harriet Tubman. Finally, the third movement, Resilience of a People develops into a very large anthem celebrating the continued resilience and vigilance that has built and permeated the very core, culture and fabric of American society like no other. These migrations have produced the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Martin Luther King, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Jordan, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and finally set precedence for the historic election of America’s first Black leader of the free world – the 44th President of The United States of America – President Barack Hussein Obama. Representation matters. May we continue to charge towards one nation, indivisible, with liberty, freedom, justice and equality for ALL mankind. - John Wineglass

PALO CORONA PROGRAM NOTES

Blue Cathedral

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)

Ludwig van Beethoven

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) is one of the most often-performed American composers today. She has won numerous awards for her compositions, including three Grammy awards, the Guggenheim Foundation Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2010 for her Violin Concerto. blue cathedral, in particular, is one of her most famous pieces. It was commissioned and premiered by the Curtis Institute of Music in 2000 to commemorate their 75th anniversary. Higdon writes, “I wanted to create the sensation of contemplation and quiet peace at the beginning, moving towards the feeling of celebration and ecstatic expansion of the soul, all the while singing along with that heavenly music.” The piece is written not only in commemoration of Curtis’s anniversary but also a musical memorial for her late brother, Andrew Blue. Higdon is a flute player, and her brother was a clarinetist, so she interweaves the two instruments in dialogue with each other, the older sibling (Jennifer Higdon) beginning the solo. The two instruments overlap toward “a glass cathedral in the sky,” until the flute eventually drops out and the clarinet continues on its journey upward. Higdon wanted to represent the “expression of the individual and the group… our inner travels and the places our souls carry us, the lessons we learn, and the growth we experience.” The piece is a celebration, a loving eulogy and reminder that the passing of a soul from this world to the next can be seen as an ascension and expansion into all that is around us.

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(1770-1827)

In the wake of Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770-1827) death, his musical oeuvre began to take on a more symbolic status. Among musical connoisseurs and regular listeners alike, he was seen not simply as a prodigiously talented composer, but as a Symphonist, having composed the Platonic ideal of what a symphony can and should be. Although Beethoven wrote only nine symphonies, each of them has been studied and analyzed continuously since they were composed. Each symphony occupies its own historical significance. The seventh symphony has been linked to a festive celebratory mood, with Berlioz calling the first movement a “ronde des paysan,” and Wagner famously calling the symphony the “apotheosis of the dance.” Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon writes that the symphony can be distilled to the evocation of a single subject and image: “the carnival or festival, which from time immemorial has temporarily lifted the burden of perpetual subjugation to the prevailing social and natural order by periodically suspending all customary privileges, norms, and imperatives.” The symphony is imbued with joyousness, and even the more somber slow movement is hardly a slow movement at all, with the tempo marking allegretto.

In today’s programming, the symphony usually occupies the place of privilege on the program. However, the premiere performance of Beethoven’s 7th symphony was at a benefit concert for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers who had been wounded at the battle of Hanau. The piece de resistance at that concert, in honor of the attendees, was Beethoven’s work, Wellingtons Sieg (Wellington’s Siege). All the leading musicians of the day in Vienna participated in the Sieg performance, including famous violinists Schuppanzigh

“Today the piece is just as popular as it was at its premiere. Movements of the 7th Symphony have been part of the soundtracks of several famous films.”

from the beginning; not only was there a contrast in the quality of the work (the Sieg is commonly viewed as one of Beethoven’s worst pieces), but there could not have been a higher quality of musicians performing the symphony. The audience loved the symphony so much at the premiere that they demanded an encore of the second movement on the spot. This wasn’t unheard of at the time, but it was certainly not very common. The symphony became so popular that it was transcribed for several configurations: winds, septet, string quintet, piano quartet, piano trio, piano four hands, and solo piano. Today the piece is just as popular as it was at its premiere. Movements of the 7th Symphony have been part of the soundtracks of several famous films: The King’s Speech, Mr. Holland’s Opus, The Darjeeling Limited, and even the X-Men: Apocalypse film.

