Program Notes

Kanon in D – Johann Pachelbel (1653—1706)
Instrumentation: String orchestra
German Baroque organist and composer Johann Pachelbel was catapulted to international fame after Conrad Jarrett’s high school choir sang a transcription of his Canon in D in the opening scene of Robert Redford’s academy-award-winning film Ordinary People (1980). As the film progressed, composer Marvin Hamlisch added more arrangements for instruments alone. And ever since, the Canon in D has set the tone for countless weddings and other ceremonies around the globe. As a musical composition, it brings together two important Baroque compositional techniques: a set of variations over a two-measure bass line and a melodic canon or round in which additional instruments (here, two more) answer the initial melody in strict imitation. In addition to taking on the compositional challenge, Pachelbel chose to intensify the music as the piece progresses by having the melodic notes speed up in relation to the bass. But for the Canon’s legions of admirers, the charm has less to do with the compositional feat and more with the simple beauty of a perfectly matched bass line, melody, and chords in the ordinary key of D Major.

Overture to The Marriage of Figaro – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756—91)
Instrumentation: 18th-c orchestra

What does a child prodigy choose to do in the last years of his career? For Mozart, the answer was to devote considerable effort to the composition of comic Italian operas. The Marriage of Figaro (1786) was the first of a trilogy of operas that he composed to libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte, a multitalented entrepreneur who ended his days as a grocer in New Jersey (where few were willing to believe that he had ever collaborated with Mozart). The plot of Figaro concerns the urgent efforts of the barber Figaro (now, a household servant) to expedite his wedding to Susanna, before their mutual employer, Count Almaviva, to pursue her, as he tried to do with every single woman under his employ. Mozart’s overture to the opera sets the stage to the madcap series of events with its audacious presto tempo and series of high-spirited musical themes. Thanks to his compositional mastery, the flurries of rapid notes never overwhelm the audience, but instead keep them engaged until the final cadence.

Adoration – Florence Price (1887—1953)
Instrumentation: Violin and orchestra

Florence Price was a prolific composer who established Chicago as home for most of career. As she was forging a career filled with firsts and accolades, she drew especially wide acclaim when a performance of her Symphony No. 1 by the Chicago Symphony in 1933 made her the first African-American female composer to have a work performed by a major U.S. orchestra. In addition to her four symphonies, she composed concertos, programmatic works, choral works, as well as chamber music, keyboard music, and songs. She composed Adoration in 1951 for organ, but its broad appeal has led to a series of arrangements for various combinations of instruments. The version for violin and orchestra allows the soloist to sing out the reverent and soulful phrases of the melodic line, which are inflected with the idioms of African-American spirituals. The violin’s presentation of the main theme is followed by a freer middle section of dialogue between soloist and orchestra, which then leads to a return of the main theme recomposed to build to the work’s climax.

Conga del fuega nova – Arturo Márquez (1950–)
Instrumentation: Full orchestra

Born into a musical family in the musically rich and diverse northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, Arturo Márquez has built a productive career from making fusions out of previously discrete musical styles and genres. Thanks to the efforts of conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Már quez’s Danzón No. 2 (1994) has become a repertoire standard all around the world, which is a rare achievement for a late 20th-century work when not tied to a film, musical, or video game.

Conga del fuega nova is rooted in the conga dance tradition imported from Cuba to Mexico. The “new fire” in the title traces back even further to an Aztec ritual based on a purifying fire. The conga dance rhythm with its distinctive fourth beat accent is most evident in the work’s outer sections, wherein the composer makes a game of surprising the listener either by reassigning the accent or leaving it out altogether. Mixed in with the mariachi band trumpet and percussion writing is the distinctive sound of two conga drums. The music unfolds in two great waves of increasing intensity and complexity, separated by a more delicate and graceful middle.

Second Suite in F – Gustav Holst (1874—1934)
Instrumentation: Full orchestra

Holst wrote this suite for military band, whose sound is preserved in this transcription for full orchestra. Three of more than a half dozen English folk song melodies used as themes appear in the first movement. The sprightly march-like dance tune “Glorishears” appears first, followed by the more the more lyrical “Swansea Town” featuring horn, and, in the center, “Claudy [sic] Banks, featuring winds. The second movement is a song without words based on the haunting melody of “I’ll Love My Love.” The suite’s “Song of the Blacksmith” is based on the song “A Blacksmith Courted Me”. In it the band roots of the Suite are evident from the prominent brass and woodwind usage and the blacksmith’s trade is evoked by hammer and anvil. The finale carries the subtitle “The Dargason,” a reference to a centuries-old dance tune. With consummate skill, Holst counterpoints this rousing melody against the famous “Greensleeves” melody at a slower tempo.

Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin (1898—1937)
Instrumentation: Piano and orchestra

This year marks the 100th anniversary of what is still America’s most famous classical composition. The premiere occurred on February 12, 1924 in New York’s Aeolian Hall, as part of an “experiment in modern music,” i.e., a full length concert, produced and conducted by Paul Whiteman, in which Gershwin’s Rhapsody was programmed as the finale. At the foundation of the concert, the “experiment,” and much of Whiteman’s career was his conviction that the future of American music should be based on crossover compositions: most specifically, on fusions between European compositional traditions and African-American jazz and blues idioms.

The fantastic success of the Rhapsody was all the more remarkable, given the circumstances surrounding its composition. At the time, George Gershwin was mainly song plugger, just on the verge of making his break on Broadway. He had never written a major orchestral work and was just beginning to learn how to arrange music for ensembles. But he did have two special gifts to bring to the project: an incomparable melodic gift and a phenomenal ability to create imaginative style-crossing piano improvisations. The compositional history of the piece, before and after its premiere, is complex, with some important details still a matter of debate. In the process of preparing an arrangement for piano and concert band, Brad Maffett conducted research at the Library of Congress with original Gershwin manuscripts and familiarized himself with discrepancies between different versions of the work. The version performed at this concert is his attempt to preserve Gershwin’s original conception of the work.

The improvisational roots of the piece are most evident in the wild impromptu harmonic scheme, which careens, for example, from B-flat to A-flat to G-flat to F# minor, A major, etc. But the piece is not without formal structure. Most of the great tunes can be traced back to just a pair of tiny 3-note motives, which is precisely the kind of thing that is praised in a Beethoven composition. And some would argue that the work’s main sections approximate those of a symphony, with a dramatic first movement, jaunty scherzo, tender slow movement, and (after an interpolated piano cadenza) a brilliant finale. Without a doubt, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is very much a product of its time that has endured the test of time, never losing its appeal for a wide variety of listeners, in America and around the world.

Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Felix Mendelssohn (1809—47)
Instrumentation: Full orchestra

In 19th century Europe, before the advent of films and film music, special productions of a popular play might include newly composed “incidental music,” which was inserted at various points. Felix Mendelssohn responded to this custom by composing first an overture for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1826, and, sixteen years later, another thirteen pieces for another production. The suite based on this pieces includes the Overture, Scherzo, Nocturne, and the ever-popular Wedding March, which was originally destined to be an intermezzo between Acts IV and V of Shakespeare’s play. Although instantly recognizable from its trumpet fanfare and opening theme, it is Mendelssohn’s rich harmonies and varied orchestral hues that made this march so special. The transition back to the opening theme’s final return and the majestic conclusión that follows give ample evidence that the composer of this world renowned wedding march was also a symphonist.