Conductor
Gregory Vajda

featuring
Corey Cerovsek, violin

JALBERT: Fire and Ice (Magnum Opus work)
BARBER: Violin Concerto
COPLAND: Music for the Theatre
BERNSTEIN: On the Waterfront Symphonic Suite

November 10, 11, 12 , 2007
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein showed the world how to write classical music in an American way. Copland’s saucy work, Music for the Theatre relies on jazz idioms of the 1920s (with just a hint of the Parisian), while Bernstein’s symphonic suite based on the film masterpiece, On the Waterfront, recalls Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, only with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint as the star-crossed lovers! Samuel Barber’s violin concerto combines the lush imagery of the Romantic era with the dissonance and jangling energy of the 20th century. It’s the perfect vehicle for the brilliant, young virtuoso Corey Cerovsek in his SRS debut.

This program also features a Magnum Opus commission, Pierre Jalbert’s Fire and Ice, which had its world premiere with Oakland East Bay Symphony in February 2007 and repeats here as part of Kathryn Gould’s Meet the Composer/Magnum Opus Project.

PRESENTED BY THE LAW OFFICES OF

PIERRE JALBERT: Fire and Ice

Pierre Jalbert was born in 1967 and lives in Houston, Texas. He composed Fire and Ice in 2006 on a commission by Kathryn Gould through Meet the Composer Foundation's Magnum Opus Project. Michael Morgan conducted the premiere with the Oakland East Bay Symphony on February 23, 2007. The score calls for three flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and three percussionists, piano, and strings. The duration is about 20 minutes.

Not to be confused with the Canadian actor and skier Pierre Jalbert (born 1925), the American composer of the same name has been developing a name for himself, marked by a wide range of compositions in both orchestral and chamber genres, and significant awards, for more than a decade. He took his musical training at Oberlin College and the University of Pennsylvania. He is now Associate Professor of Music at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston.

Despite his Midwestern and east coast educational connections, he is a familiar figure in California as well. From 1999 to 2002, he was composer-in-residence for the California Symphony, and from 2002 to 2005 he held the same position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In October 2001 the London Symphony Orchestra performed his In Aeternam at the Barbican Centre as part of the BBC’s Masterprize Competition where the work took first prize. In March 2007 he became the youngest composer to receive the Stoeger Prize, a major biennial award consisting of a $25,000 cash grant given for the creation of a significant and distinctive body of chamber music, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
 

Fire and Ice, his most recent orchestral composition, is the latest in the Magnum Opus project that was created by Kathryn Gould to promote the creation of new orchestral works to be premiered by a consortium consisting of the Santa Rosa Symphony, the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the Marin Symphony. The piece consists of two movements in a slow-fast arrangement that depicts the sensory sensations called to mind by ice and fire, respectively.

SAMUEL BARBER: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 14

Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New York on January 23, 1981.  He composed the Violin Concerto in the spring of 1939 on a commission from Samuel Fels. Albert Spalding gave the first performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of  Eugene Ormandy, on February 7 and 8, 1941. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani, percussion, piano, and strings. Duration is about 25 minutes.

Samuel Barber grew up in a musical family. His aunt was the great contralto Louise Homer, whose husband, Sidney Homer, was a composer, and he began playing the piano at age six and composing the following year. Still, it was with some trepidation that he left a note on his mother’s dresser when he was about eight to tell her of his self‑realization: “To begin with, I was not meant to be an athlete I was meant to be a composer. And I will be, I’m sure...Don’t ask me to try to forget this...and go play football.” It was Sam’s uncle Sidney who encouraged his composition most with letters full of advice, and by the time the boy was seventeen, his aunt had begun including some of his early songs on her recital programs.

Barber’s musical technique was formally developed during eight years he spent as a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he joined its first class in 1924 (when he was just fourteen). There he studied piano, composition (with Rosario Scalero), conducting (with Fritz Reiner), and voice. For a time he contemplated the idea of a career as a professional singer (and, in fact, he once recorded the baritone part in his Dover Beach for string quartet and voice, a performance that is still available on New World Records). But, it was primarily as a composer that he developed during his Curtis years.

