PROGRAM NOTES Music & Drama

Home , The Storm (Tchaikovsky), The Tempest (Sullivan), Vladimir Stasov

SAT Oct 8 at 7:30pm SUN Oct 9 at 2:00pm Five Flags Theater Downtown Dubuque PROGRAM NOTES Music & Drama WILLIAM INTRILIGATOR, Music Director & Conductor

Overture to Egmont , op. 84 - Ludwig van Beethoven

In the story of the Dutch Count Lamoral van Egmont, executed by the Spanish in 1568 for leading a movement to free the Netherlands from Spanish rule, Beethoven found the kind of hero he always idealized and could have happily honored in his “Eroica” Symphony. The history of Egmont and the aspirations of the 16th-century Netherlanders to break the yoke of Spanish Hapsburg tyranny — a story which also figures in Schiller’s famous play Don Carlos and Verdi’s opera Don Carlo — was very much in the air in Vienna at this time. Goethe had seized on it as an appropriate subject for a theatrical drama, and in turn, Schiller touched up Goethe’s play for its Viennese premiere on May 14, 1810. Ludwig van Beethoven b. 1770, Bonn, Germany; It was customary then for composers to create overtures and incidental music to enhance d. 1827, Vienna, Austria spoken dramas. When he was asked to participate in the production of Egmont, Beethoven waived any fee for his work and wrote that he took on the assignment “only out of devotion Instrumentation: to [Goethe].” In addition to the famous overture, he created several other pieces, including 2 flutes (2nd dbl. piccolo), a finalSiegessymphonie or Victory Symphony, as Egmont goes triumphantly to his death on 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, the scaffold, confident his cause will win in the end. (In fact, the Dutch had to wait nearly a 2 trumpets, timpani, strings century for their freedom from Spain.)

Beyond his generalized admiration for men like Egmont who lived and died for their ideals, the composer found contemporary relevance in this story from the already distant past. In 1809, Napoleon had invaded Austria and even bombarded and occupied Vienna. By 1810, this foreign conqueror had been driven from Austrian soil, but the bitter memories of that occupation were still fresh for the composer.

A virile, martial portrait of the play’s protagonist, the famous overture touches on Egmont’s tragic fate in the dark, ominous chords of its F-minor slow introduction. Egmont’s heroic struggle against oppression is sketched in the Allegro main section. Then, after a quiet bridge passage comes the exhilarating coda, now in F Major. This is the music of the Victory Symphony, the play’s finale, with Egmont’s triumph-in-death shouted out by the entire orchestra, topped by exuberant flourishes of the piccolo.

Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn was truly a golden child, blessed with brains and prodigious talent, and a near-ideal environment in which to cultivate them. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, had risen from poverty to become an esteemed philosopher; his father, Abraham, was one of Germany’s leading bankers and had made the family fortune. Both of Felix’s parents Felix Mendelssohn were highly educated people and were determined that their offspring would realize their b. 1809, Hamburg, Germany; full potential. The four children, all bright and eager students, were given the finest tutors d. 1847, Leipzig, Germany and books. Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, As Felix’s musical genius hatched, he was able to spread his wings into all the areas that 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, distinguished his adult career. Sunday afternoon musicales at the Mendelssohn household 2 horns, 2 trumpets, tuba, drew a crowd of Berlin’s artistic elite, and featured the youngster as impresario (planning timpani, strings Felix Mendelssohn the concert programs), piano soloist, conductor (the Mendelssohns sometimes hired a CONTINUED full professional orchestra), and composer. In 1825 when the family moved to a grand estate on Berlin’s Leipzigerstrasse, they converted the summerhouse in the garden into an auditorium seating more than 200. It was there, probably in the summer or early fall of 1826, that the 17-year-old prodigy premiered his A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture.

The Mendelssohn children were enraptured with Shakespeare’s plays and delighted in acting them out as well as reading them. Family performances of their favorite, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a tale of four mismatched lovers benighted and bedeviled by fairies in an Athenian wood, led to Felix’s precocious masterpiece. It is one of the finest of Romantic overtures, cast in traditional sonata form, but full of programmatic correspondences to the play’s plot and characters.

