AMERICAN
September 30, 2023 - 7:30 PM Ann S. Richardson Auditorium
RSO Board of Directors
Jeanette Horan, President Michael Liebowitz, Treasurer Lana Afasieva Videen McGaughey Bennett Lori Berisford Jennifer Dineen Sarah Fox Lauren Mulvilhill
Jennifer Finnerty, Vice President Christopher Bennett, Secretary
Dan Sheehan Allison Stockel Joel Third Luis Uriarte Richard Vazzana
Music Director Yuga Cohler
Executive Director Laurie Kenagy Director of Marketing and Communications Jessica Hinkley Orchestra Staff
T.D. Ellis, Orchestra Personnel Manager Catherine da Cruz, Operations Manager Amy Selig, Librarian
Ridgefield Orchestra Foundation Board of Directors Michael Soltis, President Christopher Bennett, Vice President Armel Kouassi, Treasurer Barbara Dobbin, Secretary Donna Case
Nicholas Kilsby Sabina Slavin David Whitehouse
Nancy Holland Jeanette Horan Diana Kessler
Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra 77 Danbury Road, Ridgefield CT 06877 203.438.3889 | email@ridgefieldsymphony,org | ridgefieldsymphony.org
Yuga Cohler, Music Director “Cohler conducted with surety and security. The orchestra...played with a joyful sense of making a history.” — THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Yuga Cohler is a conductor and musical producer. He is the creator of multiple orchestral concerts presented by Lincoln Center that advance classical music as a culturally relevant institution, including K-Factor: An Orchestral Exploration of K-Pop, which garnered Lincoln Center’s youngest ever audience. He is also a member of isomonstrosity, a trio whose self- titled debut album combined contemporary classical music with rap and popular artists such as Danny Brown, Zacari, and Vic Mensa. Cohler’s work has been hailed as “musical genius,” and received acclaim from such media outlets as the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. Cohler currently serves as the music director of the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra. From 2015 - 2018, he held the music directorship of the Young Musicians Foundation (YMF) Debut Orchestra in Los Angeles, one of the foremost pre-professional orchestras in the country. Other orchestras with whom he has appeared in concert include the Juilliard Orchestra, Symphony New Hampshire, the Filharmonica Toscanini, the Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra (Japan), and the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, which he guest conducts regularly and led on a sold-out international tour that concluded at Carnegie Hall. In 2018, Cohler was awarded the Paolo Vero Orchestral Prize at the Toscanini International Conducting Competition as the only American participant. Among the other accolades granted to him are the David McCord Prize for Artistic Excellence, the Charles Schiff Conducting Award, a Career Assistance Award from the Solti Foundation U.S., the Ansbacher Fellowship from the American Austrian Foundation, and fellowships from the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Cohler is Artistic Director of the Asia / America New Music Institute (AANMI), a collective that pursues cultural exchange through modern music. With AANMI, he has performed over 20 world premieres at such venues as the Beijing Modern Music Festival, the Asian Composer’s League in Seoul, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Cohler appears as both conductor and executive producer on AANMI’s debut album, Transcendent, released by Delos Records in 2018. Cohler received his master’s degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied conducting with New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert. Prior to this, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, where he studied computer science. His senior thesis, Optimal Envy-Free Cake-Cutting, has been cited by over 50 articles in the academic literature. Cohler has appeared as a guest host of the nationally syndicated classical music radio show From the Top, as well as a speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
https://yugacohler.com/
Aubree Oliverson, Violin
"Aubree Oliverson played the Concertino for all it is worth, capturing its varied moods with passion, fire, tenderness and sorrow." — NEW YORK CLASSICAL REVIEW
