Mozart Performed by Michael Thornton | Program Notes

SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1

MASTERWORKS • 2015-2016

MOZART PERFORMED BY MICHAEL THORNTON

COLORADO SYMPHONY JAMES FEDDECK, conductor MICHAEL THORNTON, horn

Friday, October 2, 2015 at 7:30 pmSaturday, October 3, 2015 at 7:30 pmBoettcher Concert Hall

DVOŘÁK Carnival Overture, Op. 92

W. A. MOZART Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, K. 447 Allegro Romanza: Larghetto Allegro

L. MOZART Sinfonia Pastorale in G major for Alphorn and Strings Allegro moderato Andante Presto

— INTERMISSION —

BRAHMS Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 Allegro non troppo Andante moderato Allegro giocoso Allegro energico e passionato

This weekend of concerTs is graTefully dedicaTed To The ralph l. and florence r. Burgess TrusT

friday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To The colorado rockies

saTurday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To anonymous

PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

JAMES FEDDECK, conductor

James Feddeck’s 2015/16 season includes subscription concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and debuts with the Detroit, and Toronto symphony orchestras, Minnesota Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, and the Orchestre National de Lyon. Feddeck’s debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra led one critic to comment that “musicians of this calibre are gold dust.” Other notable engagements include the

San Francisco, Houston, and Atlanta symphony orchestras, the Hallé Orchestra, the Residentie Orkest, and his return to the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival. Feddeck was winner of the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award in 2013. During his time with The Cleveland Orchestra, James conducted subscription concerts at Severance Hall, Blossom, and stepped in for Franz Welser-Möst in Cleveland’s fully-staged production of Don Giovanni, and subscription performances of Carmina Burana, both to critical acclaim.

MICHAEL THORNTON, horn

Before joining the Colorado Symphony, Michael Thornton left his studies at The Juilliard School to become the Principal Horn of the Honolulu Symphony. Thornton has also performed as a guest Principal Horn with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Toronto Symphony, and as guest Associate Principal Horn with the Philadelphia Orchestra. An avid chamber musician, and soloist of international recognition, Thornton has been a featured performer at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Mainly Mozart, Spoleto, Moab Music Festival, Campos do Jordao International Winter Festival, Medellin Festicamara, among many others. He performs annually as the

solo horn of the Washington Island music festival in Door County, Wisconsin, and will serve this season as hornist with the Camerata Pacifica Chamber Ensemble in Southern California. As a soloist, Thornton has appeared with the National Arts Center Orchestra, Melbourne Musician’s Chamber Orchestra, and numerous orchestras in the United States, including regular solo performances with the Colorado Symphony. He has also performed as a featured artist at several horn symposia, including the 2008 International Horn Symposium, the Western US Horn Symposium, and Hornswoggle. Appointed to the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1999, Thornton is currently Associate Professor of Horn. He also serves as a Faculty Artist at the Colorado College Music Festival each June. Thornton holds certification in Mental Toughness Training from the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Florida, and implements this training in his teaching. His students hold positions in orchestras throughout the United States and abroad, and have won numerous awards and competitions. Thornton has twice received the Marinus Smith Award, which is bestowed upon teachers at CU Boulder who have made significant contributions to their students’ development.

MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIESPE

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The Colorado Symphony is excited to announce the return of our Community Ticketing Initiative (CTI). Launched in October 2014, the program was created in an effort to reach new and diverse audiences. The CTI supports the City of Denver’s Imagine 2020 Cultural Plan which seeks to broaden access to the cultural arts for all Denver residents.

Through the CTI, the Colorado Symphony is pleased to offer complimentary tickets to children and families throughout the 2015/16 season. The Colorado Symphony offers something for everyone. Concerts include classical, holiday, family, even music from favorite movies, cartoons, and comic books! Colorado Symphony concerts are exciting for all ages – and an experience you won’t forget!

Who is Served by the CTI?Through partnerships with local agencies and community organizations, the CTI primarily serves low-income individuals and families for whom cost is a barrier to concert attendance.

How Does it Work?Organizations that serve the target population may request concert specific vouchers that can be redeemed for a seat to that concert. If you are interested in becoming a partner organization or learning more about current partners, please visit coloradosymphony.org/CommunityTicketing.

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FREE concertsat Boettcher Concert Hall

Fun, Family- Friendly


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904): Carnival Overture, Op. 92Antonín Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia (now Czech Republic), and died on May 1, 1904 in Prague. He composed the Carnival Overture in 1891 and conducted its premiere on April 28, 1892 in Prague. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo and English horn, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 9 minutes. Last performed by the orchestra on January 9, 2013 with Scott O’Neil conducting.

