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TIMELESS VOICES
Saturday, April 28, 2018, 7pm
Broadmoor Community Church Sunday, April 29, 2018, 2:30pm First Christian Church Mozart Overture to Don Giovanni, K.527 Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, op. 73 “Emperor” Kensuke Ota, piano Amy Beach Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, op. 32 “Gaelic” |
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American composer Amy Beach’s music is finally being recognized for the amazing contribution it is. The Chamber Orchestra ends its season in fine style with Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony--rarely heard and not to be missed! Classics by Mozart and Beethoven round out the program, with the jubilant return of pianist Kensuke Ota--back by popular demand--for Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto.
Pre-concert talk 45 minutes prior to each concert with Tania Cronin, Colorado College. |
Kensuke Ota began playing piano at the age of 6 and gave his first public recital when he was 14. His awards include: 1st prize in the Japanese National Piano Competition PTNA “Grand-Muse Category” in 2006, Grand Prize and Audience Award in the 2007 Rocky Mountain Amateur Piano Competition, 2nd prize in the 2012 Outstanding Amateur Piano Competition in Paris, 2nd prizes in both solo and concerto categories in the 2014 Chicago Amateur Piano Competition and, 1st prize in the 2016 Piano Bridges International Competition for Amateur Pianists in St. Petersburg. He played Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No.2 with Springs Orchestra in Colorado Springs in 2009, Mozart Concerto No. 24 with Mozart Ensemble Orchestra in 2013, and Rachmaninoff piano concerto No.3 with Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Aside from his music carrier, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Japan’s premier University of Tokyo and makes his living as a research and development scientist. He has been studying piano under Seiko Aizawa.
PROGRAM NOTES BY MARK ARNEST
Mozart Overture to Don Giovanni, K.527
Overview: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1787
Why It Matters: The innovative overture to one of the greatest operas ever composed.
Mozart’s struggles in Vienna are the stuff of legend (marvelously fictionalized in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, currently being produced at UCCS’s Theatreworks), but in Prague he was always welcome. His librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote that “It is not easy to convey an adequate conception of the enthusiasm of the Bohemians for [Mozart’s] music. The pieces which were admired least of all in other countries were regarded by those people as things divine; and, more wonderful still, the great beauties which other nations discovered in the music of that rare genius only after many, many performances, were perfectly appreciated by the Bohemians on the very first evening.”
The foundation of Mozart’s popularity in Prague was a 1783 performance of his singspiel The Abduction from the Seraglio. In 1786, Prague went wild over The Marriage of Figaro, which had received a lukewarm reception earlier that year in Vienna. This prompted Mozart to visit in early 1787, for which he probably composed the Prague Symphony (No. 38). Of a concert on January 19, Mozart wrote that he counted the day as one of the happiest of his life. During the visit, the opera house commissioned a new opera from Mozart – Don Giovanni, which would be one of the greatest works of a composer whose output is studded with masterpieces. In the last months of his life he would also compose his final opera, La Clemenza di Tito, for Prague.
According to Mozart’s wife, Constanze, Mozart composed the overture to Don Giovanni in a single night, two days before the opera’s premier. This is astonishing, but not quite as astonishing as it seems. First, Mozart typically completed works in his head, so writing down the music was for him merely copying. (Okay, that really is astonishing.) Second, as you can see in an online holograph of the manuscript, Mozart utilized a lot of shorthand. For instance, where the violins double the woodwinds, Mozart doesn’t notate the strings, but simply writes that they should play the same notes as the flutes or oboes. Since Classical sonata forms typically repeat the beginning of the piece at the recapitulation, Mozart doesn’t write this down, and instead instructs us to repeat the first 24 bars following the ominous, slow opening section.
And that opening had already been composed: It comes from the opera’s climactic scene, making it one of the first instances of a composer re-using material from the overture in the opera.
