Alastair Willis, guest conductor

Grammy-nominated conductor Alastair Willis served as the associate conductor of the Seattle Symphony from 2000 to 2003. He previously held the position of assistant conductor with the Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestras and music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra.

In the past few seasons, Willis has guest conducted orchestras around the world including the Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Mexico City Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfonica de Rio de Janeiro, Graz Philharmonic Orchestra, Cologne Opera, China National Symphony (Beijing), Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, among others. His recording of Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortileges with Nashville Symphony and Opera for Naxos was Grammy nominated for Best Classical Album in 2009.

Last season, Willis returned to Skagit Opera, Washington to lead Madama Butterfly and made his debut with the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonic, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the orchestras of Memphis, Richmond and Thunder Bay. Born in Acton, Massachusetts, Willis lived with his family in Moscow for five years before settling in Surrey, England. He received his bachelor's degree with honors from England's Bristol University and an education degree from Kingston University. He won a scholarship in 1996 to study with Larry Rachelff at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, graduating with a Master of Music degree in 1999.

Overture from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 61 . . . Felix Mendelssohn
(Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg; died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig)

When Mendelssohn was seventeen, he and his sister Fanny used to sit in the garden of their Berlin home on warm, summer days, reading aloud the German translations of Shakespeare's plays. Young Felix was especially captivated by A Midsummer Night's Dream and would often act out some of the roles. In July 1826, he thought of writing a descriptive piece he called A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, and in August he completed it. Fanny and he played it for friends as a piano duet in November, and before the year was out, he orchestrated it. The overture had its first public performance in February 1827.

The overture was dedicated to the Crown Prince of Prussia. In 1843, when the prince had become King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he asked Mendelssohn to write some incidental music for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theater of his new palace in Potsdam. One of the great marvels in the history of music is the uniformity of style, spirit and skill in the music that Mendelssohn wrote when he was seventeen and that which he composed when he was twice that age. The Court was pleased by the first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Mendelssohn's music, which took place on October 14, 1843. To the composer, who conducted the orchestra, it was an unpleasant experience because the royal guests insisted upon long intermissions that became noisy social gatherings and completely destroyed the atmosphere that Mendelssohn had intended his music to create in the theater.

Mendelssohn's magical music for this Shakespeare comedy conjures up the fairyland envisaged by Shakespeare. The Overture itself magically creates a sense of Shakespeare's fairyland in an apparently episodic piece that is rich in melody and in musical "events." Among them are the high-pitched opening chords, then the running figure like the beating of fairy wings, and after that, a sequence of tunes or fragments of melody among which only the hee-haw of Bottom, the Ass, is obviously associated with a person or character in the play.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, is, like Mendelssohn's 'Hebrides' Overture, formally based on classical sonata principles, including an exposition, development and recapitulation. Yet here, Mendelssohn adds some distinctive and unusual touches to the traditional sonata model, such as moving from the initial tonic key of E major to E minor after only seven measures to introduce the first subject. Also, the structure of the piece depends on three appearances of the wind and horn chords that begin the work. There are subtle changes in each of the chords, displaying Mendelssohn's knack for orchestration, which constitutes a major factor in the work's charm. Mendelssohn achieves, above all, a musical interpretation of the play's themes and characters through a variety of means. The hushed, scurrying sound of the strings of the first subject evoke the flurry of fairies' wings. Later, repeated, descending pizzicato lines provide an aura of suspense, as the listener becomes unclear about where the music is going tonally. The only directly obvious moment where characterization is definitely evident is in the accented leaps in the violins and clarinets as they give a hilarious impersonation of Bottom's donkey brays. In this work, Mendelssohn, interestingly enough included the ophecleide, a forerunner to the saxophone that was used primarily in military bands. Otherwise, his orchestra for A Midsummer Night's Dream includes two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, three trumpets, ophecleide, three trombones, kettledrums, triangle, cymbals and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56 . . . Johannes Brahms
(Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna)

In 1870, a music historian showed Brahms an unpublished set of six little suites or divertimentos for wind instruments that he believed Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) had composed in the 1780's or 1790's. The second movements of three suites had titles, and one of them, Saint Anthony's Chorale (from the work now catalogued as H. II: 46), so pleased Brahms that he jotted it down in his notebook. Three years later he used it as the basis of this set of variations. Twentieth century musicological studies suggest that one of Haydn's students, possibly Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831), probably composed these works from which Brahms took the theme for his composition. The titles given to the three movements in the original suites are probably the names of the melodies on which the suites, themselves derivative, had been based. Musicologists suggest that Saint Anthony's Chorale must have been a pilgrims' hymn.

The Variations is the only major work of Brahms for which detailed preliminary sketches exist; they indicate that he had been working over the musical possibilities of the chorale in his mind long before he wrote the variations down. He spent the summer of 1873 writing the composition and creating two versions of variations. The one published as Op. 56a was his first purely orchestral composition in fourteen years. The other, 56b, for two pianos, was his last big keyboard work. Brahms thought of the version for two pianos as an independent original composition, not a study-arrangement of an orchestral score like those he had made of his serenades, symphonies and overtures so that he could play them with his friends in private.

The two versions of Brahms's Haydn Variations are very similar. The rich texture of the inner voices, a hallmark of Brahms's style of orchestral writing, is perfectly idiomatic piano writing, too. It is unclear whether Brahms originally planned the two-piano version or the orchestral version, but he first showed the work to his friend Clara Schumann in the piano form, and presented the other version to his publisher a bit more than a month later. When the orchestral work was premiered, it was well received, and quickly became a part of the standard repertoire.

Although the content of the work is sophisticated and subtle, the structure is simple and direct. To begin, the theme is stated; following it, come the eight inventive variations in which Brahms develops a great series of rich, new melodies, all based on the harmonic and rhythmic structure of the original theme. For a finale, there is a new set of sixteen short, continuous variations on a five-measure motive derived from Variation IV, and then Brahms briefly brings back a bit of the original theme for a grand closing section.

Brahms's Variations on a Theme of Haydn is scored for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, tympani, triangle, and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Symphony No. 5, Op. 47 . . . Dmitri Shostakovich
(Born September 5, 1906, in Saint Petersburg; died August 8, 1975, in Moscow)

Shostakovich's family was originally Polish but settled in Russia after his grandfather's exile in Siberia. As a boy, Shostakovich had his first piano lessons from his mother and at the age of thirteen entered the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1925, at the age of nineteen, he completed his Symphony No. 1 as a Conservatory graduation piece. This period after the Russian Revolution was an era when the rulers of the Soviet Union felt that their new kind of society should support new kinds of art, and Russian composers, poets, novelists and painters formed a true avant-garde. Before long, however, their ideas changed.

During a lengthy part of his career, Shostakovich, one of the most formidable Russian composers of the twentieth century, had a difficult time practicing the art of musical composition due to official Soviet disfavor. Although his early music met with approval not only in Russia but internationally, as soon as he composed his opera Lady Macbeth and his next symphonies, the official Soviet news agency, Pravda began its condemnation of his work for its "bourgeois decadence." It described the symphony as un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric and lacking in "songfulness." Authorities suggested Shostakovich should attempt to compose music that would have greater appeal for the masses, music that was simpler, more melodic, more optimistic and more heroic in character. Ultimately Shostakovich was rehabilitated from his disfavor, but not until after a difficult period of soul-searching. Success finally returned to him with Symphony No. 5,which was more expansive and heroic than what had preceded it and it even had what was noted to be "catchy rhythm" and a "heroic opening." The authorities quoted Shostakovich as describing this work as "a Soviet artist's practical, creative reply to just criticism," and allowed him to re-enter the mainstream of Russian musical life.

Shostakovich's troubles, however, were not over. He continued intermittently to have difficulties of one kind or another with the authorities all the way up to the time of his Symphony No. 13 (1962), which he dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazis' war-time mass-murders at Babi-Yar. Even then, his acknowledged position as one of the world's greatest living composers did not preserve him from public indignity nor inhibit his creativity and innovation. His last two symphonies were works of great originality, of unconventional structure and content.

During the forty-five years between 1925 and 1970, Shostakovich wrote fifteen works in the basic musical form of the symphony, a group of works enormously varied in character and size, but all consisting of the essential idea of an extended, highly developed composition based on a large number of contrasting themes. No other composer of the twentieth century has made so extensive, so important, so durable a contribution to symphonic literature. Shostakovich's symphonies combine somber tragedy, mordant wit, expressive melody, dramatic development and profound emotion, all under a brilliantly orchestrated surface.

Music historians see his works as an historic extension of the great symphonic tradition of the last two centuries. From Haydn and Mozart through Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, the symphony seemed to move in a straight line, but then it branched out. In the German-speaking countries, Bruckner and Mahler took off in another direction. French composers like Chausson and Franck conceived of their symphonies in yet another way. In Russia, Tchaikovsky and Borodin, too, had other lines to follow. The mature symphonies of Shostakovich show him to be a composer who combined qualities from Tchaikovsky and Mahler into a new kind of modern Russian symphony.

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 has remained his most popular work. Describing his work programmatically, perhaps because he felt compelled to do so, he said: "The theme of my Symphony is the stabilization of a personality. In the center of this composition - conceived lyrically from beginning to end - I saw a man with all his experiences. The Finale resolves the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements into optimism and joy of living." He composed it to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic and it premiered in Leningrad, on November 21, 1937, when it was praised. An original and inventive work, it was written with the sure hand of a mature creator who is artistically and ideologically confident. Its subjects are long melodies used in new but simple ways.

