Windsor Symphony Orchestra ~ Music of Freedom

Aaron Copland
Shaker Melody from Appalachian Spring

Wallis Willis , arr. Burleigh
Swing Low Sweet Chariot

Nathaniel Dett
Magic Moon of Molten Gold

Antonín Dvořák
Symphony no. 9, “From the New World”

Saturday, May 3, 2008
8:00 p.m.
Chrysler Theatre
Instrumentally Speaking, pre-concert talk, inside the Chrysler Theatre
at 7:00 p.m.

Tickets: $56-$13

John Morris Russell, Conductor
Stewart Goodyear, Piano
Richard Hobson, Baritone

Shaker Melody from Appalachian Spring
Aaron Copland
B. November 14, 1900, Brooklyn, New York
D. December 2, 1990, North Tarrytown, New York

The first performance took place in October, 1944. Approx. 4 minutes.

By Dr. Ed Kovarik
Appalachian Spring, subtitled “Ballet for Martha”, was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation and first performed by the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Library of Congress in October, 1944. The original version was written for a chamber ensemble of thirteen instruments; the following year Copland extracted a concert suite from the ballet and rescored it for full orchestra (this is the version best known today). The story is of a newly married couple beginning their life together—doing chores and greeting neighbors—on a Pennsylvania farm in the early 19th century. The work exudes a sturdiness and homespun simplicity that is very much a part of Copland’s American-nationalist style. This is particularly evident in a section near the end which develops a series of variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.”

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Henry Thacker Burleigh, arr.
B. December 2, 1866, Erie, Pennsylvania
D. December 12, 1949, New York, New York
Approx. 3 minutes.

Program Notes with Swing Along

Magic Moon of Molten Gold
Nathaniel Dett
B. October 11, 1882, Drummondville, Ontario (now Niagra Falls)
D. October 2, 1943,

Program Notes with Swing Along

Swing Along
Will Marion Cook
B. 1869, Washington D.C.
D. July 19, 1944, New York

By Dr. Ed Kovarik
These three men represent the first important generation of black composers in the U.S. and two of them are linked with Antonín Dvo?ák’s National Conservatory of Music in New York City.

Harry Burleigh (1866-1949) studied voice at the Conservatory and served as Dvorák’s copyist; shortly thereafter he was appointed to the faculty. In later years he concertized extensively and set up his own voice studio in New York City. He may well be the one who introduced Dvorák to the “plantation songs” of his forbears; later he published numerous arrangements of these songs that we now call “spirituals.”

Will Cook (1869-1944) was a violinist who had studied in Berlin and made his professional debut before coming to the Conservatory to study composition with Dvorák. He made his career in jazz and pop, most notably in the black wing of the Broadway theatre, where he served as music director for the team of George Walker and Bert Williams (“In Dahomey,” 1903, and many other shows), and later acted as Williams’ musical arranger when that great star transcended the colour barrier to become a featured performer in the annual Ziegfeld Follies.

R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1942) was a decade and a half younger than his contemporaries and more academically inclined, although he too was a performer —a concertizing pianist. He was also a published poet, a choral conductor and a college administrator, and the recipient of honourary doctorates from Oberlin College and Howard University. Dett did his undergraduate work at Oberlin and later studied composition with Arthur Foote at Harvard and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. His published works are mostly short pieces for solo piano, chorus or solo voice, but he also published arrangements of spirituals. Dett, incidentally, was born in Ontario—near Niagara Falls—although he made his career south of the border.

Rhapsody in Blue
George Gershwin
B. Brooklyn, NY, 1898
D Hollywood, CA, 1937

The piece received its premiere in a concert entitled An Experiment in Modern Music, which was held on 12 February 1924, in Aeolian Hall, New York, by Paul Whiteman and his band with Gershwin playing the piano. Gershwin had agreed that Ferde Grofé, Whiteman's pianist and chief arranger, was the key figure in enabling the piece to be successful, and critics have praised the orchestral colour. Grofé confirmed in 1938 that Gershwin did not have sufficient knowledge of orchestration in 1924. After the premiere, Grofé took the score and made new orchestrations in 1926 and 1942, each time for larger orchestras. Up until 1976, when Michael Tilson Thomas recorded the original jazz band version for the very first time, the 1942 version was the arrangement usually performed and recorded.