Mozart scholar Herman Abert conceived of this overture not as slow introduction/fast main section but as “the representation of, on the one hand, an awesomely sublime power imbued with all the terrors of the other world and, on the other hand, a demonic passion spurred on to ever greater heights by every act of resistance that it encounters.” This demonic passion takes the form of an energetic sonata form. Typically for Mozart, the themes themselves are extraordinarily rich, with the first theme alone containing four separate elements: A gentle chromatic rise; a leaping, syncopated motif; a scurrying descent; and a vaguely martial conclusion, all in eight quick bars. There is no repeat of the exposition, increasing the overture’s sense of compression and urgency. In the opera, the overture carries this tension without a break into Leporello’s first aria, but this concert version ends triumphantly in D major.
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, op. 73 “Emperor”
Overview: Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1809-1811
Why It Matters: Beethoven’s final piano concerto is one of the masterpieces of his middle, heroic style.
Beethoven first became famous as a piano virtuoso; it took several more years for him to achieve recognition as a composer. His compositions for piano remain a pillar of the repertoire, and the five piano concertos – and especially the last three – are among the best-known works of the genre.
Like most of Beethoven’s works with titles – including the Pathetique, Moonlight, and Appassionata sonatas, and the Kreutzer sonata for violin and piano – the piece’s name does not come from Beethoven, but was added by a publisher. It’s not far-fetched, however. Not only was the piece dedicated to the son of an emperor – Archduke Rudolph of Austria, a friend and supporter of Beethoven’s who received numerous dedications from the composer, and was soloist at its premiere – but it possesses a regal sense of nobility and spaciousness.
The first movement is one of the most massive allegros Beethoven ever composed, surpassed only by the first movement of the Violin Concerto and the finale of the Ninth Symphony. Because the exposition is so long, Beethoven gives the piano an opening flourish to make certain we know who’s the star of the show before it resumes its customary silence during the first exposition.
The first movement covers an enormous expressive range with comparatively little thematic material – the jubilant closing theme, for instance, is a variant of the opening theme. The contrasts are sharp, and Beethoven butts different keys against each other with almost elemental force.
Before the Emperor, a concerto’s first movement contained a spot near the end for an improvised cadenza, giving soloists an opportunity to showcase their virtuosity and musical taste. The young Beethoven was famous for his improvisations, but the middle-aged Beethoven wasn’t about to give someone else this much effect on the movement’s shape: The concerto’s cadenza is written out. It’s short, which is welcome in such a long movement; and it ends, not with the customary loud instrumental trill, but with the French horns easing back into the texture. Such gentleness would have been unthinkable with the old formula.
The prayerful second movement – one of Beethoven’s most sublime inspirations – is in the distantly related key of B major, for which Beethoven has prepared us by putting a substantial chunk of the first movement in that key. After the first movement’s immense journey, this movement’s form couldn’t be simpler: the chorale-like theme, a brief interlude, and a decorated repeat of the theme.
The third movement is an ecstatic dance that revolves around itself to create a sense of never-ending motion. The themes are harmonically simple: The main theme, despite its melodic chromaticism, has only two underlying chords. And the movement’s rondo form – a regularly recurring main theme surrounding contrasting themes – is less propulsive than a sonata. The result is one of the least goal-oriented movements Beethoven ever composed: The journey is taken to enjoy the scenery, not to reach a destination.
Amy Beach Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, op. 32 “Gaelic”
Overview: Amy Beach
Born September 5, 1867, Henniker, NH; died January 27, 1944, New York City, NY
Work Composed: 1894-1895
Why It Matters: The earliest-known symphony by an American woman, and arguably the finest American symphony of the period.
Like Beethoven, Amy Beach – known during her lifetime as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach – first achieved fame as a pianist. As Amy Cheney, she made her debut with orchestra at age 16, performing Ignaz Moscheles’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; she later wrote of this event, “Life was beginning!” For the next two years she had a busy performing schedule.
This came to an end when the 18-year-old Amy married the 42-year-old Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, and agreed to limit her public performances to approximately one per year. (Her mother probably had a hand in this arrangement: Although a fine pianist herself, she was opposed to her well-bred daughter becoming a professional performer.)
