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. While in Zagreb, she won acclaim for her numerous leader; both his parents were teachers. His stepfather collected opera recordings. As a solo recitals, as well as for solo appearances with various orchestras. A bronze medalist boy, Still showed musical talent and curiosity, but for practical reasons intended to in the 1985 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, Ms. Smirnova performs regularly study medicine at Wilberforce College in Ohio. He remained involved in music at at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. She made her American recital debut at Jordan Hall Wilberforce and, as his interest in a life in music grew, he also studied at Oberlin in November 1986 and has appeared as concerto soloist with the Boston Symphony College, where he was encouraged to compose and where he heard his first orchestral Orchestra, the Boston Pops Orchestra, and other New England orchestras, as well as in concert. He began to work for the great bandleader W.C. Handy in Memphis and California and North Carolina. Ms. Smirnova has recorded for Jugoton and has been a New York, and became an oboist for theatrical productions. While in the Northeast he lecturer at the Music Academy in Zagreb. studied, briefly, with both George Whitefield Chadwick in Boston and with Edgard Varese in New York. He began working as an arranger for the bandleader Artie Shaw Violinist Nancy Bracken studied with Ivan Galamian at the Curtis Institute of Music and moved to California, where he later wrote a few scores for films and television. and later received a master of music degree from the Eastman School of Music. Origi- In 1931 Still was the first African-American composer to have a symphony—his nally from St. Louis, she was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra before joining the Afro-American Symphony performed important American orchestra (the — by an Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1979. Ms. Bracken has won competitions sponsored Rochester Philharmonic). He was also the first African-American to conduct a major by the St. Louis Symphony, the Artist Presentation Society of St. Louis, the Music orchestra in the United States, and the first to have an opera, Troubled Island, performed 1994 the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she Teachers National Association, and the National Society of Arts and Letters. She has ated in May from was Khaner. her freshman year at Curtis participated in summer music festivals in Aspen and the Grand Tetons and was con- a student of Julius Baker and Jeffrey During certmaster and a frequent violin soloist with the Colorado Philharmonic for two sum- she won first prize in the quadrennial Koussevitzky Competition for Woodwinds in featured mers. Ms. Bracken performs in the Boston area as a recitalist and chamber musician New York City. As a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow she was during Tan- soloist in Michael and has appeared as soloist with the St. Louis Symphony and the Boston Pops. glewood's annual Festival of Contemporary Music as Gandolfi's chamber concerto, Caution to the Wind. Ms. Ostling has premiered two works written

Born in Canada in 1978, Rebecca Gitter began violin studies at seven and viola studies expressly for her: Mr. Gandolfi's Geppetto's Workshop for flute and piano, and Dan when she was thirteen. In May 2001 she received her bachelor of music degree from Coleman's Pavanes and Symmetries, the latter with the Metamorphosen Chamber the Cleveland Institute of Music where she was a student of Robert Vernon, having Orchestra. Her appearances as soloist with orchestra have included engagements previously studied in Toronto, Ontario. While at CIM, she was the recipient of the with the Boston Pops, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the Ridgewood Institute's Annual Viola Prize and the Robert Vernon Prize in Viola, and twice received Symphony Orchestra in her home town. A frequent performer in solo and chamber honorable mention in the school's concerto competition, resulting in solo performances. recitals, she has appeared locally with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and Among other honors, she was the 2000 recipient of Toronto's Ben Steinberg Jewish the Boston Artists Ensemble. Musical Legacy Award and, prior to her BSO appointment, was offered a position in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She was a summer participant in the Taos School of A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, Ann Hobson Pilot became the Boston Music, Ravinia's Steans Institute for Young Artists, and the National Academy and Symphony's principal harp in 1980, having joined the orchestra in 1969 as assistant National Youth Orchestras of Canada. Rebecca joined the viola section of the Boston principal harp of the BSO and principal harp of the Boston Pops. Before that she Symphony Orchestra in August 2001. was substitute second harp with the Pittsburgh Symphony and principal harp of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C Ms. Hobson Pilot has performed as Cellist Carol Procter joined the BSO in 1965, turning down a Fulbright Scholarship to soloist with the Boston Symphony, the Boston Pops, and orchestras in Europe, Haiti, do so. Before joining the Boston Symphony she was a member of the Springfield New Zealand, and South Africa. As a chamber musician, she has appeared at such Symphony Orchestra and Cambridge Festival Orchestra, and principal cellist of the prominent festivals as Marlboro and Newport. She holds a Doctor of Fine Arts degree New England Conservatory Symphony and Chamber Orchestras. Born in Oklahoma from Bridgewater State College and is a faculty member at the New England Conser- City and raised in Dedham, Massachusetts, Ms. Procter studied at the Eastman School vatory and Tanglewood Music Center. Ms. Hobson Pilot has several compact discs of Music and at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she received her available. She was recently featured in a video documentary televised nationwide on bachelor's and master's degrees. She received a Fromm Fellowship to study at the PBS, about her personal musical journey and her journey to Africa to discover the roots Tanglewood Music Center and was a participant during the 1969-70 season in the of the harp. The recipient of numerous awards, Ann Hobson Pilot began studying BSO's cultural exchange program with the Japan Philharmonic. Ms. Procter was a piano at six with her mother, a former concert pianist and teacher in the Philadelphia member of the New England Harp Trio from 1971 to 1987 and played viola da gamba public schools. She switched to harp while in high school, continuing her training at with the Curtisville Consortium from 1972 to 1981. She performs chamber music fre- the Philadelphia Musical Academy with Marilyn Costello, and with Alice Chalifoux quently and has been soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra on several occasions. at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Actively involved in Boston-area community af- fairs, she and her husband Prentice Pilot were instrumental in the formation of the Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1952, James Orleans began his musical studies with Boston Music Education Collaborative. They have also established a concert series the trumpet, which he played for nine years. His growing interest in jazz precipitated on the islands of St. Maarten, St. Croix, and St. Thomas. a move to the double bass in 1972. Mr. Orleans majored in composition with a con- centration in double bass at Indiana University and graduated magna cum laude from Russian-born pianist Tatiana Yampolsky began her musical studies at the age of five the Boston Conservatory of Music in 1981. He was awarded fellowships to the Tangle- and made her debut at twelve at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. She wood Music Center in 1981 and 1982. Mr. Orleans's bass teachers included William graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with distinguished Rhein, Robert Olson, and Edwin Barker. He joined the Milwaukee Symphony under pianists Dmitry Bashkirov and Yakov Fliere. Since immigrating to the United States, Lukas Foss in 1982 and became a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1983. Ms. Yampolsky has performed throughout Europe and North America. She has ap- Mr. Orleans maintains an active interest in contemporary music and has performed peared as soloist with a number of orchestras, including the Boston Pops and the At- with Collage, Dinosaur Annex, the Brandeis Contemporary Chamber Players, and lantic Symphony Orchestra, and has performed locally and on tour with the Boston Boston Musica Viva, also recording with these ensembles for CRI and Northeastern Symphony Orchestra. In addition to her concert career, Ms. Yampolsky has taught at records. Mr. Orleans has written articles on the programming of 20th-century orchestral Harvard University and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. music and has served on advisory panels of such organizations as the American She currently teaches privately and at MIT. Composers Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra League, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Elizabeth Ostling joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra as assistant principal flute in September 1994 and was named associate principal flute as of the 1997-98 season, having served as acting principal from March 1995. She is also principal flute of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Ms. Ostling grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and gradu-