Chapel Hill Philharmonia Hill Hall — University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 7:30 P.M

Chapel Hill Philharmonia Hill Hall — University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 7:30 p.m. Sunday, May 2, 2010 “Fanfares and Dances” Yoram Youngerman, Guest Conductor Aaron Copland (1900-1990) Fanfare for the Common Man Ottorini Respighi (1879-1936) Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 3 Italiana Arie de Corte Siciliana Passacaglia Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1874) Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 Molto allegro con fuoco Cissy Yu — piano CHP Young Artist Concerto Competition Winner Intermission Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 Poco sostenuto — Vivace Allegretto Presto — Assai meno presto Allegro con brio Program Notes copyright 2010 Mark E. Furth, Ph.D. Do not reproduce without permission. [email protected] “Fanfares and Dances” Music can be martial, celebratory, amorous, or contemplative – a force moving us to march, dance, love, or reflect. Tonight’s Chapel Hill Philharmonia program spans this wide range. A common thread is rhythm. From the drum beats that open Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man to the propulsive finale of Ludwig van Beethoven’sSeventh Symphony, this is music in which we feel strongly the grouping of stresses in regular intervals, or measures. Rhythm serves as an organizing principle that governs our immediate perception of musical time. Paradoxically, music also can evoke an almost indefinite sweep of time, capturing the expanse from the dawn of mankind to the unknown future. This sense may be triggered by the sounds that for uncounted eons have heralded great events, the arrival of a leader, or the beginning of battle – a rhythmic pulse coupled with the blare of massed instruments – the essence of a fanfare. The biblical Joshua used one to halt the sun. Film lovers will recall how in 2001: A Space Odyssey director Stanley Kubrick employed the opening fanfare from Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra to convey the progression of human evolution, from cavemen to astronauts. In his suites From Ancient Airs and Dances, Ottorini Respighi chooses less imposing music, folk-inspired songs and dances, to forge a link with times past. Whether grand or simple, we seem programmed to respond to rhythm and melody. In Copland’s words, “So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.” Born at the beginning of the 20th century to Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants (has father changed the family name from Kaplan), Aaron Copland grew up in an apartment above his family’s department story in Brooklyn, New York. He learned piano and began composing in his early teens and, although intellectually curious and widely read, he eschewed college to pursue music. Like many American composers between the two World Wars, Copland gravitated to France to study with Nadia Boulanger. He spent three years as her pupil (1921-4), then returned home to become a champion of contemporary American composers, employing organizational and teaching skills in addition to writing challenging new music. Copland was attracted to socialist philosophy and, influenced by the Great Depression and visits to revolutionary Mexico, became an active supporter of progressive causes. In the 1930s and 40s his music moved away from edgy modernism: “I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relationship of the music- loving public and the living composer. The old ‘special’ public of the modern music concerts had fallen away, and the conventional concert public continued apathetic or indifferent to anything but the established classics. It seemed to me that we composers were in Aaron Copland composing by candlelight, 1946 danger of working in a vacuum…I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” His ballet music (Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring), film scores including an Academy Award winner forThe Heiress (1949), and patriotic works from this period often incorporated folk influences and were easily assimilated. They earned Copland a reputation “as the foremost American composer of his time.” (Grove Encyclopedia) After World War II Copland’s politics and open homosexuality made him a target for attack under McCarthyism. A performance of Lincoln Portrait was cancelled from a concert for the Eisenhower presidential inauguration in 1953, and Copland was forced to testify before a Senate subcommittee. He emerged from this period largely unscathed, and continued to compose until his mid-70s. By his death at age 90, he had received virtually every public honor that could be awarded to an artist. Fanfare for the Common Man was commissioned by Eugene Goossens, the English-born conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and premiered March 12, 1943. Copland recalled, “During World War I he had asked British composers for a fanfare to begin each orchestral concert. It had been so successful that he thought to repeat the procedure in World War II with American composers.” Goossens