Whatever the world lost by Beach abandoning her performing career, it gained by Beach concentrating on composition. But her success was hard-won. Though her husband was enormously supportive of her creative work, his support was conditional: He did not allow her to have a professional composition teacher, out of concern that her individuality might be overwhelmed. (Not to mention that, in an age when female composers were almost unheard-of, such a teacher would have been male, a possible source of concern for a middle-aged man with a very young wife.) No other composer of Beach’s era had so little contact with her peers, or had to figure out so much on her own.
Nevertheless, she persisted, and by 1893 was so well-respected in Boston that she was one of a group of American musicians invited to respond in the Boston Herald to Antonin Dvořák’s call for an American music based on African American melodies. No, she wrote; composers should look to their own heritage for their material: “We of the North should be far more likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors.”
And so it came to be that one of the first important American symphonies is largely based on Irish folk songs. It is also heavily influenced by Dvořák – specifically the “New World” symphony, which created a sensation at its December 1893 New York premiere.
Beach heard the Boston premier of the symphony later that month, and began composing her symphony just a few weeks later. It took her nearly two years to complete; she began with the second and third movements before tackling the more complex first and fourth movements.
The first movement is feverishly energetic and dramatic. Beach adapts the first two themes from her tempestuous song, “Dark Is the Night!” The closing theme is the jaunty Irish tune, “Connor O’Reilly of Clounish.”
The second movement is a set of free variations on the Irish song, “The Little Field of Barley.” Its lyricism and lilting 6/8 rhythm make it the symphony’s most immediately appealing movement.
Several commentators have described the beautiful third movement’s form as a “modified sonata form” – true if you take “modified sonata form” to mean “not a sonata form in any way at all.” It consists of a long section in E minor based on the haunting Irish lullaby, “The Lively Child”; a shorter E major section based on the Irish song, “Which Way Did She Go?”, and a comparatively brief coda that restates both themes in E minor.
For the fourth movement, Beach returned to a motif from “Dark Is the Night!”, which generates all the thematic material. The soaring second theme is particularly lovely; and after a great deal of drama, the symphony ends in a triumphant blaze of E major.
Beach’s orchestration is occasionally a bit dense and heavy – you’ll hear about three seasons’ worth of trombone and tuba in octaves – but overall it’s an expressive, well-constructed, and original piece that deserves to be performed.
And for several decades that was the verdict in the United States. The Gaelic Symphony disappeared from the repertoire, not because its composer was a woman, but for the most mundane of reasons: Taste changed, and audiences craved American music with a more distinctly American sound – a sound that composers such as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin supplied, and that the earlier, German-influenced composers such as Beach and Edward MacDowell did not.
Mozart Overture to Don Giovanni, K.527
Overview: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1787
Why It Matters: The innovative overture to one of the greatest operas ever composed.
Mozart’s struggles in Vienna are the stuff of legend (marvelously fictionalized in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, currently being produced at UCCS’s Theatreworks), but in Prague he was always welcome. His librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote that “It is not easy to convey an adequate conception of the enthusiasm of the Bohemians for [Mozart’s] music. The pieces which were admired least of all in other countries were regarded by those people as things divine; and, more wonderful still, the great beauties which other nations discovered in the music of that rare genius only after many, many performances, were perfectly appreciated by the Bohemians on the very first evening.”
The foundation of Mozart’s popularity in Prague was a 1783 performance of his singspiel The Abduction from the Seraglio. In 1786, Prague went wild over The Marriage of Figaro, which had received a lukewarm reception earlier that year in Vienna. This prompted Mozart to visit in early 1787, for which he probably composed the Prague Symphony (No. 38). Of a concert on January 19, Mozart wrote that he counted the day as one of the happiest of his life. During the visit, the opera house commissioned a new opera from Mozart – Don Giovanni, which would be one of the greatest works of a composer whose output is studded with masterpieces. In the last months of his life he would also compose his final opera, La Clemenza di Tito, for Prague.
