Robert Blocker, Dean
Yale Philharmonia
Carolyn Kuan, guest conductor
Friday, September 23, 2022 | 7:30 p.m. Woolsey Hall
Laura Karpman b. 1959
Aaron Copland 1900–1990
All American (2019)
Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo (1945)
I. Buckaroo Holiday II. Corral Nocturne III. Saturday Night Waltz IV. Hoe Down intermission
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840–1893
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64
I. Andante – Allegro con anima
II. Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza
III. Valse. Allegro moderato
IV. Finale. Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace
Program
Artist Profile
Carolyn Kuan, guest conductorRecognized as a conductor of extraordinary versatility, Carolyn Kuan has enjoyed successful associations with top-tier orchestras, opera companies, ballet companies, and festivals worldwide. Her commitment to contemporary music has defined her approach to programming, and established her as an international resource for new music and world premieres. Appointed Music Director of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in 2011, she has signed a renewal contract through May 2024.
Ms. Kuan’s North American engagements have included performances with the Baltimore Symphony, where she returned in the 2019–2020 season; as well as the symphonies of Detroit, Milwaukee, Omaha, San Francisco, Seattle, and Toronto; the Florida and Louisville orchestras; the New York City Ballet; the Colorado Music Festival and Glimmerglass Opera Festival; the New York City Opera, Santa Fe Opera, and Washington National Opera. In the 2021–2022 season she made her debut with the Columbus (OH) Symphony and returns to conduct Opera Theatre of St. Louis in Harvey Milk.
Recent international engagements have included concerts with the Bournemouth Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Symphony of Taiwan, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Residentie Orkest, Orquesta Sinfonica de Yucatan, Royal Danish Ballet, the West Australian Symphony, and the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo. Ms. Kuan made her debut with English National Opera in
Philip Glass’ Satyagraha in the 2021–2022 season.
Although debuts with the Philadelphia Orchestra (at the Mann Music Center), at Lincoln Center (leading the opera Blue), and Orchestre de Paris were canceled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Kuan has had highlights in recent seasons that include debuts with the Singapore Symphony, Santa Barbara Symphony, and the Portland Opera, conducting a production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. She led Mark Campbell’s Stonewall with New York City Opera in June 2019, which helped commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Carolyn Kuan also collaborated with Beth Morrison in a project called Ouroboros Trilogy, a three-part exploration of life, death, and rebirth as symbolized by the ancient Greek icon of a serpent eating its own tail. Working with composer Scott Wheeler, she directed Naga, one of the three operas commissioned for the trilogy. She conducted the premiere of Philip Glass’s opera The Trial with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and has conducted the Santa Fe Opera in Huang Ruo’s Dr. Sun Yat-sen; and the Washington National Opera in Daniel Catan’s Florencia en el Amazonas.
While maintaining a solid connection with traditional repertoire, Carolyn Kuan has cultivated a unique expertise in Asian music and contemporary works. From 2007 to 2012, she directed the annual San Francisco Symphony Chinese New Year concert. For the Seattle Symphony, Ms. Kuan helped launch the hugely successful Celebrate Asia! program with community leaders representing eight Asian cultures, and led
Artist Profile,
sold-out performances for three consecutive years. She has led world premieres for Music from Japan, and has conducted multimedia productions of the Butterfly Lovers Concerto and A Monkey’s Tale as part of Detroit Symphony’s World Music Series.
From 2003 to 2012, Ms. Kuan was engaged with the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and visiting composers. Some of her finest successes have bridged the gap between cultural and social issues, as in her work raising awareness of conservation and the environment through her performances around the globe of the multimedia project Life: A Journey Through Time. Developed by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and music director Marin Alsop, the project features music by Philip Glass and images by famed National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting.
Ms. Kuan’s notable performances of Life include a presentation at the Ninth World Wilderness Congress with Orquesta Sinfonica de Yucatan; at the eight-day June festival, Change Is Powerful, with the Detroit Symphony; and at CERN’s (European Organization for Nuclear Research) historical Large Hadron Collider Inauguration, with Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, attended by Swiss President Pascal Couchpin, French Prime Minister François Fillon, more than 20 other European heads of state, and dozens of Nobel laureates.
Carolyn Kuan’s previous positions include Associate Conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra; Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Ballet; and Assistant Conductor for the Baltimore Opera Company. In her 2012 debut album for
the Naxos label, Ms. Kuan conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in various works by Chinese composers.
Recipient of numerous awards, Ms. Kuan holds the distinction of being the first woman to be awarded the Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship by the Herbert von Karajan Centrum and American Austrian Foundation in 2003, resulting in her residency at the 2004 Salzburg Festival. Winner of the first Taki Concordia Fellowship, she has received additional awards from the Women’s Philharmonic, Conductors Guild, and Susan W. Rose Fund for Music. Ms. Kuan graduated cum laude from Smith College, received a Master of Music degree from the University of Illinois, and a Performance Diploma from the Peabody Conservatory.
cont.