Notes from Johns Hopkins University

It’s a wonderful story, about as American as one could hope for, about a poor kid from Brooklyn who made it big through tenacity and talent, and whose successes soon had the whole world singing with him. George Gershwin was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn and grew up cramped in a small home with three siblings and one piano (which young George played with increasing skill). At age 15 he dropped out of school to work on Tin Pan Alley, where he and dozens of other pianists sold songs for music publishers. While he was “plugging” songs for performers at the Alley, he continued his musical studies and composing, dreaming of making it big. By his early 20’s he had found some success with his own works on Broadway. In 1920, his first hit song, Swanee, sung by Al Jolson, netted him $10,000 in its first year alone. Then came success with shows in London. By age 24, the poor kid from Brooklyn had made it about as big as he might have ever dreamed. But the truly amazing part of the story was just beginning.

In the Roaring 20’s, jazz was earning respect on the street and on Broadway as a sophisticated popular music, but by and large it couldn’t find its place among the conservatory crowd. The Paul Whiteman Orchestra had some mild success bringing jazz into the concert hall, but Whiteman’s sanitized sound was only setting the stage for a jazz breakthrough, which came with Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin had played piano and written some music for Whiteman, but they had not had a serious collaboration. This changed dramatically one early January day in 1924, when George and his brother Ira learned through a felicitous glimpse at the New York Tribune that George Gershwin was to write a new jazz piano concerto for the Whiteman Orchestra.

For this concert, titled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” Whiteman planned to feature his arrangements of all sorts of music, focusing on their “jazz” elements, with the marquee piece being a concerto by the up-and-coming “jazzer” George Gershwin. With only a month to compose the piece, Gershwin wrote furiously while Ferde Grofé (Whiteman’s staff arranger and the composer of the Grand Canyon Suite) turned Gershwin’s two-piano score into an arrangement for piano and orchestra. By the time of the concert on February 12, 1924, Whiteman’s “Experiment” had all the makings of a disaster, but instead made musical history. With Gershwin at the piano, Rhapsody in Blue captivated that inaugural audience. From its famous opening clarinet glissando, through its jazzy riffs, through the unforgettable big-tune rhapsody with its jaunty half-hitch of the small riff at its end, through its ebullient finale, Rhapsody in Blue became an instant hit.

Its impact was far-reaching: Soon classical composers were writing “serious” music using jazz idioms. For all intents and purposes, Rhapsody in Blue legitimized jazz as serious musical expression, and made our young hero from Brooklyn more famous than he might ever have imagined.

Symphony no. 9, “From the New World”
Antonín Dvořák
B. September 8, 1841, Nelahozeves, near Prague, Czech Republic
D. May 1, 1904, Prague,

The symphony's premiere was on December 16, 1893 by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall (which was the home of the Philharmonic until 1962), conducted by Anton Seidl.

By Dr. Ed Kovarik
The “New World” Symphony is the perfect example of what happens when preparation meets inspiration. Dvorák had been preparing for this, his last symphony, for decades: from the early days of struggle in Prague to the first local success in the mid 1870s, the conquering of England in the mid 1880s, and finally to New York City, where from 1892 to 1895 he served as guest celebrity and director of the newly-founded National Conservatory of Music. There and at the Czech settlement of Spillville, Iowa, where he spent his summers, the inspiration was all around him in a world of new images: of vast open spaces and clogged metropolitan areas, of frontier legends, Indians, and immigrant settlements, of minstrel shows and Negro spirituals. All of it went into the symphony, which was completed during the first full year of his stay in the U.S. and first performed in New York City (to tumultous applause) in December 1893.

From our vantage point the work is difficult to assess simply because it is so familiar. Anyone coming to it afresh, however, must be struck by the composer’s consummate knowledge of his craft. The themes are tuneful and well defined, the transitions logical and concise. The work flows effortlessly with ever-changing textures and interesting orchestral sonorities. Dvorák’s handling of cyclic form is also impressive: each movement accumulates themes from the preceding movements, and the process culminates in a passage near the end of the finale, where all the themes appear together.

