PROGRAM NOTES on Air Downtown Dubuque WILLIAM INTRILIGATOR, Music Director & Conductor

Home , Andrea Gabrieli, The Perfect Fool

SAT Nov 17 at 7:30pm SUN Nov 18 at 2:00pm

anniversary concert season Five Flags Theater PROGRAM NOTES on air Downtown Dubuque WILLIAM INTRILIGATOR, Music Director & Conductor

This concert continues the 2018-19 season’s theme of the Four Elements with music evoking “Air.” Mostly, this theme is explored through music for the wind instruments — brass and woodwinds — whose sounds are produced through the pressure and flow of air.

Canzon Septimi Toni No. 2 During the 16th and 17th centuries, no city in Italy — and probably no city in Europe — had a musical tradition that rivaled that of Venice. With its immense wealth, the city developed a highly ornate style of music for both voices and instruments that suited its taste for ceremonies and festivals. And much of its greatest music was inspired by the acoustical properties of its Giovanni Gabrieli most famous edifice, the richly Byzantine St. Mark’s Basilica. (c. 1555-1612) The greatest composer of the Venetian High Renaissance, Giovanni Gabrieli spent most of his Instrumentation: life in and around St. Mark’s, finally becoming its chief organist and music director from 1585 4 horns, 4 trumpets, until his death in 1612. His uncle and teacher, Andrea Gabrieli, had preceded him in the post 4 trombone, 2 tuba and was almost as illustrious a creator. Building on Andrea’s innovations, Giovanni developed a spectacular style of music for both voices and instruments that gloried in the dramatic antiphonal effects that could be created by ensembles divided among the cathedral’s upper galleries. Today we still prize Gabrieli for having composed some of the most thrilling music ever devised for brass instruments.

Gabrieli’s elaborate canzoni are notable for their artful alternation between polyphonic (many independent lines) and homophonic (chordal) textures, their vivacious rhythmic play producing deliciously conflicting cross-rhythms, and, above all, their splendid use of antiphonal dialogues between the instruments. In this Canzon, the phrase “septimi toni” refers to the Renaissance mode or scale on which the piece is based.

Nocturno for Winds in C Major, opus 24 Felix Mendelssohn was truly a golden child, blessed with brains and prodigious talent, and a near-ideal environment in which to cultivate them. At age ten, he began studying composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, a Berlin composer who drilled him thoroughly in the Baroque counterpoint of Bach and the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart. Rapidly, the youngster blossomed into an even more accomplished composer than Mozart had been at that age.

In the summer of 1824 when Felix was 15, he went on vacation with his family to Bad Doberan on the north German coast. There he was enchanted by the resort’s resident wind band: an unusual ensemble of eleven players including a flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two Felix Mendelssohn bassoons, two horns, a trumpet, and a bass-horn. For them he wrote his charming Nocturno in (c. 1809-1847) C Major, revised much later in 1839 for a larger group of instruments. We, however, will hear Instrumentation: it in its original version, just as he wrote it at 15. It opens with a moody, beautifully colored flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, Andante, then accelerates into a lively, galloping Allegro in sonata form. 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, tuba O Magnum Mysterium Awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush at the White House in 2007, Morten Lauridsen is undoubtedly the foremost writer of choral music in America today. Certainly, his mystically beautiful “O Magnum Mysterium,” premiered in 1994 by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, has become the most famous and frequently performed American contemporary choral work of the past two decades. Several recordings including it have been nominated for Grammy Awards.

Its elegant use of polyphonic writing harkens back to the music of Gabrieli and the Renaissance masters who preceded him; Mortensen has commented that he was particularly Morten Lauridsen thinking of the 16th century’s Giovanni Palestrina and Josquin des Prez. However, the use (1943- ) of contemporary dissonances — especially in a striking passage midway through — is Instrumentation: very much Lauridsen’s own contribution. The text is a traditional sacred poem, used for 4 horns, 3 trumpets, the Christmas liturgy, that expresses the sacred mystery of the Christ Child being born in a 3 trombones, tuba manger before the eyes of humble beasts.

We will not hear that text, however, for this music will be played instead in an arrangement for wind band created by Lauridsen’s colleague at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, H. Robert Reynolds. This is in keeping with the Renaissance tradition in which multi-voiced pieces could be freely exchanged between voices and instruments. Lauridsen has described this music as “a quiet song of profound inner joy.”