The opening is pure magic: four soft woodwind chords raising the curtain on a world of fantasy. This is followed by soft, fleet, otherworldly music in E minor for violins: an early example of Mendelssohn’s trademark scherzo music, here representing the world of the fairies. The world of mortals follows with a loud theme in E Major, full of pomp and grandeur, befitting the court of Theseus and Hippolyta. We also meet two other groups of mortals in the exposition: the beleaguered lovers (Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius) in lyrical, yearning music for clarinets and violins, and finally the lower- class Athenian artisans in a clod-hopping peasant dance, punctuated with the hee-haws of Nick Bottom (transformed by the fairies into an ass). The development section is as much a dramatic story as an imaginative working-out of themes; notice the mischievous, even menacing sound of the woodwinds suggesting these fairies are more than a little dangerous. In the overture’s closing coda, the pompous court theme is slowed down to make a lovely, dreaming reverie for the violins, before the four magical woodwind chords ring down the curtain.

The Tempest, Fantasy-Overture - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

While Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy is one of his most beloved and oft performed compositions, probably few audience members are familiar with his other two Shakespearean tone poems: Hamlet, written late in his career, and The Tempest, which we will hear tonight. Getting acquainted with The Tempest brings the discovery of one of the Russian master’s most alluring romantic melodies.

Composed in August 1873 some four years after the first version of Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest was the product of a particularly happy time in Tchaikovsky’s life. He had Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky just returned from a very pleasant vacation in Western Europe, and before returning to b. 1840, Votkinsk, Russia; Moscow, he decided to spend a few weeks at Usovo, the country estate of his wealthy d. 1893, St. Petersburg, friend Vladimir Shilovsky. Since Shilovsky was away, the composer had the whole place Russia to himself, and it proved ideal for creative work. As he later remembered in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck: “I was in a kind of exalted, blissful frame of mind, Instrumentation: wandering during the day alone in the woods, towards evening over the immeasurable 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, steppes, and sitting at night by the open window listening to the solemn silence of this out- 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, of-the-way place — a silence broken occasionally by some indistinguishable sound of the 4 horns, 2 trumpets, night. During those two weeks I wrote The Tempest in rough without any effort, as though 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, moved by some supernatural force.” Astonishingly for this man who usually struggled cymbals, bass drum, strings hard over his compositions, the whole tone poem was written in just eleven days, while the orchestral scoring was completed the next month in Moscow. And at its first performance in Moscow in December 1873, it was a big success with the audience, far exceeding the response to Romeo and Juliet in 1869. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky The idea of setting to music events from this magical romance of reconciliation (it is CONTINUED Shakespeare’s last play) had come from the writer and critic Vladimir Stasov, who was also involved with promoting the Russian Nationalist composers Mussorgsky, Rimsky- Korsakov, and Borodin. Earlier in 1873, Stasov had sent Tchaikovsky a very detailed scenario on which to base his descriptive tone poem, and the composer reduced it to this outline printed in the score: “The sea. The magician Prospero sends his obedient spirit Ariel to raise a tempest, which wrecks the ship with Ferdinand on board. The magic island. First timid feelings of love between Miranda [Prospero’s daughter] and Ferdinand [son of one of Prospero’s enemies]. Ariel. Caliban. The lovers give themselves up to the delights of passion. Prospero renounces his magic power and leaves the island. The sea.”

The music very clearly follows this scenario. It opens quietly with a portrait of the calm sea surrounding the island where Prospero and Miranda have been exiled, with many string parts representing the undulating waves. A solemn, enigmatic horn melody emerges from this background; it is the key theme unifying the piece. Prospero, in majestic brass chords, and his fairy servant Ariel, in flickering high woodwinds, appear and order up the tempest, which wrecks the ship carrying the magician’s old enemies from Italy and casts them upon the shores of his island. After the storm subsides, we hear, first in the cellos, the glorious love theme representing the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand. It has a tremulous, yearning beauty only Tchaikovsky could create.

The central portion presents contrasting musical portraits of the airy spirit Ariel and the ugly island troll Caliban, both servants of Prospero. The love music soon resumes, now becoming more passionate and resembling a great balletic pas de deux. With a ringing brass chorale, Prospero gives up his magic powers, as all the characters, now reconciled, prepare to leave the island. The Tempest closes as it began with the undulating music of the sea.

