Sunday, March 31 | 2:30 Monday, April 1 | 7:30

El amor brujo, Clearfi eld, and the Guitar Classical Conversations Post-Concert Q&A Sunday, March 31

Please join Maestro Dirk Brossé and Jordan Dodson for an informal and informative Q&A session following the matinée in the Perelman Theater. Concerts & Cocktails Post-Concert Mixer Monday, April 1

Join us after our Monday evening performances at the Kimmel Center Encore Bar for Concert & Cocktails, where you can mingle and get to know the Chamber Orchestra over drinks.

PROGRAM

Manuel de Falla Suite I. Introduction & Scene VIII. Scene III. The Ghost X. Pantomime IV. Dance of Terror VI. Midnight V. The Magic Circle VII. Ritual of Fire Dance

Heitor Villa-Lobos for Guitar I. Allegro preciso II. Andantino e andante III. Alegretto non troppo – Vivo

Intermission Habanera

Steven Gerber Homage to Dvořák from Spirituals for String Orchestra

Jordan Dodson Interlude for solo Electric Guitar

Andrea Clearfi eld -in-Residence GLOW* for Electric Guitar and Chamber Orchestra I. SING II. STREAK III. GLOW

* World Premiere ORCHESTRA Violin 1 Bassoon Meichen Liao-Barnes, Acting Concertmaster Michelle Rosen, Principal Luigi Mazzocchi, Acting Assoc. Concertmaster Igor Szwec French Horn Joseph Kau man John David Smith, Principal Alexandra Cutler-Fetkewicz Lyndsie Wilson Natalie Rudoi DaSilva Trumpet Rodney Marsalis Violin 2 , Principal Elizabeth Kaderabek, Acting Principal Brian Kuszyk Guillaume Combet Donna Grantham Trombone Catherine Kei Fukuda Bradley Ward, Principal Lisa Vaupel Timpani William Wozniak Viola , Principal Matthew Cohen, Acting Principal Yoshihiko Nakano Percussion Kathleen Foster Barry Dove, Principal Alexandr Kislitsyn Piano Matthew Brower, Principal Cello Glenn Fischbach, Acting Principal Elizabeth  ompson Branson Yeast

Bass Miles B. Davis, Principal Anne Peterson

Flute Edward Shultz, Principal Frances Tate

Oboe Geo rey Deemer, Principal

Clarinet Rié Suzuki, Principal Robert Huebner PROGRAM NOTES El amor brujo Bassoon Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) Michelle Rosen, Principal Manuel de Falla was the most highly regarded Spanish composer of the French Horn early 20th century. His music was infl uenced by both impressionism (he John David Smith, Principal spent seven years in Paris, where he was befriended by Debussy, Ravel and Dukas) and Stravinsky’s , but the greatest infl uences were the Lyndsie Wilson angular rhythms and sinuous melodies of traditional gypsy and fl amenco music. He was not a prolifi c composer, but the years around World War Trumpet I were his most productive and saw his most popular pieces, including Rodney Marsalis, Principal the 1914 Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of ) and the 1917 comic ballet El sombrero de tres picos (The Three- Brian Kuszyk Cornered Hat), which was produced by Diaghilev with sets and costumes designed by Picasso. He began a collaboration with poet and playwright Trombone Federico García Lorca to collect fl amenco song and in 1922 organized the Bradley Ward, Principal El Concurso de (The Contest of the Deep Song), a two-day music festival that celebrated the art of fl amenco. Timpani El amor brujo (Love, the Magician) was commissioned in 1914 by the William Wozniak, Principal famous gypsy fl amenco dancer , with a scenario based on stories supplied by her mother. Falla created an expanded fl amenco, Percussion with the traditional dancing and singing augmented by actors, narration, and a small pit band. It premiered to mixed reviews in 1915, and Falla Barry Dove, Principal immediately began tinkering with the production. He felt the music was constrained by the small pit band so he expanded the ensemble, Piano removed the dialogue and narration, and cut most of the songs for a more Matthew Brower, Principal successful 1916 version. In 1924, he again expanded the orchestration and rearranged the music to create a one-act fl amenco ballet, which has become the version most often heard today. The score is atmospheric and evocative, ominous, frenetic and serene by turns, capturing both the spirit and folkloric quality of the story, and is one of Falla’s masterpieces. In the story, the young woman Candelas is haunted by the ghost of her former lover, who was both faithless and jealous in life, and he makes her dance with him every night (Dance of Terror). This poses a serious impediment to her budding romance with Carmelo. She attempts to break the spell with magic, but even a protective dance () proves ineffective. Carmelo persuades the gypsy girl Lucia, who once had an affair with the lover, to intervene, and when the ghost appears, Lucia begins to fl irt with the spectre. He has a roving eye in death as in life, and dances off with Lucia (Dance of the Game of Love). Carmelo and Candelas are fi nally able to share the kiss of love which breaks the spell, proving that love is indeed the most powerful magic of all.

Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) The life of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was as colorful as his music, at least in his retelling. His father was an avid amateur musician who regularly hosted sessions at his house, took his son to the and theater and taught him cello and clarinet. This tutelage came to an abrupt end when his father suddenly died of malaria. The young Villa- Lobos helped support the family by playing cello in theater orchestras. He had learned guitar and honed his skills jamming in chôros, improvisational music played by street musicians. At 18, he began traveling throughout Brazil, studying and collecting local music. His stories of taking a boat alone up the Amazon and barely escaping a cannibal tribe may be somewhat embellished, but he returned to Rio in 1912 with a deep appreciation for the unique mélange of Amerindian, African and Portuguese influences that is Brazilian music. Despite being completely self-trained, Villa-Lobos began composing music ranging from piano and chamber works to symphonies and ballets at a furious pace, in a style heavily flavored with Brazilian rhythms and melodies. His music was not particularly well received, but he soon gained a reputation a leading avant-garde composer. In 1923, he traveled to Paris, not to study but to present his own music. The French adored his exotic style, and his music was widely performed and published. He made important contacts. Stokowski programmed his music in Philadelphia and New York. The Spanish guitar virtuoso Segovia asked Villa-Lobos to compose an etude for him. He responded with an extraordinary set of 12 etudes whose wealth of musical invention and technical difficulty have made them a significant part of the guitar literature. In 1951, Villa-Lobos composed a three-movement Fantasia concertante for guitar and orchestra and dedicated it to Segovia. As the story goes, Segovia was reluctant to perform it because it did not contain a cadenza to showcase his virtuosity. Villa-Lobos finally capitulated and provided a cadenza in 1955, placing it as a separate movement and renaming the work Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra. Stokowski had taken up the music directorship of the Houston Symphony, and he invited Villa-Lobos to conduct a concert of his works, including the Guitar Concerto with Segovia as soloist, and the work was finally premiered in February, 1956. Villa-Lobos scored the concerto for a small orchestra so its sonorities would balance that of the solo instrument. There is a flavor of Bach in much of the writing, with sharp, syncopated Brazilian rhythms alternating with atmospheric, chorale-like melodies supported by rapid scales and arpeggios, as if Villa-Lobos were looking back to his most popular compositions, the Bachianas Brasileiras. The three original movements unfold in a traditional concerto format, despite the Fantasia title, the first two in a quasi ABA pattern and the third with a theme that repeats in a series of modulations. The interpolated cadenza is written in four sections, each suggestive tempo markings (quasi allegro, andante, quasi allegro and poco moderato) but no barlines, providing flexibility of expression for the soloist. If the cadenza movement looks back at all, it is to his ferocious 1929 Etudes, and is brilliant enough that it is sometimes excerpted as a recital piece.

Habanera Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) There was an unusual interest in Spanish music among French of the late 19th century: Lalo’s 1874 Symphonie Espagnole, Bizet’s 1875 Carmen, with its sensuous Habanera and Seguidilla arias, Saint-Saëns’ 1887 Havanaise. But the most popular by far was Emmanuel Chabrier’s signature work, the lively, ebullient rhapsody España. Despite a late start as a composer, Chabrier wrote a substantial amount of orchestral and piano music, songs and even a dozen or operettas, and his colorful, innovative style and idiosyncratic orchestrations influenced generations of French composers well into the 20th century. Chabrier started piano lessons at six and began composing by eight. Although his teachers felt he was talented enough to pursue a musical career, his father insisted he should study law. Chabrier continued private lessons in piano, violin and composition while he was at law school, and joined the Ministry of the Interior upon graduation in 1861. By the 1870’s he had begun to receive some recognition as a composer – two operas were produced and Saint-Saëns played some of his piano music in concert. It was after a pilgrimage to Munich in 1880 to see Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that he decided to leave the Ministry and devote himself full-time to composition. In 1882, Chabrier and his wife went on an extended vacation in Spain, and he returned with a notebook full of melodies he had transcribed. The first fruit of this trip was España, which was premiered to enormous success in 1883 and established his reputation as a composer. He wrote the languid, sultry Habanera as a piano piece two years later and produced an orchestral version in 1888. It also proved quite popular and became a frequently used encore piece. As the name habanera (“from Havana”) suggests, it originated in Cuba, a blending of the European contradance with syncopated African rhythms. It is in 2/4 time, constructed on a rhythmic cell with a dotted eighth-sixteenth- eighth-eighth note motif. Chabrier sets the melody to a variation of that rhythm, with the dotted eighth-sixteenth becoming a triplet, an effect which softens the hard edges of the syncopation but creates its own tension when set against the underlying duple meter. While the melodic rhythm remains unchanged throughout the piece, Chabrier continually tinkers with the habañera motif, shortening or removing notes and moving accents around. It is the interplay between these two contrasting rhythms underlying a relatively simple melody that makes Habanera such a distinctive work.

