Program Notes for March 2012 Concerts

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Suite from “Rodeo”
Instrumentation: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, orchestra bells, slapstick, snare drum, triangle, wood block, xylophone), harp, piano, celesta, and strings.

In 1942, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo chose Agnes de Mille (niece of the actor Cecil B. DeMille) to choreograph and help create the scenario for a new ballet, that eventually became “Rodeo” (pronounced Ro-DAY-oh). It was Agnes that chose and convinced Aaron Copland to compose the score.

Throughout the working process De Mille gave Copland very detailed musical requests and instructions, sometimes even demanding a particular number of measures at a given point in the score. Copland responded with generosity and the score sounds so spontaneous and rich that one would never imagine it was fit to order with such precision. The year after the successful premiere of the work at the Metropolitan Opera, Copland arranged four of the five pieces that comprised the original ballet into this suite.

De Mille described the storyline of the ballet as one solution to “the problem that has confronted all American women: how to get a suitable man.” She created a character called the “cowgirl,” played by herself, who was cast as a loveable kind of Lucille Ball character in an age just before television.

We meet this character in the first movement, called Buckaroo Holiday, during a vamping vaudeville episode. Later, the music comes to a sudden halt with sarcastic sounding bassoon music. A solo trombone then introduces several settings of a folk tune called “If He’d Be a Buckaroo” while the cowgirl attempts to ride a bronco, hoping to endear herself to the right man. The plan fails.

The second movement is called “Corral Nocturne.” Nocturnes were inventions of the 19th century that invoked qualities of twilight, of transition, and sometimes of darkness. In this 20th century nocturne the cowgirl was imagined as sunset gave way to darkness, moving “through the empty corrals intoxicated with space.” The diatonic harmony and standard progressions of this music that opens in C major is filled with sonic innocence. But the keys change suddenly and the passage is set with five beats per measure, making the music feel stretched and unsettled; on edge. There is a heartfelt duet for bassoon and oboe who shadow one another in a confessional interlude just before the nocturne returns to close the movement.

Two group-dance movements close the suite. The first of them is the third movement, called “Saturday Night Waltz” which begins with the sonority of open strings in tuning gestures that preface an old folk tune called “I ride an old paint, I lead an old dam.” A central section in A-flat minor casts a lonely shadow on the dancing until old “paint” returns again in E-flat major to close the movement.

“Hoe Down” is familiar to everyone through its use a few years ago in an advertising campaign to promote the sale of beef. Few know that the famous tune is actually based on a recording of an old Kentucky fiddle tune called "Bonaparte’s Retreat." Copland heard a transcribed version of a recording by fiddle player William H. Stepp (1875-1947), and even used most of Strepp’s ornamentation in his setting.

After the first full setting of the “retreat,” listen for a vamping passage that happens after the rustic trio led by solo trumpet. During the vamp the trombone enters and the music sways and sinks in chromatic motion. Then, for a fleeting moment, you will hear an E-flat major chord that represents the cowgirl kissing the man of her dreams.

Almost instantaneously "Bonaparte’s Retreat," returns in its most brilliant setting and closes the suite in jubilation.

John Corigliano (Born February 16, 1938)
Chaconne from “Red Violin”
Instrumentation: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 C or D trumpets , 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players), harp, piano or celeste, and strings

Most of the violins being played onstage by members of the GBS were made in the 19th century, perhaps some even earlier. Imagine the stories that these instruments could tell. Among many attempts explore this concept, the Canadian movie “The Red Violin” (made in 1998), tells the journey of one instrument: a violin of uncanny perfection.

In the movie the violin is stained with a solution mixed with the blood of Anna Rudolfi, wife of violin maker Nicolò Bussotti, who had just died in childbirth. The heartbroken Bussotti makes no more instruments, but this one haunts every musician who comes into possession of it.

“A story this episodic needed to be tied together with a single musical idea,” wrote Corigliano about this work. “For this purpose I used the Baroque device of a chaconne: a repeated pattern of chords upon which the music is built.”

“Against the chaconne chords,” he wrote, “I juxtaposed Anna's theme, a lyrical yet intense melody representing the violin builder's doomed wife. From these elements I wove a series of virtuosic etudes for the solo violin, which followed the instrument from country to country, century to century.