(who was concertmaster), Spohr, and Mayseder, and composers Hummel and Salieri, who played the drums and cannonades. Thayer, Beethoven’s first biographer, wrote that the musicians viewed Wellingtons Sieg similarly to how it is viewed today: “as a stupendous musical joke, and engaged in… con amore as a gigantic professional frolic.” (Beethoven, for his part, thought the same–the entire piece starts with two antiphonal drum corps “fighting” against each other.) However, this was likely yet another reason why the 7th symphony was so beloved

PALO CORONA PROGRAM NOTES

S ANTA LUCI A March 16 & 17, 2024 SUNSET CENTER, CARMEL

Jayce Ogren, Music Director and Conductor Orli Shaham, piano Overture to Don Giovanni, K. 527 [running time 7’]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Light Forming

David Robertson

(West Coast premiere) [21’]

(b. 1958)

I: “…la musique incertaine de leur voix…” II: Anfore del cuore III: Rounding to Joy INTERMISSION

[20’]

Lyric for Strings [6’]

George Walker

Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 [30’]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

(1922-2018)

I: Allegro II: Romanze III: Rondo, allegro assai

The March concert will be rebroadcast on KAZU’s HD2 Classical station on April 6, 2024, and April 7, 2024, both at 4 PM.

SANTA LUCIA CONCERT

ORLI SHAHAM P I AN O

A consummate musician recognized for her grace, subtlety and brilliance, the pianist Orli Shaham is in demand for her prodigious skills and admired for her interpretations of both standard and modern repertoire. The New York Times called her a “brilliant pianist,” The Chicago Tribune referred to her as “a first-rate Mozartean,” and London’s Guardian said Ms. Shaham’s playing at the Proms was “perfection.” She has performed with most of the major orchestras in the United States, on stage internationally from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House and appeared at music festivals around the world. Since 2007, she has been Artistic Director for Pacific Symphony’s chamber music series; and is Artistic Director of the interactive children’s concert series, Orli Shaham’s Bach Yard, which she founded in 2010. Continuing her multi-year Mozart recording project, Orli Shaham releases the final two volumes of the complete piano sonatas by Mozart in the 2023-24 season. Volumes 1-4 of the sonata cycle, and a recording of Mozart’s Piano Concertos are already out. Additionally, she has taught a master class on the digital platform Tonebase centered around the Mozart sonatas, as well as a live online discussion and demonstration of the life and music of Clara Schumann. Her discography includes a dozen titles on Deutsche Gramophone, Sony, Canary Classics and other labels. Ms. Shaham is on faculty at The Juilliard School, and has served on the juries of both the Cliburn and Honens International Piano Competitions. She is Co-Host and Creative for NPR’s “From the Top”, and was host of “America’s Music Festivals,” and “Dial-a-Musician,” a feature series she created, all of which are broadcast nationally. In addition to her musical education at the Juilliard School, Orli Shaham has a BA from Columbia University. She is a member of the board of trustees of Kaufman Music Center, serving as chair through 2023.

ORLI SHAHAM BIOGRAPHY

PROGRAM NOTES By Dr. Alicia Mastromonaco March 16 & 17, 2024

SANTA LUCIA (Light) The Santa Lucia Preserve stretches from Carmel south to San Luis Obispo County. Lucia is Latin for “light,” and Santa Lucia was famous for lighting her way to Christians hiding in Roman catacombs by wearing a candlelit wreath. Music Director Jayce Ogren compares the works on this program to the artistic technique of chiaroscuro—light and shadow. It is a concert that invites listeners to meditate on important relationships that are full of light, as well as those that are full of darkness.

Overture to Don Giovanni, K. 527

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Both of the pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) on this program were not only written in the same year, 1787, but have similar juxtapositions of comedy and tragedy, hyper dramatic action and sublime beauty. Mozart’s collaborator Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto is a retelling

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of the already centuries-old tale of the conquests of Don Juan. In the final act of the opera, Don Giovanni is dragged down to hell by the marmoreal Comendatore, after refusing to repent for his sins throughout the opera. The music for this scene is also the opening of the overture; in it, the Comendatore sings, “Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m’invitasti, E son venuto,” (“Don Giovanni, you’ve invited me to dinner, and here I am”). From the first notes of the overture, Mozart sets the listener’s expectations for Don Giovanni’s eventual demise.

