Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert Programs, Season 122, 2002
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BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA James Levine, Music Director Designate Bernard Haitink, Principal Guest Conductor Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Laureate 122nd Season, 2002-2003 CHAMBER MUSIC TEA IV Friday, February 21, at 2:30 COMMUNITY CONCERT IV Sunday, February 23, at 3, at the Twelfth Baptist Church, Roxbury This concert is made available free to the public through the generosity of State Street Corporation. TAMARA SMIRNOVA, violin JAMES ORLEANS, double bass NANCY BRACKEN, violin ELIZABETH OSTLING, flute REBECCA GITTER, viola ANN HOBSON PILOT, harp CAROL PROCTER, cello TATIANA YAMPOLSKY, piano ANDERSON Game Play, for flute, viola, cello, and harp (2002) PERKINSON String Quartet No. 1, Calvary I. Allegro II. J = 54 III. Rondo: Allegro vivace STILL Ennanga, for harp, piano, and string quintet I. Moderately fast II. Moderately slow III. Majestically—Moderately fast Week 17 Thomas Jefferson Anderson, Jr. (b.1928) Game Play, for flute, viola, cello, and harp (2002) TJ. Anderson became a professional jazz musician at thirteen, having studied piano with his mother for several years. He went on to attend West Virginia State College, Perm State, and the University of Iowa. For many years he taught at Tufts University and was chairman of the music department there. He now lives in North Carolina and composes full-time. One of the most accomplished American composers of his generation, he was the first African-American composer-in-residence of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (1969-71) and received many honors, including Guggenheim and Fromm Foundation fellowships, and commissions from Yo-Yo Ma, the Berk- shire Music Center, and the Bill T. Jones /Arnie Zane dance company, among others. Among his major works are several operas, including Soldier Boy, Soldier (1982) with a libretto by his frequent collaborator Leon Forrest, and the chamber opera Walker with a libretto by Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott. He also orches- trated Scott Joplin's opera Treemonisha, enabling it to be performed for the first time in 1972. In 2002 Boston's Cantata Singers presented his Slavery Documents 2, a com- panion piece to the late Donald Sur's Slavery Documents, to great acclaim. Anderson's eclectic approach encompasses the range of modern techniques in- cluding free improvisation, the European classical tradition, jazz, and collage, often drawing on sources from standards, folk song, and gospel music. He wrote Game Play on a commission from Eleanor Eisenmenger for the concert series "20th Century Unlimited." The piece was given its world premiere performance by Ann Hobson Pilot and the Walden Chamber Players in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on September 14, 2002. About Game Play the composer writes: As a child my sisters and I enjoyed children's games. Appropriate movements corresponded to the songs we sang. Thinking back on these years, as an adult, I was very impressed with the way enculturation took place with children's game songs and I began to consider a composition which made use of these songs and movements. In this work there are four children's songs: "Hush, Little Baby," "Head and Shoulders, Baby," "Shortnin' Bread," and a reference to playing the dozens. Encapsulated also is a motive from a popular tune of the 1940s, "Let's Build a Stairway to the Stars." In the performance, the virtuoso solo passages reflect gestures from the games. This work represents the innocence of youth. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (b.1932) String Quartet No. 1, Calvary Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was raised by an aunt. At about age twelve he moved to the Bronx, New York City, to live with his mother, who was a pianist and teacher, and had graduated Howard University. He studied dance before enrolling at the High School of Music and Art (1945-49), where he performed in the orchestra and led a choral group as conduc- tor. After two years at the School of Education of New York University he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied composition and received a master's degree. In summer 1954 he attended the Berkshire Music Center on a con- ducting fellowship. Later he met Roger Sessions at Princeton; Sessions introduced him to his colleague Earl Kim, with whom Perkinson worked informally. During a formative period of study in Europe, he attended the Salzburg Mozarteum. Perkinson co-founded the Symphony of the New World in 1965 and served as its conductor for ten years. He has also guest-conducted throughout the country and by an important opera company. He was deeply involved in the development of served as music director for the American Theatre Lab, Dance Theatre of Harlem, African-American culture in the U.S.; besides celebrating his African heritage in his