Concerts

Our 2008-2009 Season: Musical Neighbors of Note!

All performances took place in the beautiful College of Southern Idaho Fine Arts Auditorium.

Youth Soloists Concert

Sunday October 5th, 4:00 PM

ANDREW BORTZ went looking for a challenge and didn’t stop with the piano. As a Twin Falls High School junior he has enjoyed music in many forms and found success in singing, having earned a place in the All-State and All-Northwest choruses for two years. Andrew looks forward to studying composition at a major conservatory and proudly reports that he just recently submitted his first entry in a contest, commenting that composition is just like music “flowing through me.” Andrew has studied piano since the age of six, first with Teddy Snow and later with Linda Aufderheide.

ARAM KHACHATURIAN (1903–1978) would have envied a 6-year-old who had piano lessons. Born into a humble Armenian family, his bookbinder father was finally able to send him to Moscow to study music at age 20. Shortly after graduating the Moscow Conservatory in 1934, he earned international acclaim with his piano concerto. Khachaturian’s exuberant approach to the folk music of his homeland expressed in a late Romantic idiom with its tricky rhythms and virtuoso climaxes was apparently poorly understood by the Soviet Communist Party, inclined as they were to extend political control to the arts. Khachaturian’s music was criticized as “too complicated.” Yet, the composer managed to regain favor, later to be appointed professor of composition at Moscow Conservatory and tour the United States to perform with American orchestras.

BRIAN THOMSEN brings years of study of his concerto to his performance, perhaps because there is little classical literature for his instrument, but he still finds appeal in the variety of moods: from almost a Celtic jig to folk sounds. Brian has played alto sax for eight years, studying with Linda Aufderheide, previously competing at the national level in the National Music Teachers Association concerto contest.

At age 19 and home-schooled, Brian has completed his formal education for now and concentrates on his entrepreneurial endeavor: a busy lawncare business where he employs his siblings.

ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV (1865–1936) was fascinated by the saxophone and jazz. He had firmly established his traditional classical credentials, rising to appointment as Director of St. Petersburg Conservatory and publishing wellregarded symphonies, string quartets, and concerti. His compositions found less favor after the October 1917 revolution, however, when the Soviets endeavored to control artistic expression. Glazunov felt fortunate to be granted leave to travel to Vienna in 1928, then managed to extend his leave with one illness after another. During that time his creative attention focused on a saxophone quartet and his now-famous concerto for alto saxophone, saving for it the professional polish of his maturity and experience. And for that the Soviets criticized him as too influenced by “Western Bourgeois culture,” citing the saxophone concerto. Glazunov never returned to Russia during his lifetime and likely never heard his saxophone concerto performed, but scholars have termed the last eight years of his life “the saxophone concerto years.”

EMILY VANDEN BOSCH has a music teacher’s dream attitude, insisting that she is sincerely thankful to be able to practice every day. It served her well in her preparation for this, her first concerto performance, playing a piece that is at once very technical and very pianistic and always beautiful. She turned to Jay Mauchley, with whom she currently studies, for help with voicing problems, and looks forward to the new experience with the ensemble musicianship required for work with an orchestra.

Emily, now a third-year student at the University of Idaho, majoring in piano performance, music education, and Spanish, hopes to teach high school band.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809–1847) grew up in a privileged home with music as his constant companion. Under the tutelage of their pianist mother, Mendelssohn and his famous sister, Fanny, began performing for the family’s Sunday musicales at a young age. Some of Mendelssohn’s most popular compositions survive from those impromptu events, revealing early emotional maturity and technical ability that advanced the innovations of Mozart and Beethoven, including his first piano concerto, composed at age 22. Hints of that carefree childhood, and the welcome departure from the hammering style of contemporary Franz Liszt, can be heard throughout. The entire concerto was composed in one 3-day visit to Munich during which all eyes were on the lovely pianist, Delphine von Schauroth, perhaps explaining the abbreviated and breathless form requiring non-stop virtuosity and suspended only by a lyrical second theme. Some even hear Mendelssohn’s heart racing.

