American Festival Part I | Program Notes

SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1

MASTERWORKS • 2014/15THE AMERICAN FESTIVAL: PART ICOLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor BIL JACKSON, clarinetWILLIAM WOLFRAM, piano

Saturday, February 28, 2015 at 7:30 pmSunday, March 1, 2015 at 1:00 pmBoettcher Concert Hall

KEVIN PUTS Two Mountain Scenes Maestoso - Furioso

KEVIN PUTS Clarinet Concerto Vigil Surge

! INTERMISSION !

BERNSTEIN The Age of Anxiety, Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra (after W.H. Auden) Part I The Prologue: Lento moderato The Seven Ages: Variations I to VII The Seven Stages: Variations VIII to XIV Part II The Dirge: Largo The Masque: Extremely fast The Epilogue: L’istesso tempo — Adagio — Andante — Con moto

Yamaha CFX concert grand piano provided courtesy of Yamaha Artist Services, New York, and Classic Pianos of Denver.

SATURDAY’S CONCERT IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED TO SAGE HOSPITALITYSUNDAY’S CONCERT IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED TO JACK WILSON

PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

ANDREW LITTON, conductor

Andrew Litton currently serves as Music Director of the Colorado Symphony, Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York City Ballet, Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest and Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth Symphony. He was also Music Director of the Dallas Symphony from 1994-2006. He guest conducts the world’s leading orchestras and has a discography of over 120 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy®, France’s Diapason d’Or, and many British and other honours. Litton has also conducted many of the world’s finest opera companies, such as the Metropolitan

Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Australian Opera. Besides his Grammy®-winning Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with Bryn Terfel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, he also recorded the complete symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, a Dallas Mahler cycle, and many Gershwin recordings, as both conductor and pianist. For Hyperion Andrew Litton’s recordings include piano concertos by Rachmaninov, Liszt and Grieg with Stephen Hough; by Shostakovich, Shchedrin and Brahms with Marc-André Hamelin; and by Alnæs and Sinding with Piers Lane; Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto and Symphony-Concerto with Alban Gerhardt; Viola Concertos by Bartók and Rózsa with Lawrence Power; the complete symphonies by Charles Ives and orchestral works by Joseph Schwantner. Andrew Litton received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard in piano and conducting. He is an accomplished pianist, and often conducts from the keyboard and enjoys performing chamber music with his orchestra colleagues.

For further information, please visit www.andrewlitton.com

BIL JACKSON, clarinet

Bil Jackson, Associate Professor of clarinet at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University enjoys a varied musical career that includes solo, orchestral and chamber music appearances. Before joining the faculty at the Blair School, Jackson served as principal clarinetist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, Honolulu Symphony and has performed as guest principal clarinetist with the St Louis, St. Paul Chamber, Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Lukes and Cincinnati symphony orchestras. This summer will mark Jackson’s 33rd year on the

Artist-Faculty of the Aspen Music Festival. He is additionally on the Artist-Faculty of the Colorado College Summer Music Festival and has previously served on the faculties of the University of Texas, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado and Duquesne University. Jackson began his orchestral career with the Honolulu Symphony as principal clarinetist at the age of 19. He has commissioned, and premiered with the Honolulu Symphony, Dan Welcher’s Clarinet Concerto which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1990. He subsequently returned to Honolulu to record the concerto for the Naxos label. During the 2008-2009 Colorado Symphony season, Bil premiered the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts’ clarinet concerto with Je"rey Kahane conducting. Additionally he performed Kevin’s concerto via a live NPR national broadcast from the Aspen Music Festival’s 2010 season. Jackson will record the Puts concerto February 2015 with the Colorado Symphony, Andrew Litton conducting.

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WILLIAM WOLFRAM, piano

American pianist William Wolfram was a silver medalist at both the William Kapell and the Naumburg International Piano Competitions and a bronze medalist at the prestigious Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. Wolfram has appeared with many of the greatest orchestras of the world, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra Bonn, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, among others, and has developed a special reputation as the rare concerto soloist who is also equally versatile and adept as a recitalist,

accompanist and chamber musician. In all of these genres, he is highly sought after for his special focus on the music of Franz Liszt and Beethoven and is a special champion for the music of modernist 20th century American composers. An enthusiastic supporter of new music, he has collaborated with and performed music by composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Kenneth Frazelle, Marc Andre Dalbavie, Kenji Bunch, and Paul Chihara. Wolfram has extensive experience in the recording studio. He has recorded four titles on the Naxos label in his series of Franz Liszt Opera Transcriptions and two other chamber music titles for Naxos with violinist Philippe Quint (music of Miklos Rosza and John Corigliano). Also for Naxos he has recorded the music of Earl Kim with piano and orchestra — the RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland behind him. For the Albany label, he recorded the piano concertos of Edward Collins with Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. A graduate of The Juilliard School, Wolfram resides in New York City with his wife and two daughters. William Wolfram is a Yamaha artist.

MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES

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KEVIN PUTS (born in 1972): Two Mountain ScenesKevin Puts was born on January 3, 1972 in St. Louis. Two Mountain Scenes was composed in 2007 on a commission from the Bravo! Vail Festival and premiered on July 3, 2007 by the New York Philharmonic in New York City, conducted by Bramwell Tovey. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, three clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, harp and strings. Duration is about 13 minutes. The last performance by the orchestra was on April 10 and 11, 2009, with Je!rey Kahane conducting.

Kevin Puts, born in 1972 in St. Louis, received his bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music (1994), his master’s degree from Yale (1996), and his doctorate from Eastman (1999); his composition teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Samuel Adler and David Burge. He also participated in the 1996 Tanglewood Festival Fellowship Program, where he worked with Bernard Rands and William Bolcom. Puts taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1999 until the fall of 2006, when he joined the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Kevin Puts has accumulated an impressive array of distinctions: the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his acclaimed opera Silent Night, based on the 2005 French film Joyeux Nöel and premiered by Minnesota Opera in November 2012; from 1996 to 1999, he served concurrently as Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony (which premiered three of his works) and Young Concert Artists, Inc. in New York; he has received commissions from the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Minnesota Orchestra, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, Eroica Trio, Ying Quartet and other noted ensembles and organizations; he was the first undergraduate to be awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he has received grants and fellowships from BMI, ASCAP, Tanglewood, the Hanson Institute for American Music and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Benjamin H. Danks Award for Excellence in Orchestral Composition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Barlow International Prize for Orchestral Music; and in 2007 he was Composer-in-Residence with both the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and the Forth Worth Symphony.

Puts wrote, “Two Mountain Scenes was commissioned by the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and the New York Philharmonic in celebration of the Festival’s twentieth anniversary. It was premiered by the Philharmonic conducted by Bramwell Tovey at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall on July 3, 2007 and performed again at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater, Vail Valley, Colorado on July 25, 2007.

With the impressive backdrop of the Rocky Mountains in mind, I set out to create a true orchestral showpiece. The first movement (Maestoso) begins with a quartet of virtuoso trumpets combining to create the sonic illusion of a single trumpet reverberating across the valley. The strings answer with lyrical melodies that rise and fall in long-breathed arches, suggesting the silhouettes of mountain peaks. The second movement (Furioso) begins in the swirl of a mountain storm, with torrents of arpeggios played by the strings. Distant bells ring out in the valley far below; the woodwinds adopt their rhythms and press forward insistently, gaining momentum as the music builds to a climactic finish.”!

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESKEVIN PUTS: Clarinet ConcertoKevin Puts’ Clarinet Concerto was composed in 2007 on a commission for Bil Jackson from Kathryn Gould through Meet the Composer. It was premiered on April 10, 2009 by the Colorado Symphony, conducted by Je!rey Kahane with Mr. Jackson as soloist. The score calls for percussion, harp, piano and strings. Duration is about 22 minutes.

Puts composed his Clarinet Concerto in 2008-2009 on a commission from Colorado Symphony Principal Clarinetist Bil Jackson, with generous help from Kathryn Gould and Meet the Composer. For the premiere, given on April 10, 2009 by Mr. Jackson under the direction of conductor Je"rey Kahane, Puts wrote, “I met the extraordinary clarinetist Bil Jackson when he premiered my Four Airs at Music from Angel Fire (New Mexico) in the summer of 2004. That summer, he also played the fiercely di#cult clarinet part in my trio And Legions Will Rise, and I believe it was his enthusiasm for this piece that led him to commission my Clarinet Concerto.

“Inspiration is often hard to come by, and I don’t rely on it as a rule. But flipping TV channels one night, I came across an HBO documentary called Section 60 and I immediately thought of the opening music of this Concerto. Section 60 is the part of Arlington National Cemetery in which U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, and the film bears largely unsentimental but thoroughly devastating witness to the family members of these victims as they form communities at the burial site and attempt to come to terms with their losses.

“I decided the first movement (Vigil) would be elegiac, meditative and lyrical, sometimes nostalgic, dreamlike and even tragic in places. It would act as a ‘book of memories,’ so to speak, and for the most part would be about introspection and looking back.

“By means of necessary contrast, the second and final movement (Surge) would be driving and headlong. Where in the first movement the clarinetist makes smooth melodic contours in rhythms that sound almost improvised, the second would involve angular, staccato bursts of notes and an almost robotic sense of rhythm. Where the first movement is about reflection, the second can only roll forward incessantly and inexorably.

“I have always loved Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet, scored for strings with harp and piano. Though I have made no attempt here to create a ‘companion piece’ for Copland’s, I realized after a great deal of thought that this instrumentation was ideal for my purposes, though I added one percussionist who is assigned a variety of instruments.”