Barber’s style was always conservative, emphasizing the long lyrical line and relatively traditional tonal harmonies. His setting of language was felicitous, and his ear for color acute. All of these strengths made him for many years one of the most popular of American composers. Though changes in the American musical world after World War II gradually made Barber feel that he was an outsider who had been passed by, his music has been heard more frequently in recent years and appreciated for its craft and expressive directness.

Barber composed his Violin Concerto quite early in his career, after he had sprung to instant prominence when Arturo Toscanini performed two of his works (Toscanini had a reputation for not being interested in American music, so his support for the young composer was doubly impressive). This led to his first major commission, from Samuel Fels, the maker of Fels Naptha Soap and a trustee of the Curtis Institute. Fels’s adopted son was the violinist Iso Briselli; it was for him that Fels offered Barber $1000, in the spring of 1939, for a violin concerto.

Barber worked on the piece during the summer in Switzerland. He had intended to spend the fall in Paris, but the outbreak of war on September 1 made it imperative to return home, and he completed the finale in the early fall. Unfortunate differences of opinion between Barber and Briselli threatened to break the contract and leave the composer without his full fee (he had been paid half in advance). When Briselli saw the first two movements in draft, he complained that they were “too simple and not brilliant enough,” but this did not bother Barber much, because he intended to close with a virtuosic finale that would provide plenty of flash. Yet when the finale was delivered, Briselli objected again. The story has been told for a long time that he declared it unplayable. Later he insisted that his only objection was that he found it ineffective. But in any case, a test was held at the Curtis Institute to convince Fels that Barber had in fact completed his side of the deal. A young violinist there, Herbert Baumel, was given a copy of the soloist’s part of the last movement and told that he had two hours to learn it and that he should return dressed to play it (with a pianist) for a few people. The result was the complete vindication of Barber. Fels paid the remainder of the commission, and Briselli relinquished the right of the first performance. Ever afterward, Barber liked to refer to the piece as the “concerto del sapone,” or “soap concerto.”

The work was finally premiered by Albert Spalding with the Philadelphia Orchestra on February 7 and 8, 1941, to wide acclaim, and since that time it has become by far the most often performed and recorded violin concerto by an American composer. In 1948 Barber made a few alterations to the score to strengthen the climax in the slow movement and clarify what he found to be some “muddy orchestration” in the finale. When he heard Ruth Posselt play the revised version with the Boston Symphony at the beginning of 1949, he declared to Sidney Homer that it was “much improved” though in fact he had merely touched up a few orchestral passages. The revised version is always performed now.
Barber plays to his strengths as a lyricist throughout the first two movements. The soloist enters in the first bar, singing sweetly, and the movement continues to unfold with only a few outbursts from the orchestra, mostly growing out of the contrasting figure, lightly syncopated, first heard in the clarinet soon after the opening.

The slow movement is one of the great lyrical effusions in American music. Of course Barber had already written his famous Adagio for Strings (that was one of the works Toscanini had performed) and thus demonstrated his command of the long, lavish melodic line, which is also characteristic of this movement. The solo violin here waits through a preparatory passage in the orchestra highlighting the sweet sadness of what is to come, and then enters pensively, building quickly to a subdued passion that dominates the flow of the movement. (Barber added a few double-stops in the solo part, possibly as a result of Briselli’s complaint of the movement’s simplicity, but for the most part the instrument sings throughout).  The movement builds gradually to its expressive climax, then sinks back to the delicate world from which it sprang.
The finale is the shortest movement of all, but its lean athleticism provides a superb foil to the sweet and dreamy romanticism of what preceded it and provides a most effective close.

Aaron Copland: Music for the Theatre

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900, and died in New York on December 2, 1990. He composed Music for the Theatre during the summer of 1925 on a commission from the League of Composers through Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the first performance on November 20, 1925. The score calls for a small orchestra—one flute (doubling piccolo), one oboe (doubling English horn), one clarinet (doubling E‑flat clarinet), one bassoon, two trumpets, one trombone, one percussionist (playing xylophone, glockenspiel, snare drum, wood block, bass drum and cymbal), piano, two first violins, two second violins, two violas, two cellos and one double bass—but the composer adds, “In large Concert‑halls the number of strings may be increased at the discretion of the conductor.” Duration is about 21 minutes.