Program Notes
All American karpman Laura KarpmanWhen I received a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to write an overture to open a Bowl concert featuring all-American music, the title of my piece became completely obvious. I knew I could call it All American and find something to write about that would very much come out of my interests and would be lovely for a summer evening. But, I certainly didn’t know what exactly the content would be. My first instinct was to go to patriotic music, something well-known, like Sousa or another very American anthem and play with that as motivic material. An idea jumped into my head — I have been thinking a lot about the pervasive invisibility of women composers in music history. We tend to believe that there were very few, if any, women composers in past centuries, and that we are now a product of the advancement of women in all professions. But I’ve begun to think that maybe there were women composers, lots of them, and that their works have been unrecognized, unamplified. I set out looking for patriotic songs by American women composers. Much to my own surprise, I found not one or two, but hundreds.
I have taken three of these songs and used them as thematic material in what has become a very American anthem called All American — the italics being significant. There is still a Sousa quote that sneaks in, and hidden references to other works, but do listen for the very patriotic melodies of Mildred Hill (the composer of the best
known song in the English language, “Happy Birthday”), in her song “March on, Brave Lads, March on!,” Emily Wood Bower’s “Your Country Needs You,” and Anita Owen’s “’Neath the Flag of the Red, White, and Blue.”
All American is dedicated to these women. Underneath these quotes is an uneven but propulsive rhythm and melody. For me, this is an analogy to women’s advancement, moving forward in a positive direction, but always with a little bit of a trip, a hiccup. This propulsion is powered by percussion instruments, many of which are derived from kitchen tools partnered with very traditional band percussion. You’ll hear a baking sheet playing along with the snare, silverware used instead of a triangle, pots and pans used instead of tubular bells, a butcher block played with a meat tenderizer, trash bins joined with orchestral toms, and my favorite, my beloved Le Creuset 5-quart braiser used as an anvil. Please enjoy All American.
Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo copland
Patrick Campbell Jankowski
Few composers possess as distinctive a “sonic signature” as Aaron Copland. Although it would be a stretch to say that his music encapsulates the sound of American orchestral music in its time, Copland’s influence did saturate that landscape. In the 1930s and 40s in particular, Copland’s artistic goals were aligned with the idea of populism. He strived for a simplicity and directness in his music that could
Program Notes, cont.
immediately connect with audiences: prioritizing familiarity over challenge. The popular ballet Rodeo: The Courting at Burnt Ranch premiered in 1942, with choreography by Agnes de Mille, the ubiquitous artist whose style impacted not only ballet, but musical theater as well. Both the dance and the score made use of traditional American elements, and Copland incorporates extant folk tunes into each of the four episodes included in this suite.
“Buckaroo Holiday,” with its jaunty cakewalk style and rhythmic syncopation, incorporates the cowboy songs “If He Be a Buckaroo By His Trade,” and the gentler “Sis Joe.” “Corral Nocturne,” with its uneven 5/4 meter, bright woodwind timbres, and shimmery high strings invokes moonlit nights in wide-open spaces. “Saturday Night Waltz” cleverly incorporates the open fifth harmonies of tuning strings, recalling a group of fiddlers playing for an impromptu barn dance. “Hoe Down” remains among the most recognizable pieces of American orchestral music. Raucous and playful, with abruptly shifting meters, distinctive xylophone decorations, and rambunctious disruptions from the brass and rim-shot snare drum, its energy proves a perfect way to end the suite. A gradual slowing-down, as Copland put it “like a clock,” precedes one final outburst of dancing to close.
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 tchaikovsky Adam Silverman
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky grew up in St. Petersburg, where his father was a government official. Trained for a career in law, young Tchaikovsky divided his time between a position at St. Petersburg’s Ministry of Justice and the conservatory. Encouraged by the conservatory’s director, he gave up his legal career to study music full-time, and by 1865 was appointed professor of harmony. In this humble way, Tchaikovsky began his monumental career as the composer of classical music’s most popular works, including Eugene Onegin, Swan Lake, and the 1812 Overture.
