Bruckner Orchester Linz

Bruckner Orchester Linz Dennis Russell Davies Conductor Martin Achrainer / Bass-Baritone Angélique Kidjo / Vocals Thursday Evening, February 2, 2017 at 7:30 Hill Auditorium Ann Arbor 35th Performance of the 138th Annual Season 138th Annual Choral Union Series Tonight’s presenting sponsor is Michigan Medicine. Tonight’s supporting sponsor is the H. Gardner and Bonnie Ackley Endowment Fund. Media partnership provided by WGTE 91.3 FM, WRCJ 90.9 FM, Ann Arbor’s 107one, and WDET 101.9 FM. Special thanks to Tom Thompson of Tom Thompson Flowers, Ann Arbor, for his generous contribution of lobby floral art for this evening’s performance. The Bruckner Orchester Linz is the Philharmonic Orchestra of the State of Upper Austria, represented by Governor Dr. Josef Puehringer. The Bruckner Orchester Linz is supported by presto – friends of Bruckner Orchester. Bruckner Orchester Linz appears by arrangement with Columbia Artists Management, Inc. Angélique Kidjo appears by arrangement with Red Light Management. In consideration of the artists and the audience, please refrain from the use of electronic devices during the performance. The photography, sound recording, or videotaping of this performance is prohibited. PROGRAM George Gershwin, Arr. Morton Gould Porgy and Bess Suite Alexander Zemlinsky Symphonische Gesänge, Op. 20 Song from Dixieland Song of the Cotton Packer A Brown Girl Dead Bad Man Disillusion African Dance Arabesque Mr. Achrainer Intermission Duke Ellington, Arr. Maurice Peress Suite from Black, Brown, and Beige Black Brown Beige Philip Glass Ifè: Three Yorùbá Songs Olodumare Yemandja Oshumare Ms. Kidjo 3 PORGY AND BESS SUITE (1935, ARRANGED IN 1955) George Gershwin Born September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York Died July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California Arr. Morton Gould Born December 10, 1913 in Richmond Hill, New York Died February 21, 1996 in Orlando, Florida UMS premiere: This piece has never been performed on a UMS concert. Snapshots of History…In 1955: · Marian Anderson is the first African-American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera · Jim Henson builds the first version of Kermit the frog · The Detroit Red Wings win the Stanley Cup for the seventh time in franchise history George Gershwin was 11 when his Broadway tunes like the many he family first brought a piano into their completed by age 30, even though apartment. Four years later, after those talents were enough to make some lessons in classical repertoire him rich and famous. When he set including Chopin and Debussy, himself the challenge of writing an Gershwin dropped out of high school opera based on DuBose Heyward’s and found work as a “song plugger” novella Porgy, he began a patient on Tin Pan Alley, New York’s row of and deliberate search for the musical music publishing firms. He began to language that would drive the score. write his own songs, signed on with As he explained in a 1935 article in a publisher, and gravitated toward The New York Times, “Because Porgy Broadway, finding work as a rehearsal and Bess deals with Negro life in pianist on a Jerome Kern show. America…I have adapted my method Gershwin’s first Broadway production to utilize the drama, the humor, the opened in 1919, and the influential superstition, the religious fervor, the performer Al Jolson added Gershwin’s dancing, and irrepressible high spirits Swanee to a revue that year. Jolson’s of the race.” But he also knew that recording of Swanee sold millions of this was a new operatic creation, not copies in 1920 and put Gershwin on a folk mash-up, so he made a key the map as a top songwriter. decision: “When I first began work on Gershwin never stopped stretching the music I decided against the use of himself in his unfairly short life; he did original folk material because I wanted not settle into the breezy patchwork the music all to be of one piece. style of Rhapsody in Blue, written Therefore I wrote my own spirituals at age 25, nor simply churn out hit and folksongs.” 4 Dubose Heyward and his wife, Now,” “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin,” “Bess, Dorothy, had already adapted Porgy You is My Woman Now,” “Oh, I Can’t into a play, which they reworked Sit Down,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” into the Porgy and Bess libretto. “I Loves You, Porgy,” “There’s a Boat (Gershwin’s brother and longtime Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York,” and songwriting partner, Ira, also “I’m On My Way.” contributed some lyrics). Gershwin worked on the music in 1934, and he even made a trip to South Carolina to see for himself the kind of waterfront community he was trying to capture in the opera’s fictional location of Catfish Row. Porgy and Bess, an American opera like no other, opened on Broadway in 1935 with a cast of all African-American singers. Not even two years later, its