Approximately four minutes in length
Program Notes:
Inspired by William Grant Still’s love of nature and K. Mitchell Pilcher’s poetry, Wood Notes is a four-movement orchestral suite. Still’s classic American style is woven into the fabric of this suite, with warm melodies and rich textures creating a truly pleasing suite of music. The work premiered in 1948 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and has since only been recorded once by the Fort Smith Symphony with John Jeter.
Moon Dusk is the slowest movement of the four, with the elongated woodwind opening staying at the core of this movement. Swirling strings accompany, as the woodwind explores this intriguing theme. Once again Still relies on his impressionism rules to create a whirlpool of sound as soloists begin to rear their heads. An oboe solo brings the music into the pastoral side, which is soon followed by a soft violin solo. As the music grows into the climax, the themes fluctuate between voices, creating a really interesting effect. This movement ends quietly.
Approximately four minutes in length
Program Notes:
Spartacus is a ballet composed by Aram Khachaturian in 1954, for which he was awarded a Lenin Prize that same year. This is one of Khachaturian’s best known works and is still performed by the Bolshoi Theatre and other ballet companies in Russia. In 1955, he arranged the music into four orchestral suites.
The story of the ballet follows Spartacus, the Thracian king, and his wife Phrygia after they have been captured by the Romans. Phrygia is sent to become a concubine while Spartacus is forced to entertain the Roman consul and his colleagues in the gladatorial ring by killing a friend. Horrified by what he has done, Spartacus incites a rebellion among his fellow prisoners. Their rebellion is successful and they celebrate their freedom but still return to liberate the slave women, including Phrygia.
After the lovers escape, they are located by the Roman army who find and impale Spartacus with their spears as Phrygia mourns the loss of her husband.
Approximately six minutes in length
Program Notes:
As a successful opera composer in Vienna, Erich Korngold was already a master of grandiose, vivid scene-painting by the time he was recruited to compose American film scores. He was in California when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938 (the year he penned his most famous score, for Robin Hood), and from then on he made Hollywood his home, taking American citizenship in 1943.
In 1953, when a publisher asked Korngold for music suitable for school orchestras, he thought of the work he had done to re-orchestrate operettas by one of his composing heroes, Johann Strauss II, Vienna’s “Waltz King.” Korngold packaged three excerpts as Straussiana, including this Waltz that originally appeared in the 1892 operetta Ritter Pásmán.
Approximately six minutes in length
Program Notes:
Maurice Ravel completed the Menuet antique, a piece for solo piano, in 1895 to pay tribute to one of his earliest supporters, composer Emmanuel Chabrier, who died in 1894. He composed this piece at 20 years old while he was still a student at the Paris Conservatory.
In 1898, the piece was premiered by its dedicatee, Ricardo Viñes. This was Ravel’s first published work. In 1929, Ravel orchestrated the piece for large ensemble including harp, English horn, bass clarinet and contrabassoon. It is in ternary form, standard structure for a minuet.
Approximately four minutes in length
Program Notes:
Erik Satie was, depending on who you asked, an enigmatic genius who manifested the future of French music, or a vain and headstrong charlatan. After seven unremarkable years at the Paris Conservatory, where one teacher pronounced him the school’s “laziest student,” he moved at the age of 21 to the epicenter of Paris’ Bohemian nightlife scene, the Montmartre neighborhood, to play piano in cafes and compose music that ran counter to everything he had been taught. It was the next year that he wrote three short, interrelated piano pieces that he dubbed Gymnopédies, a title taken from an Ancient Greek tradition of a festival featuring naked dancers.
Nine years later, when Satie was (still) on the edge of financial ruin, his friend Claude Debussy leveraged his growing fame and arranged two of the Gymnopédies for orchestra. If dictionaries played sounds, Debussy’s arrangement of the Gymnopédie No. 1 would appear as the precise definition of that indubitably French strain of melancholy and boredom known as ennui, and as such it’s no surprise that it shows up in so many movies and TV shows to crank up that particular emotion, ranging from The Simpsons to How I Met Your Mother to The Queen’s Gambit.
Approximately three minutes in length
Program Notes:
“Lonely Town” is a dance episode from the 1944 musical On the Town, composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden. The musical follows three American sailors on shore leave for 24 hours in New York City.
Gabey, one of the sailors on leave, performs “Lonely Town” in Act I as he sings about his feelings of isolation and loneliness although he is surrounded by many people in the highly populated City. Gabey looks on as other sailors dance with girls while he is alone. He watches as a worldly sailor encounters a young, high school-aged girl in Central Park. Bernstein describes this section as “both tender and sinister” as the sailor pursues and later rejects the girl. The piece is reminiscent of the style of Bernstein’s friend and mentor, Aaron Copland.