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Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): The Age of Anxiety, Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra (after W.H. Auden)Leonard Bernstein was born on August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts and died on October 14, 1990 in New York City. He composed The Age of Anxiety in 1948-1949 and revised the score in 1965. The work was premiered on April 8, 1949 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergei Koussevitzky; the composer was piano soloist. The score was dedicated to Koussevitzky. The revised version was first heard on July 15, 1965, when the composer conducted the New York Philharmonic and pianist Philippe Entremont. The score calls for solo piano, piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTEShorn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, pianino (upright piano) doubling celesta, and strings. The work was last performed by the Colorado Symphony on March 19-21, 1998, with Marin Alsop conducting the orchestra and Je!rey Kahane as the piano soloist.

Artur Rodzinski appointed Leonard Bernstein as his conducting assistant with the New York Philharmonic at the beginning of the 1943 season. On November 14th, Bernstein took over a concert for the ailing guest conductor Bruno Walter at very short notice. The national broadcast of the program went ahead as scheduled, and the 25-year-old musician was instantly famous and immediately in demand by other orchestras. One of the earliest of his guest appearances was with the Pittsburgh Symphony on January 28, 1944, when he directed the premiere of his own Symphony No. 1, “Jeremiah”, the work that won the New York Music Critics Circle Award that year. Revealing another facet of his creative talent, Bernstein premiered both the ballet Fancy Free and the musical On the Town later in 1944, but he was still able to continue his guest conducting at such a hectic pace that he had registered a hundred performances within a year of his radio broadcast. Between 1945 and 1948 he was music director of the New York City Symphony, whose concerts specialized in avant-garde compositions. In 1947, he conducted the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, and the following year led the Palestine (now Israel) Philharmonic on a nine-concert European tour. Given such a frantic schedule, it is small wonder that Bernstein had time to write only one major work between On the Town of 1944 and the 1952 opera Trouble in Tahiti — a “symphony” for piano and orchestra based on Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety. The composer gave this background in a note in the published score:

“W.H. Auden’s fascinating and hair-raising poem The Age of Anxiety: a Baroque Eclogue began immediately to a"ect me lyrically when I first read it in the summer of 1947. From that moment the composition of a symphony based on The Age of Anxiety acquired an almost compulsive quality; and I worked on it steadily in Taos, Philadelphia, Richmond, Mass., Tel-Aviv, in planes, in hotel lobbies, and finally (the week preceding the premiere) in Boston [April 8, 1949].

“The essential line of the poem (and of the music) is the record of our di#cult and problematic search for faith. In the end, two of the characters enunciate the recognition of this faith — even a passive submission to it — at the same time revealing an inability to relate to it personally in their daily lives, except through blind acceptance.

“I have divided Auden’s six sections into two large parts, each containing three sections played without pause.

“Part One: (a) The Prologue finds four lonely characters, a girl and three men, in a Third Avenue bar, all of them insecure, and trying, through drink, to detach themselves from their conflicts, or, at best, to resolve them. Musically the Prologue is a very short section consisting of a lonely improvisation by two clarinets, echo-tone, and followed by a long descending scale which acts as a bridge into the realm of the unconscious, where most of the poem takes place.

“(b) The Seven Ages. The life of man is reviewed from the four personal points of view. This is a series of variations that di"er from conventional variations in that they do not vary one common theme. Each variation seizes upon some feature of the preceding one and develops it, introducing, in the course of the development, some counter-feature upon which the next variation seizes.


“(c) The Seven Stages. The variation form continues for another set of seven, in which the characters go on an inner and highly symbolic journey according to a geographical plan leading back to a point of comfort and security. When they awaken from this dream-odyssey, they are closely united through a common experience (and through alcohol), and begin to function as one organism. This set of variations begins to show activity and drive and leads to a hectic, though indecisive, close.

“Part Two: (a) The Dirge is sung by the four as they sit in a cab en route to the girl’s apartment for a nightcap. This section employs, in a harmonic way, a twelve-tone row out of which the main theme evolves. There is a contrasting middle section of almost Brahmsian romanticism, in which can be felt the self-indulgent, or negative, aspect of this strangely pompous lamentation.

“(b) The Masque finds the group in the girl’s apartment, weary, guilty, determined to have a party, each one afraid of spoiling the other’s fun by admitting that he should be home in bed. This is a scherzo for piano and percussion alone in which a kind of fantastic piano-jazz is employed. The party ends in anti-climax and the dispersal of the actors; in the music the piano-protagonist is traumatized by the intervention of the orchestra for four bars of hectic jazz. When the orchestra stops, as abruptly as it began, a pianino [upright piano] in the orchestra is continuing the Masque, repetitiously and with waning energy, as the Epilogue begins. Thus a kind of separation of the self from the guilt of the escapist living has been e"ected, and the protagonist is set free again to examine what is left beneath the emptiness.

“(c) The Epilogue. What is left, it turns out, is faith. The trumpet intrudes its statement of ‘something pure’ upon the dying pianino: the strings answer in a melancholy reminiscent of the Prologue: again and again the winds reiterate ‘something pure’ against the mounting tension of the strings’ loneliness. All at once the strings accept the situation, in a sudden radiant pianissimo, and begin to build, with the rest of the orchestra, to a positive statement of the newly recognized faith.”

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©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES

Documents

American Festival Part I | Program Notes