A Gift of Music
with Nicolò Spera, guitar
Sunday, December 21, 2024
7:30 – 9:30 PM
Boulder Adventist Church
The Boulder Chamber Orchestra
Bahman Saless
conductor
Giacomo Susani
guest conductor
Nicolò Spera
guitar
Annamaria Karacson
violin
Program
Georges Bizet (1838–1875)
Selections from Carmen (1875)
Giacomo Susani (b. 1995)
Concerto for 10-String Guitar and Orchestra “Lungo il Po” (2018)
Nicolò Spera, guitar
Giacomo Susani, guest conductor
Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–1999)
Fantasía para un gentilhombre (1954)
I. Villano y ricercar
II. Españoleta y fanfarria de la caballería de Nápoles
III. Danza de las hachas
IV. Canario
Nicolò Spera, guitar
Jules Massenet (1842–1912)
“Méditation” from Thaïs (1894)
Annamaria Karacson, violin
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
Czech Suite in D Major, Op. 39 (1879)
I. Preludium
II. Polka
III. Sousedská
IV. Romance
V. Finale
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nicolò Spera
Guitar
Italian guitarist Nicolò Spera brings to his teaching and performing a unique synthesis of European and American traditions.
Nicolò is one of the few guitarists to perform on both six-string and ten-string guitars, as well as on theorbo. His wide-ranging repertoire includes the extraordinary music of the Franco-Andalusian composer Maurice Ohana. He has given lecture-recitals on the music of Ohana at many institutions and festivals worldwide, and his recordings of Ohana’s works for solo guitar have won […]
Annamaria Karacson
Violin
Hungarian-born Annamaria Karacson has resided in Boulder with her family since 1986.After completing her studies at Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, she became assistant concertmaster of the Hungarian Opera and Philharmonic Orchestras with whom she toured extensively throughout Europe.She was also a founding member of the renown Hungarian Festival Orchestra along with Ivan Fischer. She won first prize in the Hungarian Opera’s violin competition, first prize in the Budapest String Quartet competition with the Takacs String Quartet and was a recipient of the Bartók-Pásztory award.
Ms. Karacson is currently concertmaster of the Boulder Chamber Orchestra, assistant concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra and member of the Colorado Ballet Orchestra. She was also, formerly assistant concertmaster of the Boulder Bach Festival and concertmaster of the Mahler Festival Orchestras. Ms. Karacson is an active chamber musician and has appeared with University of Colorado music faculty members on numerous occasions and is first violinist of the Columbine String Quartet.
PROGRAM NOTES
Georges Bizet (1838–1875)
Selections from Carmen (1875)
Georges Bizet was yet another of those composers who showed precocious brilliance as a child but never lived long enough to fulfill the promise. The difference, however, between Bizet and Mozart, who died at about the same age, is that Mozart left over 600 completed compositions, many of them masterpieces, while Bizet is known primarily for a single work, the operas Carmen. In Addition, only a few other works – the opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers), a youthful symphony and a couple of suites from his incidental music to the now forgotten play L’arlesienne – are still occasionally heard today.
Although he did not come from a family of professional musicians, Bizet’s parents recognized his talent and supported his ambition to become a musician and composer. Encouraged by his father, he entered the Paris Conservatory at the extremely young age of ten. He excelled to the point of winning the coveted Prix de Rome, a composition prize that allowed the winners to study in Rome for three years. In fact, the Prix de Rome was almost an obligatory first step on the career ladder for would-be French composers (although it certainly didn’t guarantee lasting fame).
After his return to Paris, Bizet hoped to specialize in opera. He had all the right connections in the Paris music establishment but difficulty pleasing audiences and himself. His first three operas, including Les pêcheurs de perles received only lukewarm receptions and Bizet himself destroyed many incomplete operas and large-scale orchestral works.
Carmen, based on a contemporary novella by Prosper Merimée, is the story of a fickle seductress who ensnares Don José, an innocent young soldier, into a passion that leads inexorably to desertion, degradation and finally a jealous murder on stage. Audiences and critics alike considered Carmen scandalous and immoral (although that didn’t stop it from enjoying the longest run of any of Bizet’s previous works). But when the critics panned it Bizet was crushed and succumbed to a chronic throat ailment from which he never recovered. Within three months of the premiere, he was dead. Carmen, however, was much admired by the young Giacomo Puccini, whose own verismo (true-to-life) operas were among Carmen’s direct descendents. Its fame rose gradually and it is now in the permanent repertory of virtually every opera company.