Throughout its four movements, the symphony abounds in easily recognizable themes and in sustained passages of lyrical beauty, yet it also has a constant, pressing intensity. The opening movement, Moderato, rich in dramatic contrasts, begins with a daring theme that the critic, Edward Downes, found reminiscent of Beethoven's Great Fugue, Op. 113. The theme passes from the violins to the horns and trumpets, and then is returned back again to the violins. As the rhythm becomes more propulsive, the tempo increases and more brass enter to intone the thematic statements. The tempo slows again for the recapitulation when the whole orchestra joins together to repeat the opening theme. The second movement, Allegretto, is a waltz-like scherzo with a contrasting middle trio section that features a solo violin. The symphony reaches its climax in the third movement, Largo, which is one of the composer's most original and deeply felt movements. It begins calmly, builds with momentous intensity to the climax and then returns to the mood of the beginning. The finale, Allegro non troppo, is an extended rondo, militant and march-like, with a theme introduced by the brass instruments. Grandeur and power are delivered in many musical ideas that erupt one after the other in fiery succession. The mood then softens in a slower section, but returns to the spirit and tempo of the opening and then goes on to a triumphal conclusion.

Shostakovich scored the symphony for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, clarinet in E-flat, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, tam-tam, xylophone, bells, celesta, piano, two harps and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Ron Spigelman, guest conductor

Music Director of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra in Missouri Ron Spigelman is a favorite and frequent conductor of the Tulsa Symphony and related chamber ensembles. Ron accepted an invitation to serve on the TSO Advisory Board this last spring and is an honors graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, London. In 1996, he was awarded an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARAM) for distinguishing himself in his field. Prior to his appointment in Springfield, he was the Associate Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO), and the Associate Conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Other titles have included Music Director of the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet, Music Director of the San Angelo Symphony, Music Director of the Texas Chamber Orchestra. Currently, and Music Director of the Metropolitan Classical Ballet in Texas, as well as a teacher of conducting and the Arts Administration Class "The Audience Connection" at Drury University Springfield MO.

Currently and in addition to Springfield, Ron is Principal Pops Conductor for both the Fort Worth Symphony and the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. His most recent appointment (August 2009) is Music Director of the Lake Placid Sinfonietta (NY), a summer orchestra that is 92 years old!

Since immigrating to the United States in 1994, Ron has made numerous guest appearances with orchestras across the country, including the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, the Boise Philharmonic Orchestra, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, the Austin Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Dallas Opera Orchestra.

Amongst numerous career highlights, he lists his debut with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the critically acclaimed performance and world premier of Lowell Lieberman's Pegasus. As well as his equally acclaimed Carnegie Hall conducting debut with the Buffalo Philharmonic in 2004.

Symphony No. 41, in C Major, K. 551 (Jupiter Symphony) . . .Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna)

In 1788, when Mozart wrote this lofty symphony, his last, he was living a precarious life in Vienna, feeling the strain of debt and concerned about his future. The year before, he had stopped teaching to prepare Don Giovanni for its premiere in Prague, but the opera only yielded him a pittance, and its Vienna production was a dismal failure. He had expected Emperor Joseph II to appoint him to the well-paid post of court-composer left vacant by the death of Gluck in 1787. Instead, he was offered the post at a meager salary that he could only describe as too much for what I do, too little for what I could do. The Emperor did not want symphonies, concertos, or string quartets from Mozart; he simply desired dance music for the court balls at the Redoutensaal. In desperate need, Mozart was obliged to take several loans from a friend.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1788, Mozart composed an extraordinary symphonic trilogy, three of his greatest works. He had written at least one symphony almost every year since he was eight years old, but after he completed these three, he wrote no more symphonies in the three and a half years before his death. No records exist detailing why or for whom these last symphonies were composed; there is no evidence of a commission, nor a mention of an occasion when they might have been presented. History has not provided the date when they were first performed, but it was probably not until after Mozarts death. Historians hypothesize that the writing of the symphonies might have been associated with the successful publication of Haydns set of three symphonies, in the same three keys, two or three years before.

Regardless of the circumstances, no one doubts that this brilliant and powerful symphony is anything but optimistic and triumphant. No one is sure who gave the symphony the name Jupiter or when, but it may have been the Anglo-German pianist and composer, Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858), who was a friend of Beethovens and a man who admired Mozart greatly. He supposedly gave it the title Jupiter because of what he labeled the works loftiness of ideas and nobility of treatment. Another theory that Mozarts son suggested is that Johann Peter Salomon, the German violinist who was Haydns impresario in London, might have given it the subtitle. In confirmation of this, Vincent Novello, Mozarts sons friend, said in his diary, Mozarts son said he considers the Finale to his fathers Sinfonia in C -- which Salomon christened the Jupiter -- to be the highest triumph of Instrument Composition, and I agree with him. In any case, the name first appeared officially in a concert program in Edinburgh in 1819, ten years before Novellos diary entry, when it was already familiar to audiences there, before it spread to the Continent. In a notebook that he had started in 1784, Mozart listed it under August 10, 1788, simply as a symphony, and then wrote out the opening measures of music. Schumann referred to it as the Mozart symphony with the fugal finale, and he pronounced it to be a work above discussion.

By the standards of the time, it is a huge work, imposing in its expressiveness and lengthy in duration too, although its length is variable in modern performance according to the conductors feelings about the passages marked for repetition. The dramatic intensity and the wit and the pathos of the minor key sections, as well as Mozarts interest in thematic development, make this late work significantly different than his early attempts at the symphony. The magnificent first movement, Allegro vivace, may be described as fitting the standard scheme: ideas in two related keys are stated, discussed and restated in the same key, but the ideas are monumental, and the development complex and extraordinarily imaginative. Many different elements surface in the first theme alone: the virile first measures for full orchestra, the strings gentle answer, the martial rhythm in the winds accompanied by powerful chords of the strings and then a big orchestral tutti. After a long, sustained chord, the violins return to the opening figure, but quietly this time, while winds play a new contrapuntal melody that ends as a few repeated chords. All this exposition happens in a very short space of time, and more musical invention still precedes the dramatic richness of the second theme and third themes. For the third theme, Mozart utilizes a comic bass aria from Un bacio di mano (A Kiss on the Hand) that he had recently written for somebody elses opera buffa. After that, elaborate development follows, joining the virile, the more feminine and the martial all together.

The second movement, Andante cantabile, with its stately melodies, offers not just lyrical contrast, but a new set of dramatic tensions and releases, with an orchestral texture whose rhythmic and dynamic complexity was then unprecedented. Under the charming surface, the listener feels suppressed agitation. Relief comes with the sense of lighthearted serenity in the third movement, Minuet, Allegretto, whose music is dignified. The trio brings forth sophisticated humor as Mozart teases his listeners with an apparent confusion of beginning and ending, always making one expect what is the opposite of what is given, but the finale, Molto allegro, renews the elevated discourse with energy and intensity. All the contrapuntal writing in the first three movements prepares the listener for the last movement. Shortly after settling in Vienna, around six years before, Mozart discovered the music of Bach, which had revealed to him the expressive potential of counterpoint, especially fugues. This understanding substantially enriched the works of Mozarts last years, and this influence is especially evident in the finale in which he intricately combines the classical structure he uses in the first movement with the fugal procedures of Bach. The principal theme is the little melody of just four notes that the first violins play at the beginning of the movement; this little figure, almost a clich, is found in a dozen of Mozarts other compositions and in the works of many other composers. Its importance is not in what it is, but in the monument Mozart builds of it. By the coda, Mozart has taken what grows out of it, all the themes of the movement, and combined them contrapuntally, allowing the symphony to end in a triumphant tour-de-force.

The Jupiter Symphony is scored for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Symphonie Fantastique (Fantastic Symphony), Episode in the Life of an Artist, Op. 14 . . .Hector Berlioz
(Born December 11, 1803, in La-Cte-Saint-Andr; died March 8, 1869, in Paris)

In 1830, just three years after Beethovens death, the little known twenty-six year old French composer, Hector Berlioz, composed his Symphonie Fantastique, a work that revealed him as a most original musical thinker, a man composing with great new powers of expression. The work is remarkable for its combination of musical imagery and emotional representation. It became a model for Liszt, Wagner, and Strauss, yet when it was written, it drew a wide range of response, much of it negative. Although Berlioz took many musical conventions well beyond their limits, he called his work a symphony.

When he was in his mid-twenties, Berlioz first became acquainted with Beethoven's symphonies, and these, together with his introduction to Shakespeares plays at around the same time, had a tremendous effect on him that he sought to express in his Symphonie Fantastique. In 1827, a traveling theatrical company arrived from London to perform Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and the young composer became entranced with Shakespeare. Harriet Smithson, a beautiful Irish actress exactly Berliozs age, played both Ophelia and Juliet; Berlioz fell passionately in love with her immediately. He arranged for her to attend the performance of his symphony and its sequel Llio, five years later on December 9, 1832. At that time, she was aware of his interest in her, but the two had never met. She had no idea that she was the beloved or that the symphony owed its inspiration to her until she saw the words of the text in which Berlioz longs for the Juliet, the Ophelia for whom my heart cries out. She was charmed to discover that Berliozs text expressed his feelings for her; they were married the following October. The flame of what he had called his eternal and inextinguishable passion, however, soon died. Within a few years, the two realized that they were miserable together, and they separated in 1844. When Harriet died in 1854, Berlioz married his mistress of many years.

