The Great Unknown January 20, 2024
The Great Unknown Saturday, January 20, 2024 – 7:30PM Walton Arts Center Paul Haas, Conductor
Samuel Barber
Symphony No. 1
In One Movement, Op. 9
Aldo López-Gavilán
Oceans to Cross
Lara Downes, piano
I. Oceans to Cross
II. Soul Journey
III. Conga
See Program Change Insert
INTERMISSION
Negro Folk Symphony
William L. Dawson
I. The Bond of Africa
II. Hope in the Night
III. O Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!
This concert is generously sponsored by the Starr Foundation in memory of Billie Starr. Lara Downes is generously sponsored by Mike & Mary Russell and Tod Yeslow & Jackie Telfair. Aldo López-Gavilán is generously sponsored by Dr. Malcolm & Ellen Hayward. Flowers are given in honor or Mary Ann Greenwood by her family. 2
Symphony of Northwest Arkansas
SoNA Board & Staff Board of Directors Marti Sudduth, Chair Mike Russell, Vice Chair Kim Hadley, Treasurer Laura Wilkins, Secretary Hannah Breden Monique Carswell Al Dominguez Josh Havens Malcolm Hayward, M.D. Holly Johnson Tom King Ph. D. Tod Yeslow Board of Advisors Ed Clifford Cynthia Coughlin Reed Greenwood Susan Hui Jill King Peter B. Lane Bill Mitchell Frank Sharp Dick Trammel Staff Paul Haas, Music Director Ben Harris, Executive Director Natalie Fernandez, Education Director/Personnel Manager Marti & Kelly Sudduth Chair
Devanee Williams, Development Manager Ben Glodowski, Operations & Production Manager Terry Hicks, SoNA Singers Director Sarah Pearson, Assistant Conductor Luke Pearson, Accounting Elizabeth Bainbridge, Chorus Manager Richard Bobo, Music Librarian Contact PO Box 1243, Fayetteville, AR 72702 479.521.4166 info@sonamusic.org Connect www.sonamusic.org facebook.com/sonafan instagram.com/symphonynwa Join our email list Email us at info@sonamusic.org to receive the latest updates.
The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas Paul Haas Music Director & Conductor Bob & Becky Alexander Chair
FIRST VIOLIN Ronnamarie Jensen, Acting Concertmaster Maestro’s Circle Chair
Paulo Eskitch, Acting Associate Concertmaster Sarah Sasaki Lam, Acting Assistant Concertmaster Andrew Chu Allison Steiner Merritt Denton Lester Lewis Endowed Chair
Faith Flurry Ronda Herold Yida Hu Thane Isaac Mariah Murphy Austin Rice SECOND VIOLIN Miho Oda Sakon, Principal Mt. Sequoyah Women of Music Chair*
Geronimo Oyenard, Associate Principal Mary Haley Diane Halliburton Cristian Martinez-Vega Martha Mattes Karol Rulli Rebecca Cutler-Metzger Meredith Hicks Joanna Metsker VIOLA Jesse Collett, Principal Bob & Becky Alexander Chair
Grace Clark, Acting Associate Principal Anne Wenzel Carla Geter Mary Kelly Logan Mabry Micah Neely Isaac Orvin
CELLO Kari Caldwell, Principal Thad & Melanie Beck Chair
Ashley Allison, Acting Associate Principal Amelia Ivory Diane & Edward Knight Chair
Michael Puryear Lauren Green Pecos Singer BASS Christine Craddock, Acting Principal Kassie Ferrero, Acting Associate Principal Riley Robison Peter Lane & Barbara Putman Chair
Benji Wilson FLUTE Gabriel Vega, Acting Principal Mt. Sequoyah Women of Music Chair*
Ginny Hudson, Acting Associate Principal Carley Flowers, piccolo OBOE Lauren White, Acting Principal Robert T. Murphy III & Beau G. Reynolds Chair
Suji Chang Lise Glaser, English Horn CLARINET Trevor Stewart, Principal Laura & Bruce Wilkins Chair
Jasper Hensley Orlando Scalia, bass clarinet Amanda Hudnall, E-flat clarinet BASSOON Dennis Pearson, Principal Malcolm & Ellen Hayward Chair
Richard Bobo, contrabassoon Kay Brusca
See Program Change Insert HORN Jake Rensink, Acting Principal Kim & Kelly Hadley Chair
Michael Gale Calvin & Shawna Jarrett Chair
Robert Fox Katelyn Halbert Justin Mohling, Assistant Horn TRUMPET Richard Rulli, Principal Ed & Carol Clifford Chair
Andrew Stadler Tim Wootton TROMBONE Cory Mixdorf, Principal Tenor Michael Hollomon & Eric Wailes Chair
Doug Fletcher Jason Hausback, Principal Bass TUBA Ryan Robinson, Principal TIMPANI Connor Stevens, Acting Principal PERCUSSION Fernando Valencia, Acting Principal Julianne Brown-Meola Chair
Amy Hearting Micheal Barnes Carson Vanduch HARP Alisa Coffey, Acting Principal
