Friday, February 24, 8PM @ NNU's Swayne Auditorium
Saturday, February 25, 8PM @ Morrison Center
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Robert Franz, conductor
Caroline Goulding, violin
Boise Philharmonic Youth Orchestra Seniors
Miklós Rózsa
Spellbound Concerto
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Violin Concerto
Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 10
At age eighteen, violinist Caroline Goulding has performed as a soloist with some of North America’s premier orchestras including The Cleveland Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Houston Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Charlotte Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Sarasota Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, Columbus ProMusica, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Cleveland Pops and the Cincinnati Pops. Aside from her orchestral engagements, Caroline has appeared at venues such as Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, (Le) Poisson Rouge, the Kennedy Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Buffalo Chamber Music Society’s Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, and the University of Georgia’s Ramsey Concert Hall. She has shared the stage with Béla Fleck, Anton Nel, Christopher O’Riley, Navah Perlman, Wendy Warner and Elaine Douvas.
On March 14, 2011 Caroline was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant at a reception and performance at Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse. The 2010-2011 season marked a cycle of solo orchestral engagements including debuts with the Louisville Orchestra, Sarasota Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Charlotte Symphony, El Paso Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and return solo appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra, Toronto Symphony and Atlantic Classical Orchestra. Prior to receiving the Career Grant, Caroline won the 2009 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and was presented in recital throughout the nation including debuts at the Kaufman Center’s Merkin Hall in NYC, Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre in Washington DC and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. That same year, Caroline was awarded a Grammy nomination for her debut recording on the Telarc record label.
Along with the nomination, Caroline’s debut recording garnered attention from venerable musicians, including violinist Jaime Laredo who voiced, “Caroline Goulding is one of the most gifted and musically interesting violinists I have heard in a long time; her playing is heartfelt and dazzling throughout.” Composer John Corigliano, whose Red Violin Caprices she recorded, said, “She gives a totally individual interpretation to my music. I think she will shortly become a very famous young woman and only hope that she gives my other violin works a glance.”
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Behind the Music
Spellbound Concerto
Miklós Rózsa
Born April 18, 1907, in Budapest, Hungary
Died July 27, 1995, in Los Angeles, California
This work dates from 1946. It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, theremin, and strings.
This is the Boise Philharmonic's first performance of The Spellbound Concerto.
Many of the most talented composers from the 1930s until the present have made their mark primarily in the world of film music. In the first few years of the “talkies,” Hollywood courted musicians from radio shows, but European political turmoil in the 1930s proved to be a boon to the American film studios. As artists and composers fled the rise of Nazi and Fascist regimes, many settled in the United States. California, with its warm climate and ample opportunities for musicians, eventually became the home of Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Korngold, and Miklós Rózsa, all of whom had made their name in the concert hall before immigrating. While Stravinsky and Schoenberg would remain largely in the concert hall, Korngold and Rózsa would become legendary composers for the silver screen, but they also composed concert works of great appeal and quality.
Rózsa had a musical childhood in and around Budapest. His mother was a classmate of Bartók and his uncle was a professional musician in the Royal Hungarian Opera. Composition came naturally for Rózsa who started writing his own music at the age of seven. At the age of 19, he enrolled in the Leipzig Conservatory and was a published composer just three years later. After a decade in Paris, Rózsa visited Hollywood. During the early 1940s, he worked as a contract composer for several Hollywood productions. In 1945 he became a professor of film music at the University of Southern California – a position he held until 1965. When he joined the MGM staff in 1948, he had already composed several scores for productions in London. He stayed with MGM until 1962.
Rózsa was one of the most prolific film composers in history with credits spanning from 1937-1989. Of his 94 films, many are unforgettable – Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), The Killers (1946), The Naked City (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), Valley of the Kings (1954), Lust for Life (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961), The Green Berets (1968), and Time After Time (1979). His last feature film was Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982). Rózsa is often credited for creating the sound of film noir and the Biblical epic films of the 1950s. Rózsa received many honors for his film scores, including Academy Awards for the soundtracks of Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1948) and Ben-Hur (1959).
Rózsa’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound is one of his finest. The basic plot of the film is that a psychiatrist (Ingrid Bergman) tries to protect the identity of a murder suspect as she helps him regain his memory … or so we think. This brilliant film includes the requisite plot twists and psychological drama that are Hitchcock’s hallmarks. One of the most famous scenes is a dream sequence designed by a famous Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. Rózsa wrote in his autobiography that “Dalí’s designs for the central dream-interpretation sequence immediately suggested a musical complement, and literally colored my concept of the score as a whole.”
