Program Notes
JOEL THOMPSON
Joel Thompson (b.1988) is an Atlanta-based composer, conductor, pianist, and educator best known for the choral work Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, which was premiered November 2015 by the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club and Dr. Eugene Rogers and won the 2018 American Prize for Choral Composition. His pieces have been performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Master Chorale, Los Angeles Master Chorale, EXIGENCE, and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. Currently a student at the Yale School of Music, Thompson was also a 2017 post-graduate fellow in Arizona State University’s Ensemble Lab/Projecting All Voices Initiative and a composition fellow at the 2017 Aspen Music Festival and School, where he studied with composers Stephen Hartke and Christopher Theofanidis and won the 2017 Hermitage Prize. Thompson taught at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta 2015-2017, and also served as Director of Choral Studies and Assistant Professor of Music at Andrew College 2013-2015. Thompson Is a proud Emory alum, graduating with a B.A. in Music in 2010, and an M.M. in Choral Conducting in 2013.
An Act of Resistance
FROM THE COMPOSER
“If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” Many consider this oft-used saying to be true as it relates to physical fitness, artistic skills, and even mental fortitude. Given the ubiquitous divisiveness and turmoil in the world over the last few years, it seems that this adage may also have other applications. Maybe I'm naive, but I think our current condition can be diagnosed as a severe deficiency in empathy— our world is lacking the strength to love. We haven’t been using it, so we’ve lost it.
This dearth in empathy is so pervasive that is now the new norm. People pride themselves in their rigid opposition of even listening to someone of differing viewpoints in a spirit of openness. So I decided to write a piece that would help me, and hopefully others, rebuild the strength necessary to love deeply, genuinely, and passionately.
This piece is essentially a battle between selfishness and empathy—pride v. love—and because one is easier than the other, the victor is clear towards the end of the piece. It is important that the decision to perform the music that follows “the end” remains a choice for each individual member of the ensemble.
Asking orchestral musicians to put down their instruments and stand up and sing is risky. The act requires a certain vulnerability. It can be perceived as cheesy; It can elicit negative reactions. Only a few people may choose to do it, and therefore be lonely. It can be uncomfortable. But such is the love that is required to truly change our current circumstance.
STEWART GOODYEAR
Proclaimed “a phenomenon” by the Los Angeles Times and “one of the best pianists of his generation” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stewart Goodyear is an accomplished concert pianist, improviser and composer. He has performed with, and has been commissioned by, many of the major orchestras and chamber music organizations around the world.
Last year, Orchid Classics released Goodyear’s recording of his suite for piano and orchestra, Callaloo, and his piano sonata. His recent commissions include a Piano Quintet for the Penderecki String Quartet, and a piano work for the Honens Piano Competition.
Goodyear’s discography includes the complete sonatas and piano concertos of Beethoven, as well as concertos by Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Rachmaninoff, an album of Ravel piano works, and an album entitled For Glenn Gould, which combines repertoire from Gould’s US and Montreal debuts. His Rachmaninoff recording received a Juno nomination for Best Classical Album for Soloist and Large Ensemble Accompaniment. Goodyear’s recording of his own transcription of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (Complete Ballet) was chosen by The New York Times as one of the best classical music recordings of 2015. His discography is released on the Marquis Classics, Orchid Classics, and Steinway and Sons labels. His new album, entitled Phoenix, will be released on the Bright Shiny Things label in October 2021, and will include Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Highlights last season included his debut with Orchestra of St. Luke's return engagements at the Baltimore Symphony, the Nashville Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony, and a North American and European tour with the Chineke! Orchestra.
Edvard Grieg
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) was a composer of international renown. He toured Europe and England as conductor, solo pianist, and accompanist to his wife, Nina (1845-1935), a soprano.
But just as Chopin has often been remarked to be the soul of Polish music, so, too, has Grieg been identified with Norwegian music. He wrote over 150 songs, many with words by Scandinavian writers, and his incidental music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and his Holberg Suite celebrate folk elements of Norway.
Tonight’s concerto was composed during an especially happy summer vacation with Nina in the Danish countryside. Grieg’s biographer, Richard H. Stein, rightly observes that the piece is full of the “joy of life, amorous longing, and youthful fire.” As frequently happens with works of art, the more specifically the creator mines local material, the more thematically universal the piece turns out to be. In other words, write what you know.
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
In traditional concertos, the orchestra gets to set the table for the soloist with the tunes to be introduced and developed. Unusually, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 begins with the solo piano, and while concerto composers have continued to use the traditional format (think Chopin), variations on that arrangement began to appear (Schumann, Brahms).
Tonight’s piece, which was premiered in 1869, begins with a timpani roll followed by an explosion of sound from the piano-- a series of A minor descending octaves and then ascending arpeggios.
But quickly the winds take over the business of introducing the first tune, an exploration of an E minor (the dominant of A minor) scale. The piano takes it up and then announces a skipping second melody, after which another melody, yearning, in the key of C major, appears.
This, then, is the material of the movement, in sonata form. The tempo marking is “allegro molto moderato,” which allows for great variety of mood. At times, the movement feels quiet and intimate; at other times, it springs ahead with clamor and energy. The pianist is put to the test technically with all the conventions of the keyboard: tremolos, trills, runs, thundering octaves, and arpeggios.
