BOULDER CELERITIES
SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 2025 at 7:30 PM
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WHEN
Saturday, March 1, 2025 at 7:30 PM
WHERE
Boulder Adventist Church
345 Mapleton Avenue
Boulder, CO 80304
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PROGRAM
George Frederic Handel (1685–1759)
Concerto Grosso in B-flat Major, Op. 3 No. 1 (1910–24)
I. Allegro
II. Largo
III. Allegro
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364 (1779)
I. Allegro maestoso
II. Andante
III. Presto
Ed Dusinberre, violin
Richard O’Neill, viola
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Symphony No. 5, D. 485 (1816)
I. Allegro
II. Andante con moto
III. Menuetto. Allegro molto
IV. Allegro vivace
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ed Dusinberre
Violin
Violinist Edward Dusinberre was born in 1968 in Leamington Spa, England, and started learning the violin at the age of four. After studying at the Royal College of Music in London, he continued his studies at The Juilliard School and joined the Takács Quartet in 1993.
As first violinist of the Takács Quartet, Edward Dusinberre has won a Grammy and awards from Gramophone Magazine, the Japanese Recording Academy, Chamber Music America and the Royal Philharmonic Society. Combining an international career with his longstanding appointment as artist-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder College of Music, Dusinberre performs in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Asia, and is an Associate Artist at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Edward’s book Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet won the 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society’s Creative Communication Award and was translated into German and Korean. His second book, published in November 2022, is entitled Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home.
Edward lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he enjoys hiking in the mountains and going to the theatre. During the summer he is a member of the faculty at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.
Richard O’Neill
Viola
Richard O’Neill (viola) Praised by the London Times as “ravishing” the New York Times for his “elegant, velvety tone” the Los Angeles Times as “energetic and sassy…exceptional” and Seattle Times as “sublime” Takács Quartet VIOLIST RICHARD O’NEILL has distinguished himself as one of the great instrumentalists of his generation. Winner of both a GRAMMY and EMMY Award, and recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, he has achieved recognition and critical acclaim not only as a champion of his instrument but as a social and musical ambassador as well. He has appeared as soloist with the London, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Euro-Asian Philharmonics; the Albany, BBC, KBS, Hiroshima and Korean Symphonies; the Moscow, Vienna, and Wurttemburg Chamber Orchestras; Alte Musik Koln, Kremerata Baltica and Sejong with conductors Andrew Davis, Miguel Harth Bedoya, Vladimir Jurowski, Nicholas McGegan, Eiji Oue, Francois Xavier Roth, Vassily Sinaisky, Leonard Slatkin, Osmo Vanska and Yannick Nezet-Seguin. In June 2020, he joined the world renowned Takacs Quartet.
For many years an Artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as well as Principal Violist of Camerata Pacifica, he has frequently collaborated with the world’s greatest musicians including Emanuel Ax, Jeremy Denk, Leon Fleisher, Gidon Kremer, Warren Jones, Garrick Ohlsson, Menahem Pressler, Daniil Trifonov, James Ehnes, Kyung-Wha Chung, Augustin Hadelich, Boris Giltburg, Mischa Maisky, Steven Isserlis, Edgar Meyer and The Juilliard, Emerson, Borromeo, Syzmanowski String Quartets, among many others. Festival appearances include Marlboro, Aspen, Bridgehampton, Casals, Chamber Music Northwest, Dresden, Evian, Great Mountains, Hatfield House, La Folle Journee, La Jolla, Leicester, Mecklenburg, Menlo, Moritzburg, Mostly Mozart, Music Academy of the West, Prussia Cove, Saint Barthelemy, Saratoga, Seattle and Tongyeong.
A UNIVERSAL/Deutsche Grammophon recording artist, he has made ten solo albums which have sold more than 200,000 copies. He has remained one of the best selling South Korean recording artists for over a decade with multiple platinum disc awards. His recordings of Schoenberg were twice nominated for a GRAMMY in 2006 and 2010, and his recording of Christopher Theofanidis’s Viola Concerto has earned him his third nomination and first GRAMMY in the Best Instrumental Solo Category.
