Conductor
Joana Carneiro

featuring
Jonathan Biss, Piano

Jenni Samuelson, Soprano
Philip Lima, Baritone
Sonoma State University Chorus
Santa Rosa High School Choir
Santa Rosa Symphonic Chorus

John Corigliano: Fantasia on an Ostinato
Robert Shumann: Concerto in A Minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 54
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Dona Nobis Pacem, Cantata for Soprano, Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra

December 9, 10, 11, 2006
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

Joana Carneiro, assistant conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic, wowed audiences here when she guest conducted in February of 2005. Joana returns to present our holiday program, anchored by the magnificent choral work by Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem. Jonathan Biss, winner of the 2005 Leonard Bernstein Award, demonstrates his “huge talent” in Schumann’s piano concerto. Opening this impassioned concert is a composition by Pulitzer prize-winner John Corigliano, popularly recognized for his Oscar-winning soundtrack for The Red Violin.

John Corigliano: Fantasia on an Ostinato

John Corigliano was born in New York City on February 16, 1938, and is living there. He composed Fantasia on an Ostinato in 1985 as a piano piece (dedicated to Sheldon Shkolnik) for the Seventh International Van Cliburn Piano Competition. Between January and May 1986 he extended and orchestrated the work in response to a commission from the New York Philharmonic. Zubin Mehta led the Philharmonic in the world premiere on September 18, 1986. The score calls for two piccolos, three flutes, three oboes, three clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, a large percussion battery (xylophone, glockenspiel, vibraphone, crotales, snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum, roto-tom, brake drum, three temple blocks, crash cymbals, suspended cymbal, large tam-tam, triangle, tambourine, whip, and ratchet), harp, piano, and strings.

John Corigliano grew up in an intensely musical household (his father, John Corigliano, Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for twenty-three years) and attended the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. Though his style is generally conservative, he has experimented in various eclectic ways with diverse musical traditions, emphasizing tonal harmonies in a manner that is often markedly lyrical. As he remarked in a 1980 interview, “The pose of the misunderstood composer has been fashionable for quite a while, and it is tiresome and old-fashioned. I wish to be understood, and I think it is the job of every composer to reach out to his audience with all means at his disposal. Communication should always be a primary goal.”

Corigliano achieved that goal in 1991 with his opera The Ghosts of Versailles, produced at the Metropolitan Opera with extraordinary popular success. His Symphony No. 1, inspired in its emotional content by the AIDS crisis, received many performances and awards, including the Grawemeyer Award (equivalent in financial value to a Nobel prize), and his Symphony No. 2, for string orchestra, won the Pulitzer Prize.

The composer commented:

Fantasia upon on Ostinato is based on a famous repetitive passage by Ludwig van Beethoven (Symphony No. 7, second movement). That music is unique in Beethoven’s output because of a relentless ostinato that continues, unvaried except for a long crescendo and added accompanimental voices, for over four minutes. Beethoven’s near-minimalistic use of this material and my own desire to write a piece in which the performer is responsible for decisions concerning the durations of repeated patterns led to my first experiment in so-called minimalist techniques.

I approached this task with mixed feelings about the contemporary phenomenon known as minimalism, for while I admire its emphasis on attractive textures and its occasional ability to achieve a hypnotic quality (not unlike some late Beethoven), I do not care for its excessive repetition, its lack of architecture, and its overall emotional sterility.

In Fantasia on an Ostinato, I attempted to combine the attractive aspects of minimalism with convincing structure and emotional expression. My method was that of paralleling the binary form of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony ostinato by dividing the Fantasia into two parts. The first explores the rhythmic elements of the ostinato as well as the harmonic implications of its first half. The second part develops and extends the ostinato’s second half, transforming its pungent major-minor descent into a chain of harmonies over which a series of patterns grows continually more ornate. This climaxes in a return of the obsessive Beethoven rhythm and, finally, the appearance of the Beethoven theme itself.

Robert Schumann: Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 54

Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, on June 8, 1810, and died in Endenich, near Bonn, on July 29, 1856. He began work on what became his single piano concerto in mid-May 1841, at which time he composed the first movement (calling it Fantasie in A minor); the remainder of the work came four years later. He composed the final movement in May 1845 and the middle movement by July 16. Clara Schumann played the work at its first performance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus on New Year’s Day 1846; Ferdinand Hiller conducted. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons in pairs, as also horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings.

Robert Schumann intended to become known as a virtuoso performer, but a hand injury ended his hopes for that career and he turned more and more to composition. His early compositions were for the piano, his own instrument. And he found, in the person of the teenaged Clara Wieck, the pianist whom he regarded as his ideal interpreter and for whom he wrote virtually all of the keyboard music composed after their meeting. Even more, she became his wife and soulmate.

They married in September 1840. By the beginning of 1841, their union was proving fruitful in two ways. Clara was already pregnant with Marie, the first of their eight children, and Robert demonstrated his own fecundity with a new burst of music. He sketched the whole First Symphony in just four days, from January 23 to 26, completed the orchestration by February 20 and heard a performance under Mendelssohn’s direction on March 28! He pursued further orchestral plans. First came what he called his “symphonette”—the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale in E composed between April 12 and May 8. It was followed at once by a “Fantasie in A minor” for piano and orchestra that we now know as the first movement of the Piano Concerto, completed by May 20. Ten days later he began a new symphony in D minor, referred to as his second, though it was finally published—and is known today—as the Fourth. This he completed by September and followed at once with a never-finished symphony in C minor. Thus, in less than a year, Schumann wrote the better part of four symphonies and a good chunk of the piano concerto!

