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A NEW ERA OF EXCELLENCE |
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WINTER CONCERT 2009 |
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Unknown Brilliance Overture to Alfonso und Estrella Schubert Violin Concerto No. 22 in A minor Viotti
PROGRAM NOTES George Bernard Shaw, Irish dramatist, socialist, and music critic, said in his usual sardonic tone, "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children." Certainly he could not have been considering the three composers on tonight's program or the Young Artist Audition winners who are the symphony's featured soloists. The young Franz Schubert, Claude Debussy and Peter Tchaikovsky were each accomplished composers, and each produced remarkable works at an early age. David Olsen and John Kermott are aspiring young musicians with bright futures in the offering. Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) produced more musical works in his short thirty-one year life than many other composers produce in a normal life span. Music poured from him in great profusion, seemingly without effort: songs, sonatas, duos, trios, quartets, quintets, octets, symphonies, incidental music to dramas, and, yes, even singspiels* and operas. His reputation today rests on his purely instrumental works and his small-scale songs and larger song cycles, but Schubert probably spent more time and effort to produce a successful large-scale stage work than he did on his other works combined.
At age seventeen, Schubert found sudden fame when his song Die Erlkönig (The Elf King) scored a great success, and for a time he became the darling of Viennese music circles. Indeed, the song, based on a Goethe poem, is a powerful and evocative work in true Romantic vein in both word and music, worthy of its continuing popularity as a recital piece. But the master of the art song (He composed more than six hundred.) proved incapable of producing a provocative and sustained work to compete with the masters of the singspiel (Carl Maria von Weber) and the opera (Gioacchino Rossini). In total, he composed music for at least fifteen large-scale vocal works including several operas and singspiels. He produced his earliest opera for his teacher Antonio Salieri at age sixteen, and then two other operas - Die Zwillingsbrüder (1820) and Die Zauberharfe (1820) - were premiered in Vienna, but were found to lack merit. For his next opera, Schubert was determined to follow his own light in structuring the work and not heed the advice of his critics. To this end, he composed Alfonso und Estrella to a libretto by his good friend Franz von Schober. The opera, aimed at the growing genre of German romantic opera, proved a dismal failure. The finished work could not even generate enough interest among performers and promoters to warrant a single performance. It received its first public performance in a heavily-abridged version in June 1854 under the supervision of Franz Liszt. Schubert later extracted the wonderful Overture to Alfonso und Estrella and used it as the overture to his Incidental Music to Rosamunde and came to call it his "Rosamunde Overture."** The overture is Beethovenesque in its layout and invention and concludes with a Mozartean flourish. Achille-Claude Debussy (1862-1918), while not the musical prodigy that Schubert was, nevertheless showed such talent that at age ten, he was enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied with Ernest Guiraud, and César Franck among others. For a time, Debussy served as music teacher to the children of Nadezhda von Meck, the patron of the arts who salvaged Peter Tchaikovsky's career during a time of personal crises, and then spent a four-year sojourn at the French Academy in Rome. The stay in Rome was not a fortuitous time for Debussy, who suffered from depression and the inability to compose anything of significance. He did meet Franz Liszt, whom he admired, and before his departure for home he completed four pieces which were submitted to the Academy, perhaps to justify his four-year residency.
After his return, Debussy twice undertook the pilgrimage (1888, 1889) to the Bayreuth Festival in Germany to witness the triumph of Richard Wagner, particularly that composer's Ring cycle.***And for a time following his visit, he was enamored of the German master's music. In fact, one can hear the influences both of Liszt and Wagner in Debussy's Petite Suite, completed in 1889. The Petite Suite, suggested by the poem Scenes de bal of Albert Saint-Paul, was originally scored for piano four hands. This is the version when Debussy, along with his music publisher Jacques Durand, premiered the work to a salon of music elites in Paris. According to Durand the performance did not go as planned:
Despite its tepid first reception, the work has entered both the piano and the orchestral repertoires as one of Debussy's most approachable melodic pieces. The version on tonight's program is the orchestrated one arranged in 1907 by Henri Büsser, a French composer noted for his orchestration skills.