Light Forming

David Robertson (b. 1958) is nearly identical to that of a Mozart concerto, albeit with the modern addition of a percussionist.

Most concertos are composed with a specific soloist in mind, even if the composer does not work closely with the intended soloist during the composition process. However, few concertos are written specifically for a spouse. Composer and conductor David Robertson (b. 1958) wrote Light Forming for his wife, Orli Shaham, who is performing it with the Monterey Symphony. Robertson studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but much of his career has been dedicated to being a conductor with orchestras such as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, where he and Shaham met in 1999 when he was conducting her performance of Chopin’s first concerto in E minor. Robertson and Shaham have performed over 25 concertos together, and Light Forming is a continuation of their working and life partnership. Light Forming was commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic and premiered in October 2022 under the baton of Eric Jacobson. Robertson notes that he knew he wanted the piece to be around twentyone minutes so that it could serve as a companion piece to another concerto. Additionally, Robertson’s instrumentation

Robertson notes that he has always been interested in the sounds people make when talking and wanted to use the piano as a musical transliterator of poetic meaning. The first movement, “… la musique incertaine de leur voix…” (“the uncertain music of their voices,”) is a line from Marcel Proust’s Sodom et Gomorrah that is beloved by the composer, and which he uses to bolster the movement within literary underpinnings. The inspiration for the music comes from French structuralist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s prose poem La Déclaration Foraine (“Declaration at a Fair”). Robertson notes that Mallarmé’s poems “often flicker between the sound and the sense of a phrase, an inherently musical approach,” and that was the inspiration to use the piano to pull meaning out of the inflections of the sonnet. The second movement draws inspiration from a room full of amphorae at the Museum of the Imperial Fora in Rome. Robertson was moved not only by the vessels but the room in which they were housed, within the ancient walls of the Forum. The fact that the vessels need to be carried with both hands inspired the foundational technique of the movement, the use of two-fisted piano chords. In the final movement, Robertson reflects on the immense joy that music can provide. Particularly during the pandemic when he was composing the work, music was a source of solace, wonder, and delight. Robertson writes that the third movement “is an exuberant, grateful dance around the light and love that Orli is constantly bringing to me ever since that first lucky meeting” in 1999.

SANTA LUCIA PROGRAM NOTES

Lyric for Strings

George Walker (1922-2018) for Voice and Orchestra, which was commissioned by the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa. He wrote over ninety works, with commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, among others.

“He was the first Black graduate of Curtis, where he received artist diplomas in piano and composition in 1945.” Composer George Theophilus Walker (1922-2018) was a groundbreaking composer whose long career was filled with many prominent compositions premiered by major orchestras, and numerous prizes and awards for his output. Walker started attending Oberlin Conservatory when he was 14 to study piano with David Moyer and organ with Arthur Poser. At age 18 he went to the Curtis Institute of Music to study piano with Rudolf Serkin, chamber music with William Primrose, Gregor Piatigorsky, and composition with Rosario Scaler (who was also Samuel Barber’s composition teacher). He was the first Black graduate of Curtis, where he received artist diplomas in piano and composition in 1945. Later, he attended Eastman where he was the first Black graduate to earn a Doctorate of Musical Arts in 1955. Walker was awarded a Fulbright in 1957 and moved to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger for two years. Walker was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for his work Lilacs

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Walker first composed Lyric for Strings as the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1 in 1945 when he was a graduate student at Curtis. The first version for orchestra, titled Lament, was premiered by the Curtis orchestra with Seymour Lipkin conducting. Walker later rearranged and renamed the piece. Lyric for Strings is dedicated to the memory of Walker’s grandmother, a formerly enslaved person, who died shortly before the piece’s completion.

Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Out of his twenty-seven piano concertos, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) composed only two in minor keys, this one, and Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491, which was premiered in 1786. With the ink hardly dry on the parts at the premiere, the 20th piano concerto contains all the sturm und drang “storm and stress” turbulence that was so popular at the time. It also has the joyous happy ending that was given to the Lenten audience at the premiere in February 1785. D minor is an important key for Mozart, one that for him evokes a tragic state. D minor is a world, as musicologist John Rice argues, of “vengeance and violence, the supernatural, the underworld, and the furies.” The overture from Don Giovanni (who eventually is dragged down to hell) is in D minor, as is the Queen of the Night’s aria from Die Zauberflöte, in which she implores her daughter to murder the Queen’s arch nemesis, Sarastro. The overture, aria, and concerto all have similar characteristics of violence and fury, particularly in the first movement. The concerto opens with foreboding rumblings in the low strings. The disquieting syncopations remain ominously quiet until the entire orchestra enters, with trumpets and drums ringing out. Even the second movement does not provide a complete respite from the sturm und drang—in the middle of the movement is a minor outburst that agitates the placid beauty from before. There is the saying that all of Mozart’s music is opera. As with many of the operas at the time, the piano concerto does not remain in minor for the duration but ends triumphantly in major. It is the Lieto fine, the happy ending that audiences expected, that appears only after the final cadenza at the 3rd movement. The optimism of the era shines through, and the chiaroscuro of this program appears again. From darkness comes light.

LOM A PR I E TA April 20 & 21, 2024 SUNSET CENTER, CARMEL

Jayce Ogren, Music Director and Conductor Sean Panikkar, tenor | Daniel Nebel, horn Epitaph to a Man Who Dreamed

Adolphus Hailstork

Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings [25’]

Benjamin Britten

[running time 7’]

I: II: III: IV: V. VI: VII:

(b. 1941)

(1913-1976)

Prologue Pastoral: “The Evening Quatrains” Charles Cotton (1630-1687) Nocturne: “The Splendor Falls” Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) Elegy: “The Sick Rose” William Blake (1757-1827) Dirge: “Lyke Wake Dirge” Anonymous (15th century) Hymn: “Queen and Huntress” Ben Johnson (1572-1637) Epilogue

INTERMISSION

[20’]

Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten [6’]

Arvo Pärt

Symphony No. 3, Pastoral [34’]

Vaughan Williams

(b. 1935)

(1872-1958)

I: Molto moderato II: Lento moderato— Moderato maestoso III: Moderato pesante IV: Lento

The April concert will be rebroadcast on KAZU’s HD2 Classical station on May 11, 2024, and May 12, 2024, both at 4 PM.

LOMA PRIETA CONCERT

SEAN PANIKKAR T E N OR

Sean Panikkar continues “to position himself as one of the stars of his generation… His voice is unassailable— firm, sturdy and clear, and he employs it with maximum dramatic versatility” [Opera News]. Highlights of the 2023-24 season include a debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in a new production of Das Rheingold led by Music Director Sir Antonio Pappano, a new production of Die Fledermaus at the Bayerische Staatsoper under the baton of Music Director Vladimir Jurowski, a new production by Wayne McGregor of Œdipus Rex at Dutch National Opera, a new production by Peter Sellars of The Gambler at the Salzburger Festspiele, and a revival at the Metropolitan Opera of Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Kevin Puts’ hit new opera, The Hours. The American tenor of Sri Lankan heritage achieved a break-out success in his 2018 Salzburger Festspiele debut in The Bassarids and he has been lauded for performances at Los Angeles Opera as Gandhi in Satyagraha, at the Wiener Staatsoper in Wozzeck, and for Intolleranza 1960 both at the Salzburger Festspiele and Komische Oper Berlin. Numerous engagements with the Metropolitan Opera include The Death of Klinghoffer, Guillaume Tell, and Roméo et Juliette. On the great symphonic stages of the world, he has made music with Juraj Valčuha and the Houston Symphony, Xian Zhang and the New Jersey Symphony, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Sean Panikkar is a member of Forte, the operatic tenor group combining voices from different cultures into one incredible sound. The trio was created and debuted for the first time ever on America’s Got Talent and was seen and heard by tens of millions of television viewers in national broadcasts on NBC. An alumnus of San Francisco Opera’s Adler Fellowship, Sean Panikkar holds Master’s and Bachelor degrees in Voice Performance from the University of Michigan.