Praised for her evocative lyricism and joyful, genuine approach, young American violinist Aubree Oliverson is proving to be one of most compelling artists of her generation, distinguishing herself with clear, honest, and colourful performances, which have been described as “powerful… brimming with confidence and joy” (Miami New Times) and “masterful” (San Diego Story). In demand as a concerto soloist, recent and forthcoming highlights include performances with the San Diego Symphony (under Edo de Waart), Utah Symphony (Conner Gray Covington), Puerto Rico Symphony (Maximiano Valdés), Pacific Symphony, Columbus and Des Moines Symphonies (Carl St. Clair), New Haven Symphony, Roma Tre Orchestra, Brno Philharmonic (František Macek), and the Pasadena Symphony (Nic McGegan), in works by Bach, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Haydn, Saint-Saens, Dvorak and Barber. In 2021, she joined the Louisiana Philharmonic for a two-week residency during which she performed Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (under Carlos Miguel Prieto) as well as chamber music. Elsewhere, she has worked with the Aspen Philharmonic, Redlands Bowl Orchestra, Boca del Río Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica, Cappella Istropolitana in Vienna, Kontrapunktus Baroque Ensemble, and the Orchestra of Americas (Carlos Miguel Prieto and Paolo Bortolameolli). In recital, having made her Carnegie Hall Weill Hall recital debut at age twelve, she has gone to perform to sold out audiences at the Grand Teton Music Festival, SOKA Performing Arts Centre, and the SCERA Centre for the Performing Arts, and has upcoming recitals in Rome, Los Angeles, and in Ridgecrest, California as part of Midori’s Partners in Performance Recital Series. She has featured on NPR’s From The Top numerous times. Aubree graduated from the Colburn Music Academy in Los Angeles in 2016 and is a former student of Debbie Moench, Eugene Watanabe, Danielle Belen, and Boris Kuschnir at the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien. She currently studies with Robert Lipsett, the Jascha Heifetz Distinguished Violin Chair, at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles. Ms. Oliverson plays a very fine Giovanni Battista Guadagnini violin kindly loaned to her by Irene R. Miler through the Beare's International Violin Society, and a Jean “Grand” Adam bow on loan from the Metzler Violin Shop.
https://www.aubreeoliverson.com
AMERICAN September 30, 2023 7:30 PM Anne S. Richardson Auditorium
Yuga Cohler, Conductor Aubree Oliverson, Violin
The Blue Room (Concerto for Violin & Orchestra) Reena Esmail (b. 1983 - )
Movement 1 Movement 2
Violin Concerto, Op. 14 Samuel Barber (1910-1981) I. Allegro ~ II. Andante ~ III. Presto in moto perpetuo Aubre Oliverson, Violin Intermission Overture to “Candide” Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story” Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) I. Prologue ~ II. Somewhere - III. Scherzo IV. Mambo - V. Cha-Cha - VI. Meeting Scene VII. Cool - VIII. Rumble - IX. Finale
Program Notes
THE BLUE ROOM (Violin Concerto) by Reena Esmail BORN: 1983, Chicago, IL
PREMIERE : This piece was commissioned by Robert Bolyard, conductor. It was premiered on April 14th, 2007 at Battell Chapel, Yale University with violin soloist Alexander Woods. INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, harp and strings PROGAM NOTES: Two years before I wrote The Blue Room, I had sketched out two themes that I wanted to turn into a violin concerto. It was only years later, when I was asked by conductor Robert Bolyard to write a piece for his graduation recital from Yale in 2007, that the piece actually began to take shape. The Blue Room is in two movements. The first movement contains the two themes from the initial sketch, essentially recreating a previous vision of the piece, and the second movement was my response to that vision. The title was taken from a poem called White Key, by the Poet Laureate of California, Carol Muske (the text of which I later set for choir). The line reads, “…like the light on the bed / In the blue room where I last held you.” The poem is such a poignant expression of love and loss and has resonated with me for years, since the day I first heard it. - program notes by Reena Esmail
Reena Esmail
VIOLIN CONCERTO, OP. 14 by Samuel Barber BORN: March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania DIED: January 23, 1981, in New York City COMPOSED: Summer 1939 through July 1940; revised in November 1948
