RIGHT HERE - WHERE WE LIVE

Tracey Rush
Jane Eyre, Fantasy Overture

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op 18
Rei Hotoda, piano
Moderato
Adagio sostenuto
Allegro scherzando

Amy Beach
Symphony No. 2 in E minor, 'Gaelic'
Allegro con fuoco
Alla siciliana - Allegro vivace - Andante
Lento con molta espressione
Allegro di molto

 

PROGRAM   NOTES

Tracey Rush

Tracey Rush is founder and Executive Director of the Northeast Iowa School of Music in Dubuque. A graduate of Bob Jones University (BS) and the University of Northern Iowa (MM), Rush presently teaches music in the Dubuque Community School District and at Emmaus Bible College. In 1988, she formed the Dubuque Community String Orchestra, an organization she still conducts. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently featured her as one of the 'most influential Musicians in the Tri-States.' She has served four terms as Chair of the Iowa Composers Forum, and is affiliated with the American String Teachers Association, Music Educators National Conference (MENC), and ASCAP. She owns and operates Fountain Park Music Publishing of Dubuque, Iowa.

The recipient of more than twenty-five commissions, Rush has had her works appear on festival and preferred music lists nation-wide. During the 1996-97 season, Rush served as Composer-in-Residence of the Dubuque Symphony. Four of her works were performed by the Dubuque orchestra, including a commissioned work, The Spirit of Freedom, a rousing concert fanfare which was later played at the MENC 56th In-service in Phoenix, Arizona, and by the Owensboro (KY) Symphony Orchestra under former Clinton Symphony Orchestra conductor Nicholas Palmer. One piece Angels in the Snow has been featured on many orchestra programs around the country. Her composition The Butterfly Garden received the Francis J. Pyle Award in 1999. In March 2008, Rush appeared at Carnegie Hall conducting her Fantasia in F with the Brookfield East (WI) High School orchestra, and in April 2010, the premiere of her Photographic Memories, a work based on photographs of Muscatine, Iowa, photographer Oscar Grossheim, was performed by the Muscatine Symphony Orchestra under maestro Brian Dollinger. In addition, Rush was a finalist in the American Composers Forum 'Continental Harmony Project.' and Mothering Heights, a musical-comedy revue Rush co-wrote with Rebecca Christian, has been published by Dramatic Publishing.

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre had long been a favored subject in Rush's catalog of unfinished projects when she was approached by Carl Johnson, conductor of the Des Moines Community Orchestra, to compose a work for the orchestra's 'Women's Night Out' program. When she learned that the orchestra had recently performed Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, Fantasy Overture, her thoughts immediately turned to an unfinished musical on Jane Eyre she and a playwright friend had worked on in the 1990s. She realized 'this was the perfect opportunity to resurrect my previous work on Jane and do my own concert fantasy with those themes that...had been languishing in the piano bench all these years.'

Jane Eyre, Fantasy Overture is patterned after Tchaikovsky's concert fantasy and incorporates five themes, each depicting 'a different emotion in Jane's life and her development and growth into the incredible character that she [becomes].' The five themes are 'Childhood at Gateshead' (based on a plaintive four-note motif J(C)-A-N(G)-E), "The Red Room,""Lowood: Death of Helen,""Flight from Thornfield," and "Reunion."

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) began his career as a composer with great promise. Peter Tchaikovsky before his untimely death in 1893 saw in the young Sergei a kindred spirit, a soul imbued with a gift of melody similar to his own and worked to advance his career. The older composer was so taken with two of Rachmaninoff's early endeavors, the Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor, Op 1 (1891) and an opera Aleko which premiered at the Bolshoi in the spring of 1893 to the extent that he volunteered to conduct Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem The Rock, Op 7 during the upcoming fall season. To Rachmaninoff's dismay, Tchaikovsky died suddenly and the promised concert performance never took place. However saddened he was by Tchaikovsky's death, he nevertheless enjoyed a new enthusiasm for composition and set to work on the most demanding of compositions, a work that would define his musical maturity to himself and to his contemporaries - a symphony.

To this point in his nascent career, Rachmaninoff had known nothing less than success; he had won two Great Gold Medals (one as a pianist and another as a composer) and had garnered the support of illustrious composers such as Tchaikovsky and Nicolai Zverev. Thus it came as a bitter shock when the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op 13, in March 1897 proved to be such a disaster* that the composer descended into a severe depression that incapacitated him as far as composing was concerned for nearly three years. Yet, amid the gloom there was a ray of sunshine - a small beam of light in the form of a little piano piece that Rachmaninoff came to call simply 'It' - the Prelude in C-sharp minor. This somber four-minute work caught the fancy of audiences in America and England when it was programmed by Alexander Siloti, Rachmaninoff's cousin, on a tour in 1898. In England, Siloti secured a performance date for Rachmaninoff as pianist and conductor with the London Philharmonic Society for the spring of 1899. Rachmaninoff, in turn, promised to provide a new piano concerto for the London engagement. He was unable, however, to fulfill the promise.

The failure of his First Symphony still haunted him, and as late as fall 1899, he had to admit that 'My musical matters go very badly.' In fact, matters seemed to only worsen with the passing of time. Encouraged by a friend, Rachmaninoff sought relief with two visits to the noted Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, only to find the author of no help at all but to the contrary, 'a very disagreeable man.' No doubt, Tolstoy's comment on hearing Rachmaninoff and bass Fyodor Chaliapin perform one of the composer's songs did not alleviate Rachmaninoff's gloom: 'Tell me, do you really think anybody needs music like that?'

