program notes

2020 - 2021 SEASON Celebrating 100 Years

Wilkins & Joshua Roman March 26 & 27 at 7:30 p.m. | Holland Performing Arts Center Thomas Wilkins, conductor (biography on pg. 4) Joshua Roman, cello (biography on pg. 5)

MALCOLM ARNOLD Four Scottish Dances, Op. 59 (1921-2006) 1. Pesante 2. Vivace 3. Allegretto 4. Con brio

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR Suite from the Ballet Music, Hiawatha, Op. 82a (1875-1912) 1. The Wooing 2. The Marriage Feast 3. Bird Scene 4. Conjuror’s Dance 5. The Departure 6. Reunion

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS No. 1 in A minor for (1835-1921) Violoncello & , Op. 33 I. II. Allegretto con moto III. Allegro non troppo

MAURICE RAVEL Suite (5 pièces enfantines) from (1875-1937) Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) 1. de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty) 2. Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb) 3. Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes (Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas) 4. Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) 5. Le Jardin féerique (The Enchanted Garden) program notes by Steven Lowe

Four Scottish Dances, Op. 59 Malcolm Arnold Born: Northampton, October 21, 1921 Died: Norwich, September 23, 2006

The son of musical parents, Malcolm Arnold enjoyed home schooling; by age 12 he began studying trumpet after hearing Louis Armstrong perform. By age 15 he was able to study the instrument with Ernest Hall. Thereafter he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied composition with Gordon Jacob. Two years later Arnold secured a position as second trumpet with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with which ensemble he maintained a virtual lifetime relationship.

As his skill and reputation evolved, he was eagerly sought as a film score composer, perhaps most notably for his music for the David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai. Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell compared him to no less than Charles Dickens, noting their shared great skill as entertainers who were sensitive to the “human predicament.”

Arnold composed Four Scottish Dances in 1957. The opening number, Pesante, includes a healthy dollop of brass and percussion expressing characteristic Scottish elements including characteristic rhythms. A lively reel, Vivace, follows with a moment of rest before resuming the original mood. An Allegretto provides balm for contrast but utilizes the aptly named Scottish snap, a rhapsodic episode as a flute tune floats over a harp accompaniment. The delectable suite closes with a spirited dance marked Con brio.

Suite from the Ballet Music, Hiawatha, Op. 82a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Born: Holborn, U.K., August 15, 1875 Died: Croydon, U.K., September 1, 1912

Born of a Black doctor from Sierra Leone and a white Englishwoman, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor transcended the barriers of class and race to become an enthusiastically acclaimed composer. Prodigious musical talent surfaced early and drew support from a number of patrons who helped him navigate the challenges of study at the Royal College of Music under the guidance of composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles Wood.

By far his greatest and longest lasting fame blossomed from his 1898 cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, inspired by Coleridge-Taylor’s absorption of Longfellow’s epic poem, one of a number of settings of the poetry of his favorite poet.

The cantata enjoyed a long performance history in Great Britain and made a successful trans-Atlantic voyage to the United States where his music and reputation flourished, especially among Black audiences. He likened his own great interest in both indigenous African and Black American music with Dvořák’s use of Bohemian melody and modal , and Brahms’ adoring attitude and adoption of Hungarian musical accents.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt invited Coleridge-Taylor to the White House, a significant gesture in a period of rampant and often violent mistreatment of Black Americans in the years following Reconstruction through the 1920s. (Sadly, the quest of racial equality remains an unfulfilled goal). During Coleridge-Taylor’s three American tours, white musicians in New York referred to him as the “African Mahler.”

Edward Elgar, an early supporter, recommended him to the famed Three Choirs Festival in 1896, which prompted the august musical organization to open its arms to Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, composed in 1898. For much of the next century the cantata became an annual fixture at the Three Choirs Festival.

Only a month before Coleridge-Taylor’s premature death from pneumonia in September 1912 did he compose the Hiawatha Ballet Music suite. Another 13 years elapsed before the premiere of this orchestra-only score. Noted poet Alfred Noyes, close friend of the composer, wrote: “Too young to die: his great simplicity, his happy courage in an alien world, his gentleness, made all that knew him love him.”

Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha tells the fictional story of an Ojibwe hero’s marriage and life with his ill-fated wife Minnehaha. Coleridge-Taylor drew heavily from the poet’s epic, focusing on the couple’s wedding attended by his many friends who contribute to the festivities with stories than range from the sweetly lyrical to the boastful and patently false. Yet by the wedding’s end, all ends happily with the following resume of the narrative: “Such was Hiawatha’s Wedding/Thus the wedding-banquet ended/And the wedding-guests departed/Leaving Hiawatha happy/ With the night and Minnehaha.”

The music is unabashedly upbeat and resolutely diatonic. Drumbeats are not calls to war, but celebrations of the wedding; the drums dot the landscape with other quasi-Native American evocations of Indian life. The main theme, a series of alternating rising and falling intervals, serve as bookends for the score with a final iteration as the music comes to a happy close. Vibrant episodes shift into quieter and more reflective sections, providing dynamic contrasts between the two types of expression. An appealing feel for dance keeps the music afloat.

Concerto No. 1 in A minor for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 33 Camille Saint-Saëns Born: , October 9, 1835 Died: Algiers, December 16, 1921

Long-lived Saint-Saëns survived an early reputation as a musical revolutionary to become an arch-reactionary, which says perhaps less about him than about the tumultuous changes in culture during his long, productive life. Early on he adopted an esthetic that eerily presaged Stravinsky’s assertion that music can express nothing, that its “meaning” lies exclusively within its formal self. Saint-Saëns, orphaned early and brought up by uncaring relatives, never married, nor even achieved much intimacy with his fellow human beings, finding more comfort in the safer presence of pets. To a degree, his esthetic derived from the barrenness of his personal life, though in its rejection of the expressive potential of music, he was also reacting in French fashion to perceived excesses of German Romanticism.

But whatever his psychological damage, he was a consummately gifted musician with talent and intelligence in many fields. He even lectured on astronomy! An esteemed and composer of great formal ingenuity, he wrote with facility in all genres from grand to solo recital pieces and virtually everything else in between including for (five), violin (three) and cello (two).

Saint-Saëns’ A-minor Cello Concerto, along with his Third (“Organ”) Symphony, Fourth and rarely played First share a structural idea inherited from Beethoven and used with increasing frequency by composers of the Romantic era—works without breaks between movements (e.g., Schumann’s Fourth Symphony) and/ or the use of recurring themes throughout a composition (e.g., Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique). In his first Concerto for Cello, Saint-Saëns all but adopts a single-movement format.

The opening Allegro non troppo bursts forth with energy generated by a single stressed chord from the orchestra that immediately yields to a downwardly sweeping theme from the solo cello that undergoes a series of imaginative and pronounced variations.

The ensuing Allegretto con moto acts as a gentle, breath-catching interlude inspired by dream-like memories of the dance.

The bi-partite finale, Allegro non troppo – Un peu moins vite, recalls previous motifs from the opening and second movements and builds excitement through increasing tempi and virtuosity in the solo part.

Suite (5 pièces enfantines) from Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) Maurice Ravel Born: , , March 7, 1875 Died: Paris, December l8, 1937

Though often compared with the voluptuous, sensuous and intentionally ambiguous music of Debussy, Ravel’s compositions are precise, clear in design, economical in their skillful . Stravinsky complimented Ravel’s fastidious craftsmanship as analogous to that of “a Swiss watchmaker.”

Like many of the French composer’s works, Mother Goose was hatched as a piano piece (1908) written expressly for a young sister and brother team, Mimi and Jean Godebski, whose parents were friends of Ravel. A gifted pianist with a subtle ear for keyboard timbres, Ravel was a truly consummate orchestrator. These “cinq pieces enfantines,” as he described the music, capture to beguiling perfection a feeling for childhood innocence and freshness. The colors of the orchestral version (1911) shimmer in airy lightness; rhythm and melody are intentionally simple (though anything but simplistic).

The brief introductory Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty is a mere 20 measures long but effectively limns a musical portrait of the somnolent princess. Hop o’ My Thumb, derived from a tale in Perrault’s anthology of 1697, mirrors the plight of a young boy whose plan to follow a trail of bread crumbs he has strewn on his course through the woods has been undone by birds who have satisfied their hunger at the poor lad’s expense. Ravel cagily has the strings meander through scales in search of a home tonality, just as the boy is searching for a route to safety.

As one might expect, Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas, utilizes melodic shapes redolent of the Orient. Ever since Debussy had been smitten with Asian and South Pacific Island music at the 1893 Exhibition in Paris, composers in the French capital and elsewhere could not get enough of pentatonic and other non-Western scales.

