559344 bk Jamestown US 13/6/08 10:57 Page 12 Also available: AMERICAN CLASSICS JAMESTOWN CONCERTO American Music for Cello and Orchestra Perry • Schuman • Thomson Yehuda Hanani, Cello RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland) 8.559255 8.570200 William Eddins 8.559198 Get this free download from Classicsonline! MacDowell: Romance for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 35 Copy this Promotion Code Nax1cAIrDqEM and go to http://www.classicsonline.com/mpkey/mac98_main. Downloading Instructions 1 Log on to Classicsonline. If you do not have a Classicsonline account yet, please register at http://www.classicsonline.com/UserLogIn/SignUp.aspx. 2 Enter the Promotion Code mentioned above. 3 On the next screen, click on “Add to My Downloads”. 8.559344 12 559344 bk Jamestown US 13/6/08 10:57 Page 2 American Music for Cello and Orchestra William Perry (b. 1930): Jamestown Concerto Also available: William Schuman (1910-1992): A Song of Orpheus Virgil Thomson (1896-1989): Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra This is a presentation of three works that should be an William Perry: Jamestown Concerto important part of the American cello literature but have for Cello and Orchestra not been frequently heard. It is the first modern recording of William Schuman’s A Song of Orpheus; William Perry was born Virgil Thomson’s Concerto for Violoncello and on 8th March, 1930, in Orchestra in its original full orchestration has not been Elmira, New York, a recorded since the 1950s; and William Perry’s small upstate city that Jamestown Concerto is receiving its world première was also the birthplace recording. All three composers worked extensively in of composer Charles art song, opera or musical theatre, and their concertos, Tomlinson Griffes. After while technically demanding, emphasize the lyric a solid grounding in qualities of the cello, the instrument that most closely piano, Perry began identifies with the human voice. The music is distinctly composing and conduct- American, optimistic and outgoing, while intentionally ing in his teen-age years, touching on the roots of the American experience. producing a full-length There are some interesting commonalities about the musical at the age of three pieces and their composers. Each work draws on sixteen. This led to musical study at Harvard University specific inspiration from the past. In the case of where his teachers included Paul Hindemith, Walter Schuman’s A Song of Orpheus, the source material is a Piston and Randall Thompson. This period in the early Shakespearean poem from the play Henry VIII. William 1950s was a particularly fruitful time for musical Perry quotes from seventeenth-century madrigals in the activity at Harvard, and Perry was also able to study 8.559254 Jamestown Concerto and also sets a poem from the harmony with Irving Fine and musicology with the Elizabethan period. Virgil Thomson draws on melodies legendary Archibald T. Davison, for whom Virgil from a Southern hymnal published in 1835. Thomson had once been a teaching assistant. As a Similarly, all three composers had distinguished conductor, Perry organized his own student orchestra careers apart from their composing activities: Schuman and chorus, specialising in eighteenth-century music as an educator and arts administrator, president of and in one performance of Handel’s Royal Fireworks Juilliard School and later of the Lincoln Center for the Music provided a wind section that included twelve Performing Arts in New York City; Virgil Thomson as oboes, eight bassoons and a serpent. the influential chief music critic of the New York Herald During post-graduate military service in Germany, Tribune; William Perry as an award-winning film and Perry wrote a musical theatre piece called Xanadu that television producer. was to tour Europe for more than five years, and upon his return became a house composer and television producer for a major advertising agency. When the job of musical director and silent film accompanist at the 8.559291 Museum of Modern Art in New York became available, Also available on Naxos DVD 2.110521 Perry was selected for the post and over the next twelve 8.559344 211 8.559344 559344 bk Jamestown US 13/6/08 10:57 Page 10 William Eddins years composed more than a hundred film scores for such The composer has provided the following notes: silent screen classics as The Gold Rush, The General, William Eddins is the Music Director of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and a Orphans of the Storm, Blood and Sand and others. His I. London 1606. The Virginia Company frequent guest conductor of major orchestras throughout the world. He was Principal subsequent television series, The Silent Years, hosted by Guest Conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra for five seasons. Orson Welles and Lillian Gish, introduced silent film After the solo cello is established as the narrator of the Engagements have included the New York Philharmonic, St Louis Symphony, classics to two new generations of film-goers. story, the orchestra enters with a colourful splash Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Throughout his more recent career, Perry has representing