Season Finale
Alexander Borodin- Overture to Prince Igor Max Bruch - Scottish Fantasy in Eb Major Johannes Brahms - Symphony No. 4 in e minor Guest Artist Caroline Goulding, violin At sixteen, violinist Caroline Goulding has already graced the stages of prestigious orchestras such as The Cleveland Orchestra, The Cleveland Pops Orchestra, The Detroit Symphony, the Cincinnati Pops, the Buffalo Philharmonic, Sinfonia Gulf Coast, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the Aspen Concert Orchestra and the Louisville Youth Orchestra, to name a few. At age 13, after winning the coveted first prize of the Aspen Music Festival’s Concerto Competition, Alan Fletcher, President and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School, praised, “Here was freshness, confidence, radiant technique and perfect optimism wrapped in sparkling beauty.” Caroline has adorned the small screen and public airwaves as well as the concert stage. She has appeared on NBC’s “Today,” National Public Radio’s “From the Top” and on the “Martha Show”, hosted by Martha Stewart. Recently, Caroline was invited to perform for the new PBS TV Series “From the Top: Live from Carnegie Hall,” which aired in 2007. Through the generous efforts of The Stradivari Society of Chicago, Caroline became the recipient of an A&H Amati violin, which dates back to 1617 and was once owned by Beethoven’s former patrons, the Lobkowicz family. Caroline shares this honor with such artists as Joshua Bell, Midori, Gil Shaham, Sarah Chang and Vadim Repin. Caroline has collaborated with artists such as Christopher O’Riley, Anton Nel, Umberto Clerici, and Béla Fleck. Caroline began studying the violin when she was three years old, under the tutelage of Julia Kurtyka and continues her studies with renowned violin pedagogue Paul Kantor at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She has also attended several music schools including the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Juilliard School as a young artist for the Starling-Delay Symposium, the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and The Ceilidh Trail School of Celtic Music on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. In 2008, Caroline signed a record deal with industry giant Telarc. Her Grammy-nominated debut CD was released in the summer of 2009. Borodin: Overture to Prince Igor Alexander Borodin was born in Saint Petersburg, the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince and a Russian mother. As a boy he received a good education complete with piano lessons and eventually earned a doctorate in medicine at the Medico–Surgical Academy. Like most Russian composers of his time, Borodin made his living elsewhere (Borodin was a reputable chemist and physician), and music was a secondary avocation. He died suddenly during a ball from heart failure in 1887 and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in Saint Petersburg. Borodin’s opera Prince Igor is based on the East Slavic epic The Lay of Igor's Host which recounts the 1185 campaign of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich against the invading Polevetsian tribes. The opera was unfinished at the composer's death and was edited and completed by his friends Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. It was first performed in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1890. The overture from this opera is regularly performed on orchestral concerts as a standalone work. Bruch: Scottish Fantasy With no need for the “new music” of Wagner and Liszt, conservative Max Bruch had plenty left to say in the rich Romantic vocabulary handed down from Mendelssohn and Schumann. For this reason his works have an admirable consistency across the span of his compositional career. He wrote in all genres, his violin works, especially his G minor violin concerto and the present work, the Scottish Fantasy, were and remain his most popular. He preferred to write solo concertos for the violin above any other instrument, because it “can sing a melody better than a piano, and melody is the soul of music.” Such an old-fashioned attitude may have been ridiculed by some critics, but the greatest violinists of his time were drawn to Bruch’s lyrical and emotional style; Perhaps Bruch was unfortunate to have been born an exact contemporary of Johannes Brahms, under whose shadow he could never fully emerge. Actually the two had a friendly relationship, in light of Brahms teasing Bruch. Once, walking down the street together, they happened upon a hurdy-gurdy player. “Listen, Max!” said Brahms, “That fellow has gotten ahold of your latest oratorio!” On another occasion it is said that Johannes, approaching Max after the premiere of his latest choral work, asked, “Tell me, where do you get your beautiful - manuscript paper?” Scottish Fantasy, a violin concerto in all but name, also