The Symphonie Fantastique grew in part from the turbulent emotion the actress aroused, and in that sense only, Smithson can be said to have contributed to its inspiration. Although Berlioz contended she was explicitly embodied in the symphony, he had actually written much of the symphony before he met her; thus, it is quite likely that it was not originally written to follow an elaborate descriptive program.

The Symphonie Fantastique is most renowned for its brilliantly imaginative orchestration and for Berlioz's use of a single melody, which pervades all five movements. The symphony varies from the classical four-movement traditional form by the composers insertion of a waltz before the slow movement and a march after it. He felt that his work followed naturally from where Beethoven had left off with his symphonic creation; he believed its ide fixe (a recurring melody) was the next musical step toward symphonic unity. In an entirely original way, Berlioz used this (the ide fixe) in every movement; it is also the germ from which several other themes grow as a connecting link binding the whole work together. The melody represents his beloved, Harriet Smithson, an ide fixe, a persistent obsession. The work reflects Berliozs fascination with the supernatural and the grotesque, with heroic longing and frenzied romance. Another part of the innovative style of the work is the way Berlioz emphasizes new instrument possibilities, new tone colors and effects as well as sounds that suggest an infinite variety of emotions and ideas. He uses little standard motivic development.

Berlioz had a literary program distributed at the premiere containing a footnote he had written which stated: The distribution of this program to the audience, at concerts in which this symphony is to be played, is indispensable for the complete understanding of the work's dramatic plan. He had compounded his highly colored plot from such diverse works as Goethe's Faust, E.T.A. Hoffmann's Tales, DeQuincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, and Chateaubriand's Ren. The original program included:

PART ONE: DAYDREAMS, PASSIONS

He recalls an uneasiness of soul, moments of melancholy and joy which he experienced before seeing his beloved; then comes the fiery love with which she inspired him, leading to moments of delirious anguish, of jealous fury, a return to loving tenderness and his religious consolation.

PART TWO: A BALL

He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of a brilliant fte.

PART THREE: SCENE IN THE COUNTRY

One summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds playing Ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue; this pastoral duet, the scene around him, the trees gently swaying in the breeze, and his own hope all combine to restore an unusual calm in his heart; but then she appears again, his heart stops beating, and he is agitated and concerned about whether she might betray him! One of the shepherds begins his song again; the other does not answer him. The sun sets, and there is the sound of distant thunder and solitude. Silence.

PART FOUR: MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD

He dreams that he has killed his beloved and is condemned to death. He is being led to execution. The procession advances to a somber and wild, as well as brilliant and solemn march. The dull sound of heavy footsteps follows after resounding outbursts. At the end, the ide fixe reappears briefly, like the last thought of love interrupted by the fatal stroke.

PART FIVE: DREAM OF A WITCHES' SABBATH

He sees himself at the witches' Sabbath in the middle of a group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters of all sorts, who have come together. He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter, and shrieks. The ide fixe reappears, but it has now become an ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance-tune. She comes to the witches' Sabbath. There are expressions of joy at her arrival. She takes part in the diabolic orgy. Funeral bells and a parody of Dies irae sounds. Witches' dance and then the Dies irae and the witches' dance come together.

The introduction is derived from a romance that Berlioz had composed under the influence of a youthful infatuation. The ide fixe theme, repeated throughout the movements of the work, originally appeared in Herminie, a cantata he had written in 1828. The main thematic material of the first movement is meant to suggest the artist's reveries and passions. The violins are the first to articulate the ide fixe melody, a forlorn statement of longing, after the long, slow introduction to the symphonys opening movement. By the end of the first movement, the protagonist's anxiety subsides into religious consolation, announced by repeated, sustained hymnal amens.

The second movement, Valse, Allegro non troppo, is simply a traditional ternary dance movement, a waltz, with the ide fixe appearing as the Trio. The harps and the woodwinds add special color to the ball. This movement shifts the programmatic musical focus away from an interior emotional experience to an invocation of the surroundings, yet Berlioz deftly blurs the boundary between interior and exterior space when the hero finds himself briefly confronted by his beloved in the middle of the ball.

Berlioz placed the slow movement third instead of second, just as Beethoven had done in his Ninth Symphony. This movement, Adagio, includes bird calls and intermittently flowing rhythmic patterns, and it owes much to the scene by the brook movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, known as the Pastorale. Berliozs Adagio is in a slow sonata form with the ide fixe as the secondary theme. It opens with an exchange between the English horn and oboe, simulating shepherd calls of the ranz des vaches, or alphorn sounding the tune used by the Swiss to call the flocks together. The scene buoys the young musician's imagination, but with the reappearance of the beloved and intimations of her faithlessness, darkness gathers. The close is equivocal as the shepherd falls silent, and the muffled tympani suggest the sound of distant thunder.

The unsettled close of the third movement effectively prepares the way for the nightmare that follows. Again recalling the Beethoven Pastorale, the fourth and fifth movements are structurally linked in their scoring for large orchestra with a full brass ensemble with the garish March to the Scaffold serving as prologue to the Witch's Sabbath finale. The march, Allegretto non troppo, is based on the March of the Guards from Berliozs unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges; tonally and temperamentally, it provides an effective transition from the vague foreboding at the close of the third movement to the fourth /fifth-movements (Larghetto Allegro, the unleashing of horror in which the Beloved (the ide fixe) is turned into a hideous witch, shrieking in the clarinet and leading the rest of the spirits on the wild dance of the Witches Sabbath. The lovely ide fixe melody is now grotesque with grace notes and trills. But the witches greet the sound with shrieks of laughter. The ide fixe returns, and the revelry is interrupted by bell soundings and the playing of a melody of the Dies Irae, a medieval melody used for funerals, part of the Requiem Mass, and well known to audiences of the time. It carried with it the significance of Judgment Day. Berlioz used it here to create the extreme contrast of the apocalyptic idea occurring in the middle of the witches revelry. Witches poke fun at the sacred; they profane the good and the just. The ide fixe and Dies irae mix in the grotesque Ronde du Sabbat (Sabbath Round Dance), which eventually becomes a fugue, combining these ideas. The large orchestra explodes with full energy in the coda.

Berlioz completed the symphony in Paris in April 1830; it was first performed there on December 5, but it was not the Symphonie fantastique we hear today; Berlioz reworked much of it in the next two years while he was in Italy, after winning the Prix de Rome. The revised version was performed with its sequel, Llio, or The Return to Life, on December 9, 1832. Still later Berlioz added the religioso coda of the first movement and wrote several versions of the symphonys descriptive program. He originally headed his symphony Episodes from the Life of an Artist, and added Symphonie Fantastique later as a subtitle.

He considerably toned down his attack on the beloveds faithlessness, and became gradually more willing to let the music speak for itself without an accompanying text. By 1855, he had recast it so that the musician takes his dose of opium at the beginning and thus the symphony became an opium dream. He hears the beloved melody, like an ide fixe, everywhere. The following is a translation of his program for the last version: A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of despair over love. The narcotic dose, too weak to bring him death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his sensations, sentiments and recollections are translated, in his sick mind, into musical ideas and images. Even his beloved has become a melody for him, an obsession that he finds and hears everywhere.

The instruments required are two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, three clarinets and small clarinet in E-flat, four bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

David Lockington, guest conductor

Tulsa symphony is pleased to welcome David Lockington back to the podium for the second consecutive season. Maestro Lockington has been music director of the Grand Rapids Symphony since January 1999 and has energized audiences and musicians alike while reaching new heights of artistic excellence.

The Grand Rapids Symphony has been his sole music directorship since the 2000-2001 Season. Prior to that season, he held the music directorships of both the Long Island Philharmonic (1996-2000) and New Mexico Symphony Orchestra (1995-2000). He has led a number of other orchestras since his arrival to the United States in 1978 from his native Great Britain. His conducting activities have also included serving as music director of the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra, Denver Young Artist’s Orchestra and Boulder Bach Festival. He was founder and conductor of the Academy in the Wilderness Chamber Orchestra and for three years held the post of assistant conductor with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and Opera Colorado. He was assistant conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1992 and later was promoted to associate conductor. In 1993, he became music director of the Ohio Chamber Orchestra.

David Lockington conducts the Richard and Helen DeVos Classical Series, Casual Classics Series, Edward Jones Coffee Classics, Fox Motors Pops Series, Chase Picnic Pops, and DTE Energy Foundation Family Series concerts, in addition to special events, educational and festival concerts with the Grand Rapids Symphony. His guest conducting engagements include appearances with the Saint Louis, Houston, Detroit, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Colorado and Oregon symphonies, the Buffalo, Rochester and Louisiana Philharmonics and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall. Internationally he has conducted the China Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra in Beijing and Taiwan, led the English Chamber Orchestra on a tour in Asia and appeared with the Orquesta Sinfonica del Principado de Asturias in Spain and the Northern Sinfonia in Great Britain. David Lockington began his career as principal cellist with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. After completing his bachelor of arts degree at the University of Cambridge, he came to the United States on a scholarship to Yale University, where he received his master’s degree in cello performance and studied conducting with Otto Werner Mueller. He was a member of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and served as assistant principal cellist for three years with the Denver Symphony Orchestra before turning to conducting.

Overture and the Janissary Chorus to the Opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio. . .Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna)

Die Entführung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") was Mozart's first full-length German opera, which he composed at the request of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II. When it had its premiere, in Vienna on July 16, 1782, it was a tremendous success, despite some organized opposition by Mozart's rivals. Its only flaws, the Emperor said, were that the music was too good for the Viennese and that there were too many notes. Mozart, with his characteristic blunt honesty, is reported to have replied that he had put in only as many notes as he thought necessary.

