SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA a JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Cristian Măcelaru, Conductor January 21, 2017 LEONARD BERNSTEIN Symp
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SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Cristian Măcelaru, conductor January 21, 2017 LEONARD BERNSTEIN Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD The Sea Hawk Suite Main Title Reunion The Albatross The Throne Room The Orchid Gold Caravan Duel Part I Duel continued Freedom INTERMISSION VARIOUS Hollywood Scores: “Perlman Plays Hollywood” arr. John Williams “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca “Love Theme” from Cinema Paradiso “Theme” from Far and Away “Main Title” from Out of Africa “Marion and Robin Love Theme” from The Adventures of Robin Hood “Theme” from Sabrina “Theme” from Schindler’s List “Tango (Por Una Cabeza)” from Scent of a Woman Itzhak Perlman, violin MUSIC FOR THE MOVIES Even in the days of silent films, movie-makers recognized that the experience on the screen could be enhanced with musical accompaniment, and movie theaters hired pianists and organists to improvise music that would underline or intensify what the audiences were experiencing on the screen. (The teenaged Dmitri Shostakovich supported his family by playing piano in freezing movie halls in Leningrad in the early 1920s.) With the arrival of talkies, it became possible to compose and incorporate music directly into each movie, and a new art form was born. This concert offers film music by several different composers, but featuring two in particular. Leonard Bernstein would have written more for the movies, but he found the experience difficult; On the Waterfront was his only film score. Two decades earlier, Erich Wolfgang Korngold moved from Vienna to Hollywood and completely changed our sense of what film music might be, writing music so distinct that it can stand alone in the concert hall. This program concludes with an arrangement for violin and orchestra of film music by one of the greatest Hollywood composers, John Williams. Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront LEONARD BERNSTEIN Born August 25, 1918, Lawrence, MA Died October 14, 1990, NYC Early in 1954 Leonard Bernstein was asked to write music for On the Waterfront, a film directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. Bernstein was attracted to the idea of composing for film, and – working very carefully with a rough cut of the movie – he composed the score between February and May 1954. He then went to Hollywood for the editing process…and the experience was dismaying. Bernstein discovered that his carefully composed music had been cut, edited and often buried beneath the dialogue and action of the movie, and although the score was nominated for an Academy Award, Bernstein never wrote another film score. The following year, however, he put together what he called a Symphonic Suite from the music he had written for the film, saying that his purpose was to “salvage some of the music that would otherwise have been left on the floor of the dubbing-room.” But he made clear that this was a symphonic work, not simply a gathering of music from the film: “The main materials of the suite undergo numerous metamorphoses, following as much as possible the chronological flow of the film score itself.” Bernstein led the premiere of the suite himself with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood on August 11, 1955. Kazan’s film, one of the monuments of American cinema, tells the exceptionally violent story of the struggle for control of longshoremen on the New York docks. Shot in a gritty black-and-white, it begins with a murder (a man is thrown off a balcony) and concludes when the hero Terry Malloy – played by a young Marlon Brando – is beaten to a pulp on the docks. He gets up and walks to work, destroying the power of the racketeers in the process. (This is the film in which Brando utters the famous line: “I coulda been a contender!”) As Bernstein noted, the suite generally follows the events of the movie. It gets off to a striking beginning as a solo French horn lays out the long theme that will be associated with Terry Malloy; Bernstein marks this opening section Andante (with dignity), and the horn theme will return in many forms throughout the suite. The quiet opening quickly gives way to a Presto barbaro, driven by powerful drums and jagged wind figures; this is the music that accompanies the violent acts of the racketeers in the movie. This section, in Bernstein’s jazzy manner despite its violence, goes on for some time before giving way to music that accompanies Malloy’s love for Edie Doyle (played by Eva Marie Saint in the film). First announced by flute and harp, this music provides a moment of calm