Tuesday, November 5, 2024
11:00 AM
Florence Kopleff Recital Hall
VARIATIONS ON PORGY AND BESS
ARR. ERIC SAMMUT | B. 1968
Porgy and Bess is an English-language opera by American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin. It was adapted as a film in 1959. Some of the songs in the opera, such as "Summertime", became popular and are frequently recorded.
George Gershwin, born in Brooklyn,1898, was the second son of Russian immigrants. In 1924, when George teamed up with his older brother Ira, “the Gershwins” became the dominant Broadway songwriters, creating infectious rhythm numbers and poignant ballads, fashioning the words to fit the melodies with a “glove-like” fidelity. This extraordinary combination created a succession of musical comedies, including LADY, BE GOOD! (1924), OH, KAY! (1926), FUNNY FACE (1927), STRIKE UP THE BAND (1927 and 1930), GIRL CRAZY (1930), and OF THEE I SING (1931), the first musical comedy to win a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1926 Gershwin read PORGY, DuBose Heyward’s novel of the South Carolina Gullah culture, and immediately recognized it as a perfect vehicle for a “folk opera” using blues and jazz idioms. PORGY AND BESS (co-written with Heyward and Ira) was Gershwin’s most ambitious undertaking, integrating unforgettable songs with dramatic incident. PORGY AND BESS previewed in Boston on September 30, 1935 and opened its Broadway run on October 10.
Fantasie for viola and piano
JOHANN NEPOMUK HUMMEL | 1778-1837
A child prodigy from a musical family, the seven-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel made such an impression on his piano teacher that he was invited to move in with the family. (That teacher was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.) After touring Europe for five dazzling years, the teenaged Hummel returned to Vienna, where he found himself locked in a fierce rivalry and on-again-off-again friendship with the only pianist of comparable talent. (Ludwig van Beethoven, of course.) When Hummel needed a steady job in his early twenties, all it took was a word from a supportive older composer to his longtime employer. (That would be Franz Joseph Haydn and the Esterházy family). This is all to say that Hummel was a musician who earned the respect of his most esteemed colleagues, even if his star has faded over the centuries.
Hummel was active in a period when virtuosic solo vehicles with orchestra were all the rage, and he completed at least sixteen such crowd-pleasers for his own instrument, the piano. His Potpourri for viola and orchestra belongs to the same tradition, in this case using a title that promises a sampling of fun and approachable delights. His audience would have picked up on the various opera quotations from Mozart and Gioachino Rossini, and even outside of that context, the viola’s voice-like warmth and huge sonic range hold self-evident charms.
notes © 2023 Aaron Grad
Sonata No. 26 Op. 81 “Les Adieux”
I. Das Lebewohl
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN | 1770-1827
Fernanda Miranda, piano
Listen carefully to the three opening chords of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat Major, Op. 81a. For Beethoven, these chords outlined the three broken syllables of the word “Le-be-wohl,” or “Fare-thee-well,” which he inscribed in the manuscript.
Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” (“Fairwell”) Piano Sonata was completed on May 4, 1809 as Napoleon’s army invaded Vienna. Among the fleeing aristocrats was Beethoven’s sponsor and composition and piano student, Archduke Rudolf (1788-1831).
Concerto in E-flat major for alto saxophone and orchestra
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV | 1865-1936
Concerto in E-flat major for alto saxophone is deeply rooted in Romanticism and has entered the standard saxophone repertoire. The work premiered in Nyköping, Sweden, on 25 November 1934, with Sigurd Raschèr, a famous German saxophonist, as soloist. It is Raschèr who is credited for bringing about the concerto's composition. He hounded Glazunov for a saxophone concerto, so much so that the composer wrote to a colleague that he had started the piece in March "under the influences of attacks rather than requests from the Danish (sic) saxophonist named Sigurd Rascher". He completed the work in June 1934.
Ice Cream Sextet
from Street Scene
KURT WEILL | 1900-1950
Street Scene is an American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, Street Scene is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1929 play of the same name by Rice. He received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947. Considered far more an opera than a musical, Street Scene is regularly produced by professional opera companies and has never been revived on Broadway. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the mid-ground between Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957).
Mariel
OSVALDO GOLIJOV | B. 1960
A student of a diverse range of composers, Golijov has blended Argentinean music, traditional Jewish idioms, and modern sounds into a distinctive style. His klezmer-influenced clarinet quintet The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994) first brought him to international attention and other works have received considerable acclaim, particularly La Pasión según San Marcos, commissioned by the Stuttgart International Bach Academy in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the death of Bach. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, was Musical America’s composer of the year in 2006, and won the 2007 Best Classical Contemporary Composition Grammy for his opera Ainadamar.
Golijov wrote the following note about Mariel:
“I wrote this piece in memory of my friend Mariel Stubrin. I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a single moment frozen forever in one’s memory, and which reverberates through the piece, among the waves and echoes of the Brazilian music that Mariel loved. The work was written for and premiered [in 1999] by Maya Beiser and Steve Schick.”
- notes from Hollywood Bowl
Selections from West Side Story
LEONARD BERNSTEIN| 1918-1990
ARR. JACK GALE | 1935-2018
Prologue
Maria
America
West Side Story is a musical conceived by Jerome Robbins with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. Inspired by William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, the story is set in the mid-1950s in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, then a multiracial, blue-collar neighborhood.
The original 1957 Broadway production, directed and choreographed by Robbins, marked Sondheim's Broadway debut. It ran for 732 performances before going on tour. The production was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in 1958, winning two. The show had an even longer-running West End production, a number of revivals, and international productions. A 1961 musical film adaptation, co-directed by Robert Wise and Robbins, was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won ten, including Best Picture. A 2021 film adaptation, directed by Steven Spielberg was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with six additional nominations, winning for Best Supporting Actress.