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Saturday 8 PM November 21, 2009 KING CENTER, Melbourne
Musical Journeys! |
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"Conductor Choices CD Recommendations"
Respighi - Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 1
Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra/Sir Neville Marriner, conductor
EMI Classics 86549
O'Connor - Strings and Threads Suite
Mark O'Connor, fiddle
Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra/Scott Yoo, conductor
SONY 89660
Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on Greensleeves
City of London Sinfonia/Sir John Barbirolli, conductor
EMI Classics 67264
Haydn - Symphony No. 92 Oxford
Cleveland Orchestra/George Szell, conductor
SONY 87284
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PROGRAM NOTES |
The Brevard Symphony Orchestra & Travel Service welcomes you to a musical tour taking you to destinations on both sides of the Atlantic. We'll begin in ancient Italy with Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, travel to the ‘Soul' of America with Strings & Threads by Mark O'Connor, and then cross back over the ocean to England with Vaughan William's Fantasia on Greensleeves and Haydn's Oxford Symphony. No need to use your MasterCard, Visa, or Discover; we only require your imagination. What a deal!
Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) - Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 1:
The Ancient Airs and Dances Suites (1917, 1923, and 1931) bring together Respighi's sumptuous style of orchestration and his knowledge and profound respect for music of the past. In these Suites the composer translates into modern musical language the blending of elegance, liveliness, delicacy and repose that characterized the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. Respighi had an abiding interest in ancient music and performed scholarship on numerous works by such honored composers as Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Tartini and Vitali. The Suites draw heavily from the collections of old lute music published by the Italian musicologist Oscar Chilesotti.
The Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 1 opens with a Baletto de "Il Conte Orlando" ("Count Orlando's Dance"), released in Venice in 1599 as part of a large collection of lute pieces by Simone Molinaro (ca. 1565-ca. 1693). Next is a Gagliarda written by Vincenzo Galilei (1520-1591), a respected Florentine composer and theorist also remembered as the father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei. Set against Galilei's lively triple meter dance is an anonymous Italiana placed above a bagpipe-like drone. The third movement is a deliciously sad air of haunting beauty. This Villanella is a serenade with plucked accompaniment, tracing back to Neapolitan street song, derived in the 16th century from an earlier Spanish vocal form. The final movement is marked Passo mezzo e Mascherada and opens with a passa mezzo, literally a "step-and-a-half," inferring a quick-footed dance almost twice as fast as a pavane. It is interrupted by a mascherada, a flowing villanella sung at a masked ball, to bring the Suite to an invigorating close.
Mark O'Connor (b. August 5, 1961, Seattle, Washington) - Strings and Threads for Violin and String Orchestra:
- Fair Dancer Reel
- Sailor's Jig
- Captain's Jig
- Off to Sea
- Pilgrim's Waltz
- Road to Appalachia
- Shine On
- Cotton Pickin' Blues
- Pickin' Parlor Rag
- Queen of the Cumberland
- Texas Dance Hall Blues
- Swing
- Sweet Suzanne
"Brilliantly original" - The Seattle Times
"One of the most talented and imaginative artists working in music - any music - today." - The Los Angeles Times
"One of the most spectacular journeys in recent American music." - The New York Times
"I think that's been part of my success, that my music looks forward while looking backward." - Mark O'Connor
Mark O'Connor is a man of many hats - both literally and figuratively - celebrated as an American bluegrass, country and classical fiddler, composer and music educator. His music is wide-ranging and diverse, reflective of an upbringing that exposed him to a variety of musical genres. A child prodigy, O'Connor's first instrument was the guitar, which he took up at the age of six. By age eleven, he became enamored of bluegrass and country guitar, particularly inspired by some of the great guitarists of the era; including, Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, Doc Watson, and some of the bluegrass players like Tony Rice and Norman Blake. His first contest win was at the age of ten at a classical/flamenco guitar competition, held at the University of Washington. Not long after, O'Connor took up studies with the legendary Texas fiddler, Benny Thomasson, a musical giant known as an innovator who created the modern era of American fiddling in the 1940's. Before high school was through, he won every major fiddle competition in the country.
O'Connor opened another musical door by touring in his late teens with legendary jazz violinist, Stéphane Grapelli, considered one of the supreme improvisers in the history of the violin. After graduation, O'Connor toured the festival circuit and distinguished himself as a studio musician. The Country Music Association named him Musician of the Year six years in a row (from 1991-1996). He also won two Grammy awards - one for his New Nashville Cats album and another for his Appalachian Journey album, collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer. His journeys into the classical realm have been artistically and commercially successful. The Fiddle Concerto has received over 200 performances giving it the distinction of being one of the most performed concertos of the last half-century. In addition, O'Connor has composed six violin concertos, string quartets, string trios, choral works, solo unaccompanied works and a new Symphony. There have been numerous film projects as well, to name a few: the PBS Series Liberty! The American Revolution; Johnny Appleseed (narrated by Garrison Keillor); and most recently, Ken Burns' The War.
Throughout his career, O'Connor has worked and recorded with an exceptionally wide variety of artists, such as Chet Atkins, James Taylor, Michelle Shocked, Alison Krauss, Itzhak Perlman, David Grisman, Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Renee Fleming, Stéphane Grappelli, Midori, Patty Loveless, The Dixie Dregs and Wynton Marsalis. This never-ending cross-fertilization has led to a distinct new American Classical music, bringing together a multitude of musical styles and genres. This ‘O'Connor Phenomenon' has been affectionately described by The Los Angeles Times, noting that he has "crossed over so many boundaries, that his style is purely personal."
