ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Carter Brey was appointed Principal Cellist of the New York Philharmonic in 1996,
and made his subscription debut as soloist with the orchestra in May 1997, performing
Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations led by then-Music Director Kurt Masur. He has performed
as soloist in subsequent seasons in the Elgar Cello Concerto with André Previn conducting;
in William Schuman’s A Song of Orpheus with Christian Thielemann; in the Barber
Concerto with conductor Alan Gilbert; in Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote with Music
Director Lorin Maazel and with former Music Director Zubin Mehta; and in the Brahms
Double Concerto with Concertmaster Glenn Dicterow and conductor Christoph
Eschenbach, as well as with Lorin Maazel on the orchestra’s 2007 tour of Europe. The
Brahms was also performed at the Tanglewood Music Center in the summer of 2002 as
part of Kurt Masur’s final concerts as Philharmonic Music Director. (Brey most recently
performed Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in D with Riccardo Muti conducting in April 2010.)
Carter Brey rose to international attention in 1981 as a prizewinner in the Rostropovich
International Cello Competition. Subsequent appearances with Mstislav Rostropovich and
the National Symphony Orchestra were unanimously praised. His awards include the
Gregor Piatigorsky Memorial Prize, the Avery Fisher Career Grant and Young Concert
Artists’ Michaels Award. He was the first musician to win the Arts Council of America’s
Performing Arts Prize. Brey has performed as soloist with many of America’s major
symphony orchestras.
His chamber music career is equally distinguished. He has made regular appearances
with the Tokyo and Emerson string quartets as well as the Chamber Music Society of
Lincoln Center, the Spoleto Festival in the U.S. and Italy, and the Santa Fe Chamber
Music and La Jolla Chamber Music festivals, among others. He presents an ongoing series
of duo recitals with pianist Christopher O’Riley; together they have recorded The Latin
American Album, a disc of compositions from South America and Mexico (Helicon
Records). His recording with Garrick Ohlsson of the complete works of Chopin for cello
and piano was released by Arabesque in the fall of 2002 to great acclaim. A faculty member
of the Curtis Institute, Brey appeared as soloist with the Curtis Orchestra at Verizon Hall
and Carnegie Hall in April of 2009.
Brey was educated at the Peabody Institute, where he studied with Laurence Lesser and
Stephen Kates, and at Yale University, where he studied with Aldo Parisot and was a
Wardwell Fellow and a Houpt Scholar. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ilaria
Dagnini Brey, and their two children, Ottavia and Lucas. Among his outside interests are
marathon running, ballroom dancing and sailing.
UMD SCHOOL OF MUSIC
PRESENTS
IN GABRIELI’S GARDEN
UMD Wind Orchestra
Michael Votta Jr., conductor
Friday, November 2, 2012 . 8PM
Elsie & Marvin Dekelboum Concert Hall
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CLARICE SMITH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
43
PROGRAM
PROGRAM NOTES
IN GABRIELI’S GARDEN
GIOVANNI and ANDREA GABRIELI (1555-1612/1532-1585)
Canzonas and Sonatas (1597)
Canzon noni toni à 12
Sonata pian’ e forte
Canzon septimi toni No. 2
Canzon duo decimi Toni à 2
JOHN ADAMS (1947)
Chamber Symphony (1992)
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)
Serenade, Op. 7 (1881)
BERNARD RANDS (1934)
Ceremonial (1993)
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GIOVANNI and ANDREA GABRIELI (1555-1612/1532-1585)
Canzonas and Sonatas (1597)
Giovanni Gabrieli (ca.1553-1612) was born into the thriving Venetian musical community
at a time of musical synthesis and progress. He would become a catalyst for further musical
innovation during this era. Little is known of Gabrieli’s earliest years, except that he likely
was raised primarily by his uncle, Andrea. Andrea, who was employed as an organist and
composer at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, was undoubtedly a strong musical influence
upon his nephew. Like his uncle, Gabrieli traveled to the court of Duke Albrech V in
Munich, where he studied with and worked as an apprentice to Orlando de Lassus.
