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Program notes and soloist biographies for the 2008 Mother's Day Concerts
May 10 & 11, 2008

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Program notes

By Horace Work

Sir William T. Walton (1902-1983)
Crown Imperial March

Sir William Walton, knighted in 1951, was a British composer and conductor whose musical style was influenced by Stravinsky, Prokofiev and jazz. His orchestration, how he deployed the sounds of the instruments in his works, is clear and brilliant. Rhythmic vitality, sweeping romantic melodies, and sharp, sometimes dissonant, harmonies are hallmarks of his style.
Walton wrote music for many different occasions: film scores, ceremonial pieces, chamber music and choral works. Perhaps the work that brought him the greatest international recognition was the oratorio “Belshazzar’s Feast.” The “Crown Imperial March” is distinctly ceremonial and grand in style.

Friedrich (Fritz) Seitz (1848-1918)
Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major, Op. 15

Friedrich Seitz was a German Romantic Era composer and violinist who wrote chamber music and concertos for violin. His concertos are charming, smaller pieces and were used by the great violin pedagogue, Shinichi Suzuki, in his progressive training method. “Concerto No. 4” is a jaunty composition that incorporates technical challenges, such as fast double stops, into its appealing musical fabric.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Piano Concerto in D Major
Rondo all’ Ungherese

The Classical Period’s longest-lived composer from among its three foremost representatives was Joseph Haydn. His 77 years overlapped all of Mozart’s life and all but 18 of Beethoven’s 57 years.
Often called “Papa,” Haydn is sometimes regarded as “Father of the Symphony” (he wrote 104) and “Father of the String Quartet” (82). “Actually, he fathered neither the classical symphony not quartet, nor any children for that matter. The sobriquet comes from his personality, which was serene, and generous and fatherly, and from his seminal effect on the whole of Western music. Every composer since has been in his debt; we are all in some degree his children.” (Jan Swafford, “The Vintage Guide to Classical Music”)
The third movement uses rondo form, in which the main musical idea recurs between sections containing contrasting musical ideas. “Ungherese” means “Hungarian.” Haydn’s use of gypsy rhythm and the minor mode between sections in the major key gives the piece a gypsy or folk music quality.

Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948 — )
Pie Jesu from the Requiem Mass (1985)

A list of musical shows by Andrew Lloyd Webber reads like a who’s who of the business: “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Evita,” “Cats,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,”and 11 others.
Lloyd Webber’s musical productivity and success reminds the listener of his countryman, G.F. Handel, who also wrote many operas. As a businessman, Handel owned or partly owned the theaters, which presented his works, and Lloyd Webber is the owner of a number of West End theatres, including the Palace. (Wikipedia)
The Requiem Mass premiered in New York on Feb. 25, 1985, at St. Thomas Church. This composition was inspired by an article he read about the plight of Cambodian orphans.” (Wikipedia)
The “Pie Jesu” became so popular in Great Britain that it placed high up on the pop charts there. Currently, there are two performances of “Pie Jesu” on YouTube.

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, final mvt.

Mendelssohn, a veritable genius, performed piano in public at 9 and began composing at 11. At 17 he wrote the exquisite “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a work that continues to be popular today, almost 200 years after its first performance.
Mendelssohn died young, at 38, but led a fantastically productive life as a solo performer, composer, conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and leader of the Bach revival.
Of the 121 opuses Mendelssohn published, a remarkable number for so short a life, a perennial favorite is the “Violin Concerto in E Minor,” his only violin concerto. Every concertizing violinist must learn this work and indeed, no student at any conservatory graduates without it.
The third and final movement is sprightly, playful and utterly original in its musical voice. The musical texture is truly limpid, unlike many works of the Romantic Era, and the solo violin always soars overtop the orchestra. Mendelssohn’s balance of soloist and orchestra is unique.