Approximately four minutes in length
Program Notes:
Shostakovich was a musical prodigy who entered the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919, at the age of 13. He weathered setbacks including the death of his father in 1922, a bout of tuberculosis in 1923, and ever-precarious family finances that led him to take a side job as a movie theater pianist—a gig that nurtured his lifelong affection for popular music. He still completed his studies at age 19, offering his First Symphony as a graduation piece.
Both Shostakovich and the conductor who had premiered the First Symphony, Nikolai Malko, attended a musical playing in Moscow in 1927, and they were both captivated by a number listed as “Tahiti Trot,” which accompanied a foxtrot dance. (The song was actually “Tea for Two,” composed by Vincent Youmans in 1924 for the show No, No, Nanette.) To have a little fun with the supremely confident Shostakovich, Malko challenged him one night to a bet: could he transcribe that tune from memory and orchestrate it, all in less than an hour? Shostakovich went to another room and triumphantly returned about 40 minutes later with this sweet and silly arrangement still known as Tahiti Trot.
Approximately two minutes in length
Program Notes:
The Golden Age is a ballet in three acts and six scenes by Dmitri Shostakovich. This piece is based on a libretto by Alexander Ivanovsky and premiered October 26, 1930 at the Kirov Theatre.
The ballet satirizes the political and cultural changes taking place in Europe in the 1920s. It is about a Soviet soccer team playing in a Western city. The team comes into contact with politically incorrect characters like the Diva, the Fascist, the Agent Provocateur and more. Match rigging, police harrassment and unjust imprisonment by the bourgeoisie are all faced by the team. Finally, they are freed from jail when the local workers overthrow the capitalist leaders. At the end of the ballet, the workers and soccer team engage in a dance on solidarity.
Shostakovich was a big soccer (football) fan and was said to have coined the phrase “Football is the ballet of the masses.”
The third movement of Shostakovich’s The Golden Age, titled Polka, was reused as the second of his Two Pieces for String Quartet in 1931. He also arranged the Polka for solo piano (Op. 22b) and piano four hands (Op. 22c), in 1935 and 1962 respectively.
Approximately four minutes in length
Program Notes:
As of 1902, Igor Stravinsky was a young law student whose musical pursuits amounted to some piano lessons and a year of private theory training. As he began to think more seriously of a life in music, he arranged to show some of his scores to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the leading teacher and tastemaker in Saint Petersburg. Rimsky-Korsakov steered Stravinsky away from the conservatory, where the untrained 20-year-old would have stuck out, but he saw enough promise that he took Stravinsky on as a private student.
The death of Rimsky-Korsakov in 1908 ended Stravinsky’s whirlwind apprenticeship. His real arrival as a professional composer came early the next year, when two short orchestral compositions, Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks, debuted on the same program. One attendee who recognized Stravinsky’s burgeoning talent was the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev; he soon took a chance on Stravinsky when the original composer tapped for The Firebird fell through, and the rest is history.
With its fantastical textures and robust themes, Fireworks demonstrates how well Stravinsky absorbed the lessons of Rimsky-Korsakov, especially in the craft of orchestration. There are flashes of the ritualistic bombast that served Stravinsky so well in his forthcoming ballets, and at the same time hints arise of the sparkling clarity that Stravinsky maximized during his later decades of neoclassical exploration.
Approximately three minutes in length
Program Notes:
As if in relief to the gravity of the previous movement, this final movement is a lighthearted tribute to the “mestizo” or mixed-race music of the South American Pacific coast. In particular, it evokes the “romancero” tradition of popular songs and dances that mix influences from indigenous Indian cultures, African slave cultures, and western brass bands.
Currently serving as Composer-in-Residence with the storied Philadelphia Orchestra and included in the Washington Post’s list of the most significant women composers in history (August, 2017), identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank’s music. Born in Berkeley, California (September, 1972), to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela explores her multicultural heritage through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Gabriela has traveled extensively throughout South America in creative exploration. Her music often reflects not only her own personal experience as a multi-racial Latina, but also refract her studies of Latin American cultures, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own.
Moreover, she writes, “There’s usually a story line behind my music; a scenario or character.” While the enjoyment of her works can be obtained solely from her music, the composer’s program notes enhance the listener’s experience, for they describe how a piano part mimics a marimba or pan-pipes, or how a movement is based on a particular type of folk song, where the singer is mockingly crying. Even a brief glance at her titles evokes specific imagery: Leyendas (Legends): An Andean Walkabout; La Llorona (The Crying Woman): Tone Poem for Viola and Orchestra; and Concertino Cusqueño (Concertino in the Cusco style). Gabriela’s compositions also reflect her virtuosity as a pianist — when not composing, she is a sought-after performer, specializing in contemporary repertoire.
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Your gift to the Phoenix Symphony keeps music alive — from powerful performances and education programs to hospice bedside visits that bring comfort and connection when words fail. Give today and help us reach our $250,000 year-end goal before midnight, December 31.