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Brevard Symphony Orchestra 2009-10 Season - Postcards From America:
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)
Gregory Smith (1957 -) - Notions:
"The music of Gregory Smith covers a wide range of the musical world and has been referred to as 'engaging, emotional and theatrical'. His music entertains thousands every day and night at Disney theme parks while reaching millions on television networks throughout the world. Smith's symphonic family/educational concert works are among the most performed in the genre.
The family/educational concert works of Gregory Smith have received over 700 performances by more than 160 orchestras, often with Smith narrating. Orchestras such as the Atlanta, Baltimore, Bonn, Boston, Cincinnati, Minnesota, and Toronto orchestras and the Rochester and Hong Kong philharmonics have embraced Mr. Smith's unique approach to family/educational concerts.
Smith enjoys a long association with the Walt Disney Company and has served as Composer and Arranger for numerous productions at the five worldwide theme parks. He composed and conducted the music for the highly acclaimed nighttime spectacular, Wishes, at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. Smith also composed and arranged the music for Disneyland's Thea award-winning, 50th anniversary celebration, Remember, Dreams Come True. In addition, his music accompanies the fireworks displays at Disneyland Paris and the recently opened Hong Kong Disneyland. Smith's original Disney songs have been performed and recorded by artists including Eden Espinosa, Peabo Bryson, Kimberley Locke, Jennifer Holliday and Jodi Benson. Most recently, Smith composed and arranged the music for the Disneyland summer fireworks spectacular, Magical. He also arranged and programmed the music for the newly opened Disney's Electrical Parade at California Adventure.
Notions is a symphonic overture commissioned by the Victoria Symphony (TX) in commemoration of the orchestra's 35th anniversary. Notions refers to items used in sewing, for example, needles, pins, thread and buttons. Musically, the work is sewn together using various melodic and rhythmic fragments as well as recurrent orchestral gestures. To extend the analogy further, imagine a film editor cutting together various shots of the same characters in different settings and backgrounds in an attempt to make a complete scene. The premiere of Notions was conducted by Victoria Symphony music director, Darryl One, and took place on September 20th of 2008." [Excerpted from Gregory Smith's official website @ www.gregorysmithmusic.com.]
Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) - Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104:
- Allegro
- Adagio ma non troppo
- Finale: Allegro moderato
Only removed by a half dozen years from the 100th anniversary of Dvorak's death, it is good to step back and appreciate the enormous contributions this extraordinary composer has made to the repertory and to respect his legacy as one music history's most gifted, natural, and prolific geniuses. Although numerous composers have expressed their profound appreciation, perhaps Johannes Brahms' accolade is the most impressive: "I should be glad if something occurred to me as a main idea that occurs to Dvorak only by the way."
Antonin Dvorak's beginnings would not have suggested such eventual lofty status. Born from Slavic peasant stock, he was the son of a poor innkeeper and butcher in Nelahozeves, a small village outside of Prague. The young Dvorak seemed destined to follow down that same road. However, Dvorak's father sparked an interest in music in his son through his zither playing at local weddings and other festivities and through his occasional performance of original dance tunes. Before too long son fiddled alongside father and came to learn and love the folksongs and dances of the region. Though his career was to take him around the world, these early years shaped Dvorak to the extent that he remained a ruralist at heart and was never happier than when in the countryside of his native Bohemia.
But given the young musician's growing prowess as a musician, Dvorak would eventually leave village-life for studies that would take him to the larger Zlonice where he studied organ and where he also had lessons in music theory. Encouraged by his parents, in 1857 at the age of only sixteen Antonin went to the big city, enrolling at the Organ School in Prague. After graduating second in his class two years later, he went on to take a position as a violist in the Bohemian Provisional Theater Orchestra. During this formative time, Dvorak was also composing in a style increasingly influenced by the nationalistic music of Smetana, who served as conductor of theater orchestra. So promising was Dvorak that he was awarded a Ministry of Education stipend for composition in 1875, by a panel that included Brahms.
In Prague Dvorak gained a solid grounding in Classical musical practices. He came to have a deep respect for such composers as Mozart, Schubert, and especially Beethoven who all served as models. He also was much affected by Liszt and Wagner and assimilated aspects of their styles. He even contemplated moving to Vienna so as to try his hand at German form operas.
