Saturday, May 3, 2025 • 7:30 p.m.
First Free Methodist Church (3200 3rd Ave W, Seattle)
Harmonia Orchestra & Chorus
William White, conductor
Carson Ling-Efird, cello
Program
Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835)
Overture to Norma
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129
— intermission —
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
Die erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60
- complete concert program (PDF)
About the Concert
Die Erste Walpurgisnacht tells the story of a band of pagan druids who are beset upon by Christian invaders and — unlike in any other Romantic oratorio — the pagans win! Druids were in the air in 1831: they were also the subject of Bellini’s great dramatic opera Norma. The centerpiece of our concert is Robert Schumann’s cello concerto, performed by a phenomenal young soloist — and Seattle native — Carson Ling-Efird, who joins Harmonia on a break from her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music.
- This performance will last approximately one hour and 45 minutes, including one intermission.
- Harmonia music director William White will present a pre-concert talk at 6:30 p.m.
Maestro’s Prelude
Good evening, and welcome to Hallowe’en in May! If you came here tonight looking for DruidCon 2025 but found yourself at our concert instead, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Our theme tonight is Paganism & Druidry, and it gets off to a rollicking start with the overture to Bellini’s opera Norma. Set in Roman Gaul, the opera’s plot centers around a steamy love triangle between two Druid priestesses and a Roman overlord, which erupts into an open conflagration (quite literally). Norma is a bel canto opera, a style that emphasizes voluptuous vocal lines above all else, and like most of these works, its instrumental music is rarely recognized in its own right, but I think this piece is a real humdinger with some great tunes.
As far as Druids are concerned, we’re not going to get more on-theme than with Felix Mendelssohn’s Die Erste Walpurgisnacht. This is an incredible work that virtually no one has ever heard of, and I think this all comes down to the title. Even if you translate it into English, it’s just “The First Walpurgis Night,” which is hardly any less head-scratching. If Mendelssohn had instead called it “The Druids’ Midnight Revenge,” I think this piece would be a Top 40 hit.
Picture it: 800 AD in the Harz Mountains of Northern Germany. A band of Druids seeks to perform their springtime rituals atop the local mountain peak, but they know that doing so risks death at the hands of the encroaching Christian settlers. They decide to use the Christians’ belief system against them, dressing as devils and scattering throughout the woods. When the Christians arrive, the Druids put on an epic spookfest and the Christians beat a hasty retreat. The pagans celebrate their victory with a rousing anthem (which admittedly has a certain Lutheran ring to it, but such was Mendelssohn’s wont).
What does any of this pagan stuff have to do with the Schumann cello concerto? Well, in a way, nothing, but in another way, quite a lot. If I could sum it up in one word (and I believe I can) that word would be: Romanticism.
Because Norma and Die Erste Walpurgisnacht are dramatic works, it’s easy to see how they are awash in Romantic themes such as the macabre and tragic love, but Robert Schumann swam in those same artistic waters — we need look no further than the 300 songs he wrote in his short lifespan. Schumann was a profoundly literary musician, and he developed his musical ideas in tandem with poetic texts. The better we know his songs and character pieces, the more easily we can see how his instrumental works were telling stories and singing songs, albeit without words.
I doubt you’ll have any trouble hearing the poetry as it spins forth from the cello of our excellent soloist, Carson Ling-Efird. I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Carson before, and I can tell you that she’s truly something special.
— William White
Solo Artists
Nineteen-year-old cellist Carson Ling-Efird, a Seattle native, is currently a second-year student at the Curtis Institute of Music, studying cello with Peter Wiley, Gary Hoffman, Christine Lee, Nick Canellakis and Yumi Kendall. She made her solo debut with the Seattle Symphony in 2018 at the age of 12 after being selected as a Seattle Symphony Young Artist. In 2019, she was a KING-FM Young Artist Award grand-prize winner and the recipient of the Seattle Chamber Music Society Monika Meyer Clowes Memorial Award. She made her international solo debut with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra Youth in January 2020, and in November of that year appeared on NPR’s From the Top as a fellow. This past summer she studied in France at the Ecoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau. In addition to cello, Ms. Ling-Efird has also studied piano and composition, beginning piano at age six while spending a year with her family in Kunming, China, and composition in the summer of 2017. From 2019 to 2023, she was a selected participant in the Seattle Symphony’s Merriman Family Young Composers Workshop program, during which time Seattle Symphony musicians premiered her compositions. Her latest work, Procession Quintet, is scored for piano, clarinet, flute, violin and cello. Ms. Ling-Efird plays a Matthias Neuner cello (Mittenwald, 1807), generously loaned to her by the Carlsen Cello Foundation.
Soprano Karen Dunstan hails from Ypsilanti, Michigan. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music and in 2023 completed a Master of Music in Vocal Performance at the University of Washington. Ms. Dunstan has appeared in many opera productions, including La Bohème, Dido and Aeneas and L’Elisir d’Amore, and is most proud of her performance as Grimgerde in the “Flight of the Valkyries” scene from Die Walküre.
