Leroy Anderson
Christmas Festival
Sleigh Ride
Mikola Dmitrovich Leontovich, ed. Richard Hayman
Ukranian Bell Carol
Arcangelo Corelli
'Christmas' Concerto in G minor, Op 6, No 8
Vivace
Allegro
Adagio - Allegro - Adagio
Vivace
Allegro
Largo
Alfred Reed
Russian Christmas Music
Carol of the Little Russian Children
Antiphonal Chant
Village Song
Cathedral Chorus
I N T E R M I S S I O N
Peter Ily'ich Tchaikovsky
Nutcracker Suite, Op 71a
I. Overture Miniature
II. Characteristic Dances
March
Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy
Russian (Cossack) Dance
Arabian Dance
Chinese Dance
Dance of the Reed Pipes
III. Waltz of the Flowers
Georges Bizet
Farandole from L'Arlesienne Suite No 2
Robert Shaw/Robert Russell Bennett
Many Moods of Christmas - Suite One:
Good Christian Men, Rejoice
Silent Night
Patapan
O Come, All Ye Faithful
George Fredick. Handel
Messiah Choruses
And the Glory of the Lord
For Unto Us a Child is Born
Hallelujah
Sing-along
PROGRAM NOTES
Leroy Anderson
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Leroy Anderson (1908-1975), often grouped with George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Charles Ives as an American music original, got the idea for the theme of Sleigh Ride as he dug in his Woodbury, Connecticut, yard for water pipes during a heat wave in 1946. As he dug and the perspiration soaked his clothes, he thought of a tall glass of ice water to quench his thrist, a thought that turned to winter and snow and then to racing over the countryside in a horse-drawn sleigh with a sharp, wintry breeze whipping across his cheeks. That was all the composer needed to conjure up a melody. For more than a year he worked to refine this theme, adding two additional parts to enclose the tune before he felt it worthy to premiere.
Conceived as a concert overture, Christmas Festival was arranged in 1950 by Anderson as a showpiece for his own orchestra. The compilation of melodies, whether by intent or by accident, illustrates both the secular and religious aspects of the season. It includes Joy to the World; Deck the Halls; God Rest ye Merry, Gentlemen; Good King Wenceslas; Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; The First Noel; Silent Night; Jingle Bells; O Come All Ye Faithful.
Mikola Leontovich
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Mikola Leontovich (1877-1921) is remembered today primarily for his choral compositions, most of which are based on Ukrainian folk songs, liturgy, and the works of Ukrainian poets. During his lifetime, he was well-known outside his native country, especially in western Europe where he was referred to as the 'Ukrainian Bach.' A rather shy man, he was a somewhat passive advocate for Ukrainian independence from the USSR who, nevertheless, was assassinated by a Soviet agent in early 1921.
Outside his native Ukraine, Leontovich is best known for Shchedryk, the Ukrainian Bell Carol. In English tradition, it has become a Christmas carol known as the Carol of the Bells and, at times, as Ring Christmas Bells. The version on tonight's program is an arrangement by American orchestrator Richard Hayman. The carol is noted for its clearly recognized four-note ostinato motif. A favorite source of material for television and movie music composers, the song has been used many times in one form or another to provide the season's flavor to such films as Home Alone, The Santa Clause, and TV segments such as Carol of the Meows.
Arcangelo Corelli
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Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) wrote the Concerto grosso in G minor, Op 6, No 8 on commission from Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni and it is believed to have been first performed in the Cardinal's presence around 1690. Corelli, a noted violonist of great influence, wrote and published few compositions during his lifetime, but he did gather twelve of his concerti which he had honed and revised over the years, into a collection shortly before his death. The Op 6 was published posthumously. Eight of the concerti are in the sonata da chiesa (church sonata) style, while the final four are in the sonata da camera (chamber sonata) form. This group of concerto grossi exerted a great influence over the style and manner of the concerto form for Italian composers who followed Corelli. Its influence can be seen in the works of German composers Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel, as well.
The designation of the piece as the 'Christmas Concerto' comes from the inscription affixed by Corelli to the manuscript: Fatto per la notte di Natale - 'Made for the night of Christmas.' , Rather than the usual four, the concerto is comprised of six short movements. The spiritual nature of the work is further enhanced in the finale, a Pastorale, or Pastorali, which refers to the shepherds who went to Bethlehem to bear witness to the birth of Jesus. In Corelli's time, in fact, it had become a tradition for rural shepherds to visit nearby towns to play their pipes at nativity scenes.
Alfred Reed
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To celebrate the allied countries successul assault on mainland Europe, D-Day, June 6, 1944, the city fathers of Denver, Colorado, planned a Christmas holiday concert around the theme of Russian and American collaboration in the war against the Axis powers. They gave the commission to American composer Roy Harris to implement. Harris's plan was to premiere works representing composers from each country. He chose the second movement from his own just-completed Symphony No 6 'Gettysburg Address' and Serge Prokofiev's March, Op 99, without realizing that the Prokofiev work had been premiered in the United States by the 529th Army Air Corps Band. To stay true to his commission, Harris asked his assistant Alfred Reed (1921-2005) to compose a new Russian-inspired piece for the concert. Reed, incidentally, was the staff arranger for the aforementioned Army Air Corps Band. With sixteen days left before the concert, the twenty-three-year-old Reed set to work scouring the music corps' library for suitable material to incorporate into his homage to Russia, and, within eleven days, he had completed the score for Russian Christmas Music.
