Season Finale

Sunday, May 15, 2011 • 3:00 p.m.
First Free Methodist Church

Orchestra Seattle
Seattle Chamber Singers
Darko Butorac, conductor
Ronald Patterson, violin
Catherine Haight, soprano
Kathryn Weld, alto
Gerald Sams, tenor
Charles Robert Stephens, baritone

Program

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901)
“Spuntato ecco” from Don Carlo
“Va, pensiero” from Nabucco

Carol Sams (*1945)
Childhood’s Moon (world premiere)

Max Bruch (1838–1920)
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26

—intermission—

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Symphony No. 3 in E♭ Major, Op. 97 (“Rhenish”)

About the Conductor

Guest conductor Darko Butorac serves as music director of the Missoula Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Fidenza Opera Festival in Italy. Critics have lauded his performances as marked by a “great range of expressiveness,” “extraordinary refinement of dynamic shading” and a “fine sense of shape and color.” Since taking the helm of the Missoula Symphony in 2007, Mr. Butorac has propelled that orchestra to a new level of musical achievement, with an expanded repertoire and local premieres of works by established and emerging composers. An enthusiastic ambassador for classical music, he also produces the award-winning Downbeat DownLow podcast with radio personality Leah Lewis.

Mr. Butorac has appeared as a guest conductor with such ensembles as the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Charleston Symphony, Canton Symphony and Montana Lyric Opera, and served as principal conductor of the Northwest Mahler Festival. His guest-conducting engagements abroad include performances with the Trondheim Symphony in Norway, Mendoza Symphony in Argentina, Xiamen Philharmonic in China, Kharkov Symphony Orchestra and Kharkov Philharmonic in Ukraine, and the Giuseppe Verdi Orchestra of Parma. Engagements this season include performances with the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra as well as OSSCS.

Darko Butorac earned his Master of Music degree from Indiana University, where he conducted over 30 concerts with the school’s major ensembles. He has also worked extensively at the Brevard Music Center, Aspen Music Festival and the University of Toronto, his alma mater. His principal mentors are David Effron, Jorma Panula and David Zinman.

About the Soloists

Violinist Ronald Patterson, Professor of Violin at the University of Washington School of Music since 1999, has concertized extensively in the United States and Europe since the age of 11, performing 45 works (including six world premieres) in more than 150 solo performances with orchestra. A student of Jascha Heifetz, Eudice Shapiro and Manuel Compinsky, he has been acclaimed for his “skill, authority and imagination” by The New York Times. Between 1965 and 1999, Mr. Patterson served as concertmaster of the Monte Carlo, Houston, Denver and Miami Symphonies, the St. Louis Little Symphony and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Mr. Patterson was a founder and Associate Professor of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University (Houston, 1974–1979) and Assistant Professor at Washington University (St. Louis, 1967–1971), as well as on the faculty of Stetson University, MacMurray College and the University of Miami. He currently serves as first violinist of the Rainier String Quartet and concertmaster of the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra, the resident quartet of the Santa Barbara Chamber Music Festival.

Many compositions have been recorded by and written for Patterson and his wife, violist Roxanna Patteson, performing as “Duo Patterson.” Czech Mates is their latest CD, featuring works by 19th and 20th Century Czechoslovakian composers. Mr. Patterson has also recorded for CRI, Erato, Orion, Vox, Ante Aeternum, Virgin Classics, Serenus, Philips and EMI. A five-time First Prize Winner of the Coleman Chamber Music Competition, he has performed chamber music with some of the greatest musicians of our day, including Heifetz, Piatigorsky and Szeryng. In 1998 he was named Officier de l’Ordre du Mérite Culturel, one of the Principality of Monaco’s highest honors.

Soprano Catherine Haight is well known to Seattle audiences for her performances of Baroque music. She is an accomplished performer of the oratorio repertoire, including all of the major works of Handel and Bach. Ms. Haight has been a guest soloist with the Pacific Northwest Ballet in their acclaimed production of Carmina Burana; her recordings include Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang with Philharmonia Northwest, Orff’s Carmina Burana with Seattle Choral Company and Handel’s Messiah with OSSCS under the direction of George Shangrow. She is currently a member of the voice faculty at Seattle Pacific University.

Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Weld has performed extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. She has made solo appearances with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Charles Dutoit and Kurt Masur, and made her Carnegie Hall debut to critical acclaim in a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor.

Tenor Gerald Sams has been a member of the Seattle Chamber Singers since the early days of the ensemble. With OSSCS, he has been featured as a soloist in most of the great Handel oratorios, as well as many Bach cantatas and works of Mozart. Mr. Sams studied voice at Pomona College and the University of California at Santa Barbara, and since that time has sung with many of the choral groups in the Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest.

Baritone Charles Robert Stephens has performed leading roles with the New York City Opera and at Carnegie Hall with the Oratorio Society of New York, the Masterworks Chorus, Musica Sacra and with Opera Orchestra of New York. He regularly performs with distinguished ensembles such as New York’s Sacred Music in a Sacred Space, Seattle Pro Musica, Portland Chamber Orchestra and Portland Baroque. This season he debuts with the Oregon Symphony and Boston Early Music Festival and returns to the Seattle Symphony and Helena Symphony as well as OSSCS.

Program Notes

Giuseppe Verdi
Choruses from Nabucco and Don Carlo

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was born October 9, 1813, near Busseto, Italy, and died on January 27, 1901, in Milan. He composed Nabucco in 1840; it received its premiere on March 9, 1842, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Don Carlo premiered at the Paris Opera on March 11, 1867, while its revised Italian version was first performed at La Scala on January 10, 1884.

The son of an innkeeper and a spinner, Giuseppe Verdi displayed immense musical talent early in life, assisting as an organist at the local church before assuming the position on a full-time basis at age nine. His musical fame rests upon the approximately 30 operas he produced from 1839 through 1893, establishing his reputation as one of the greatest and most influential of all opera composers.

In 1836, Verdi was appointed municipal music master in Busseto, where he married his childhood sweetheart. When Bartolomeo Merelli, impresario at Milan’s illustrious opera house, La Scala, finally agreed to present Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, in 1839, it fared well enough for Merelli to contract with Verdi for several more operas. Personal tragedy interfered, however: The composer’s daughter had died in 1838 at the age of 17 months; he then lost his 15-month-old son just prior to Oberto’s premiere; and within eight months, his wife suddenly succumbed to encephalitis. While struggling with these devastating events, Verdi managed to complete a comic opera, but it proved a miserable failure. He vowed never to compose again.

Merelli demonstrated a great deal of faith in Verdi, however, and finally persuaded the composer to examine the libretto for Nabucco; set in Babylon and Jerusalem in 587 B.C., it recounts the biblical story of how King Nebuchadnezzar attacked the Jews, conquering them and then exiling them from their homeland. Verdi later recounted, with some dramatic embellishment, the tale of his arriving home one day, tossing the libretto on the table, and beginning to read the passage beginning “Va, pensiero,” the text of the celebrated chorus in which the enslaved Israelites express their hunger for their homeland, to which the libretto had fallen open.

The lavish success of Nabucco launched Verdi’s long and legendary career. He composed the five-act French grand opera Don Carlo in 1867 but continued to revise it over the course of some 20 years (its Italian version is most familiar to today’s audiences). In the midst of the persecutions of the Inquisition and the Spanish monarchy, Carlos, Prince of Asturias (1545–1568), struggles with issues of love, loyalty, friendship, and liberty after his betrothed marries his father, Philip of Spain, as a provision of the peace treaty ending the war between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois.

During the final years of his life, the famous and financially secure composer devoted much of his energy to the development of his landholdings and to involvement in charitable activities. He died in 1901 of a massive stroke, and his funeral was, as he wished, a quiet occasion “without music or singing.” A month later, tens of thousands of people lined the streets during his official state funeral procession and joined in singing the dearly beloved chorus “Va, pensiero.”