Symphony No. 1 in C

by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Visualize hunting for a friend’s house in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knocking on this door, then trying that one. Beethoven opened his first symphony as if searching: first an unprecedented jarring dissonant chord, then two more chords experimenting ever so briefly with two other keys, teasing before settling into the comfortable ceremonial key of C major. By the turn of the nineteenth century he had successfully mastered the smaller musical forms, composing brilliantly for piano. But as a student of the great Haydn, today called “father of the symphony,” Beethoven faced inevitable comparisons. His first effort was abandoned. Wrong door. When he premiered what we now know as his first symphony, his audience heard the fresh approach to the genre and called it a masterpiece. New neighborhood; right door.

At the height of his “classical period” and straying little from the established form, Beethoven presents the expected four-movement symphonic force majeure. An inventive first movement of playful energy leads to a graceful if not profound andante con moto, teasing in the manner of a fugue without succumbing to the form. Even his menuetto is more like a carefree and laughing scherzo. But the best surprises are saved for last: the rising scale the violins have difficulty completing, the unexpected key of B-flat, the jousting between the first and second violins concluding in an irrepressible conviviality. All is scored richly (“too many winds” according to one critic) with “considerable art, novelty, and wealth of ideas,” reported an influential newspaper at the time.

In hindsight, we now think the newness of a Beethoven symphony fitting for the dawn of a new century. It was audacious. This experiment of a genius now brought a frightening new vision of music no longer circumscribed by social graces but expressive of strong emotions, ushering in a new school of music, called “romantic.”

Prelude to Die Meistersinger

by Richard Wagner (1813–1883)

Richard Wagner chose for his only comic opera a plot already overused: earnest young poet yearns to win the heart of the lovely and rich Eva by winning a contest, a singing contest. It was a story appealing to an 1860s German audience, familiar with 16th century guilds of craftsmen and apprentices, including the Mastersingers.

The Prelude, composed first, methodically previews the thematic material to come, opening with a pompous march to illustrate the splendid guild-sponsored ceremonies that kept music and poetry close to everyday lives. A yet heavier march follows, broken here and there with hints of the winning song and reminders of Eva’s love theme, as the Mastersingers and revelers parade to the riverside venue for the singing contest. The “Meistersinger” theme details in fugue the contest itself in the central section of the prelude, with opposing sides asserting their themes, with the winning song gaining prominence, and with Wagner poking fun at the leading contestant with cackling asides by the winds and trilling in the strings. The climax of the fugue subsides to the brass, announcing in thundering grandeur the first “Meistersinger” theme and leading into a climax of Wagnerian genius in which three themes and a fragment of the fourth are heard simultaneously while the prize-winning song of the poet carries above it all. The music swells into a festive hubbub of orchestral brilliance celebrating music itself, and the Die Meistersingers.

One envisions a masterpiece of such cleverness and magnitude and enduring popularity to have been a time-consuming and meticulous effort. Wagner denied this during his lifetime, recalling it more as a process of inspiration:

“As from the balcony of my flat, in a sunset of great splendor, I gazed upon the magnificent spectacle of ‘golden’ Mayence, with the majestic Rhine flooding its outskirts in a glory of light, the Prelude to my Meistersinger again suddenly made its presence close and distinctly felt in my soul. Once before had I seen it rise before me out of a lake of sorrow, like some distant mirage, I wrote down the prelude exactly as it appears today in the score…”

Fall Concert

Tuesday November 11th, 7:30 PM

REBECCA PRESCOTT, graduate of Jerome High School and Music and Theater major at Boise State University, now performs with Vox3 in Chicago. In recital with the company, a rising vocal group of young singers, critics found her voice “seemed to shine with the range and mood of the music.”

From Idaho to Vox3, Ms. Prescott has compiled an impressive resume in musical theater. She performed lead roles with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival and Idaho Theatre for Youth before moving to northern California to join the Sierra Repertory Theatre company, where she was awarded an honorable mention for acting in the Backstage West/ Dialogue awards. She then moved to the Chicago area and earned a Master of Music in Vocal Performance at Chicago College of Performing Arts, along the way working with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Eclipse Theatre, Gilbert & Sullivan Society, and Light Opera Works. For her ensemble work with The Bailiwick Theater she was awarded an After Dark award.

As Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ms. Prescott achieved critical acclaim, calling her “a standout. Well focused top notes, great tone and projection as well as amusing comic abilities make her perfect as a Savoy heroine.” Prescott will reprise “A Simple Sailor Lowly Born” from that performance.

Ms. Prescott plans also display her theatric versatility with a sampling of the hits of Broadway’s golden age, including “Summertime” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) and “I Feel Pretty” from Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story (1957). She plans to add familiar leading lady love-song showstoppers like “‘Til There Was You” from Willson’s Music Man (1957), and there will be other surprises.

A full calendar of appearances will call Ms. Prescott back to Chicago: the January 2009 premier of Ricky Ian Gordon’s song cycle Orpheus and Euridice with her new husband, Amos Gillespie, and brother, Matthew Prescott; then in June 2009 in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s four-person opera, Greek, both with Chicago Opera Vanguard. She has already sung the role of Maureen Reagan in Eric Reda’s world premier of Reagan’s Children with this contemporary opera company. In December Ms. Prescott will be a featured soloist for the Season of Concern AIDS benefit concert, where two song cycles will be written for her.

In her rare spare time, Ms. Prescott loves to lift heavy weights, watch Star Trek, eat chocolate, and keep up with her nieces and nephews. More information and pictures from prior roles can be seen at www.vox3.org/members.

Music In War

We honor our veterans with music at a time in history when it seems that music has no role in war, except maybe the image of the occasional soldier equipped with earbuds and iPod captured on camera. Time was in the history of our country when war without music was unthinkable.

Revolutionary War forces depended, for instance, on music to communicate. Drums, chosen for their durability and ease of operation, and fifes (small piccolo-like wood and metal instruments) which were easily transported and audible above gunfire and battlefield din, were essential to the war effort. A company of 100 soldiers had a minimum of four musicians, insuring a drummer and fife player posted alongside the commander around the clock. Familiar cadences and ditties communicated every order from battlefield tactics to the daily schedules for life in camp. Harming the opponent’s musicians was off-limits, a kind of early “war crime.”

By the time of the Civil War, brass instruments were in wide use, drums were more sophisticated, and whole bands led soldiers into battle. A staggering number of musicians were mustered into the service of both the Union and the rebels. President Abraham Lincoln shrewdly recognized the power of music to mobilize the troops, to build morale in camp, to worship the Almighty, and to soothe heartache back home. One Lincoln biographer has written that, although Lincoln was no musician and couldn’t even sing well, more than any president before or since, he was sung to and played for more often, and appreciated it more. He knew as well as any that the song on one’s lips proclaimed one’s loyalties and could prompt a riot.

The Symphony recalls the music of the Civil War with the work of American composer and arranger for West Point and University of Michigan Marching Bands Jerry Bilik (1933– ). His American Civil War Fantasy is a tone poem tapestry of the sounds familiar to Lincoln, songs for which the President would have known all the words. It opens with popular tunes from American daily life like “Listen to the Mockingbird” and “Camptown Races” until one hears the distant drums and strain of “John Brown’s Body” and oncoming conflict, “Maryland, My Maryland” (“O Tannenbaum”) for the South and “The Battle Cry of Freedom” for the Union. The sentimental “Just Before the Battle, Mother” foretells the inevitable escalation of intensity and volume until the percussion section unleashes fullscale battle, finally resolving into the familiar “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

By World War II, music in the service of patriotism was important to the American way, thanks in part to the works of John Philip Sousa and his band. Big band jazz, the popular favorite of the thousands of young recruits even contributed to the war effort as name musicians and whole bands enlisted, calling to memory now the sad loss of patriotic bandleader Glenn Miller in the European theater.