Modest Mussorgsky (1829-1881)
Hopak and Great Gate of Kiev

“Hopak” is a lively Ukranian dance with heel beats, in which dancers stamp their heels on the floor.
Mussorgsky studied piano from the age of 10, but entered the cadet school of the Imperial Guard as a teenager, and became a Guardsman as an adult. Only later did a friend introduce him to Cui and Balakirev, composers of the “Mighty Russian Five.” It was then that Mussorgsky decided to become a professional composer himself.
He played and analyzed piano arrangements of works by Beethoven and Schumann, and Balakirev helped him acquire a knowledge of form. However, he failed to write convincing music in the classical style and felt he lacked technique; it was this deficit that “compelled him time and again to leave his various pieces unfinished.” Mussorgsky was able to write short works but couldn’t string them together into a bigger, formal composition. (“Baker’s Biographical Dictionary” ed. N. Slonimsky)
Originally, the “Great Gate of Kiev” was written for the piano as the finale of a tone poem called Pictures at an Exhibition. Today, there are more than 10 orchestrated versions of Pictures to choose from; the one best known is by Ravel.
As a concluding section, the “Great Gate of Kiev” is one of the most imaginative, grand, and effective endings any composer could have written. It acts like a coda, recapitulation, and finale all rolled into one powerful movement.

Vittorio Monti (1868-1922)
Czardas

Monti, an Italian born in Naples, composed ballets, operettas, pantomimes, as well as instrumental, vocal and violin pieces. Today, Monti is best remembered for writing Czardas.
Monti studied violin at the conservatory in San Pietro at Majella, and composition with Paolo Serrao. He went to Paris in 1886 and became the concertmaster in the Lamoureux Orchestra. Later, he became a conductor in Paris.
The Czardas is a Hungarian national dance in two movements, one slow and the other fast. It’s interesting that most gypsy orchestras know and play the Czardas of Monti, a Neapolitan composer. Moreover, these dances are singularly the cause of Monti’s fame.
Hungarian folk music has made itself felt in the world of classical music. Great composers such as Haydn, Beethoven, Liszt, Dvorak, Brahms and Bartok have used the unusual rhythms, scales, and harmonies, in their compositions, often in final movements. The distinctive soulfulness of the music, a yearning quality, even a pathos, has intrigued and inspired great musical minds for more than 200 years.

Pearce Littler (1991 — )
Symphony One (2008)

Pearce LittlerLittler is a junior at Glenwood Springs High School and a regular member of the violin section in Symphony in the Valley. He studies violin under Suzanne Nadeau-Porter of Gypsum.
These concerts mark his debut as an orchestral composer and conductor, and the premier for Symphony One.
“I just love to write music,” Littler says. “I always had all these songs in my head and I wanted to write them down. Composing for me, I think, is less of an inspiration and more of a need.”
Littler won the 2008 Glenwood Springs Stars of Tomorrow competition with a solo version of his composition, “Piano-Violin Duet.” He will perform the piece again with pianist Anna Triebel at the GSHS Coffee House, 7 p.m. on May 13.
Littler is also a member of the Glenwood Springs High School Varsity Choir.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Grand March from Tannhauser

“The first half of the Romantic period in music was dominated by Beethoven, the second half by Richard Wagner,” writes Jan Swafford (Vintage Guide). “Others wrote large, ambitious works; Wagner wrote epic music dramas with world-transforming intentions. One simply attended other composers’ operas; Wagner established a shrine [at Bayreuth] for his 17-hour, four-night cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), presented as a quasi-religious festival to a convocation of pilgrims.”
Wagner’s life goal was to change opera, to make it like the ancient Greek form of music drama. In this new form, the elements of music, text, drama, movement and design would be equal in importance; solo arias and recitative would no longer dominate. Music drama would be a kind of religious ritual based on myths and legends,” which would uplift, even purify, its listeners.
 The opera Tannhauser is the story of a minnesinger named Tannhauser. The minnesingers were knightly poet-singers in Germany during the 12th and 13th centuries. The story includes a singing contest, and the “Grand March” is heard in Act II as richly attired noblemen enter and assemble for the contest.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
Finale from The Pines of Rome (1924)

Respighi and The Pines of Rome are practically synonyms; think of one and the other comes to mind. The Pines of Rome is a set of four symphonic poems. They are described as tone paintings of the Roman landscape, in that the tone coloring of the orchestral instruments paints a picture in the mind of the listener.
The Romantic Era composers, from Berlioz and Schumann, to Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Gershwin and Grofe, strove to evoke mental pictures through tone coloring and program music. Program music used extra-musical ideas, or followed a story set forth in program notes.
Respighi played the viola and the violin, and was principal violist in the orchestra of the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg for two years. He studied composition there with Rimsky Korsakov, and later with Max Bruch in Berlin.
Respighi’s music is both romantic in style and accessible, that is to say, listenable. In his melodic and harmonic language, Respighi does not stray into the modernism so familiar to the 20th Century in works of composers such as Bartok, Hindemith or Schoenberg. The Pines of Rome became a regular on concert programs from the moment it was written, and today remains as popular as ever.