COMPOSER'S NOTE: ‘Strings and Threads' represents my version of how folk music on the violin evolved in America. From my ancestral roots in Ireland, tracing my family tree down through the thirteen original colonies from where they eventually migrated to the West during the early 1900's, I attempted to write in the styles of my favorite fiddle traditions. The music styles which the ancestors must have brought with them and the music they must have encountered along their journey are the subjects of the Suite - from the reels and waltzes, through the blues and spirituals and on to swing and bebop.
‘Strings and Threads' was premiered in 1986 as an unaccompanied violin piece with dancers. With the help of Edgar Meyer, it was adapted to string orchestra for its 1992 premiere in Baltimore. I would estimate that I have performed this piece 1,000 times on stage!
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) - Fantasia on Greensleeves:
The idiom of English folk-song and the pastoral tradition has come to define much of Vaughan Williams' most cherished music. By channeling this idiom he was able to develop his own individual and immediately recognizable sound, sometimes through suggestion, and sometimes through direct quotation. The popular Fantasia on Greensleeves is Vaughan Williams' best known work in the latter category.
Vaughan Williams encountered Greensleeves frequently during his folksong excavations in 1904-1906. This was at a time when he was preparing a new edition of the English Hymnal, eventually published in the Oxford Book of Carols. In 1912, he was invited to compose entr'acte music for a Stratford production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and he reached back for the Greensleeves melody after reading Falstaff's lines: "Let the sky rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves, hail kissing comfits and eryngoes." Later, Vaughan Williams incorporated it into his Shakespearean opera Sir John in Love, which was completed in 1928. The Fantasia on Greensleeves is cast in a basic ABA form, with Greensleeves surrounding another English song, Lovely Joan, which Vaughan Williams collected in Norfolk in 1908.
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) - Symphony No. 92 in G major, "Oxford":
Adagio - Allegro spiritoso
Adagio
Menuet: Allegretto
Presto
Nothing in his humble background would have led anyone to suppose that Franz Joseph Haydn would emerge as one of the very greatest of the Classical period composers. Born in a tiny Austrian village called Rohrau with a father who made wagon wheels and farmed, Haydn's musical background was limited to hearing folk-songs his dad loved to sing and to taking in the dances the peasants of the village would perform on festive occasions. Nevertheless, his family could not ignore the boy's passion for music. At the age of six he was sent for two years to live with an uncle and aunt who gave him at least some basic music lessons.
His first big break came at eight when he was accepted as a choirboy in the Cathedral of St. Stephen. But when his voice changed he was put out on the street without a penny. Haydn said, "I barely managed to stay alive by giving music lessons to children for about eight years." Throughout those inauspicious and struggling years Haydn taught himself by absorbing all he could from Johann Joseph Fux's respected treatise on composition, Gradus ad Parnussum. During this time the very young man took odd jobs, including playing organ in private chapels, playing violin for the Brother of Mercy, and would switch gears in the evening to play in the popular Viennese street bands that offered evening entertainment. While other great composers at this point in their lives received first-rate or conservatory training, this musical genius was simply trying to survive.
Yet through dogged determination and perseverance, Haydn's immense talent gradually came to the attention of aristocratic patrons of music. Big break number two came when in 1761; Haydn entered the service of the Esterházy's, the most affluent and powerful of the noble Hungarian families. At the age of twenty-nine, following years of hand-to-mouth existence, Haydn was happy to be engaged as Vice-Kapellmeister, entering into an arrangement that brought into his life stimulating working conditions and for the first time - security. The composer was to spend the next thirty years of his life there, with most of his music composed for performance in the palaces of the family. Though isolated, the palace was magnificent and contained an opera house, a theater, two concert halls, and 126 guest rooms.
Haydn did have to work his tail off, though, required, as he was to compose large quantities of music in multiple mediums and to serve in numerous capacities as music director, principal conductor, general manager, librarian, and custodian of instruments, personnel manager, and teacher! Yet, after years of scraping for a living, Haydn was grateful for steady income and the artistic freedom he was granted by the Esterházy's. It is true and only natural that he would at times feel confined in such a setting, but he did say: "Not only did I have the encouragement of constant approval, but as conductor of an orchestra I could make experiments...and be as bold as I pleased. I was cut off from the world; there was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original."
Haydn composed the Symphony No. 92, Oxford in 1788 or 1789, commissioned by French aristocrat Count d'Ogny for a concert series in Paris by the Loge Olympique. This followed the great success of the "Paris" Symphonies (Nos. 82-87) in 1787. Haydn found more favor for the symphony when he conducted it in London in 1791. But the work's greatest fame-to-claim came when the composer led a performance at the Sheldonian Theater, Oxford University, on July 7 1791, on the occasion of being awarded an honorary doctorate, therefore the symphony's nickname, the Oxford. The story goes that in deference to ceremonial regulations, Haydn wore his doctoral robes of cherry and cream-colored silk for three days, although they made him feel silly. But however awkward he may have felt - Haydn was essentially a humble man - for the rest of his life he cherished the degree, it appears more than any other accolade or distinction in his long and illustrious career.
The Oxford Symphony is unquestionably one the composer's finest and most venerable works, lauded over centuries for its rich invention, melodic charm, satisfying balance of form, orchestral brilliance, and, of course, humor. Haydn biographer, H.C. Robbins Landon, wrote of the Oxford Symphony: "It seems to sum up, to round off, the enormous number of symphonies Haydn had written up to this point; it is a work written in the high summer of a long and productive life and its infinitely subtle introduction and poetic slow movement show us more of Haydn's true character than do any of the letters of the period. Together with some of the ‘Paris' works and No. 88, it is one of the few symphonic works of the time worthy to stand beside the last four symphonies of Mozart."
Notes provided by: David R. Glerum, Music Director - WMFE-FM/NPR, Orlando, FL. (1990-2009); Music Director - WXXI-FM/NPR, Rochester, N.Y. (1980-1990) |
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