The DC Concert Orchestra Society
presents a concert by
The DC Concert Orchestra
Randall Stewart, Music Director
Sunday, December 11, 2016, 3:00 p.m.
The Church of the Epiphany
Franz Schubert
Die Zauberharfe Overture (Rosamunde), D. 644
Max Bruch
Romanze for Viola and Orchestra in F Major, op. 85
Susan Russo, Viola
Carl Maria von Weber
Clarinet Concerto in F minor, op. 73, Allegro
Karin Caifa, Clarinet
Intermission (15 minutes)
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op. 67
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro
Contributions to the DC Concert Orchestra Society are greatly appreciated.
Randall Stewart, Music Director
Randall Stewart has had an active career as
a conductor of orchestras, operas, and
student ensembles throughout the
Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. He comes to
the DC Concert Orchestra having
previously served as the Associate
Conductor of the Columbia Orchestra and
Music Director of the Baltimore Sinfonietta. His recent guest
engagements have included the Catholic University Symphony Orchestra,
Anne Arundel Community College Orchestra, and the D.C. Youth Orchestra
Program. Maestro Stewart has also been active as an opera conductor,
having led performances of Catholic University's productions of The Merry
Widow and L'incoronazione di Poppea, as well as productions of Il Barbiere
di Siviglia, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Die Zauberflöte for coópera (New York
City).
A passionate advocate of American composers, Maestro Stewart has led
performances of works by Ives, Copland, and Barber, as well as
contemporary works by Eric Whitacre and Michael Daugherty.
A hallmark of his professional work is Maestro Stewart's commitment to
education. He presently serves as the Music Director for the SEED School
of Maryland in Baltimore, having previously taught in Baltimore and
Frederick Counties.
Maestro Stewart has studied with Gustav Meier, Kenneth Kiesler, Dan
Lewis, and David Searle. He holds a D.M.A. in Orchestral Conducting from
The Catholic University of America.
Susan Russo, Viola
Susan Russo earned a B.M. and M.M. in music
education at Temple University, where she
studied viola with Evelyn Jacobs Luise. Before
moving to the DC area, she taught elementary
vocal and early childhood music in Philadelphia.
She is currently occupied with raising her three
young sons, but enjoys making music whenever
she has the opportunity: as the violist of the Rubicon Quartet, a soloist for
the Friday Morning Music Club, and an occasional accompanist for her
church on Capitol Hill. When not making music, Susan enjoys long distance
running, collecting Star Trek novels, and drinking strong coffee.
Karin Caifa, Clarinet
Karin Caifa returned to clarinet playing in 2012
as a member of the NIH Community Orchestra.
Since then, she has been active in DC area
chamber and orchestral ensembles, including
the chamber and orchestral components of
DCCOS.
Karin joined CNN Newsource, the affiliate arm of CNN, in 2007 and has
covered three presidential campaigns, two presidential inaugurations, and
major domestic and international events.
Karin concurrently earned a B.A. in international studies from Johns
Hopkins University and a B.M. in clarinet performance from Peabody
Conservatory; and later, an M.S. from the Columbia School of Journalism.
While at Columbia, she was a member of the Columbia Summer Winds,
performing outdoor concerts in New York City Parks.
Standing Between Eras
In the history of Western art music, we typically divide the restrained,
formal style of the Classical period from the more expressive, often
programmatic style of Romanticism sometime between 1815 and 1825.
The truth is much more complex; traits of Romanticism can be found in
Haydn and Mozart in the 18th century, while the forms of the Classical era
remained important building blocks for many of Romanticism’s greatest
lights. Most of today’s concert explores music from the transition
between these eras, with three works from a roughly fifteen-year period
in which the Classical style was on the wane. On the other hand, Bruch’s
Romanze is a throwback to an earlier age. Written a century later, it was
anachronistic when it premiered, fully embracing Romanticism when it
seemed the rest of the musical world had moved on.
