Program - Dvorák Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"

SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1

MASTERWORKS • 2015-2016

DVOŘÁK SYMPHONY NO. 9 "FROM THE NEW WORLD"

COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDRE DE RIDDER, conductor

YUMI HWANG-WILLIAMS, violin

Friday, May 13, 2016 at 7:30 pmSaturday, May 14, 2016 at 7:30 pmBoettcher Concert Hall

BRYCE DESSNER Résponse Lutosławski Resonance Preludio Des Traces Warsaw Canon Residue

BARTÓK Violin Concerto No. 2 Allegro non troppo Andante tranquillo Allegro molto

DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, "From the New World" Adagio — Allegro molto Largo Scherzo: Molto vivace Allegro con fuoco

This weekend's concerTs are graTefully dedicaTed To Bonfils-sTanTon foundaTion

friday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To fackler legacy gifT, roBerT graham

saTurday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To raymond and suzanne saTTer, Ted and donna connolly

PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIESANDRE DE RIDDER, conductor

From producing records in Africa to curating innovative concert series in Melbourne, Copenhagen, Berlin and Helsinki - where he is the newly announced Artistic Director of the Musica nova Helsinki festival - while commissioning genre-defying contemporary projects with his musicians’ collective “Stargaze”, André de Ridder embodies a unique position amongst today’s conductors. He has formed close artistic relationships with a diverse range of artists such as Kaija Saariaho, Uri Caine, Bryce Dessner, Michel van der Aa, Damon Albarn and bands such as Mouse on

Mars, and performs regularly at international festivals, including BBC Proms, Holland Festival and Sydney Festival. In 2013, de Ridder founded “s t a r g a z e”, a think-tank pool of like-minded European musicians. Operating from Berlin, they quickly found a home at the legendary Volksbühne theatre, and were awarded a grant to put on their own 3-day festival, “s t a r g a z e presents’, performing with artists like Terry Riley, Tyondai Braxton, Nils Frahm, Pantha du Prince and Pekka Kuusisto. De Ridder’s discography includes Max Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed (DG) and an album of orchestral music by Bryce Dessner and Jonny Greenwood (DG). The Max Richter recording was awarded an ECHO Klassik ‘Classic Without Borders’ award 2013. In November 2014 de Ridder earned his first credit as ‘producer’, with the release of “Africa Express Pre-sents: In C Mali”, on Transgressive Records. The current season will conclude with De Ridder’s debut with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and his return to the BBC Proms, in a programme of songs by the late David Bowie, reinterpreted by s t a r g a z e and special guest artists. André de Ridder was educated in Berlin and subsequently studied at the Music Academies of Vienna and London, under Leopold Hager and Sir Colin Davis.

YUMI HWANG-WILLIAMS, violin

Yumi Hwang-Williams made her debut at the age of 15 as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, six years after having emigrated from South Korea. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, her exceptional musicianship has earned her a reputation as an artist who, in addition to her thoughtful and stylish interpretations of the classics, is known for her commitment to exploring and performing the works of contemporary composers. Featured in a Strings magazine cover article in 2008, she was described as a “Modern Prometheus” who has “emerged as a fiery champion of

contemporary classical music.” She has been soloist with Basel (Switzerland), Linz (Austria), Indianapolis, Cincinnati Symphonies, with Dennis Russell Davis, Paavo Jarvi, among others. Her recent collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet playing Adès Concerto Concentric Paths ten times garnered much praise. Yumi Hwang-Williams has served as Concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony since 2000 and continues to be very active in the community with solo/chamber concerts. She is a faculty member of the Lamont School of Music, University of Denver. You can learn more about Yumi at www.yumihwviolin.com.

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESBRYCE DESSNER (B. 1976): Réponse Lutosławski (“Response to Lutosławski”) for String OrchestraBryce Dessner was born on April 23, 1976 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Réponse Lutosławski was composed in 2013, and premiered on November 29, 2014 by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Grand Theater in Warsaw, conducted by Bassem Akiki. The piece is scored for strings. Duration is about 15 minutes. This is the first performance by the orchestra.

