STETSON UNIVERSITY DAVID BJELLA A native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Cellist David Bjella has a multi-faceted career as a teacher, chamber musician, orchestral player, and soloist. He is Professor of Cello at Stetson University as well as Co-Principal of the IRIS Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Michael Stern. He was a member of the Inman Piano Trio for 13 years. He is one of the featured IRIS chamber musicians for the Naxos released CD "Music of Stephen Hartke" which was chosen by the New York Times as a Top Ten Classical Recording of 2003. Mr. Bjella has been on the faculty at the Orfeo Festival in Italy, the Rocky Mountain Summer Conservatory in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the Bellingham Festival in Washington state, the Quartz Mountain Festival in Oklahoma, the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, the Bay Area Music Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Cuerdas de Enlace, a performing and teaching festival in Honduras. As soloist, he has appeared with many regional and college orchestras in the Southeast and Midwest; he has also been Principal Cellist of the Florida Symphony, Orlando Philharmonic, Southwest Florida Symphony and the Annapolis Symphony. ANTHONY HOSE STETSON UNIVERSITY Anthony Hose is the Director of Orchestras at Stetson University; Principal Conductor, Welsh Chamber Orchestra; Artistic Director, Beaumaris Festival; and Head of Music Emeritus, Welsh National Opera. CHAMBER ORCHESTRA His European orchestra work includes Ankara Symphony, Berlin Symphony, Budapest Concert, Icelandic Symphony, Rhine Philharmonic, Munich Bach Collegium, Suisse Romande, London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, London Mozart Players, Anthony Hose, conductor English Chamber and BBC Scottish. He frequently conducts the Orlando Philharmonic. Tuesday, November 5, 201 3 ) 7:30 p.m. His opera career began at Glyndebourne and includes Covent Garden, Lee Chapel, Elizabeth Hall Wexford, Milan, Welsh National, Lyons, Geneva, Gothenburg and Icelandic Opera. His repertoire of over 90 operas, ranges from Handel to Tippett and includes most of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. He founded the Buxton International Festival. Opera magazine listed his "Beatrice and Benedict" performances at Buxton in the top 30 best productions worldwide since 1945. BBC broadcasts include Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, Hamlet (Thomas), Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Turn of the Screw and Albert Herring, The Servants by William Mathias, Cavalli's Jason, and Kodaly's The Spinning Room. School of Music STETSON 421 N. Woodland Blvd., Unit 8399 | DeLand, FL 32723 UNIVERSITY stetson.edu/music | concert line 386-822-8947 STETSON UNIVERSITY PROGRAM CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Henry V (scenes from the film) William Walton VIOLIN I Passacaglia: Death of Falstaff (1902-1983) Austin Burket, concertmaster Rebeca Baquerizo, co-concertmaster Touch Her Soft Lips and Part Jeremiah Riddle, co<oncertmaster Ashton Knowles Caitlin Brown The River Cam Eric Whitacre Chelsea Probus (b. 1970) David Bjella, cello VIOLIN 2 Mary Renfroe, principal Jacqueline Byl, co-principal Kara Swanson Threnody: Musk for the Passing ofBranwen Morfydd Owen Sara Nusbaum (1891-1918) Jacob Billups VIOLA Suite in F (lady Radnor's Suite') C. Hubert H. Parry Erica Honkonen, principal Prelude (1848-1918) Brett Chinander, co-principal Allemande Alexa Grohowski, co-principal Sarabande Tatjana Muroski, osst principal Ryan Becker Bourree Nicole Sastre Slow Minuet Gigue CELLO Ariel Arthur, principal Joseph Rubano, co-principal Marcus Jones BASS Timothy Huckaby, principal Sean Strott, osst principal PROGRAM NOTES WILLIAM WALTON I HENRY V Sir William Turner Walton was born in Lancashire, England, and had a remarkably diverse musical education between Christ Church, Oxford, and the tutelage of his patrons, the three Sitwell siblings. He flourished most significantly as a composer and gained notoriety for his obsessive attention to detail. Walton wrote in a variety of styles and genres, but his compositional repertoire was not particularly numerous on account of his perfectionism. The score to Laurence Olivier's 1944 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V was one of several film scores that Walton wrote during his career, although he characteristically did not think highly of the genre's