*Mt. Sequoyah Women of Music: Jenny Coogan, Karolyn Farrell, Jill King, Lynn Rogers, Jane Scroggs, Jackie Telfair, Laura Wilkins, and Ann Marie Ziegler
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Paul Haas Music Director & Conductor SoNA Music Director Paul Haas enjoys a distinctive career as conductor, composer and installation artist. His guest conducting engagements have included performances with Orchestra of St. Luke’s, San Antonio Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and the New World Symphony, among others, as well as festival appearances.
Francisco, the Anchorage Museum of Art in Alaska and the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In addition to his positions as Music Director of SoNA and the Thunder Bay Symphony in Ontario, Canada, Haas is the founder and Artistic Director of Sympho, a trailblazing concert production company that creates powerful and emotional musical experiences, collaborating with leading artists and using unexpected performance methods and unorthodox venues.
Over the last decade, he has written commissions for a wide variety of iconic venues, including the Park Avenue Armory and Rubin Museum of Art in New York, Grace Cathedral in San
Haas is a graduate of Yale University and The Juilliard School. He resides in Germantown, New York, with his wife and three children. Find out more at paulhaas.com.
Aldo López Gavilán Composer & Pianist
See Program Change Insert
Praised for his “dazzling technique and rhythmic fire” in the Seattle Times, and dubbed a “formidable virtuoso” by The Times of London, Cuban pianist and composer Aldo López-Gavilán excels in both the classical and jazz worlds as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chambermusic collaborator, and performer of his own electrifying jazz compositions. He has appeared in such prestigious concert halls as the Amadeo Roldán (Cuba), Teresa Careño (Venezuela), Bellas Artes (Mexico), Carnegie Hall and Jordan Hall (USA), Royal Festival Hall (UK), Nybrokajen 11 (Sweden), The Hall of Music (Russia), and Duc de Lombard et Petit Journal Montparnasse (France), as well as venues in
Lara Downes Pianist Pianist, cultural catalyst, and New York Times Sunday Crossword clue 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). Her dynamic work as a sought-after soloist, Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, producer, curator, arts activist, and advocate positions her as a cultural visionary on the national arts scene. She was honored as the 2022 Classical Woman of the Year by Performance Today. Downes’ recent and upcoming onstage adventures include guest appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Pops, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra, and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, with recitals and residencies
Canada, Santo Domingo, Colombia, Spain, Greece, Hong Kong, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Austria.
López-Gavilán has recently been touring in the U.S., appearing at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. He has also toured extensively in Europe, South America, Canada, and the U.S. with Cuban singer-songwriter Carlos Varela, for whom he wrote all the string arrangements for an award-winning documentary that was broadcast by HBO Latino in the U.S. Aldo has also been performing together with the Harlem Quartet, a GRAMMY-winning string quartet founded by his brother and violin virtuoso Ilmar López-Gavilán. They will continue touring broadly for the rest of the year with concerts in many cities across the nation. Learn more at aldomusica.com.
at Ravinia, the Gilmore Festival, Washington Performing Arts, Caramoor, and the Cabrillo Festival, among 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” which debuted at the top of the Billboard and Amazon charts and was featured on an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Lara has a highly visible media presence in her role as the creator and host of AMPLIFY with Lara Downes, an NPR Music video series entering 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. Learn more at LaraDownes.com.
