Season Concert 3: Unity
Sunday, April 30, 2023
3:00 pm @ Penn State Recital Hall
Jessie Montgomery - Banner (2017)
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco - Guitar Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 99 (1939)
Michael Fine - Suite for Strings IV. Finding Home (2014)
Alberto Ginastera - Variaciones Concertantes Op. 23 (1953)
Concert Sponsors: Galen Dreibelbis & Glenn Fleming
Guest Artist Sponsor: Happy Valley Adventure Bureau
PROGRAM NOTES
Banner: Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981) was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation and community development. Her parents – her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller – were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time.
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony.
“Banner is a tribute to the 200th Anniversary of the Star Spangled Banner, which was officially declared the American National Anthem in 1814 under the penmanship of Francis Scott Key. Scored for solo string quartet and string orchestra, Banner is a rhapsody on the theme of the Star Spangled Banner. Drawing on musical and historical sources from various world anthems and patriotic songs, I’ve made an attempt to answer the question: ‘What does an anthem for the 21st century sound like in today’s multi-cultural environment?’
“In 2009, I was commissioned by the Providence String Quartet and Community MusicWorks to write Anthem: A tribute to the historical election of Barack Obama. In that piece I wove together the theme from the Star Spangled Banner with the commonly named Black National Anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing by James Weldon Johnson (which coincidentally share the exact same phrase structure). Banner picks up where Anthem left off by using a similar backbone source in its middle section, but expands further both in the amount of references and also in the role play of the string quartet as the individual voice working both with and against the larger community of the orchestra behind them.” -- Jessie Montgomery
Guitar Concerto No. 1: In 1938 the Italian government announced the Italian Racial Laws and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) was banned from the radio as performances of his work were canceled. The new racial laws, however, convinced him that he should leave Italy. He wrote to Arturo Toscanini, who left Italy in 1933, explaining his plight, and Toscanini responded by promising to sponsor him as an immigrant in the United States. Castelnuovo-Tedesco left Italy in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.
Like many artists who fled fascism, Castelnuovo-Tedesco ended up in Hollywood, where, with the help of Jascha Heifetz, widely considered to be one of the finest violinists of modern times, he landed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a film composer. Over the next fifteen years, he worked on scores for some 200 films there and at the other major film studios.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco was a significant influence on other major film composers, including Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Herman Stein, and André Previn.
The idea of tackling the composition of the concerto came from a request from Andrés Segovia, who in those years was engaged in the work of enhancing and revaluing the guitar in the field of classical music. A fundamental aspect of this project was to enrich the musical repertoire of the instrument with original compositions of great depth. Castelnuovo-Tedesco was one of the major contributors in this process.
Segovia faced the problem of placing an orchestra alongside a guitar – an instrument with a much more modest sound volume, for example than a piano or violin. The difficulty was overcome by Castelnuovo-Tedesco brilliantly, creating a refined dialogue between guitar and orchestra that never dominates the soloist.
The first performance of the Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra no. 1 took place on October 28, 1939, at the Adela Reta National Auditorium SODRE in Montevideo, Uruguay, with Andrés Segovia, guitar and the SODRE Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lamberto Baldi.
Suite for Strings: GRAMMY Award winning Classical Producer of the Year (1992), Michael Fine (b. 1950) is widely acknowledged as one of the top classical recording producers in the world. In addition to recording production, Fine has been active in artistic planning for orchestras including the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Gergiev Festival Rotterdam where he served as Artistic Manager, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France where he was Interim Artistic Director and with the Seoul Philharmonic where he was Artistic Advisor.
Fine remains active as clarinetist with engagements at Festival Mozaic in California and the Tongyeong Music Festival in South Korea. He began composing in 2013. His music includes several concertos, string quartets and a variety of works for chamber ensembles. He has had works premiered in the United States, France, Spain, and Cuba.
“This Suite was my first attempt to compose for orchestra and the first of my compositions which I heard performed in concert. Its four movements are a personal travelogue beginning with a brief overture whose restless beginning expresses some of my wanderlust. ‘Heading North’ had its creative inception with my improvising its opening phrases on a piano in Seoul. The orchestra had been rehearsing the music of one of the great Scandinavian composers. This influenced my reflections as I noodled on the piano and the subsequent movement for string orchestra. ‘Heading South’ is a happy retreat to warmer musical climes while the return home in the last movement - ‘Finding Home’ - finds a contented traveler reminiscing on the voyage. It ends simply with the cello saying ‘I’m home’ via a return to C major.” -- Michael Fine
Variaciones Concertantes: In 1952, Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) lost his faculty position at Conservatorio de Música y Arte Escénico in La Plata, Argentina’s premier music conservatory, which he had established and directed since 1948. This came about because he opposed naming the conservatory after Eva Perón, the wife of Argentinian President Juan Perón. Ginastera found himself at odds with Perón’s populist administration on more than one occasion. When he composed Variaciones concertantes, he was in significant financial peril. Eventually, he was reinstated at the conservatory, three years after a military coup ended Perón’s presidency.
Ginastera divided his works into three general “periods” or “phases” “objective nationalist” (1934-1948), “subjective nationalist” (1948-1958), and “neo-expressionist” (1958-1983).
Variaciones concertantes (1953) neatly falls into the middle of Ginastera’s three style periods, the “subjective nationalist.” For many, Ginastera musically represents Argentina incorporating Argentinian folk elements, specifically from the gaucho tradition. Variaciones concertantes is not meant to directly summon images of a gaucho’s life herding livestock, performing in rodeos, or playing the guitar, but it still pays homage to these ideas. During his early “objective nationalist” period, Ginastera developed several musical “calling cards” or “signatures,” things we hear that tie the music to him. One of these calling cards is a six-note chord, E-A-D-G-B-E, the pitches of the guitar’s open strings.
Variaciones concertantes begins with the harp playing these pitches, which give way to the main theme. The music appears to spring forth from that initial chord. “The work has a subjective Argentinean character” according to Ginastera “Instead of employing folklore material, an Argentinean atmosphere is obtained by the use of original melodies and rhythms.”
Program notes by Conductor Laureate, Douglas Meyer.