But there is more to the symphony than technique. There is also a sense of personal involvement, which manifests itself most clearly in the heartfelt second movement, with its main theme (for English horn) written in the manner of a Negro spiritual. Everything about this movement—the mysterious opening chords, the tragic resignation of the main theme, the central lament (with its undertone of sobbing), even the happiness briefly captured—expresses Dvorák’s sympathy for the transplanted Africans of the new world. As for the rest of the symphony, it is not hard to hear Indian tom-toms and the folk dancing of a transplanted Czech village in the third movement, or a chuffing steam engine on a cross-country run in the finale. All such images are strictly optional, however; the work can also be engaged simply as music. But what of the symphony’s enigmatic conclusion—those strange, dissonant chords just before the end? Perhaps it is the composer’s way of leaving us with a question-mark: can this fragmented society overcome its prejudices and fulfill its promise?

Stewart Goodyear

Known for imagination, a graceful, elegant style and exquisite technique, Stewart Goodyear, is an accomplished young artist whose career is clearly on the rise. Some highlights of his season schedule this past year (season 2005-06) included his last-minute substitutions at the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas and with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Peter Oundjian as well as his return to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Jarvi, and his Dallas Symphony Orchestra debut appearances.

In June, 2006 Mr Goodyear returned to the Philadelphia Orchestra to collaborate with conductor Andrew Litton; and in November, 2006 Mr. Goodyear will appear with the esteemed Andrew Davis on the podium at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Goodyear will also make return appearances with the orchestras of Calgary, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Seattle, Indianapolis, and Victoria this season. He makes his Columbus (Ohio) Symphony and Rochester Philharmonic debuts this season as well.

Richard Hobson

Richard Hobson is acclaimed for the “strong dramatic persona” he brings to his performances. Appearances have taken him throughout the USA to companies including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, The Dallas Opera, Baltimore Opera, Mississippi Opera, Shreveport Opera, and Michigan Opera Theater. In his Italian operatic debut, he was heard as Amonasro at the Teatro Strehler (Milano, Italy) in the new Franco Zeffirelli production of Aida in the summer of 2001.

In March of the 2004-2005 season, Richard made a very successful debut with The Delaware Opera as Porgy in Porgy and Bess. He also sang in Samson and Dalilah with the Metropolitan Opera and did his first Iago in Othello with Regina Opera in Brooklyn, New York. In October 2005, Mr. Hobson debuted with Gateway Classical Music Society as Amonasro in Verdi’s Aida in Manhattan. He also sang the Four Villains in Les Contes d’Hoffmann with Taconic Opera in Westchester, NY.

He began the 2003-2004 season at the Metropolitan Opera in their new production of La Juive by Halevy. He subsequently appeared in Boris Goudonov and Madama Butterfly. The 2002-2003 season featured a return to the Handel Choir of Baltimore for their annual performances of Messiah. In the summer of 2003 Mr. Hobson sang Germont in La Traviata in New Jersey’s Metro Lyric Opera. In the spring he returned to the roster of the Metropolitan Opera for their new production of Les Troyens.

The 2001-2002 season began at the Metropolitan Opera, where he was heard as ‘One-Eyed Brother’ in their much heralded production of Die Frau Ohne Schatten (Strauss), and as Yamadori in Madama Butterfly. That season also held debuts at Pittsburgh Opera as Henry Davis in Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, and at Austin Lyric Opera in the title role in Rigoletto. Mr. Hobson also sang Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoore and Marcello in La Boheme in New Jersey’s Metro Lyric Opera productions in August 2002.

Career highlights include his Metropolitan Opera debut as Yamadori in Madama Butterfly, and his New York City Opera debut in the title role of Porgy in Porgy & Bess. At both Nashville Opera and Toledo Opera, Richard debuted as Sharpless in Madama Butterfly, and his first Scarpia (Tosca) for Houston Ebony Opera Guild. Richard sang his first Rigoletto in a concert version with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, and his debut at the Spoleto Festival USA as the Sorceress in Dido and Aeneas.

An outstanding musician, he has interpreted leading roles in world premiere performances of several new works including: Josiah in Harriet, the Woman Called Moses with Skylight Opera Theatre; General Vorchieliff in Hoiby’s Something New for the Zoo at Prince Georges Opera; the title role in Martin Luther: Dramatic Oratorio, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness by Nat Irving with the Dallas Symphony; and Rogue in The Idiot, a work-in-progress at The Banff Music Centre in Canada.

In the media, Richard has appeared in a televised aria concert with the Baltimore Symphony. Awards are numerous including the Sullivan Foundation Career Grant, Metropolitan Opera Guild National Council Auditions, Caruso Competition, Pavarotti Competition; Dallas Opera Guild Career Grant; Baltimore Music Club, and the American Traditions Competition.

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