Overture to Die Zauberharfe, D. 644 (1820)
Franz Schubert
b. Vienna (Himmelpfortgrund), January 31, 1797
d. Vienna, November 19, 1828
Schubert is best known today for his prodigious song output, but he most
wanted to be known as an opera composer. Die Zauberharfe was a
melodrama with spoken text and music, premiered at the Theater an der
Wien when Schubert was only 23. Accounts describe a fantastic, early
Romantic story with magical devices no doubt intended to recall Mozart’s
Die Zauberflöte from three decades earlier, but it was an artistic debacle,
closing after only eight performances. The libretto and some of the music
were subsequently lost, and the overture was eventually published with
Schubert’s incidental music for a play, Rosamunde, long after Schubert’s
death. There is no evidence Schubert ever intended for this work to be
used in that context.
Schubert had absorbed himself in the style of Italian opera, and the
resemblance of this work to the lively overtures of Rossini is hardly
coincidental. Schubert had even written two “overtures in the Italian
style” three years earlier, and the opening and closing of this work are
freely adapted from the first of those, D. 590. The formal structure is one
common to operatic overtures of the Classical era, that of a truncated
sonata form, missing the development section.
Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 73 (1811)
Carl Maria von Weber
b. Eutin, Germany, November 18, 1786
d. London, June 5, 1826
Like Schubert and Beethoven, Weber was part of the first Romantic
generation whose lifetime is contained almost entirely within what we
generally consider the Classical era. Like Beethoven, he came from a
musical family, and his father hoped he would be a prodigy on the level of
Mozart, obtaining the best possible training for him once his musical
talents became apparent. His life was nearly as tragically short as Mozart’s
and Schubert’s, and while he was not as prolific, he made notable
contributions to the operatic and clarinet repertoire.
Weber composed three works for clarinet and orchestra, all around 1811,
and all intended for his friend and virtuoso Heinrich Bärmann, who
premiered this work at the Court Theater in Munich on April 5th of that
year. Bärmann had recently begun playing on a ten-key clarinet, a
significant technical improvement over the instrument Mozart had at his
disposal, and Weber was fascinated by the expressive, vocal quality of the
instrument. The first movement, which will be performed today,
represents a creative modification of traditional first movement sonata
form, both in the compactness of its thematic material and the expressive
range that the soloist is asked to explore in a relatively short amount of
time.
Romanze for Viola and Orchestra, Op. 85 (1911)
Max Bruch
b. Cologne, January 6th, 1838
d. Berlin, October 2nd, 1920
Bruch was a prodigiously talented composer whose reputation, even 96
years after his death, is somewhat inhibited by being known as a “poor
man’s Brahms.” A near exact contemporary (Brahms was five years older),
the two shared a musical conservatism that built on the legacy of
Mendelssohn and Schumann. Bruch held on to those values long after
Brahms’ death in 1897, composing music in a quintessentially Romantic
style at the same time that Stravinsky and Schoenberg were creating
stunningly modernist works like Le Sacre du Printemps and Pierrot Lunaire.
He is best known today for his Violin Concerto in G (1868) and Scottish
Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra (1880).
The Romanze was composed in 1911, towards the end of his career
teaching at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. This short but stunning
work represents an interest he was showing in the viola late in life, when
he also wrote a double concerto with the clarinet, along with a set of
chamber pieces with viola, clarinet, and piano. The structure of the music
is remarkably conservative: a fairly straightforward sonata form that is
stylistically indistinguishable from his works nearly a half century earlier,
when Romanticism was still in full flower. The viola soloist is given an
unusually sensuous line that allows the instrument to reveal its warmth
and potential for expression.
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (1808)
Ludwig van Beethoven
b. Bonn, December 16, 1770
d. Vienna, March 26th, 1827
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was the sixth to be premiered, as part of a
somewhat infamous marathon Academie (concert) at the Theater an
der Wien on December 22, 1808. The four-plus hour long benefit for
Beethoven included the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (their numbers were
actually reversed on the original playbill), the Fourth Piano Concerto, the
Choral Fantasy, and portions of the Mass in C Major, most of which were
premiers. Accounts indicate that the performance was not ideal; while
concerts during that period were longer than today, the sheer volume of
new music for the orchestra to learn was overwhelming, especially as its
technical demands reached the limits of all but a few performers of the
period. (Additionally, it appears that Beethoven’s famously cantankerous
personality did not sit well with the orchestra!)
The Fifth Symphony is one of the most, if not the most, written about
pieces of Classical music ever composed. Performers, scholars, and
audiences have attempted to divine its meaning for over two centuries.