Mozart wrote the opera at a very happy time of his life, when he was engaged to marry Constanze Weber. The first name of the heroine of the opera is that of the composer's fiancée. The opera takes the form of a singspiel, a happy play with music with all the action carried on in spoken dialogue with song used to express strong emotions rather than further the plot line.

The Abduction from the Seraglio was an opera story of familiar characters in an exotic setting. It tells, in brief, of a young noblewoman captured by a Turkish Pasha whose advances she resists. Her lover's attempt to rescue her fails, but the Pasha forgives and releases them. The opera contains what was called "Turkish music" in Mozart's time. The term did not then describe any especially Eastern Mediterranean cast of melody but simply specified the presence in the orchestra of bass drum, cymbals, triangle and sometimes jingles and piccolo, as used in the military bands of the Ottoman rulers of much of southeastern Europe, in their territories adjoining the Austrian empire.

To establish the character of the opera and to set the scene clearly, Mozart makes very prominent use of the "Turkish music" in the overture. In the 18th century, Turks were all the rage and Turkish fashion, hairdos and Turkish music were all in vogue.

In the first act of the opera a chorus of Janissaries welcome the Pasha and sing his praises in the chorus, "Singt dem grossen Bassa Lieder." The Janissaries were not Turks, but Christians captured in the Balkans and elsewhere who were converted by force to Islam and coerced to join the army and the Sultan's guard. Janissary music was Turkish military music, and in Vienna at that time, it was fashionable for the royal household to keep a military band to play Janissary music, thus the Viennese became used to hearing and enjoying Janissary music in the parks.

The orchestra requires a flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. As originally written, the overture runs right into the first scene of the opera. It is usually played in concert with an ending devised by Johann André (1741-1799), a composer and music publisher. Another alternative ending by the pianist/composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) is relatively rarely heard.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Sinfonia Concertante, in E Flat, K. 364 . . . Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart probably wrote this work in Salzburg during the summer of 1779, some months after his return from Mannheim and Paris, where multiple concertos were very popular and were usually given the name sinfonia concertante, but very little about the origin of this outstanding work has been uncovered. Symphonie concertante really belong, with few exceptions, to the realm of the concerto. They exist in two or three movements, the first in Classical ritornello form, (an alternation of tutti and solo sections), the last usually in rondo form, where the theme recurs after episodes that alternate with it. The works are usually light and popular in style rather than either heroic or grand. This particular Sinfonia Concertante is widely considered the masterwork of the genre.

History does not record the occasion or the soloists for whom this work might have been composed, and the beautiful violin part makes one wish that Mozart had not given up writing violin concertos four years earlier. He also more or less gave up playing the violin at around this time, to the great distress of his father, who was a famous violin teacher. The viola came to be his preferred string instrument, although his playing of it has only been documented in chamber music. Robert Gutman, in his celebrated recent biography of Mozart, hypothesizes that perhaps Mozart intended this work for his father Leopold and himself to play and used it as a step toward rebuilding family togetherness and increasing the family repertoire. Another possibility, Gutman says, is that Mozart may have written this "double" concerto because a local taste for concertos with more than one soloist seems to have been growing.

The viola part of the Sinfonia Concertante uses the then common technique of scordatura, a practice in which the viola soloist's part is played a half tone lower than it sounds to the ear by a deliberate manual mistuning, with the soloist tuning his instrument a half-tone higher than normal. This unusual practice was fostered in order for the violist to help match the tone and sonority of the solo violin better and to give the viola a brighter sound, helping to distinguish it from the orchestral violas. This special tuning practice also made the violist's part easier to play, especially for those with small hands, which Mozart had.

The refined Sinfonia Concertante, one the finest of Mozart's string concertos, composed in the summer of 1779, brings together elements of the Baroque concerto grosso and the concerto. The magnificent themes, the sensitive writing for the solo instruments, the interplay between the two and between the soloists and the orchestra give all of it unusual distinction.

The first movement, Allegro maestoso, features a marvelously subtle and elegant dialogue. The second movement, Andante, has a succession of glorious question-and answer phrases in which the soloists seem to seek to surpass each other in beauty and profundity of expression. The extended rondo finale, Presto, closes the work in exhilarating high spirits.

The small accompanying orchestra consists of oboes, horns and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

La Valse, Choreographic Poem . . . Maurice Ravel
(Born March 7, l875, in Ciboure; died December 28, l937, in Paris)

In 1906, Ravel wrote to a friend that he was contemplating a musical homage to Johann Strauss, a waltzing symphonic poem to be called Wien ("Vienna"). "You know my affinity for those wonderful rhythms," he said, "and that I value the joie de vivre expressed by the dance." By 1914 he had created a sketch for the work, but World War I and failing health intervened, and he did not work on it again until after the war. La Valse developed from a piano piece to an expanded score for two pianos, and finally into a colorful orchestral score.

In the winter of 1919-20, Ravel converted the initial sketch into La Valse, a "choreographic poem," partly in honor of the waltz king, Johann Strauss. Before the World War made it inappropriate for him to write music solely in honor of an Austrian composer, he described it as "a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz. Through whirling clouds, glimpses of waltzing couples are faintly seen. The clouds gradually scatter. An immense hall becomes visible, peopled with a circling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light bursts forth from the chandeliers. An Imperial Court, around 1855." [Abridged] As the score evolved, Ravel began to think of it as a choreographic work in which the main character would dance herself to death. La Valse builds to a large crescendo, developing from the motives heard quietly rumbling at the beginning. First, in the form typical of the Viennese waltz, Ravel introduces several themes, each based on a different melody. In the work's center, the themes return in fragments, no longer retaining the rhythmic flow of the waltz. The music becomes transformed harshly, and demonic dissonance is interjected. Rhythms become irregular as tension mounts; the waltz is forever broken apart as a five-note motive dominates and carries this forceful, disturbing work to its end. Overall, the effect Ravel produces is the sense of motion at once erotic, delirious, and somehow fantastic, surreal yet uncannily remote.

Serge Diaghilev, the director of the original Ballets Russes, for whom Ravel had written Daphnis et Chloé, was interested in La Valse for a ballet, but when he heard the composer and a friend play through it at two pianos, he said it was a "masterpiece. . . but not a ballet" and thought it would not be effective as dance. Ravel became furious, picked up his music and left the room, and the rift between the two became so deep they never spoke or collaborated again. History has, of course, proved the inimitable Diaghilev wrong, for Nijinska, Fokine and Balanchine all successfully choreographed La Valse.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Suite from the Opera, Der Rosenkavalier, ("The Knight of the Rose") Op. 59 . . . Richard Strauss
(Born June 11, 1864, in Munich; died September 8, 1949, in Garmisch)

Around the turn of the century, Strauss abandoned the symphonic poem as his principal vehicle of musical expression and turned toward the opera. His first two operas are now almost forgotten, but the second two, Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) are dramatic masterpieces whose durable success has not been diminished by their shocking subjects.

In 1911, in his fifth opera, Strauss turned away from tragedy and disaster toward brilliant comedy. Der Rosenkavalier came as close to the spirit of Mozart as a 20th century opera composer could. It is set in 18th century Vienna and tells a frothy tale of love and intrigue in which a rose of silver symbolizes betrothal. Both libretto and music are brilliantly witty and colorful. Strauss did not overlook any opportunity to enliven the work: he even exploited the 19th century Viennese favorite, the waltz.

This Suite was created shortly before Strauss's death. It is a musical summary of the opera in one long, continuous movement in a form similar to Strauss's own symphonic poems. It has seven sections: introduction, entrance of the Cavalier and presentation of the rose, duet of the young lovers, waltz, love-triangle trio of the young couple with the older grande-dame, another love duet and a closing waltz.

The Suite is scored for triple woodwinds, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, one or two harps and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Crafton Beck, guest conductor

In addition to serving as Music Director of the Mississippi Symphony and the Lima Symphony, Mr. Beck also appears as a guest conductor with orchestras across the country and has performed with over thirty American orchestras including the Milwaukee Symphony, the Oregon Symphony, the New World Symphony, the New Mexico Symphony, the Delaware Symphony, the Memphis Symphony, the Arkansas Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Dayton Philharmonic, the Kansas City Symphony, and the Florida Orchestra.

The scope of his musical versatility is also reflected in his talent as an arranger of over 80 musical selections, most of which have appeared on recordings by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. Two of these albums have received Grammy Award Nominations. Such orchestras as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl have also performed Mr. Beck’s arrangements.

Mr. Beck earned his undergraduate degree and his Master's degree at The Ohio State University in Columbus, and a Doctorate in Conducting from the Cincinnati College -Conservatory of Music.

Quartet San Francisco, guest artists

Grammy nominees for their last two releases (2006 and 2007)and International Tango competition winners (New York , 2004), Quartet San Francisco expresses itself in its agility and standout virtuosic playing. Quartet San Francisco is Jeremy Cohen and Alisa Rose , violinists, Keith Lawrence, violist, and Michelle Djokic, cellist. As crossover specialists they excel in multiple styles — from jazz to tango, pop to funk, blues to bluegrass, gypsy swing to big band and beyond.

Since its concert debut in 2001, Quartet San Francisco has offered its exclusive and ground-breaking literature to local, national and international audiences in a variety of venues that include tango and concert halls, jazz festivals, museums, and classrooms. In 2002 the quartet began its on-stage collaborations with tango dancers. In the 2004-06 academic years the quartet was in residence at Mills College in Oakland , CA.