the robust liveliness of London in the late Philharmonic. He has also conducted the Berlin Staatskapelle, Welsh National alternated the writing of film and stage music with Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. A broad second Photo courtesy of Opera, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic, Adelaide orchestral compositions that have received theme, presented by the cello and a consort of viols (first Symphony Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, the RAI Orchestra Sinfonica performances from the Chicago Symphony, the Saint desk string players), introduces The Virginia Company, Nazionale, the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra, and Opéra de Lyon. He also Louis Symphony, the Detroit Symphony and other the corporation formed to finance and supervise an continues his work as a pianist and chamber musician, and regularly conducts from leading orchestras in the United States, Canada and expedition to the New World. The germ for this melody the piano in works by Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin and Ravel. A native of Buffalo, Europe. His television productions have won Emmy and comes from a madrigal written by John Milton (father of Edmonton Symphony Orchestra NY, he graduated from the Eastman School of Music at the age of eighteen, and also Peabody Awards, and he received two Tony the poet) and contributed to a set of madrigals, The studied conducting with Daniel Lewis at the University of Southern California. nominations for his score to Broadway’s Wind in the Triumphs of Oriana, compiled by Thomas Morley and Willows. Perry’s music is richly tonal with broad-based published in 1601. The collection was dedicated to melodies and a frequent use of modality that often Queen Elizabeth (Oriana) and each madrigal ended with reminds one of the pastoral music school of Ralph the phrase “Long Live Fair Oriana” as in Milton’s RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland) Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Dance forms, both setting. period and contemporary, are a dominant element in the Principal Conductor: Gerhard Markson rhythmic structuring of much of his music. The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra plays a central rôle in classical music in Ireland, through live performance, Perry’s Jamestown Concerto was written in broadcast and touring. As an integral part of RTÉ (Ireland’s Public Service Broadcaster), the orchestra reaches a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of great number of listeners through its weekly broadcasts on RTÉ lyric fm and through its association with the the first permanent colony in America at Jamestown, European Broadcasting Union (EBU). In addition to its annual subscription season, Horizons contemporary music Virginia in 1607. It had its première in Scottsdale, series, national tours and residencies and summer concerts series, the orchestra continues to make a name for itself Arizona on 28th January, 2007 with the Musica Nova Fig. 1 internationally through its recordings with Naxos, Marco Polo and on the RTÉ label. In 2004 the RTÉ NSO won the Orchestra conducted by Warren Cohen and Yehuda The movement ends with a flourish and the First Orchestra and Concerto: CD Première category of the Critics’ Awards in the 2004 Cannes Classical Awards for its Hanani as soloist. It received its broadcast première on Landing of the colonists in May of 1607. recording of Joly Braga Santos’s Symphony No. 4 (8.225233) under conductor Álvaro Cassuto. Highlights of recent US National Public Radio on 13th May, 2007, the exact seasons have included Ireland’s first complete Mahler symphony cycle, as well as complete cycles of Shostakovich, commemoration date of the first landing in Virginia. II. Settlements Along the River Bruckner, Prokofiev, Beethoven and Schumann symphonies, a Brahmsfest, a Stravinsky retrospective, and the The work differs from traditional cello concertos in orchestral song-cycles of Mahler. several significant ways. It is in five movements and An interlude depicts dawn in the New World as the contains no internal cadenzas. There is a solo cello settlers establish their site on the James River in Full details of all upcoming RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra concerts are available at: overture that introduces the first movement, and territory ruled by Chief Powhatan, whose regal call is www.rte.ie/performinggroups/nationalsymphonyorchestra thereafter each movement is preceded by an interlude played by a solo trombone echoed by a solo horn. for cello, sometimes lightly-scored. And while most Skirmishes between settlers and natives are punctuated concertos would be referred to as absolute music, the by the few cannon owned by the colonists. Captain John Jamestown carries a programme, somewhat in the Smith appears (trumpets in triads) to quell the uprising, tradition of Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy or Richard and we meet Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, who has Strauss’s Don Quixote but with greater specificity in a childlike theme (solo flute against solo cello delineating the characters and events involved in the pizzicato).