Program Notes





	Concert Program for May 7, 2006 Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra 35th Anniversary Season Scott Parkman, conductor BRAHMS Academic Festival Overture, op. 80 (1881) (1833-1897) David Robertson, guest conductor JOAN TOWER Made in America (2005) (b. 1938) BARBER Knoxville: Summer of 1915, op. 24 (1947) (1910-1981) Christine Brewer, soprano Intermission TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 2 in C minor, op. 17, “Little Russian” (1872, (1840-1893) rev. 1879-80) Andante sostenuto, Allegro vivo Andantino marziale, quasi moderato Scherzo: Allegro molto vivace Finale: Moderato assai, Allegro vivo, Presto Christine Brewer’s appearance with the Youth Orchestra is underwritten by a generous gift from Mark and Peggy Holly. The Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra performance of Joan Tower’s Made in America is part of Ford Made in America A Partnership Program of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer Ford Made in America is made possible by Ford Motor Company Fund. This program is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding is provided by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, JPMorgan Chase, Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, and The Amphion Foundation. Profiles Scott Parkman Described by the Boston Globe as “charismatic and clearly gifted,” Scott Parkman is completing his third year as the Assistant Conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) and Music Director of the Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra (SLSYO). He also performs regularly with the SLSO in all education, family, and run-out concerts. Mr. Parkman held positions with the Minnesota Orchestra, Oakland East Bay Symphony, and Oakland Youth Orchestra prior to his appointment in St. Louis. In the Bay Area, he regularly conducted the Festival Opera of Walnut Creek, including performances of The Marriage of Figaro and premiere productions of The Elixir of Love and Aida, as well as performances with the Sacramento and Palo Alto Philharmonic Orchestras. Nationally recognized as an educator, Mr. Parkman has led the University of Michigan All-State Orchestra at Interlochen and, in 2006, will lead All-State orchestras in Florida and Texas. Additionally, he has conducted music clinics and performances at Truman State University, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Dickinson College, and is regularly invited to appear in primary and secondary school music classrooms. Mr. Parkman is a committed advocate for arts education--working personally with local, state and national leaders to promote greater inclusion of the arts in public school education. David Robertson A master of communication and an inspirational force both on and off the podium, American conductor David Robertson has been praised by the press as “that rare combination of passion and intellect that draws musicians and audiences.” In the fall of 2005, Mr. Robertson began his tenure as the 12th Music Director of the 126-year-old Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and also assumed the title of Principal Guest Conductor of London’s BBC Symphony Orchestra. A recognized expert in 20th- and 21st-century music with extensive international conducting credits, Mr. Robertson has held several posts abroad. Prior to his Saint Louis Symphony appointment, Mr. Robertson was Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon and Artistic Director of that city’s auditorium, posts he held from 2000-04. His tenure there marked the first time that one artist held both musical posts in Lyon. From 1992-2000, he was Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, of which Pierre Boulez is Honorary President, and from 1985-87, he was resident conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Born in Santa Monica, California, Mr. Robertson was educated at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied French horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. Musical America named him Conductor of the Year for 2000. In 1997, Mr. Robertson was named a recipient of the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, the premier prize of its kind, given to exceptionally gifted American conductors. He has two teenage sons and is married to pianist Orli Shaham. Christine Brewer American soprano Christine Brewer’s appearances in opera, concert and recital are marked with her own unique timbre, at once warm and brilliant, combined with a vibrant personality and emotional honesty unique in her generation of vocalists. Concert highlights this season include semi-staged performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the Saito Kinen Festival with Seiji Ozawa, Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and the role of Chrysotemis in Strauss’s Elektra with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Brewer’s repertoire encompasses the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, Strauss, Mahler, Janáček, and Britten and she regularly performs with many of the world’s leading orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. On the opera stage Ms. Brewer has been seen in a variety of roles, including the title role in Ariadne auf Naxos, which has become a signature role for her, at the Metropolitan Opera, Opéra de Lyon, Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and Santa Fe Opera. Her professional career began with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and her affiliation with that company includes leading roles in Peter Grimes and Don Giovanni. Joan Tower Known and admired for her bold and energetic music, Joan Tower is one of America’s most successful and best-known composers of concert music. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, has remained in the repertoire, with performances by the orchestra of Saint Louis, New York, San Francisco, Minnesota, Tokyo NHK, and Toronto, as well as the National Symphony and London’s Philharmonia. Ms. Tower’s tremendously popular five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman have been played by more than 400 different ensembles. Since 1972 Ms. Tower has taught at Bard College, where she is the Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She is composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a title she has held for eight years at the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. The first woman ever to receive the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Composition (1990), she was inducted in 1998 into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2004 into the Academy of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Program Notes BY MARGARET NEILSON Though separated by seven years, Brahms and Tchaikovsky share the same birth date: May 7. How could we not do a work by each composer on this closing concert of the Youth Orchestra’s 35th-anniversary season? Joan Tower’s work Made in America is receiving its St. Louis premiere. Ms Tower was composer-in-residence with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra from 1985-87. To help conclude the 35^th-anniversary celebration David Robertson is guest conducting the Brahms and Christine Brewer joins the Youth Orchestra for Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Johannes Brahms was born on this date into a rather poor but happy family. His father was a musician, a bass player, and his mother very supportive of the young Brahms’s musical interest. Brahms showed such talent at a young age that a benefactor was found to help with the cost of piano lessons. He started supporting himself in his teens playing the piano in restaurants and taverns in Hamburg. As a young man Brahms met several influential musicians of the day who were to be major influences in his life, among them were Robert and Clara Schumann, the composer and pianist, respectively, who were husband and wife, and violinist Joseph Joachim. Schumann was to be one of Brahms’s greatest supporters and friends, and Brahms had a long friendship with Clara after Robert’s death. Brahms had a variety of conducting jobs, both orchestral and choral, in addition to his performance career as a pianist. He had a deep interest in the music of Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. He spent a lot of time studying their works in great detail and building his own library of scores and books. Brahms had built a strong reputation as a composer by the time he was in his mid-thirties. He did not write a symphony, however, until he was in his early forties and then his four symphonies came in fairly close succession. He never wrote an opera, but did write some beautiful choral works, his Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) being an outstanding example. The Academic Festival Overture was written as a musical “thank you” to the University of Breslau, which had awarded him an honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1879. He did not particularly like the title “Academic Festival” but neither he nor any of his friends came up with a better name. Brahms used several popular student songs as the melodies for this fun piece, concluding with “Gaudeamus igitur.” Composer Joan Tower provides the following information about the inspiration for Made in America: When I was nine, my family moved to South America (La Paz, Bolivia), where we stayed for nine years. I had to learn a new language, a new culture, and how to live at 13,000 feet! It was a lively culture with many saints’ days celebrated through music and dance, but the large Inca population in Bolivia was generally poor and there was little chance of moving up in class or work position. When I returned to the United States, I was proud to have free choices, upward mobility, and the chance to try to become who I wanted to be. I also enjoyed the basic luxuries of an American citizen that we so often take for granted: hot running water, blankets for the cold winters, floors that are not made of dirt, and easy modes of transportation, among many other things. So when I started composing this piece, the song “America the Beautiful” kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme for the work. The beauty of the song is undeniable and I loved working with it as a musical idea. One can never take for granted, however, the strength of a musical idea--as Beethoven (one of my strongest influences) knew so well. This theme is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, interjecting, unsettling it, but “America the Beautiful” keeps resurfacing in different guises (some small and tender, others big and magnanimous), as if to say, “I’m still here, ever changing, but holding my own.” A musical struggle is heard throughout the work. Perhaps it was my unconscious reacting to the challenge of, “how do we keep America beautiful?” American composer Samuel Barber was from a musical family and started his training as a child. When he was 14 he became a pupil at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he studied piano, composition, and conducting. His style of music is lyrical and more romantic in style than much of what was being written by his contemporaries. In 1935 he won a Pulitzer traveling scholarship and the American Prix de Rome. He served in the armed forces from 1942 to 1945. He settled in Mount Kisco, New York, sharing a house with Gian Carlo Menotti, with whom he collaborated on several works. His Adagio for Strings (arranged from this string quartet) is one of the most well-known and popular pieces of American music. The text of Knoxville, by James Agee, depicts a summer’s evening as seen by a child. The music and text are beautifully matched. Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s early life was comfortable and happy, spent in the Ural Mountains where his father worked as a mine inspector. His education was good and included music. The family moved to St. Petersburg when the boy was 10, and he went to the school of jurisprudence. Graduating at 19, Tchaikovsky worked as a clerk for the government while he continued to study music. At 21 he started to study at the new music school would become the St. Petersburg Conservatory. At 26 he became a harmony teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. At this time he was composing and his own style began to immerge in the 1870s. He had two unhappy relationships with women in the 1870s--one actually turned into a disastrous marriage. He was usually able to keep his emotional upheavals and work separate, and developed a career as composer and conductor, traveling extensively in Europe and to the United States. He developed a relationship with a sympathetic and wealthy patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. They never met, but she was supportive of his work for many years. The Symphony No. 2 dates from 1872 and a summer visit to the area known as “Little Russia”: the Ukraine. There Tchaikovsky heard several folks tunes that he incorporated into the symphony. This is the only one of his six symphonies to be so tightly connected to Russian folk melody. The work was substantially revised and the final version that is known today dates from 1883. The first movement opens slowly with a Ukrainian version of the folk song “Down by Mother Volga,” played by the solo horn. The melody of the following fast section could also be a folk tune. These two melodies are developed throughout the movement. The melody of the second movement is a march that Tchaikovsky had written for an opera that he never completed. The theme is surrounded by a soft two-note pattern for timpani. The scherzo is full of energy with the trio focusing on the woodwinds. The Russian tune “The Crane” is the main melody of the forth movement, which was Tchaikovsky’s favorite. Program notes © 2006 by Margaret Neilson *KNOXVILLE: SUMMER OF 1915* BY JAMES AGEE We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. …It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds’ hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone; forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew. Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose. Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes… Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces. The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums. On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there…. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,… with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away. After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but, will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am. Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra 2005-2006 Scott Parkman Music Director First Violins Sarah Drake Concertmaster Anna Fung Concertmaster Lindsay Garritson Concertmaster Benjamin Hart Concertmaster Holly Jenkins Concertmaster Nicole Schroeder Jeff Spangler Joseph Kim David Kang Lisa Nadeau Michelle Godbee Winston Wun Clayton Penrose-Whitmore James Lee Shana Snarrenberg Paul Mazuski Emily Meyer Anna Perretta Second Violins Tony Morales Principal Caroline Hart Andrea Ginsburg Tiffany Yang David Ramos Charity Callahan Joy He Teddy Wiggins Elana Estrin Jonathan Novack Erica Westenberg Raymond Chen Ariana Youn Ana Gabriela Fonseca Katherine Stookesberry Lawrence Lin Katharine Haberman Jordan Harp Violas Mitchell Stumpf Principal Neil Zundel Caitlin Claycomb Sonia Emmons Katie Jones Brianna Bassman Josh Rockers Ingrid Popp Ankit Bhargava Grace Easley Anne Bewig Christopher Ruh Cellos David Standing Principal Rob Nevett John McAfee Ryan Ash Monica Godbee Melanie Goldstein Kathryn Dawson Daniel Winfield Patrick McVicker Jed Kasica Catherine Meihaus Basses Scott Strathman Principal Elliott Perko Anna Cross Beth Boedeker Joseph Paule Jr. Beth Anne Roberts Emily Moses Emilee Graham Harp Elizabeth Gerberding Flutes Amanda Blaikie Principal Amanda DuClos Amelia Becker Ali McCance Piccolo Amelia Becker Oboes Heather Baxter Principal Margaret Rahmoeller Lindsey Brandel Paul Orland English Horn Paul Orland Clarinets Rachel Siegel Principal Luci Disano William Bryant Andrew George Bassoons Daniel Webster-Clark Principal Jeff Panhorst Andrew Carr Jared Daiber Contrabassoon Jeff Panhorst Horns Liz Thompson Principal Theresa Steiner Lawton Hall Dan Schroeder Leah Edgerton Trumpets Brent Petzoldt Principal Steven Sharp Nick Niehaus Andrew Linn Trombones Ryan Repking Principal Paul Sander Jake Butchli (bass) Tuba Stephen Elford Principal Percussion/Timpani Tim Crockett Hallie Gleasman Julie Hribar Grace Philipp Caleb Ping Librarians John Tafoya Roberta Gardner Manager Peggy Neilson Coaches from the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra Jenny Jones, First Violins Elizabeth Dziekonski, Second Violins Leonid Gotman, Violas David Kim, Cellos Don Martin, Basses