Find out more about Quartet San Francisco at www.quartetsanfrancisco.com

Overture to Colas Breugnon, Op. 24. . . Dmitri Kabalevsky
(Born December 30, 1904, in Saint Petersburg, Russia; died February 14, 1987 in Moscow)

Dmitri Kabalevsky is an important figure in the musical world, and after the death of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, he was unquestionably the most important Russian composer. He was a skilled pianist and conductor, a dedicated teacher and a leading member of the Soviet Union's most important musical organizations.

In the 1930's, a Russian translation of Romain Rolland's novel, Colas Breugnon was published, and it immediately captivated the composer. The book consists basically of the memoirs of the fictional title-character, a jolly old craftsman-philosopher, who is free with good-humored, but severe critical of the restrictive society in which he lived at the end of the Middle Ages in Burgundy. Kabalevsky wrote, "I read the book at the age of thirty and fell in love with it for life, for its sunny brightness, its love of life [and] its infinite belief in the individual and in the message of art." The opera, Colas Breugnon, The Master Of Clamecy follows the book, and sets forth the difficulties of the wood sculptor's life, which he led in high style even though it caused him trouble with the local Duke. Kabalevsky composed the opera, in 1936-1937, and it received its premiere in 1938 at the Leningrad State Opera. 1936 was the year that Stalin denounced and banned Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Kabalevsky composed his opera with a gentler hand although his main character opposes the duke and with his sculpting of the duke riding backwards on a donkey, makes fun of the government. Kababevksy's opera did nevertheless, initially receive some criticism, but since the novel was popular among the Soviet intellectuals, it escaped any denouncement.

When Rolland granted Kabalevsky permission to use his novel, he stipulated, "Don't make Colas too serious. Colas without laughter won't be Colas." Kabalevsky understood that idea well, saying, "The force of Rolland's book . . . is in the strength of its characters, first of all in the person of its hero, Colas, in the folk spirit which the whole book breathes, in its great life-asserting optimism, in that love of life with which Rolland has filled every page."

The brief, brilliant overture opens the opera in the highest of spirits, full of life, incorporating jazzy syncopations and rhythmic intensity. A slower, lyrical middle section is illustrative of another side of Colas Breugnon's personality. As the critic, Hunsberger commented, "The orchestral colors are in a class of their own, ranging from overwhelming fortissimos to chamber effects to raucous splashes of wind and percussion energy." The score requires solo violin, piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, snare drum, xylophone, gong, harp, and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Selections from Evita. . . Andrew Lloyd Webber
(Born March 22, 1948 in London)

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is an English composer whose rock-based works have helped revitalize British and American musical theatre. His most successful are spectacles that include vivid melodic music and dramatic staging, blending rock and roll, English music-hall song and operatic forms.

He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and at the Royal College of Music. While a student, he collaborated with Timothy Rice on dramatic productions, with Rice writing the lyrics. Their first show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, was followed by the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. Popular though controversial, it joined classical forms with rock and told the story of Jesus' life.

Evita, also with lyrics by Tim Rice, began as an album of a rock opera in 1976 and was not produced on stage until 1978 in London; in 1979, it came to New York's Broadway. In 1996, a film of the musical was released with Madonna and Antonio Banderas starring. The musical focuses on the life of Argentine political leader Eva Perón, (1919-1952), the second wife of Argentinean president Juan Perón (1895-1974).

The captivating music of Evita is almost entirely sung-through; the lyrics generally are witty as the work depicts the trajectory of Eva Duarte Perón's life, beginning in obscurity, but reaching the magnitude of a legendary personality. The musical is only very loosely based on the actual life of its heroine, but rather follows her from the day of her death in July 1952, with flashbacks covering her coming to Buenos Aires, her alleged love affairs, her meeting with Perón, becoming the first lady, her work for charity, and then her death from cancer at thirty-three.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Blue Tango. . . Leroy Anderson
(Born June 29, 1908, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; died May 18, 1975, in Woodbury, Connecticut)

Leroy Anderson, one of America's most popular composers, wrote many melodies that almost everyone knows without knowing their titles or who wrote them. Sleigh Ride is one of Anderson's most familiar. Blue Tango, Syncopated Clock, and Bugler's Holiday are others.

Anderson was born into a family in very modest circumstances and was able to attend Harvard on a special scholarship for gifted students from the local community. His principal fields of study were music and linguistics, (he studied harmony with Romanian composer Georges Enescu and composition with Walter Piston) and his acquaintance with several little known European languages resulted in his becoming a military intelligence officer during the World War II. Before the War, however, Anderson had already begun his musical career and worked as a teacher, choirmaster, organist and bass player. As director of the Harvard University Band, he attracted the attention of Arthur Fiedler, the conductor of the renowned Boston Pops Orchestra, who hired him as staff arranger and composer for the Boston Pops Orchestra. Composer John Williams, his contemporary, said, "Anderson is one of the great American masters of light orchestral music." Anderson composed almost all his music for orchestra, and almost all of it is very, very short: the average composition is only three minutes long; nevertheless, his works consists of sophisticated orchestral writing with very appealing melodic themes.

In 1951, Fiedler and the Boston Pops received a Gold Record for Anderson's vibrantly irresistible Blue Tango, which reached number 1 on the Billboard charts, and was the first record to sell one million copies. Blue Tango, written for string orchestra, was actually Anderson's first hit; later, it became a popular song with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. It is a simple, winning melody that uses the traditional Argentine tango rhythm but it does not have the melodramatic flash of authentic tangos.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Scenes from West Side Story. . . Leonard Bernstein
(Born August 25, 1918, Lawrence, Massachusetts; died October l4, 1990, in New York)

One of the greatest American musicians of the 20th century, Leonard Bernstein was a prolific composer and conductor. The Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, he wrote three symphonies and diverse concert works, and made extensive contributions to musical theater, one of his great loves. The first of his Broadway musicals, On the Town, was a hit of the 1944 season, when he was only twenty-six years old. After Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956), came West Side Story, which was performed for the first time in 1957. In 1961, West Side Story was made into a film that was voted Best of the Year and won ten Oscars.

Based on an ancient story that is best known as Shakespeare told it in Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story is the tale of a young boy and girl whose love is thwarted by the enmity of the people around them. In this modern version, the young lovers are Tony and Maria. The feuding families of Shakespeare's play, the Montagues and the Capulets, are transformed into two rival street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, and the action is transferred from the streets of Verona to the West Side of Manhattan. The plot unfolds, allowing the rich melodies that characterize the characters and the situations in which they find themselves, to pour forth.

In this version, some of the most popular numbers of the musical are highlighted. After the Introduction, comes Cool, a Fugue (Allegretto) in which the Jets vent their hostility. Mambo (Presto) represents reality again and is characterized by a competitive dance between the gangs. The romantic ballad Tonight is the song in which the lovers declare their love for one another. The song America expresses conflicting views of life in the United States: the positive aspects of American life are pitted against those of Puerto Rico.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Danse Bacchanale, from the Opera Samson et Delilah. . . Camille Saint-Saëns
(Born October 9, 1835, in Paris; Died December 16, 1921, in Algiers)

Of operas on Biblical subjects, one of the most popular and successful is Saint-Saëns' Samson et Delilah. It began its life in 1868 as an oratorio. The composer's cousin, Ferdinand Lemaire, wrote the libretto. Franz Liszt induced Saint-Saëns to put the finishing touches on Samson et Delilah, and Liszt premiered it on December 2, 1877 at the Grand Ducal Theatre in Weimar. This very French opera had its première in Germany, sung in German.

The story of Samson, an Israelite hero who was tragically betrayed to the Philistines by the courtesan Delilah, is told in Judges 16,4-31. In Act III, Scene 2 inside the temple of Dagon, before a huge statue of their god, the Philistines celebrate victory over Samson and the Israelites by performing a wild bacchanale, a horrid, orgiastic ballet. The High Priest and Delilah mock the once powerful hero, and declare that if Jehovah restores Samson's sight, he will serve the Israelites' God. Samson prays for strength to counter this blasphemy, as the Philistines offer libations in thanks to Dagon. In the following scene, Samson destroys their temple and everyone in it.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Gisèle Ben-Dor, guest conductor

Gisèle Ben-Dor has won worldwide acclaim as guest conductor with major orchestras and as Music Director of the Santa Barbara Symphony, becoming Conductor Laureate in 2006. Uruguayan by birth and upbringing, she is a particularly persuasive champion of Latin American composers (Ginastera, Revueltas, Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla, Bacalov). Internationally, she has most recently led the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Bern Symphony, Jerusalem Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic, Boston Pro-Arte Chamber Orchestra, and the national orchestras of Brazil, Chile and Costa Rica. She has led the New York Philharmonic, London Symphony, BBC/Wales, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Pops, New World Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Israel Chamber Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Houston Symphony and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande among many others. As assistant to Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic, she led the orchestra on two last minute calls, including a highly acclaimed program of Mahler and Beethoven, without the benefit of rehearsals. She also led the orchestra in New York's Central Park before an estimated audience of 100,000 and at the British Festival. Her major performances of Ginastera's music have included a unanimously acclaimed new production and European première of his last opera, Beatrix Cenci (Grand Théâtre de Genève) and Turbae ad Passionem Gregorianam in Madrid. Upcoming new recordings of Ginastera's music feature Plácido Domingo (excerpts from his first opera Don Rodrigo); earlier recordings include Ginastera's complete ballets Estancia and Panambí (Naxos), and The Soul of Tango (world premières by Piazzolla and Bacalov). Elected by the musicians, she is also Conductor Emerita of Boston's Pro-Arte Chamber Orchestra. Recognized by Leonard Bernstein, they shared the stage at Tanglewood and at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Winner of the Bartòk Prize of Hungarian Television, she made her conducting début with the Israel Philharmonic in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, televised by the BBC/London throughout Europe. She studied at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv and at the Yale School of Music.