Tenor Charles Lyon Stewart hails from Washington, DC, where he began singing with the National Cathedral Choir at age nine and at 13 made his solo debut with the National Symphony in the annunciation scene of Handel’s Messiah. He holds a Bachelor of Music in vocal performance from Indiana University and is now a cardiothoracic intensive care nurse enrolled in the Doctor of Nursing Practice program at the University of Washington. Recent solo performances include Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the Emerald City Chamber Orchestra.
Born in Minneapolis, baritone Gabriel Salmon grew up in Palo Alto before attending St. Olaf College, from which he earned a Bachelor of Arts in music and another in economics. After stints in Denver and Richmond, Virginia, he moved to Seattle a year and a half ago and immediately joined Harmonia. He also currently sings with Epiphany Parish Church and previously with the St. Olaf Choir, Minnesota Opera and Picnic Operetta.
A Seattle native, bass-baritone Steven Tachell began his academic musical studies at the University of Washington and the Vienna Music Conservatory. With Seattle Opera, he has sung Sharpless in Madama Butterfly and Ping in Turandot. He has appeared on stage an in concert throughout the United States, as well as Switzerland, Germany and Japan, singing with the Seattle Symphony, Spokane Symphony, St. Gallen Opera Theater and Opera Orchestra of New York, among many others.
Chad DeMaris has been recognized as a “strong lyric tenor” and for his “beautiful, warm tone with a strong sense of sincerity.” He recently made his mainstage debut with Seattle Opera, singing Cop/Reporter 2 in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Other engagements include solo roles in Mozart’s Coronation Mass and Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude, King Kaspar in Amahl and the Night Visitors and Eduardo Jr./Mr. Xoloti in Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World.
Tenor John Garlid hails from Connecticut, where he began his vocal journey as a treble at Christ Church, Greenwich. At Bard College, he immersed himself in experimental music and recording engineering, guided by Marina Rosenfeld, Richard Teitelbaum and James Bagwell. He currently works as a union stagehand in Seattle, singing at St. Mark’s Cathedral and Epiphany Parish Church while studying with countertenor José Luis Muñoz.
Originally from Colorado, tenor Jacob Malpocker holds a bachelor’s degree in vocal music from Seattle University and a master’s degree in choral conducting from Washington State University. He currently teaches music in the Highline School District and directs the ensemble Fratres at St. James Cathedral. A published composer and arranger of choral music, he currently sings with Opus 7, Cathedral Cantorei at St. James, and Epiphany Parish Church.
Baritone Brennan Brichoux has experience in opera, choral singing and musical theater, with a keen passion for the dramatic stage. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music and vocal performance from Pacific Lutheran university, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2019. Since then, he has been an active in Seattle’s musical scene, performing with many area ensembles and frequently serving as a solo cantor at St. James Cathedral.
Program Notes
Vincenzo Bellini
Overture to Norma
Bellini was born November 3, 1801, in Catania, Sicily, and died September 2, 1835, near Paris. He composed his two-act opera Norma in 1831. It received its premiere at La Scala on December 26 of that year. The overture calls for pairs of woodwinds (with one flute doubling piccolo), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, harp and strings.
Bellini is considered by many to be first among equals at the art of bel canto opera, and Norma perhaps his greatest work. Before he reached the age of 30 he had composed seven operas, among them I Capuleti e i Montecchi (premiered in Venice in March 1830) and La sonnambula (which debuted in Milan in March 1831). He and his librettist, Felice Romani, then turned their attention to an adaptation of a French play, Norma, ou L’infanticide, by Alexandre Soumet.
In Roman-occupied Gaul circa 50 B.C.E, a Druid priestess, Norma, tries to persuade Pollione (the Roman proconsul and her former lover), to end his relationship with Adalgisa, a younger Druid priestess. When he refuses, Norma confesses in public that she has broken her vow of chastity and borne two children with Pollione. As she prepares to sacrifice herself, Pollione experiences a change of heart and joins her on a flaming pyre.
Bellini’s overture incorporates material from a frenzied Act II chorus (“Guerra, guerra”) and an ensuing duet between Norma and Pollione (“In mia man alfin tu sei”).
Robert Schumann
Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129
Robert Alexander Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, on June 8, 1810, and died near Bonn on July 29, 1856. He composed this concerto between October 10 and 25, 1850. Ludwig Ebert was the soloist in the premiere, which took place at the Leipzig Conservatory on June 9, 1860. The accompaniment calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings.
On September 1, 1850, Robert and Clara Schumann moved their family from Dresden to Düsseldorf, where Robert had been engaged as director of the orchestra and chorus. Initially the Düsseldorfers welcomed the Schumanns, but Robert’s inexperience as a conductor led to discord with the choir (who rebelled at his programming of the Bach Passions) and eventually the orchestra (who felt he played too much of his own music). Fortunately, Robert began to earn enough from the publication of his compositions to supplement his part-time conducting salary (although the money Clara made as a performer and teacher also supported their family). Robert would produce fully a third of his mature works during his few years in Düsseldorf, including his “Rhenish” Symphony.