Like almost every musician of the late 19th century, Dvořák had to come to grips with the astounding phenomenon of Richard Wagner and his music dramas. Around 1890, he undertook a study of this grandiloquent music, as well as that of Wagner’s stylistic ally (and father-in-law) Franz Liszt, and he was rewarded with a heightened awareness of the expressive possibilities of orchestral program music. Several important scores from Dvořák’s last years seem to bear the influence of his study of this so-called “Music of the Future”: the five tone poems of 1896-1897 (The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel, The Wild Dove and Heroic Song), Silent Woods for Cello and Orchestra, Poetic Tone Pictures for Solo Piano, and the 1892 cycle of three concert overtures: In Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello.

In his study of the composer, John Clapham indicated that Dvořák intended the triptych of overtures to represent “three aspects of the life-force’s manifestations, a force which the composer designated ‘Nature,’ and which not only served to create and sustain life, but also, in its negative phase, could destroy it.” More specifically, Otakar Šourek noted that they depicted “the solemn silence of a summer night, a gay whirl of life and living, and the passion of great love.” Dvořák himself said that the Carnival Overture was meant to depict “a lonely, contemplative wanderer reaching at twilight a city where a festival is in full swing. On every side is heard the clangor of instruments, mingled with shouts of joy and the unrestrained hilarity of the people giving vent to their feelings in songs and dances.” Dvořák evoked this scene with brilliant music given in the most rousing sonorities of the orchestra. Into the basic sonata plan of the piece, he inserted, at the beginning of the development section, a haunting and wistful paragraph led by the English horn and flute to portray, he said, “a pair of straying lovers,” the wanderer apparently having found a companion. Following this tender, contrasting episode, the festive music returns

and mounts to a spirited coda to conclude this joyous, evergreen Overture.

oWOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791): Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, K. 447Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, and died December 5, 1791 in Vienna. He composed the Third Horn Concerto late in 1783 for the Austrian horn virtuoso Joseph Leutgeb; its premiere date is unknown. The score calls for two clarinets, two bassoons and strings. Duration is about 14 minutes. January 5-7, 1996, with John Keene playing the solo horn and Matthias Kuntsch conducting.

Among the friendships from his Salzburg days that Mozart renewed when he moved in Vienna early in 1781 was that with the horn player Joseph Leutgeb, who had left his post as a colleague of Wolfgang and his father, Leopold, in the orchestra of Archbishop Colloredo to


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTEStour successfully through Germany, France and Italy performing his own Horn Concerto before settling in Vienna in 1777. Leutgeb found it impossible to make a living from music, however, so he purchased a cheesemonger’s shop from his wife’s family with the help of a loan from Leopold Mozart. (When Leopold saw Leutgeb’s tiny establishment, he quipped that it was “the size of a snail shell.”) The nature of Wolfgang’s relationship with Joseph may be surmised from the jocular dedication of the Horn Concerto No. 2, K. 417 that he wrote for his friend: “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has taken pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox and simpleton, Vienna, May 27, 1783.” They must have had a merry time together, but there was also a deep, mutual concern, because when the horn player-cheese maker fell behind in his loan payments, Wolfgang defended his friend to his straight-laced father. Things apparently went well for Leutgeb in later years, however, and he died in prosperity in 1811.

Though Mozart wrote good-natured insults to Leutgeb in the three other concertos he wrote for him, the Third Concerto is free of these gibes and is perhaps the most serious of the set in nature, especially in its second movement, entitled “Romanza.” The first movement is an effortless sonata-concerto structure, combining melodic inspiration with formal clarity and suave orchestration. The finale is a compact rondo in galloping 6/8 meter, a jovial reminiscence

of the hunt, the horn’s ancestral milieu.

oLEOPOLD MOZART (1719-1787): Sinfonia Pastorale in G major for Horn and Strings, Eisen G3Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s father, was born on November 14, 1719 in Augsburg, Germany, and died on May 28, 1787 in Salzburg. His Sinfonia Pastorale was composed around 1750. Duration is about 12 minutes. This is the first performance by the orchestra.

Leopold Mozart’s professional life divided itself into two parts hinged by 1756, the year of the birth of his son Wolfgang. Born into the family of an Augsburg bookbinder in 1719, Leopold attended the Benedictine University in Salzburg and entered the service of the Count of Thurn and Taxis there in 1739 as a violinist; four years later he was appointed to the court orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg. Mozart was diligent in his duties and he rose through the ranks of the archiepiscopal musical establishment to assume the posts of Composer to the Court (1757) and Deputy Kapellmeister (1763). As part of his responsibilities, he wrote a great many “contrapuntal and other church works, oratorios and pieces for the theater, symphonies, large-scale serenatas and concertos, in particular for the transverse flute, oboe, bassoon, horn, trumpet, etc.,” as Mozart himself recorded in 1757 in an account of the music at the Salzburg court. In 1756, he published a violin method that was regarded for years as the most important treatise of its kind; it remains an invaluable source of information on 18th-century performance practice.