WORLD PREMIERE: February 7, 1941, in Philadelphia, by The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, conductor, Albert Spalding, solois. The revised version was introduced January 7, 1949 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky, conductor, Ruth Posselt, soloist, INSTRUMENTATION: two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano, and strings, in addition to the solo violin. PROGRAM NOTES: When the Curtis Institute of Music opened its doors to students on October 1, 1924, Samuel Barber was second in line. It was a violinist who managed to pass through the portal before him: Max Aronoff, a future member of the Curtis String Quartet, the ensemble for which Barber would compose (a dozen years later) his String Quartet with its famous slow movement, often heard in its string orchestra setting as his Adagio for Strings. Barber’s musical gifts had been apparent from an early age, and he was fortunate to have been born into a family that was attuned to recognize them. Although his parents were not professional musicians, his aunt, the contraltoLouise Homer, was a mainstay at The Metropolitan Opera, and her husband, Sidney Homer, was well known as a composer of light Lieder of the parlor- song sort. At Curtis Barber studied piano (with Isabelle Vengerova), composition (with Rosario Scalero), and voice (with the baritone Emilio de Gogorza, who was a colleague of Barber’s aunt at The Met). While still a student there he produced several works that have entered the repertoire, including DoverBeach for baritone and string quartet (which he sang in its first commercial recording) and the orchestral Overture to The School for Scandal and Music for a Scene from Shelley. Thanks to a Rome Prize, he spent 1935–37 at the American Academy in that city completing, among other pieces, his Symphony in One Movement; it quickly received high- profile performances in Rome, Cleveland, and New York, as well as in the opening concert of the 1937 Salzburg Festival. The following year his reputation was cemented when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony broadcast his Essay No. 1 and the Adagio for Strings; the latter would become one of the most recognized compositions of the century. Barber was famous, and he was not yet 30 years old. In 1939 he returned to Curtis, this time as composition professor, and he maintained that position until 1942, when he traded his affiliation there for one with the U.S. Army Air Forces. During this period Barber composed his Violin Concerto, which also grew out of a Curtis connection. Samuel Fels, of Fels Naptha soap fame, served on the school’s board of directors, and in early 1939 he offered Barber a $1,000 commission to write a violin concerto for Iso Briselli, a Curtis violin student he was interested in assisting. Barber accepted. He got to work on the piece that summer while staying in SilsMaria, Switzerland. He moved on to Paris, where he hoped to complete the finale, but with the outbreak of war in August, Barber returned home to continue working on his concerto in America.
PROGRAM NOTES cont.: The finale was in part problematic because the violinist for whom the concerto was commissioned (and his violin coach) expressed displeasure with it. After provisional read throughs, including by the respected violinist Oscar Shumsky, Barber showed his concerto to the eminent Albert Spalding, who was reputedly on the lookout for an American piece to add to his concerto repertoire. Spalding signed on instantly, and it was he who introduced the work, with Eugene Ormandy conducting The Philadelphia Orchestra, following its extended gestation. — program notes by The NY Philharmonic
Samuel Barber
Leonard Bernstein
OVERTURE TO "CANDIDE" by Leonard Bernstein BORN: August 25, 1918. Lawrence, Massachusetts DIED: October 14, 1990. New York City COMPOSED: 1956
I NSTRUMENTATION: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings PROGRAM NOTES: The troubles and adventures of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide are nearly as varied and pitiable as those of Voltaire’s optimistic hero. Lillian Hellman may have suggested collaborating on Candide to Bernstein as early as 1950, a time when the composer was much involved in music theater projects. Trouble in Tahiti premiered in 1951 and Wonderful Town opened in 1953. (This was also the period when West Side Story was gestating.) In 1954 Hellman switched her attention – also diverted by a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee – to The Lark, her adaptation of a play by Jean Anouilh. Bernstein wrote incidental music for it, and the following year The Lark opened on Broadway, where it ran for 229 performances.