According to Mozart’s wife, Constanze, Mozart composed the overture to Don Giovanni in a single night, two days before the opera’s premier. This is astonishing, but not quite as astonishing as it seems. First, Mozart typically completed works in his head, so writing down the music was for him merely copying. (Okay, that really is astonishing.) Second, as you can see in an online holograph of the manuscript, Mozart utilized a lot of shorthand. For instance, where the violins double the woodwinds, Mozart doesn’t notate the strings, but simply writes that they should play the same notes as the flutes or oboes. Since Classical sonata forms typically repeat the beginning of the piece at the recapitulation, Mozart doesn’t write this down, and instead instructs us to repeat the first 24 bars following the ominous, slow opening section.
And that opening had already been composed: It comes from the opera’s climactic scene, making it one of the first instances of a composer re-using material from the overture in the opera.
Mozart scholar Herman Abert conceived of this overture not as slow introduction/fast main section but as “the representation of, on the one hand, an awesomely sublime power imbued with all the terrors of the other world and, on the other hand, a demonic passion spurred on to ever greater heights by every act of resistance that it encounters.” This demonic passion takes the form of an energetic sonata form. Typically for Mozart, the themes themselves are extraordinarily rich, with the first theme alone containing four separate elements: A gentle chromatic rise; a leaping, syncopated motif; a scurrying descent; and a vaguely martial conclusion, all in eight quick bars. There is no repeat of the exposition, increasing the overture’s sense of compression and urgency. In the opera, the overture carries this tension without a break into Leporello’s first aria, but this concert version ends triumphantly in D major.
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, op. 73 “Emperor”
Overview: Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 1770, Bonn, Germany; died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria
Work Composed: 1809-1811
Why It Matters: Beethoven’s final piano concerto is one of the masterpieces of his middle, heroic style.
Beethoven first became famous as a piano virtuoso; it took several more years for him to achieve recognition as a composer. His compositions for piano remain a pillar of the repertoire, and the five piano concertos – and especially the last three – are among the best-known works of the genre.
Like most of Beethoven’s works with titles – including the Pathetique, Moonlight, and Appassionata sonatas, and the Kreutzer sonata for violin and piano – the piece’s name does not come from Beethoven, but was added by a publisher. It’s not far-fetched, however. Not only was the piece dedicated to the son of an emperor – Archduke Rudolph of Austria, a friend and supporter of Beethoven’s who received numerous dedications from the composer, and was soloist at its premiere – but it possesses a regal sense of nobility and spaciousness.
The first movement is one of the most massive allegros Beethoven ever composed, surpassed only by the first movement of the Violin Concerto and the finale of the Ninth Symphony. Because the exposition is so long, Beethoven gives the piano an opening flourish to make certain we know who’s the star of the show before it resumes its customary silence during the first exposition.
The first movement covers an enormous expressive range with comparatively little thematic material – the jubilant closing theme, for instance, is a variant of the opening theme. The contrasts are sharp, and Beethoven butts different keys against each other with almost elemental force.
Before the Emperor, a concerto’s first movement contained a spot near the end for an improvised cadenza, giving soloists an opportunity to showcase their virtuosity and musical taste. The young Beethoven was famous for his improvisations, but the middle-aged Beethoven wasn’t about to give someone else this much effect on the movement’s shape: The concerto’s cadenza is written out. It’s short, which is welcome in such a long movement; and it ends, not with the customary loud instrumental trill, but with the French horns easing back into the texture. Such gentleness would have been unthinkable with the old formula.
The prayerful second movement – one of Beethoven’s most sublime inspirations – is in the distantly related key of B major, for which Beethoven has prepared us by putting a substantial chunk of the first movement in that key. After the first movement’s immense journey, this movement’s form couldn’t be simpler: the chorale-like theme, a brief interlude, and a decorated repeat of the theme.