Dedicated to the music of our time, he has worked with composers Lera Auerbach, Mason Bates, Elliott Carter, Paul Chihara, Unsuk Chin, Mario Davidovsky, John Harbison, Jo Kondo, Chris Paul Harman, Matthias Pintscher, Huang Ruo, Christopher Theofanidis, George Tsontakis, Melinda Wagner, John Zorn, and has premiered works commissioned and composed for him by Carter, Harbison, Ruo, and Chihara. In 2018 he premiered composer Lera Auerbach 24 Preludes with the composer at the piano for Camerata Pacifica, in 2019 he recorded Huang Ruo’s Viola Concerto “In Other Words” at the Bavarian Radio, and in 2022 premiered Paul Chihara’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra with the Seoul Philharmonic and Osmo Vanska.
A popular figure in South Korea, he has appeared on major television networks, newspapers and publications. His 2004 appearance in the KBS Documentary Series, Human Theater was viewed by over 12 million and led to a second series and his popularity with the Korean public. In 2013, he led a documentary series featuring his work with a multicultural youth orchestra for MBC, “Hello?! Orchestra” which led to an International Emmy in Arts Programming and a feature length film that debuted at the Busan International Film Festival. For thirteen seasons, he served as artistic director of DITTO, introducing tens of thousands to chamber music in South Korea and Japan. On DITTO’s two international tours, he sold out both Tokyo’s International Forum and Osaka Symphony Hall as well as the Shanghai Concert Hall.
The first violist to receive the Artist Diploma from Juilliard, he holds a Bachelors of Music from The USC Thornton School of Music magna cum laude and a Masters from The Juilliard School: Donald McInnes, Karen Tuttle and Paul Neubauer were his mentors. In 2006 he was honored with a Proclamation from the New York City Council for his achievement and contribution to the arts. He serves as Goodwill Ambassador for the Korean Red Cross, The Special Olympics and UNICEF, runs marathons for charity and serves on the faculty of the CU Boulder College of Music and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.
He performs on two rare violas: one made by Matteo Goffriller of Venice, the ex-Trampler, made in 1727, and the other, a Gasparo da Salo, ex-Iglitzin, the Counts of Flanders. Richard is a Thomastik-Infleld artist.
PROGRAM NOTES
George Frederic Handel (1685–1759)
Concerto Grosso in B-flat Major, Op. 3 No. 1 (1910–24)
Concerto No 1 is scored for two recorders, two oboes, two bassoons, strings (with divided violas) and continuo. It is probably the earliest concerto in the set, although the oldest surviving manuscript score is circa 1724. The imaginative recorder parts in the Largo would probably have been played by one oboist and one bassoonist, who would otherwise be tacet. The disproportionate length of this movement, and the fact that the short final Allegro (featuring the two bassoons) does not return to the home key of B flat major, would suggest that this work may not represent Handel’s final intentions.
Program Notes by Roy Goodman
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364 (1779)
By 1779 - a few years before Haydn wrote his Symphony No. 76 - the 23-year-old Mozart was chomping at the bit to break free from the restrictions imposed by his employer in Salzburg, the Archbishop Colloredo. His recent tour westward to Mannheim and Paris had proved of decisive importance; it apparently stirred a desire to experiment with some of the instrumental forms and styles Mozart had been encountering.
One result was the Sinfonia Concertante, a work that bursts with the joy of exploring new instrumental sound combinations and possibilities. It also marks a sort of turning point, in essence summing up much of what Mozart had achieved to date as an artist. Not long afterward - and in part on account of indulging in such purely pleasurable creative endeavors, at the expense of his duties as court organist - he was summarily dismissed by his boss (as he sardonically puts it in a letter, "with a kick on my arse") and left Salzburg for good to live in Vienna.
The genre here, as the name indicates, is basically a hybrid between the symphony and the concerto - what, later in the 19th century, would be labeled a double concerto for violin and viola. Yet the Sinfonia Concertante wondrously unifies these several dimensions. Like Haydn, Mozart exploits his rather modest orchestral ensemble to the maximum; there's no percussion, nor even flutes or Mozart's beloved clarinets, but he divides the violas into two for a richer string blend. The proportions of the opening movement (marked with the epic-sounding tempo "Allegro maestoso") are generous and expansive, further contributing to the work's symphonic aspect.
For many, this piece represents the grandest of Mozart's violin concertos, surpassing the five official ones. At the same time, the viola is no second fiddle here. Mozart's choice of instrument for the second soloist is telling: although an excellent violinist, he himself loved to play viola in string quartet ensembles, enjoying the perspective of being "in the middle." One unforgettable characteristic of the Sinfonia Concertante is the remarkable partnership and equality shared by both soloists and the searingly beautiful sound blend they create. Mozart's original score even inscribes the viola part in D major, thus requiring the violist to tune the strings up a half-step. The intention is to give the usually more-reserved viola a certain resonance to offset the violin's usual limelight-hogging sonority.
