WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 2025 / 8:00 PM / ST. MARY’S CATHOLIC CHURCH
CONNER GRAY COVINGTON , conductor
KATHRYN EBERLE , violin
UTAH SYMPHONY
MOZART
CONCERT SPONSOR
PATRICIA
RICHARDS & WILLIAM NICHOLS
STRAVINSKY
RAVEL
Selections from Idomeneo (13”)
I. Chaconne
II. Pas de seul
Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss for Violin and String Orchestra (22’)
INTERMISSION
Mother Goose (complete ballet) (28’)
Conner Gray Covington Conductor
Described by Yannick Nézet-Séguin as “a musician who lives the music,” American conductor Conner Gray Covington performs an unusually broad repertory of symphonic, opera, and film repertoire ranging from classical to the present day. During his four-year tenure with the Utah Symphony as Associate Conductor and as Principal Conductor of the Deer Valley® Music Festival he conducted nearly 300 performances of classical subscription, education, film, pops, and family concerts as well as tours throughout the state. Previously, he was a Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music where he worked closely with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, with whom he made his Carnegie Hall debut, and the Curtis Opera Theatre while being mentored by Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Covington is a five-time recipient of a Career Assistance Award from the Solti Foundation U.S. and was a featured conductor in the Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview presented by the League of American Orchestras.
Kathryn Eberle Violin
Acclaimed by The Salt Lake Tribune as “marrying unimpeachable technical skill with a persuasive and perceptive voice,” violinist Kathryn Eberle is the Associate Concertmaster of the Utah Symphony and the Concertmaster of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in Los Angeles. Eberle has also served as Guest Concertmaster with the Kansas City, Omaha, and Richmond Symphonies.
Eberle performs annually as soloist with the Utah Symphony with whom she’s performed over 10 works as a featured soloist. She made her subscription series debut with the Utah Symphony in April 2014 performing Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade. Other solo appearances include performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Nashville Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, the National Academy Orchestra of Canada, and the Bahia Symphony in Brazil.
An avid chamber musician, Eberle has collaborated with such artists as Edgar Meyer, Jaime Laredo, Arnold Steinhardt, and Ricardo Morales and has been a guest artist at numerous music festivals.
Mozart’s addition of a ballet to his 1781 opera Idomeneo was both traditional and fiscally strategic. The noble tales and stuffy reputation of opera seria were on the decline, but ballet was a perennial fan favorite. It easily attracted lower-class audiences to the opera, who paid less for their seats, but comprised the lion’s share of income for the composers and opera houses. Adding ballet into opera was so common in Mozart’s day that the Munich Opera House, where Idomeneo premiered, kept an in-house French ballet troupe at the ready for just such occasions.
Though not prone to self-reflection, Stravinsky was at least able to repurpose the music and eventually rescue the ballet. He immediately set out to arrange the music for the concert hall, both for the intimate combination of violin and piano and in a larger orchestral version. His quick thinking might have also inspired New York-based George Balanchine to rechoreograph the ballet in the early 1930s, giving Stravinsky a new introduction to American audiences.
Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic tale The Ice Maiden, the ballet depicts the downfall of a jealous lover who kisses his mother’s murderer—the Ice Queen—in revenge for what he believes to be his fiancée’s infidelity. As he often did, Stravinsky combined western European stories with his own Russian heritage. Musically and thematically, The Fairy’s Kiss is an homage to Stravinsky’s compatriot Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky blended his own classically-inspired melodies with those from Tchaikovsky’s vocal and piano music, showing his respect for their shared love of Russian culture. Stravinsky also claimed that he chose the story to honor Tchaikovsky’s early death at age 53—both the main character and the composer died at the peak of their creative powers.
Even though ballet was considered an essential part of an opera, it had no clear connection to Idomeneo’s plot or musical style. None of the main characters participate in the ballet, and unlike staged ballets, it had no story line of its own. Where the ballet belongs in the opera was also anyone’s guess: in the first performance, Mozart placed the ballet at the end of Act 3, during the finale celebration of the coronation of a new king. However, even Mozart himself appears to have moved the ballet around: in some it appeared in the first act, and in others it was presented during the intermission. Both of these places would have appeased impatient audiences by presenting the ballet a little sooner in the evening and enticed them to come back for more.
Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss
// Solo violin and strings //
The History
Igor Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss continues the theme of foreign composers borrowing from, and assimilating into, French ballet culture. Stravinsky was already an international celebrity, largely due to his French ballets, when he wrote The Fairy’s Kiss in 1928, but he wasn’t immune to mistakes. Instead of handing the score over to his longtime choreographer Sergei Diaghilev, Stravinsky entrusted this one to Bronislava Nijinska, Diaghilev’s chief rival. This move deeply offended Diaghilev and widened a growing rift between him and Stravinsky. It also might have cratered the whole production: Nijinska’s production flopped, and Stravinsky blamed the poor choreography and costumes.
The History
Ravel’s Mother Goose ballet is the only French ballet written by a French composer on this program. A confirmed bachelor, Ravel nonetheless loved children and children’s stories. He originally wrote the Mother Goose Suite in 1908 as a gift to Mimi and Jean Godebski, the children of Ravel’s close friends, who he also hoped would perform the piece. The suite’s original five movements each depicted a single scene from popular fairy tales, such as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Tom Thumb,” and the lesser known, but equally magical, “Empress of the Pagodas.”
Three years later, Ravel expanded the piano duet into a ballet version, the full course of which is heard tonight. Ravel wove the original five tableaus into an elevenmovement piece, to which he also added an overarching narrative centered on the story of “Sleeping Beauty.” The various tales and characters weave in and out of each other, not unlike the modern musical Into the Woods, so that multiple fairy tales take place simultaneously in a single enchanted forest.
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HISTORY OF THE MUSIC — BALLET MUSIC
The full piece adds a prelude, two new movements, and four mood-setting interludes, all played without pauses. The first movement sets the scene of an enchanted forest, creating a feel of a distant and fantastic world, and anticipating melodic themes from each story. Mother Goose herself appears in the second movement, spinning on a wheel whose rhythmic treadle can be heard in the tambourine.
Sleeping Beauty appears in the third movement, where she has pricked her finger on the spinning wheel and falls into an enchanted sleep. The fourth movement transitions the listeners from Sleeping Beauty’s plight to a conversation between Beauty and the Beast. In the fifth movement, we meet the Beast, a contrabassoon, as he proposes marriage to Beauty, who has seen his true value despite his terrifying appearance. The sixth movement, another interlude, again transitions to a tableau of Tom Thumb, the miniscule boy who has discovered that he is lost in a gigantic forest after birds have eaten the breadcrumbs he dropped to mark his path. The eighth movement prepares listeners to visit the mystical world of the orient, the pinnacle of exoticism for Ravel. In the ninth movement, we see the Chinese empress Laideronnette taking a playful bath, surrounded by pagodas.
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A final interlude in the tenth movement anticipates all the fairy tales converging into a single fantastic universe. Prince Charming has discovered Sleeping Beauty’s whereabouts, and, convinced of their mutual love, he bestows love’s first kiss to waken her. All the inhabitants of the enchanted forest join to celebrate. In a joyful climax, the Fairy Queen arrives to bless the Sleeping Beauty and the Prince’s intention to marry. The pealing of church bells, depicted in both the low strings and percussion, signal the final happy ending.