underwrote eighteen fanfares he hoped would make “stirring and significant contributions to the war effort,” often assigning specific topics. For example, he had Howard Hanson write a Fanfare for the Signal Corps, while Walter Piston’s fanfare honored “the Fighting French”. Yet Copland found a more universal subject, perhaps helping to explain why his is the only one of these works still played today. He also incorporated the Fanfare into his Third Symphony, and it first gained a wide audience in that context. The populist title of Copland’s Fanfare reflected his politics. No doubt he enjoyed the irony of honoring the GI grunt, “the common man [who], after all, was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army,” with a musical device conventionally employed to celebrate generals, dignitaries, and royals. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist suggests that Copland also wished to pay homage to “a progressive vision of social justice and international community.” At one point he considered titling the work a Fanfare for Four Freedoms. Freedom of speech and religion and freedom from fear and economic want often were cited by President Franklin Roosevelt and Vice-President Henry Wallace as “the foundation of a new ‘moral order’.” Crist believes that Copland actually chose the Fanfare’s name to echo the title of a remarkably successful radio speech given by Wallace to expound on these freedoms – “The Price of Free World Victory: The Century of the Common Man.” To this writer a fanfare, regardless of its intended ceremonial purpose or instrumentation, calls to mind the closing words of the archetypal romantic novel by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616): “’God save me!’ said Don Quixote. ‘What a life we shall lead, Sancho my friend! What flageolets will reach our ears, what Zamoran pipes, what timbrels, what tambourines, and what rebecs!’” If a fanfare stirs images of a gallant knight-errant tilting at a windmill, Ottorini Respighi’s third suite of Ancient Airs and Dances evokes a more intimate form of romance – courtly love, as practiced in the great Italian city-states of the Renaissance. Respighi grew up in Bologna, Italy. He began musical studies with his father, a piano teacher, but focused more on violin and viola. He also studied composition with Luigi Torchi, a pioneering musicologist who helped instill in his pupil an abiding passion for early music. Another influential teacher was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a master of orchestration. Respighi studied with him while performing in the orchestra of the Russian Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg during two winter seasons of Italian opera. Back in Bologna, from 1903-8 he continued to support himself with orchestral jobs and as violist of the Mugellini String Quartet. He also began to publish transcriptions of works by 16th to 18th century composers, including Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and Antonio Vivaldi (1678- 1741). His own writing also drew favorable notice. In 1913 Respighi became professor of composition in Rome at the state-sponsored Conservatory of Santa Cecilia. A decade later he was promoted to director, but after three years gave up the administrative post to devote more time to composition. In 1919 he married one of his students, Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo (1894-1996). They collaborated closely until his death in 1936. Elsa survived her husband by almost 60 years, living to the age of 102, served as his biographer, and continued to promote his work. Respighi’s breakthrough orchestral piece was Fountains of Rome, completed in 1916. Ottorini Respighi This together with Roman Festivals and Pines of Rome, constitute the trilogy of symphonic poems for which Respighi is best known. Perhaps because these works were favorites of Italy’s bombastic dictator Benito Mussolini, it became fashionable to criticize Respighi for letting “picturesque colorfulness spill over into a flamboyant garishness that seems aimed primarily at lovers of orchestral showpieces.” (Grove Music) However, there seems little evidence that he was sympathetic to Mussolini’s politics. Rather, “the unworldly Respighi was probably, in truth, more influenced…by a simple, child-like delight in the kaleidoscopic riches of a modern orchestra than by the pageantry of fascism.” (Grove Music) In works drawn from older sources, Respighi’s style was more elegant. A sympathetic reviewer argues that his “deep love of ancient Italian and medieval church music not only focused interest on these genres but it also inspired some of his most refined and appealing masterpieces like: Ancient Airs and Dances, The Birds [based on baroque pieces imitating birdsong], the Three Botticelli Pictures and the Concerto Gregoriano.” (Ian Lace) The three sets of Antiche danze et arie per liuto (Ancient Airs and Dances) date from 1917, 1924, and 1932. They draw directly from love songs and dances of the late Renaissance, most of them transcribed from lute tablature.

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