and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. He was music director of the docu- music, he knew and worked with well-known peers in the artistic community, in- mentary King: From Montgomery to Memphis (1970) and has composed for many feature cluding Langston Hughes, who wrote the libretto for Troubled Island (whose subject and television films, including Cicely Tyson's A Woman Called Moses and a song for If was Haiti). Still also wrote music that touched on his Scottish and Native American He Hollers, Let Him Go, based on the Chester Himes novel. His concert music ranges ancestry. Among many honors, he was chosen to write a theme song for the 1939 from song and choral music to solo piano to orchestral works. Coleridge-Taylor New York World's Fair. Still's career has held up as the most significant example for Perkinson (he is a namesake of the significant English composer, Samuel Coleridge- younger generations of African-American composers of concert music. Taylor) is now principal conductor and coordinator of performance activities at the Still wrote Ennanga in 1956; the piece exists in a version for harp and orchestra Center for Black Music Research of Columbia College Chicago. as well as the version for harp, piano, and string quintet. An "ennanga" is a kind of Perkinson wrote his String Quartet No. 1, Calvary, while a student at the Manhattan African harp found in Uganda, normally used to accompany song, with as many School of Music. Lately it has received renewed attention, in particular through the as eight strings tuned to a pentatonic scale. This accounts for Still's use of pentatonic offices of the young Marian Anderson String Quartet, who have championed it in scales throughout the piece. There are also some metrical characteristics, for example performance. Perkinson has written: the six-beat measures grouped, flamenco-like, in patterns of 3+3 alternating with 2+2+2 in the first movement, that be abstractions of Calvary is based on a tune from the communion service that I had heard in many may African rhythm. Still's music, though, to recreate different churches. When I sat down to write this string quartet, I was not trying to makes no attempt other styles; it is a personal amalga- mation of influences classical, write something black; I was just writing out of my experience. It was a natural, in- from the European jazz/Tin Pan Alley, and African- traditions. stinctive thing, and I think that's important for any composer regardless of what his American origins are. The Calvary quartet was composed in 1951, but did not receive its first In Ennanga the harp is cast in the role of a concertante soloist, often leading the performance until 1956 when the Cumbo Quartet played it at a Carnegie Hall proceedings and engaging in give-and-take with the ensemble. The first movement concert held to commemorate Harry T. Burleigh, the Afro-American composer builds upon that strong two-bar rhythm in the pattern mentioned above. The second and singer. is songlike, with a soulful, lamenting character. Each of the instrumental groups—the This composition for strings in three movements is based on forms of music harp, the piano, and the strings—plays sections with very little or no accompaniment prevalent in the repertoire of the Classical era, such as sonata-allegro, song form, from the others. The finale begins with arpeggios in the harp before moving into and rondo. The folk tune is referenced several times in the opening movement, the upbeat dance music of the main part of the movement. The two halves of the not at all in the second movement (the second movement's thematic material movement are divided by a return to the harp arpeggios. The harp's short cadenza comes from the coda of the first movement), and is introduced as the second theme of glissandos sets up the brief, declamatory ending. In this movement, among the in the last movement, with melodic variations that allow it to switch from major pentatonic melodies, one can hear traces of Still's experience with the harmonic to minor modes (or the reverse) in several instances. The piece, while always tonal, world of the popular standards. employs a kind of twentieth-century modal chromaticism as the basis for its har- —Notes by Robert Kirzinger monic structure. Born in Siberia, Tamara Smirnova joined the BSO in 1986 as associate concertmaster of William Grant Still (1895-1978) the Boston Symphony Orchestra and concertmaster of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Ms. Ennanga, for harp, piano, and string quintet Smirnova began playing the violin at six and graduated in 1981 from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. Upon completing her studies she moved to Zagreb, soon be- The significant American composer William Grant Still was born in Mississippi and coming concertmaster of the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, the youngest concertmas- raised in Arkansas. His father, who died when Still was an infant, had been a band- ter in the history of that ensemble.