PROGRAM NOTES cont.: Thoroughly enthused about Candide , Bernstein persuaded Hellman to adapt it as a neo- Classical operetta, rather than the play with incidental music that she had envisioned. After a few out-of-town performances, the new work opened in New York City December 1, 1956. It closed less than three months later, after 73 performances. For a contemporary opera, that would have been a phenomenal run – for a Broadway show, it was a flop, for which Hellman’s book received most of the blame. Bernstein quickly moved on to other things, such as West Side Story and the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic. Candide had a few different performances in the 1950s and ’60s, and a new complete production in 1971 (with some new music by Bernstein), which opened in San Francisco and reached Los Angeles and Washington DC, but not New York. In 1973, however, it got a complete makeover, with Bernstein’s permission but not his participation. Harold Prince directed a cut-down and rearranged one-act version, with new orchestrations and a new book, for which Hugh Wheeler won a Tony Award. This version was then expanded back into two acts, with much of the cut music restored (although also reordered) in orchestrations by John Mauceri. It was premiered by New York City Opera in 1982. Mauceri then began yet another version for Scottish Opera, this time with Bernstein’s help. They restored much of the original order, with new work on the book (and connecting narrations) by John Wells (Wheeler having died). This was first performed in 1988, and provided the basis for the 1989 concert version that Bernstein conducted and recorded as his final thoughts on the work. Whatever the travails of Candide as a whole, its overture has become a hugely popular concert classic. Though it does touch on some of the show’s great tunes, the dashing overture is also a shapely sonata form with points of canonic imitation and a sparkling Rossini crescendo to close. - program notes by John Henken SYMPHONIC DANCES FROM "WEST SIDE STORY" by Leonard Bernstein COMPOSED : The musical West Side Story was composed principally from autumn 1955 through summer 1957, and Bernstein assembled portions of the score into the Symphonic Dances in early 1961, overseeing the orchestration for this version as it was carried out by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. The Symphonic Dances are dedicated “To Sid Ramin, in friendship” WORLD PREMIERE : The musical was premiered on August 19, 1957, at the National Theatre in Washington, DC; the Symphonic Dances were first performed on February 13, 1961, with Lukas Foss conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, in a pension fund gala concert titled “A Valentine for Leonard Bernstein”. INSTRUMENTATION : 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets plus E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bongos, suspended cymbal, cymbals, tenor drum, snare drum, bass drum, four pitched drums, xylophone, trap set, three cowbells, timbales, conga drum, police whistle, vibraphone, chime, woodblock, triangle, glockenspiel, tom-tom, guiro, maracas, finger cymbals, tambourine, harp, piano, celesta, and strings
PROGRAM NOTES cont.: THE BACKSTORY: Throughout his career, Leonard Bernstein struggled to balance the competing demands of his multifarious gifts as a composer, conductor, pianist, media personality, and all-round celebrity. Time for composition was potentially the most endangered in the mix that packed his date-book, and he had to take special care to see that it didn’t get entirely crowded out by his day-to-day obligations as a performer. That he left as large an oeuvre as he did is a testament to his astonishing musical fluency and to his embrace of a wide variety of American styles. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Bernstein was schooled at Harvard (where he graduated in 1939) and, following advanced work at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, returned to his home state. There he worked at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and was taken under the wing of Serge Koussevitzky, musical director of the Boston Symphony. In 1943, he moved to New York, the city with which he would become most famously associated. While working as assistant conductor to Arthur Rodzinski, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein stepped in at short notice—on November 14, 1943—to substitute for an ailing conductor (Bruno Walter) at a Philharmonic concert and, as they say, the rest is history. In 1958, he began a decade-long tenure as that orchestra’s music director. By that time, he was already making a mark as the first conductor to truly harness the power of the rapidly developing medium of television. A generation of music lovers received some of their earliest indoctrination through his Young People’s Concerts at the New York Philharmonic, a series of fifty-three broadcasts that began in his first season with the New York Philharmonic. (He continued to oversee the series until he handed it off in 1972 to Michael Tilson Thomas, then the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the Boston Symphony.) But Bernstein had already established a presence on television several years before he inaugurated the Young People’s Concerts. In November 1954, he presented his first special on Omnibus, a Sunday-night show that ran from 1952 through 1961, originally on the CBS network, then on ABC and finally NBC. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation and hosted by Alistair Cooke, it exemplified the medium’s highest aspirations, purveying insightful programming on topics in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Bernstein presented seven Omnibus installments on a variety of musical topics. His first, using Beethoven’s sketches for his Fifth Symphony to explore the composer’s decision-making process, became a classic. Bernstein included its script in his 1959 essay collection The Joy of Music, along with those of his other Omnibus topics, which included American musical theater, the innovations of Stravinsky, and the brilliance of Bach. THE MUSIC: As early as 1949, Bernstein and his friends Jerome Robbins (the choreographer) and Arthur Laurents (the librettist) batted around the idea of creating a musical retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set amid the tensions of rival social groups in modern New York City. The project took a long time to find its eventual form. An early version tentatively titled East Side Story, involving the doomed love affair between a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy on New York’s Lower East Side, was altered to reflect the more up-to-date social issue of gang conflict. Much of the composition was carried out more-or-less concurrently with Bernstein’s work on his opera Candide, with music flowing in both directions between the two scores.