The second movement, marked adagio, begins with hymn like string playing, long mournful phrases in D-flat major punctuated by brief pauses. Color is provided by the French horn and the cello. When the piano enters, the right hand wanders languidly down the keyboard, then back up. But adagio doesn’t mean without bite, which is provided by a large passionate tune, stretches of chromaticism, rustling in the piano, and the prominence of a doleful horn. Musicologist Gerard Schjelderup suggests that this movement is a “lonely mountain-girt tarn which lies dreaming of infinity” (That’s a lake surrounded by mountains.) An apt description because the movement feels ruminative, almost improvised.
The third movement bursts forth without pause from the adagio. The form? Louis Biancolli identifies it as a rondo, referring to the excited little figure (built on a Norwegian folk tune) in the piano that stitches together five melodic episodes. Near the end the 2/4 meter changes to triple meter, characteristic of, according to Edward Downes, the “springdans.” Lively, syncopated! The concerto comes to a rapturous conclusion with everyone playing the sweet tune introduced about five minutes before by the flute.
The work received its premiere in Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 3, 1869, with the Norwegian pianist Edmund Neupert as soloist. (Interestingly, Franz Liszt sight-read the manuscript when Grieg visited him in 1870 and sent the young man on his way with these words: “Just you carry on as you have started; I assure you, you have the wherewithal for it…”)
PYTOR ILYICHTCHAIKOVSKY
Russian composer Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) wrote successfully in all genres: symphony, concerto, opera, chamber music, ballet, and song. For his efforts he received an honorary degree from Cambridge in 1893, but he seemed never to have been completely confident of his gifts and creations. As Wilson Strutte notes, “The real tragedy of Tchaikovsky is that he spent a great part of his life under the shadow of imaginary horrors created by his own sensitive and tortured nature.”
Events surrounding the composition and early history of the Symphony No. 5 bearout Strutte’s view. In April 1888, in new and beautiful surroundings in Froklovskoye with four symphonies behind him, he wrote to his friend Madame von Meck, “I am dreadfully anxious to prove, not only to others but to myself, that I am not yet played out as a composer.” (Far from it!) He finished the symphony by August, saying, “Thank God, no worse than the others.”
Unfortunately, the first few performances of the new work were not well received by the critics. Only later, in Hamburg, did the piece get enthusiastic notices, at which point the tender-hearted composer said that maybe it was not so bad after all.
This story is just one more to add to the list of poignant Tchaikovsky anecdotes. It reminds those of us who are not creative artists that there is no romance in any form of acute emotional distress. The miracle of creation is that it manages to keep demons at bay long enough for the work to get done.
SYMPHONY NO. 5
Pay attention to the opening notes in the clarinets; they’re the last ones you’ll hear about 50 minutes later, and you’ll have heard them many times throughout this brooding work.
The first tempo of the first movement is marked andante, but it feels like a funeral march; the melody touches on almost every note of the Eminor scale. The meter then changes from 4/4 to 6/8, but the slight swing in the step is merely ironic because the dark colors still dominate. This second tune, announced by the clarinets and bassoons, provides much of the material for the rest of the movement. A beautiful string bridge connects this slightly martial section to one that is suddenly light and mercurial, then absolutely passionate. The strings soar ,and all forces join in for a thoroughly rhapsodic scene. As for the rest of the movement, Edward Downes refers to it as “a battlefield of rhythms and sonorities.” The movement concludes quietly, but uneasily, in the lower strings.
If the opening melody of the second movement is ravishing, consider why: It is sung by the melancholy solo horn, over strings, then the oboe delivers the lovely second theme. Soon this passionate tune is passed to the strings, with echoes from other instruments. The wind section animates the proceedings with yet a third melody. The mood is suddenly broken by the trumpets, however, restating the first movement’s opening motto! Brass, and a fierce kettledrum, briefly hold sway. The struggle now appears to be between the yearning forces that began the movement and these harsh interlopers. Volatile swings in dynamics increase the tension: which mood shall prevail? When all is said and done, it’s the quiet, tender one.
The third movement is a grand waltz built around two themes. The first is expansive—a lush melody in the strings, with colorful touches by the winds. The second theme is a busy, brisk section whose ¾ meter seems blurred because the rhythmic emphases come in unusual spots. Tchaikovsky soon brings back the first theme, briefly overlapping the second. And then, quite remarkably, at the end of the movement, the clarinets trot out those ominous opening notes of the symphony.
How splendid is the beginning of the last movement! Taking up that signature motto once more, the orchestra parades it pastour ears with great nobility, and less menace than before. E major, not E minor! An intense drum roll leads into an allegro vivace section, inexorable in its forward motion. Listen forth is new jaunty tune and a second with an ornamental turn because they are the warp and woof of this movement. Brass reclaim the stage with a punctuated rendition of the melody while the strings swirl. Tchaikovsky paces the proceedings superbly, slowing for certain stretches, chugging along elsewhere, then charging ahead. At times the orchestration is remarkably transparent, with woodwinds prominent; at other times all forces are onboard. The piece builds naturally to a full-throttled, confident re-statement of the familiar tune in the strings. The brass have another go at it, and the coda is a strut to the end.
The piece premiered on November 17, 1888, in Moscow, with Tchaikovsky conducting.
Program notes by Paul Lamar