San Antonio Philharmonic Classics 4 Program

Classics 4

Program Guide

Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky Sarah Ioannides, conductor Gabriela Martinez, piano

Photo credit: Thomas Concordia

Adelante Juntos!Forward Together Dear esteemed patrons,

In this holiday season, we wish to express our sincere gratitude for your invaluable patronage. The San Antonio Philharmonic has had the distinct privilege of presenting numerous Young People's Concerts to the students in our region, achieving record-breaking attendance at our captivating Classics performances, and gracing extraordinary community events across the city throughout this year. Remarkably, we are only halfway through our exhilarating season.

We remain steadfast in fulfilling the mission of the San Antonio Philharmonic, which is to serve our distinctive community by bringing the gift of music to all individuals. Our aim is to cultivate cultural understanding, foster artistic growth, and empower individuals of diverse generations and backgrounds through the profound and transformative power of music. By doing so, we strive to create a vibrant and interconnected community. As we embark on our second season, we are resolute in our commitment to keeping Classical music alive. With the inclusion of esteemed guest conductors and soloists, we continue to bring the beauty of music not only to our valued patrons but also to every member of this dynamic community.

We are committed to establishing a thoughtful performing arts organization for all San Antonians, and we are grateful for our patrons, the community, and all those who consistently provide us with unwavering support. San Antonio and its neighboring regions hold a deep history for arts and culture, and it is with great honor that we embrace the responsibility of carrying this legacy into 2024. The San Antonio Philharmonic uplifts all individuals through the power of music and we are honored to continue this great tradition.

We cordially invite you to consider making your end-of-year planning a heartfelt contribution to the San Antonio Philharmonic, thereby enabling us to sustain our steadfast commitment to serving our beloved community. Your generous support will help us continue nurturing the cultural fabric of San Antonio, ensuring the enduring vitality of classical music for years to come.

Please enjoy this evening’s concert alongside your fellow members of the arts community, as we come together to celebrate where we have been and where we are headed together.

With deepest gratitude,

Roberto Treviño, Executive Director

Program December 1 & 2, 2023, 7:30 p.m.

Sarah Ioannides, conductor Gabriela Martinez, piano

Caught by the Wind

Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981)

Concerto No. 2 in C minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 18 Moderato Sergei Rachmaninoff Adagio sostenuto (1873-1943) Allegro scherzando Gabriela Martinez, piano

Intermission

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Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Andante – Allegro con anima (1840-1893) Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza Valse: Allegro moderato Finale: Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace

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Orchestra Violin I Ertan Torgul, Concertmaster Rainel Joubert, Assistant Concertmaster Philip Johnson Elizabeth Girko Laura Scalzo Andrew Small Craig Sorgi Bassam Nashawati Angela Caporale Antonio Cevallos Violin II Mary Ellen Goree, Principal Karen Stiles, Assistant Principal Judy Levine-Holley Beth Johnson Amy Venticinque Stephanie Westney Julie Post Eva Weber Viola Allyson Dawkins, Principal Marisa Bushman, Assistant Principal Amy Pikler Christopher Gokelman Beverly Bias Bethany Turriff

Flute Tyler Martin, Principal Hunter O’Brien Julie Luker, Assistant Principal Oboe Mayu Isom, Principal Erin Webber, Assistant Principal Clarinet Ilya Shterenberg, Principal Ivan Valbuena Paez, Assistant Principal Nicholas Councilor Bassoon Brian Petkovich, Principal Ryan Wilkins, Assistant Principal Horn Peter Rubins, Principal Catherine Dowd Russell Rybicki, Assistant Principal Erin Amendola Caroline Steiger Trumpet John Carroll, Principal Lauren Eberhart, Assistant Principal Dan Orban

Cello Kenneth Freudigman, Principal Barbara George, Assistant Principal Qizhen Liu Ignacio Gallego Carolyn Hagler Carrie Pierce

Trombone Steve Peterson, Principal Erik Anderson, Assistant Principal Simon Lohmann

Bass David Milburn, Principal Zlatan Redzic, Assistant Principal Steven Zeserman James Chudnow

Timpani Peter Flamm, Principal

Librarian Allison Bates

Tuba Joseph Hipp, Principal

Percussion Riely Francis, Principal Sherry Rubins, Assistant Principal

Sarah Ioannides

Sarah Ioannides, Conductor Sarah Ioannides is the newly appointed Resident Conductor of National Youth Orchestra-USA, and Music Director of Symphony Tacoma. She maintains an extensive and international reputation as a guest conductor, speaker and adjudicator. Described by the New York Times as a conductor with “unquestionable strength and authority” and a conductor with “magic” (News Tribune), Sarah Ioannides has gained recognition for her passionate performances, multifaceted leadership and creativity in programming and multimedia productions.