If 1875 was a good year for the composer, it was deserved, for Tchaikovsky had struggled for several years to gain acceptance as a reputable composer. To this point, he had achieved very limited success with his large-scale works. His Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture of 1869, while showing promise of great things to come, nevertheless had to be revised several times before the composer was satisfied with it. Prior to the Romeo and Juliet piece, A large Symphony No. 1 in G minor (1868) proved disappointing to the highly sensitive Tchaikovsky, who fell into deep throes of despondency at public criticism of his work. His return to the form in 1872 - 73 with the modestly successful Second Symphony ignited anew his desire to work with larger forms. While little is known of the gestation of the Third Symphony, we know that Tchaikovsky completed the score while on summer break from his position at the Moscow Conservatory of Music where he was a teacher of harmony. The title page of the score carries the notation: Begun 5 June 1875 at Usovo. Finished 1 August 1875 at Verbovka. The first performance of the symphony took place on the evening of November 7, 1875, at a concert of the Russian Musical Society. The conductor was Nikolai Rubinstein, the founder of the Moscow Conservatory and the brother of Anton Rubinstein, the esteemed Russian composer and pianist. Tchaikovsky was in attendance and later wrote to his brother Modest that "[m]y symphony fared very well, and had appreciable success. I was called for and roundly applauded." A performance followed in February 1876 in St. Petersburg at which the symphony was well received by the public and critics alike. Only later, at a performance of the work at the Crystal Palace in London, did the symphony get its inappropriate nickname. A reviewer of the concert referred to the work as the Polish based on the tempo markings in the final movement - tempodi Polacca. Other than the markings, the symphony has no references to materials - musical or literary - of a Polish origin. Symphony No. 3 in D major, Op 29, a five-movement piece, was a significant milestone in Tchaikovsky's music output. It is a 'mature' symphony in every sense of the meaning and the first of his large works to get a broad hearing. Today, it has been overshadowed by his Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies, but at the time it was the work that launched his career to become the most Western and the most programmed of Russian composers. Young Artist Audition Winners David Olsen of Fulton will perform the first movement from Paul Creston's Concertino for Marimba and Orchestra, Op 21. The movement is marked Vigorous and exhibits a major characteristic of Creston's music, which is an emphasis on rhythm.
Paul Creston (1906-1985), born Giuseppe Guttoveggio, was to a great degree a self-taught composer, and significant success came to him only when he was in his mid-thirties with the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 (1941), for which he won the New York Critic’s Circle Award. For the two decades following this triumph, Creston was, along with George Gershwin, Samuel Barber, and Roy Harris, the most frequently programmed American composer both here and abroad. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Creston had no hesitation about composing for media other than the concert hall. He wrote award-winning scores for both radio and television, notching an Emmy citation for his score to the 1964 television documentary In the American Grain. Creston's music fell out of favor in the 1960s as did most of the American neo-Romantic genre. Creston never came to terms with the experimental, scholarly avant garde music that flowed from the universities, and unlike Stravinsky and Copland, made no attempts to alter his style or content. He continued to compose until his death from cancer in 1985. In addition to being a notable teacher, Creston was a prolific writer on music with a particular bent toward the history and use of rhythm. Besides many magazine articles on the subject, he published two highly valued books Principles of Rhythm and Rational Metric Notations. The Concertino for Marimba and Orchestra is a melodious exercise in rhythm as one might expect from the solo instrument. The instrument is tested through its full range, and the soloist is put through his paces.
Giovanni Viotti (1755-1824) was considered one of the foremost violin virtuosos of his day and an esteemed composer of music for that instrument. Viotti is credited with uniting the traditions of Italian violin playing, exemplified by Archangelo Corelli, with the French school of playing which was prevalent during Viotti's time. In his youth he studied and toured with the noted Italian violinist Gaetano Pugnani, and after an especially significant Paris debut, he remained in the French capital where he entertained the nobility until he was forced to flee to London in 1792 during the darkest days of the French Revolution. In England, Viotti began to recover his life and had notable success as a virtuoso and composer, performing several new violin concerti for an increasingly adoring public. However, when the English reacted in disfavor toward the excesses of the Revolution, rumors flew abroad to London of French intrigue, forcing some of the French exiles to flee to other lands. Viotti took up a semi-retired existence in the south of Germany, but returned to the English capital when the anti-French fervor subsided. He continued his career as performer, composer, and conductor; he was the leader of the orchestra at the benefit concerts in 1794-95 when Joseph Haydn offered his latest set of symphonies, the so-called "London" symphonies. Following a series of bad business decisions, Viotti became disenchanted with his music career, renounced public performance, and took up the trade of a wine merchant. He did continue to compose as his moods allowed. His venture into the world of trade did not prove lasting, and by 1818 he was back in Paris as director of the Paris Opera. He remained there for several years trying earnestly to revive an enterprise that had been allowed to descend into mediocrity. He had some success, but, again despairing, he returned to London in 1823 where he died in relative obscurity. Viotti composed 29 violin concerti between the years 1782 to 1808, of which the Violin Concerto No. 22 in A minor is the most often performed. It exhibits those characteristics of unified violin playing and Romantic sensibility that influenced the composers of his day - Mozart, Beethoven and Ludwig Spohr to name a few. Incidentally, this concerto was a particular favorite of composer Johannes Brahms. Citations *Eighteenth-century German opera, containing spoken dialogue and usually comic in tone. The earliest singspiels (song - play) were light plays whose dialogue was interspersed with popular songs. The singspiel rose to great popularity in the late 18th century. Its success was partly caused by a reaction by composers and audiences to the artificial conventions of the then dominant Italian opera. **The Incidental Music to Rosamunde now uses the overture to Schubert's melodrama Die Zauberharfe in place of the overture to Alfonso und Estrella. ***Wagner had built a special theater from which he showcased his operas, which over time (to this day) became a special annual event for music lovers from the world over. The Ring cycle - the highlight of the festival - included all four operas in the Ring of the Nibelungen: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Die Götterdämmerung. ****Some authorities consider Tchaikovsky's Manfred as a symphony, making a total of seven symphonies, but other musicologists deem the four-movement work an extended symphonic tone poem, based on the work of the same name by the English poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron.
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Clinton Symphony Orchestra PO Box 116 Clinton, IA 52733-0116 |
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