Michael Noble, pianist

Michael Noble gave his first public recital at the age of six. He attended the Idyllwild Arts Academy, a boarding arts high school in Southern California where he studied with Dean of the Arts, Nelms McKelvain. Upon graduation he was awarded the highest honor for a musician at the Academy: the Outstanding Musician of 2005-2006. Michael has won numerous awards in competitions including the Bob H. Johnson Gold Medal at the 2009 Crescendo Music Awards in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2nd Prize in the 2009 Chopin International Piano Competition of the Thousand Islands and the 2005 Idyllwild Arts Concerto Competition. He has played with the Idyllwild Arts Academy Orchestra and will debut with the Tulsa Symphony in the 2011 season.

Michael has performed in numerous master classes for musicians including Gary Graffman, John Perry, Boris Berman and Richard Danielpour. He has participated in the Eastern, Aspen, and Bowdoin music festivals as well as the Morningside Music Bridge program in Shanghai, China. He attended the International Piano Academy in Freiburg, Germany in the summer of 2009 where he worked with Vitaly Margulis and Paul Badura-Skoda among others. Additionally, he has worked with such pianists as John O'Conor, Julian Martin, Martin Canin, Anton Nel and Marie-Francois Bucquet.

In the fall of 2008 Michael attended the Paris Conservatoire as part of Eastman's Conservatory Exchange Program where he worked with pianist Nicholas Angelich. He recently obtained his BM from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York where he was a student of Nelita True. He also earned a BA in English at the University of Rochester. Michael will be pursuing his Masters this fall at the Yale School of Music.

Les Préludes, Symphonic Poem, No. 3, S. 97. . . Franz Liszt
(Born October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary; died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany)

Franz Liszt's position in musical history is assured by the influence of his unmatched piano virtuosity, by his championing of such advanced composers of his time as Berlioz and Wagner, and especially by his "modernization" of music. He created a new style of piano-playing, conceived the idea of the symphonic poem, established a place for folklore in art-music, and reconstructed the piano concerto. His new ideas profoundly influenced several generations of composers and performers.

The idea of the "symphonic poem," and even its name, were Liszt's inventions. He had already composed a large number of long, descriptive pieces for piano when he decided to write similar orchestral works that would be even more extended and more fully developed. He found the models for his new esthetic principle in such compositions as the Pastorale Symphony of Beethoven and the Symphony Fantastique of Berlioz, and in the descriptive Overtures of the young German Romantic composers that were not overtures to anything but simply short topical pieces. The symphonic poem changed the course of musical history and provided a great vehicle for the creative powers of such composers as Smetana, Tchaikovsky and, above all, Richard Strauss.

When Liszt began to work on Les Préludes, in the late 1840's, he was a great pianist, a mature artist and one of the most famous musicians in Europe, but he had little knowledge of the orchestra and no experience in writing for it. He revised it over may years. It became his most famous symphonic poem.

Officially, this work was based on Alphonse de Lamartine's long poem of the same name, and the episodic framework of Liszt's music mirroring Lamartine's account of life as a series of "Préludes" leading up to death, seems to suggest such a progression. Near the end, the work takes on a heroic tone, and it can be assumed that Liszt is affirming an all-pervading life force. Yet, even though one can project such connections to Lamartine's poem, actually the work was originally written as an overture for a series of male choruses, Les Quatre Éléments ("The Four Elements: Stars, Floods, Earth, and Wind,") Liszt wrote but did not complete in 1848, for poems by Joseph Autrans.

In reusing the material for Les Préludes, Liszt transformed the earlier overture into a more continuous work, conveying a narrative of epic forces. The earlier overture was an orchestral introduction, a prelude to a choral work for which many of its glorious melodies were first conceived. Some of its themes are also used in an early song and a piano piece. When he decided to convert the cantata overture into a symphonic poem, Liszt found a new literary association for his music. He discarded the poetic cantata text and instead adapted some lines from the Méditations poètiques (1823) of the French poet, Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869), printing his own paraphrase in the score:

"What is our life but a series of preludes to the unknown song whose first, solemn note is sounded by death? Love makes the magic dawn of all life. But in what life are the first delights of happiness not fated to be interrupted by some storm whose fatal wind dissipates its fair illusions and whose deadly thunderbolts destroy its altar? And what spirit, cruelly wounded, does not seek to set down its memories, in the sweet calm of country life, at the end of one of those tempests? Man does not really resign himself for long to savoring the kindly warmth that first charmed him in Nature's bosom, and when the trumpet sounds the alarm, he rushes to his dangerous post, no matter what the war that calls him to its ranks, in order to regain, in combat, full awareness of himself and complete possession of his forces."

Les Préludes, the third of Liszt's twelve symphonic poems, like all the other is a one-movement piece based in some way on extra-musical ideas from literature or history and composed in the 1850's. Liszt conducted the premiere of Les Préludes with the Grand Ducal Court Orchestra of Weimar, on February 23, 1854, at a pension-fund concert for the benefit of widows and orphans of members of the orchestra.

Lamartine's poetic themes were life, love and death. Les Préludes and Méditations poètiques do share some thematic elements unquestionably: the aggrandizement of man's individual nature, the omnipresence of the divine, the profundity of love, communion with nature, and the melancholy often associated with the Romantic sensibility.

Les Préludes is also a good example of Liszt's idea of the "transformation of themes." Liszt believed that a complete piece of music might evolve from limited themes, which would be transformed throughout the work, appearing with a different character each time they reappeared. In Les Préludes, the main theme consists of three-note figure, initially appearing in the strings at the beginning of the work.

The score calls for an orchestra of piccolo and three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, harp and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1, in D Major, Op. 19. . . Sergei Prokofiev
(Born April 23, 1891, in Sontzovka; died March 5, 1953, in Moscow)

Prokofiev traveled freely in the West, and lived and worked in America and Europe as well as in his homeland. He was born in a remote Ukrainian village where his agronomist father worked as manager of a large estate and his mother gave him his first music lessons. At thirteen, he entered the Conservatory in Saint Petersburg, where he began his important career as composer and pianist while still a student. In May 1918, he set off on a long voyage eastward to America taking the Trans-Siberian railroad to Honolulu and San Francisco, and in September arrived in New York. He carried the scores and sketches for many compositions with him, the recently completed Violin Concerto among them. He performed on the piano, finished one opera and started another, but did not succeed in persuading anyone to play his difficult new concerto here. In 1920, Prokofiev moved on to Paris, where he lived until he returned to the Soviet Union in 1933. There he made the acquaintance of another Russian émigré musician, Serge Koussevitzky, who was to be the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949. Koussevitzky gave the concerto its first performance on October 18, 1923, in Paris, with his orchestra's concertmaster, Marcel Darrieux as soloist.

The Concerto No. 1 is a powerful work, aggressive in its modernism, at once witty and harsh, reflecting, perhaps, the troubled times in which it was written. It begins with a moderately slow Andantino movement, dominated by a beautiful, long-spun melody. In the middle section, the pace quickens and the music becomes more dramatic. The opening melody returns, altered, to close the movement quietly. The second movement is a brilliant, diabolic Scherzo, Vivacissimo, as fast as possible, full of violin pyrotechnics and hammer blows from the orchestra. An air of mystery pervades the opening of the last movement, Moderato, but the violin soon creates a mood of warm romanticism. The music rises to a dramatic climax, and when it subsides, the principal theme of the finale becomes combined with melody of the first movement, which ends the concerto.

The concerto is orchestrated for piccolo and two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, tuba, timpani, snare drum, tambourine, harp and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Symphony No. 3, in F Major, Op. 90. . . Johannes Brahms
(Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna)

Brahms was forty-three years old when he finally completed his first symphony, a project that had occupied him, sporadically, for more than two decades. His Symphony No. 2 followed only a year later, but there was another sizeable gap of six years between the second and the third. Definitely Brahms had been composing other important works during this period, including the Tragic and Academic Festival Overtures, the Violin Concerto and the Second Piano Concerto, which greatly enhanced his reputation. Nevertheless, his Third Symphony was eagerly anticipated and was finally completed during the summer of 1883 at the German resort town of Wiesbaden.

The symphony, when it was first performed on December 2, 1883, was better received than the Symphony No. 2 had been at its first playing, but its success was not an easy one. Although Richard Wagner had died earlier that year, a fierce Wagner-Brahms public feud had not yet subsided and fanatical members of the Wagner cult tried to poison the atmosphere at the premiere. The conflict of the two factions almost brought about a duel. However, the symphony was performed more than a dozen times during the first months of 1884. After each performance, the composer polished his score further, and within half a year, it was published and Brahms went off to the country for the summer to work on his Symphony No. 4.

Commentators often say that Brahms's Symphony No. 1 was an overt and grave tribute to Beethoven, and the Symphony No. 2, is understood to be an homage to Schumann. In the Symphony No. 3, Brahms is at last understood to be completely himself. "Many music lovers will prefer the titanic force of the First Symphony," his friend, the powerful critic Eduard Hanslick wrote after the first performance, "others, the untroubled charm of the Second, but the Third strikes me as being artistically the most nearly perfect." This ardent work offers the listener direct and uncomplicated pleasures. That is not to say that this is a simple work: the symphony is a structure whose accessibly tuneful "exterior" conceals an intricately organized "interior." It is a more personal and intimate Brahms than his first two symphonies displayed, but it has no less vitality or strength than those that preceded it.

