Program - Copland Conducted by Andrew Litton

SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1

MASTERWORKS • 2015-2016COPLAND CONDUCTED BY ANDREW LITTON

COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor

KIRILL GERSTEIN, piano

Friday, April 29, 2016 at 7:30 pmSaturday, April 30, 2016 at 7:30 pmSunday, May 1, 2016 at 1:00 pmBoettcher Concert Hall

RICHARD DANIELPOUR Celestial Night Maestoso Adagio

RACHMANINOFF Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 43

— INTERMISSION —

COPLAND Third Symphony Molto moderato, with simple expression Allegro molto Andantino quasi allegretto — Allegro con moto — Meno mosso (Tempo I) — Molto deliberato (Fanfare) — Allegro risoluto

This weekend of concerTs is graTefully dedicaTed To colorado symphony guild

friday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To paul goodspeed and mary poole

saTurday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To eca foundaTion, ken and Zoe Barley

PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES

ANDREW LITTON, conductor

Colorado Symphony Music Director Andrew Litton is the newly appointed Music Director of the New York City Ballet. Mr. Litton also serves as Bergen Philharmonic Music Director Laureate, Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest, and Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He guest conducts the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies, and has a discography of over 120 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy, France’s Diapason d’Or, and many other honors. Besides his Grammy®-winning Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast

with Bryn Terfel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, he also recorded the complete symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, a Mahler cycle with the Dallas Symphony, and many Gershwin recordings as both conductor and pianist. Mr. Litton is a graduate of the Fieldston School, New York, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School in piano and conducting. The youngest-ever winner of the BBC International Conductors Competition, he served as Assistant Conductor at Teatro alla Scala and Exxon/Arts Endowment Assistant Conductor for the National Symphony under Rostropovich. His many honors in addition to Norway’s Order of Merit include an honorary Doctorate from the University of Bournemouth, Yale University’s Sanford Medal, and the Elgar Society Medal. An accomplished pianist, Litton often conducts from the keyboard and enjoys performing chamber music with his orchestra colleagues. For further information, visit www.andrewlitton.com.

KIRILL GERSTEIN, piano

The multifaceted pianist Kirill Gerstein is rapidly ascending into classical music’s highest ranks. With a masterful technique, discerning intelligence, and a musical curiosity that has led him to explore repertoire spanning centuries and numerous styles, he has proven to be one of today’s most intriguing and versatile musicians. Highlights of his 2015-16 season in North America include performances of Scriabin’s Prometheus: Poem of Fire with Ricardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony, Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2 with Semyon Bychkov and the Berlin Philharmonic, Rachmaninoff

Concerto No. 1 with the Cleveland Orchestra, and playing both of George Gershwin’s piano concertos in the original jazz-band version to open New York’s 92nd Street Y’s season; re-engagements with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well as with the Toronto, Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Colorado, Utah and Oregon symphonies and the National Arts Centre Orchestra; a tour to Australia and New Zealand; his debut with the Royal Concertgebouw with concerts in Amsterdam and Frankfurt; a European tour with the Czech Philharmonic; and recitals in New York and Houston. Born in 1979 in Voronezh, Russia, Mr. Gerstein studied piano at a special music school for gifted children and taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents’ extensive record collection. At the age of 14, he came to the United States to study jazz piano as the youngest student ever to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Mr. Gerstein became an American citizen in 2003 and divides his time between the United States and Germany.

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESRICHARD DANIELPOUR (b. 1956): Celestial NightRichard Danielpour was born on January 28, 1956 in New York City. Celestial Night was composed in 1996-1997 and premiered by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra on October 23, 1997 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, conducted by Zdenĕk Mácal. The score calls for three flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano (doubling celesta), and strings.Duration is about 20 minutes. This is the first performance by the orchestra.