The first major work he tackled in this new city (over the span of a mere 15 days) was his cello concerto, which he originally called a Konzertstück (“concertpiece”), perhaps due to its compact form in three continuous segments rather than the traditional three discrete movements. “We must come up with a genre,” he had written in an 1839 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik article, “that consists of a longer movement in a moderate tempo, in which the preliminary section would take the place of a first Allegro, the cantabile section, that of the Adagio, and a brilliant ending, that of the Rondo.”
Schumann had studied cello a bit as a child, and toyed with the instrument after a self-inflicted injury to his right hand at age 22 dashed his hopes of becoming a piano virtuoso, but the concerto was apparently not inspired by any particular performer or occasion. “There are so few works for this lovely instrument,” he later wrote, hoping that the concerto “will perhaps be welcomed by many.”
Robert finished the cello concerto on the same day that he conducted his first subscription concert in Düsseldorf (which featured Clara as soloist in a Mendelssohn piano concerto). “It pleases me very much and seems to me to be written in true violoncello style,” Clara wrote the following month. And a year later: “I have played Robert’s Violoncello Concerto through again, thus giving myself a truly musical and happy hour. The romantic quality, the vivacity, the freshness and humor, also the highly interesting interweaving of violoncello and orchestra are indeed wholly ravishing, and what euphony and deep feeling one finds in all the melodic passages!”
Although the principal cellist of the Düsseldorf orchestra read through a piano reduction of the concerto with Clara, no performance materialized. After various revisions, two publishers rejected the work, but Breitkopf & Härtel finally issued a cello-and-piano version in 1854. The premiere took place four years after Robert’s death, at a Leipzig concert marking his 50th birth anniversary.
The concerto opens in A minor, which was “Clara’s key,” according to Schumann biographer Judith Cherniak, while “Clara’s name appears throughout the concerto in the falling figure sounding ‘Clara,’ especially in the tender slow movement, and more playfully in the last movement.” Robert forgoes an extended orchestral introduction, with the solo instrument dominating from the work’s opening bars. The F-major central section follows seamlessly from the first, and a reminiscence of the concerto’s opening material leads a transition to the Rondo finale, which near its conclusion features the work’s only cadenza (largely accompanied by the orchestra).
Felix Mendelssohn
Die erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg, and died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig. He composed this cantata in 1831 and 1832. After a first public performance in January 1833, he withdrew the work, making various revisions over the course of the next decade. In addition to soloists and chorus, the published score calls for pairs of woodwinds (plus piccolo), horns and trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion and strings,
In addition to reigning as the most influential writer in the German language, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a true polymath, making important contributions as a botanist, producing plays by Friedrich Schiller as director of the theater in Weimar, and writing novels, poems and plays that would inspire composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Wagner and Mahler.
Goethe expressly intended his 1799 poem Die erste Walpurgisnacht for a musical setting, entrusting it to the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, who made three unsuccessful attempts over the course of several years before ultimately abandoning the project. Yet Zelter unwittingly provided the solution to this dilemma when in 1821 he introduced his septuagenarian friend to his 12-year-old composition pupil, Felix Mendelssohn.
Goethe, who had heard Mozart perform at age 7, pronounced young Felix an even greater prodigy: “What this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.” In spite of a six-decade age difference, the two struck up a fast friendship via correspondence and the occasional meeting at Weimar. The last of these occurred as Mendelssohn embarked on a trip to Italy (which would result in his beloved A-major “Italian” symphony) and it was then that Goethe entrusted his young scion with the Walpurgisnacht text.
In his poem, Goethe depicts the very first St. Walpurgis’ Night (held each April 30), the name deriving from a Christian attempt to co-opt a pagan festival that welcomed spring but had long been rumored to involve witchcraft and Satan worship. Belief in witches had waned during the Enlightenment, so here Goethe retcons the origin of the celebration as an attempt by Druids (in actuality, Saxons) to ward off Christian soldiers bent on disrupting their peaceful rituals by playing into the Christians’ fears and superstitions.
“It seems that the German heathen priests and elders,” wrote Goethe, “after they had been driven out of their holy groves and Christianity had been forced upon them, went with their faithful followers to the wild, inaccessible peaks of the Harz Mountains in the beginning of the spring, there (in the old way) to direct prayer and flame to the formless God of heaven and earth. Now, in order to secure against the armed missionaries who were tracking them, they found it good to disguise a number of themselves and thereby to hold their superstitious enemies at bay, and, protected by devils’ masks, to fulfill the purest service to God.”
Mendelssohn’s “Ballade for chorus and orchestra” opens with an extended overture depicting a winter storm giving way to spring. Each section follows its predecessor without pause, forging ahead with a dramatic impetus that equals any operatic finale of the day. Hector Berlioz praised the “impeccable clarity” of the score. “Voices and instruments are completely integrated, running in opposite directions, even colliding, with an apparent disorder that is the perfection of art.” He singled out for praise the concluding chorus: “One scarcely knows what to admire most in this finale — the orchestral or the choral writing, or the whirlwind movement of the whole!”
— Jeff Eldridge