There is one element of the symphony every listener may notice in the very beginning of the first movement and be able to follow through to the final movement: it is a musical motto that consists of just three notes: F, A (or A-flat) and F. These three notes had an extra-musical significance for Brahms. Back in 1853, his friend Joseph Joachim, who was one of the greatest violinists of the 19th century and a composer too, had taken as his motto, "Free, but Lonely," in German, Frei aber einsam. From these notes, represented by the first letters of these words, thus F-A-E, the two young musicians and two of their friends (one of whom was their mentor, the composer Robert Schumann) had jointly fabricated a violin sonata. At the time of the Symphony No. 3, just thirty years later, Brahms was a fifty-year-old bachelor who declared himself to be frei aber froh, "Free but happy." His F-A-F motto and some altered variants of it are everywhere in this symphony. In the first and last movements, the attentive listener will find the motto is almost inescapable. It already takes on an important role in the first movement at the end of the development before the recapitulation, where a solo French horn announces it. In the second and third movements, it is often implicit or alluded to, if not stated outright.

As the symphony begins, Allegro con brio, the motto is the melody of the first three measures, and it is the bass line underlying the main theme in the next three. The three-note motto is presented boldly as well as in disguise, sometimes as melody, other times as accompaniment, or as something in between, remaining constantly in play for as long as another musical element's needs do not interfere with its expression.

The symphony's slow movement is a gracious Andante, which some commentators say recalls the spirit of Mozart. The motto is lyrically woven into the whole of this movement. The warm and touching third movement, Poco allegretto, takes the place of the conventional, speedy scherzo. It has a three-part form: ABA, and the repeated A section is made distinctive by the different orchestration Brahms gives it the second time through. The dramatic Allegro finale is a huge, lyrical, passionate movement, rich in melody, intensely exploited, altered, and developed until at the end, the music of the coda brings back the motto. It is heard first in the oboe and then in the French horn before its final statement in the flute. Then the violins softly take over to bring the symphony to its end, letting it fade away in a mysterious close after a last statement of the first theme from the initial movement.

Many conductors found this quiet ending a problem and for a time its conclusion resulted in this symphony's being performed in concert rather less frequently than Brahms's other three. Yet, the slow and quiet music that concludes the symphony leaves listeners in a calm and contemplative mood, which should not be considered a negative factor at all in our restless and stressful lives at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Gerhardt Zimmermann, guest conductor

Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann returns to Tulsa for a third consecutive season as he enters his 30th year as Music Director and Conductor of the Canton Symphony Orchestra. Zimmermann's energetic and vibrant performances have drawn invitations to appear on the podium with the Cleveland, Chicago, National, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New Jersey, Syracuse, Rochester and San Antonio orchestras. Other guest appearances include the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris, the Toronto Symphony, the Calgary Philharmonic, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago's Grant Park, Colorado Philharmonic and the Cleveland Opera.

In 2006, Zimmermann was named Director of Orchestral Activities at the University of Texas, Austin. And after serving 21 years as Music Director/Conductor of the North Carolina Symphony, he is currently Conductor Laureate of that orchestra. This past summer, he returned to the Breckenridge Music Festival for his 13th season as Music Director and Principal Conductor.

After his debut with the Colorado Philharmonic in 2003, the Denver Post said "…one would be hard pressed to recall a better account of Edward Elgar's 'Enigma' Variations. Zimmermann, though with a score on the music desk before the podium never opened it, and led the orchestra with command and sure concert. It was masterful, the orchestra responding with sonorous clarity." And the Rocky Mountain News read: "Zimmermann and company created an exquisite reading of Elgar's 'Enigma' Variations… the conductor, working from memory, made every note count. His control over the proceedings was complete, and the orchestra responded with some of its finest playing of the season."

With headlines such as: "Zimmermann the Spark that ignites Grant Park Symphony", "Canton Symphony steams up night", "LPO (Louisiana Philharmonic) delivers drama with flair….", and "Orchestra (Canton Symphony) gives impassioned Ninth Symphony (Mahler)", Zimmermann consistently receives accolades from critics and audiences alike. He has recorded with the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Louisville Orchestra and the North Carolina Symphony on the MMA, Louisville, and Koch labels. Zimmermann has also appeared as a guest on Breakfast with the Arts, a weekly program on the Arts and Education Network.

As comfortable with opera as on the concert stage, the Maestro has conducted staged works of Mozart, Verdi, Strauss Jr., Puccini and Gershwin and made his debut with the Cleveland Opera in February of 2006, conducting Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. The Cleveland Plain Dealer remarked that "Zimmermann…went on to lead a warm, vivid reading… The orchestra responded with a keen blend of ensemble finesse and solo suavity". The Akron Beacon Journal added "I've rarely heard the orchestra sound so full or play more expressively than under …… Zimmermann".

Born in Ohio, Mr. Zimmermann lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife Sharon. They have two children, Anna Marie and Peter Karl Irum.

Tulsa Oratorio Chorus

Vocal Soloists TBA

Overture and Incidental Music for Goethe's Tragedy, Egmont, Op. 84. . . Ludwig van Beethoven
(Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna)

The background music in film and television dramas today has historical antecedents in the music that has been part of theater presentations since ancient times. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when most of our current con¬cert repertoire originated, many composers, including Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, wrote music that was "incidental" to the theatrical and literary content of the dramatic productions that it accompanied. Of Beethoven's three relatively large scale efforts in this field, dating from 1809 to 1811, his Egmont music is the best.

The historical Count Egmont (1522 1568) was a Flemish statesman and soldier who faithfully served King Philip II of Spain (whom opera lovers know from Verdi's Don Carlo) until Philip annexed the North European Lowlands and placed them under the harshly tyrannical rule of a Spanish nobleman, the Duke of Alba. Egmont's leadership of a resistance movement brought him to trial for high treason and a sentence of death. His martyrdom in the cause of freedom made him a popular hero, a venerated figure whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 1832), Germany's greatest poet, memorialized in the play he wrote in 1788.

Although in Beethoven's time in Vienna, political subjects were filled with a tinge of danger, nevertheless, the Royal and Imperial Court Theater planned new productions in the 1809 1810 season including two plays about the struggle of small European regions for freedom from occupation and foreign rule. These two were Goethe's Egmont and Friedrich von Schiller's William Tell (in which the original tyrant was an Austrian). The theater director approached Beethoven and the now forgotten Adalbert Gyrowetz, who was the Court Theater's staff composer and conductor for new incidental music. It is believed that Beethoven really wanted to do William Tell, which is probably the better play, but that Gyrowetz got that assignment through his court connections, leaving the more difficult Egmont for Beethoven. In later years, Beethoven claimed to have chosen Egmont because of his great admiration for Goethe. Yet even if Egmont was only his second choice, the subject matters falls into an area of human endeavor that always interested him greatly: the heroic individual's struggle on behalf of the greater good of others. It is the fictional topic of his opera Fidelio, and it figures in the idealized history of the Egmont play and the Eroica Symphony.

The commission was offered to Beethoven in the autumn of 1809, and he worked on the music until June 1810. As was usual in the theater, and often still is, the Overture was written last. The music was not quite ready on May 24, the appointed opening night, and the overture was heard for the first time at the fourth performance on June 15, 1810, under the composer's direction. On April 12, 1811, Beethoven wrote to Goethe that he was having a copy of the music sent to him, and that he wanted very much to have the poet's opinion of it: "Your criticism could be helpful to me and my work, and would be as welcome as highest praise." Goethe replied that he was away from his home post and had not seen the music but had heard good things about it and planned to use it in his own new production in the following year. When Beethoven found that his publisher had not dispatched the score, he angrily asked how the firm could be "so discourteous to the finest German poet?" It is now widely known, however, that Goethe, for all his greatness as a poet, did not have much of an ear or taste for music.

The Overture is an expressive piece that sets the mood for the evening's powerful drama and provides a musical synopsis of it. The large number of its melodic elements suggests that they were associated, in the composer's mind, with specific elements of charac¬ters and events of the play.

Nine individual musical numbers follow the Overture.
No. 1. Song, the first of two for Egmont's beloved Clär¬chen, whose name is the German diminutive of Clara. Goethe's play, it should be noted, is a work of historical fiction. In fact, Egmont had a wife and nine children, and there probably was no Clärchen.

Die Trommel gerühret!
Das Pfeifchen gespielt!
Mein Liebster gewaffnet
Dem Haufen befiehlt
Die Lanze hoch führet
Die Leute regieret.
Wie klopft mir das Herze !
Wie wallt mir das Blut !
O hätt ich ein Wämslein,
Und Hosen und Hut!


Ich folgt ihm zum Tor haus
Mit mutigem Schritt
Ging durch die Provinzen
Ging überall mitt
Die Feinde schon weichen,
Wir schielssen darein.
Welch Glück sonder gleichen,
Ein Mannsbild zu sein!

Beat the drum! Sound the fife! My beloved is in armor and in command of the troops. Raise high the lance! Let the people rule! How my heart is beating! How my blood is boiling! Oh, if I had jacket, trousers and hat! I would follow him out the city gate, march through the provinces, go everywhere with him. The enemy is weakening. We are firing at them. What a matchless joy it would be to seem to be a man!

No. 2. Entr'acte I. The quiet opening changes into the agitated music for a crowded street scene.

No. 3. Entr'acte II seems to be music for serious re¬flection on the subject of war, which is referred to in drum beats and horn calls.

No. 4. Song. Clärchen's love song.