In the familiar story of Beauty and the Beast, Ravel gives Beauty’s delicate “words” to the high woodwinds, while the Beast speaks through the nether regions of the ’s deep tones. When they finally join in marriage, the two melodies are braided together and the Beast’s theme is magically transformed into an evanescent glow high in the solo violin’s range.

The closing number, The Fairy Garden, is not taken from a particular story but is Ravel’s enchanting summary of the sense of mystery, magic and fantasy that permeates Ma Mère l’Oye. The serene, almost beatific, calm of this section is a marvel of delicate sonority. © Steven Lowe

Thomas Wilkins, conductor Thomas Wilkins is celebrating his final season as music director of the Omaha Symphony, a position he has held since 2005. Additionally, he is principal conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the Boston Symphony’s artistic advisor, education and community engagement, and holds Indiana University’s Henry A. Upper Chair of Orchestral Conducting established by the late Barbara and David Jacobs as a part of that University’s “Matching the Promise Campaign.” Past positions have included resident conductor of the Detroit Symphony and Florida Orchestra (Tampa Bay), and associate conductor of the Richmond (VA) Symphony. He also has served on the music faculties of North Park University (Chicago), the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Devoted to promoting a life-long enthusiasm for music, Thomas Wilkins brings energy and commitment to audiences of all ages. He is hailed as a master at communicating and connecting with audiences. Following his highly successful first season with the Boston Symphony, the Boston Globe named him among the “Best People and Ideas of 2011.” In 2014, Wilkins received the prestigious “Outstanding Artist” award at the Nebraska Governor’s Arts Awards, for his significant contribution to music in the state while in 2018 Thomas Wilkins received the Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society conferred by Boston’s Longy School of Music. And in 2019 the Virginia Symphony bestowed Thomas Wilkins with their annual Dreamer Award. During his conducting career, he has led throughout the United States, including the , the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cincinnati Symphony and the National Symphony. Additionally, he has guest conducted the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, the Symphonies of Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Baltimore, San Diego and Utah, and the Buffalo and Rochester Philharmonics, as well as at the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago. His commitment to community has been demonstrated by his participation on several boards of directors, including the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, the Charles Drew Health Center (Omaha), the Center Against Spouse Abuse in Tampa Bay, and the Museum of Fine Arts as well as the Academy Preparatory Center both in St. Petersburg, FL. Currently he serves as chairman of the board for the Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund and as national ambassador for the non-profit World Pediatric Project headquartered in Richmond, VA, which provides children throughout Central America and the Caribbean with critical surgical and diagnostic care. A native of Norfolk, VA, Thomas Wilkins is a graduate of the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. He and his wife Sheri-Lee, are the proud parents of twin daughters, Erica and Nicole. Joshua Roman, cello Joshua Roman is a cellist, accomplished composer and curator whose performances embrace musical styles from Bach to Radiohead. Before setting off on his unique path as a soloist, Roman was the Seattle Symphony’s principal cellist – a job he began at just 22 years of age and left only two years later. He has since become renowned for his genre- bending repertoire and wide-ranging collaborations. Roman was named a TED Senior Fellow in 2015. His live performance of the complete Six Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach on TED’s Facebook Page garnered 1.8M live viewers, with millions more for his Main Stage TED Talks/Performances, including an improvisational performance with Tony- winner/MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Bill T. Jones and East African vocalist Somi. A Gramophone review of his 2017 recording of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Cello Concerto (written for Roman) proclaimed that “Roman’s outstanding performance of the cello concerto is the disc’s highlight… Roman’s extraordinary performance combines the expressive control of Casals with the creative individuality and virtuoso flair of Hendrix himself.” Recent highlights include performing standard and new concertos with the Colorado, Detroit, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, and San Francisco Symphonies. In addition to his other orchestral appearances Roman has collaborated with the JACK, St. Lawrence, and Verona Quartets and brings the same fresh approach to projects to his own series, Town Music at Town Hall Seattle. Joshua Roman’s adventurous spirit has led to collaborations with artists outside the music community, including creating “On Grace” with Tony-nominated actor Anna Deavere Smith. His compositions are inspired by sources such as the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K. Smith, and the musicians he writes for, such as the JACK Quartet, violinist Vadim Gluzman, and conductor David Danzmayr. Roman’s outreach endeavors have taken him to Uganda with his Thomas Wilkins, conductor violin-playing siblings, where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers and displacement camps.