However, at the same time Dvorak was discovering a musical nationalism that would drive his music for the rest of his life. The music of Bedrich Smetana, grounded as it is in the folk idiom of Bohemia, made a powerful impression on Dvorak. Stemming from the realization that the tunes he learned as a child from his father could serve as a wonderful source of inspiration for his own music, combined with what he learned from Smetana about nationalism in music, Dvorak developed and stayed true to a musical philosophy that combined classical grounding in composition with inspiration and styles that came directly from his homeland.
The Czech people, long ruled by the Hapsburgs from Vienna, were struggling and fighting for emancipation in order to establish their own nation. Dvorak sympathized and strongly thought of himself as a committed Czech patriot. But he stopped short of activism. "But what have we to do with politics?" he once wrote to a publisher. "It is well that we are free to dedicate our services to a splendid art." While not a revolutionary as such, Dvorak remained patriotic and could not help being swept up in the nationalistic fervor of the time.
Dvorak's musical nationalism hardly ever manifested itself in direct quoting of folk song melodies, but rather found expression in the integration of the traditional characteristics of melody and rhythmic patterns of Slavonic folk music. Such was the case with Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, a set that met with immediate acclaim, thrusting Dvorak's career forward. The composer found his work becoming known beyond Czech provincial borders thanks to the respect and friendship of Johannes Brahms and thanks to the praise offered by the respected critic Hanslick and by such esteemed conductors as Hans von Bulow and Hans Richter. Prizes and honors of many kinds had begun to pour in and Dvorak was gaining an international reputation.
By 1891, word spread as far as America when Jeannette M. Thurber, whose husband had amassed millions in the wholesale grocery business, enticed Dvorak to serve as director of her newly formed National Conservatory of Music. Dvorak's three-year residency in New York City proved to be successful and highly productive. The principal works of his American sojourn were the chamber masterpieces, the American Quartet, Op. 96, and the E-flat-minor Quintet, Opus 97; the Symphony From the New World, the popular Violin Sonatina in G, and the Biblical Songs, Op. 99.
The Cello Concerto was the last work Dvorak completed in the United States. It was begun in New York City on November 8, 1894, and completed three months later on February 9, 1895. Many argue that Dvorak's Czech musical language was never absent from any of the works he wrote in the New World. This is particularly true of the Cello Concerto, written when the composer was feeling increasing homesickness for his native land. Although penned in America, the Cello Concerto looks homeward and is thus primarily Czech in flavor.
The inspiration for the concerto came from a concert Dvorak attended of the New York Philharmonic in 1894. The performance featured Victor Herbert (later of operetta fame) as the soloist in his own Second Cello Concerto. This experience reversed Dvorak's reservations on what he perceived as the limited potential of the cello as a viable solo instrument. All of Dvorak's concerns as to the cello's upper range, which he heard as thin and nasal, were allayed when he heard Herbert successfully negotiate and project the most treacherous passages in the higher reaches of the instrument. The result is what is universally considered to be the greatest of all cello concertos. Dvorak's Cello Concerto is the crown jewel in the genre and is one of the composer's most personal and emotionally poignant musical statements. When the great Brahms first saw Dvorak's score he wondered, "Why on earth didn't I know that one could write a cello concerto like this? If I had only known, I would have written one long ago!"
Ferde Grofe (1892-1972) - Grand Canyon Suite:
Although 2217 miles and a 34-hour drive away from Melbourne, we can still experience the beauty and majesty of the Grand Canyon right here at the King Centre with Maestro Confessore as our tour guide and the Brevard Symphony Orchestra as our vehicle. Although we are surrounded here by ocean and lush sub-tropical vegetation, Ferde Grofe's richly evocative score can take us across the country to the powerful and inspiring desert landscape that is the Grand Canyon.