“While I scored the film just for the soloist and string orchestra (to emphasize the ‘stringness’ of the picture), I composed this seventeen-minute concert work for violin and full orchestra.”

Corigliano described the opening of his Chaconne as powered by “diaphanous ascending string lines [that] unveil the chaconne chords, voiced in incantatory dotted rhythms, in low winds and brass.” It is Anna’s theme that follows. “Virtuosic etudes quicken the pace,” he wrote, “lead to a rushing climax; these yield to a stratospherically high, gravely slow melody, which remembers, against slowly shifting string sonorities, Anna's romantic theme.”

“The string chords louden, strengthen with winds and brass: then the soloist reclaims, in determined accents this time, the diaphanous string line that opened the score. The orchestra halts to launch the soloist's cadenza, impetuous and songful by turns: then the chaconne, in strings chords rendered brittle by sharp attacks with the wood of the bow, gradually climax in a grand tutti restatement of the incantatory opening and a whirlwind coda for all.”

There was a Roman proverb often inscribed on the wood of musical instruments: “Dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano. (While living I was silent, dead I sweetly sing). Perhaps, as the music of Corigliano reminds us as it is being performed, the violins onstage do speak a language we can understand.

Robert Carl  (b.1954)
White Heron; for Orchestra
Instrumentation: 3 Flutes, 3 Oboes, 3 Clarinets in Bb, 3 Bassoons, 4 Horns in F, 3 Trumpets in C, 2 Tenor Trombones, 1 Bass Trombone, Tuba, Harp, Timpani, 3 Percussion, Strings

Robert Carl received his musical training at Yale, Penn, and the University of Chicago. He also studied in Paris during 1980-1 as a Lurcy Fellow at the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. His teachers include Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, Ralph Shapey, George Rochberg, Jonathan Kramer, George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and Robert Morris. Mr. Carl has received prizes and fellowships from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, American Chamber Symphony, NACUSA, and Tanglewood. He is the recipient of a 2005 Chamber Music America commission for a string quintet premiered by the Miami String Quartet and Robert Black, contrabass.

“White Heron” is dedicated to Gustav Meier and the Greater Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra, and this is the world premiere of this nine-and-a-half minute work.

The composer made the following remarks about this work in his score:

“In January 2012, Karen McCoy and I traveled to the Florida Keys, where we rented a home in Marathon, whose back yard was the Gulf of Mexico. One of the best things was that about a quarter mile away was an uninhabited island which served as a rookery for hundred of birds. As a result, we saw a constant parade of fowl, in particular cormorants, ibises, and pelicans. And most striking was a single white heron that staked out the house's little swimming pool as its private domain, for drinking and long still moments of reflection. The intersection of the paths of all these birds began to suggest a musical form to me. When I wrote the piece, it was though I was taking dictation from them.

The individual birds are represented quite explicitly (their first entrances are marked in the score). As a backdrop, a series of overtone-based “harmonic waves” moves through a 13-chord progression over the entire course of the piece, suggesting to me the presence of the ocean in its vast, neutral grandeur. And periodic moments of lyricism and gentle ecstasy suggest the reactions of the human observer.”

The Greater Bridgeport Symphony first played the music of Robert Carl on played January 27, 1990, and between then and 2008 has played four of his works: “The Stars' Harmony/The Night's Pleasure,” “Liberty for Orchestra,” “The World Turned Upside Down,” and “Memories of Forgotten Ancestors.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990)
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Instrumentation:.3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 6 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 saxophones, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, euphonium, tuba, timpani, 5 percussionists, harp, piano and strings.

West Side Story came together as an extended and tangled collaboration among four visionaries: Arthur Laurents for the script, Stephen Sondheim for lyrics, choreography by Jerome Robbins, and music by Leonard Bernstein. Caught-up in waves of distraction and delays, it took eight years from the first inspirations to the time that the finished product opened on Broadway in the fall of 1957. (The same year in which Bernstein was named Music Director of the New York Philharmonic). This original production met with positive reviews and, with time off for a tour, ran almost one thousand performances at the Winter Garden Theatre.

Four years after the original Broadway production, the famous film adaptation of the musical was created. Winner of ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, it was the film version of the musical that comes to mind even today when most people think of West Side Story.

