The Planets: Season Opening!
Johannes Brahms- Academic Festival Overture Sir Edward William Elgar- Cello Concerto in e minor Gustav Holst- The Planet Guest Artist Zuill Bailey, cello Artistic Partners- Boise State University and Boise Master Chorale Passionate, fluid and artistically masterful, Zuill Bailey has become one of the premier cellists of our time. He has performed in some of the most prestigious venues with the orchestras of Chicago, San Francisco, Utah, and many others. He has even played under the batons of Itzhak Perlman, Andrew Litton, and James DePriest, and has performed with legendary musicians. From sold-out concert halls, Bailey has also made an appearance on HBO’s hit television series OZ. Beyond America, Bailey’s virtuosic ability has sung to the masses all across the world. In Russia, Bailey performed with the Moscow Chamber orchestra for their 50th Anniversary tour. In addition, Bailey has performed in Israel, Japan, the United Kingdom just to name a few. In 1995, the year after graduating from the prestigious Peabody Conservatory, Zuill Bailey won the highly acclaimed Yale Gordon Concerto competition. He later went on to study at Juilliard School of Music with Julliard String Quartet cellist, Joel Krosnick. Bailey mastered his craft and successfully launched on to the world stage. As a soloist, Zuill Bailey has become one of the most sought after cello concerto performers. His repertoire includes, and is not limited to, Dvorak’s famous Cello concerto, Saint-Saens’ Cello concertos 1 and 2, Tchaikovsky’s Rocco Variations for cello and orchestra, and Beethoven’s Triple concerto. He has even premiered a number of contemporary pieces for cello and orchestra including Theodorakis’ Rhapsody for cello and orchestra. In 2010 his repertoire will expand to include the Bach Cello Suite for solo cello. Beyond his passion for solo music, Bailey has engaged in the intimate setting of small ensemble music. An avid and inspired performer, Zuill Bailey also plays cello in the trio Perlman-Schmidt-Bailey trio. Bailey continues his musical endeavors away from the ensemble in performing regularly with pianist Awadagin Pratt. In both 2006 and 2007 he and pianist Simone Dinnerstien were awarded the Classical Recording Foundation Award for successfully recording Beethoven complete works for solo cello and piano, which was released in 2009. Outside of performing, Bailey is the dedicated Artistic Director of El Paso Pro-Musica. As Artistic Director, Bailey organizes chamber orchestra performances and recitals for the community. He has organized winter musical events he hopes will inspire the people of El Paso. It’s an opportunity to broaden his development artistically in bringing classical music to the masses. Elgar: Cello Concerto Edward Elgar was in is house in the woods outside the tiny village of Fittleworth in Sussex when the Treaty of Versailles ended the Great War. His reaction to the situation was complex. He had been greeted as a progressive when he first rose to national and international prominence at age 43 with the Enigma Variations and the Dream of Gerontius, there was also a strongly nostalgic, even sentimental streak in the great Victorian composer. Beginning the global conflict he expressed horror at the fate of men and even the mere horses, and grew increasingly concerned that his patriotic song “Land of Hope and Glory” (originally penned as part of his “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1) had taken on unintended jingoistic overtones. During the war years his music began to fall from fashion as people adapted to the realities of a changed world. But more importantly for his creative spirit, in Elgar’s mind, the end of the war was the end of the England he knew as a child. Elgar’s father was an organist and piano tuner who ran a music store in Worcester, and so young Edward learned music at home. As young as five, he was adventurous bicyclist and enjoyed long rides into the countryside to study scores borrowed from his father’s shop. He dreamt of becoming a concert violinist and studied abroad, it never happened. So Elgar honed his craft in the school of pure experience: performing, teaching, arranging, conducting, and composing. In the process he became indispensable to the region’s music-making community (Like Michael Torke above, he was also a bassoonist; in Elgar’s case it was with a village woodwind quintet). Even at the height of his fame he was sensitive about his bumpkin roots. At one point he turned down an invitation to luncheon with the Queen with a petulant note reading, “You would not wish your board to be disgraced by the presence of a piano-tuner's son and his wife”. Musically, the premiere of the Cello Concerto did not go well. The orchestra’s performance was not been sufficiently rehearsed and described as “a muddle.” Also, the premiere of the Cello Concerto was the last performance of any of Elgar’s works that Lady Elgar was to attend before her death. This tragedy could be one of the factors in the composer’s cessation of compositional output; he was 62 when he began the Cello Concerto, and though he lived to be 77, it would be the last major work he completed. Reasonably, that is why the Cello Concerto has come to be regarded to a certain degree, the War Requiem that Elgar never wrote. The work’s own character belies any such easy comparison. Cast somewhat atypically in four movements, it opens with an anguished recitative for the cello. After a dramatic, seemingly unmetered solo from the cello, the second movement breaks the tension with a quicksilver dance. The third movement occupies only four pages of music in full score. This is no dirge - rather, a romance. The culminating movement, like the first, begins with a dramatic cello solo. This soliloquy manages to balance bittersweet reverie with swagger. Soon the orchestra and soloist engage in a spirited, even