DANIEL NEBEL HORN

Daniel Nebel is currently the principal hornist of the Monterey Symphony, Horn Instructor at Colorado State University Pueblo, and keyboardist at Arvada United Methodist Church in Arvada, CO. He served as a bandsman with the United States Air Force Band of the Golden West for five years touring extensively throughout the Western United States. He currently freelances throughout Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and California and has previously held positions with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra, Wichita Grand Opera, Fort Collins Symphony, and North State Symphony. A longtime pianist and church organist, Nebel has directed music and accompanied services for seven congregations over the last seventeen years and currently runs a private teaching studio in the Denver Metro area. Additionally, Daniel Nebel is a certified personal trainer, a yoga instructor, and recently completed a Doctorate at the University of Northern Colorado specializing in postural studies of horn players. Nebel also holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Wichita State University. He enjoys hiking, backpacking, trail running, cycling, and rock climbing with his wife Erin in the beautiful public lands of the Western United States.

SEAN PANIKKAR | DANIEL NEBEL BIOGRAPHIES

PROGRAM NOTES By Dr. Alicia Mastromonaco April 20 & 21, 2024

LOMA PRIETA (Dark Hill) Loma Prieta Peak is located just north of Monterey County, part of the Loma Prieta fault line that was the locus of the disastrous 1989 earthquake. At the center of this concert—like the center of the quake that disrupted so many lives—is music about loss. Epitaph for a Man Who Dreamed honors the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. The Britten Serenade is about ephemerality, night, sleep, and dreams. The Pärt is written in memory of Benjamin Britten. Finally, the Vaughan Williams is a tribute to the beautiful landscape of northern France and the soldiers who died there during World War I. It is an elegiac program, yet there is an ineffable beauty in each piece that breathes life into the spaces they inhabit.

Epitaph to a Man who Dreamed

Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) In a nod to one of the most famous speeches in American history, Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) composed this elegy to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1980, which was premiered by the Baltimore Symphony under William Henry Curry. Hailstork writes at the top of the score, “A great man is being buried. A few mourners ring the gravesite singing a spiritual. Gradually, more bereaved gather and join in (strings). They reflect upon their memories of hopes and dreams inspired by their fallen leader. The service concludes and the bowed heads begin to lift. They will carry on.” 48

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The piece itself exists almost outside of time, like an epitaph written on a tombstone, whose sentiments remain inscribed for centuries to come. Hailstork writes further, “Technically the piece is a study in understatement and control. There is no virtuosity. There are no sudden dramatic effects. Harmony is simple, coloration is medium to dark. There is a very restrained and careful control of climax, there being only one at the end of the work.” Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “I have a dream,” although it was given over sixty years ago, in 1963, lives in today’s consciousness as if it had been delivered yesterday. So, too, does the Epitaph provide a timelessness that suspends the listener in a sea of reflection and remembrance.

Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

his respect for a composer’s ideas.” The piece was dedicated to Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron of Sackville, an admirer of Britten’s, who helped with the choice of poetry.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) is credited with being the most famous British composer since Henry Purcell, whose music has become a part of the standard repertoire in the classical music world. His most famous works are his vocal works: operas, song cycles, and choral works. The Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings is one of his most beloved works that has become a standard piece in the horn and tenor repertoire. The Serenade was written for Britten’s musical and life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, and horn player and rising star in the musical world at the time, Dennis Brain. Pears was Britten’s muse, whose voice has become synonymous with Britten’s tenor roles. Britten met Brain in the summer of 1942, when the latter asked the composer for a horn concerto. The Serenade is what came of that request. In a memorial tribute to Brain, Britten wrote of the horn player’s enthusiasm for the piece, “His help was invaluable in writing the work; but he was always most cautious in advising any alterations. Passages which seemed impossible even for his prodigious gifts were practiced over and over again before any modifications were suggested, such was

The piece was primarily composed during a severe bout of measles that Britten suffered from in March and April 1943. The Serenade is bookended by a prologue and epilogue for solo natural horn, the precursor to the modern horn that does not have any valves. Britten makes use of the slightly out of tune notes along the harmonic series on the horn. The first performance took place at Wigmore Hall in London in October 1943, with Pears, Britten, and Walter Goehr conducting his string orchestra. In some ways, the Serenade was a compositional preamble to what is perhaps Britten’s most famous work, his opera Peter Grimes, Op. 33, which was composed around the same time. The piece has elegiac qualities, though it was not intended to be an elegy to commemorate a loss. The poetry all hints at something that is unreachable, in the distance, a “shadowed pastoralism.” However, it has become a sort of musical elegy for Dennis Brain. In addition to being the most sought-after horn player in England during his lifetime, Brain was also an avid sportscar enthusiast. In 1957, while driving back to London from a concert with the Philharmonia in Edinburgh, Dennis Brain hit a tree in in a tragic, fatal accident in his Triumph sportscar. He was only 36. The Serenade, along with Britten’s Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain, were written for Brain and Pears.

