Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – April 1

BEETHOVEN'S ODE TO JOY

April 1 / 7:30 p.m.

Morris Performing Arts Center

Alastair Willis, Music Director Kiera Duffy, Soprano Emma Rose Sorenson, Alto Emanuel-Cristian Caraman, Tenor Bill McMurray, Bass Notre Dame Chorale Alexander Blachly, Director South Bend Chamber Singers, Nancy Menk, Music Director

PROGRAM

BATES

Ode

PANN Slalom

BEETHOVEN

Symphony No. 9, Op. 125

I. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso

II. Molto vivace

III. Adagio molto e cantabile

IV. Presto - Allegro assai - Allegro assai vivace

Kiera Duffy, Soprano

As a soloist, Kiera has appeared with many of the world’s elite orchestras and opera companies, including the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and many more. Her chamber music appearances include Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Aldeburgh Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, Ojai Music Festival, Bard SummerScape Festival, Tanglewood Festival, Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, and the Collaborative Arts Institute in Chicago. Kiera Duffy has been the Head of Undergraduate Voice Studies at the University of Notre Dame since 2017.

Emma Rose Sorenson, Alto

Emma Sorenson, is currently based in Chicago. Sorenson was a recent semi-finalist in the Lotte Lenya competition hosted by the Kurt Weill Institute. She also won first place in the Kansas City District Metropolitan Opera Auditions. In the 2019-20 season, Sorenson was featured in her first season as a Chorister at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, associate member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, ensemble at Chicago Opera Theater and will be reprising her role in the ensemble quartet and understudy for Old Lady in The Knight’s Orchestra’s production of Bernstein’s Candide at the Ravinia Music Festival. Emma graduated with a master of music performance degree from The Boston Conservatory under the tutelage of Dr. Rebecca Folsom.proudly supports the 90th Season Guest Artists.

Emanuel-Cristian Caraman, Tenor

Throughout his career, Romanian tenor and recording artist EmanuelCristian Caraman has appeared with opera companies, symphony orchestras, and on the recital stage in Europe, South America, and North America.

As of 2016, he is the general and artistic director of South Bend Lyric Opera in South Bend, Indiana. Caraman received his doctorate in music from National Music University in Bucharest, under Professor Doctor Grigore Constantinescu, with the thesis, American Vocal Music of the twentiethcentury. Since 2018, Caraman is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Indiana University at South Bend.

Bill McMurray, Bass

With more than forty operatic roles to his credit, baritone Bill McMurray has been described as “a baritone with warm, rich tones and superb stage presence” by the Durham Herald Sun. Such roles include “Figaro” in Il Baribiere di Sivigila, “Count Almaviva” in Le nozze di Figaro, and “Escamillo” in Carmen. Walter Marini of the New Buffalo Times is quoted as saying his portrayal of “Marcello” in Puccini’s La Boheme is “a powerful actor who brings great elegance to the role. His singing is as fine as anything being heard in major opera houses today.”

Notre Dame Chorale,

Alexander Blachly, Director The Chorale is the official concert choir of the University of Notre Dame. A mixed ensemble of 70 voices specializing in choral works from the Renaissance to the present, it performs a concert on campus each fall and each spring in the Leighton Concert Hall of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. In addition, the Chorale performs Handel's Messiah with the Festival Baroque Orchestra in the Leighton Concert Hall the first weekend of December.

South Bend Chamber Singers,

Nancy Menk, Music Director The South Bend Chamber Singers, an ensemble-in-residence at Saint Mary’s College, is in its 34th season. Over the past 30-plus years, the Singers have presented major choral-orchestral works such as Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Magnificat, Mass in B Minor, and St. John Passion; Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and more. Yet, the ensemble concentrates primarily on works by living composers and regularly commissions new works and unusual and complex arrangements.

“Ode”

MASON BATES

Born: January 23, 1977, Philadelphia, PA

AT A GLANCE

Composed: 2001 Duration: 11 minutes

THE STORY

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of the rare works of the repertoire that has attained, in addition to its vaulted musical status, a cultural and even political significance. The exalted setting of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” forever associated the work with a hope for peace and brotherhood, but this hope was ultimately frustrated by the events of the twentieth-century. With an eye to events past and present, whether such a hope can ever be fulfilled.

The piece begins as if in a dream, with fragments of the “Ode to Joy” floating over illusory harmonies in the orchestra, and soon focuses on the most characteristic fragment – the Ode’s first three notes. This motif drives the transformation that follows – from a hopeful world of lyricism into a menacing, destructive fanfare of war. Along the way, we get a glimpse of the martial music of the Ninth's last movement, which begins harmlessly but soon spins out of control. In the aftermath of the ensuing explosion – which, like weapons of mass destruction, leaves very little standing – a pulsating harmonic world floats downwards. It is the harmonies of the work’s beginning, but in reverse, finally ending with the opening chord – an open fifth. Having begun with the theme that ends Beethoven’s symphony, the work ends with his beginning: an uncertain world of harmonic ambiguity, articulated by a trembling in the strings – as we wait for something to happen.