De Lassus composed in a style that was extremely cosmopolitan for his time, and his vast
output (more than 2,000 known works) exemplifies a high degree of sensitivity to the
intertwining of text painting, counterpoint and harmonic effect. Gabrieli would come to
incorporate many of these same elements into his compositions.
Gabrieli returned to Venice by early 1584, whereupon he assumed temporary
employment as an organist at St. Mark’s. On January 1, 1585, a competition was held to
select a permanent employee, and the younger Gabrieli was chosen to join his uncle in
full-time service to the church. Later that same year, Gabrieli was elected as organist to the
Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a Venetian confraternity. His duties for both St. Mark’s and
the Scuola Grande primarily consisted of performance responsibilities for regular Masses
and feast days, as well as for other Venetian celebratory events. Gabrieli officially began
composing music for these occasions soon after his uncle’s death in 1585.
The city-state of Venice enjoyed tremendous prosperity and independence from
significant external political and ecclesiastical pressures. Venice’s role as a center of trade
between east and west created an unusually extravagant and cosmopolitan atmosphere.
The center of Venetian culture at this time was the cathedral of St. Mark’s, where the clergy
were more directly responsible to the doge who reigned over the city than to the authorities
in Rome. St. Mark’s featured a grand musical tradition, dating at least back to Adrian
Willaert (ca. 1490-1562), one of the pioneering choirmasters of the cathedral. From the
earliest years of the 16th century, Venetian composers had written for multiple choruses, or
cori spezzati, to create complex contrapuntal and antiphonal textures. Giovanni Gabrieli
would bring this practice to maturity, composing works for up to five choruses.
Many liturgical motets were performed in St. Mark’s with instruments accompanying
the multiple choirs. At first, unspecified instruments could be used to simply double vocal
lines and strengthen the textures. Venetian congregations were accustomed to hearing
mixed ensembles of voices and instruments as a local performance practice. Sackbuts,
precursors to the modern trombone, and cornetts, trumpet-like instruments made out of
wood that are now extinct, were likely choices for these duties. Eventually, instruments
began performing these polychoral vocal compositions without the voices, and by the end
of the 16th century original works were being written for use within the liturgical service.
In 1597 Giovanni Gabrieli published his first collection of works, known as the Sacrae
symphoniae. This volume consisted of 45 vocal works and 16 pieces for instrumental
ensemble. The Sonata pian’ e forte was first published as part of this set.
In the late 1500s, the term “sonata” referred generically to pieces for instrumental
ensembles or solos intended for use in a sacred setting (as opposed to their secular
counterpart, the canzona). Gabrieli’s Sonata pian’ e forte is a very early example of a composer
including specific dynamic markings for the performers. Gabrieli notes “pian” when one
choir plays alone, and “forte” when both play simultaneously. This work is also one of the
In Gabrieli’s Garden
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PROGRAM NOTES
PROGRAM NOTES
earliest compositions to call for a specific instrumentation: originally one choir consisting
of one cornett and three sackbuts, and a second choir consisting of one viola and
three sackbuts.
Most 16th-century sonatas were sectional in form, and the Sonata pian’ e forte is
consistent with this tradition. The work is divided into five short sections, each of which
utilizes the antiphonal forces separately before using them together. As the work progresses,
the interplay between the choirs evolves from generally homophonic textures with slowly
changing modal harmonies, to be increasingly contrapuntal with more rapid harmonic
motion. In the first section, each choir is introduced through long independent statements
followed by a culminating phrase for the full ensemble. By the third section, the choirs
are interacting in vigorous dialogue, exchanging and developing melodic and harmonic
fragments at one-measure intervals. The final phrase of the work features all eight voices in
an independent contrapuntal texture. Most sacred vocal music of this period was polyphonic,
and in this work Gabrieli progresses from the simple to the complex in terms of texture
and instrumental usage.
