PROGRAM NOTES Classics 3 Downtown Dubuque LISTEN HERE
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SAT Apr 10 at 2:00pm SAT Apr 10 at 7:30pm WILLIAM INTRILIGATOR, Music Director & Conductor SUN Apr 11 at 2:00pm Five Flags Theater PROGRAM NOTES Classics 3 Downtown Dubuque LISTEN HERE https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3vrspI8XT4KFZZyVsp8pfb?si=3177e021bc694176 Grande Tarantelle, opus 67 Arranged by Matthew Coley The flamboyant piano virtuoso and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk was the first American composer to make a big splash in Europe as well as throughout the Western Hemisphere. Born in New Orleans, he was so precociously musical that at age seven he was deputizing for his teacher as organist for the city’s St. Louis Cathedral. At 13, he was sent to Paris for more advanced training, but Pierre Zimmermann, the head of the piano department at the famed Paris Conservatoire, refused to let him audition Louis Moreau Gottschalk because of his prejudice against Americans. Nevertheless, Gottschalk managed to study b. 1829, New Orleans, LA; with prominent Parisian teachers and at age 15 gave a piano recital at the city’s renowned d. 1869, Tijuca, Brazil Salle Pleyel, which made him an instant sensation. In the audience was Chopin, who was so excited by Gottschalk’s talent he predicted the teenager would become the “king of pianists.” Before he was 20, Gottschalk also became celebrated as a composer; his exotic pieces, inspired by the creole music he’d known in New Orleans, were eagerly gobbled up in Spain and Switzerland as well as in France. In 1853, Gottschalk arrived back in the U.S. and endeavored to repeat his success in New York City. But finding it more difficult to establish himself in his native land, he moved on to the Caribbean, where he toured extensively, absorbed new influences from Latin American and African-creole dances and rhythms, and composed prolifically, especially for his own instrument. When he finally returned to America in 1862, despite the Civil War raging and the arduous travel conditions, he covered 15, 000 miles by rail and gave 85 recitals in just four months. However, a sexual scandal in California in 1865 caused him to flee the country for good. After living in several South American cities, Gottschalk came to Rio de Janeiro in 1869 and continued his frenetic pace of concertizing there. But by the end of the year, he fell ill, probably with yellow fever, and died outside the city on December 18th, age only 40. Gottschalk’s Grande Tarantelle was composed in 1868 during his South American period. The tarantella is a vivacious leaping dance that originated in southern Italy and has been adopted by composers of all nationalities. Gottschalk’s brilliantly virtuosic version was designed to display his formidable technique and showmanship at the piano, but we will hear it in an arrangement by Matthew Coley for the Heartland Marimba Quartet. A Ragtime Medley (The Cascades, The Easy Winners, Elite Syncopation, The Entertainer, Maple Leaf Rag, and Solace) Arranged by Matthew Coley At the turn of the 20th century and through World War I, a vivacious new musical style known as “ragtime” was the most popular music in America. It had evolved from the “ragged time” playing of itinerant black pianists who performed in the bars and brothels of the fast-growing cities and towns along the Mississippi River. The term “ragged time” referred Scott Joplin to the snappy syncopated rhythms that sounded so refreshingly lively and exotic to white b. 1868, Texarkana, Texas; Americans. In fact, these exhilarating piano rags were the precursor to jazz. d. 1917, New York City Known as the “King of Ragtime,” Scott Joplin, the son of a freed slave, was the greatest of the ragtime composers, and he had ambitious dreams of carrying his ragtime syncopations into the concert hall and the opera house. Little is known about his early musical training, but by the age of 16 or 17, he had left home to work as a pianist in St. Louis. The publication of his Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 made him famous throughout the nation and soon in Europe as well. Dozens of other piano rags followed, including such hits as The Easy Winners, Pine Apple Rag, and The Entertainer (famously used in the 1974 movie The Sting). Moving on to New York City, Joplin began composing more extended works intended for the concert hall. At his premature death in 1917 at age 48, he was working on a ragtime symphony and struggling feverishly to have his opera Treemonisha mounted on stage. But the vogue for ragtime had now passed, and Treemonisha would not be produced by an opera company until the 1970s. For decades, ragtime music was virtually forgotten except by a small coterie of musicians. In the early 1970s, composer Günther Schuller, at the time the president of Boston’s New England Conservatory, set the ragtime revival in