The Symphonic Dances were developed by Bernstein in 1961 during the making of the film, and were premiered by the New York Philharmonic in December of that year conducted by his friend and colleague Lukas Foss.

The music is often not presented in the order in which it appears in the musical, or in the film, but is molded by purely musical logic instead. The orchestral score divides the work into nine titled sections. The lengths of these sections vary considerably from under one minute to four and a half minutes.

Prologue: Opens with a fanfare followed by rhythmic finger snaps. Depicting the attitude of the rival gangs the “Jets” and the “Sharks,” this long segment shifts through multiple dances, a trio, and several interludes. It culminates in a developmental section that combines musical fragments and attitudes culled from all of the material thus far presented. The close of the development is marked by the sounding of a metal pea-whistle.

This prologue is a great place to contemplate Leonard Bernstein’s unique musical personality. You will hear jazz and Cuban inspired rhythms powered by a drum set, walking basses, and brass sectional playing inspired by Latin music from the 1950s. But you will also hear that the techniques Bernstein used to develop these jazzy materials come straight from Beethoven and Stravinsky.

Somewhere: “There's a place for us,” sings the solo viola accompanied by other first chair strings, “somewhere a place for us…” The elaborated restatement: “There’s a time for us” is led by solo horn, and the bridge is voiced by the section strings.

Listen for the elaborate transition after the pedal-filled postlude that is marked by a cymbal crash and loud two-note fanfare in brass. During this passage the two-note phrasing of “Somewhere” is transformed into the obsession with two-note groupings in the scherzo, to which it connects without seam.

Scherzo: (1.5 minutes) A gentle and light interlude set in an AABA structure, where the B section has finger snaps.

Mambo: This dance comes crashing in with an interlude for Latin percussion. It is filled with brilliant writing that is rhythmically precise but also needs to groove in order to come alive. If it does the joint-will-be-jumpin! There is a long-standing audience tradition of joining the orchestra is shouting the word “MAM—BO” twice during this lively section. If you are feeling the spirit, watch the conductor and let it rip! The mambo freezes in place to make room for a cha-cha.

Cha-Cha: Lasting less than a minute, this cha-cha is articulated as a flute quartet with hesitations. It depicts the two lovers dancing together, and you will hear reference in the music to the words: “I just met a girl named Maria.”

Meeting Scene: Also less than a minute, this dream-like passage is led by solo violin with other single strings who meditate on the name “Maria”

“Cool:” (three-and-a-half minutes) Obsesses over three-notes motives and brings back the jazz-inspired world of the prologue. A bewildering array of solo passages for winds, brass and percussion glitter throughout. The section ends with finger snaps.

Rumble: This music accompanies the stylized dancing gang-battle during which leaders from both sides are killed. A five-note ostinato fuels the opening of this section which leads to a quieter passage of scurry music before culminating in fierce and ragged gestures.

Finale: (Four minutes) Opens with a flute cadenza and closes with an instrumental setting of Maria’s response to Anita’s pleas to move on to a different man: “I have a love, and it's all that I have/Right or wrong, what else can I do? / I love him; I'm his, / And everything he is / I am, too.” The pedal-tone refrain from “Somewhere,” returns to close the work in quiet meditation.

Program Notes, October 2011

by Jeffrey Johnson

Throughout 2011-2012 we celebrate Maestro Gustav Meier’s 40 years as our Music Director. We open our season with a near reprise of the very first program that conductor Gustav Meier performed with the Greater Bridgeport Symphony in 1971.

For this concert, three of the four pieces are identical. The 1971 program also included a newly composed work. Because Maestro Meier is known for his commitment to high-quality new music, this program will also feature a recently composed work; a symphony by Robert Sirota called “212.”

This program is organized in sonic symmetry—a single movement work followed by a symphony, then after intermission a symphony followed by a single movement work. It is a design built without the use of chorus, without soloists, and without a concerto.

The Debussy Prelude and the Tchaikovsky Fantasie-Overture on Romeo & Juliet launched their young and still unknown composers into international acclaim. The symphonies at the center of the program feature composers who were well known within the musical community at the time the works were written. Both symphonies contemplate memory. The Schumann Symphony No. 4 is saturated with self-memory. It is the testament of a composer who was beginning to drown in a complex inner-state. “212” is a work that contemplates the memory of a place (Manhattan), and of a person who made that place come alive.