In February 1925 Serge Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony in the young Aaron Copland’s Organ Symphony, written for the American tour of his teacher, Nadia Boulanger. Recognizing in Copland a special gift, Koussevitzky at once persuaded the League of Composers to commission a piece from him for a concert that the conductor was scheduled to direct for the League the following season.

After leading the premiere of Music for the Theatre in Boston Symphony concerts on November 20 and 21, Koussevitzky conducted it a week later at the League of Composers concert in New York. The critics hated it. Typically, Koussevitzky made a point of including it in his next BSO concert in New York, so they would have to hear it again!

Part of the response to Music for the Theatre at the outset was simply the predominance of the jazz element, which Copland chose to employ in order to make the work sound “American.” Concert works employing jazz were all the rage during the 20s, but it was a craze that worked itself out in a very short time. Few of the works produced as a result are heard much today, but Copland’s score is still wonderfully fresh.
Copland had no particular play in mind when he composed Music for the Theatre; the title simply indicates his sense that the musical ideas have something of the atmosphere of the stage—certainly of the stage in that period, filled with jazzy riffs. The “Prologue” begins with a heavily syncopated trumpet solo, leading into a lyrical passage that surrounds a jazzy Allegro.  (Copland disclaims any intention of quoting “Three Blind Mice” in the lyrical tune; in any case, only the first few notes, which happen to be part of the major scale, resemble it in any way.) The second movement is a nervous “Dance,” mostly in 5/8 time (a daring meter for the day), in which Copland does quote the 1904 tune “The Sidewalks of New York” (“East side, West side...”). The “Interlude” is a lyric statement beginning and ending with an English horn solo; a slow, singing theme is presented three times with slight changes. “Burlesque” is the most “extreme” movement in harmonic acerbity, designed to suggest a rather grotesque humor. Copland has cited the popular comedienne Fanny Brice as a partial inspiration for the movement. The “Epilogue” links material from the third movement (especially the opening clarinet theme) and the first movement (the descending theme reminiscent of “Three Blind Mice”) to reach a quiet—and quite untheatrical—conclusion.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: On the Waterfront Symphonic Suite

Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on October 14, 1990.  He composed the score for the Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront , which opened on July 28, 1954. Bernstein himself conducted the first performance of the symphonic suite that he created from the film score a year later at Tanglewood, on August 11, 1955. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, alto saxophone, 2 timpanists and three percussionists (xylophone, vibraphone, glockenspiel, snare drum, bass drum, suspended cymbal, triangle, wood block, chimes, three tuned drums, two tamtams), plus harp, piano, and strings.

Leonard Bernstein’s only venture into the score of films was for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, a story of violence and heroism, of racketeers and longshoremen. Marlon Brando played Terry, an ex-prizefighter and longshoreman who, though at first a tool of the racketeers, develops the courage to withstand them, largely through the love and support of his girl Edie (played by Eva Marie Saint), whose brother has been killed by the mobsters, a hit that Terry unknowingly helped set up. The film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards (including for Best Score) and won eight of them, including Best Picture.

The orchestral suite begins with the film’s opening music presenting, in the solo horn, Terry’s theme, which, in a much grander version, will conclude the score. A rapid, nervous section, Presto barbaro, presents the music connected with scenes of violence in the film. Its septuple meter creates unsettling, even frightening, effects. A complete change of character, to a fresh lyrical melody in solo flute accompanied by harp and clarinets, marks the beginning of an extended love scene, building to great intensity.

Another version of Terry’s theme leads to a new section of violence, the music that accompanies Terry’s fight with the racketeer John Friendly (played by Lee J. Cobb). Its conclusion leads to the dénouement of the film and the score. The other longshoremen have agreed to work only if Terry works. Though he has been severely beaten in the fight, he drags himself to the docks and begins working in an act of heroic defiance of the crooked union leaders. His music builds gradually to a powerful climax with recollections of the bitterness of his story.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)