The weight of the four note opening gesture has most typically been
identified with the idea of fate, with Beethoven’s assistant Schindler
claiming that Beethoven had expressly stated “Thus Fate knocks at the
door!” in order to indicate the true meaning of the work.
Beyond that possibly apocryphal story, however, Beethoven was curiously
silent. He was volatile, his life tumultuous in personal matters, and by the
time he wrote the Fifth Symphony he had notable hearing loss that had
not yet progressed to its most advanced stages. We know that he was
quite capable of writing programmatic titles when he chose to do so;
indeed, the Symphony in F Major (now numbered as his Sixth) that had
premiered a mere two hours earlier has such titles. In recent years,
scholars have proposed alternate, secret, political meanings, assuming
that Beethoven had to avoid the ire of imperial censors or the threat of
invading armies. Again, though, Beethoven left papers at his death that
were quite intentional in letting us know what he wanted us to think about
him and his works. The Heiligenstadt Testament, the alternately
tormented and dramatically suspect “suicide note” from 1802, is the
quintessential example of this. Beethoven left us no clues as to the
“meaning” of the Fifth in his papers.
What the Fifth is, on a structural level though, is plain. It is the relentless,
organic, working out, on a level not seen before, of a single musical idea.
The opening four note motive, whose rhythmic content outstrips the exact
pitch relationships in importance, permeates the four movements of the
work. A second important structural element includes the key
relationships within the symphony. Set in C minor, by Beethoven’s time
there were expectations of what key relationships would be explored in
the course of a four movement symphony. Most notably, Beethoven
utilizes the parallel major key in each movement- a notable departure
from standard practice, but one of a few unexpected departures. These
C major “interruptions,” something that would have been quite jarring to
Beethoven’s listeners, gradually transform the four-note “fate” motive
into something altogether different. The general tone of the symphony
gave inspiration to many of the per aspera ad astra (“over rocky roads to
the stars”) symphonies of the Romantic era, from Mendelssohn to
Mahler’s.
It is possible that the Fifth is simply part of a long working out of the most
advanced implications of Classical form and structure. While Beethoven
expands tradition, he does not entirely break with it: an elderly Haydn
could recognize the forms even when he did not completely understand
what Beethoven was doing. At the same time, the concentration of
emotional energy seems to transcend the technical implications of the
piece. On the other hand, if it is, in the words of noted musicologist
Robert Greenberg, an early example of Expressionism, then we can only
take our own emotional experience of the work to know what it was that
Beethoven meant.
The Theatre an der Wien, as it
appeared around 1815. Built by
the impresario who staged
Mozart’s final opera, it hosted
the premier of Beethoven’s 5th
and Schubert’s Die Zauberharfe,
and was Beethoven’s home from
1803-04.
About today’s soloists
The DCCO is a vibrant community orchestra whose members
come from all walks of life, with an immense talent pool.
Last spring, auditions were held from within the orchestra
for members to appear as soloists with the DCCO. Five
performers were selected to appear in concerts over the
next two seasons, including today’s soloists.
Program Notes by Randall Stewart
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[email protected]
DC Concert Orchestra Society
The DC Concert Orchestra Society (DCCOS) is a charitable, non-profit,
501(c)(3) arts organization incorporated in October, 2015 in Washington,
DC, with the following mission statement:
The DC Concert Orchestra Society brings classical
music to the metropolitan region while providing
performance opportunities and continuing education
for amateur adult musicians to enjoy a lifetime of
music-making. Through the D.C. Concert Orchestra
and through public and private chamber ensembles,
the Society seeks to provide quality performances for
new audiences and under-served populations,
enriching the cultural life of greater Washington.
The precursor to DCCOS started out as a Meetup group founded in July,
2007 which was devoted to amateur performance of chamber music. In
2011, from within this Meetup group, a chamber orchestra emerged.
Today’s DCCOS is comprised of two distinct components: the DC Concert
Orchestra (DCCO), appearing in today’s program, and the DC Amateur
Classical Musicians of (DCACM), devoted to chamber music performance.
The Society offers adult non-professional musicians collegial, noncompetitive environments in which they can maintain and improve their
collaborative musical skills. DCCOS is also actively developing its outreach
programming to provide chamber music and orchestral performances to
audiences facing life challenges.