Lara Downes is an artist represented by CADENZA ARTISTS INTERNATIONAL LLC, 299 S Main Street, Suite 1300 #99733, Salt Lake City, UT 84111. www.CadenzaArtists.com. Lara Downes is a Yamaha Artist. 4
Symphony of Northwest Arkansas
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The Maestro’s Circle
SoNA wishes to thank the Maestro’s Circle, donors who contribute multi-year gifts of $5,000 or more. If you would like to learn more about multi-year gifts that help ensure SoNA’s future, please contact Devanee Williams, Development Manager at devanee@sonamusic.org or 479.521.4166. Bob & Becky Alexander
Reed Greenwood
David & Pam Parks
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Mary Ann Greenwood (in memoriam)
Mary Lynn Reese
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Beau G. Reynolds
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Bozie Foundation
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Support for the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas is provided, in part, by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Symphony of Northwest Arkansas
Friends of SoNA Contributions to SoNA’s annual fund and special events enable us to continue to bring great music and innovative music education to life in Northwest Arkansas. Gifts listed below have been received or pledged between July 1, 2022 through December 15, 2023. We make every effort to maintain accurate records. If we have inadvertently omitted your name, please let us know so that we may correct our error. Gifts listed below do not include corporate matches.
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Symphony of Nortwest Arkansas Paul Haas, Music Director
The 2023-24 Season Continues at Walton Arts Center Defying Expectations February 17 / 7:30PM
Ode to Joy: Beethoven’s Ninth April 6 / 7:30PM
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Symphony of Northwest Arkansas
PROGRAM CHANGE Due to a family emergency of the featured soloist originally scheduled to perform the world premiere of Aldo López-Gavilán’s Oceans to Cross, that portion of this evening’s program has now been replaced with George Gershwin’s An American in Paris. SoNA is working to reschedule the world premiere of Oceans to Cross for a later date, likely as part of the 2024-25 Season to be announced later this year.
The Great Unknown January 20, 2024 Walton Arts Center Paul Haas, conductor
An American in Paris (1928) George Gershwin b September 26, 1898 in New York City, NY d July 11, 1937 in Los Angeles, CA
Highbrow pundits never quite knew what to do about George Gershwin. That such a more or less self-taught Broadway tunesmith presumed to write ambitious concert works was annoying
enough. That he was often boisterously successful with those same works was even more irritating. Some critics vented their umbrage via potshots at Gershwin’s perceived technical shortcomings. Others dismissed his works as mere passing fancies, such as the New York Evening Post’s Oscar Thompson, who allowed that while An American in Paris might be all the rage circa 1928, “to conceive of a symphony audience listening to it with any degree of pleasure or patience twenty
years from now, when whoopee is no longer even a word, is another matter.” Raised patrician pinkies notwithstanding, conductors knew a good thing when they heard it and snapped the piece up. The 1929 midwestern premiere was led by no less than Fritz Reiner, soon to be followed by such luminaries as Artur Rodzinski, Alfredo Casella, and erstwhile San Francisco Symphony maestro Henry Hadley. Even Arturo Toscanini— nobody’s choice as an advocate for American music—turned in a whipcrack rendition with the NBC Symphony. The first studio recording, with Nathaniel Shilkret conducting the Victor Symphony and featuring an uncredited George Gershwin himself on celesta, took place on February 4, 1929, less than two months after the New York premiere. Umpteen performances and recordings later, An American in Paris dances blithely towards its centennial, bedrock repertory, familiar and loved the world over. Far
more than a mere Jazz Age travelogue, this quintessentially American symphonic poem unfolds with radiant vitality and intoxicating energy. An American in Paris eschews formal symphonic development in favor of a loose episodic structure charting the adventures of an American tourist sampling the glories of Paris and succumbing to fits of homesickness along the way. The work’s most compelling features are its marvelous melodies—who isn’t enchanted by the central “blues” section with its wailing trumpet solo?—and its glittering orchestration, featuring that quacking quartet of Parisian taxi horns. “It’s not a Beethoven symphony, you know,” commented Gershwin, perhaps in reaction to elitist reservations about the work’s overriding joie de vivre. “If it pleases symphony audiences as a light, jolly piece, a series of impressions musically expressed, it succeeds.”
In addition to the musicians listed in the main program roster, the following musicians have been added:
SAXOPHONE Michael Hanna, alto Acting Principal Nick Suosso, tenor Sarah Hetrick, baritone