Organ Spectacular “Once Upon a Castle”

Sunday, September 15, 2019, 2:30pm
FIRST UNITED METHODIST CHURCH 420 N Nevada Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80903
Pre-concert talk with Donald Zimmerman, D.M.A., Music Director, Immanuel Lutheran Church, begins 45 minutes prior to the performance

Joseph Rheinberger                    Organ Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, op. 177                                
Carol Wilson, organ
Francis Poulenc                             Organ Concerto in G Minor
Simon Jacobs, organ
Michael Daugherty                       Once Upon a Castle
Dr.  Joseph Galema, organ

The Chamber Orchestra’s 2019-2020 season opens with an exotic trip through Germany and France, ending at the mysterious Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California--home of Charles Foster Kane of Citizen Kane fame.  Simon Jacobs, the new Music Director at Grace Episcopal Church, makes his solo debut with the Chamber Orchestra while longtime friends Carol Wilson and Dr. Joseph Galema return for a powerful and diverse program.  The local premiere of Michael Daugherty’s Once Upon a Castle rounds out the program with a mind-boggling tour of Hearst Castle’s Neptune Pool and opulent parties in the Xanadu style, with a nod to Citizen Kane’s famous “Rosebud.”

PROGRAM NOTES BY MARK ARNEST

Overview: Joseph Rheinberger
Born March 17, 1839, Vaduz, Liechtenstein; died November 25, 1901, Munich, Germany
Work Composed: 1894

Josef Rheinberger’s talent was apparent early; he was organist at his parish church at the age of seven, and just five years later he was accepted into the Munich Conservatorium. He began teaching in Munich shortly after graduating, and remained there for the rest of his life.
That resumé might barely hints at Rheinberger’s ambition and energy. He performed extensively. He composed industriously, with nearly 200 compositions published in his lifetime, and many posthumous works. His copious organ works are his best known compositions, but he composed prolifically in many genres, ranging from opera, oratorio, and cantata, to songs and piano solos.
In addition, Rheinberger was one of his era’s most influential teachers, instructing or mentoring a slew of German musicians, though only Engelbert Humperdinck (composer of the opera Hänsel und Gretel) and the legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler are still widely remembered. He also gave advice and encouragement to the young Richard Strauss, but this relationship ended in 1888 when Rheinberger reacted to Don Juan – Strauss’s first mature work – by saying, “It’s a pity that you’ve got on to this false track, you’ve so much talent.” (The easy-going Strauss didn’t take it too personally; he continued to conduct Rheinberger’s works – including the 1894 premier of this concerto. However, he stopped showing his music to Rheinberger.)
As his remark to Strauss suggests, Rheinberger was a staunchly conservative composer, firmly in the camp of Brahms and Dvořák, as opposed to the modernism of Wagner and Liszt. The triumph of Wagnerism, along with the rise of other modern approaches, probably contributed to the obscurity that has largely enfolded Rheinberger’s music after his death. This is unfortunate, because Rheinberger’s music is excellent: not gloriously original – you will hear echoes of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Bach – but always well crafted, usually beautiful, and often inspired. And as with Brahms, who was less conservative than his contemporaries realized, Rheinberger’s harmonies sometimes surprise, and his thematic development is sophisticated.
The Organ Concerto follows a typical three-movement structure, with two fast sonata-form movements flanking a slower A-B-A movement. The organ and the orchestra are tightly integrated. The organ is often doubled with other instruments, and Rheinberger varies the tone color adroitly. One phrase might feature the organ doubling the French horns, and the next doubling the violins. As in Chopin’s piano concertos, there is no spectacular cadenza for the soloist, but the solo part is nearly continuous: The organist’s longest rest is a mere five-and-a-half bars long.
The concerto begins dramatically, with a catchy and rhythmically jagged motif that helps guide us through the sonata form. The second theme’s noble lyricism is more typical of Rheinberger, but it also invites an unflattering comparison with Edward Elgar’s slightly later Enigma Variations, which uses the same opening motif to greater effect.
The second movement features a pithy, songlike theme that recurs in subtle variants, a lá Schumann. The middle section’s theme is more vigorous, and the lovely transition back to the first theme shows off Rheinberger’s compositional skill. The finale begins with a hammering theme; its most charming theme is the closing theme, slightly reminiscent of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. Rheinberger’s sense of form is sure, and just when it sounds as if the concerto is churning towards a triumphant but slightly pat major-key conclusion, it suddenly swerves back to minor for a tempestuous coda that gives the final cadence a heroic cast.

