Classics 1: Music of the Spheres Program Notes Gran Fanfarria, Op. 7B Giancarlo Castro D'addona Born in Barquisimeto, Venezue
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Classics 1: Music of the Spheres Program Notes Gran fanfarria, op. 7b Giancarlo Castro D’Addona Born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, August 8, 1980 Composer, conductor, and trumpet player Giancarlo Castro began his music studies at the age of eight in El Sistema, Venezuela’s famed program of social change through music. After brief exposure to the violin, he switched to trumpet and went on to become a member of the program’s most renowned ensembles: the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra—with which he made numerous tours in America, Europe, and Asia—as well as the Venezuelan Brass Ensemble and Simón Bolívar Brass Quintet. He has known the orchestra’s famed music director, Gustavo Dudamel, since the age of twelve when they studied together in Barquisimeto. Castro’s path as a composer began around age twenty-two with his Five Piano Preludes, which he dedicated to El Sistema’s founder, José Antonio Abreu. He studied composition at the Vicente Emilio Sojo Conservatory in Barquisimeto, then at the University Institute of Musical Studies in Caracas, and he credits Latin American music, jazz, and film scores as his primary influences. He was especially inspired by John Williams, whom he felt honored to meet when performing Star Wars music as a trumpeter at the Walt Disney Concert Hall under his hero’s direction. Like Williams, Castro has composed both film music and works for the concert hall, and he frequently conducts his own works. In 2015 he conducted his Rhapsody for Talents, composed in 2013 for 190th anniversary of the instrument maker Buffet Crampon, at the Radio France Auditorium—becoming the first Venezuelan composer to conduct his own work in this internationally famous venue. Among his 2016 compositions are the soundtrack for the Venezuelan film Redención and his Clarinet Concerto, performed at the Salzburg Festival. More concertos followed in 2017: for tuba (Philadelphia Orchestra principal Carol Jantsch, Tanglewood and Interlochen), violin and strings (Concierto Sureño, Marie-Françoise Pallot, Boulogne-Billancourt Conservatory, France), and saxophone (Buffet Crampon artist Michel Supera, Valenciennes, northern France). Meanwhile Castro’s earlier works continue to receive performances worldwide, notably his celebrated Gran fanfarria, which in its original form dates from the early days of his formal composition studies. Castro originally composed the virtuosic work in 2004 for the Venezuelan Brass Ensemble, a subset of the celebrated Simón Bolívar Orchestra, but its popularity led to the composer’s arranging it for symphonic band, then for brass band, and finally in 2016 for orchestra. The piece indeed opens in exuberant fanfare style involving the full orchestra. Trumpets and horns are especially prominent as a rollicking gallop ensues. A lighthearted section full of catchy mixed meters brings on a pensive, lyrical cello melody that builds with a Williams-esque cinematic sweep but also quiets for a lovely trumpet solo. The return of the high-spirited gallop makes two dramatic pauses in its final race to the close. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, suspended cymbal, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, tubular bells, xylophone, and strings Concertino for Harp and Orchestra Germaine Tailleferre Born in Parc-St.-Maur, near Paris, April 19, 1892; died in Paris, November 7, 1983 Germaine Tailleferre, whose talents as a pianist and composer became apparent at a very early age, was another of countless composers whose parents objected to a musical career. Nevertheless, in 1904 she entered the Paris Conservatory where she excelled, receiving numerous first prizes. Most significantly, she became acquainted there with Auric, Honegger, and Milhaud, who introduced her to Satie, the “father” of Les Six. It was through her association with this group, which also included Poulenc and Durey, that she became recognized. Tailleferre’s prompt detachment from Les Six stemmed from her lack of interest in attacking Impressionism and creating a new French art music based on popular sources, yet her music retained something of their values—spontaneity and humor. Her compositions are generally Neoclassical; in one of her last interviews she described herself as an admirer of the “lesser masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” But her music also exhibits harmonic features of Ravel (with whom she had studied orchestration), and bitonal and polytonal mixtures, as in the music of Milhaud, whose birth year she shares. She even tried her hand at serialism (Clarinet Sonata, 1958), although she found herself uncomfortable with this technique, as well as with electronic music, which she considered impersonal. Tailleferre composed her Concertino for Harp and Orchestra in 1926–27, dedicating it to Ralph Barton, whom she had married—his fourth wife—in early 1926 within weeks of their meeting. He was