Gioachino Rossini 1792-1868
PROGRAM NOTES cont.: As the production of West Side Story moved into the home stretch it was beset with several crises. Cheryl Crawford, the producer, got cold feet about what she termed “a show full of hatefulness and ugliness,” but her partner Roger Stevens jumped in to ensure that the project would continue; and the young Stephen Sondheim, who had been brought on as lyricist, snagged the interest of his friend Harold Prince to be involved as a producer. To everyone’s amazement, Robbins announced at the eleventh hour that he would rather spend his time directing than choreographing the show, thereby jeopardizing Prince’s participation; in the end, Robbins was persuaded to stay on as choreographer and was granted an unusually long rehearsal period as an inducement. On August 19, 1957, West Side Story opened in a try-out run in Washington, DC, with a host of government luminaries in attendance. (During the intermission, Bernstein ran into Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in tears.) It proved a very firm hit when it reached Broadway, running for 772 performances, just short of two years. After that it embarked on a national tour and eventually made its way back to New York in 1960 for another 253 performances, after which it was released as a feature film in 1961. “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” wrote Walter Kerr, critic of the Herald Tribune , in the wake of the opening in New York, and one might argue that his assumption remains true six decades later. West Side Story stands as an essential, influential chapter in the history of American theater, and its engrossing tale of young love against a background of spectacularly choreographed gang warfare has found a place at the core of Americans’ common culture. In the opening weeks of 1961, Bernstein revisited his score for West Side Story and extracted nine sections to assemble into what he called the Symphonic Dances. The impetus was a gala fundraising concert for the New York Philharmonic’s pension fund, to be held the evening before Valentine’s Day. In the interest of efficiency, Bernstein’s colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had just completed the orchestration of West Side Story for its film version, suggested appropriate sections of the score to Bernstein, who placed them not in the order in which they occur in the musical but instead in a new, uninterrupted sequence derived from a strictly musical rationale. Two of the most popular favorites of the musical’s songs are found in the pages of the Symphonic Dances: “Somewhere” and “Maria” (in the Cha-Cha section), though not the also-beloved “America,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “I Feel Pretty,” or “Tonight.” – program notes by James M. Keller The late Jack Gottlieb, who for many years served as Bernstein’s amanuensis, provided this summary of the sections of the Symphonic Dances and how they relate to the action in the well-known musical: Prologue: The growing rivalry between two teenage gangs, the Jets and Sharks. Somewhere: In a visionary dance sequence, the two gangs are united in friendship. Scherzo: In the same dream, they break through the city walls, and suddenly find themselves in a world of space, air and sun. Mambo: Reality again; competitive dance between the gangs. Cha-Cha: The star-crossed lovers see each other for the first time and dance together. Meeting Scene: Music accompanies their first spoken words. Cool: An elaborate dance sequence in which the Jets practice controlling their hostility. Rumble: Climactic gang battle during which the two gang leaders are killed. Finale: Love music developing into a processional, which recalls, in tragic reality, the vision of “Somewhere.”
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