LOMA PRIETA PROGRAM NOTES

Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten centers around the key of A minor. The piece is scored for a string orchestra and a single chime on the pitch “A” that tolls at the beginning of the work to situate the pitch center. Pärt noted that he had only discovered Britten’s music shortly before he passed away, and lamented the fact that he would have liked to meet him but never got the chance. Like many of Pärt’s compositions, the piece is meditative; a meditation on death and perhaps, missed opportunities.

Benjamin Britten’s death in December 1976 had a profound effect on Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935); so much so that he dedicated an elegiac piece he was writing to the memory of the composer whom he so admired. Pärt is known for his sparse minimalist works, such as Spiegel im Spiegel, and Für Alina, which don’t occupy the same lushness of the Cantus. In this work, Pärt utilizes a style of composition he invented in 1976, which he calls tintinnabuli. In Latin, tintinnabulum means “bell,” and Pärt’s tintinnabula music consists of just two lines: an M-voice, or melodic line, that usually moves by step, and a T-voice, or tintinnabulation line, which usually only uses the pitches of the “tonic” triad. Cantus is technically also a prolation canon in five parts, in which each voice enters an octave lower and at half speed. This creates the effect of falling, until every voice meets in their bottom register on an A minor chord.

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“Pärt ... dedicated an elegiac piece he was writing to the memory of the composer whom he so admired.”

Symphony No. 3, Pastoral

Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) 1921. Sir Adrian Boult, who would become one of Vaughan Williams’s most ardent interpreters, conducted the premiere in January 1922 with the Orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

“his composition career was not purely musical, but more humanistic, more oriented toward the condition of his fellow citizens.” Vaughan Williams Foundation

British Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was born to an esteemed family of lawyers and thinkers (his grandmother was a sister of Charles Darwin) and was the son of a reverend. Unsurprisingly, given his background, his outlook on his composition career was not purely musical, but more humanistic, more oriented toward the condition of his fellow citizens. Vaughan Williams had such a sense of responsibility to the people around him that in 1914 he enlisted, at age 42, as a wagon orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I. He served in France and on the Salonika front, later returning to France as an artillery officer. Vaughan Williams did not compose any music during the war, but he did make music, such as conducting an army choir on Christmas Eve in 1916, and the idea for a symphony began to take shape in his mind at this time. He began work on the symphony in 1919 and completed it in

The Pastoral nomenclature of the symphony is not meant to evoke a quaint, idyllic landscape. Far to the contrary, Vaughan Williams’s pastorality in this symphony is a treatment on the vicissitudes of war on the European people and landscape. This is “war time music,” as Vaughan Williams wrote to Ursula Wood, his future wife, in 1938. The symphony is almost entirely slow movements. Even the faster third movement is labeled only “moderato.” The fourth movement opens with a wordless voice, often sung by a soprano, but in this case, a tenor. The symbolism of a male voice opening the final movement makes this war time symphony more poignant. Is this the voice of a fallen soldier, or soldier returning home? Or is it the disembodied voice of place? Within the dissonances and reflectiveness of the Pastoral symphony, the memories of war recede into moments of utter beauty and hopefulness in Vaughan Williams’s lush and poignant harmony and orchestration.

LOMA PRIETA PROGRAM NOTES

PINN ACLE S May 18 & 19, 2024 SUNSET CENTER, CARMEL

Jayce Ogren, Music Director and Conductor

Symphony No. 5 [running time 65’]

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

I: Trauermarsch II: Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter Vehemenz III: Scherzo IV: Adagietto V. Rondo-Finale

The May concert will be rebroadcast on KAZU’s HD2 Classical station on June 8, 2024, and June 9, 2024, both at 4 PM.