Tchaikovsky’s interest in Russian folk music was strong, yet it was generally overshadowed by a strong neoclassicism. He published arrangements of Russian folk songs in 1869 while under the spell of Mili Alexeyevich Balakirev, the leader of “The Five” whose dominating influence on Russian music extended to the point of correcting and revising the compositions of those composers who fell under his spell. Tchaikovsky, a student and professor in rival institutions, twice accepted and rejected Balakirev’s influence, which is especially evident in such works as the Romeo and Juliet Overture (1869) and the Manfred Symphony (1885). His symphonies were composed at even intervals throughout his career, and they are a record of his ever-growing stylistic refinement. In the fifth, Tchaikovsky’s range of expression reached new heights. The orchestra, though not large, is used with extraordinary
power and subtlety of color. His melodies are sharply etched yet refined, and he borrows from a Polish love-song for the symphony’s first subject. His musical rhetoric features a “fate” motto which is found as a melodic element, a rhythmic ostinato, and as horn and trumpet calls. Unifying all the movements, it is announced in the prelude and reinterpreted throughout the symphony. In a cryptic message to his patron and confidant Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky wrote that the introduction represented “complete resignation before Fate... before the inscrutable predestination of Providence.” This preoccupation with the Romantic concept of gloomy inevitability was strong in Tchaikovsky. Throughout his life he battled depression which related to his stressful career, a gambling addiction, his disastrous marriage, and his recurring fear of “writing himself out” and having nothing left to compose.
This last fear, especially strong in the early 1880s, was obviously misguided. Within the next few years, he soon composed the fifth symphony and followed it with Sleeping Beauty, The Queen of Spades, and The Nutcracker. This period also marked his debut as touring conductor, which helped popularize his works in Europe and America.
About the Yale Philharmonia
The Yale Philharmonia is one of America’s foremost music-school ensembles. The largest performing group at the Yale School of Music, the Philharmonia offers superb training in orchestral playing and repertoire.
Performances include an annual series of concerts in Woolsey Hall, as well as Yale Opera productions in the Shubert Theatre. The Yale Philharmonia has also performed on numerous occasions in Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York City and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
assistant manager Samuel Bobinski assistant conductor Samuel Hollister
office assistant Marty Tung stage crew Shania Cordoba Ryan Goodwin Riana Heath Makana Medeiros Jackson Murphy Xinyun Tu Amber Wang Declan Wilcox Kean Xiong Lucas Zeiter library Darius Farhoumand Stephanie Fritz Nicholas Hernandez Guan-Ru Lin Freya Liu Jaimee Reynolds
Staff manager Jeffrey M. Mistri
Yale Philharmonia Roster
Peter Oundjian, principal conductor
violin i
Emily Shehi Miranda Werner
Minkyung Lee
Evan Johanson
Albert Steinberger
Satoka Abo
Gregory Lewis Xingzhou Rong
Amy Oh
Riana Heath Katherine (Kit Ying) Cheng
Yan Li violin ii Tiffany Wee Tristan Siegel Kenneth Naito Da Young (Rachel) Lim Alexander Goldberg Ladusa Chang-Ou Guan-Ru Lin Zili Sha
Yiqing Fu In Ae Lee
viola Colin Laursen
Cassia Drake
Kayla Cabrera
Wilhelm Magner
Serena Hsu
Wanxinyi Huang
Katie Liu
Matthew McDowell
cello Hans Emil Sollesnes
Jasmine Pai
Jenny Bahk
Benjamin Lanners
Jakob Taylor
Mafalda Santos Cheng “Allen” Liang
Ga Eun Lee
double bass Min Kyung Cho Nicholas Hernandez Hector Ponce Esther Kwon Dylan Reckner Chelsea Strayer
flute Collin Stavinoha ¹ Hyeonjeong Choi ³ Michael Huerta ²
bassoon Lucas Zeiter ¹ Ryan Goodwin
Darius Farhoumand ² Marty Tung ³ Winfred Felton
contrabassoon Ryan Goodwin
timpani Michael Yeung percussion
Yukiko Nakamura ¹ Makana Medeiros ² Mingyu Son harp
oboe William Stevens ¹ ³ Michelle Oh ²
english horn Rachel Ahn ¹
clarinet
Tianyi Shen ¹
Zikang Wang
Kean Xiong ²
Lloyd Van’t Hoff ³
bass clarinet Nikki Pet
horn Franco Ortiz ¹ Corey Schmidt Stephanie Fritz Amber Wang Kate Warren ² Xin He ³ Jaimee Reynolds trumpet Lizbeth Yanez ¹ Eric Evans Joshua Bialkin ³ Shania Cordoba ² trombone Yuki Mori ¹ Chandler McLaughlin ³ Timothy Maines ²
bass trombone Jackson Murphy
tuba Bridget Conley
Yun Chai Lee ¹ Mia Venezia ² keyboard
Robert Levinger ¹ Takeshi Nagayasu ²
¹ Principal on Karpman ² Principal on Copland ³ Principal on Tchaikovsky
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List as of September 22, 2022
Upcoming Events at YSM
sep 27 Miró Quartet with David Shifrin, clarinet
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