Ironically, the first performance of Russian Christmas Music was not at the Denver festival celebration but on a nationwide radio broadcast on December 12, 1944. The concert performance took place two days later. The score is based, like Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, on the litergical music of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is non-instrumental vocal music. Reed's work is in one movement with four distinct sections, ending with the exhiliratingly intense Cathedral Chorus.
Peter Ily'ich Tchaikovsky
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Peter Ily'ich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) considered his music for The Nutcracker ballet to be "infinitely poorer" than that of The Sleeping Beauty. Following the success of his opera Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades), Tchaikovsky had accepted two commissions from the director of the Imperial Theatres - one for a ballet and another for a one-act opera. The director gave Tchaikovsky no options on the subject for the ballet; it was to be based on Alexandre Dumas père's adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Tchaikovsky liked neither Dumas' adaptation nor Hoffman's original story but felt compelled, for financial reasons, to fulfill his obligation.
He began work on the score in early 1892 prior to leaving for a successful tour of the United States. He finished the piece by late summer of the same year. To generate public enthusiasm for the ballet, the composer made a suite of eight of the numbers he had already completed and presented The Nutcracker Suite, Op. 71a to the St. Petersburg branch of the Musical Society on March 19, 1892. The complete ballet debuted in December 1892 to generally poor reviews. While the suite was an immediate success, the complete ballet did not achieve great popularity until the 1950s. It has since become standard Christmas fare for ballet troupes around the world.
Of special interest is Tchaikovsky's use of the then newly-invented instrument, the celesta. The composer was particularly intrigued by the heavenly sound the celesta produced and used it in several places throughout the score, but in no place more effective than in the 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy' where it is a featured solo instrument.
Georges Bizet
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The Farandole comes from themes Georges Bizet (1838-1875) used in his incidental music to Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles), first performed in 1872. Bizet originally wrote twenty-seven numbers of varying lengths to augment the drama, but both the play and the music were considered failures at the time. Bizet, to salvage something from his efforts, extracted four pieces from score which he reochestrated and published as his L'Arlésienne Suite. The four pieces in this first suite are Prelude, Minuetto, Adagietto and Carillon. It was not until four years after Bizet's death that the second suite was created.
L'Arlésienne Suite No 2 was crafted by Ernest Guiraud (1837-1892), a composer and a life-long friend of Bizet. Like Bizet, he took three selections from the original source material, although he did take liberties with the arranging and scoring of the pieces he chose to include in the finished product. Guiraud was not hesitant in fashioning the music as he saw fit. Guiraud's suite is comprised of Pastorale, Intermezzo, Menuet, and Farandole. The Menuet comes not from the incidental music, but from Bizet's 1866 opera The Fair Maid of Perth. The Farandole, a provincial dance from southern France, in Bizet's original takes approximately a minute and a half to perform; in Guiraud's embellished version, he augments the dance with a traditional French Christmas carol, March of the Kings, to extend the piece to approximately three minutes. Thus, it is through Guiraud's manipulation of Bizet's original material that the Farandole is often scheduled on Christmas programs.
The Many Moods of Christmas is a collection of seventeen Christmas carols prepared under the auspices of American choral director and conductor Robert Shaw expressly for a recorded album for RCA Victor released during the Christmas season of 1963. Shaw commissioned composer, arranger and orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett to do the arrangements for the recording. Bennett divided the carols into four suites or medleys. Shaw himself conducted the Robert Shaw Chorale and Orchestra for the album, which proved to be a big seller for RCA for several seasons. The recording was issued in both monophonic and stereo versions as was the practice at the time.
Shaw recorded the four suites again in 1983 with the advent of the digital recording process, this time with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus for Telarc. This particular recording, unlike the closely-miked studio recording of 1963, was recorded in the more spacious and openess of Atlanta Symphony Hall, thus providing a more natural sound experience. This digital CD is still a popular seller today; however, it must compete with itself somewhat in that the 1963 studio recording has been reissued to the delight of those who grew up during the earlier period.
George Frederic Handel
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Messiah premiered the evening of April 13, 1742 as one of a series of charity concerts in Dublin, Ireland. George Frederic Handel (1685-1759), the German-born, Italian-educated, English citizen, composed this masterpiece over a three-week period during the summer of 1741 set to a libretto by Charles Jennens. Handel, depressed and in debt, followed his usual manner in composing, incorporating material from his earlier works and the works of other composers along with his original ideas. At the premiere, Handel led the singers from the harpsichord while Matthew Dubourg, an Irish violinist, composer, and conductor, led the orchestra. The original composition took approximately three and a half hours to perform, and little is known of the reception the work received at its premiere, but it was a success when Handel led a performance in London the following year. Not until 1818 did an American premiere take place in Boston.
Handel altered and revised Messiah depending on the occasion and the musical forces he had at his command, and it was only in 1754 that an 'authentic' version was presented at a benefit performance for London's Foundling Hospital. Yet, other notables have sought to improve on the original modest orchestration. Mozart expanded Handel's scoring by adding woodwinds and organ. Later, in the twentieth century, Eugene Goossens augmented Mozart's arrangement with the addition of more woodwinds and brass. Goossens' version was popular for a period of time, but it is seldom heard in a live performance today. The trend in performance today is to opt for the more modest requirements of the original.
The choruses from Messiah offer some of the most inspiring and stirring music that Handel ever wrote. Of particular note is the most famous of them, the Hallelujah chorus. The text is taken from three verses in the New Testament book of Revelation in the King James version of the Bible. The chorus comes at the end of part two and tradition dictates that the audience stands at this point, as King George II did in Handel's time, to show deference to the King of Kings.
Program Notes © 2011 William H. Driver and Clinton Symphony Orchestra Association