In 1598 Gabrieli’s Sacrae symphoniae were reprinted in the Germanic lands north of
the Alps. As his music became widely known, many northern aristocrats sent their young
musicians to study with Gabrieli in Venice. Thus composers in their formative years were
exposed to Gabrieli’s style of polychoral writing in antiphonal textures, text setting and
the growing potential of instrumental composition. Through the publication of his
music outside of Venice and the direct propagation of his musical and compositional
philosophies, Gabrieli’s musical language would spread across the European continent at
the beginning of the 17th century.
—Note by Kevin Geraldi
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JOHN ADAMS (1947)
Chamber Symphony (1992)
The Chamber Symphony, written between September and December of 1992, was
commissioned by the Gerbode Foundation of San Francisco for the San Francisco
Contemporary Chamber Players, who gave the American premiere on April 12. The
world-premiere performance was given in The Hague, Holland by the Schoenberg
Ensemble in January 1993.
Written for 15 instruments and lasting 22 minutes, the Chamber Symphony bears
a suspicious resemblance to its eponymous predecessor, the Opus 9 of Arnold Schoenberg.
The choice of instruments is roughly the same as Schoenberg’s, although mine includes
parts for synthesizer, percussion (a trap set), trumpet and trombone. However, whereas the
Schoenberg symphony is in one uninterrupted structure, mine is broken into three discrete
movements, “Mongrel Airs”; “Aria with Walking Bass” and “Roadrunner.” The titles give
a hint of the general ambience of the music.
I originally set out to write a children’s piece, and my intentions were to sample the
voices of children and work them into a fabric of acoustic and electronic instruments. But
before I began that project I had another one of those strange interludes that often lead
to a new piece. This one involved a brief moment of what Melville called “the shock of
recognition”: I was sitting in my studio, studying the score to Schoenberg’s Chamber
Symphony, and as I was doing so I became aware that my seven-year-old son Sam was
in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the ‘50s). The
hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head
with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive, and
I realized suddenly how much these two traditions had in common.
For a long time my music has been conceived for large forces and has involved broad
brushstrokes on big canvasses. These works have been either symphonic or operatic, and
even the ones for smaller forces like Phrygian Gates, Shaker Loops or Grand Pianola Music
have essentially been studies in the acoustical power of massed sonorities. Chamber music,
with its inherently polyphonic and democratic sharing of roles, was always difficult for me
to compose. But the Schoenberg symphony provided a key to unlock that door, and it did
so by suggesting a format in which the weight and mass of a symphonic work could be
married to the transparency and mobility of a chamber work. The tradition of American
cartoon music — and I freely acknowledge that I am only one of a host of people
scrambling to jump on that particular bandwagon — also suggested a further model for
a music that was at once flamboyantly virtuosic and polyphonic. There were several other
models from earlier in the century, most of which I came to know as a performer, which
also served as suggestive: Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, Stravinsky’s Octet and L’Histoire
du Soldat, and Hindemith’s marvelous Kleine Kammermusik, a little known masterpiece for
woodwind quintet that predates Ren and Stimpy by nearly 60 years.
Despite all the good humor, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly
difficult to play. Unlike Phrygian Gates or Pianola, with their fundamentally diatonic
palettes, this new piece, in what I suppose could be termed my post-Klinghoffer language,
is linear and chromatic. Instruments are asked to negotiate unreasonably difficult passages
and alarmingly fast tempi, often to inexorable click of the trap set. But therein, I suppose,
lies the perverse charm of the piece. (“Discipliner et Punire” was the original title of the first
movement, before I decided on “Mongrel Airs” to honor a British critic who complained
that my music lacked breeding.)