Lorelette Knowles

Carol Sams
Childhood’s Moon

Carol Sams was born in Sacramento, California, in 1945. Based on a 2005 work for children’s chorus and piano, this cantata receives its first performance this afternoon. In addition to SATB vocal soloists and chorus, it calls for pairs of woodwinds (plus bass clarinet), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, percussion, harp and strings.

Carol Sams is a well-known Seattle composer and soprano. A student of Darius Milhaud, her works have been performed by many area ensembles, including OSSCS, and throughout the United States and Europe. Her full-length opera The Pied Piper of Hamelin, commissioned by Tacoma Opera, premiered in 1993. Along with many songs, choral works and a symphony, Ms. Sams has a total of 12 operas to her credit. She holds a DMA degree in composition from the University of Washington, an MA from Mills College, and is currently music director at Prospect Congregational Church in Seattle. The composer provided the following note about her newest work:

Childhood’s Moon is a reworking of an earlier piece, Songs to the Moon, which I wrote for the Northwest Boychoir and their ensembles at the request of Joe Crnko, who performed it in 2005. At the time, I wanted to explore the relationship of children’s imagination and the moon, specifically to intrigue children with ideas about the moon through history, folklore, folksongs, facts and riddles. People have been fascinated by the moon for so long we even have language that describes a moony state of mind: loony, moony, lunatic, moonstruck, moonfaced, moon-eyed, etc. There is something romantic and crazy and obsessive about our relationship with the moon, and this was what appealed to me: taking our complex relationship with the moon and exploring it. When George Shangrow heard the piece, he thought it would be good for OSSCS and asked me to orchestrate, expand and rework it. And so I have done. I have added a movement, “Moon Proverbs,” and fully orchestrated the piece, fleshing out the choral parts with tenor and bass, and expanding the choral parts. Some of the movements have been transposed in whole or in part. And so it seems to be a totally new piece; the childlike element is still there, but almost as from a distance. Certain movements, the riddles and the nursery rhymes specifically, still have that kind of innocence, but the other movements have actually changed character, particularly “Luna,” written to a poem by a talented young boy. At any rate, I have been charmed by the moon and these texts, and I hope you will be too.

I want to thank the poets Art Mampel and Morgan Waidelich for their contributions to this work. Art was kind enough to tell the St. Francis story in his own words, and to write the concluding poem.

Carol Sams

Max Bruch
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26

Max Karl August Bruch was born in Köln on January 6, 1838, and died near Berlin on October 2, 1920. Joseph Joachim premiered the revised version of his first violin concerto in Bremen on January 5, 1868. In addition to solo violin, the work calls for pairs of woodwinds, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.

“In my youth, I studied violin for four or five years,” Max Bruch wrote in 1911, “and although I did not become an adept performer, I learned to know and love the instrument. The violin seemed to me even at that time the queen of instruments, and it was quite natural that I early had the inclination to write for it. Thus, my first concerto, Op. 26, which was introduced to the musical world by Joachim during the season of 1867–1868, gradually grew. It was not at that time my intention, so far as I can remember, to write further works for the violin; and indeed, for years, I devoted myself to writing compositions in large form for chorus and orchestra. In 1873 I wrote Odyssesus and in 1875 Arminius (which is better known in America than in Germany) and in 1877 Das Lied von der Glocke. … I never had any special interest for the piano and I wrote only a little for it in my youth. I was destined by nature to write compositions for the voice, and I always studied singing with special interest and have associated largely with singers. This tendency has also, of course, been displayed in my violin works.”

While Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra and Kol Nidre for cello and orchestra continue to appear on concert programs, today his fame rests almost exclusively on the first of his three violin concertos, which stands with those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms among the greatest masterpieces of the 19th century. The celebrated Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim even dubbed Bruch’s “the richest” and “most seductive” of the four.