“Autumn” and “Winter” from The Four Seasons More than a century after Gabrieli, Antonio Vivaldi became Venice’s leading composer of the Baroque style. Ordained to the priesthood as a young man and known as the “Red Priest” for his flame-colored hair, Vivaldi rarely celebrated Mass. Instead, he presided for some three decades as music master at Venice’s L’Ospedale della Pietà, a charity school for orphaned girls, and made its concerts one of Venice’s leading cultural attractions. Over the course of his long and illustrious career, he composed some 500 concertos for virtually every instrument extant in his era.

In 1725, Vivaldi published a remarkable collection of 12 concertos, entitled Il cimento Antonio Vivaldi dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (“The Trial of Harmony and Invention”), the first four of them (1678-1741) being The Four Seasons. Although he had written other concertos with colorful titles, the Instrumentation: Seasons took descriptive writing several steps farther by graphically illustrating four sonnets, solo violin, harpsichord, strings possibly written by Vivaldi himself, which are included in his original printed edition.

In this season’s first concert, we heard “Spring” and “Summer”; now we will move on to “Autumn” and “Winter.” The bountiful harvests of “Autumn” are celebrated by a sober peasant dance in the first movement. But the violin soloist has drunk too much, and his inebriated antics provide delightful virtuoso opportunities. Vivaldi wrote in the slow movement’s score that this is the sleep of the drunken revelers. The most fascinating movement is the last: a detailed scenario of an autumn hunt with the horses’ stately prancing, the baying dogs, rattling gunfire, and the soloist as the fleeing stag dying just before the end.

“Winter” is shown as a menacing season; Vivaldi may be recalling here the terrible winter of 1708–9 when Venice’s lagoon froze over. In its extraordinary opening, the chattering instruments enter one by one, piling up harsh dissonances to evoke the bitter cold. By contrast, the slow movement conjures up the cozy atmosphere indoors by the fire, with the pattering raindrops outside imitated by plucked violins. The final Allegro describes the citizens’ attempts to walk slowly on the ice, then quickly with frequent falls. As the string instruments depict blowing winds, the music reminds us that winter brings enjoyment as well as discomfort. “Mars” from The Planets Arr Ken Singleton

Premiered in London on November 15, 1920, Gustav Holst’s first and only work for very large orchestra, The Planets, created an immediate sensation. The New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony fought so heatedly for the American premiere that a compromise had to be struck: both performed it on the same day, but New York received the edge because of the time-zone difference!

Gustav Holst Not a symphony, The Planets is a series of seven interrelated tone poems or, as Holst (1874-1934) preferred, “mood pictures.” When he wrote them between 1914 and 1916, he had become very interested in astrology. Thus, he was thinking more about the astrological influence of Instrumentation: the planets on man’s character than their qualities as celestial bodies. 2 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, percussion The work’s first movement is “Mars, the Bringer of War,” which we will hear in Ken Singleton’s arrangement for the brass section and percussion. So powerful is it as an evocation of modern warfare’s savagery that listeners assumed Holst must have been reacting to the news from World War I’s trenches. However, “Mars” was actually composed in 1914 before the war began. In the unusual meter of 5/4, it opens with a relentlessly pounding rhythmic ostinato that gradually mounts to an ear-splitting din. An ominous three-note motive ending with a dissonant half-step drop also dominates the music. Holst instructed that “Mars” be played as fast and brutally as possible.

Serenade for Winds, opus 7 Richard Strauss may well have had the longest creative career of any of the major composers, and it began when he was only six years old. Throughout his teens, he churned out quantities of songs, piano pieces, and chamber music. By 17 or 18, he created the Serenade for Winds in E-flat Major, the first of his prodigious output to enter the standard repertoire. It was premiered in Munich on November 27, 1882.

At this stage of his career, the young Strauss was influenced greatly by the conservative tastes of his father, Franz Strauss, who was perhaps the greatest horn player of his day. So it’s not surprising that the Serenade is a very traditional sonata-form movement that shows Richard Strauss little of the sumptuous chromatic melodies and pushing-the-envelope harmonies that would (1864-1949) soon become the composer’s trademark. It is scored for 13 wind instruments: two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns; and a contrabassoon (this part often Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, played by tuba, as it will be at these concerts). Already, Strauss knew the qualities of his 2 bassoons, 4 horns, tuba instruments and blended their colorful sonorities together elegantly.

The Serenade opens with a gracious theme that might have been written by Mozart, then makes a nod to Mendelssohn with a perky horn and high-woodwind dialogue. The second theme (solo clarinet and horn), with its little hesitations, is especially pleasing and original. Solo oboe uses a variant of this to bridge to the more animated development section, which features a bold leap from the home key of E-flat to the very distant key of B minor. After the recapitulation of the opening music, a lovely coda rounds off this charming work. Ballet from The Perfect Fool Arr Jay Friedman

Outside his native England, Gustav Holst today is known mostly for his spectacular showpiece The Planets. But wonderful as it is, that piece is only partially representative of this composer who preferred to dwell out of the limelight and was also known as a great teacher, spending much of his time at the St. Paul’s School for Girls in London.