Overview: Francis Poulenc
Born January 7, 1899, Paris, France; died January 30, 1963, Paris, France
Work composed: 1934-38

"An uncharacteristic work composed for an unexpected medium by the most unlikely composer."  Gillian Weir, organist

Despite his bon vivant public persona, Francis Poulenc lived a quietly heroic life. During World War II, he stayed in Paris during the German occupation, where instead of lying low he composed works that criticized the Nazis. He was openly gay at a time when this was dangerous. It’s not surprising that his masterpiece, the opera Dialogue of the Carmelites, explores the idea of moral courage.
This would have surprised the young Poulenc, whose story is unusual among French musicians. He was both privileged and an outsider: On the one hand, he came from a wealthy family and never had to hold down a job; and on the other hand, he is almost unique among French composers for having never had formal training at the Paris Conservatoire, which even such famous mavericks as Berlioz, Debussy, and Satie attended. (Satie at least lived up to his reputation as an outsider by failing to graduate.) Poulenc came to prominence in the early 1920s with witty and irreverent works such as the Mouvements perpétuels for piano and the ballet Les Biches, which enchanted people with their quirky tunefulness, their bittersweet-but-not-too-modern harmonies, and their ebullient energy.
Poulenc had already begun to change in the early 1930s – even a master of wit eventually longs for something more substantial – but the catalyst for his transformation was the 1936 decapitation of his friend Pierre-Octave Ferroud in an automobile accident. To help deal with his grief, Poulenc made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, in southern France. Here, he later wrote, “pondering on the fragility of our human spirit, the life of the spirit attracted me anew. Rocamadour led me back to the faith of my childhood.”
The Organ Concerto’s period of composition straddles this change of heart: He began the piece in 1934, on a commission from the Princesse de Polignac (a somewhat unapproachable title for the very approachable Winnaretta “Winnie” Singer, heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune), and didn’t complete it until 1938. Upon finally delivering it to the Princess, he wrote that “never, since I began to write music, have I had so much trouble in finding my means of expression.”
Poulenc’s difficulties are in no way evident in this piece, which has become the most popular organ concerto composed since Handel’s from the 18th century. Its seven sections, alternating slow and fast, weld together the charm of his early work along with his mature weight and seriousness. The form is reminiscent of the arches favored by Poulenc’s older colleagues Ferruccio Busoni and Béla Bartók: The first and last sections are related, as are the second and sixth sections and the third and fifth sections. (The prayerful third section is by far the longest in the piece.) Numerous thematic connections provide a sense that the sections belong together despite a stylistic range that Gillian Weir describes as “echoes of Bach, a bit of Mozart, a bit of Tchaikovsky, but all synthesized into vintage Poulenc.”
Lacking rigorous conservatory training, Poulenc turned to Maurice Duruflé for advice on writing for organ. (Duruflé’s superb interpretation was immortalized in a 1961 recording.) Poulenc chose a fairly light orchestral accompaniment – only strings and tympani – so that the work could be performed in a mid-sized church or even a large salon with an organ. The latter was not as rare as you’d expect – they were fashionable in the era’s upper-class French households, and the concerto was indeed premiered in the Princess’s salon.
The Organ Concerto is one of Poulenc’s most widely performed works. Poulenc described it as being “on the outskirts” of his religious works; perhaps the most eloquent testament was given by the Princess de Polignac, in a letter she wrote to Poulenc as she was dying in London during the Second World War: “Its profound beauty haunts me.”