boisterous dialogue but the mood grows more poignant until the first movement's initial theme is reprised, serving as a bookend to the movement and the concerto. Johannes Brahms: Academic Festival Overture In 1853 Robert Schumann lauded the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms as the “young eagle” among composers. From that moment on, new opportunities presented themselves regularly as demand grew for new works from this fresh new face on the musical scene. His pen flowed with chamber music, piano pieces, choral works, and art songs. However, it was not until 1858 that his first orchestral work, the Serenade No.1, appeared. During the same period, he composed his First Piano Concerto – a flashy virtuosic work far removed from the brooding introspection of Brahms’s later masterpieces. Reception of the First Concerto has been described as ranging from “indifference to revulsion.” The composer had simply not found his musical voice. Twenty years later Brahms was at his creative peak and his music was presented on concert programs worldwide. However, the composer had an extreme fear of sea travel and a disdain for public adulation, so any journeys, except for those carried out by land, were out of the question. Therefore, when Cambridge University in England offered Brahms an honorary doctorate in 1876, he respectfully declined the honor. Three years later, the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw) in present-day Poland offered the composer the same degree. He accepted. After attending the solemn ceremony, Brahms penned a note of thanks to the school. His sentiments were answered by the director of musical studies in Breslau, Bernhard Scholz, who clarified for his old friend that the University expected a musical work in exchange for the honor. The following summer, in the resort town of Bad Ischl, Brahms composed his Academic Festival Overture. Brahms’s only experience with the world of academia had been gained from a two month stay with his violinist friend Joseph Joachim in the University town of Göttingen nearly thirty years earlier. The two became acquainted with the beer halls, learning several student drinking songs in the process. It was the only university experience that the composer knew. Brahms included in his score what he remembered from Göttingen, causing the resulting work to be more of a boisterous potpourri of student songs that a solemn work for a ceremonial occasion. Imagine the surprise of the university dignitaries and city officials when Brahms himself conducted his celebratory score in early 1881. Although the faculty and administrators were perplexed, the students surely understood the esteemed composer’s wicked sense of humor. Holst: The Planets Holst was born into the fourth generation of a German family who emigrated to England from Latvia around 1800 and produced painters, actors, and musicians. Though he learned piano and violin at an early age, and later professionally played the organ, Holst is unusual among composers for having also learning the trombone. In his 30’s he took lessons in Sanskrit in order to make his own direct translations of some of the ancient Hindu philosophical texts. His output was marked for a time by this fascination, until about 1911. A broad survey of his output shows an unceasing exploration of novel forms and techniques, a security especially in choral writing, and increasing fluency with modal and bitonal processes. For much of his life he taught music, mostly to adolescents and amateurs, but as his reputation grew (mostly in connection with the phenomenal success of The Planets), he was invited to lecture abroad, including stints at Harvard and The University of Michigan. Work on The Planets began in 1913 and continued through 1917 with the first performance taking place privately in 1918. An incomplete, yet successful public premiere followed a few weeks later. The whole work was not heard again until October of 1920. Astrology, not astronomy, is the subject of the work, which is why there are seven movements only: Earth has no astrological sign nor Roman deity associated with is as the others do; and Pluto hadn’t been discovered. Holst was asked whether he might consider adding a movement for the new planet of Pluto but declined; in later years he often expressed frustration that this one work had overshadowed his others. This remains true today. Mars,The Bringer of War is a meditation on the nature of brutality and aggression. Holst makes this movement unmistakably vivid by casting it in quintuple meter and calling heavily on the battlefield instruments, brass and drums. One of the winning aspects of The Planets as a suite is how each movement provides contrast to its neighbor, as Venus does here, in a few moments of serene and ravishing foil to all of Mars’ red-faced bluster. The winged messenger Mercury appears next, speeding through the orchestra and across every octave of the compass, occasionally kicking up clouds of dust in his wake. Jupiter is depicted in two related themes: the initial, more rhythmically complex idea gives a sense raucous good fun; the second in the center of the movement, takes its sweet time. For Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age, Holst conceived a procession—very soft at first, in low flutes and guttural double basses—to the edge of mortality, the clanking gates of Hades. Once the terrible nadir passed there is cosmic acceptance. Xylophone, pounding bass drum, and staccato bassoons color Holst’s scoring for Uranus, the Magician, whose conjuring tricks are left entirely to one’s imagination. Cloaked in the nebulous periphery of the cosmos, Neptune is portrayed lurking in long tones from the low strings and frosty glimmerings from the celesta. Near the end, an offstage women’s choir adds wordless, disembodied utterances before fading into inky silence. |
Concerts & Events |