Even today, it is music that can rekindle the emotions of war. When Steven Spielberg set out to tell the story of a World War II soldier whose brothers had all died in battle, he engaged John Williams to score the impossible: strategic silence. Williams has been known for, if anything, an heroic style heard in Olympic fanfares and space cowboy fantasy adventure odysseys. Spielberg instead portrayed the unvarnished horror of battle—death, destruction, chaos—all action, no music. Then to sharpen the emotional focus, Williams scored the interludes of quiet reflection, writing a series of “remembrances.”

With themes too subtle to call attention to themselves or to leave an audience humming, Williams took charge of the raw passions lingering after the disarray of battle, making sense of the sadness with tinges of hope, leaving us to feel the haunting emptiness of war even without film images.

The centerpiece is the “Hymn to the Fallen,” which is described by Spielberg in the liner notes to the Boston Symphony Orchestra recording as “a memorial for all the soldiers who sacrificed themselves on the altar of freedom in the Normandy Invasion of June 6, 1944,” and which will “stand the test of time and honour forever the fallen of this war and, possibly, all wars.” It has been said that during the recording session musicians of the BSO found themselves in tears, so moved by the message and the music.

Variations on a Korean Folk Song

by John Barnes Chance (1932–1972)

The Korean folk song “Arirang” (pronounced AH-dee-dong), captured the fascination of American composer John Barnes Chance during his service with the U.S. Army in Korea in the late 1950s. This simple tune of typical Korean folk melancholy, possibly reflecting the country’s long history of internal conflict and foreign domination, is revealed to be quite complex at the hand of Chance. In the five variations Chance masterfully captures the spirit and mood of the simple tune with such common variation techniques as inventions of rhythm, inversion, scales, and chord harmonies.

His Variations on a Korean Folk Song, initially for concert band, won the 1966 Ostwald Award for the American Bandmasters Association, and has become a classic of the concert literature.

Winter Concert

Friday February 27th, 7:30 PM

JOSÉ LUIS EGUILUZ, a native of Bilbao, Bizkaia, in Spain, began his musical training at the age of eight in Balbao’s Superior Conservatory of Music, undertaking a comprehensive program of solfège, theory and history of music, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, acoustics, and trumpet and piano performance.

As a young adult he focused his musical training toward conducting in Vienna, Austria, with Karl Ernst Hoffman and Swedish choral master, Eric Ericson. He went on to establish his identity as an orchestral conductor through an extended 6-year orchestral conducting apprenticeship under the guidance of Maestro Alberto Blancafort.

Maestro Eguiluz currently conducts a wide range of opera, as well as orchestral and Zarzuela (Spanish musical theater combining dance, operatic and popular songs) works in the Basque Country and abroad, and has won numerous Zarzuela awards throughout Spain. His most recent concert was with the Ukrainian State Orchestra of Kiev, and he makes frequent guest appearances with the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta Barroca Simón de Huarte of Bilbao, Sotto Voce Orchestra of San Sebastian, the Orquesta Lírica de Bilbao, the Orquesta Sinfónica Donostiarra of San Sebastian, and Bilbao’s Municipal Band. He has also collaborated with many choirs throughout Spain and conducts in the leading concert halls of the country such as the Auditorio Nacional of Madrid, Bilbao’s Palacio Euzkalduna, the Kursaal in San Sebastian and Baluarte of Pamplona.

With his extensive background in Basque folk music, Maestro Eguiluz has frequently been commissioned to arrange and compose Basque music for historical projects and for dance accompaniment. He began his contact with Idaho in 1988 when the Government of the Basque Autonomous Region sent him to advise Boise’s Biotzetik Basque Choir during its formative years. His contact with the Boise Basque Community has remained constant and he frequently works on projects with his Boise friends. He will conduct the Boise Philharmonic’s April 2009 concert.

In addition to music, Maestro Eguiluz maintains a dual career and dedicates the rest of hisv time to teaching Classical Languages at the High School level. He serves on several European education commissions and is currently on sabbatical from his job as High School Principal of Txorierri High School in Derio, Bizkaia. He is married to Gooding native, Michelle Alzola, and has two children.