Two orchestral suites from Carmen were compiled by Fritz Hoffmann after Bizet's death. But most conductors assemble their own suite.
Program Notes by Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn
Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–1999)
Fantasía para un gentilhombre (1954)
The music of Joaquin Rodrigo is steeped in the music and culture of his native Spain, including Baroque music of the early Spanish church as well as folk melodies and traditional Spanish folk instruments, especially the guitar. Born in Sagunto, Valencia, in 1901, Rodrigo was blinded at the age of three by diphtheria, which he said turned him early to a life of music. After winning early honors at the Conservatoire in Valencia, he studied in Paris with Paul Dukas at the École Normale de Musique, adding French influences to his style. He spent the Spanish Civil War exiled in Paris, but returned to Spain in 1939 and became the leading composer of his country. He is best known for his concerti, especially the haunting Concierto de Aranjuéz for guitar.
The Fantasia para un gentilhombre (Fantasia for a Gentleman) was written in 1954 for Andrés Segovia, the “gentleman” of the title. The thematic elements are based on short works by a 17th-century Spanish baroque guitarist, Gaspar Sanz, who wrote the first Instruction Book of Music for Spanish Guitar in 1674. The melodies compiled by Sanz were based on still older, traditional dance tunes. Rodrigo expanded on these short melodies, in some cases completing themes from the older composer’s original sketches, and said he orchestrated the work to produce a sound in the “manner of strong spices that were so popular in the victuals of the period.” Segovia premiered the work in 1958 with the San Francisco Symphony.
In the late 1970s, flutist James Galway asked Rodrigo for permission to arrange the Fantasia for flute. Rodrigo readily agreed, and also checked the score and attended the recording sessions in 1978, marking suggestions for changes. It is Galway’s arrangement that is performed here today.
The first movement, Villano y Ricercare, opens with the villano, a 17th-century dance with song popular in both Spain and Italy. The violins state the main theme and the flute elaborates, then the soloist leads the fugue of the ricare, while various sections of the ensemble follow. Throughout the interweaving of the fugal theme, the orchestration never overwhelms the flute–something we can attribute directly to Rodrigo, who was scoring for the equally delicate sound of guitar.
Españoleta y Fanfare de la Caballería de Nápoles combines the slow, lilting dance of the españoleta with a fanfare for, as the title states, the cavalry of Naples, which was under Spanish rule in Sanz’s time. The brisk fanfare includes a col legno section for the strings, where the players use the wooden side of the bow against the string.
The fast, rhythmic Danza de las Hachas is a “hatchet dance” meant to be performed with torches. Soloist and orchestra trade roles, each accompanying and then leading the dance.
The lively Canario is a folk dance from the Canary Islands in 6/8 time, in which orchestra and soloist compete in brilliant figures that grow in intensity until the flute breaks free in a virtuosic cadenza.
Jules Massenet (1842–1912)
“Méditation” from Thaïs (1894)
By the end of his long career, Jules Massenet was known somewhat pejoratively among trendy Parisian musical intelligentsia as “la fille de Gounod” – Gounod’s daughter – and this characterization, while undoubtedly unfair, isn’t entirely unreasonable either. Massenet had been Gounod’s student at the Paris Conservatory, and, like his teacher, won the prestigious Rome Prize at 21. Both men were primarily composers of grand opera, and both were popular and prosperous for many years. Both also shared a finely-honed sensibility that struck audiences of the day as, somehow, characteristically feminine, and indeed both were especially popular among female audiences throughout their careers.
Massenet wrote no fewer than 33 operas over the course of four and a half decades, and perhaps inevitably certain formulas crept into his work. Musically, Massenet incorporated a bit of Wagner – lengthy recitatives, less formal closure between the operas’ arias and ensemble numbers – into a French operatic style perfected by Gounod. Thematically, Massenet returned time and again to the character of the reformed courtesan, the beautiful prostitute who finds religion, perhaps becomes a nun, and dedicates her life to God. Massenet himself was not particularly religious (“I don’t believe in all that creeping-Jesus stuff,” he wrote to the composer Vincent D’Indy, “but the public likes it, and we must agree with the public.”), but he wasn’t foolish enough to throw away the recipe for the popular success he so enjoyed.