has a fittingly prominent role for the harp. Bruch picked up material for the work from a printed collection with editorial oversight from Robert Burns, entitled The Scots Musical Museum. The works of Sir Walter Scott were also a powerful influence, affecting the romantic, misty atmosphere of the work. The first movement, unusually slow, begins with a gloomy e-flat minor introduction intoned by somber brass before the solo violin enters with brooding mien. Soon the first Scottish folk tune, Auld Rob Morris, appears with warm string accompaniment. A livelier dance, The Dusty Miller, occupies the second movement, and after a curiously interrupted slow connective passage, the third movement commences. Its melody, from the folk song I’m down for lack of Johnnie, is treated in a passionate andante. For the fourth movement, Bruch borrowed the unusual tempo from Mendelssohn’s famous “Scotch” symphony. The tune is Hey Tuttie Tatie to which Robert Burns fitted the words of his battle poem Scots wha hae. Brahms: Symphony No. 4 Brahms in his youth was usually serious and shy, but an insensitive side would show itself from time to time. His friend Joachim described him at age 21 as “egoism incarnate. But the image audiences more commonly conjure is the older, bearded gentleman about Vienna, denizen of the Red Hedgehog (his favorite tavern), a bit scratchy perhaps but civilized, reserved, and extremely formal. Clara Schumann, for whom he had a great unrequited love but who remained a close and trusted friend for life, confided that after 25 years the man was still a riddle to her; she was sometimes wounded by his gruffness. On the other hand, he was known to hand out sweets to children, whom he cherished. In his 50’s he was able to ameliorate his demanding conducting and performing schedule with sumer holidays in the Alps, where he could find peace to compose. His third and fourth symphonies were written there. At this stage in his life, Brahms enjoyed the attention of two or three smart and talented younger women; they grew to be close friends and even mutual admirers, but marriage was no longer a scenario he considered. In a letter concerning the Fourth Symphony he wrote to Elizabeth von Herzogenberg, “In general pieces by me are unfortunately more pleasant than I am myself and require less correction!” With the work completed in August of 1885, Brahms returned to Vienna pleased with the fruit of his labors. He joked to a friend that it was just “a few entr’actes and polkas I happened to have lying about.” This jocular mood would dissipate when his colleagues expressed misgivings about the piece. The premiere in Vienna was met coldly by the audience and critics alike. ...Brahms’s production is striking. True, he could never rise above the mediocre; but such nothingness, hollowness, such mousy obsequiosness as the E minor Symphony had never yet been revealed so alarmingly in any of Brahms’s works. The are of composing without ideas has decidedly found in Brahms one of its worthiest representatives. He has found... the language of the most intensive musical impotence. The New York Post of November 1, 1886, reported of the US Premiere that: The Allegretto is the most original movement of the four. It is marked “grazioso,” yet it rather reminds one of the gambols of elephants than of a fairy dance. The greater part of the symphony was antiquated before it was written. Audiences disagreed. At Brahms’s final public appearance in April 1893, the Vienna PO chose this work to honor the declining and beloved artist; each movement was met with an ovation, and the crowd turned to Brahms. The Symphony shows a mixture of sorrow and understanding typical of many of Brahms’s late works. The first movement’s mysterious undulating theme is worked into a dramatic edifice, in which is at first heartrending may be rendered as euphoric moments. Brahms writes a powerful climax in the coda, and caps the movement with a pounding “Amen.” The opening of the second movement, almost medieval-sounding in the phrygian mode for the brass, belies the graceful and dignified andante. Brahms asks the piccolo, contrabassoon, and triangle to join in the raucous dance of the third movement. It blasts away any arterial plaque that may have formed after the two very rich previous courses. The finale is a baroque (even Renaissance) style of variation in which ever-changing overlays are constructed over a repeated bass line. Dread trombones contribute for the first time in the symphony, and through the austere processes of transformation of denial, then resignation. At the quietest moment of acceptance the brass ring out with the opening motto and the process is regenerated; 14 more variations follow. Brahms then turns up the gas for a coda that careens like a sword-pierced actor to the stage. |
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