Bryce Dessner — educated at Yale, guitarist of the Grammy-nominated indie rock band The National, festival impresario, recipient of noteworthy commissions from leading international soloists and ensembles — is a member of the richly and diversely gifted generation of performers and composers who are shaping the musical culture of the new millennium. Dessner, born in Cincinnati in 1976, had his earliest musical training on flute and switched to classical and rock guitar in his teens, when he formed a band with his twin brother, Aaron; they continue to work together in The National, which they formed in 1999. “I was also playing classical guitar recitals,” Bryce recalled, “and people said, ‘You know, you can’t really do both things. My intuition told me they were wrong…. Someday that diversity of experience would be more enriching or rewarding than just going down one path.” Both wide-ranging musical experience and collaboration with other artists have remained driving forces in Bryce Dessner’s career: he is founder and curator of the annual new-music Cincinnati-based MusicNOW festival, co-founder (with Aaron) of the Crossing Brooklyn Ferry festival (which features New York City musicians across a wide spectrum of styles), a founding member of the improvisatory instrumental group Clogs, co-founder of Brassland Records, and Composer-in-Residence at Muziekgebouw Eindhoven in The Netherlands. As a performer and producer, Dessner has worked with a wide variety of musicians, including Steve Reich, Philip Glass, David Lang, Bon Iver, Antony and the Johnsons, Bang on a Can All-Stars, composer/guitarist Jonny Greenwood, singer Shara Worden and multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry. His orchestral, chamber and vocal compositions have been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Metropolitan Museum of Art (for the New York Philharmonic), Kronos Quartet, BAM Next Wave Festival, Barbican Centre, Edinburgh International Festival, Sydney Festival, eighth blackbird, Sō Percussion, New York City Ballet and many others. He has also created theatrical works in collaboration with choreographers Benjamin Millepied and Justin Peck, visual artist Matthew Ritchie, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and composers Sufjan Stevens and Nico Muhly.

Dessner composed Réponse Lutosławski (“Response to Lutosławski”) in 2013 for an anniversary celebration at the Grand Theater in Warsaw on November 29, 2014 of three of Poland’s most prominent modern composers: the centenary of Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994) and the eightieth birthdays of Henryk Górecki (who died in 2010) and Krzysztof Penderecki (who conducted the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs at the concert). Of his contribution to the event, Dessner said, “Réponse Lutosławski is written as an homage to Witold Lutosławski’s amazing composition for string orchestra, Musique Funèbre (‘Music of Mourning’). I spent months studying the score and recordings of the work as well as many of Lutosławski’s other pieces. This was an amazing process of discovering one of the 20th-century’s great musical minds and allowing his adventurous spirit to influence my own musical decisions. My Réponse Lutosławski is written in five movements, each of which is inspired either directly or indirectly by the Lutosławski score: Resonance, Preludio, Des Traces (‘Footprints’),


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESWarsaw Canon and Residue. I like to think that his music opened a window in a certain direction for me, or pushed open a door through which I could then pass and take my journey with the music.”

oBELA BARTÓK (1881-1945): Violin Concerto No. 2 Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881 in Nagy Szent Miklós, Hungary, and died September 26, 1945 in New York City. The Violin Concerto No. 2 was composed in 1937-1938 and premiered by violinist Zoltán Székely with Willem Mengelberg and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra on April 23, 1939. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo, two oboes (second doubling English horn, two clarinets (second doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons (second doubling contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp and strings. Duration is about 37 minutes. The orchestra last performed the work May 16-18, 2003 with Leila Josefowicz as the violin soloist and Daniel Hege on the podium.

Certain composers throughout history have taken special delight in providing their creations with many-layered and carefully balanced musical structures. The great 15th-century Flemish master Johannes Ockeghem wrote some of the most hauntingly beautiful and solemnly inspirational music of the Renaissance. His listeners probably never suspected that in one particular Mass, all four voices were derived from a single melody sung simultaneously in four different meters and four different modes. In his monumental The Art of Fugue, J.S. Bach produced some twenty fugues of great variety all based on a single theme. Beethoven’s best music shows an integration from its smallest detail to its largest formal level. To this line of the foremost masters of musical structure must be added the name of Hungary’s greatest composer, Béla Bartók.

With the exceptions of only Brahms and Webern, no composer after Beethoven wrote works of more profound formal integrity than Bartók. His compositions seem to be monumentally unified, even on first hearing, by the way in which each grows from measure to measure, an organic process that gives unity and cohesion to a work. (The first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is the archetypal example of such organic growth.) The opening movement of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, for example, is a fugue in which not only the theme itself but also the pitches of successive entries, the range, the instrumentation, and the dynamics all exhibit interlocking arch structures. His Fifth Quartet is symmetrical around the third of its five movements. Other of his works show relationships to the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series. Does all of this intellectual abstraction, then, mean that the music of Bartók (and Beethoven and Bach and Ockeghem) is nothing more than a mathematical game, the solution to some sonic puzzle? The answer is a resounding, unshakably humanistic “NO!” In Bartók’s own words, “I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.”