The first sketches for Bruch’s concerto date from 1857, around the time his first opera, Scherz, List und Rache, debuted in Köln. He completed it in early 1866, with the premiere slated for April 1, but when the intended soloist fell ill, violinist Otto von Königslöw stepped in to debut the concerto at a hastily rescheduled concert on April 24, with the composer conducting. Bruch subsequently withdrew the work to make revisions, sending the new manuscript to Joachim the following summer. Joachim provided helpful suggestions and participated in a private rehearsal at Hanover in October 1867. Bruch dedicated the concerto to Joachim, who performed the official premiere of the revised version the following January.

Although cast in the standard three movements, Bruch originally labeled the opening Introduzione, quasi fantasia before settling on the title Vorspiel (“Prelude”). It leads without pause to the central Adagio, in which three distinct musical motives unfold in turn, most clearly demonstrating the linkage between Bruch’s vocal compositions and his writing for solo violin. The Gypsy-dance finale, marked Allegro energico, predates the similarly themed closing movement of Brahms’ violin concerto by nearly a decade.

Over the course of his long life, Bruch developed something of a love-hate relationship with this concerto. This may have been due in part to the fact that he sold the publishing rights to the work for a one-time fee and never saw any royalties from his first and greatest musical success. Late in life, after World War I left him in dire financial straits, he attempted to sell his autograph copy in the United States, but never received any payment prior to his death in 1920.

Robert Schumann
Symphony No. 3 in E♭ Major, Op. 97 (“Rhenish”)

Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, on June 8, 1810, and died near Bonn on July 29, 1856. He composed this symphony between November 2 and December 9, 1850. Schumann himself conducted the premiere in Düsseldorf on February 6 of the following year. The work calls for pairs of woodwinds, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings.

Robert Schumann’s tenure as municipal music director at Düsseldorf, along the banks of the Rhine, would end badly: After averting a forced resignation in October 1852, he would step down the following year and in February 1854 attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Rhine. He would spend the remaining two years of his life in an insane asylum near Bonn.

But Schumann’s arrival in Düsseldorf with his wife Clara, on September 2, 1850, marked a time of great optimism for the composer, sparking a period of inspired composition. He produced his remarkable cello concerto in a mere 15 days during October, and at the beginning of November began work on the last and greatest of his four symphonies (the so-called Symphony No. 4, published last, being a revision of a work first performed in 1841). “Robert is at work on something,” Clara wrote in her diary on November 16, “I do not know what, for he has said nothing to me about it.” Schumann completed the symphony in just over a month, presenting it to his wife as a surprise on December 9. He conducted the premiere the following February at Düsseldorf’s Geisler Hall on the sixth concert of the Allgemeine Musikverein. On March 19, 1851, the composer wrote to a publisher that his new work “perhaps mirrors here and there something of Rhenish life.”

Schumann cast his symphony in five movements instead of the traditional four, although the majestic fourth movement can be viewed as grand slow introduction to the finale. The heroic theme of the opening movement, announced by horns, is one of Schumann’s most magnificent creations, its ingenious cross-rhythms obscuring the pulse of the 3/4 meter until the seventh bar. Instead of the typical scherzo, Schumann follows with a ländler, a more deliberate dance form in 3/4 time; at one point he appears to have subtitled the movement “Morning on the Rhine” but deleted all programmatic notations from the score before publication. Next comes a graceful intermezzo in place of the traditional slow movement.

The fourth movement originally bore the subtitle, “In the character of the accompaniment to a solemn ceremony.” During November 1850, the Schumanns had traveled to Köln for a ceremony elevating the local archbishop to a cardinal. The event took place at the city’s imposing Gothic cathedral. Construction of the edifice began in 1248, continuing until 1473, when work halted until 1842. Schumann had first seen the cathedral in 1830, and even in its unfinished state it dominated the skyline. After its completion in 1880, it was the tallest building in the world—until the Washington Monument was finished in 1884. Schumann introduces three trombones at the opening of the fourth movement to help create an aura of religious solemnity.

The joyful finale bears hallmarks of a rondo form, with Schumann unleashing a succession of new themes eventually joined—somewhat unexpectedly—by music from the slow movement now in celebratory rather than solemn guise. A brief coda recalls the spirit of the opening movement.

Jeff Eldridge