– Program Note by composer

“Slalom”

CARTER PANN

Born: February 21, 1972

AT A GLANCE

Composed: 1999 Duration: 10 minutes

THE STORY

“Slalom” was originally written for orchestra in 1998-99 as a scherzo perpetuo. It was to be a chance to flex my orchestration muscle to a degree I had not yet reached. In 2001, conductor John Lynch was seeking to commission a new work for wind symphony, and we agreed that “Slalom” could make an attractive addition to the repertoire. Arranging the piece for wind symphony has proven my most astute compositional act to date.

“Slalom” is a taste of the thrill of downhill skiing. The work is performed at a severe tempo throughout, showcasing the orchestra’s volatility and endurance. The idea for a piece like this came directly out of a wonderful discovery I made several years ago at Steamboat Springs, Colorado, when I embarked on the mountain-base gondola with a cassette player and headphones. At the time I was treating myself to large doses of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. The exhilaration of barreling down the Rockies with such music pumping into my ears was overwhelming. After a few years of skiing with some of the greatest repertoire, it occurred to me that I could customize the experience.

The work is presented as a collection of scenes and events one might come by on the slopes. The score is peppered with phrase-headings for the different sections such as “First Run,” “Open Meadow,” “Champagne Powder”, “Straight Down,” “TUCK,” and “On One Ski, Gyrating” among others. In this way “Slalom” shares its programmatic feature with that of Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony. The similarities end there, however, for “Slalom” lasts ten minutes…precisely the amount of time I need to get from Storm Peak (the peak of Mt. Werner, Steamboat Springs) to the mountain base, skiing full throttle.

– Program Note by composer

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Born: December 17, 1770 (Baptismal record), Bonn, (now Germany) Died: March 26, 1827, Vienna

AT A GLANCE

Composed: 1822-24 Duration: 70 minutes Premiered: May 7, 1824 at the Theater

am Kämpnertor and conducted by Beethoven himself.

THE STORY

The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven claims a special place in the history of the symphony and in Beethoven’s growth as artist and public figure. Its performance can never be an ordinary event.

Since 1812, Beethoven’s life had been in a continuous state of crisis and he had written little. By 1820 he began to “set about,” as Beethoven biographer Maynard Solomon puts it, “reconstructing his life and completing his life’s work.” At first the process was slow. But by 1822, he was again working in a rage of energy. As part of this regeneration, the various projects and ideas connected with the Ninth Symphony began to sort themselves out. The first movement was ready early in 1823; by February 1824, the score was finished.

The first performance was given on May 7, 1824, in Vienna. The deaf composer stood on the stage beating time and turning the leaves of his score, but the real conducting was done by Michael Umlauf. At the end, Beethoven was still hunched over the pages of music, and contralto soloist Caroline Unger gently turned his head around so that he might see the applause he could not hear. The Ninth Symphony traces a path from darkness to light, and of this process and of the struggle for clarification, the famous opening offers a microcosmic view. This crescendo is achieved by more than an increase in volume. Rhythm and harmonic tension also play their part. We hear at first just two notes, A and E. At a certain point in the crescendo, the E’s drop away, to be instantly replaced by D’s in bassoon and horns, the new note sounding in fact strangely dissonant against the prevailing A’s. The D turns out to be the “answer” on which the whole orchestra agrees in the great fortissimo summit of that first crescendo, but the tense anticipation of that note is a personal, marvelous, and utterly characteristic touch.

The scherzo is a huge structure, as obsessive in its driving and exuberant play with few ideas as the first movement was generous in its richness of material. The trio carries a certain sense of hymnal or communal music about it. It reaches forward toward the world of the Ode, “To Joy.”

Two bars of upbeat – clarinets, bassoons, middle and lower strings – ease us into the Adagio. Beethoven at first alternates two themes of contrasting gait, key, and temperature, varying each, soon dropping the second, but enveloping the first in ever more fanciful decoration. The effect is one of exaltation and, at the end, profound peace.

The most horrendous noise Beethoven could devise shatters that peace, and now an extraordinary drama is played before us. In the gestures of operatic recitative, cellos and basses protest. Quotations of music from the first, second, and third movements vividly dramatize the idea of search. When, after three tries and three rejections, the woodwinds propose something new, the cellos and basses, with some cheering along by winds and drums, lose no time in expressing their enthusiasm. Those hectoring strings change their tone. The orchestra rounds off their recitative with a firm cadence, and without a second’s pause for breath one of the world’s great songs begins.

Beethoven spreads before us in a series of simple and compelling variations, interrupted by a return of the horrendous fanfare that began the movement. What earlier was matter for our imaginations to work on is now made explicit. The recitative is sung now, to words that Beethoven himself invented as preface to Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode.”

Schiller had been dead eighteen years when Beethoven set “An die Freude.” Schiller did not think much of the poem, which is an enthusiastic drinking song. Perhaps Beethoven saw through it, perhaps he read into it what he needed. What is sure is that he transformed it. And once the words are there, they, and of course even more Beethoven’s transcendent responses to them, sweep us along "Happily, like His planets flying along their magnificent heavenly orbits…as a hero runs to victory.”