It was also in 1756 that Leopold’s only surviving son, Wolfgang Amadeus, was born. (The Mozarts had seven children; only two outlived infancy.) This “miracle that God allowed to be born in Salzburg,” as Leopold called his dazzling offspring, changed his life. Leopold abandoned his own ambitions and largely stopped composing in order to devote all of the time and energy not required by his duties at court to educating Wolfgang and his talented sister, Maria Anna


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES(called “Nannerl” by the family). The stories of the boy’s triumphant tours to the musical capitals of Europe, painstakingly arranged by his father, are well known. Through Wolfgang’s teenage years, Leopold acted as his teacher, private secretary, impresario, proofreader, editor, copyist and sometimes even valet, all the while carefully preserving the boy’s manuscripts and, in 1768, making a catalog of his most important works to that date. The breadth and high quality of musical erudition that informs the music of Wolfgang Mozart would have been impossible without the guiding influence of his father. Though his relationship with his son was often strained after Wolfgang’s move to Vienna in 1781, Leopold remained a steady source of advice and concern. He enjoyed the crowning moment of his life during a visit to the imperial city in 1785, when he heard some of the day’s best musicians, not least Joseph Haydn, sing his son’s praises. Leopold’s death, in Salzburg in 1787 at the age of 68, was a blow from which Wolfgang never fully recovered before his own untimely demise only four years later, at just half his father’s age.

Leopold Mozart’s works range widely in style and quality, having been created, like virtually all the music of his time, for specific occasions and patrons. In addition to sacred cantatas, Masses and other church works, there are some four dozen symphonies (many lost), several concertos (curiously, none for violin, Leopold’s own instrument), numerous serenades and divertimentos, and much chamber and keyboard music. His instrumental works are in a pleasing, frankly popular style, with several showing a penchant for novel programmatic effects: one of his best-known creations is a Musical Sleigh Ride; another is a playful symphony with parts for toy instruments.

The Sinfonia Pastorale, composed around 1750, evokes its bucolic namesake with bagpipe-like drones, rudimentary melodic construction, plain textures and occasional wayward notes, this last perhaps intended as a witty commentary on the undependability of amateur country musicians, a technique Wolfgang used to riotous effect in A Musical Joke (K. 522) almost forty years later. The Sinfonia calls for strings and corno pastoriccio — a vague term that may indicate an 18th-century concert horn, a rustic hunting horn or an Alphorn — though the inclusion of the wind instrument seems to be more for scenic value than for virtuoso display, since the part calls for just three bugle-call pitches (C, E, G, though this last in heard in both high and low octaves) and it is omitted altogether in the Andante. The work’s performance at this concert on an eight-foot-long Alphorn, the ultimate outdoor instrument, perfectly suits both its musical

and descriptive natures.

o


JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897): Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, and died on April 3, 1897 in Vienna. He composed his final Symphony during the summers of 1884 and 1885 and conducted the premiere with the Meiningen Orchestra on October 25, 1885. The score for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes. January 23-25, 2009, with Douglas Boyd conducting.

In the popular image of Brahms, he appears as a patriarch: full grey beard, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes. He grew the beard in his late forties as, some say, a compensation for his late physical maturity — he was in his twenties before his voice changed and he needed to shave — and it seemed to be an external admission that Brahms had allowed himself to become an old man. The ideas did not seem to flow so freely as he approached the age of fifty, and he even put his publisher on notice to expect nothing more. Thankfully, the ideas did come, as they would for more than another decade, and he soon completed the superb Third Symphony. The philosophical introspection continued, however, and it was reflected in many of his works. The Second Piano Concerto of 1881 is almost autumnal in its mellow ripeness; this Fourth Symphony is music of deep thoughtfulness that leads “into realms where joy and sorrow are hushed, and humanity bows before that which is eternal,” wrote the eminent German musical scholar August Kretzschmar.

The Symphony’s first movement begins almost in mid-thought, as though the mood of sad melancholy pervading this opening theme had existed forever and Brahms had simply borrowed a portion of it to present musically. The movement is founded upon the tiny two-note motive (short–long) heard immediately at the beginning. To introduce the necessary contrasts into this sonata form other themes are presented, including a broadly lyrical one for horns and cellos and a fragmented fanfare. The movement grows with a wondrous, dark majesty to its closing pages. “A funeral procession moving across moonlit heights” is how the young Richard Strauss described the second movement. Though the tonality is nominally E major, the movement opens with a stark melody, pregnant with grief, in the ancient Phrygian mode. The mood brightens, but the introspective sorrow of the beginning is never far away. The dance-like quality of the third movement heightens the pathos of the surrounding movements, especially the granitic splendor of the finale. The closing movement is a passacaglia — a series of variations on a short, recurring melody. There are some thirty continuous variations here, though it is less important to follow them individually than to feel the massive strength given to the movement by this technique. The opening chorale-like statement, in which trombones are heard for the first time in the Symphony, recurs twice as a further supporting pillar in the unification of the movement.

©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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Mozart Performed by Michael Thornton | Program Notes