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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth (the concert opens with "...for our children's children" - a world premiere work by Kenji Bunch in honor of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial) Charles Ives Symphony No. 3 (Camp Meeting) Charles Ives received early musical training from his father and at age fourteen became the youngest salaried church organist in the state of Connecticut. In 1894 he entered Yale University, where he studied composition with Horatio Parker. After graduation, however, he moved to New York and became an actuary for the Mutual Insurance Company, writing and performing music part-time. Ives established the Ives & Myrick Agency (of the Mutual Insurance Company) with Julian Myrick in 1908. Ives & Myrick became one of the most successful insurance agencies in the country, but Charles Ives as a composer was not known to the public at all. Having abandoned the life of a “professional” musician around 1902, Ives published almost all of his works privately or through journals. Ives embraced this duality: I have experienced a great fullness of life in business. The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You can not set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance. There can be nothing exclusive about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life. My work in music helped my business and work in business helped my music. The music that became the Third Symphony began as organ works Ives composed for his own use when he was engaged as organist at Central Presbyterian Church in New York City. Ives used the pieces—a prelude (first movement), postlude (second movement), and communion music (third movement)—during services in 1901 and 1902. The three pieces are based on five well-known hymn tunes, but Ives was not interested in presenting mere variations. His goal was to create a formative aesthetic experience for his listeners through the deconstructing and reconstructing of recognizable musical elements. Listeners can enjoy the process of the elements coming together, but can also reflect on non-musical aspects if they know the texts of the hymns. Ives decided to recast these innovative works into a symphony around 1904. He scored it for a chamber orchestra with single woodwinds, two horns, trombone, and strings. Two hymns hold the work together as a whole: Charles Glazer’s “Azmon” (associated with the text “O for a thousand tongues”) and William Bradbury’s “Woodworth” (generally known through the text “Just as I am”). Fragments of these melodies occur in all three movements. Ives also provides a unifying context for the listener through titles that evoke the revival gatherings of Ives’s youth: the Third Symphony is called “The Camp Meeting,” with the movements “Old Folks Gatherin’,” “Children’s Day,” and “Communion.” This symphony is one of Ives’s most accessible works—especially if you recognize the hymns and remember that it was written by an organist. Composer Lou Harrison picked the Third Symphony out of a crate of manuscripts he acquired from Ives in the summer of 1945 for a concert of American music he was planning for the next concert season with the New York Little Symphony. Creating a performance score and parts with the help of copyist Carl Pagano, Harrison fell even deeper under Ives’s spell as his orchestra rehearsed the music. The Third Symphony had its official world premiere on April 5, 1946, with several other performances following in quick succession. The piece was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1947, after which the composer reportedly quipped, “Prizes are for boys. I’m a grown man.” Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Violin Concerto in E minor Felix Mendelssohn’s short career was certainly one of the most highly regarded of the nineteenth century. Raised in a wealthy Berlin banking family, Mendelssohn had the best general and musical education possible at the time. He was encouraged to pursue philosophy, including aesthetics, and also made a thorough study of literature. He traveled widely, managing to meet and befriend most of the influential figures in the arts and letters during his time. When he reached his mid-twenties, he was much in demand as a guest conductor and performer. With his prodigious intellectual and musical gifts, Mendelssohn developed an individual style of composition that falls somewhere between Classicism and Romanticism. As noted, Mendelssohn was well-versed in the literature of his day and did not shrink from trying to depict narrative and emotion in music — traits we generally ascribe to the Romantics. However, his musical tastes almost always pulled him back to the formal and harmonic language of his predecessors, the Classicists. His final formal post was as conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, where he also helped to found the Conservatory. Mendelssohn completed his Violin Concerto in E minor in 1844. This was his second attempt at a concerto for the violin, as he had written one in D minor in 1823. Around July of 1838, while based in Berlin, Mendelssohn determined to complete a concerto for his friend Ferdinand David, concertmaster at the Gewandhaus. It seems that he had a good grasp of the thematic ideas he wanted to use early on; he wrote to David, “the beginning [of the concerto] gives me no peace.” Working out the technical details and consulting with David about various passages, though, took another five years. Solidly virtuosic, yet simple in its conception, the E-minor Violin Concerto is reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which was first presented in 1843, but was based on an overture he had written seventeen years earlier). All the attention to detail created an immortal work, beloved by both performers and audiences for over 150 years. Jean Sibelius Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Opus 82 Jean Sibelius set his sights on becoming a violin virtuoso when he was fifteen. When he entered the University at Helsinki, his violin teacher labeled him a genius but he found that he could not overcome debilitating stage fright. Sibelius did not finish the violin course, switching to composition instead. His music was well-received while he was at the university, and after graduation he went on to study in Berlin and Vienna. There he discovered a great wealth of musical repertoire that Finland had simply been unable to provide. When Sibelius decided to write abstract symphonies, he drew on his education while retaining the heroic style that had been successful for him. He once described his symphonic composition process as being “as if the Almighty had thrown down pieces of a mosaic from Heaven’s floor and asked me to put them together.” In September of 1914, Jean Sibelius wrote to his friend Axel Carpelan, “I am still deep in the mire, but I have already caught a glimpse of the mountain I must surely climb … God opens his door for a moment, and the orchestra is playing the Fifth Symphony.” Sibelius completed a version of the Fifth Symphony for the festivities surrounding his fiftieth birthday and it received its premiere on December 8, 1915. This first version of the symphony was performed several times over the next few months before being withdrawn by the composer. For his next birthday, Sibelius gave the symphony a severe overhaul, making a new first movement from materials that had been two movements while also lengthening the piece by several measures. Carpelan was pleased: “The sounds of your Fifth are still ringing in my ears, richer, more original and more beautiful than any nature symphony since Ludwig [Beethoven] the Great.” Sibelius, however, was still not satisfied and put the symphony back in its drawer until he found time to work on it again several years later. Sibelius conducted the first performance of the symphony at the end of November, 1919, in a series of three sold-out performances by the Helsinki Philharmonic. With the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius again captured the hearts of his countrymen and eventually the world. By working on it for so long, Sibelius was able to craft a major work of stirring music that is meticulously organized but sounds quite free. The symphony opens with a horn call of rising fourths and continues with winds. The double reeds sing an exotic phrase with a triplet. When the strings enter, they play an undulating line that might sound like waves. The themes are developed in relation to each other without really reaching any kind of rhetorical climax. We hear the horn call again in a transitional passage that leads to the Allegro moderato (originally the second movement). Here the music resembles a folk-dance in triple meter. Under the dance, however, undulations and rising motives denote further developments. In creating one movement from what had been two, Sibelius spins out music that is more like a tone poem than a Classical sonata-allegro opening movement. Through this narrative we are also introduced to musical characteristics that pull the entire symphony together. The slow movement is a work of simplicity and stunning beauty, reminiscent of the slow movement in Beethoven’s Seventh. The Andante is built on a five-note figure that develops through several variations, while also foreshadowing elements of the finale. The final movement opens with the strings and a brisk chorale. Soon, we experience an overlay of the horns and the motive Sibelius referred to as his “swan hymn”—a theme closely tied to the rising fourths in the symphony’s opening and quoted briefly in the second movement. A beautiful counterpoint to the horns is added in the low strings. The music builds slowly from the misterioso base to the conclusion, which Sibelius marks with six precise sforzando chords. A performance of the Fifth Symphony was being broadcast from Helsinki the night Jean Sibelius died. It seems fitting that he left this world accompanied by music he believed had come from Heaven. © 2009 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth
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