The Violin Concerto (1938) fulfills Bartók’s twin demands for formal logic and emotional expression. When originally asked by Zoltán Székely to write a concerto, Bartók conceived a single-movement work in variation form. The violinist, however, insisted on a traditional three-movement concerto, so the composer revised his scheme — in part. Székely got his three


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESmovements, but Bartók still got his way. In a marvelous structural plan, he constructed the second movement as six variations on a plaintive theme influenced by the Eastern European folk songs to which he devoted so many years of study and collection. Bartók’s variation technique was not just limited to the second movement, however. He actually made the finale, section by section, a variation of the opening movement, thereby giving the effect of something apparently new to close the Concerto but with a distinct sense of déjà vu. The first movement themes are therefore heard a total of four times, each one subtly transformed from the one before: once each in the exposition and recapitulation of the first movement, and once each in the similar places in the finale. Yet for all of its careful and involved structure, this Concerto possesses great emotional expression, beautiful sonorities and memorable folk-inspired themes. It is music that satisfies both our spiritual and intellectual needs, making it a worthy companion to the masterpieces in the concerto form by Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Berg and Prokofiev.

oANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904): Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”Antonín Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, and died May 1, 1904 in Prague. The “New World” Symphony was composed in 1892-1893, during the first of his three years as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Anton Seidl led the New York Philharmonic in the work’s premiere on December 16, 1893 in Carnegie Hall. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes. The lasat performance by the orchestra was April 9-11, 2010 with Douglas Boyd conducting.

When Antonín Dvořák, aged 51, arrived in New York on September 27, 1892 to direct the new National Conservatory of Music, both he and the institution’s founder, Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, expected that he would help to foster an American school of composition. He was clear and specific in his assessment: “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. They can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.... There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot find a thematic source here.” Dvořák’s knowledge of this music came from Henry Thacker Burleigh, an African-American song writer and student of his who sang the traditional melodies to the enthralled composer. Burleigh later recalled, “There is no doubt that Dr. Dvořák was very deeply impressed by the Negro spirituals from the old plantation. He just saturated himself in the spirit of those old tunes, and then invented his own themes.”

The “New World” Symphony was not only Dvořák’s way of pointing toward a truly American musical idiom but also a reflection of his feelings about his own country. “I should never have written the Symphony as I have,” he said, “if I hadn’t seen America,” but he added in a later letter that it was “genuine Bohemian music.” There is actually a reconciliation between these two seemingly contradictory statements, since the characteristics that Dvořák found in Burleigh’s


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESindigenous American music — pentatonic (five-note) scales, modal minor keys with a lowered seventh degree, rhythmic syncopations, frequent returns to the central key note — are common to much folk music throughout the world, including that of his native Bohemia. Because his themes for the “New World” Symphony drew upon these cross-cultural qualities, to Americans, they sound American; to Czechs, they sound Czech.

The “New World” Symphony is unified by the use of a motto theme that occurs in all four movements. This bold, striding phrase, with its arching contour, is played by the horns as the main theme of the sonata-form opening movement, having been foreshadowed (also by the horns) in the slow introduction. Two other themes are used in the first movement: a sad, dance-like melody for flute and oboe that exhibits folk characteristics, and a brighter tune, with a striking resemblance to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, for the solo flute.

Many years before coming to America, Dvořák had encountered Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, which he read in a Czech translation. The great tale remained in his mind, and he considered making an opera of it during his time in New York. That project came to nothing, but Hiawatha did have an influence on the “New World” Symphony: the second movement was inspired by the forest funeral of Minnehaha; the third, by the dance of the Indians at the feast. That the music of these movements has more in common with the old plantation songs than with the chants of native Americans is due to Dvořák’s mistaken belief that African-American and Indian music were virtually identical.

The second movement is a three-part form (A–B–A), with a haunting English horn melody (later fitted with words by William Arms Fisher to become the folksong-spiritual Goin’ Home) heard in the first and last sections. The recurring motto here is pronounced by the trombones just before the return of the main theme in the closing section. The third movement is a tempestuous scherzo with two gentle, intervening trios providing contrast. The motto theme, played by the horns, dominates the coda.

The finale employs a sturdy motive introduced by the horns and trumpets after a few introductory measures in the strings. In the Symphony’s closing pages, the motto theme, Goin’ Home and the scherzo melody are all gathered up and combined with the principal subject of the finale to produce a marvelous synthesis of the entire work — a look back across the sweeping vista of Dvořák’s musical tribute to America.

©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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Program - Dvorák Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"