an advisor to The New Yorker and a prominent contributor as a theatrical caricaturist and reviewer, and she had come to the U.S. to advance her career, which she did in high style. She convinced the great Leopold Stokowski to conduct her First Piano Concerto in Philadelphia with celebrated French pianist Alfred Cortot, and she herself performed the piece with Willem Mengelberg leading the New York Philharmonic on the same night that Cortot was performing it in Boston with Serge Koussevitzky. The euphoric couple resided in New York at first, but they moved to France in 1927 in the hope of saving their increasingly troubled marriage. Many of their difficulties stemmed from Barton’s jealousy of her fame, his active discouragement of her composing, and his worsening manic depression. When the Concertino had been premiered by harpist Marcel Grandjany and the Boston Symphony led by Koussevitzky, Barton was said to have been yelling at the composer backstage that he did not want to be known as “Mr. Tailleferre.” Nevertheless, he must have been appreciative of the dedication, because he designed the cover for the Concertino’s 1928 publication with his typical whimsical flair. They divorced after he threatened to kill their unborn child. Tailleferre was also discouraged from composing by her second husband, lawyer Jean Lageat, an abusive alcoholic who was known to spatter ink over her manuscripts, though that marriage lasted twenty-four years before ending in divorce. She never lost her faith in her creative abilities, however, and she remained active as a composer until 1983 when she died at age ninety-one. In the Harp Concertino, Tailleferre captivatingly combines Impressionism with her signature touches of humor. The first movement begins in a burst of delightful activity with swirling orchestral phrases and constant, shifting harp patterns. The harp introduces the more forthright second theme as well as the exposition’s more subdued closing theme, but throughout the movement the harp slips easily between soloistic and accompanimental roles. Arching out of the depths and traversing kaleidoscopic changes, an extended cadenza provides the opportunity for the harp to shine alone before the opening activity returns. The subdued, haunting colors of the middle movement owe much to the muted strings, a pensive flute melody, and delicate harp figuration. After the mysteriously glistening middle section peaks, the opening returns, ending in shadows Tailleferre labeled the jolly finale “Rondo” to signify a traditional closing-movement structure of a recurring refrain with intervening contrasting episodes—in this case laid out A-B-A-C-A-B-A. Her lively refrain features a dancelike melody begun by the harp and the “B” sections provide contrast with a more melancholy tune. Throughout, the raucous brass interjections, martial snare drums, and repetitive rhythmic passages bring Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat and Petrushka to mind. The wonderfully expansive “C” section begins gruffly in the depths, blossoming into an ingenious fugal episode. An insistent snare-drum “lick” and a brash final chord end the Concertino in high spirits. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, clarinet, 2 horns, trumpet, timpani, snare drum, and strings The Planets, op. 32 Gustav Holst Born in Cheltenham, September 21, 1874; died in London, May 25, 1934 “As a rule I only study things that suggest music to me. That’s why I worried at Sanskrit. Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely,” wrote Gustav Holst in 1914. Clifford Bax, brother of composer Arnold Bax, had been impressed by Holst’s settings of the Rig Veda, and it was he who introduced Holst to astrology in 1913, furthering the mystical leanings Holst showed throughout his life. Telling horoscopes, Holst admitted, was his “pet vice,” and he stressed the astrological character of each planet, rather than its associations with myth. Equally important that year was Holst’s exposure to the new sounds, particularly rhythms and ostinatos, in the music of Stravinsky, whose Petrushka and Rite of Spring were presented in London in June and July, respectively. Though thoughts of The Planets had occupied Holst for some time, he began composing the first movement (Mars, the Bringer of War) in May 1914. Holst’s daughter Imogene steadfastly maintained that he had already completed the sketch before the First World War I broke out on August 4, thus it should be viewed more as a prophetic vision than a comment on the War. Further work on The Planets had to be fit in among Holst’s teaching commitments at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, hence its lengthy gestation period of two years. Venus and Jupiter were composed that fall, and in 1915 he worked on Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Mercury was the last of The Planets to be written, and the task of orchestrating the suite took place during 1916. Because of wartime conditions there seemed little hope of an orchestral performance of his enormous work and he had to be content with various two-piano airings.