Thaïs was written in 1874 and is perhaps the finest of Massenet’s reformed-courtesan operas. Set in fourth-century Alexandria, it tells the story of Thaïs, the kingdom’s haughtiest, proudest courtesan, and Athanael, an ardent young monk. Athanael sets out to convert the worldly title character and eventually does, but along the way develops carnal feelings for the beautiful Thaïs with predictably tragic results: this being an opera, everyone dies in the end.
The Meditation is taken from the opera’s second act, and immediately precedes the first appearance of the converted Thaïs in the rough habit of a repentant pilgrim. One of the most dramatic violin solos in all operatic literature, its soaring melodies, and pulsating emotion have made it a favorite of violinists and a hugely popular standalone piece ever since. It is, in a word, gorgeous, and perfectly captures what Debussy called its composer’s “power of pleasing, which, strictly speaking, is a gift.”
Program Notes by Chris Vaneman
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
Czech Suite in D Major, Op. 39 (1879)
The Czech suite was written at the point in Dvořák's career when his fame as a composer was burgeoning. The popularity of nationalist music was growing. Liszt had had great success with his set of Hungarian rhapsodies, composed from 1846 onwards, and Brahms had followed on with his famous set of 21 Hungarian dances. The music publisher Fritz Simrock was looking for more music of this kind, and on the recommendation of Brahms approached Dvořák to commission a new work. The commission saw the publication of a set of 16 Slavonic dances which were originally written for piano duet. The work was a huge success. Simrock made a handsome profit and Dvořák received a pitifully small fee. At Simrock's request Dvořák orchetrated the dances, and they were published as his Opus 46. This time Dvořák got a much higher fee. The Czech suite was written the following year.
Evidently there was little love lost between Dvořák and Simrock, but the collaboration was one that the aspiring young composer could not avoid. Dvořák did not approve of the publisher's business methods, which involved presenting misleading information to the public. The two fell out over the question of how Dvořák's first name, "Antonín" was to appear on the publications. On the cover of the Slavonic dances, Simrock printed it using the German version "Anton". This was because at the time the intellectual world of Prague was mostly German speaking, and Czech speakers were often regarded as ignorant country bumpkins. Dvořák was justly outraged by having his name printed in this form, and for later publications a compromise had to be reached. For the Czech suite the name was abbreviated to "Ant.". Simrock also liked giving misleadingly high opus numbers works to imply modernity and the maturity of the composer. Dvořák insisted that the Czech suite was his Opus 39, even though it was written the year after his Op 46 Slavonic dances.
The work is made up of five movements, three of which are traditional Czech dances, and two are descriptive of the Bohemian countryside which inspired much of Dvořák's music. The first movement is a pastorale in which the bucolic atmosphere is created by drone sounds accompanying a long lyrical melody which is passed around the orchestra and meanders through different keys. Other textures are used to accompany it including prominent birdsong in places.
The second movement is a Polka - the most celebrated of Bohemian dances that found its way into many nineteenth century composers' work. It is a dance in duple time with a characteristic rhythmic pattern. Dvořák's movement is in the minor key with a beautiful recurring melody, contrasted by a more lively trio.
The third movement is a sousedská which is dance in three quarter time. It has a calm, swaying character and it is usually danced in pairs. Simrock gave the movement the alternative title of Minuet, but the character of the music is quite different from the Viennese minuet of the classical period. It has long legato lines with occasional rhythmic snaps.
The fourth movement is a romance that takes us back into the countryside. It is slower and gentler than the two preceding dances, and like the first movement has a lyrical melody that passes around the orchestra.
The final movement is a furiant. This is a fast energetic dance that swaps regularly between duple and triple time. It provides a lively and exuberant conclusion to the work. Dvorak wrote another two very famous furiants, one in his Slavonic dances opus 46, and the other as the third movement of his sixth symphony.