Symphonette Program Notes
Benjamin Britten – Simple Symphony
(1913-1976)
Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy. He was quite an ordinary little boy; he took his snake-belt to bed with him; he liked cricket; he adored mathematics, got on alright with history. There was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music.
Mark O’Connor – Appalachia Waltz
(b. 1961)
Written originally as a duet for Mark O’Connor and Yo-Yo Ma, Appalachia Waltz focuses on the melodies and harmonic richness of O’Connor’s childhood and his love of this region of the US.
Carlos Gardel – Por una Cabeza
(1890-1935)
One of the great Latin Actors and Musicians of his time, Carlos Gardel, was what was called a “matinee idol” of his time. In addition to his fine skills as an actor, the French Born, Argentine raised Gardel was also a composer responsible for one of the most well-known tangos of his time and of today.
Translated as “By a Head”, Por Una Cabeza refers to a horse race where a horse narrowly wins a race by the length of a horse’s head. The Tango originated in the Rio De La Plata between the borders of Argentina and Uruguay, and both countries lay claim to the title of “Birthplace of the Tango.”
The Tango heard tonight is famous in American cinema, appearing in Schindler’s List, Scent of a Woman, and True Lies.
– Program Note by Brian Worsdale
Adrian Gordon – High Rise
(b. 1983)
High Rise is a high-energy groove, that takes the orchestra on an exciting musical journey of adventures in a big city. The improvisatory-like lines, and percussive elements provide a fun musical landscape for string orchestras and audience members alike.
– From the composer
Young Peoples Orchestra Program Notes
Jessie Montgomery – Starburst
(b. 1981)
This brief one-movement work for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst: “the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly” lends itself almost literally to the nature of the performing ensemble who premieres the work, The Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.
– From the composer
Anthony Barfield – “Allegro Moderato” from Invictus for Brass
(b. 1983)
“Invictus”, meaning “unconquered”, is a short work about New York City in its current circumstances. It’s about dealing with the heightened sense of uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. In conversations with New Yorkers about their personal feelings about these issues, I’ve learned that people feel a sense of anxiety and yet a sense of community and hopefulness that change for the better is on the horizon. New York is resilient, courageous, and adaptable. “Invictus” is meant to show that, despite these troublesome times, we are in fact unconquerable.
“Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts”
– From the composer
Arturo M árquez – Danzón No. 2
(b. 1950)
The idea of writing the Danzón No. 2 originated in 1993 during a trip to Malinalco with the painter Andrés Fonseca and the dancer Irene Martínez, both of whom are experts in salon dances with a special passion for the danzón, which they were able to transmit to me from the beginning, and also during later trips to Veracruz and visits to the Colonia Salon in Mexico City. From these experiences onward, I started to learn the danzón’s rhythms, its form, its melodic outline, and to listen to the old recordings by Acerina and his Danzonera Orchestra. I was fascinated and I started to understand that the apparent lightness of the danzón is only like a visiting card for a type of music full of sensuality and qualitative seriousness, a genre which old Mexican people continue to dance with a touch of nostalgia and a jubilant escape towards their own emotional world; we can fortunately still see this in the embrace between music and dance that occurs in the state of Veracruz and in the dance parlors of Mexico City.
The Danzón No. 2 is a tribute to the environment that nourishes the genre. It endeavors to get as close as possible to the dance, to its nostalgic melodies, to its wild rhythms, and although it violates its intimacy, its form and its harmonic language, it is a very personal way of paying my respects and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music. Danzón No. 2 was written on a commission by the Department of Musical Activities at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and is dedicated to my daughter Lily.
– From the composer
Aaron Copland – Four Dances from Rodeo
(1900-1990)
Work composed: The ballet Rodeo was written June–September 1942, on commission from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
World premiere: the ballet, on October 16, 1942, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Franz Allers, conductor
What Makes the American Sound? For the average listener of American popular music, that question changes with each generation’s interest in music. In the world of classical music and film, “the American sound” may be found in the scores of Aaron Copland. Born in Brooklyn, few composers of his like existed. In his nearly 75 years of creative output, Aaron Copland captured the American West, the urban landscape, the heartland of America, and a small bar in Mexico.
To a certain extent, Copland’s musical vocabulary, rich as it usually is in rhythmic counterpoint, widely spread voicing, and disjunct intervals, shaped its harmonic and rhythmic structure to create all those sounds.
Copland composed Rodeo in 1942 as a ballet to be choreographed by Agnes de Mille for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She initially described it to him as “the story of The Taming of the Shrew — cowboy style.” She continued:
“It is not an epic, or the story of pioneer conquest. It builds no empires. It is a pastorale, a lyric joke … . There are never more than a very few people on the stage at a time … one must be always conscious of the enormous land on which these people live and of their proud loneliness.”