PINNACLES CONCERT

PROGRAM NOTES By Dr. Alicia Mastromonaco May 18 & 19, 2024

PINNACLES (Peak/Culmination) The craggy ridges and valleys of Pinnacles National Park were formed around 23 million years ago, a product of eruption, cracking, stretching, and erosion. The landscape is otherworldly, something that is unique to the region. AustroBohemian composer Gustav Mahler said that “A symphony should be like the world. It must embrace everything.” If each of his nine completed symphonies is a world, then the fifth occupies the world of love. Mahler wrote the symphony during his brief courtship of Alma Schindler in 1901 before their marriage in 1902. It is dedicated to her. The symphony has moments of cragginess and melancholy, but finishes with ebullient moments of joy and celebration.

Symphony No. 5

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Hofoper in 1897. He served there from 18971907, when conflict at the Hofoper made him decide to move to the United States to take an appointment at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Gustav Mahler’s (1860-1911) symphonies have found their place among the canonical symphonic repertoire, but only they after they were “rediscovered” in the middle of the 20th century. By the 1970s, Mahler was one of the most recorded symphonists. Gustav Mahler came from a Bohemian Jewish Family but later converted to Catholicism shortly before being appointed director of the Vienna 54

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He began the Fifth symphony in the summer of 1901, the first year Mahler spent the season at his villa on the Wörthersee, through the period in which he met and married Alma Schindler in 1902. Mahler put the piece through numerous revisions as late as 1907 and was fully satisfied with the work. He wrote, “The Fifth is finished. I have been forced to re-orchestrate it completely. I cannot understand how I could have written so much like a beginner ... Clearly the routine I had acquired in the first four symphonies completely deserted me, as though a totally new message demanded a new technique.” Despite his

qualms with the work, it is one of his most popular works. The symphony is comprised of five movements, grouped into three parts. It was Mahler’s first purely instrumental symphony since his First, in which he incorporated passages from his song cycle Songs of a Wayfarer in the orchestra. The Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies each have vocal parts, as does his Eighth (the “Symphony of a Thousand”). Mahler wrote, “the human voice would be utterly out of place here. There is no call for words, everything is said in purely musical terms.” Still, there are instrumental allusions to three of Mahler’s songs in this symphony. The first movement, Trauermarsch (“funeral march”), opens with a militaresque trumpet fanfare, in C# minor. The opening solo forms a rhythmic tattoo for the movement. This minor third fanfare is borrowed from the first movement of the Fourth symphony, in which the trumpet plays the same theme, but the Fifth is a more insistent version of the motive. The second movement is in some respects a continuation of the first movement and comprises the other half of the first part. There is not an enormous amount of thematic material, but Mahler spins these themes into the third movement, the Scherzo, which is the whole of the second part of the symphony, as well as the longest single movement. Mahler wrote that the movement “is intensely difficult to work out because of the structure and the supreme artistic mastery which it demands in all its relationships and details. The apparent confusion must resolve itself into perfect order and harmony, as in a Gothic cathedral.” Like many of Mahler’s scherzo movements, there is more than a passing resemblance to the Ländler, a German peasant country dance. Sometimes akin to a Ländler, other times more like a Viennese Waltz, the third movement is full of both geometry and Schwung. The horn obligato part in the scherzo soars above the orchestra and the horns seem to echo over Alpen lake where Mahler was composing.

Music scholars sometimes ascribe extramusical meaning to symphonies in the search for a deeper understanding of the work. In some cases, the composers deny any program but Mahler himself claimed to have sent the Adagietto as a musical love letter to his future wife. Composers both, Mahler and Schindler traveled in similar circles in Vienna. Alma Schindler wrote, “I had first met Zemlinsky at a small party and we went through the people around us with malicious sarcasm. Suddenly we looked at each other. ‘If we can think of someone about whom only good can be said, we’ll drain a glass to him!’ And with one voice we cried: ‘Mahler!’” After meeting at a party, Mahler and Schindler had a whirlwind courtship before Mahler proposed within a few months. The Adagietto opens Part Three of the symphony and is perhaps the most famous of all of Mahler’s works. The movement opens with only the strings and harp; a tender, beautiful passage that. The lush beauty of the movement belies the fact that the Mahlers’ marriage was not always a happy one, not least of all because Mahler married Alma Schindler only after she agreed to abandon her own promising composition career. He was also nearly 20 years her senior. Despite any turmoil that might have been brewing beneath the surface, the movement floats above the fray of worldly concerns, an idyllic respite. The Rondo-Finale, the closing movement of Part Three, alludes to a motif from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a song cycle that Mahler had been working on for years, Lob des hohen Verstandes. It reintroduces the brass chorale material from the second movement, as well as an enlivened version of the Adagietto. Transcending the Trauermarsch from the first movement, the Rondo-Finale ends in a burst of laughter, a raucous, joyous ending to the world that Mahler created in his Fifth Symphony.