dual function as concert music. However, he did rescore two pieces for strings from the original film score, and these two pieces were included in both of the more expansive concert arrangements of the score by Muir Mathieson and Sir Malcom Sargent. The first movement, Passacaglia: The Death of Falstaff, describes the death of a knight who appears in three other plays by Shakespeare. The second movement, Touch Her Soft Lips and Part, plays when the soldiers are preparing to depart for battle and bidding their lovers farewell; this melody has been arranged for numerous ensembles, perhaps most notably for string octet and as a violin solo. ERIC WHITACRE I THE RIVER CAM Eric Whitacre is a Grammy award-winning American composer and choral conductor who is most noted for his choral works, although he has also composed a variety of orchestral, film, and operatic music. Whitacre is most recently renowned for his groundbreaking YouTube collaboration project called "Virtual Choir" that aims to bring voices together through the Internet from all over the world and create an enormous, international ensemble. Whitacre's piece for solo cello and strings, The River Cam, was commissioned by Julian Lloyd Webber to celebrate his 60th birthday during a period that Whitacre spent teaching and studying at Cambridge University, and it was incidentally inspired by the composer's long walks along the River Cam which runs through the city. In the composer's own words, Whitacre began writing a pastoral piece of music in an undeniably British style, but his sole objective was "to follow the thread of the melodic fragments and capture as best I could the quiet and heartbreaking beauty of the River Cam." The premiere was given on April 14, 2011 at the Royal Festival Hall by Julian Lloyd Webber and the Philharmonia Orchestra and was conducted by the composer. MORFYDD OWEN | THRENODY: Music FOR THE PASSING OF BRANWEN Morfydd Llwyn Owen was born in Treforest, South Wales, to two amateur musicians. She studied piano and composition at Cardiff University and the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she also studied as a mezzo-soprano. Ms. Owen married Ernest Jones, the renowned psychoanalyst, eighteen months before her untimely death following an emergency appendicitis operation. Ms. Owen left behind almost 200 compositions in the brief span of time in which she actively composed. Among these is her Threnody> composed in Welsh tradition to honor its tragic legend of the maiden Branwen. The legend tells the story of Branwen's marriage to the King of Ireland, which went awry when her vengeful stepbrother ruined the horses that were given to the king as part of her dowry. The king later punished Branwen for the offense of her stepbrother by forcing her to serve as a kitchen maid, where she was abused and treated unkindly. Branwen contacted her family in secret, and in the ensuing intervention, the same infamous stepbrother threw Branwen's son into a fire and started a devastating war between the nations. Branwen is said to have died of a broken heart after seeing the destruction that she caused. Ms. Owen describes Branwen's poignant despair and pays homage to her unjust suffering in Threnody^ one of the twentieth century's most beautiful elegiac compositions. C. HUBERT H. PARRY | SUITE IN F ("LADY RADNOR'S SUITED Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry was born in Bournemouth, England to a large and wealthy family, and his musical aptitude developed at an early age when he was encouraged to study the piano by his preparatory school teachers. Parry was the professor of composition at the Royal College of Music for many years, where he taught pupils such as Hoist and Vaughan Williams, and he also contributed to the birth of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the I870's and 80's. In 1894, the Countess of Radnor, a friend of Parry's, commissioned the Suite in F for her chamber orchestra and conducted its premiere. The dance suite explores six different antique regional styles, but Parry's English style of composition slightly blurs the lines around the distinctions of these dance forms throughout the suite. The end result is a fusion of ancient tradition and contemporary practice, of the foreign and the familiar, and of the elegant and the bombastic, all of which serve to create Parry's unified and well-rounded British take on a broader spectrum of European music. Program notes by Alexa Grohowski .