Internationally, Sarah has conducted on six continents with orchestras including the Tonkünstler, the Royal Philharmonic, Orchestre Nationale de Lyon, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony, the Flemish Radio, Bilbao Symphony, and some of the world's greatest National Youth Orchestras, including the South African National Youth Orchestra, Andalusian Youth Orchestra and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra.

Sarah began her career with the Cincinnati Symphony, where she became the first woman appointed to a full-time conducting position and she has since conducted extensively in the United States including the Buffalo Philharmonic, Charleston Symphony, Hawai’i Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Tulsa and the Toledo Symphony.

A great advocate for new music, Sarah has conducted and curated over 60 world, North American and European orchestral premiers, recorded world premieres with Nordic Chamber Orchestra, Malmö Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. She has produced many original videos for live orchestral multimedia performances and digital productions and was previously an assistant production coordination with composer/conductor Tan Dun. Attending Oxford University on an Instrumental Scholarship and The Juilliard School, she earned two Master's degrees. After receiving an Advanced Certificate in Conducting from the Guildhall School of Music, Sarah came to the USA as a Fulbright Scholar and graduated from The Curtis Institute of Music where she studied and was Assistant to the late Otto-Werner Mueller.

Married to Scott Hartman, renowned trombonist, they have three children, Elsa and Karl (twins), and Audrey.

Gabriela Martinez

Photo Credit Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

GABRIELA MARTINEZ, Pianist Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez has garnered a stellar reputation for the lyricism of her playing, her compelling interpretations, and her elegant stage presence. She has been described as “a remarkable pianist, with a cool determination, a tone full of glowing color and a seemingly effortless technique,” her touch “magical” (LA Times) and her musicianship “elegant and insightful” (The New York Times).

Gabriela made her orchestral debut at age 6, and since then has performed with over 100 orchestras, including the San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, Grand Rapids, New Jersey, Tucson, Pacific and Fort Worth symphonies; Buffalo Philharmonic; Germany’s Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Nürnberger Philharmoniker; Canada’s Victoria Symphony Orchestra; the Costa Rico National Symphony; and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in Venezuela.

Gabriela’s passion for new music has led her to premiere works by such 13 composers as Mason Bates, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Paola Prestini, Jessica Meyer, and Dan Visconti. Her debut album, Amplified Soul, was released on the Delos label in 2016, and recognized with a GRAMMY Award for Producer of the Year (David Frost). Her performances have been featured on National Public Radio, CNN, PBS, “60 Minutes,” ABC, “From the Top,” Radio France, WQXR and WNYC (New York), MDR Kultur and Deutsche Welle (Germany), NHK (Japan), RAI (Italy), and on numerous television and radio stations in Venezuela.

Gabriela won First Prize at the Anton G. Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Dresden (2003) and was a semifinalist at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (2005), where she also received the Jury Discretionary Award. She is a fifth-generation pianist; she began her piano studies in Caracas with her mother, Alicia Gaggioni. Gabriela earned Bachelor’s and Master’s of Music degrees at The Juilliard School as a full scholarship student of Yoheved Kaplinsky.

Program Notes Caught by the Wind (2016)

by Jessie Montgomery (b. New York, 1981)

Jessie Montgomery is one of the most prominent American composers of the new millennium. Her music, which often addresses issues of social justice, reaches across boundaries of race and gender to redefine what we have traditionally been thinking of as the classical “canon.” Caught by the Wind was commissioned by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, which gave the first performance, under the direction of David Alan Miller, on June 11, 2016. The composer has offered the following remarks on her piece: Caught by the Wind has two main sources of inspiration: first, my brother’s environmental activist bicycle tour, The Pleasant Revolution, where he and his disciples traveled thousands of miles promoting awareness of environmental issues, self-powering their shows with bicycle generators…The journey of pedaling from country to country by bicycle was a powerful and transcending experience for all band members and crew who dedicated months, even years, to the tour.

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Midway through composing the piece, things took a slightly different turn: while on retreat in upstate New York, I was on a much-needed head-clearing walk through the woods and found a branch that had been mangled and torn by the wind. I was fascinated by how the intricate system of stems tangled together revealing a full life cycle in its now disfigured form. The piece, in the end, is about cycles—whether bicycles or life cycles—it spins, journeys and winds, gets caught and ultimately comes to its end.

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Program Notes Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor (1901)

by Sergei Rachmaninoff (Semyonovo, Russia, 1873 – Beverly Hills, CA, 1943)

Sergei Rachmaninoff once described himself as a man chasing three hares, and not sure of having captured even one of them. The ‟three hares” were the three sides of Rachmaninoff’s musical career: composing, piano-playing, and conducting. During his life, there were indeed periods when he had to give up one of these activities for another. But his gifts as a creative artist and a performer were really only different aspects of the same musical personality.