A major part of that color was Rózsa’s use of the theremin, an electronic instrument that is played by moving both hands in proximity to two antennas on a console. The instrument is not touched as it is played. Theremins deliver a very close imitation of a high soprano voice singing on an open syllable. The sound became an unmistakable staple in sci-fi movies in the 1950s. Rózsa’s use of the theremin to represent a dream state was a stroke of genius.
In 1946, the year after Spellbound was released, Rózsa decided to turn the score into two different versions for orchestra. Entitled the Spellbound Concerto, one version includes a virtuosic solo part for a featured pianist. The other version is for orchestra alone. Both works are absolutely captivating, largely because of the immense strength of the themes, which are guaranteed to stay with the listener. Rózsa liked to relate the story about his friend Jerome Kern, the composer of Show Boat, who “told me one day that ‘we’ were going to publish the Spellbound Concerto.” Kern was a co-owner of Chappell’s Publishing in New York, along with Cole Porter and the Gershwin Estate. The tightly-knit Hollywood musical community worked together to preserve each others’ work and is responsible for today’s audiences being able to enjoy this timeless classic.
©2011 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com
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Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Born May 29, 1897, in Brno, Moravia (now Czech Republic)
Died November 29, 1957, in Hollywood, California
This work was first performed on February 15, 1947, by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Golschmann with Jascha Heifetz as soloist. It is scored for solo violin, piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, one trombone, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp, and strings.
This is the Boise Philharmonic's first performance of Korngold's Violin Concerto.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s story is remarkable. Born during the final years of the Austrian Empire, he was one of the greatest prodigies of his time. At age nine he composed a cantata that drew praise from Mahler. His rise was rapid, with numerous piano works, a few orchestra pieces, a ballet, several chamber works, and two operas to his credit before he reached twenty years of age. Among his admirers were Sibelius, Puccini, and Richard Strauss. Before long he found himself in college at the Vienna Staatsakademie – not as a student, but as a professor appointed by the Austrian president.
In 1934 the film director Max Reinhardt invited Korngold to Hollywood to help with the adaptation of music for the famous Warner Brothers version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream starring Mickey Rooney. Korngold accepted and found himself immersed in the Hollywood studio system in which films were produced from start to finish in sprawling studio complexes, relying on in-house departments for every aspect of the production. Hollywood music departments employed studio orchestras to record the music written by staff composers and arrangers. Korngold found the studio system to be lucrative and satisfying and, for a few years, divided his time between Vienna and Hollywood. However, the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and their annexation of Austria in 1938 led Korngold to settle permanently in the United States. He became a citizen shortly thereafter.
Korngold composed the music for seventeen films for Warner Brothers Studios, winning Academy Awards for the 1936 Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland feature Anthony Adverse and Errol Flynn’s 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood. Although most of his efforts went to the studio, Korngold still managed to compose music for the concert hall, including his 1939 opera, Die Kathrin, and his masterful 1946 Violin Concerto.
Composed in the late-Romantic style, Korngold’s Violin Concerto was dedicated to Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer who had championed the young composer’s music in 1906 when Korngold was only nine years of age. The work was written at the request of violinist Bronislaw Huberman for the legendary Jascha Heifetz, who gave the premiere performance. It is interesting that the thematic material in the work is derived from Korngold’s film scores. In a sense, using themes from his American career along with Romantic European compositional techniques results in a summary of Korngold’s musical experiences. The Violin Concerto is a uniquely American work cut from brilliant Viennese fabric.
Korngold’s Violin Concerto opens straightaway with the soloist playing a passionately soaring theme drawn from the 1937 film Another Dawn. Treated tenderly at first, this melody will become the emotional core of the movement. After an animated episode, a surpassingly lyrical theme is presented, this time by the orchestra with a solo violin obbligato. Korngold drew this melody from his 1939 score to a Bette Davis vehicle entitled Juarez. After a brilliant cadenza, all of the themes return in a decidedly cinematic orchestration.
The second movement (Romance) begins with a poignant theme in the upper register of the solo violin accompanied by a dreamy blend of harp and strings. Korngold borrowed this theme from his Oscar-winning score to Anthony Adverse. A newly composed second section introduces a tinge of storminess before the movement ends quietly with harp and strings. As with most concerti for virtuoso soloists, the finale is a brilliant technical showpiece. Based on his music from The Prince and the Pauper, a 1937 Errol Flynn and Claude Rains film, this movement is a rondo that includes elements of variation form.
