American Composers Festival 2014
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AMERICAN COMPOSERS FESTIVAL 2014: FROM SCREEN PACIFIC SYMPHONY’S PACIFIC TO SCORE MAY 8, 9, 10 classical series SEGERSTROM CENTER FOR THE ARTS Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall Concerts begin at 8 p.m. Preview talk with Alan Chapman begins at 7 p.m. presents 2013-2014 HAL & JEANETTE SEGERSTROM FAMILY FOUNDATION CLASSICAL SERIES CARL ST.CLAIR • conductor | SOPHIE SHAO • cEllo RICHARD GUÉRIN • curator JOHN WILLIAMS Tributes! For Seiji (b. 1932) HOWARD SHORE Mythic Gardens for Cello and Orchestra (b. 1946) WEST COAST PREMIERE Sophie Shao INTERMISSION JAMES HORNER Flight — CONCERT PREMIERE (b. 1953) ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL Symphony in G-sharp Minor — WORLD PREMIERE (b. 1954) The 2014 American Composers Festival is supported by PACIFIC SYMPHONY PROUDLY RECOGNIZES ITS OFFICIAL PARTNERS Official Airline Official Hotel Official Television Station Media Partner The Saturday, May 10, performance is being recorded for broadcast on sunday, July 27, 2014, at 7 p.m. on Kusc, the official classical radio station of Pacific Symphony. 6 • Pacific Symphony NOTES from the composers About John Williams In a career that spans five decades, John Williams has become one of America’s most accomplished composers for film and the concert stage. He has served as music director and laureate conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and he maintains thriving artistic relationships with many of the world’s great orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He also holds the title of artist-in-residence at Tanglewood. Williams has received a variety of prestigious awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honor, and the Olympic Order, as well as five Academy Awards and 48 Oscar nominations. He also has received seven British Academy Awards (BAFTA), 21 Grammys, four Golden IAMS Globes, five Emmys and numerous gold and platinum records. LL Williams has composed the music and served as music director I for more than 100 films. His 40-year artistic partnership with W director Steven Spielberg has resulted in many of Hollywood’s most acclaimed and successful films, includingSchindler’s List, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters OHN of the Third Kind, the Indiana Jones films, Saving Private Ryan, J (b. 1932) Amistad, Munich, Hook, Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Empire of the Sun, The Adventures of TinTin, Tributes! For Seiji War Horse and Lincoln. Williams composed the scores for all six Instrumentation: 3 flutes (second and third doubling on piccolo), 3 oboes Star Wars films, the first threeHarry Potter films,Superman, JFK, (third doubling on english horn), 2 clarinets, e-flat clarinet doubling on Born on the Fourth of July, Memoirs of a Geisha, Far and Away, The bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (third doubling on contrabassoon), 5 horns, 3 Accidental Tourist, Home Alone, Nixon, The Patriot, Angela’s Ashes, trumpets, 3 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, 5 percussion, harp, Seven Years in Tibet, The Witches of Eastwick, Rosewood, Sleepers, piano, celesta, strings Sabrina, Presumed Innocent, The Cowboys, The Reivers and Goodbye, Performance time: 10 minutes Mr. Chips among many others. Williams has also composed numerous works for the concert stage, ributes! For Seiji is a collection of musical thoughts and among them two symphonies, and concertos for flute, violin, clarinet, jottings that form a kind of Festschrift for orchestra, written viola, oboe and tuba. Williams also has filled commissions by for Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra as they t several of the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York celebrated 25 years of artistic collaboration. These jottings also form Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and little portraits of just a few of the great soloists in the orchestra’s the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. ranks, and at other moments, sketches of entire sectional groups. I’ve attempted to “freeze-frame” some of the wonderful sonorities the Williams has composed music for many important cultural and orchestra produces that are among my personal favorites. commemorative events. Liberty Fanfare was composed for the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. His orchestral work The piece is based on the interval of a major second, which, like its Soundings was performed at the celebratory opening of Walt sister interval the seventh, has to be constantly tuned and retuned Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. In the world of sport, he has in performance, according to its modal and harmonic context. contributed musical themes for the 1984, 1988 and 1996 Summer Musicians make adjustments intuitively, and the tuning of this small Olympic Games, the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, and the 1987 interval is one of the great secrets of good orchestral