The ballet was received with enthusiasm. The much-feared critic Claudia Cassidy wrote in the Chicago Tribune: “Rodeo is a smash hit. What Miss de Mille has turned out in this brilliant skirmish with Americana is a shining little masterpiece.”
To capture the profoundly national spirit of the subject, Copland drew directly from the well of American folk songs, an obsession of composers at the time. Folk tunes (or melodies that mimic them) appear in quite a few Copland scores, but in Rodeo, they play a role almost constantly.
– Program Note by Brian Worsdale
Manuel de Falla – Three Dances from The Three-Cornered Hat
(1876-1946)
The triumvirate of composers Granados, Albéniz, and Falla, are the most important composers of twentieth-century Spain, without question. But, many would award the palm of “first among equals” to Falla. American audiences know him primarily for three relatively early works: The “Ritual Fire Dance” from his ballet, El amor brujo; the symphonic suite for piano and orchestra, Nights in the Gardens of Spain; and, of course, the music for The Three-cornered Hat. All of these compositions are tuneful, accessible, and either rooted in Spanish folk elements, or French impressionism. However, he went on from the 1920s to explore imaginative and challenging elements of modernism in his stimulating and influential works.
Achieving a modicum of success as a young composer in Madrid from the turn of the century, he turned early on to works for the stage—not only for their practical popularity, but also because he had shown from a very early age a flair for literary and dramatic interests. After composing a series of successful zarzuela (popular Spanish musico-dramatic entertainments), he hit the big time in 1905 with his first major opera, La vida breve, which incorporated significant elements of traditional Gypsy music. A promised performance that was part of the prize that it won never materialized, so in disappointment, the young Falla left Madrid for Paris. It changed his life. There he met and hobnobbed with the luminaries of French artistic life, including Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Dukas, and the impresario, Diaghilev. Later, insular Spanish music critics harped on the “impressionisms” in his subsequent compositions, at the expense of Spanish elements, but never mind. At the onset of World War I he moved back to Spain, and achieved much greater recognition as a composer than in his earlier period. Nights in the Gardens of Spain dates from this period. His association from that time with the theatrical personage, Gregorio Martínez Sierra and his wife, Maria, resulted in his writing in 1916 the ballet, El amor brujo, and the incidental music for a modest pantomime, El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife).
The latter work was immensely successful, and a fateful visit to Madrid by Igor Stravinsky and the acclaimed impresario of the Ballets Russes, Segei Diaghilev, led to Diaghilev’s encouragement of Falla to extend and enlarge the music to a complete ballet. The little farce, El corregidor y la molinera, was based on the novel, El sombrero de tres picos, and the expansion of the concept by Falla took the original title. The combination of native Spanish musical material by Falla, Léonide Massine’s choreography, and Pablo Picasso’s cubist sets and costumes received rave reactions at the première.
The risqué story is a bit complicated, but the essence is that a village magistrate (whose uniform includes a traditional tricorn hat) tries foolishly to seduce a miller’s wife, and ends up making a complete clown of himself. The lecherous magistrate has the miller arrested on trumped up charges, inadvertently falls in the river, jumps into the Miller’s bed. Clothes are surreptitiously exchanged, resulting in mixed up identities and competing seductions—you get the idea. But, in the end virtue triumphs and the ridiculous magistrate is suitably humiliated.
Falla extracted two suites for orchestra from the ballet, one from each act. The first suite opens with a very short fanfare for the curtain rise, and we see the mill. Following that is a leisurely depiction of the warm, sleepy afternoon and the magistrate’s pretentious procession near the mill (the droll bassoon depicts the latter). The miller, taking a dislike of the magistrate, has his wife tantalize him with a swirling, seductive fandango to lure him on. Upon the conclusion of the dance the bassoon/magistrate returns. A tender moment in the music depicts the miller’s wife disingenuously teasing him with an offer of some grapes; she then coquettishly runs away. Pursuing her, he’s led into an ambush, and the angry husband jumps out of the bushes and frightens away the clownish magistrate with a stick—ending act one.
The success of the ballet came after Falla, Massine, and Diaghilev had taken time and trouble to tour the country and research the native Andalusian materials. That took a while, but paid off handsomely a few years later, at the London première, in 1919. Its Spanish tunes, dramatic storytelling, and brilliant orchestration have made it an audience favorite ever since—even if, like Aaron Copland’s populist music of the 1930s—it represents only one facet of the composer’s musical style.
– By Wm. E. Runyan
Used by permission