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Wilkins & Joshua Roman 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 Concerto No. 1 in A minor for (1835-1921) Violoncello & Orchestra, Op. 33 I. Allegro non troppo II. Allegretto con moto III. Allegro non troppo MAURICE RAVEL Suite (5 pièces enfantines) from (1875-1937) Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) 1. Pavane 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 harmony, 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: Paris, 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 pianist and composer of great formal ingenuity, he wrote with facility in all genres from grand opera to solo recital pieces and virtually everything else in between including concertos for piano (five), violin (three) and cello (two). Saint-Saëns’ A-minor Cello Concerto, along with his Third (“Organ”) Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto and rarely played First Violin Concerto 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: Ciboure, France, 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 orchestration. 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.
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