Danzas Fantásticas

by Joaquín Turina (1882–1949)

Born to a modestly privileged and artistic family of Seville, Joaquín Turina was encouraged to his love of music early. He studied piano and began to dabble in composition as a child. Still, Seville was thought of as provincial, so Turina set off at age 20 to debut as a pianist in Madrid, never to return to living in Seville. Ultimately he moved on to Paris, where he associated with other Spaniards, enjoying the active encouragement of Manuel de Falla, and willingly absorbing the influence of Claude Debussy, hoping to find success with a sophisticated European compositional style. In the ironic end, Seville clearly remained in Turina’s blood, and his works most performed today are full of Sevillanismo.

Those Sevillan roots are not only heard in his 1919 Danzas Fantásticas, but the score is graced with quotations from the José Más novella of stories from Seville, La Orgía. The opening movement, Exaltación, is an Aragonese jota developed with kaleidoscopic mood, closing as if existing only in imagination, and leading to the Ensueño (Dream) movement. Although that second movement opens dramatically, the tones of evening bells and undulating dances drift into the blissful dream, a lyric romance wedding Andalusian melody with Basque zorcico rhythm. Then with the animated Orgía final movement, announced by bravura horns and forceful low strings, Turina offers climax in a brilliant Andalusian farruca, evoking flamenco.

Fantasía Para Un Gentilhombre

by Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–1999)

Despite having lost his sight to diphtheria at the age of three, Joaquín Rodrigo mastered the piano to acclaim as a virtuoso concert pianist. And despite having never mastered the guitar, Rodrigo brought the instrument to the concert stage and confirmed its place there, leaving a legacy of concert repertoire for the solo guitar that remains popular and gentle on the contemporary ear.

It was the near death of his beloved wife, Turkish pianist Victoria Kamhi, and grief over her miscarriage that had inspired his first concerto for guitar and orchestra. The Concierto de Aranjuez, heard on our stage just two years ago—along with the powerful story of the anguish that inspired it—has remained the most popular guitar concerto of all time.

Many commissions followed the successful premier of the Concierto, and much more music of the Andalusian (southern) Spanish tradition was brought to the concert hall. Perhaps the most widely acclaimed is the Fantasía Para Un Gentilhombre.

At the request of renowned guitarist Andrés Segovia, revealed by Rodrigo’s widow to be the gentilhombre of the title, he composed the Fantasía. From the six short dances for solo guitar by the 17th century Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz, taken from a three-volume work now commonly known as Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra española (Musical Instruction on the Spanish Guitar), Rodrigo fashioned four movements preserving the original names.

The first movement, called Villano y Ricercare, introduces a lyric dialogue between solo guitar and orchestra, repeating the Sanz theme with ever more invention, familiarizing the audience with the compositional form and hinting at the melodies to be heard in each later movement, before slipping into the Ricarcare, a complex fugue based on a two-bar phrase.

The second movement returns to a more lyrical theme as the Españoleta, haunting in its rich accompaniment of strings, and relieved only by the contrasting middle section, the Fanfare de la Cabellería de Nápoles (Fanfare for the Cavalry of Naples) of jarring percussion and ghostly trumpet and flute fanfares.

The energetic third movement, the Danza de las Hachas (Dance of the Torches), crescendos the orchestral mood into the climax of a fourth movement composed in the style of a folk dance of the Canary Islands, to which Rodrigo pays tribute with a bird call toward the end.

Twin Falls resident and neighbor GARY GAROFANO brought the Concierto de Aranjuez to our stage in February of 2007 and returned for a brief cameo appearance last season, again warmly welcomed by our audience. He studied music performance at California State University, Fullerton with David Grimes, and classical guitar with Dorothy de Goede and Vincenzo Macaluso. His efforts were rewarded when he was selected to perform in master classes with Pepe Romero and with Michael Lorimer and was a finalist in the 2nd Annual Carmel Classic Guitar Festival Competition in 1977. A healthcare professional for 26 years, and now working as a Psychiatric Social Worker at St. Luke’s Canyonview Psychiatric & Addiction Services Hospital, Mr. Garofano teaches classical guitar privately.