intonation, International Summer Games of the Special Olympics. In 2006, which is in turn a major prerequisite to making a beautiful sound. Williams composed the theme for NBC’s presentation of NFL The piece opens with a sonorous brass intoning a low D, which in Football. my mind is a kind of signature pitch level of the Boston Symphony Williams holds honorary degrees from 21 American universities, as its sound resonates with the empathetic and all-knowing walls including The Juilliard School, Boston College, Northeastern of Symphony Hall. The strings then sound the secundal E and we university, tufts university, Boston university, the new England proceed from there, as a five-note melodicidée fixe carries us along. conservatory of music, the university of massachusetts at Boston, I’ve dedicated all of this to Seiji, who has not only led the orchestra The Eastman School of Music, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music but has tended and nourished it through these many years, thus and the university of southern california. preserving and invigorating a great tradition. These few notes are but a small tribute to Seiji and the great Boston heritage we all so rightly treasure. — John Williams Pacific Symphony • 7 NOTES awards. Shore was one of the original creators of Saturday Night Live. He served as the music director on the show from 1975 to 1980. At the same time, he began collaborating with David Cronenberg and has scored 15 of the director’s films, including the forthcoming Maps to the Stars, The Fly, Crash and Naked Lunch. His original scores to A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises and Dead Ringers were each honored with a Genie Award, and Cosmopolis was awarded for score and song “Long to Live” with Canadian Screen Awards. Shore continues to distinguish himself with a wide range of projects, from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, The Departed, The Aviator and Gangs of New York to Ed Wood, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia and Mrs. Doubtfire. Shore’s music has been performed in concerts throughout the world. HORE In 2003, Shore conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings Symphony in S Wellington. Since then, the Symphony and The Lord of the Rings – Live to Projection concerts have had over 335 performances by the world’s most prestigious orchestras. In 2008, Howard Shore’s opera The Fly premiered at the Théâtre OWARD du Châtelet in Paris and at Los Angeles Opera and just completed H (b. 1946) a successful run at Theatre Trier in Germany. Other recent works include the piano concerto Ruin and Memory for Lang Lang which Mythic Gardens for Cello and Orchestra premiered with the China Philharmonic Orchestra on October 11, WEST COAST PREMIERE 2010, the cello concerto Mythic Gardens for Sophie Shao which Instrumentation: : 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, premiered with the American Symphony Orchestra on April 27, harp, strings, solo cello 2012 and Fanfare for the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia. He is Performance time: 20 minutes currently working the score for the third film ofThe Hobbit trilogy. his work, written for Sophie Shao, was inspired by the Shore received the Career Achievement for Music Composition architecture of three classic Italian Gardens: Cimbrone, Award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Medici and Visconti Borromeo Litta. Mythic Gardens is a New York Chapter’s Recording Academy Honors, ASCAP’s Henry t Mancini Award, the Frederick Loewe Award and the Max Steiner companion piece for the piano concerto I wrote for Lang Lang, Ruin and Memory. Award from the city of Vienna. He holds honorary doctorates from Berklee college of music and york university, he is an officier de Growing up in Canada, I spent many summers in Northern Ontario. l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la France and the recipient of the The surrounding natural beauty of the area was and remains a great Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in Canada. inspiration. I believe that it is through this love of nature that I was able to connect so well to Tolkien’s work. The natural world influences the form of my compositions when writing for the concert Flight stage as well. However, it is the incredible musicians themselves, such as Sophie Shao, whose artistry is always at the center of my Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, creativity when composing. 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, 3 percussion, 2 harp, 2 pianos, strings I first met Sophie when she recorded several cello solos and duets Performance time: 12 minutes that I composed for the score to the documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon). Mythic Gardens was composed specifically for Sophie light was originally conceived and written as an orchestral through a generous gift from Linda and Stuart Nelson and was piece to be used as the background music for a live aerobatic commissioned by the American Symphony Orchestra.