As his depression became more debilitating, Rachmaninoff found himself incapable of beginning the most necessary of tasks. So lacking in ambition was he that he had difficulty writing a new piano concerto for which he had sought a commission. In desperation, then, he agreed to visit a psychiatrist who specialized in the new art of hypnotic suggestion as a cure for depression. Rachmaninoff had faint hopes when he first met Dr. Nicholas Dahl, but as his daily sessions with the doctor advanced from January through April 1900, the composer gradually emerged from the gloom and doom of his inner world:

I heard the same hypnotic formula repeated day after day while I lay half asleep in an arm-chair in Dr. Dahl's study."You will begin to write your  concerto―You will work with great facility―The Concerto will be of an excellent quality." It was always the same without interruption. Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me. Already at the beginning of the summer I began to compose again. The material grew in bulk, and  new musical ideas began to stir within me―far more than I needed for my concerto. By autumn I had  finished two movements of the concerto―the [Adagio]and the Finale. . .

These two movements were played at a benefit concert in December 1900 with the composer at the piano and his cousin Alexander Siloti conducting. The performance was a success with the audience and with the critics, one of whom praised the work's 'poetry, beauty, warmth, [and] rich orchestration.' The complete concerto with its innovative first movement premiered less that a year later performed by Rachmaninoff and Siloti with the Moscow Philharmonic. The concerto was a complete success; his former piano teacher Sergei Taneyev is reported to have wept during the second movement, and later, that most acerbic of Russian composers Sergei Prokofiev referred to it as 'a work of exceptional, astonishing beauty.'

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op 18 while noted for its lyricism and phrasing is a work set apart from the usual piano concerto of Rachmaninoff's time in that it offers two innovative features. The opening notes are played solo on the piano with echoes of the famous Prelude in C-sharp minor, with the orchestra entering only after the piano has set the mood. The second feature regards the concerto overall. Unlike the classical and romantic concertos that preceded the 'Rach 2', the work does not pit piano against orchestra, as if one is seeking to dominate the other. Rather, Rachmaninoff intertwines the two elements into a flowing symphonic whole, each alternating the lead role, yet as one entity.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was fortunate to live to see his piano concerto become part of the active repertoire of all aspiring pianists. Some scholars have downplayed the role that Dr. Dahl played in Rachmaninoff's recovery, stating that indications were that the composer was working his own way out of his depression. But it is noteworthy that Rachmaninoff thought so well of the doctor's treatment that he dedicated this concerto to him.

 

Amy Marcy Beach

The parents of Amy Marcy Cheney (1867-1944) were aware of her musical abilities while she was still quite young, for she had been picking out tunes on the piano by age four. After her family moved to Boston in 1875, she began formal piano lessons and advanced rapidly in both form and technique, so that by age sixteen in 1883, she gave the first of several successful public recitals. Her first major test as a performer came in March 1885 when she played the Piano Concerto in F minor of Frederick Chopin with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In that same year, she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Boston surgeon, Harvard professor, and amateur musician, twenty-four years older than she.

The good doctor encouraged his wife to concentrate on composition, and she, limiting herself to one public recital a year, began a severe regimen of self-study in composition and theory. Her prior formal study in composition was a year as the student of Junius W. Hill of Boston, with whom she studied harmony and counterpoint. Much of what she learned was from studying the scores of past masters, such as Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven as well as the musical works of her contemporaries. Her early pieces tended to be small in scale and form - songs, for example, of favorite poems. In short order, however, she brought forth a major work that earned her laurels as a serious composer, a Mass in E-flat major, Op 5, which was first performed by the Boston Handel and Haydn Society in 1892. With this composition, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach (the name she used both as performer and composer) became the preeminent woman composer in the United States, and she joined the 'Second New England School,' or 'Boston Group,' as the lone female among American composers that included John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, George Whiting, and Horatio Parker.

Two years later in 1894, Beach began writing her Symphony in E minor, 'Gaelic,' in part to counter the notion advanced by Antonin Dvořák, then head of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, that American composers could find their national emotion and mood in the spirituals and work songs of African Americans. Some American composers such as Paine, Chadwick and Foote saw no need for a nationalistic music, preferring instead an 'abstract' music, typical of Johannes Brahms. Beach, the youngest member of the Boston Group, differed with Dvořák, however, in that composers 'of the North should be far more likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors.' True to her own spirit, Beach incorporated four Irish themes into her 'Gaelic' symphony, themes that would have been familiar to music audiences of the time. She also included in the fourth movement themes of her own devising, Irish in style and substance.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered the Symphony in E minor in 1896, with later performances in Brooklyn and New York. Other orchestras followed suit in short order. The work even crossed the Atlantic to Germany where several performances took place. The symphony was widely admired and increased Beach's stature as an accomplished American composer of serious music. Her Boston Group colleagues were quick to praise the score, with Chadwick opining that the work was 'full of fine things, melodically, harmonically, orchestrally, and mighty well built besides.' And then, he gave her the ultimate accolade; she was now 'one of the boys.'

*Rachmaninoff's symphony is now considered a remarkable work in its own right. The failure of the work at its premiere is laid at the feet of composer Alexander Glazunov who conducted the work - that, and the lack of rehearsal time. Glazunov, according to reports, was inebriated and had little control of the performance.

Program Notes © 2011 William H. Driver and Clinton Symphony Orchestra Association

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