Program Notes

Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1555-1612) was among a group of Flemish and Italian composers who formed the Venetian school of composition in the late 1500s. In contrast with the pious Roman school, music of the Venetian school was more festive and colorful, using chromaticism, freer modulation, and even microtonal experimentation. The rounded architecuture of Venice's massive St. Mark's Basilica gave rise to new thinking on tonal colors, naturally occuring echos, and antiphonal placement of musicians up and down the interior balconies.

 

Ensconced at St. Mark's as first organist, Gabrieli composed and conducted brilliant instrumental and vocal works employing antiphonal choirs, echo effects and progressive instrumentation. In antiphonal music, one choir sings the first part of a phrase, then the other choir answers back with the rest of the phrase in a call-and-response fashion.

 

Canzon septimi toni No. 2 for two antiphonal choirs was published in Symphonie Sacrae, 1597, a massive collection of church music for up to 15 instruments. Among the instruments at hand were violin, cornett – a straight wooden tube with a cup-shaped mouthpiece – and sackbut, the direct ancestor of the modern trombone.

 

Gabrieli's joyful Canzonas form the core repertoire of modern brass choirs and have stimulated collaborations among professional brass players all over the world.

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– Ruth Wilson

Delphine Waltz was commissioned in 2022 by John Walz in dedication to his wife, Delphine. The original instrumentation is for flute, clarinet and piano and has been arranged for marimba, vibraphone and piano for this concert.

 

Delphine Waltz is part of a collection of chamber pieces of diverse musical languages and styles called “Songs Under the Sun”. Other titles are “The Gardens of Chamonix”, for marimba, vibraphone and piano, “Jabulon Trio”, for flute, marimba and piano, and “Con qué la Lavaré?” for soprano voice and piano. Although of different styles, they share a similar lightness of feeling.

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—Daniel Canosa

Richard Strauss loved wind instruments and he loved the music of W.A. Mozart, in particular the Gran Partita, an hour-long serenade for 13 wind instruments. The instrumentation of Strauss’s nine-minute Serenade for Winds in E flat resembles that of the Partita, the addition of flutes instead of basset horns being the main difference.
 
Mozart’s work was premièred in 1784; Strauss’s Serenade appeared 97 years later, in 1881. Between those dates, the design and capabilities of instruments had become more sophisticated, and instrumental music had become increasingly dense as the 19th century progressed.

 

The Serenade opens with a stately theme in sonorities akin to a cathedral organ. This is an inspired compositional device allowing the music almost to melt into a flowing melody that is mellow, warming, and spiced with countermelodies against a rocking accompaniment. The sobriety of the first theme makes the sensuousness of the second all the more delicious. After exploring the musical possibilities of the material heard so far, Strauss reiterates the two themes, now more briefly, and ends the Serenade with a sigh of satisfaction, a thoughtful flute having the last comment.
 
Strauss was 17 years of age when he composed this piece. We have no record of its reception but, with the benefit of hindsight, we can detect signs of the mature composer at several points, the extravagant use of the horns in particular, also the lush, swirling harmony that was to make such an impact in tone poems like Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel. This view is reinforced by the American critic, John Mangum, who remarked that ‘…the work is much more than simply a deft imitation of Mozart and Mendelssohn; it represents the young Strauss filtering and distilling these influences into something remarkably original.’

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– William Salaman, Online Programme Notes

The Serenade for Strings in E major was completed within a fortnight in the spring of 1875. Its atmosphere reflects an auspicious time in the composer’s life: Dvořák was enjoying his first successes on the concert platform, and he had also succeeded in acquiring a state scholarship for the first time. The work is a document of the composer’s exceptional sense of small forms. In five short movements, clearly constructed around a three-part song form, he exposes solid thematic material with the aid of rich imagery. The music of the Serenade flows easily and naturally with a sense of immediacy, its character idyllic and peaceable. A typical trait of the composition is its frequent imitation of themes in various voices; Dvořák reinforces the cyclical nature of the form by quoting the main theme of the first movement before the coda of the final movement. The Serenade in E major is one of the composer’s most popular and most frequently performed works.

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– https://www.antonin-dvorak.cz

I struggled for a long time to name this piece – which is part of why it has two names, Reconciliation and Rorqual. Rorquals are a family of enormous baleen whales that include blue whales and humpbacks. The name Reconciliation is based on the design of this concert, where the orchestra spends most of the time fragmented, only to come back together at the end. Indeed, Reconciliation (Rorqual) features various sections of the orchestra, sometimes alone, sometimes arguing with each other, and other times begging for understanding. Through a series of dance-like sections, the orchestra gradually unites for a triumphant finale.                                                                          

 

The opening chords and colors were inspired by a hike in the swirling fog of the Marin Headlands, but the melodies were too direct and the places visited in the music too varied to name the piece after one location. The ocean-based, natural origin of the music eventually led me to imagine the piece as a loose representation of the yearly, ocean-spanning migration of a great whale, with the grand finale an homage to the vastness and power of the blue and humpback whales.

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— Kevin Gordon