His technique was matched by few pianists in the first half of the 20th century, but his repertoire was comparatively small and he was at his best when he played his own music. Conversely, he wrote most of his works with himself as a performer in mind. A piano work by Rachmaninoff is therefore a personal communication from an artist who summed up his artistic creed in the words: ‟A composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books that have influenced him, the pictures he loves. It should be the sum total of his experiences.”

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Rachmaninoff wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1900-01, shortly after what seemed to be the greatest trauma in his life up to that point. Three years earlier, he had composed a symphony that met with a disastrous reception at the St. Petersburg premiere. The fiasco was caused largely by the poor performance and the prejudices prevalent in St. Petersburg towards young composers from Moscow, and was therefore in no way Rachmaninoff’s fault. Yet the composer fell prey to such severe depression that he became unable to write any music.

In his despair, he turned to a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Dahl, who used hypnosis to restore Rachmaninoff’s faith in his own creative powers. When the composer was finally cured, he expressed his gratitude by dedicating his new concerto to Dr. Dahl.

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continued

Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor (1901)

by Sergei Rachmaninoff (Semyonovo, Russia, 1873 – Beverly Hills, CA, 1943)

As so often with Rachmaninoff, the principal vehicle to convey his ‟personal communication” is his own highly individual melodic writing. He makes the piano ‟sing” with the passion of an operatic hero, though at the same time he also has it perform the most dazzling musical acrobatics with fiendish arpeggios and other types of virtuoso passagework. The piano is the protagonist throughout, but the orchestra is equally important and there are many prominent orchestral solos. There are times when the pianistic fireworks merely serve as an accompaniment to the melody presented in the orchestra.

Each of the Second Concerto’s three movements contains numerous tempo changes in accordance with the evolution of the musical characters. But the unity of the work is ensured by the thematic recapitulations prescribed by Classical rules. Rachmaninoff counterbalanced his effusive, hyper-Romantic melodic writing by an almost academic adherence to traditional musical craft with regard to matters of form. He scored the second-movement ‟Adagio sostenuto” in E major, a tonality far removed from C minor, the concerto’s home key; but he bridged the gap between those two keys by modulating passages that open both the second and third movements. Both Beethoven in his Third Piano Concerto and Brahms in his First Symphony had used this C minor/E major relationship between their respective first and second movements. In both cases, one may hear the jump between the two unrelated tonalities. Not so in Rachmaninoff. His ‟bridges” between movements exemplify something he strove to do throughout the concerto, namely to eliminate all ‟rough edges” and create a flow of great melodies unimpeded by breaks or jolts in the continuous unfolding of the musical events.

Program Notes Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888)

by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia, 1840 – St. Petersburg, 1893)

Despite his growing international fame, Tchaikovsky was constantly plagued by self-doubt. Early in 1888, he went on a three-month European tour, conducting his own works with some of the world's finest orchestras. He was lionized in Paris, London, Prague, and met Dvořák, Grieg, & Mahler. Yet his private life was not free from turmoil.

After his return from abroad, Tchaikovsky decided to write a new symphony, his first in ten years.

The four movements of Tchaikovsky's Fifth are linked by a common theme that returns over and over again, usually played by the brass instruments and apparently symbolizing the threatening power of Fate. The theme is first heard in the "Andante" introduction of the first movement, where it is followed by a more lyrical, lilting idea as we move into the faster "Allegro con anima" tempo.

The second movement is lyrical and dream-like, suggesting a brief respite from the struggle. The first horn plays a beautiful singing melody, eventually joined by the full orchestra. A second idea, in a slightly faster tempo, is introduced by the clarinet. Soon, however, an intense crescendo begins that culminates in the fortissimo entrance the Fate theme.

The third movement is a graceful waltz with a slightly more agitated middle section. As before, we expect a respite from the Fate theme and the emotional drama it represents. Yet before the movement is over, there is a short reminder on the clarinets and bassoons.

In the finale, Tchaikovsky seems to have taken the bull by the horns: the Fate theme dominates the entire movement, despite the presence of a number of contrasting themes. At the end of a grandiose development, the music comes to a halt on the dominant.

The final resolution is yet to come, in the form of a majestic reappearance of the Fate theme and a short "Presto" where all "doubts, complaints and reproaches" are cast aside and, against all odds, the symphony receives the triumphant ending it needed.

Author: Peter Laki

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Upcoming

Classics 5

Photo Credit Terry Johnson

Villa-Lobos and Mahler January 19 & 20, 2024 Marcelo Lehninger, conductor Laura Strickling, soprano Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 Mahler Symphony No. 4 Recognized for her “flexible voice, crystalline diction, and warm presence,” GRAMMY-nominated soprano Laura Strickling joins the cellos of the SA Phil in Villa-Lobos’ gorgeous Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5. Brazilian conductor Marcelo Lehninger conducts Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 4, which explores the profound issues of life and death through the eyes of a child, featuring Ms. Strickling.

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Roberto C. Treviño - Executive Director

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Photo Credit Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

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