Overview: Michael Daugherty
Born: April 28, 1954, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Work Composed: 2003, revised 2015

Michael Dougherty comes by his eclecticism honestly. His father was a jazz and country and western drummer; his mother sang musical theater. His youthful influences include Tin Pan Alley, Bach, a marching band, a soul group, and playing Hammond organ at county fairs. In college his teachers ranged from ultra-modernist Charles Wuorinen to the great Hungarian composer György Ligeti. He has taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) since 1991. 
He has written of the piece:
Once Upon a Castle (2015) for organ and orchestra was commissioned by the Ann Arbor Symphony and a consortium consisting of the Cedar Rapids Symphony, Rockford Symphony Orchestra, and West Michigan Symphony Orchestra. The world premiere was given by the Ann Arbor Symphony conducted by Arie Lipsky, with Steven Ball, organ, at the Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, Michigan, on November 15, 2003. The world premiere of the revised version was given by the Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero, with Paul Jacobs, organ, at Schermerhorn Symphony Center, Nashville, Tennessee, on November 6, 2015.
One of my favorite places to visit is Big Sur, a sparsely populated refuge located along the Pacific coast’s Highway 1 between Monterey and Cambria, California. Driving this scenic route, it is hard not to notice the Hearst Castle set high above the Pacific Ocean on the barren mountains of San Simeon. The Hearst Castle was the vision and private residence of American media mogul William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) and designed by architect Julia Morgan (1872–1957). Construction of the colossal castle began in 1919 and continued for nearly 30 years. By 1947, the Hearst Castle was a grand estate of 165 rooms. Today, the Hearst Castle is a museum and National Historic Landmark. My sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra is a nostalgic trip down memory lane to a time that was “once upon a castle.”
I. The Winding Road to San Simeon evokes the five-mile road winding up the San Simeon mountains to the Hearst Castle. The music crescendos until we reach the top of the entrance of the castle, where lush major chords in the organ and panoramic rhythmic sweeps of orchestral color evoke the spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean high above the coastline. As one of the world’s richest men at the time, Hearst had the means to travel the world to purchase extravagant European classical paintings, tapestries, sculptures and antiquities to decorate the rooms, terraces, pools, and walkways of his beloved castle. It is not by chance that I have composed music for this movement that might occasionally remind the listener of a musical “antique.”
II. Neptune Pool is the centerpiece of the Hearst Castle. Framed by statues of the sea-god Neptune and his Nereids, this magnificent outdoor Olympic-sized pool seems to hover above the clouds of the Pacific Ocean. For this movement, I have composed reflective “water music” that wistfully mirrors the grandeur of this aquatic wonder. This movement is dedicated to the memory of organist William Albright (1944–98), my former colleague in the composition department at the University of Michigan, who was considered one the world’s greatest composers of contemporary organ music.
III. Rosebud. In the shadow of the Hearst Castle is Citizen Kane (1941), the groundbreaking film starring and directed by Orson Welles. The film presents an unflattering caricature of Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane), his mistress Marion Davies (Susan Alexander) and life at the Hearst Castle (Xanadu). My music for this movement echoes a brilliant scene in the film where the boisterous Kane (the organ) and lonely Susan (the solo violin) argue from opposite ends of a cavernous empty room of the castle. The sleighbells remind us of Kane’s final word, before he dies alone: “Rosebud,” painted on Kane’s childhood sled.
IV. Xanadu. Randolph Hearst and his longtime companion Marion Davies were high society’s premiere Hollywood couple, throwing lavish weekend parties at the Hearst Castle during the 1920s and 1930s. Among those who received and accepted the coveted invitations were important political dignitaries such as Winston Churchill and famous film stars of the day including Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, and Greta Garbo.
For the final movement, I also had in mind fragments of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem, Kubla Khan. My Xanadu is filled with exotic organ chords and virtuoso bass pedal riffs surrounded by sizzling strings, rumbling brass, shimmering percussion, and pulsating timpani. In the middle of the proceedings, I briefly return to an elaborate development of music from the first movement. After this “flashback,” I pull out all the stops for a dramatic ending, which concludes my tour of Xanadu and the “pleasure-dome” that Hearst built “once upon a castle.”

OUR PERFORMANCE OF THOMAS WILSON'S ARRANGEMENT OF WIDOR'S TOCCATA FOR OUR 2018 ORGAN SPECTACULAR!

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