The third movement is an ecstatic dance that revolves around itself to create a sense of never-ending motion. The themes are harmonically simple: The main theme, despite its melodic chromaticism, has only two underlying chords. And the movement’s rondo form – a regularly recurring main theme surrounding contrasting themes – is less propulsive than a sonata. The result is one of the least goal-oriented movements Beethoven ever composed: The journey is taken to enjoy the scenery, not to reach a destination.
Amy Beach Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, op. 32 “Gaelic”
Overview: Amy Beach
Born September 5, 1867, Henniker, NH; died January 27, 1944, New York City, NY
Work Composed: 1894-1895
Why It Matters: The earliest-known symphony by an American woman, and arguably the finest American symphony of the period.
Like Beethoven, Amy Beach – known during her lifetime as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach – first achieved fame as a pianist. As Amy Cheney, she made her debut with orchestra at age 16, performing Ignaz Moscheles’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; she later wrote of this event, “Life was beginning!” For the next two years she had a busy performing schedule.
This came to an end when the 18-year-old Amy married the 42-year-old Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, and agreed to limit her public performances to approximately one per year. (Her mother probably had a hand in this arrangement: Although a fine pianist herself, she was opposed to her well-bred daughter becoming a professional performer.)
Whatever the world lost by Beach abandoning her performing career, it gained by Beach concentrating on composition. But her success was hard-won. Though her husband was enormously supportive of her creative work, his support was conditional: He did not allow her to have a professional composition teacher, out of concern that her individuality might be overwhelmed. (Not to mention that, in an age when female composers were almost unheard-of, such a teacher would have been male, a possible source of concern for a middle-aged man with a very young wife.) No other composer of Beach’s era had so little contact with her peers, or had to figure out so much on her own.
Nevertheless, she persisted, and by 1893 was so well-respected in Boston that she was one of a group of American musicians invited to respond in the Boston Herald to Antonin Dvořák’s call for an American music based on African American melodies. No, she wrote; composers should look to their own heritage for their material: “We of the North should be far more likely to be influenced by the old English, Scotch, or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors.”
And so it came to be that one of the first important American symphonies is largely based on Irish folk songs. It is also heavily influenced by Dvořák – specifically the “New World” symphony, which created a sensation at its December 1893 New York premiere.
Beach heard the Boston premier of the symphony later that month, and began composing her symphony just a few weeks later. It took her nearly two years to complete; she began with the second and third movements before tackling the more complex first and fourth movements.
The first movement is feverishly energetic and dramatic. Beach adapts the first two themes from her tempestuous song, “Dark Is the Night!” The closing theme is the jaunty Irish tune, “Connor O’Reilly of Clounish.”
The second movement is a set of free variations on the Irish song, “The Little Field of Barley.” Its lyricism and lilting 6/8 rhythm make it the symphony’s most immediately appealing movement.
Several commentators have described the beautiful third movement’s form as a “modified sonata form” – true if you take “modified sonata form” to mean “not a sonata form in any way at all.” It consists of a long section in E minor based on the haunting Irish lullaby, “The Lively Child”; a shorter E major section based on the Irish song, “Which Way Did She Go?”, and a comparatively brief coda that restates both themes in E minor.
For the fourth movement, Beach returned to a motif from “Dark Is the Night!”, which generates all the thematic material. The soaring second theme is particularly lovely; and after a great deal of drama, the symphony ends in a triumphant blaze of E major.
Beach’s orchestration is occasionally a bit dense and heavy – you’ll hear about three seasons’ worth of trombone and tuba in octaves – but overall it’s an expressive, well-constructed, and original piece that deserves to be performed.
And for several decades that was the verdict in the United States. The Gaelic Symphony disappeared from the repertoire, not because its composer was a woman, but for the most mundane of reasons: Taste changed, and audiences craved American music with a more distinctly American sound – a sound that composers such as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin supplied, and that the earlier, German-influenced composers such as Beach and Edward MacDowell did not.
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