Pops Concert

Friday May 1st, 7:30 PM

Elijah

by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Felix Mendelssohn was born into a wealthy and cultured Berlin family. He was a gifted child, so much so that the finest musicians of the day hailed him as a second Mozart. By the time he had reached his mid-teens Mendelssohn had composed a large number of mature works, including twelve string symphonies and his first symphony for full orchestra, written when he was only fifteen. He was sixteen when he wrote the String Octet, and the wonderful overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream followed a year later.

No sooner had Mendelssohn’s first oratorio, St. Paul, received its premiere in 1836, than he began thinking about a suitable subject for a new oratorio. The idea of one based on the life of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, particularly appealed to him. Unfortunately no suitable libretto was forthcoming and with the ever-pressing demands of his other work he regretfully put the idea to one side. It was to be another ten years before it came to fruition.

In 1845 the Birmingham Festival committee wrote to Mendelssohn, asking him if he would write a new oratorio for the following year’s Festival. He returned to Elijah with renewed enthusiasm, working feverishly on the score to ensure that it was completed according to schedule.

The first performance, conducted by Mendelssohn himself, took place on the 26th of August 1846. It was an unprecedented success. No less than four choruses and four arias were encored, and the applause evidently bordered on the hysterical. It was without doubt the crowning glory of Mendelssohn’s spectacularly successful career, but tragically it was to prove his last major triumph. A lifetime of overwork now brought rapidly failing health, and when his beloved sister Fanny unexpectedly died, he never recovered from the shock. He died on November 4th, 1847.

After its resounding first performance, Elijah immediately established itself as second only to Messiah in the public’s affections. It received countless performances in the years just after its composition and this enormous popularity continued scarcely unabated throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

During the post-war period there was a considerable reaction against Mendelssohn’s music. To what extent this was an after-effect of the rampant German anti-Semitism of the 1930’s and 40’s is difficult to determine, but the generally held view, particularly in some sections of the musical establishment, was that his life had been too easy and too comfortable, and that as a consequence his music, with its classical elegance and understated emotion, was superficial and distinctly inferior. Elijah almost disappeared from the repertoire of a great many choral societies. Thankfully, in recent years there has been a more balanced attitude to Mendelssohn, avoiding both the excessive adulation which surrounded him during his lifetime and the equally absurd denigration of more recent times.

Structurally the work is clearly influenced by the choral masterpieces of Bach and Handel, but its highly dramatic style, at times bordering on the operatic, constitutes a significant step forward from its Baroque predecessors. Elijah has many other outstanding qualities: the imaginative orchestration, the spontaneity and energy of the counterpoint, the variety which Mendelssohn brings to the recitatives to ensure that they always maintain the dramatic impetus, and the sheer beauty of many of the arias and choruses. Above all, there is no mistaking the work’s considerable dramatic impact, epitomized by the vivid characterization of Elijah himself. – Joseph Casperson

The MAGIC VALLEY CHORALE had its inception as early as 1958 with a presentation of the Messiah under the sponsorship of the Twin Falls Music Club. Roger Vincent again directed “A Chorus of Magic Valley Singers” with Teala Bellini at the piano, in annual performances of the Messiah subsequently sponsored by the Magic Valley Council of Churches and the Twin Falls Ministerial Association.

In February of 1973 the Magic Valley Chorale was officially formed, and a board of nine directors was elected. Roger Vincent was President and directed the Chorale for its first five years. In 1978 the Chorale became associated with the College of Southern Idaho.

The Chorale is dedicated to the promotion of a wide variety of choral music, with two concerts of major choral literature yearly, first in the spring and then at Christmas. Membership is open to all singers.

Directors following Roger Vincent over the years have been Harold Smith, Pat Woliver, Gary Kirkeby, and Carson Wong. Joseph Casperson is completing his ninth year as Director.

This concert marks only the fourth combined performance of the Magic Valley Chorale with the Magic Valley Symphony since November, 1973, when the two first joined to perform Elijah under the baton of Del Slaughter. In May, 2000, the Symphony and Chorale collaborated to present the Idaho premier of Daniel Bukvich’s amazing From the Journals of Lewis and Clark, an effort repeated in 2005 to the delight of the Magic Valley community.