Download WILLIMANTIC ORCHESTRA

INSTRUMENTALISTS
Violin I
Paul Navratil,
Concertmaster
Jennifer Arel
Gillian Arnott
Kay Berris
Kimberly Blair
Melissa Colonese-Scutt
Susan Cutlip
Scott Lehmann
Violin II
Barbara Horn
Cheryl Bayline
Brian Frankovitch
Michael Geigert
Victoria Hervieux
Patrick Kmiecik
Mary Lou Morrison
Justyna Poznanski
Viola
Selena Roy
Barbara Gibson
Barbara Glenister
Don Shankweiler
Cello
Matthew Nichols
Curtis Barnes
Sondra Boyer
Ryan Lavallee
Solveig Millett
Jena Mitchell
Jennifer Morenus
Charlotte Sundstrom
Bass
Liz Davis
Rob Rainwater
Charles Seivard
Flute
Elise Couillard
Joan D’Auria
Sandra Smith Rosado
Oboe
Abby Chien
Althea Madigan
Clarinet
Rick Bennett
Shirley Roe
Bass Clarinet
Joe Tomanelli
Alto Saxophone
Karen Lendvay
Tenor Saxophone
Joe Tomanelli
Bassoon
Bill Clark
Peggy Church
Horn
Bethany Croxton
Virginia Eurich
Laura Renard
Kurt Scimone
Trumpet
Sam Eurich
Bob Lemons
Ed Pitkin
Trombone
Ross Koning
Kevin Tracy
Bass Trombone
Kyle Gagne
Percussion
John Consiglio
Liz Kiebler
Ryan Lavallee
Jack Summers
Piano
Liz Kiebler
WILLIMANTIC ORCHESTRA
David H. Vaughan, Conductor
HOLIDAY CONCERT
7:30 P.M., Saturday, 07 December 2013
Shafer Auditorium, ECSU, Willimantic
PROGRAM
Leroy Anderson
A Christmas Festival
Antonio Vivaldi
Concerto in b for Four Violins
I. Allegro
II. Largo – Larghetto – Largo
III. Allegro
Soloists: Paul Navratil, Kay Berris, Barbara Horn, Justyna Poznanski
Gustav Holst (arr. Wagner)
A Holst Christmas
Piotr Tchaikovsky
Selections from Nutcracker Suite No. 1
I. Marche (tempo di marcia vivo)
II. Danse de la Fée-Dragée (andante non troppo)
III. Danse russe Trepak (molto vivace)
IV. Danse Chinoise (allegro moderato)
V. Valse des Fleurs (tempo di valse)
Leroy Anderson
Sleigh Ride
PROGRAM NOTES
A Christmas Festival (1950) & Sleigh Ride (1948) Leroy Anderson (1908–76)
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to parents who had emigrated from Sweden, Anderson studied piano and organ with his mother and began composing
in high school. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in music from Harvard, where his
teachers included Walter Piston and Georges Enescu. In 1931, after failing to
win a fellowship that would have allowed him to study with Nadia Boulanger in
Paris, he began working on a Ph.D. in Scandinavian languages.
Music, however, remained Anderson’s passion. In the time his studies left him
(and probably a bit more), he tutored Radcliffe students in music, directed the
Harvard University Band, served as church organist and choir director, played
(piano, double bass, tuba, accordian) in dance bands, and produced arrangements. In 1934 he quit his doctoral program to work as a professional arranger.
His big break came in 1936, when the Boston Pops asked for an arrangement of
Harvard songs, leading to commissions from Arthur Fiedler for encore pieces:
Jazz Pizzicato (1938) and Jazz Legato (1939).
Anderson continued to arrange and compose for Fiedler during World War II,
when his knowledge of German and Scandinavian languages got him assigned
to a desk job in military intelligence. In the decade afterward, he was de facto
Arranger and Composer for the Boston Pops. Most of his best-known works—
including The Syncopated Clock, Sleigh Ride, The Typewriter, Blue Tango, Sandpaper Ballet, Trumpeter’s Lullaby, and Bugler’s Holiday—date from this time.
His light and tuneful pieces, which sound so unlabored, were the product of a
good deal of labor; Anderson was a careful craftsman, who often spent several
months writing and re-writing a short piece.