Richard Danielpour, one of America’s most gifted composers, was born in New York City on January 28, 1956. He completed his undergraduate education at the New England Conservatory in Boston (Bachelor of Music, 1980) and received his Master of Music (1982) and Doctor of Musical Arts (1986) degrees from the Juilliard School, where his principal teachers were Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin; he also studied composition with John Heiss and conducting with Benjamin Zander and Jacques Monod. Danielpour trained as a pianist with Lorin Hollander, Veronica Jochum, Theodore Lettvin and Gabriel Chodos, and appeared as soloist in the premiere of his First Piano Concerto with the Caracas Philharmonic in 1981. From 1984 to 1988, he taught at the College of New Rochelle and Marymount Manhattan College; he is currently on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music (since 1993) and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (since 1997). At the invitation of Leonard Bernstein, Danielpour served as guest composer at both the 1989 Festival of the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome and the 1989 Schleswig-Holstein Festival in West Germany. He has subsequently fulfilled residencies with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Van Cliburn Foundation, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, Saratoga Music Festival, Berklee College of Music in Boston and UCLA; in 2002, he held the Alberto Vilar Fellowship and Residency at the Berlin Academy in Germany. Among Danielpour’s other distinctions are grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Barlow, Vollmer, Astral and Djerassi foundations, the Bearns Prize of Columbia University, the Charles Ives Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an ASCAP Award, residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the American Academy in Rome, a Jerome Foundation Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a residency in Bellagio, Italy.

Among the many organizations that have commissioned works from Richard Danielpour are the Pittsburgh Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. In May 2005, Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre premiered Danielpour’s Margaret Garner, starring Denyce Graves in the title role, with a libretto by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winner Toni Morrison based on the same true story of a fugitive Kentucky slave who killed her infant daughter and then tried to kill herself when faced with the prospect of returning to slavery that Morrison recounted in her 1987 novel Beloved. Margaret Garner has received subsequent productions in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Charlotte and New York.

Concerning Celestial Night, composed between December 1996 and April 1997 on commission from the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra to celebrate both that ensemble’s 75th anniversary and the grand opening of Prudential Hall in Newark in October 1997, Danielpour wrote: “Celestial Night is a piece about duality (yin and yang; heaven and earth). Writing it for me


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESwas the result of a growing acceptance of duality and impermanence as a basic fundamental of life. And yet this duality, if we are to understand it correctly, springs from the same source, just as both movements in this work are derived from the very same material. There is nothing ‘new’ in all this, to be sure — it is an archetype remembered by some with frequent recurrences in art.

“Inspiration for the piece came from stargazing late at night on several evenings at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during the summer of 1996.... Celestial Night tends to have a heavenward motion behind it, and seems to be reaching away from the earth. As I was writing this piece, I began to experience it as a kind of mirror of heaven and earth. I know this sounds very lofty, but I mean that in the sense that there was something in the first movement that was continually moving upward in search of transformation, as many of my works seem to be. At the start of the first movement, you experience a kind of willfulness in the music, but as the conclusion of the movement approaches, it becomes apparent that this willfulness is not going to accomplish anything of its own accord, that there has to be an infusion of grace, something that doesn’t happen because you’ve earned it, but just comes as a gift. The second movement is like the grace that the first movement needs to complete itself.”

oSERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943): Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 43Sergei Rachmaninoff was born on April 1, 1873 in Oneg (near Novgorod), Russia, and died March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California. He composed the Paganini Rhapsody in 1934. Leopold Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra on November 7, 1934 in the premiere, at Baltimore’s Lyric Theater; the composer was the soloist. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. The duration is approximately 22 minutes. The work was last performed on October 17 & 18, 2009, with Olga Kern as soloist and Jeffrey Kahane conducting the orchestra.

The legend of Nicolò Paganini has haunted musicians for nearly two centuries. Gaunt, his emaciated figure cloaked in priestly black, Paganini performed feats of wizardry on the violin that were simply unimagined until he burst upon the European concert scene in 1805. Not only were his virtuoso pyrotechnics unsurpassed, but his performance of simple melodies was of such purity and sweetness that it moved his audiences to tears. So far was he beyond the competition that he seemed almost, well, superhuman. Perhaps, the rumor spread, he had special powers, powers not of this earth. Perhaps, Faust-like, he had exchanged his soul for the mastery of his art. The legend (propagated and fostered, it is now known, by Paganini himself ) had begun.

Paganini, like most virtuoso instrumentalists of the 19th century, composed much of his own music. Notable among his oeuvre are the breathtaking Caprices for Unaccompanied Violin, works so difficult that even today they are accessible only to the most highly accomplished performers. The last of the Caprices, No. 24 in A minor, served as the basis for compositions by Schumann, Liszt and Brahms, and was also the inspiration for Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESon a Theme of Paganini. Rachmaninoff’s work is a series of variations on this theme, which is characterized as much by its recurrent rhythm (five short notes followed by a longer one) as by its melody.