—John Adams
In Gabrieli’s Garden
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PROGRAM NOTES
PROGRAM NOTES
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)
BERNARD RANDS (1934)
Serenade, Op. 7 (1881)
Ceremonial (1993)
Richard Strauss had just turned 17 when he composed his Serenade for 13 wind instruments
in 1881. In true prodigy style, he had already published a string quartet, a piano sonata,
some shorter piano pieces and an orchestral march, and his catalogue of unpublished
compositions included a full-length symphony.
As the teen-aged son of the Munich court orchestra’s principal horn player Franz
Strauss, the young Richard already lived in a world saturated with music. Franz’s musical
tastes were fairly conservative. According to Richard, “His musical trinity was Mozart
(above all), Haydn, and Beethoven. To these were added Schubert, as song-writer, Weber,
and, at some distance, Mendelssohn and Spohr. To him Beethoven’s later works, from the
Finale of the Seventh Symphony onward, were no longer ‘pure’ music (one could begin to
scent in them that Mephistophelian figure Richard Wagner).”
Strauss Senior was decidedly unsympathetic when it came to “new” music, and no one
was newer in late-19th-century Munich than Wagner. Stories abound about clashes between
Franz Strauss and Wagner, with the horn player railing against Wagner’s music while
playing it with incomparable skill and beauty. Even Wagner was forced to admit of Strauss
Senior that “when he plays his horn, one cannot stay cross with him.”
The beauty of Franz Strauss’s horn playing certainly influenced his son’s writing for winds
in the Serenade, which utilizes four of his father’s instruments along with double woodwinds
and contrabassoon (or double bass or tuba, depending on the available resources). The
teen-aged composer’s assured writing could also be attributed to his first-hand knowledge
of the orchestra. His father directed the Wilde Gung’l, an amateur orchestra that played
in a Munich tavern, and young Richard was a frequent and curious visitor at rehearsals,
and he eventually joined the orchestra, in 1885, playing among the first violins for three
years. Franz’s preference for the music of the Classical and early Romantic eras also seems
to have shaped his son’s early compositional efforts to a considerable extent.
The Serenade premiered in Dresden on November 27, 1882, conducted by the noted
conductor Franz Wüllner, who had led the Munich premieres of Das Rheingold and Die
Walküre, the first two installments in Wagner’s 14-hour Ring tetralogy, in 1869 and 1870.
The work is much more than simply a deft imitation of Mozart and Mendelssohn; it
represents the young Strauss’s filtering and distillation of these influences into something
remarkably original. The contour of the melodies easily identifies the 17-year-old as the
future composer of works filled with moments of achingly beautiful lyricism like Der
Rosenkavalier and, especially, his late opera Daphne, with its rich wind scoring.
The Serenade is in a single, sonata form (exposition of themes, development of themes,
recapitulation of themes) movement. Strauss’s use of sonata form, which was an innovation
of the classical era of Mozart and Haydn, reflects his immersion in the works of his father’s
“musical trinity.” The music itself is melodic and lyrical, with the second theme (prefaced
by a brief, minor-key transition) reveling in the rich, full sound of the 13 wind instruments.
The development section starts with the oboes over a series of sustained notes played by
the horns and the contrabassoon. A rising figure in the lowest instruments creates a sense
of anticipation as the development approaches the recapitulation. The recapitulation begins
with what is perhaps the most evocatively beautiful moment in the Serenade, as the horns
play the first theme with great warmth, which surely must have put a smile on Franz’s face.
The work ends gently, with the flutes, a gesture that offers a premonition in miniature of
some of Strauss’s ravishing writing for the soprano voice in his greatest operas.
—John Mangum
The music of Bernard Rands has established him as a major figure among his generation
of composers. Through some 90 works written in a wide range of performance genres,
the originality and distinctive character of his music has emerged and been described as
“plangent lyricism” with a “dramatic intensity” and a “musicality and clarity of idea allied
to a sophisticated and elegant technical mastery” — qualities he developed from his early
studies with Dallapiccola, Maderna and Berio.