Concerto in b for Four Violins, RV 580
Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)
Born in Venice, where he lived most of his life, Vivaldi learned violin from
his father, who played in San Marco’s orchestra, and also studied with its leader,
Giovanni Legrenzi (1626–90), a noted composer. Ordained a priest in 1703, he
was shortly thereafter excused from priestly duties on grounds of ill-health (probably asthma). For most of his career, he was a teacher, composer, and conductor
at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, where unmarriageable girls—illegitimate, orphaned, disfigured—were sheltered and schooled to a high standard in music.
Most of Vivaldi’s 400 concerti and 60 choral works were written for instruction
or performance at the Ospedale. At its celebrated public concerts the musically
accomplished young ladies performed behind screens, heard but not seen. (What,
one wonders, became of them?) Vivaldi also wrote numerous operas, though not
for the Ospedale, where they would have been considered inappropriate (Arsilda,
Regina di Ponto (1715) was initially banned in Venice; its title character falls in
love with a woman who pretends to be a man). In 1740, his music no longer
popular in his native city, Vivaldi moved to Vienna, hoping—vainly, as it turned
out—for a court appointment; he died there in poverty the following year.
This concerto is the tenth of twelve published in 1711 in Amsterdam as Op. 3,
a collection (with the intriguing title L’Estro Armonico—literally, “harmonic estrus”) that made Vivaldi known throughout musical Europe as an exciting new
composer. Bach made keyboard transcriptions or arrangements of six of these
concerti, including this one. Sparely scored by Vivaldi for four violins, two violas, cello, and continuo, it is heard today in an arrangement by Ralph Matesky
for solists and string orchestra.
A Holst Christmas
Gustav Holst (1874–1934)
Despite his Germanic name, Gustav[us von] Holst was an English composer,
born in Gloucestershire. His father, like several of his forebearers, was a professional musician and taught his son piano in hopes that he might continue the
family’s musical line as a concert pianist. Neuritis in Gustav’s right arm put that
career out of reach, and he instead turned to composition, which he studied at the
Royal College of Music (1893–98). At this time and for several years thereafter,
he supported himself by playing trombone gigs. In 1905, realizing that the very
modest success of his compositions was not going to pay the bills and finding
playing light fare in theatre orchestras “a wicked and loathsome waste of time,”
he accepted a teaching position at a girls’ school. He spent the rest of his life
as a music educator, composing largely for amateur and school ensembles, while
working on more ambitious compositions on the side. A 1919 performance under Adrian Boult of his large orchestral work, The Planets (1916–18), brought
him acclaim and more attention than he wanted. Several subsequent compositions were also well received, but Holst’s moment in the sun was relatively brief.
Though he thought it his best orchestral work, audiences and critics of the time
did not care much for Egdon Heath (1927), a tone poem inspired by Thomas
Hardy’s description of this locale in his novel The Return of the Native. As with
some other artists, a just appreciation of Holst’s works came only after his death.
This piece is an orchestral arrangement by Douglas Wagner of Holst’s settings
of Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the bleak midwinter” for the 1906 English Hymnal and (in 1916) of “Lullay my liking”, a 15th century text for a lullaby sung by
Mary to the baby Jesus, along with excerpts from his Christmas Day: a Choral
Fantasy of Old Carols (1910).
Selections from Nutcracker Suite No. 1, Op. 71 a Piotr Tchaikovsky (1840–93)
Tchaikovsky’s last ballet, The Nutcracker, was commissioned by the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg in December 1890. Although one would not guess
from this music, this was a trying time for the composer. His long-time financial backer and confidant, Nadezhda von Meck, had recently pleaded poverty
and broken off the relationship; his sister Sasha died just as Tchaikovsky began working on the ballet; and the ballet’s unsatisfactory scenario (loosely based
on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”) failed to
inspire him, leading the composer to doubt his artistic powers. In May 1891
Tchaikovsky confessed that “writing the ballet has cost me an effort because I
could feel a decline in my powers of invention,” adding later that “this work has
tired me out (I think the old man is beginning to be played out).” Suite No. 1 was
first performed in March 1892 (the ballet itself, delayed by various production
problems, premiered in December 1892). This performance of the suite omits its
overture and two of the dances.
Notes by S. K. Lehmann