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
(Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun)

World Premiere: December 22, 1894 in Paris
Most Recent Performance by GBS: April 25, 1998

This “faune” was no fawn. The mythological faune that inspired this work was a forest spirit, a human head with goat horns—all goat from the waist down to the feet. The faune inhabits a poem written by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) from which the work derives its title.

The poem is a monolog spoken directly by the faune to himself. It speaks in a language of hazy symbols, and there is never a plot without the presence of contradiction.

This faune was a musician. Like Pan, he cut reeds from a marsh to play upon the pipes. The poem describes how the Faune’s breath passed through the instrument to produce music that became part of nature itself: “Le visible et serein souffle artificiel / De l’inspiration, qui regagne le ciel (the visible and serene artificial breath / which regains the sky.)” This imagery helps explain the distinctive sound world of Debussy’s orchestration.

Debussy loved this poem. He transformed its musical qualities into one of the most iconic openings ever written—a single flute playing an elusive chromatic tune “doux et expressif (quietly and espressively),” while outlining a tritone; the most dissonant, yet symmetrical, interval.

Listen as four settings of this opening tune are played by the flute, each shaded differently. The fluid, almost improvisational quality of the music comes from notation that is detailed and complex. The challenge for any orchestra is to make its elusiveness sound effortless.

A richly contoured transition lasting several minutes escalates the intensity of expression, and then subsides as the music locks into D-flat major. A lyrical tune unfolds in winds, then full strings, and finally on solo violin.

Four new settings of the opening tune follow to close the work. We find our home in E major during the third statement of the theme (which is marked by the first use of antique cymbals). We are greeted there by the solo violin; an old friend.

Debussy began writing this Prelude in 1892 at the age of thirty, and put the finishing touches on it two years later. It was music that made him famous.

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Symphony No. 4

World Premiere: December 6, 1841, in Leipzig.
Revised version March 3, 1853, in Dusseldorf
Most Recent Performance by GBS: January 25, 1997

From 1830 to 1843 Robert Schumann wrote music with an almost single-minded approach to timbre. His first 23 published works were all for solo piano and they occupied him occupied him until the onset of his marriage to the internationally successful pianist Clara Wieck in 1840. During the first year of his marriage, often called the “Liederjahr (song-year)” he completed 168 songs in 365 days.

1841 was a year of symphonies. Having somehow completed his “Overture, Scherzo & Finale” during the Liederjahr, Schumann turned to the symphonic form by writing his first symphony (nicknamed the “Spring Symphony”), and then writing the first version of the symphony that would become known as his fourth.

On a Saturday evening, May 29, 1841, Schumann noted in his personal diary that he had received inspiration in a sudden flash and was ready to write this symphony. He completed the work in 103 days, finishing in early September. Parts were copied and the work was premiered in December. But Schumann delayed publication of the work for ten years and gave it a complete overhaul before publishing it as op. 120. In the interim the second and third symphonies had been published, so op. 120 became known as the Symphony No. 4.

The most significant changes involved a thickening of textures. Schumann sought a burdened sound. The music also explored the premise that any particular musical idea need not reside in only one movement, but that ideas could resurface in unexpected locations throughout the symphony. It is this technique that gives the work its sense of remembering; of exploring thoughts whose significance changes with new contexts.

All four movements of this symphony are directly connected. But in spite of the lack of breaks between movements, the symphony has the prototypical symphonic shape, where an expansive opening movement gives way to a slow movement, a dance, and then a finale.

Remember the music you hear in the introduction to the opening movement, it will reappear in the central section of the slow movement beneath arabesques played by the solo violin. It will also appear again, twice, in the third movement where it acts as a trio.

You would be correct to expect the galloping theme that opens that exposition of the first movement to return in a recapitulation, but it does not. Instead Schumann explores the dramatic potentials of lyrical melodies set against restlessness music, and ends the movement without a complete resolution of his materials. There are many other tricks, and many other connections, listen for places where things seem strangely familiar. This is a symphony of déjà vu.