Homage to Dvořák from Spirituals for string orchestra Steven R. Gerber (1948-2015) Steven R. Gerber had several ties to the Philadelphia area. He completed his undergraduate studies at Haverford College, which now houses his papers, and did his graduate studies at Princeton University. The Steven R. Gerber Trust, created after his death, funds a number of musical projects, including the Chamber Orchestra’s composer-in-residence program. Gerber describes his early music as freely atonal, but he always found the demands of serial music restricting and his compositions became increasingly tonal, although liberally seasoned with thick, crunchy chords and dissonant moments. His 2000 Spirituals consists of ten numbers which were inspired in some way by African-American spirituals. In his notes, Gerber says they are “not arrangements, but new works inspired by the original songs. My intent was neither to deconstruct the original material or treat it ironically, but simply to pay homage to its beauty by creating new compositions out of it.” The first number, Homage to Dvořák, is the longest and most expansive of the ten. He uses the famous theme from the Largo of Dvořák’s 1893 Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”, weaving fragments of the melody and rhythm into a richly textured, somewhat elegiac piece. The choice of the Dvořák music honors a sort of reverse spiritual. The melody is Dvořák’s own, written in the style of a spiritual, and was only set to words in 1922 by William Arms Fisher to create the popular spiritual Goin’ Home. Dvořák had come to America in 1892 to head the National Conservatory of Music in New York and was introduced to African- American spirituals by chance when he heard one of his students, Harry T. Burleigh, singing in the hallway. Dvořák had an exceptional ability to write authentic-sounding music in the style and spirit of indigenous music, something he had already demonstrated with the Slavonic and Czech- inflected music of his earlier compositions. Burleigh became his assistant, helping with copying out the “New World” Symphony, and would later have a distinguished career as a baritone recitalist and a composer best known for his intricate choral settings of spirituals.

GLOW Andrea Clearfield (b. 1960) The electric guitar has a uniquely American heritage, invented in America and originally popularized by blues, jazz and country musicians. The first truly electric guitar was commercialized in 1931, and the modern solid core instrument was invented by guitarist Les Paul in the early 1940’s. In the acoustic instruments featured in this concert series, the vibrations of the strings are transferred to a sound board mounted over a resonating chamber, and the characteristic sound of the instrument is largely determined by its construction. In an electric guitar, the vibrations of the strings directly create an electronic signal which is amplified and sent through a speaker. Because the signal is electronic, it can readily be modified to create many different timbres and sounds, and the development of digital signal processing allowed many effects that formerly required studio post processing to be created in real time, providing a very sonically rich concert experience. Chamber Orchestra Composer-in-Residence Andrea Clearfield has provided the following program notes: “The inspiration for this concerto, GLOW, arose from “color”. I was initially inspired by the artwork of painter Eva Darrington in her Color Field series and a quote by Wassily Kandinsky, ‘I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and made them sing with all the intensity I could.’ I wanted to explore the wide range of colors possible on the electric guitar, with its various pedals and sound effects.

“One will hear a range of electric guitar effects including delay, chorus, feedback, reverb, distortion, “whammy bar” tremolo as well as different textures created by vibrato, harmonics, bends, palm muting and the use of a violin bow and an Ebow. My own synesthesia also came into play, wherein I imagine colors when listening to musical pitches and hear notes to colors. I’ve had synesthesia as long as I can remember, and this neurological condition in which one sense stimulates another strongly influences the harmonies, pitch centers and emotional qualities of my music. Growing up with an artist mother, Louise Clearfield, I remember the vibrant colors in her studio, and would compose early works to her paintings. “Color” to me now represents not only visual colors but the overarching character or feeling of a work or movement. GLOW employs colorful harmonies, energetic rhythms, and rock-infused passages. For the latter, I reached back to the idiomatic sounds of the electric guitar during my early years playing keyboards in rock bands.

“The concerto has three movements. The first, “SING” features shifting chords under fluid guitar cantabile melodies and intimate soloistic passages in the orchestra based on a recurring interval of a descending fourth. The second, “STREAK”, begins with waves of harmonics and percussive strings, exploding into propulsive motion and incisive chordal punctuations. The last movement, “GLOW” is a modal landscape of undulating textures and melodies, slowly building to a climax and resolving in a coda of harmonics.