The Pines of Rome closes these Symphony in the Valley’s concerts in grand fashion, and effectively signals the end of an era too.
With this piece we bid a fond adieu and best wishes to our beloved conductor of 14 years, Wendy Larson. Thank you, Wendy, for all you have done!

Soloist biographies

Sylvia Tran Sylvia Tran, 12, Aspen
Sylvia is in the 7th grade at Aspen Middle School. She started playing violin at 8, and studies under Heidi Curatolo.
She was inspired to take up the violin after accompanying a friend to her music lesson.
“After that, I knew that was my instrument and I can be great at it,” she said.
Playing the violin has also helped her maturity.
“I am shy, and I thought that playing the violin could build confidence, because you have to play well and have special techniques. It feels like the confidence in me builds up when people like my music,” she said.
Sylvia likes the concerto she is playing because it is an upbeat song that includes various bow and hand techniques. It also skips back and forth between styles, starting and ending with the hint of a Spanish dance and breaking into an Austrian ländler, which is like a slow waltz.
“It features left hand pizzicato, harmonics, various bow strokes including ricochet and brush strokes,” she said. “All of these combine to make an enjoyable, happy song that is challenging and fun to play.”
Jenaer Rader Jenaer Rader, 14, Loma
Jenaer is in 9th grade at Fruita Middle School. He started playing piano at 8, and studies under Katie Mientka.
Jenear started playing piano to help his sister.
“My younger sister started to play piano and was apprehensive about taking lessons alone, so I decided to take piano lessons with her so she would not be afraid. I grew to like playing the piano myself,” he recalled.
Jenaer likes the way one section flows easily into the next in Haydn’s piano concerto.
“I really like the B minor section,” he noted. Listen for the brief modulation to the minor key about halfway into the piece.
Zoe Levine Zoe Levine, 13, Carbondale                                   
Zoe is in the 7th grade at Aspen Community School.
She started her performing career two years ago with Jayne Gottlieb Productions, and has been singing and dancing in Gottlieb shows ever since. Last fall, she began taking singing lessons from Julie Paxton through the Jazz Aspen Snowmass music program.
“My love of music started when I was 4, going to Jazz Aspen concerts with my dad,” Zoe says. “But I always loved to sing.”
Tackling the “Pie Jesu,” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wildly popular Requiem Mass, brought Zoe to a new level. “It has challenged me to reach ranges I could never reach,” she said.
William Ronning William Ronning, 17, Glenwood Springs
William Ronning is a senior who is home schooled along with his five siblings. He began playing violin at 4, studying under Ginny Womack and Byron Plexico in Indianapolis and now under Paul Primus, principal second violin for the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.
William has been a finalist and winner of several young artist competitions in Indiana. His first solo performance with an orchestra was at the age of 12.
He was a member of the New World Youth Symphony Orchestra in Indianapolis for five years, where he served as principal second violin. In 2006 this orchestra placed first in the ASTA National Orchestra Festival in Kansas.
William plays with the Aspen Choral Society Orchestra and is the founder of The Zephyr String Quartet, which performs locally for weddings and special events, its members being his siblings.
William plans to major in violin performance at Bob Jones University. He plans to continue his study of the violin at a music conservatory. In his free time, William enjoys building and flying radio controlled airplanes.
Annie Tempest Annie Tempest, 18, Carbondale
Annie is a senior at Roaring Fork High School in Carbondale.
She began playing violin at 6, and studied under Mary Carlson. She now studies under Suzanne Nadeau Porter of Gypsum.
“I was inspired to play violin when I attended a ‘Peter and the Wolf’ concert with my mom when I was 5. I loved the sound of the violin and the way it looked when people played it,” Annie recalled.
“I also liked the flute, and after the performance I announced that I wanted to play either violin or flute. Before I knew it, my mom had found a violin teacher and I was learning to play violin.”
Her choice for her senior recital is “Czardas” by the Italian Vittorio Monti.
“I really enjoy playing ‘Czardas.’ It has a gypsy style, which makes it more dramatic and exciting to play, allowing me to experiment with sliding and tone and dynamics.
“This piece has both fast and slow parts, and chords and harmonics, which all keep it fun and interesting to play. Hopefully it will be entertaining to hear.”
Annie plans to attend Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa.

© 2008 Symphony in the Valley
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