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HOLIDAY CONCERT 2009

Leroy Anderson
Sleigh Ride
Christmas Festival

Georges Bizet
Farandole from L'Arlésienne Suite No. 2

Bill Holcombe
'Twas the Night Before Christmas
by Clement Moore

George Frederick Handel
Choruses from Messiah

Franz Xaver Gruber
Stille Nacht

Peter Ily'ich Tchaikovsky
Nutcracker Suite, Op 71a

Christmas Sing-along

PROGRAM  NOTES

Leroy Anderson

Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) has been grouped along with George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Charles Ives as a true American music original. Regardless of critical judgment, his distinctive, descriptive miniatures continue to delight audiences today as they did at their introductions.

Leroy Anderson was a man of New England born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1908, to Swedish immigrants, both of whom had musical talents. He began studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, then he entered the music program at Harvard University where he graduated magna cum laude. He then pursued a master's study program in orchestration and composition with eminent composers Georges Enescu and Walter Piston. It was as an orchestrator and arranger that he caught the attention of Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops. Anderson composed his first original piece for the Boston Pops - Jazz Pizzicato - in 1938, and followed the next year with Jazz Legato, both of which were immediately successful.

During World War II, Anderson served as an intelligence officer in the U. S. Army, but he maintained his composing and conducting activities. After the war, he continued his association with the Boston Pops, and he and his family moved permanently to Woodbury, Connecticut. It was here that he conceived the basic theme of Sleigh Ride while digging in his yard for water pipes during a July heat wave in 1946. For a year and a half he refined his theme and added two additional parts to surround the tune before its premiere with the Boston Pops in May 1948. It  was an immediate success with several recorded versions available by 1949.

A concert overture, Christmas Festival was arranged in 1950 by Anderson as a showpiece for his own orchestra. 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. 

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 to augment the drama, but both the play and the music were considered failures at the time. Bizet, to save something of his efforts, drew from the total number four pieces 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 four selections from the original source material, although he did take liberties with the arranging and scoring of the four 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 its original guise 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.

Clement C. Moore

Clement Clarke Moore's (1779-1863) "Account of A Visit from Saint Nicholas" was first published in the Troy, New York, Sentinel on December 23, 1823, without attribution. It was submitted by a family friend who had heard the poem recited by one of Moore's children. Moore did not take complete credit for the authorship of the poem until 1844 when he included it in a book of his poetry. The poem gained immediate recognition, first in the state and then nationwide, appearing in newspapers and almanacs yearly until 1837 when it was included in an anthology of poems with Moore's name given as the author. Scholarship through the years, however, has revealed doubts as to Moore's claim. Some students of the work give credit for the classic to Henry Livingston (1748-1828), but regardless of its authorship the poem has become the quintessential Christmas poem revealing the joy, anticipation and expectations of the secular side of the season.

Composer and arranger Bill Holcombe's background in swing, jazz, radio, and movie music clearly influenced his accompaniment to the Moore/Livingston classic. His treatment of The Night Before Christmas is a straight forward reading of the classic accompanied by an orchestral arrangement that includes easily recognizable carols and songs of the yuletide. His arrangement of the music clearly showcases the areas in which he has spent the greatest portions of his active career: Jazz and Big Band elements are strewn throughout the score to give the music a modern, festive flavor.

Franz Xaver Gruber

Several apocryphal stories surround the origin of the Christmas carol Stille Nacht (Silent Night). Was it the creation of an itinerant musician forced to seek refuge in an isolated church from a blinding snowstorm in the Tyrolean alps? Did the melody come from the pen of Mozart? Beethoven? Schubert, maybe? The Romantic heart knows no bounds when it comes to the fanciful re-imaginings of the mundane, but, in truth, the carol was the work of an assistant pastor Joseph Mohr (1792-1848) and his choir-master/organist friend Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863). The two men met on a Christmas Eve afternoon in 1818 in Gruber's apartment over the school at which Gruber taught. Mohr brought with him a poem he had written two years before while pastor in another village. He hoped Gruber would be able to set the words to music for the Midnight Mass that evening. In a few hours, Gruber had composed the music for Mohr's poem, and, that evening, they stood before the congregation at St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria, to perform the song that would in twenty years become world famous.

Grove's Dictionary of Music offers the following information on the spread of the song from Oberndorf/Amsdorf to the wider world:

Karl Mauracher, an organ builder in the Zillertal, visited Arnsdorf in 1821, and must have been shown the song; Gruber referred to a ‘well-known Zillertaler’ who took the song to the Tyrol. It was probably taken to the Leipzig trade fair of 1831 by the Strasser family from the Zillertal, and first appeared in print in 1838 (‘slightly changed’, according to Gruber). Its fame spread rapidly: it came to be regarded as a Tyrolean folksong, and was eventually translated into many different languages.

In the late nineteenth century the song was attributed to various composers including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Only in recent years has the dispute been finally settled with the discovery of an arrangement of Stille Nacht in Joseph Mohr's hand with a note in the upper corner "Melody by Fr. Xav. Gruber."

Click Here for an audio example of verse one of the Gruber/Mohr original.

George Frederic Handel

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.

Peter Ily'ich Tchaikovsky

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. 72a 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.

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.

 

This program is funded in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.