“This is my first work for electric guitar, and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with highly gifted soloist, Jordan Dodson, who generously made videos of effects on his guitar and played through sketches in progress. I am deeply grateful to the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Maestro Dirk Brossé and the American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter for awarding me the Steven R. Gerber Composer Residency and commissioning this work.”

Andrea Clearfield Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning composer of music for orchestra, opera, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations. Clearfield creates deep, emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges. She has been praised by the New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces”, the L.A. Times for her “fluid and glistening orchestration” and by Opera News for her “vivid and galvanizing” music of “timeless beauty”. Her works are performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. Among her 150 works are eleven large-scale cantatas including one commissioned and premiered by The Philadelphia Orchestra. Recent works are inspired by Tibetan music fieldwork that she conducted in the Nepalese Himalaya. Her first opera will be presented as a work-in-progress as part of the NYC Prototype Festival this January. She was appointed the Steven R. Gerber Composer in Residence with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia for their 2018-19 season. Clearfield was awarded a 2017 Independence Foundation Fellowship, a 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, Ucross, Wurlitzer Foundation, Copland House and the MacDowell Colony among others. Her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes, G. Schirmer, Hal Leonard and Seeadot and recorded on the Bridge, Sony, MSR, Albany, Crystal and Innova labels. Passionate for building community around the arts, she is founder and host of the renowned Salon featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music since 1986. As a performer she played keyboards with the Relâche Ensemble for 25 years and had the great honor of being invited to perform with the Court of the Dalai Lama in 1995. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Recording Academy/Grammy’s, Philadelphia Chapter. Jordan Dodson Performance Today describes classical guitarist Jordan Dodson as “one of the top young guitarists of his generation.” A winner of Astral’s 2013 National Auditions, he is an active soloist and chamber musician based in New York and Philadelphia. He has also received awards from the 2011 Lillian Fuchs Chamber Music Competition, the 2010 Indiana International Guitar Competition, and the 2008 American String Teachers Association Competition. In 2013, he was a Young Artist in Residence on American Public Media’s Performance Today. Mr. Dodson’s recent performance and teaching schedule has taken him across the U.S. and abroad to venues such as (Le) Poisson Rouge (New York City), Roulette (Brooklyn), the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), and the Museo Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá), and to such music festivals as the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and Festival Daniou (France). An advocate for contemporary music, Mr. Dodson has commissioned and premiered dozens of pieces internationally, including works by Lewis Nielson, Elliot Cole, Robert Sirota, and Gabriella Smith. He performs in several New York City chamber ensembles including Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, and Contemporaneous, and he recently collaborated with such acclaimed artists as the International Contemporary Ensemble, Anne-Marie McDermott, and Ransom Wilson. He can be heard on the album Subject on Tzadik Records. In the fall of 2011, Mr. Dodson was one of two students selected to inaugurate the Curtis Institute of Music’s classical guitar studio, bringing to the school not only a new instrument, but also new repertoire and new possibilities for music-making. Curtis Dean John Mangan said Dodson fulfilled the school’s need for “ambassadors for the instrument and its repertoire who could create interest among their peers, along with a desire to collaborate.” ​Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Jordan Dodson started playing music at a young age. He holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Cincinnati College- Conservatory of Music, and his teachers have included Clare Callahan, David Starobin, and Jason Vieaux. He plays a Gary Lee guitar. We say each year that we’re all in this together, and never have we meant it more. Ticket revenues represent just a small part of the cost of producing our concerts. For the remainder, we rely on support from individuals, foundations, business and government. And as you know, it is challenging for any arts organization to make ends meet. In fact, it gets harder every year.

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WATER PASSION AFTER ST. MATTHEW TAN DUN JUNE 27, 2019 – 8PM ANNENBERG CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

The Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia 2018/2019

mcchorus.org mozart’s linz symphony saint-saëns and the oud

Don’t miss the fi nal concert in our Migrations season!

Middle East Mozart’s Linz Symphony, Saint-Saëns, and the Oud Sunday, May 19 2019 | 2:30 Monday, May 20, 2019 | 7:30

Dirk Brossé, Conductor Simon Shaheen, Oud

Perelman Theater Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

For Tickets Call 215.545.1739 or visit chamberorchestra.org Simon Shaheen

Maestro Dirk Brossé brings our exploration of musical migrations around the world to its conclusion with renowned Oud player Simon Shaheen and Mozart’s incredible Linz Symphony, No. 36. Enjoy the balance of sound between this ancient Middle Eastern instrument and the similarly timeless elegance of core repertoire for which the Chamber Orchestra is known.