in an otherwise violent score. A variant of the opening horn theme leads to a further burst of violence, specifically the music that accompanies the fight between Malloy and union boss Johnny Friendly. The suite concludes with a return of the opening horn theme, but now it has been transformed into a heroic march, and on this music the suite drives to its powerful – and strident – close. The Sea Hawk Suite ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD Born May 29, 1897, Brno Died November 29, 1957, Hollywood Erich Wolfgang Korngold did not set out to become a film composer. In fact, when he was born, no one had any idea what film music might be. But it was clear that young Korngold would become a composer – few children have been as precocious as he was. Korngold’s cantata Gold, written when he was ten, amazed Mahler, and those impressed by young Korngold included Richard Strauss and Puccini, who said: “That boy’s talent is so great, he could easily give us half and still have enough left for himself!” Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt, composed when he was 20, received simultaneous premieres in Hamburg and Cologne, and in the 1920s he was one of the most admired young composers in Europe. And then his career took an unexpected turn. Invited by Max Reinhardt to Hollywood to help arrange Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream music for a 1935 film of that Shakespeare play, Korngold was delighted to find his romantic idiom ideally suited to film music; when Hitler came to power soon after, Korngold moved his family to Hollywood. He achieved his greatest success in the late 1930s with swashbuckling music for Errol Flynn movies like Captain Blood and Robin Hood, but he was just as adept at grand period pieces like The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Korngold’s film scores earned several Oscars®. The Sea Hawk (1940) was Korngold’s final score for an Errol Flynn movie. Directed by Michael Curtiz (who two years later would direct Casablanca), The Sea Hawk is loosely (very loosely) based on the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Sir Francis Drake on the eve of England’s confrontation with the Spanish Armada. Flynn plays the Drake-figure, who is named Geoffery Thorpe in the movie. Thorpe warns Elizabeth about the danger from Spain, and she sends him on a mission to Panama, where he is captured by the Spanish and sent to the galleys. Thorpe escapes, returns to England, unmasks the traitorous Lord Wolfingham in Elizabeth’s court, and kills him in a duel. At the end he is reunited with his love Dona Maria and knighted by Elizabeth. This suite of excerpts from the movie opens with the Main Title, which bursts to life on a tremendous fanfare that Korngold marks Allegro impetuoso. This fanfare figure, which will return throughout the score, gives way to the soaring love theme, here introduced by the violins. Reunion is the music that accompanies Thorpe’s return to Dona Maria; once again we hear the love theme. Albatross is the name of Thorpe’s ship, and he first sees it to the accompaniment of this music, which opens with a leaping trumpet call. A drum roll opens The Throne Room, which takes the form of a processional as courtiers and guests are led in to see Elizabeth. The next two excerpts come from the episode in Panama: the brief Orchid sets the scene, while The Gold Caravan pictures the target of Thorpe’s secret mission. The Duel – suitably violent – is the music that accompanies Thorpe’s fight with Lord Wolfingham, still considered among the greatest of all swordfights ever captured on film. (The sequence is made all the more remarkable when one learns that the actor who played Wolfingham – Henry Daniell – could not fence; the entire swordfight was shot as shadows and close-ups to compensate for this). Freedom combines music from several scenes: Thorpe’s escape from the Spanish, his return to Dona Maria and his knighting by Elizabeth. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger PERFORMANCE HISTORY by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist This program marks the first appearance at these concerts of Leonard Bernstein’s concert suite of music arranged for orchestra from his only film score, On the Waterfront. Likewise, the full suite of music from Erich Korngold's award-winning score for the swashbuckling 1940 Errol Flynn epic, The Sea Hawk, is also receiving its initial SDSO classical concerts hearing tonight, though some of this music has been heard on pops programs over the years. To complete the sequence of tonight's San Diego premieres, our soloist, Itzhak Perlman, is playing an arrangement for solo violin and orchestra by John Williams of music from several Oscar®-winning and Oscar®-nominated film scores, including some of Mr. Williams’ own. .