The Sinfonia Concertante is in part about an extraordinary abundance of ideas and sonorities which - thanks to Mozart's art - pour out with a seeming effortlessness, like ripened fruit simply there to be plucked. The opening orchestral exposition makes this clear, as one idea is laid out on top of another until, with a half dozen in the air, one loses track. And more are yet to come as the curtain opens and the soloists enter in one of the most sublime passages of all Mozart, soaring out from the background on a sustained high E-flat. It's perhaps no surprise that George Balanchine choreographed a famous ballet to this music, for the role of the duo soloists entails a conversation not just with the orchestra at large but with each other (it's intriguing, as well, to imagine Mozart's own voice represented by the viola). This is clear in the many echoing passages he unfolds and in his construction of the cadenzas, expressly written out.
Beyond these instrumental dimensions, there's yet another. This is the world of opera, of lamenting song, with a hint of archaic baroque sentiment, which comes to the fore in the sensitive and lengthy Andante, one of Mozart's relatively rare minor-mode slow movements. Here we find an emotional depth that, as Maynard Solomon speculates in his notable biography, may reflect the composer's experience of loss in coping with the recent death of his mother. Specifically, the duality of the violin-viola sound contributes to another aspect of the piece's stunning beauty: listen as the solo violin takes up its plaintive aria of grief and the response from the viola, now providing a sudden but believable consolation. The two continue to form a complementary pair as Mozart unfolds his song seamlessly, virtually prefiguring what Wagner would later coin as "infinite melody."
With the presto rondo finale, an irrepressibly joyful spirit returns. As Alfred Einstein observes, its "gaiety results principally from the fact that in the chain of musical events the unexpected always occurs first, being followed by the expected." Or, to return to Hesse's ethereal Immortals, the Sinfonia Concertante ends with their characteristic laughter, which is "laughter without an object…simply light and lucidity."
Program Notes by Thomas May
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Symphony No. 5, D. 485 (1816)
In 1816, 19-year-old Franz Schubert was writing music and was a much-loved member of a musical ecosystem that buoyed guys like Beethoven and Rossini to stardom. If he were alive today, it’s easy to imagine him as one of those kids who dropped out of school to sit on his bed and play guitar all day. Making music was not a vocation for Schubert—he didn’t make much money at it— but it’s what he did with his time.
Schubert was one of fourteen children born to Franz and Elisabeth Schubert. Only five survived infancy. An amateur cellist and schoolmaster, Schubert’s father made music the focus of family life. By his teens, young Franz was the violist in his family string quartet, and it was for this group that he wrote some of his earliest known compositions—sixteen quartets by the age of 19 (including unnumbered juvenile pieces).
As a youth, Schubert had been a member of the famed Vienna Boys Choirs where he received schooling at the Academic Grammar Gymnasium, played in and conducted an orchestra, received music lessons, meals and a roof over his head. One of his music teachers was Antonio Salieri (perhaps unjustly maligned in the Broadway show Amadeus), who proved to be a very nurturing influence. Once Schubert’s voice changed, he was a candidate for a fellowship which would have enabled him to continue his education, however academics failed to hold his interest. Instead of writing copious amounts of music, he dropped out and returned home, hoping to become a full-time musician. His father did not approve and insisted that he work. At age 17, he started teaching at his father’s school—a job he found unbearable. Quitting the teaching job, he moved out and fell into a society of musicians (mainly friends from school), as well as poets, writers, and intellectuals.
Drinking into the night, Schubert and friends haunted local taverns, discussing the art and politics of Imperial Austria, as well as dancing, playing music, and reading aloud. Referring to themselves as the pub crawlers, this group became his support system, sustaining his short life by lending a piano, sharing in his compositions or offering a place to sleep.
19-year-old Schubert wrote his Symphony No. 5 in September and October of 1816. At the time, he played viola in a pickup orchestra that would gathered in people’s homes, most of whom were amateur players. But one of the musicians was violinist Otto Hatwig, a member of the Burgtheater orchestra (famous for having premiered works by Mozart and Beethoven). It was at Hatwig’s apartment, in the fall of 1816, that this ad hoc ensemble first played Schubert’s Symphony No. 5. The public premiere would not happen until October 17, 1841— thirteen years after Schubert’s death.
Program Notes by Noel Morris