composer died in Hollywood, felled by brain cancer at the age of 38. Morton Gould, another American composer with a penchant for blurring the lines between “popular” and “serious” music, arranged the Porgy and Bess Suite heard here for a 1956 recording released by RCA Victor. This version is less familiar than the glossier arrangement known as Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture, made in 1942 by Robert Russell Bennett; Gould preserved more of Gershwin’s orchestration, and he kept his excerpts in the same sequence that they appear in the opera. The suite, comprising some 30 minutes of uninterrupted music, presents instrumental versions of the most famous melodies stitched together with linking material that stays true to the sound of Gershwin’s interludes. After the brassy overture that depicts a bustling waterfront during the day, the suite continues with the languid lullaby “Summertime” and goes on to sample these highlights: “A Woman is a Sometime Thing,” “My Man’s Gone 5 SYMPHONISCHE GESÄNGE (SYMPHONIC SONGS), OP. 20 (1929) Alexander Zemlinsky Born October 14, 1871 in Vienna Died March 15, 1942 in Larchmont, New York UMS premiere: This piece has never been performed on a UMS concert. Snapshots of History…In 1929: · The first public demonstration of color TV is held, by H.E. Ives and his colleagues at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York · In New York City, the Museum of Modern Art opens to the public · Karl Benz, the creator of the first automobile, dies Alexander Zemlinsky, a key figure in memory of his late wife, Ida. Vienna around the turn of the 20th Zemlinsky extracted the texts for his century, has long been overshadowed orchestral song cycle from an anthology by his more radical students. A published in Vienna in 1929 under the composer who earned praise from title Africa Sings: A Collection of New both Brahms and Mahler, Zemlinsky African-American Poetry. The songs briefly coached his friend and future use German translations of poems brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg — by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, the only formal training ever received Countee Cullen, and Frank Smith by the leader of the “Second Viennese Horne, four African-American men School.” Schoenberg’s two chief whose works helped define the Harlem disciples, Webern and Berg, also Renaissance in the years between the attended Zemlinsky’s orchestration two world wars. Zemlinsky was not class; meanwhile Zemlinsky became interested in mimicking American jazz infatuated with one of his female sounds in his score (a trend that was students, Alma Schindler, but she sweeping Europe at the time), but he married Mahler instead. did add a mandolin to his orchestration, Surrounded by musical lending certain passages the kind revolutionaries, Zemlinsky opted of jangly rhythmic drive that would for a more conservative path, one normally come from a banjo or guitar. rooted in Brahms’ organic approach The cycle begins with “Song from to tonal development and Mahler’s Dixieland” (from a Langston Hughes saturated palette of orchestral colors. poem originally titled “Song for a Dark Zemlinsky’s success as a conductor Girl”), a haunting scene set at the site of pushed composing to the margins of a lynching. The second number, “Song his life, but the music he did create of the Cotton Packer,” features tense, was of exceptional quality, like the brooding music that gives this work Symphonische Gesänge (Symphonic song a menacing edge. “A Brown Girl Songs) he composed in 1929 in Dead” evokes another painful vignette, 6 in which a “Dark Madonna” is laid out for burial in a white dress. “Bad Man” veers toward a more callous, devil-may-care posture for the moment, but then another Hughes text, “Disillusion,” makes a plaintive plea to “be simple again” so as to erase the pain. The last Hughes selection, “African Dance,” evokes the low, slow beating of the tom-toms during a seductive nighttime dance. The cycle ends with the cutting irony of “Arabesque,” describing the innocent play of a white girl and a black boy in Georgia under the dangling body of a lynched man. TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS Song from Dixieland Lied aus Dixieland Text by Langston Hughes Translation by Josef Luitpold Way Down South in Dixie Weit unten, im Süden, in Dixieland, (Break the heart of me) o brich, mein Herz, o brich! They hung my black young lover Sie haben an einen Baum dich gehängt, To a cross roads tree. o Ärmster, Liebster, dich! Way Down South in Dixie Weit unten, im Süden, in Dixieland, (Bruised body high in air) zermalmt, vom Wind umweht! I asked the white Lord Jesus Und ich hab den weißen Herrn Jesus gefragt: What was the use of prayer? Wozu, wozu noch das Gebet? Way Down South in Dixie Weit unten, im Süden, in Dixieland, (Break the heart of me) ich leb’, ich atme kaum.

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