PINNACLES PROGRAM NOTES

DR. ALICIA MASTROMONACO

ASS I STAN T PRI N C I PAL HO R N Program Notes Author

Alicia has played with the Monterey Symphony since 2007. She is also a member of the Carmel Bach Festival, Marin and California Symphonies and plays with orchestras across the Bay Area, including the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, Berkeley Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Santa Rosa Symphony, New Century Chamber orchestra, and other regional orchestras. She is Lecturer of Horn at Sonoma State University. A San Francisco native, Alicia began her music studies at age seven on the piano and sang in the San Francisco Girls Chorus before taking up the horn. Alicia earned Bachelor of Music degrees in Horn Performance and Musicology from Boston University, then did graduate work at the Universität der Künste Berlin before returning to California to continue her studies. She earned a Master of Music in horn performance at University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master of Arts and PhD in Musicology from University of California, Santa Barbara. Alicia lives with her husband, daughter, and two cats in El Cerrito where she enjoys the many beautiful hiking trails just outside their door, baking sourdough bread, and gardening.

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BOARD OFFICERS Charles Schimmel, Chair Maureen Sanders, Vice Chair Pinkie Terry, Treasurer Jeffrey Wallace, Secretary Bruce Lindsey, Immediate Past Chair

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Jeryl Abelmann Susan Breen Susan Britton Mollie Hedges Diane Mall Alan Mason Noelle Micek Brenda Murdock Lee E. Rosen William Sharpe Martin Wolf David Zaches

ADMINISTRATION Nicola Shangrow Reilly,

President and CEO Noemi Vera, Director of Operations

Virginia Marine,

Director of External Relations Julie Lim, Office Manager Drew Ford, Personnel Manager and Orchestra Librarian Liz Lyman, Executive Administrator

PROGRAM BOOK CREATIVE DIRECTOR Virginia Marine

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HONORARY COUNCIL William G. Doolittle Roberta Elliott Gabrielle Hahn Jo-Ann Hatch Carol Lee Holland Joanne Taylor

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LEGACY SOCIETY Our Legacy Society is made up of those individuals who wish to be a part of the future of the Monterey Symphony. We honor and celebrate this amazing group of individuals annually, and we cordially invite you to join the Legacy Society. Let us know that you have included the Monterey Symphony in your planned giving.

Greta Alexander Andrew Allison The Dorothy L. Becker Trust Bethany Beckman* Gary & Carolyn Bjorklund Lewis & Sally Cantor Jacqueline M. Clampett-Jones Katharine Comstock Leland E.* & Gloria U. Dake Roderick* & Suzanne* Dewar William & Nancy Doolittle William* & Nancy Fisher Robert M. & Betty Jo Graham* Louise Guard* Ruth S. Hartmann* Mollie Hedges Dr. & Mrs. Michael Hendrickson Jill Himonas* Peter & Patti Hoss Herschel & Shirley* Loomis Marjorie Love*

Sally Maggio Sherrie McCullough Dick* & Grace Merrill Mr. Don Newmark Alyce M. Nunes* John Philips & June Dunbar Margaret Anderson Radunich* Nicola Reilly Lee & Shirley Rosen Barbara Rupp Virginia Ruth Charles Schimmel William* & Kristine* Schuyler Robert Sykes Joanne Taylor Elizabeth Haywood Watt* Neal & Elaine Whitman Donald & Renate Wunsch *deceased

If you are interested in joining the Legacy Society, please contact Nicola Shangrow Reilly, President and CEO, at nreilly@montereysymphony.org or call our office at (831) 645-1131.

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