The Orchestra gave its first public performance in 2012. In January, 2014,
Maestro Randall Stewart assumed the position of Music Director. Now
starting its sixth season, the Orchestra continues to experience significant
growth, and has shed its “chamber” label and now appears as a full
symphony Orchestra. Under Maestro Stewart’s baton, the difficulty of
repertoire has increased, the quality of performance greatly improved,
and the exciting voyage of meeting greater challenges has just begun.
If you’d like to learn more about, or perhaps participate in the DC Concert
Orchestra or the DC Amateur Classical Musicians, please visit us at
http://www.DCConcertOrchestra.org
https://www.facebook.com/TheDCCO
http://www.meetup.com/ACM-DCCO
Board of Directors
Robert Myers, President
Jack Aubert, Secretary
Yolanda Cole
Katherine Mariska, ex officio
Randall Stewart, ex officio
Officers and Staff
Randall Stewart, Music Director
Robert Myers, Executive Director
George Clarke, Treasurer
Yolanda Cole, Chair, Development
Cassie Conley, Librarian
Jack Aubert, Webmaster
Robert Loo, Webmaster
Donors
Corporate Sponsors
Bronze ($100-$249)
Connecticut Ave. Wine & Liquor
Hickok Cole Architects
New Orchestra of Washington
Sandra Ames
George Bedinger
Justin Boggess
Jon Chen
Danae Engelbrecht
Michelle Fevola
Domenica Gilbert
Rachel Goldstein
Kathleen Kelly
John Mariska
Katherine Mariska
Karin Peeters
Susan Russo
Julie Siegel
James Stanford
David Steinhorn
Jean Stoner
Platinum ($1000+)
Jack Aubert
Yolanda Cole
Cassie Conley
JoAnn Lynn
Robert Myers
Eric Won
Gold ($500-$999)
Franca Barton
Andrea Bufka
Joe Rosen
Nadia Sophie Seiler Memorial Fund
Silver ($250-$499)
Audrey Boles
Lois Gutowski
Dan Leathers
Cameron Lee
Randy Mueller
Lisa Wagner
d’Andre Willis
Nickel ($50-$99)
Siham Abdel-Naby
Katherine Cunningham
Edward Fizdale
Alexandra Hathaway
Lovancy Ingram
Kathleen McCormac
Carson Smith
Cumulative for the 12 month period ending November 30, 2016
To donate, visit: http://www.dcconcertorchestra.org/contributions.php
The DC Concert Orchestra Society is a tax-exempt charitable 501(c)(3)
organization. All donations are tax exempt to the maximum extent permissible
by law. No goods or services are offered in return.
Musicians
Violin I
Katherine Mariska, Concertmaster
Benjamin Bodnar, Asst. Concertmaster
Katherine Cunningham
Danae Engelbrecht
Alexandra Hathaway
Raycurt Johnson
Jules Kim
Vesper Mei
Karin Peeters
Nikila Venkat
Sophia Wallach
Steven Zaboji
Violin II
Carrie Esko, Principal
Clio Chimento, Asst. Principal
Emily Lanza, Asst. Principal
Rob Bigelow
Cassie Conley
Michelle Fevola
Domenica Gilbert
Lovancy Ingram
LisaKo Kawai
Annie Xiao
Viola
Susan Russo, Principal
Lisa Wagner, Asst. Principal
Humberto Gonzalez
Monica Greene
Art Slater
Elizabeth Steele
Darwin Walters
Samantha Wines
Cello
Kathleen McCormac, Principal
Jon Chen, Asst. Principal
Franca Barton
Edward Fizdale
Kathleen Kelly
Amy Suntoke
Eric Won
Double Bass
Douglas Rathbun, Principal
Michael Davis
Ruth Kennedy-Walker
Robert Loo
Flute
Yolanda Cole, Principal
Rachel Goldstein
Robin Pike (Piccolo)
Oboe
Andrea Bufka, Principal
JoAnn Lynn
Clarinet
Jack Aubert, Principal
Joseph Rosen
Bassoon
Audrey Boles, Principal
Dan Leathers
Susan Wilson (Contrabassoon)*
Horn
Justin Boggess, Principal
Edith Gilmore
Carson Smith
David Steinhorn
Trumpet
Randy Mueller, Principal
Ivan Acuna
Trombone
Julie Siegel, Principal
Bob Schmertz
James Stanford
Timpani
Kevin Stevens*
* Guest Musician