Ferde Grofe was one of America's most talented and popular composers and arrangers during the first half of the twentieth century. He found his niche as a superb musical landscape painter. Classically trained, early on in his career Grofe was in the viola sections of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Concurrently, he gained a reputation as an immensely gifted jazz musician with his own popular jazz band and through his improvisations and arrangements. In 1920 he was hired into Paul Whiteman's band as pianist and arranger, flourishing for the better part of a decade with arrangements like Whispering - a hit that sold over a million copies. But the most notable arrangement was that of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The composition was so successful that Grofe was encouraged to try his hand at his own large-scale concert works in a vernacular idiom. These classical/popular creations often took as subjects our varied American topography, culture and history. Along with the Grand Canyon Suite of 1931, this series of musical landscapes came to include Mississippi: A Journey in Tones, Hudson River, Yellowstone, Death Valley, Niagara Falls, World's Fair (in honor of the 1964 World's Fair in New York), etc. Grofe demonstrated through these works that he could write brilliantly atmospheric and descriptivemusic, most impressive for its spectacular orchestration. Of the Grand Canyon Suite, Grofe wrote: "I have spoken of America in this music simply because America spoke to me, just as it has spoken to you and to every one of us." He continues, "If I have succeeded in capturing some part of the American musical spirit, I am grateful that I was trained to do so. But this music is your music, and mine only in the highly technical sense that a copyright has been filed away with my name on it. Always we must realize that there is much more to hear. Our land is rich in music, and if you listen you can hear it right now. This is our music you hear, surging forth, singing up to every one of us."
The following comments on the Grand Canyon Suite were provided as a preface to the published score:
"SUNRISE. It is early morning on the desert. The sun rises slowly, spattering the darkness with the rich colors of dawn. The sun comes from beyond the horizon, and a brilliant spray of colors announces the full break of day.
"The movement begins with a soft roll on the kettledrums; a series of chords played by the woodwinds follows. The main theme is played by the English horn. The development of the movement is taken up by other instruments, reaching a triumphant climax that depicts the dawn of a new day.
"THE PAINTED DESERT. The desert is silent and mysterious, yet beautiful. As the bright rays of the sun are reflected against majestic crags and spread across the sands in varying hues, the entire scene appears as a canvas thick with the pigment of nature's own blending.
"The movement starts with a mysterious theme played by bass clarinet and viola accompanied by weird chords in the lower registers of the orchestra. It is interrupted by strange harmonies from the woodwinds and the upper register of the piano. A contrasting melody of lyric quality follows. This is succeeded by the mysterious music, which opened the movement.
"ON THE TRAIL. A traveler and his burro are descending the trail. The sharp hoof beats of the animal form an unusual rhythmic background for the cowboy's song. The sounds of a waterfall tell them of a nearby oasis. A lone cabin is soon sighted and, as they near it, a music box is heard. The travelers stop at the cabin for refreshment. Now fully rested, they journey forth at a livelier pace. The movement ends as man and burro disappear in the distance.
"This is the most popular movement of the suite. It starts as the orchestra simulates the loud bray of a burro. After a violin cadenza, the first theme - a graceful melody in a rhythmic pattern - is established. It has the feeling of a burro walking. The second theme of the movement - a melody in Western style - is played contrapuntally to the first. This is followed by a suggestion of an old music box, which is played by the celesta. The opening theme is heard again in a faster tempo. The movement is concluded with the bray of the burro. The ending is short and incisive.
"SUNSET. Now the shades of night sweep over the golden hues of day. As evening envelops the desert in a cloak of darkness, there is a suggestion of animal calls coming from the distant rim of the canyon.
"A wild, animal-like call, played by the horns, opens this movement. This is followed by the main them, which is introduced by bells and violins. In the development, the theme is repeated by oboes and violins, then by woodwinds and violins, again by cellos and horns, horns and flutes. Finally the horns again play the calls heard in the opening bars, and the movement ends as the tones fade into the distance.
"CLOUDBURST. This is the most pictorial movement of the suite. We hear the approach of the storm. Lightning flashes across the sky and thunder roars from the darkness. The torrent of rain reaches its height in a cloudburst, but the storm disappears rapidly and the moon comes from behind the clouds. Nature again rejoices in all its grandeur.
"Glissando effects in the violin section describe the approach of the storm. All the resources of the orchestra are used to portray the battle of the elements in the development. The agitated movement subsides, and then follows a gradual crescendo that reaches its climax at the very end."
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