Because of his teaching duties, it often took Holst years to finish a major work. Such was the Gustav Holst case with his opera The Perfect Fool, labored over from 1918 to 1922 and premiered at the (1874-1934) Royal Opera House Covent Garden on May 14, 1923. Because of its eccentric plot involving a wizard, a princess, and the eponymous fool, it was not a success. But the Ballet with which Instrumentation: it opens has lived on happily, being performed both in its original full-orchestra version 4 horns, 4 trumpets, and in arrangements for brass instruments. We will hear it in an arrangement for two 3 trombones, 2 tuba, euphonium, percussion brass choirs and percussion created by Jay Friedman, principal trombonist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

In the Ballet, the Wizard — using the voice of a solo trombone (Holst’s own instrument) — summons the spirits of three of the Elements onto the stage where they perform brief dances, each epitomizing the quality of the element they are representing. First we hear the Earth Spirits, who perform a comic, rambunctious, and rather noisy dance suggesting close-to- the-soil peasants. A quieter, calmer voice introduces the Spirits of the Water, whose music is lyrically graceful and whose bell-like percussion effects (and Asian pentatonic scales) mimic the cool sounds of Javanese gamelan music. Then the Spirits of Fire again accelerate the music into a fast tempo, with the brass instruments evoking the blazing power of flames.

Angelus! Prayer to the Guardian Angels Near the end of his long life, Franz Liszt was a vastly different man — and composer — than in his glittering youth. Now long retired from his career as the pre-eminent piano virtuoso of his era, he no longer wrote pieces designed to show off his digital feats. Instead, his music became spare, often dark, and stunningly experimental in its treatment of harmony and form. It also frequently treated religious themes, for during Liszt’s final 20 years, his religious faith came to dominate his life. In 1865, he took minor religious orders, becoming an abbe in the Roman Catholic Church.

Over the course of his career, Liszt wrote three collections of intensely personal piano pieces Franz Liszt with extra-musical themes known as the Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”). In (1811-1886) his third and last collection, composed mostly during the 1870s, he began with the fervently beautiful “Angelus” (1877). Three times a day in the Catholic church, the Angelus devotional Instrumentation: prayer, commemorating the Incarnation, is said in churches and monasteries; the faithful are strings summoned to it by the tolling of the Angelus bell. Liszt begins and ends the piece with the sound of this bell trembling in the air, then gradually builds to a state of spiritual exaltation.

The older Liszt frequently transcribed pieces he particularly loved to other instruments, his favorite choice being the string quartet (which could be expanded to a larger string ensemble). In 1880 and 1882, he made two such arrangements for “Angelus.” As he told a friend, this was one of his favorite pieces, “although I don’t generally like my own music.” “Gathering of the Armies” from Lohengrin Arr Brian Buerkle

Premiered in 1850, Lohengrin was the last of Richard Wagner’s traditional Romantic operas before he launched his revolutionary music dramas of the Ring cycle. It is a battle between goodness and evil, Christianity and paganism set in 10th-century Flanders. The gentle Elsa has been accused of killing her younger brother, the heir to the throne of Brabant. In answer to her prayer, a mysterious knight (Lohengrin), clad in silver and riding a boat drawn by a swan, appears and declares himself her champion. He defeats the knight Telramund to prove her innocence. He then marries Elsa, but cautions her never to ask his name or from Richard Wagner where he comes. (1813-1883)

Instrumentation: But in Act III, Elsa, her faith in Lohengrin damaged by the insinuations of Telramund’s wife 4 horns, 4 trumpets, Ortrud, does ask that fateful question and in the process destroys her new marriage. The 4 trombones, tuba, excerpt known as the “Gathering of the Armies” is the brief introduction to the final scene timpani, percussion of the opera, in which Lohengrin, his identity as a Knight of the Holy Grail now revealed, must leave Brabant and the heartbroken Elsa forever. Summoned by King Henry, his nobles gather to learn what has happened.

As we know, Wagner’s operas are filled with electrifying music for brass, and this excerpt is the most of resplendent of the heraldic brass-dominated passages contained in Lohengrin. We will hear Brian Buerkle’s arrangement, which eliminates the rest of the large orchestra but retains the powerful role played by the brass section.