By the 1840s new concertos largely lost the classical balance of the concertos of Mozart and Beethoven. Now concertos seemed intended to show off the technical dexterity of the soloist, who was almost always the composer as well. Following the virtuosic path blazed by the violinist Paganini, pianists like Kalkbrenner, Thalberg, and Herz churned out showy but empty pieces. As a critic, Schumann had frequently attacked their shallow exhibitionism. His own concerto calls for a virtuoso player, but it never parades the difficulties for the mere astonishment of the audience, but rather for expressive purposes.

When he had finished the first movement Clara played it through—twice!—during a dress rehearsal of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in August 1841 while eight months pregnant. Schumann tried to interest a publisher in the Fantasy, but when no one appeared interested, he put it aside. It was nearly four years before he returned to it and made the Fantasy the first movement of a full-scale three-movement concerto, one of the finest of piano concertos to come after Beethoven.

Its completion came in another of those moods of exalted creativity that brought forth astonishing results in an improbably short time. The Fantasy provided a convenient platform from which to dive into composition anew by connecting the new second and third movements to the thread of the movement already written. So fully did he re-enter the spirit of the earlier movement that one would never guess at a four-year gap during the composition of the whole.

The piano is, of course, the pre-eminent participant in the concerto, but equally wonderful is the variety of chamber music textures that Schumann finds in the orchestra, with orchestral soloists or small groups taking it upon themselves to intertwine with the pianist or to extend or contradict the piano’s musical ideas.

Following the opening outburst of dotted chords tossed off by the fistful, Schumann presents the principal—indeed, almost the only—thematic idea in the movement, a pensive lyric melody that begins with three descending notes. That melody comes back in many guises—in C major as the second theme, in A-flat to start the development with the air of an intimate sonata for clarinet and piano, and finally, after the cadenza, in a speeded up march rhythm for a stirring close.

Schumann called the slow movement an “Intermezzo.” It offers a change-of-pace, an interlude between the two large outer movements, filled with delicate and pensive touches and another example of Schumann’s way of creating a new melody (the yearning second subject) out of a tiny figure heard at the climax of the movement’s opening phrase.

As the Intermezzo runs its course, distant recollections of the concerto’s opening explodes into an exuberant rondo based on the main theme of the first movement. It is, in part, Schumann’s rhythm that keeps this music perpetually fresh, and the most striking rhythmic passage in the piece (and the trickiest) comes at the second theme of the finale, where rests create the effect of one broad bar of 3/2 time in the place of two bars of 3/4. Schumann’s sense of scale and proportion never deserts him, and the close of the last movement is at once shapely in form and irresistible in its verve.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Dona nobis pacem, Cantata for Soprano, Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on October 12, 1872, at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England, and died in London on August 26, 1958. He composed Dona nobis pacem in 1936, assembling appropriate texts from various sources, for the Huddersfield Choral Society, which sang in the premiere, led by Albert Coates in Huddersfield on October 2, 1936, with the Hallé Orchestra. Renée Flynn and Roy Henderson were the vocal soloists. The orchestral score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets (two optional), five trombones (two optional), tuba, timpani, percussion, bells, harp, optional organ, and strings.

During much of his long life, Ralph Vaughan Williams was widely regarded as the most important English composer of his generation, taking the baton passed from Edward Elgar and later passing it on himself to Benjamin Britten.

But Dona nobis pacem is, in a sense, a Vaughan Williams score with links both back to Elgar and ahead to Britten. As a large work for chorus and orchestra commissioned for a British choral organization—he wrote it for the centennial of the Huddersfield Choral Society in 1936—he was filling the shoes that Elgar had frequently filled in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. And the character of the work—an anti-war composition that was clearly shaped by the rumbles of potential war coming from the Continent, and one that introduces poetry in English into a Latin liturgical text from the Mass—foreshadows Britten’s 1962 masterpiece, the War Requiem.

Vaughan Williams did not carry any romantic views of military glory. Though he had been too old to enlist as a soldier in World War I, he had signed up for the ambulance corps, and in that position he had seen more than enough carnage to convince him that war could be nothing but a catastrophe for all concerned.

The composer himself assembled the very diverse passages of text. After the Latin beginning, with its dark opening prayer, he unleashes war’s frenzy to Walt Whitman’s vivid evocation of the sounds and the effect of brutality of combat.

The next section, again from Whitman, strikingly recognizes in the corpse of the enemy solder “a man divine as myself,” and the poet offers a farewell kiss. This is a particularly strong anticipation of Britten’s War Requiem, in which one soldier—unaware that he himself has died—walks down a long tunnel filled with bodies. One of them springs up in recognition and tells him, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”
Vaughan Williams had set Whitman’s “Dirge for Two Veterans” in 1914 and salvaged for this work, evoking the stillness of the night, interrupted by the funeral procession. A somber, but noble funeral march in C brings the two veterans—who are father and son—to their final resting place.

The baritone sings words that were part of a speech given by John Bright in Parliament at the time of the Crimean War. The soprano and chorus repeat their plea for peace. In the reassuring and optimistic final movement, the baritone offers the prophecies of Daniel and Haggai, while the chorus sings the promise of Micah, “Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation.” All participants join in the final expression—which, in the context, is one of hope as much as it is a promise—“on earth, peace, good-will toward men,” followed once more by the soprano’s gentle repetition of the Latin prayer that opened the cantata: “Grant us peace.”

Please see the program insert for text.