Robert Sirota  (October 13, 1949)
212: Symphony No. 1

World Premiere: January 2008, Manhattan School of Music
This is the first performance of the work by the GBS

Internationally recognized composer Robert Sirota was born in New York City and has been the President of Manhattan School of Music since 2005. His portfolio includes six other works for orchestra including In the Fullness of Time, for organ and orchestra, which has been played with increasing frequency, and three concertos. He has written numerous works for chorus and symphonic band, three short operas, a full-length music theatre piece, and a varied assortment of chamber works.

“212” is the classic telephone area code for Manhattan. The numbers were assigned in 1947. Manhattan was intentionally given preferential treatment—it was the quickest possible number for an area code that could be dialed using the old rotary phones. The influx of cell-phones made 917 and even 646 resident on the island.

There is no sense of 917 or 646 in this “212,” which evokes images of classic Manhattan and was dedicated by the composer to the memory of his father who was, according to Sirota, “a truly great New Yorker.”

Sirota’s work opens with a movement called “Approaches” that invokes the massive skyscrapers encountered when approaching the island from almost any of its bridges. The raw intensity of the opening focuses into an ethereal “shimmering” central section where distilled solos pass from solo trumpet, to clarinet, and finally to solo violin before the passage begins to retrace its steps, finding once again the intensity of the opening.

“The end of the first movement,” wrote Sirota, “is interrupted by a subway train (specifically, the Number 2 express rumbling through the 59th Street station) which dissolves, without pause, into the second movement, “Do Not Hold Doors.”

Sirota based the musical scoring of the second movement on an unexpected feature of this common piece of subway advice. “I liked the fact that its four words contain, consecutively, two, three, four, and five letters, wrote Sirota. “The primary theme, introduced by a quartet of saxophones, is a syncopated four-chord tune in which the chords consist, respectively, of two, three, four, and five notes.” The second movement may begin in the subway, but there is a jazz club right above it; and we are going in!

The third movement is an invocation of Ground Zero. Sirota crafted this music from the central movement of his string quartet called “Triptych,” which was originally composed in 2002.

The finale, called “O Manhattan” is set around a big tune played for the first time by offstage horns. “This finale is a hymn to our Manhattan,” wrote Sirota, “more precious and hopeful than ever.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky  (1840–1893)
Overture-Fantasy on Romeo and Juliet

World Premiere: March 16, 1870, in Moscow.
Final Version: May 1, 1886, in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Most Recent Performance by GBS: November 4, 2006

In the spring of 1868 the twenty-eight year old Tchaikovsky met, and developed a collegial relationship with, the composer Mily Balakirev who was conductor of the Russian Musical Society Orchestra in Saint Petersburg. Balakirev suggested the idea of writing a work for the RMS based on Romeo and Juliet and even brainstormed various structural strategies with Tchaikovsky.

The work was completed, dedicated to Balakirev, and premiered in the spring of 1870. Because of the particular way in which this music encoded a dramatic arc into classical sonata form, it needed two cycles of revision before it found its final form in 1886. As a result of this extended genesis the work never received an opus number.

Prior to reaching its final form in 1886 the work was slow to catch fire with the public, but since then it has become of the most frequently performed of all Tchaikovsky’s works. It is famous for the unforgettable sweep of its love music, a passage that maintains its impressivenss in spite of being used in advertisements, cartoons, and parodies since the advent of modern media.

This love music is set against fighting music that represents the clash of families and outbreak of violence in the original play. But it was the introduction and coda that encase this conflict that gave Tchaikovsky the most trouble. He needed a way to set the atmosphere for this story, and an effective way to comment on the significance of the action after it had taken place.

The solution for the introduction centered on two parallel panels of music, the second echoed a half-step lower than the first. The music has a narrative quality that feels confessional, quietly singing to us, and focusing our attention and preparing for an imaginary rise of the curtain.

The coda is recognizable in the pulsing of the timpani as the cellos unfold a minor-key version of music that sounds like a hymn. Soon the strings voice a transformation of the love theme with the harp strumming in the background in a texture that suggests a heavenly context. Perhaps Tchaikovsky meant to suggest that the love of Romeo and Juliet transcended mortality and survived in an eternal plane of reality.

A loud roll on the timpani and several short fanfare articulations from the orchestra shake us from this dream world back into the present.

For additional information,
contact the Greater Bridgeport Symphony.