Taking his cue from the Paganini legend, Rachmaninoff combined another melody with that of the demonic violinist — the Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) from the Requiem Mass for the Dead. This ancient chant had long been connected not only with the Roman Catholic Church service, but also with musical works containing some diabolical element. Berlioz associated it with the witches’ sabbath in his Symphonie Fantastique, Liszt used it in his Totentanz (“Dance of Death”), Saint-Saëns in his Danse macabre, and Rachmaninoff himself in his earlier Isle of the Dead.

The Rhapsody, a brilliant showpiece for virtuoso pianist, is a set of 24 variations. The work begins with a brief, eight-measure introduction followed, before the theme itself is heard, by the first variation, a skeletal outline of the melody reminiscent of the pizzicato opening of the variation-finale of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. The theme, 24 measures in length, is stated by the unison violins. The following variations fall into three groups, corresponding to the fast–slow–fast sequence of the traditional three-movement concerto. The most familiar section of the Rhapsody, and one of the great melodies in the orchestral literature, is the climax of the middle section. This variation, No. 18, actually an inversion of Paganini’s theme, has a broad sweep and nobility of sentiment unsurpassed anywhere in Rachmaninoff’s works.

oAARON COPLAND (1900-1990): Third SymphonyAaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, and died December 2, 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York. His Third Symphony was composed between 1944 and 1946, and premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sergei Koussevitzky, on October 18, 1946. The score calls for tpiccolo, three flutes (third also doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, piano, celesta, and strings.Duration is about 44 minutes. The symphony was last performed on April 26-28, 2013, with Scott O’Neil on the podium.

The Third Symphony of 1944-1946 brings together the two dominant strains of Copland’s musical personality: the abstract modernism of his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924) and Short Symphony (1933) is particularly evident in the first and third movements, while the influence of folk song and New England and Quaker hymnody familiar from Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Lincoln Portrait and other works of the early 1940s is strongest in the second and fourth. The opening movement, in moderate tempo, eschews traditional symphonic sonata form in favor of a structure in two large musical paragraphs with a benedictory coda. The first section presents the movement’s three themes, each introduced with the simplicity and economy that mark Copland’s best music: a smooth melody in wide-spread octaves for violins, clarinets and flute; a theme in similar style initiated by oboes and clarinets; and a broad


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESphrase of unsettled tonality intoned by the trombones. The trombone phrase is worked out at some length, and rises to a mighty climax before a sudden quiet ushers in the briefer second section, in which the first two themes are ingeniously combined to lead to an even more violent outburst based on the trombone motive. Another abrupt hush begins the coda, which is built from variants of the first and second themes exquisitely suspended in a musical setting of unaffected beauty and sweet melancholy.

The Scherzo begins with a boisterous brass preview of the movement’s principal theme. The theme is presented in full by horn, clarinets and violas in a more deliberate tempo, and recurs twice (unison low strings and, in augmentation, in the low brass) with intervening episodes. The trio is given over to a folksy little waltz melody that would not be out of place in Rodeo or Billy the Kid. After a truncated return of the first section, a grandiloquent presentation of the waltz theme and a striding transformation of the Scherzo motive close the movement.

The main part of the Andantino is occupied by what Copland called a “close-knit series of variations” on a graceful theme presented by the solo flute. The melody, he continued, “supplies thematic substance for the sectional metamorphoses that follow: at first with quiet singing nostalgia; then faster and heavier — almost dance-like; then more child-like and naive; and finally vigorous and forthright.” Framing these variations as introduction and postlude are austere, almost mysterious transformations of the trombone theme from the first movement hung high in the violins.

The Finale follows without pause. The Fanfare for the Common Man, written in 1942 at the invitation of Eugene Goossens for a series of wartime fanfares introduced under his direction with the Cincinnati Symphony, provides the thematic material for the introduction. The well-known strains are first heard, softly, in the high woodwinds and then given in their familiar stentorian guise by the brass and percussion. The main portion of the movement begins with the presentation of an animated, syncopated theme by the oboe. A broad restatement of the Fanfare motive by the trombones opens the development section, which is unusual in that the structural second theme, a lyrical strain of swaying metric configuration, is embedded within it. The development builds to a galvanic climax. The recapitulation weaves together the finale’s principal theme, fragments of the Fanfare and the opening motive of the first movement. A magnificent peroration capped by another return of the theme that began the entire work closes this great American Symphony.

©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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Program - Copland Conducted by Andrew Litton

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