©2011 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com
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Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93
Dmitri Shostakovich
Born September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg, Russia
Died August 9, 1975, in Moscow, USSR
The work was given its earliest performance on December 13, 1953, in Leningrad, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. It is scored for two piccolos, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, three clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.
This is the Boise Philharmonic's first performance of Symphony No. 10
The infamous Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sought to control all aspects of Russian society during his reign from 1922 to 1953. He demanded a new Russia that embraced conservative and nationalistic principles. Anything that was not aligned with his carefully-proscribed doctrine was viewed as anti-Soviet. Most of Stalin’s enemies were simply eliminated. Nowhere was this more noticeable than in the Great Purge that began in 1934 during which the Party expelled those they viewed as opportunists and infiltrators. Before Stalin’s death in 1953 slowed the bloodshed, over 700,000 people had been killed and millions of others had been sent to forced labor camps in Siberia.
Artists of all types were among the primary targets of the Great Purge. Composers had to walk a fine line to please Stalin. Formalism in music, described as that which did not appeal to the masses and emphasized form over substance, was forbidden. Instead, composers were expected write popular music using a direct musical language that served the needs of the Party – a style called Soviet Realism.
Dmitri Shostakovich ran afoul of the Soviet authorities on two occasions. In 1936 Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and denounced the opera in Pravda as “Muddle Instead of Music.” Performances of Shostakovich’s music all but stopped and the composer was so distraught he became suicidal. His famous “response to just criticism,” the Fifth Symphony (1937), is grandiose and triumphant, representing what the Soviet authorities believed was a glorification of their doctrine. However, most of the world saw it as the composer’s victory over oppression. In 1948 the Union of Soviet Composers, under pressure from Stalin, denounced Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and several less famous composers. Shostakovich, whose relatively happy Ninth Symphony (1946) had newly angered Party officials, was forced to present a humiliating speech of self-abasement to the full body of the Union. The architect of this public dishonor was Andrei Zhdanov, a trusted advisor of Stalin’s who had been entrusted to control artistic renegades. Zhdanov himself was killed later the same year, having grown too powerful for Stalin to trust.
When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, on the same day as Prokofiev’s death, a palpable thaw began. Shostakovich felt the need to express this great relief in a major work. Since he had just begun to sketch a new symphony, it seemed like the logical forum. From the following August until October, he assembled the sketches into the work many believe to be his greatest symphony – the sardonic and mighty Tenth. Shostakovich described the work’s meaning with his usual candor:
“I wrote it right after Stalin’s death, and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It’s about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking.”
The Tenth Symphony is not a work that sings the praises of the Motherland. Shostakovich had clearly taken advantage of the post-Stalinist Soviet political thaw, under the less hard-line leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, to express his innermost joy at the dictator’s demise.
Cast in a slow sonata form, the opening movement is filled with storm and stress. Beginning with a somber statement in the strings, a clarinet solo enters with a desolate theme. Tension builds until the horns enter with a mirror image of the opening theme. As the remainder of the movement unfolds, the musical textures alternate between sparseness (reminiscent of chamber music) and full orchestral tutti that enliven the movement with a disturbing anxiety. Could this represent life under Stalin?
Shostakovich’s second-movement “portrait of Stalin” is a dazzling tour-de-force that is among the most challenging pieces in the repertoire. Described as “a graphic descent into madness,” this movement uses the full orchestra, without solos, to represent ferocity and evil. The brilliant writer David Hurwitz has noted that “all major climaxes in this movement occur in bright major keys, suggesting not just evil run amok but the genuine triumph of evil run amok.”
Appearing as a desolate waltz-like dance, the third movement includes one of the classic features of Shostakovich’s music – his musical signature. Built on the notes D-Es-C-H (the German notes D, E-flat, C, B-natural that reflect certain letters in the German spelling of the composer’s name, D SCHostakovich), this autograph first appears in the middle of the waltz theme, but recurs most triumphantly in the climax, accompanied by blasting horns near the end of the movement.
A brooding introduction begins the final movement, much in the same character as the opening of the symphony. After just a few measures, a rhapsodic oboe solo, followed by flute and bassoon, adds a quality of mystery. Before long the movement erupts into a brisk allegro tempo that feels more like a scherzo than a finale. Sardonic and acid-witted, the movement progresses and builds momentum until the moment of triumph. D-Es-C-H is heralded by the full orchestra with bass drum and gong, followed by a dramatic pause. A new section of hymn-like reverence begins, bringing back material from throughout the symphony, this time cast as a victorious dance of freedom.
©2011 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com
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