Rands’s most recent commissions include orchestral works for the Suntory concert hall
in Tokyo; for the New York Philharmonic’s 100th anniversary, the centenary of Carnegie
Hall; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Philadelphia Orchestra; and the Internationale
Bach Akademie. Last season the Boston Symphony Orchestra Seiji Ozawa conductor and
Mstislav Rostropovitch soloist, presented the premiere performance of his Concerto for
Cello, composed for Rostropovitch’s 70th birthday celebration. Rands’s work, Canti del
Dole for tenor and orchestra was awarded the 1984 Pulitzer Prize and his orchestra suite
Le Tambourin won the 1986 Kennedy Center Friedheim Award.
Ceremonial is a monothematic composition in which a single, extended melody is
repeated ten times during the course of the work. The melody, first stated by a solo
bassoon, is subsequently played by various combinations of instruments, always increasing
in density and in complexity of timbre. This latter quality is the central concern of the
work, which employs unusual and unconventional mixtures of instrumental groups —
sometimes in extreme registers — in order that the melody is continuously transformed.
Each statement of the melodic theme is separated from the next by a dense harmonic idea
that serves to interrupt the forward motion of the melodic and rhythmic flow. At the
outset, both harmonic and melodic ideas float free of any discernible meter or pulse. As
specific rhythmic ideas are introduced and accrue in the percussion section, the music
gradually takes on a regular beat that propels it to its concluding climax. The mood and
pace of the music gradually, deliberately and inevitably moves through its rituals.
—Bernard Rands
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In Gabrieli’s Garden
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UMD WIND ORCHESTRA
ABOUT THE CONDUCTOR
UMD WIND ORCHESTRA
Michael Votta Jr. was Music Director of the North Carolina Wind
Michael Votta Jr., conductor
Flute
Trumpet
Grace Lee
Jenny Lehtonen
Meghan Shanley
Vanessa Varela
Avery Boddie
Steven Cunningham
Adam Janus
Ken Kupyak
Anne McNamara
Andrew Shebest
Will Yaeger
Oboe
Sarah Balze
Samantha Crouse
Emily Knaapen
English Horn
Emily Knaapen
Clarinet
Elise Bond
Emily Milanak
Emily Robinson
Adam Trinkoff
Bassoon
Clarisse Benson
Ronn Hall
Nick Ober
Jacqui Symon
Horn
Laura Bent
Isaac Julien
Matthew Pearson
Avery Pettigrew
Andrew Rudderow
Robert Williams
Trombone
Tyler Castrucci
John Crotty
Kevin Downing
Steve Omelsky
Orchestra prior to joining the faculty of the University of Maryland in
the fall of 2008. Critics have praised him as “a conductor with the drive
and ability to fully relay artistic thoughts” and for his “interpretations
of definition, precision and most importantly, unmitigated joy.” Before
his appointment at Maryland, Votta held conducting positions at the
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Duke University, Ithaca
College, the University of South Florida, Miami University (Ohio) and Hope College.
Votta maintains an active schedule as guest conductor and clinician in the U.S., and has
appeared in Europe and Israel.
Votta holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Conducting degree from the Eastman School of
Music where he served as Assistant Conductor of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and studied
with Donald Hunsberger. A native of Michigan, Votta received his undergraduate training
and master of music degrees from the University of Michigan, where he studied with
H. Robert Reynolds. As a clarinetist, Votta has performed as a soloist throughout the U.S.
and Europe. His solo and chamber music recordings are available on the Partridge and
Albany labels.
Tuba
Emily Grossnickle
Percussion
Robert Bowen
Laurin Friedland
Arielle Miller
Michael O’Neill
Erin Shupe
Piano
Luis Reyes
Violin
Jonathan Richards
Viola
Emily Cantrell
Cello
Jonathan Cain
String Bass
David George
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In Gabrieli’s Garden
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