Freudvoll
Und leidvoll,,
Gedankenvoll sein;
Langen
Und bangen
In schwebender Pein;
Himmelhoch jauchzend,
Zum Tode betrübt;
Glücklich allein
Ist die Seele, die liebt.

To be joyful, sorrowful, thoughtful; yearning for and fearing the lingering pain; cheered sky high; sorrowful unto death the only happy soul is the one in love.

No. 5. Entr'acte III. The theme of the opening Allegro, distantly derived from No. 4, suggests Egmont's love for Clärchen as does the high flight of the clarinet with the other solo winds. The following march section accompanies Egmont to prison.

No. 6. Entr'acte IV. Again, this dramatic music has as its subjects love and war. At the end, Clärchen enters, to the quiet phrases of clarinets and bassoon.

No. 7. Music for the Death of Clärchen. Having learned that Egmont has been sentenced to death, Clärchen takes poison and her life quickly ebbs away until, at the end, the stage is left in darkness.

No. 8. Melodrama (in the old sense of speech with music, melody and drama combined). Egmont calls for sleep to comfort him in his sorrow. His dream, in which he sees the figure of Clärchen as the embodiment of Liberty, makes up the rest of the scene. A loud rush of strings tells of his (dreamed) death, but a trumpet announces victory, and Liberty crowns him with a wreath. At the roll of the drum, the image vanishes.

No. 9. Symphony of Victory. Egmont calls on his people to fight for their dear ones and for their possessions. If they are to fall in battle, he says, let them die happy. He sets them an example, with his own behavior for moral victory is his and right must eventually prevail.

The instruments of the orchestra are piccolo and two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.

Symphony No. 9, in D minor,"Choral," Op. 125 . . . Ludwig van Beethoven
(Born December 17, 1770, in Bonn; died March 26, 1827, in Vienna)

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, a paean to the brotherhood of man and a work of great optimism, is one of the cornerstones of the history of European music. In it, Beethoven celebrates the potential of mankind. Historically, this symphony, Beethoven's last, allowed him to look back at the demise of Napoleon and ahead with prophetic vision and sanguinity to a time of peace when, metaphorically, all men would be brothers.

The Ninth Symphony required a long period of gestation. Beethoven's first eight symphonies had been produced in the twelve years that began the century, but between them and the ninth, another twelve years needed to elapse. The earliest mention of what would evolve into this symphony occurred in 1793 when Beethoven announced he wanted to set the Ode to Joy by the contemporary German playwright and poet, Friedrich Schiller, to music. Yet it took almost thirty years from that date before Beethoven outlined the last movement of the symphony, using this text for a choral setting with vocal soloists and orchestra.

Beethoven's sketchbooks evidence thoughts and actual work on this symphony as early as 1812, when the composer was still completing the previous two symphonies, and in 1815, he wrote the fugue subject for the theme that was to be the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony. Music historians think his Missa Solemnis, Op. 123 gave him motivation to write what he imagined would be a "religious symphony," as the idea of using a chorus began to form. He knew his new music was to require new subjects, new forms and new powers of creation because the works of his middle years had exhausted for him all the possibilities of the classical forms he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart.

Beethoven began the composition of his last and longest symphony in earnest around 1817, although he actually did most of the writing of it in the year and a half of late 1822 and 1823, finishing it in 1824. In April 1822, his pupil Ferdinand Ries inquired of the London Philharmonic Society how much it would offer him for his new symphony. The Society offered fifty pounds for the work, with specific conditions: that Beethoven deliver it in March 1823, and that the Society have the exclusive performance rights for a year and a half. Beethoven agreed and accepted payment but did not comply with the agreement.

At the time, the success of Rossini's music in Vienna rankled Beethoven and he resolved that his new symphony must be first performed elsewhere. However, when a large group of professional and amateur musicians petitioned him to allow his own city of Vienna to hear his new work first, he was touched and relented. His friends soon issued an announcement that a concert with Herr Beethoven personally taking part in its direction would take place on May 7, 1824, nearly a year before it was heard in London. The works to be performed were Beethoven's Grand Overture (The Consecration of the House, Op. 124) and three hymns with solo and choral voices (the Kyrie, Credo and Agnus Dei from the Missa Solemnis) as well as a new symphony with solo and choral voices in the finale, on Schiller's ode, To Joy (the Ninth Symphony, Op. 125).

A well-known but perennially touching anecdote about that first performance recalls how Beethoven sat among the performers with a score and, at the beginning of each movement, signaled the tempo to the conductor, Michael Umlauf. The symphony was a tremendous success. When the timpani beat out the rhythmic theme pattern at the beginning of the second movement, the applause almost overpowered the music that followed. At the triumphal conclusion of the symphony, the audience stood up and cheered, enthusiastically waving their hats and handkerchiefs in the air, but Beethoven was totally unaware of the reaction because he was still seated facing the performers, with his back to the theater. His complete deafness had prevented him from hearing either his music or the ovation that followed it. With tears in her eyes, the contralto soloist took his arm and turned him toward the audience.

Beethoven's innovation at the beginning of the first movement, the enigmatic open fifths which grow imperceptibly out of stillness, have been likened to the "darkness and void before creation." After the initial growth from nothingness, an agitated, dramatic, often mysterious or questioning mood takes over in this serious first movement, Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso. Fragments of themes slowly metamorphose into the main theme, followed by a concentrated development and coda. The second movement, Molto vivace, Presto, Molto vivace, is a scherzo in sonata form, the only scherzo in all Beethoven's symphonies that precedes, rather than follows, the slow movement. It has a fugal exposition, but no ordinary one. Each of the themes and counter themes share almost the same rhythm. The main section of this unusually dark scherzo, Molto vivace, is based principally on an arresting rhythmic pattern that is driven home with most striking effect when it is heard as a solo on the timpani and then is treated as a five-voice fugue. The contrasting trio section, Presto, is more frolicsome and lighter in temperament. It recurs twice, between repetitions of the section, and then in abbreviated form, it brings the movement to a close. The third movement is a model of serenity. It presents two themes, a slow Adagio molto e cantabile, a very melodic subject alternating with a moving and romantic theme, Andante moderato, and then variations on each theme. Overall, this movement has a quiet lyricism that contrasts with all the other movements in the symphony. Many Beethoven analysts have tried to establish the theory that each of the first three movements derives from one main theme or motif. The French composer d'Indy pointed out: "All the typical themes of the symphony present the arpeggio of the chords of D or B flat, the two tonal bases of the work; one might, therefore, consider this arpeggio as the real cyclic theme of the work."

In the fourth movement, the symphony's message finally emerges, as Beethoven's biographer, Maynard Solomon put it, "from powerful opposing forces – from the tragic, frenzied, and probing modalities of its earlier movements – and by grafting the cantata form into the sonata cycle." It reaches its climax and "succeeds, primarily, because of the rich ambiguity of a message that manages to transcend the particularities of its origin and to arrive at a set of universal paradigms." This memorable movement makes the dramatic transition from instrumental to choral work. Jonathan Kramer noted that the unusual form of the last movement is "an experiment in combining different traditional forms into a single movement: sonata, variations, cantata, concerto, fugue and opera. It is a complete four-movement symphony in miniature, onto which is grafted the outlines of sonata form. The sonata's exposition is a set of variations, its development is a fugue, and its coda is an operatic finale."

The final movement's long introduction serves as a link between the first three movements and the concluding one. After an initial dissonant fanfare, the principal themes of the first three movements each reappear fleetingly before the main theme, on which the finale is based, appears as a recitative in the cellos and basses. Beethoven has created a mammoth set of variations on what is actually a simple theme. First it is articulated without words. After the orchestra creates a fierce and unsettling clamor, the low strings intone this noble main theme of the movement, and this theme repeats several times, each time with more instruments added, until the entire orchestra joins in with its majesty. The opening returns yet again, and this time the baritone recitative follows. His words are not Schiller's, but Beethoven's own as he sets the stage with a rebuke: "O, friends, not these sounds! Let us sing something more pleasant, more full of gladness!" What come next as the chorus enters are the words of Schiller's Ode, which Beethoven adopts to express his ideas of human brotherhood and the joy it releases.

When the second theme would naturally appear, the theme transforms into a Turkish march, a style popular since Mozart's time, with a distinctive "Turkish" sound produced by the triangle, cymbals and bass drum. Then the chorus and orchestra add another variation to the Ode to Joy theme before a break, after which comes the fugue, whose themes then combine before the ending section commences. With great emotional depth and tremendous intensity, the symphony concludes with a double fugue for the chorus and a jubilant and triumphant operatic finale of joy and praise. Nietzsche, the philosopher, paraphrased Schiller's words as Beethoven used them: "Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him."

When Beethoven planned the symphony, he had thought of ending it with a purely instrumental movement for which he even made some sketches, but he used them later in the finale of his Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. After much working and reworking, Beethoven decided not to set the Schiller poem to music, but to rearrange the text to suit his musical and dramatic intentions. Schiller's To Joy, or Ode to Joy as it is often called in English, is a poem of five twelve-line stanzas, each stanza having a twelve-line and an eight-line section, written when Schiller was only twenty-five. In the opening chorus, in accordance with his own poetic vision, Beethoven runs together the twelve-line sections of the first three stanzas. The text of the tenor solo, which follows, is the six-line section from the fourth stanza.

The symphony is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, kettledrum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle and strings. At the first performance, the orchestra included twenty-four violins, ten violas and twelve cellos and basses, and the wind instruments were doubled.

Program notes are © copyright 2010 Susan Halpern.