Downton Abbey Suite - John Lunn

For six seasons beginning in January 2011, the lavishly filmed British historical series Downton Abbey lured millions of mesmerized viewers to PBS and became public television’s most popular show ever. Lovers of period drama — and those who didn’t know they were — couldn’t get enough of the loves and travails of the aristocratic Crawley family on their palatial English country estate as they lived through the challenges of the World War I era and the Roaring Twenties. Lord Robert Grantham, his beautiful but unscrupulous daughter Lady Mary, and his irrepressibly sharped-tongued mother Lady Violet (played by Maggie Smith) became irresistible weekly companions. And like its PBS predecessor of the 1970s John Lunn Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton devoted just as much attention to the large staff that kept b. 1956, Glasgow, Scotland this family gorgeously dressed and sumptuously fed: Mr. Carson, the housekeeper Mrs. Hughes, and Anna and John Bates were perhaps even more beloved than those upstairs. Instrumentation: Adding to the series’ appeal was Scottish composer John Lunn’s romantic score for all 2 flutes, oboe, 2 clarinets, six years. Lunn has become the John Williams of the British mini-series, having also bassoon, horn, 2 trumpets, created scores for three television dramatizations of Charles Dickens’ novels, as well as trombone, tuba, timpani, bells, suspended cymbal, The Granchester Mysteries, The White Queen, and many others. He described his role as triangle, strings “manipulating what’s going on … underneath the dialogue … putting something else in there that, without it, you’d view the scene differently.” He received two Emmy Awards as well as numerous British awards for his six seasons of music. Everything was scored for chamber orchestra with Lunn himself playing the prominent piano part.

We’ll hear a short suite drawn from all this music. Lunn did not originally intend the famous melody, with its driving ostinato under nostalgic violins, to be the series theme; he wrote it originally to underscore the first season’s opening scene, which takes place on a train journeying across the English countryside. Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major - Sergei Prokofiev

When Sergei Prokofiev fled the Russian Revolution by train across Siberia and by steamer across the Pacific to San Francisco in 1918, he had high hopes that America would be the land of opportunity for him as it had been for so many others. American audiences and critics were initially fascinated by this bold young pianist/composer whom they saw as embodying the proletarian spirit of the new Soviet Union—never mind that he was in reality a refugee. The New York Times gushed: “His fingers are steel, his wrists steel, his biceps and triceps steel. … He is a tonal steel trust. . … He is blond, slender, modest as a musician, and his impassability contrasted with the volcanic eruptions he produced on Sergei Prokofiev the keyboard.” b. 1891, Sontsovka, Ukraine; Heartened by this enthusiasm, Prokofiev spent the summer of 1921 on the Brittany coast d. 1953, Moscow completing both his Third Piano Concerto and his opera The Love for Three Oranges for Instrumentation: December premieres in Chicago, by the Chicago Symphony and the Chicago Lyric Opera 2 flutes (2nd dbl. piccolo), respectively. The Piano Concerto, however, had a long gestation period back in Russia, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, with some of its ideas dating back as far as 1911. It grew into a work of remarkable unity 2 bassoons, 4 horns, and power, which embodied all five elements Prokofiev listed in his autobiography as 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, characteristics of his music: the “classical,” the “modernistic,” the “dynamic,” the “lyrical,” timpani, tambourine, castanets, bass drum, and the “humorous.” cymbals, strings This concerto is one of the great tests of a pianist’s technical virtuosity. Even its composer found it formidable. “My Third Concerto has turned out to be devilishly difficult. I’m nervous and I’m practicing hard three hours a day,” he wrote before the Chicago premiere. To his surprise, the work drew only a lukewarm response in an America still uncomfortable with modern music. But audiences in Europe loved it, and soon Prokofiev moved to Paris, ruefully acknowledging that the U.S. wasn’t ready for him.

In creating a bravura work for piano, Prokofiev did not slight the orchestra. Its colorful writing is nearly equally demanding, and its pungent woodwinds and soaring strings add a characteristically Prokofievian blend of irony and romance. This is a concerto without a true slow movement; instead, the composer weaves slower, more lyrical episodes into all three movements.

The first movement opens with a slow introduction in which solo clarinet, then two clarinets sing a melancholy Russian melody. Then the orchestra swings into a fast tempo, and the piano presents the brilliant, twisting principal theme. Even more exotic is the second theme, sung by the oboe above clattering castanets and crisp, percussive writing for the piano. On its later return, this second theme will become harsher, almost grotesque with thick piano chords topped by a shrieking piccolo. Midway through, the tempo returns to a slower Andante as the piano rhapsodizes over the opening Russian theme.

In the second movement, a droll dance theme in the woodwinds over a march in the strings forms the basis of five contrasting variations. These range from fast virtuoso outings for the piano to a slow, mysterious reverie by the soloist over light woodwind and string accompaniment. The quiet conclusion of this movement is especially intriguing.

The finale is a mixture of rhythmic drive and soaring lyricism. It is dominated by some of the most relentlessly difficult piano writing ever devised. But relief comes in the big central lyrical section, featuring one of Prokofiev’s signature arcing melodies tossed from woodwinds to high violins. The drive to the finish ranks among the most exciting in the concerto literature, with virtuosity, speed, and pitch all raised to the very zenith.