motion. Schuller had been an active jazz musician, and now he founded the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble to perform orchestrations of Joplin rags discovered in a 1909 publication The Red Back Book. A recording followed, which became a bestseller and received a Grammy Award. At last, Scott Joplin was hailed as a major American creative pioneer, a status he never quite achieved in a lifetime of struggling against prejudice. We will hear a medley of Joplin’s piano rags (The Cascades, The Easy Winners, Elite Syncopation, The Entertainer, Maple Leaf Rag, and Solace) transformed, once again, by Matthew Coley for the Heartland Marimba Quartet. Symphony No. 1 in G Major, opus 11, no. 1 Composer, virtuoso violinist, renowned orchestral leader, expert swordsman, and swashbuckling courtier, Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was one of the most extraordinary figures in late 18th-century France. The son of an African slave and a white plantation owner in Guadeloupe, he was brought to France when he was about ten and raised by his prominent father to be a gentleman. As a young man, Saint-Georges became famous for his championship fencing skills, but his musical talents soon surpassed that. The esteemed composer and conductor François- Joseph Bologne, Joseph Gossec took him under his wing for composition lessons and engaged him as a Chevalier de Saint-Georges violinist in the Concert des Amateurs, one of Paris’ finest orchestras. b. 1745, Basse Terre, Guadeloupe; A portrait of Saint-Georges in his maturity — elegantly dressed and brandishing the d. 1799, Paris, France sword he wielded so skillfully — shows him to have been a handsome man, with light- brown skin, striking dark eyes, and sensuous, well-molded features. By 1772, he emerged as a charismatic soloist, introducing his first two violin concertos with Paris’ Concert des Amateurs. Those concertos bear witness to his virtuoso skills, but a friend, Louise Fusil, praised his expressivity of his playing as a more important gift. When Gossec relinquished his leadership of the Concert the following year, Saint-Georges became his successor while continuing to compose for the orchestra and his solo performances. Enraptured French audiences called him “Le Mozart Noir” — “The Black Mozart.” Indeed, during the late 1770s when Mozart was living in Paris, the two became fast friends. On today’s concert, we will hear Saint-Georges’ Symphony No. 1 in G Major, written in 1779 and scored for a string orchestra brightened by pairs of oboes and horns. In three movements, it impresses with its gossamer beauty, subtle rhythmic play, and impetuous energy. The opening sonata-form Allegro unfolds with impatient speed, driven by relentlessly marching staccato notes. But this music also finds time for a gracious, spinning second theme. In the development section, Saint-Georges stirs considerable drama, including excursions into the minor mode, into his high-spirited mix. Evoking the atmosphere of the elegant aristocratic soirées at which Saint-Georges was a frequent guest, the Andante second movement in D Major glistens and chirps like an ornamental French clock. Mimicking society beauties fluttering around a ballroom, the first violins float exquisitely above a ticking accompaniment in second violins and violas. The Allegro assai finale, another sonata form, returns to the home key of G Major for music that mingles relaxed loveliness with bold declamations from the full orchestra. The torrents of fast notes in the violins show us the virtuosity that made the Chevalier such a sought-after soloist at the French court. Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major The most popular and probably the finest of Schubert’s first six symphonies, the Fifth Symphony in B-flat Major was written in the fall of 1816 when the 19-year-old composer had just received a discouraging professional setback. After earning a solid musical education under such masters as Antonio Salieri (of Amadeus fame) at the Stadtkonvikt, Vienna’s highly respected City Seminary, in 1815 Schubert found himself back where he’d started —in his father’s grammar school in the family home teaching young children their ABC’s six days a week. Seeking a post that would make better use of his education if not his genius, Schubert applied in spring 1816 to be a music teacher at a training college in Franz Schubert b. 1797, Vienna, Austria; Laibach. Despite a warm testimonial from Salieri, that September he learned he had been d. 1828, Vienna turned down for the job. And yet not a trace of the discouragement and fatigue Schubert must have been feeling can be found in this effervescent symphony reveling in the sheer joy of music. Perhaps more than any other composer, Schubert lived solely in and for his music. And so despite a grinding teaching schedule, the years 1815 and 1816 were among the richest of his extraordinarily prolific creative life.