Grand Finale
at Macky Auditorium
Saturday, May 24, 2025
7:30 – 9:30 PM
Macky Auditorium
University of Colorado - Boulder
The Boulder Chamber Orchestra
Bahman Saless
conductor
Adam Żukiewicz
piano
Program
Dudley Buck (1839–1909)
Festival Overture on “Star-Spangled Banner” (1879)
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1879–1941)
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (1934)
Adam Zukiewicz, piano
Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978)
Waltz from Masquerade (1941)
Johann Strauss II (1825–1899)
Emperor Waltz, Op. 437 (1889)
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Waltz No. 2 from the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1 (1938)
Johann Strauss II (1825–1899)
Frühlingsstimmen, Op. 410 (1882)
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Waltz from Cinderella, Op. 87 (1840–44)
Johann Strauss II (1825–1899)
Overture to Die Fledermaus (1874)
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Adam Żukiewicz
Piano
Adam Piotr Żukiewicz is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed concert pianist. He concertized across Europe, United States, Canada, Japan, Brazil, Hong Kong, and Macau, and his performances were broadcast in the USA, Canada, Italy, Slovenia, Germany, and Poland. Mr. Żukiewicz consistently receives critical acclaim, while his innovative programming - focused on exploring connections between the popular and the lesser known gems of the traditional and contemporary repertoire - continues to engage and inspire audiences around the world. […]
PROGRAM NOTES
Dudley Buck (1839–1909)
Festival Overture on “Star-Spangled Banner” (1879)
Were you a white collar professional in London during the second half of the eighteenth century, and you were also a music-lover, you might have counted yourself as a member of the famed Anacreontic Society. Named after an ancient Greek poet, this rowdy bunch of music aficionados met biweekly in a tavern for drinking, dining, singing, and to sponsor public performances by leading musicians of the day. The group welcomed many distinguished visitors, including Franz Josef Haydn in 1791.
Around the time of the Anacreontic Society’s founding, the British Empire held 24 colonies in North America; by the time the Society disbanded in 1792, that number of colonies had been reduced by 13. These colonies, of course, had united outside British rule under a single “star-spangled banner.” As is well-known, the sight of the American flag during the War of 1812 inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry”, which would become the text of the National Anthem. But less wellknown is the fact that Key wrote his text to the tune of the “Song of the Anacreontic Society”, written by John Stafford Smith and performed at its meetings in London decades before. So, the next time you have difficulty reaching the upper notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, think of the boisterous gentlemen of the Anacreontic Society drunkenly belting their theme song every other Wednesday night.
A number of composers have written creative arrangements of the tune of “The StarSpangled Banner”. Igor Stravinsky’s rather ponderous version was uncharacteristically conventional, though that didn’t save him from the fierce scrutiny of Boston law enforcement, who accused him of violating a local statute against improper arrangements of the National Anthem. More recently, violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery wrote Banner (performed last season by the QCSO on Masterworks I), brilliantly rearranging fragments of the song to depict both the hope and the contradictions that the anthem has long represented. American composer-organist Dudley Buck made two contributions to the genre, first in the solo organ work Concert Variations on “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1868) and later in Festival Overture on the American National Air (1879) for orchestra.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1839, Buck trained at the Leipzig Conservatory with highly-influential piano pedagogue Louis Plaidy, whose international studio also included the Norwegian Edvard Grieg, the Czech Leos Janacek, and the British Arthur Sullivan. Though Buck’s music is rarely performed today, he was highly-celebrated during his lifetime as a conductor (assisting Theodore Thomas in directing what would become the New York Philharmonic), organist (holding prominent posts in Hartford, Chicago, Boston, and New York), and composer (particularly of cantatas, often on patriotic themes). Originally performed at a Fourth of July celebration on Coney Island, the printed program for the premiere of Festival Overture included the following designation: “Audience requested to join in a single verse, at a signal from the conductor.”
Program Notes by Jacob Bankes
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1879–1941)
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (1934)
Rachmaninoff summed up his life as a composer shortly before his death (in Beverly Hills, his final home): “In my own compositions, no conscious effort has been made to be original, or Romantic, or Nationalistic, or anything else. I write down on paper the music I hear within me, as naturally as possible. I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music.... I have been strongly influenced by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov; but I have never, to the best of my knowledge, imitated anyone. What I try to do, when writing down my music, is to make it say simply and directly that which is in my heart when I am composing. If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes either beautiful or bitter or sad or religious.”
The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is one of his least sentimental pieces—with the exception of that swooning 18th variation, which is a tour de force in which the minor-key Paganini theme is inverted to become a major-key, inescapably Russian theme.
The score was written in 1934, by which time Rachmaninoff could look back on three decades of fame as a virtuoso pianist, admired for performing not only his own works but also those of Beethoven and Chopin, and alongside distinguished violinists, chief among them Fritz Kreisler.
His own music had by the early 1930s become leaner and meaner from the sprawling, yearning pre-World War I scores on which his reputation, for good or ill, rested. In the later works—beginning with the Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 40, continuing with the Three Russian Songs, Op. 41, the Corelli Variations for solo piano, Op. 42, and culminating with the Rhapsody—the level of dissonance is higher, while rhythms are more angular than in the past.
The Rhapsody—though there is nothing rhapsodic about its tightly focused structure—comprises an introduction followed by 24 variations on the last of Nicolò Paganini’s 24 caprices for solo violin (a set of variations in itself). The theme was a favorite subject of 19th-century composers for large-scale variations works, among them Robert Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms. Rachmaninoff applied his own, highly original thoughts on the subject, his grandest inspiration being the combining of the theme by the “devilish” violinist with the hellish medieval liturgical Dies irae theme, which is heard in the seventh, 10th, and 24th variations.
Program Notes by Herbert Glass
Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978)
Waltz from Masquerade (1941)
Armenian-Soviet composer and conductor, Aram Khachaturian was born in Tbilisi, the county of Georgia and later moved to Moscow, where he studied at the Moscow Conservatory. Khachaturian’s musical contributions include three symphonies, ballet music to Spartacus and Gayane (later of which includes the famous “Sabre Dance”), film scores, and numerous concertos, including the widely-performed 1940 violin concerto. The composer is perhaps best known for his use of folk music and sensuous melodies, the inspiration for which he drew from his childhood, life events, people, and Armenian and Georgian songs and dances. In early 1950s he taught at the Moscow Conservatory and the Gnessin Institute, and later, in 1957, became the Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers.
In 1948, The Central Committee of the Communist Party accused Khachaturian, along with other Soviet composers including Prokofiev and Shostakovich, of writing “formalist music”—music that went against the Soviet ideal. Khachaturian responded to the charges, stating “I want to warn those comrades who, like myself, hoped that their music, which is not understood by the people today, will be understood by future generations tomorrow. . . What can be higher and nobler than writing music understandable to our people and to give joy by creative art to millions?”
Khachaturian composed incidental music for a 1941 production entitled Masquerade. A few years later, in 1944, the composer formed a stand-alone symphonic suite containing five movements from the original production. The movements are based on romances and dances and include a hauntingly-dark Waltz in a minor key, a nostalgic and mournful Nocturne featuring a solo violin, a stately and upbeat Mazurka, a film noir-like Romance with a legato and sustained melody heard in a solo trumpet, and a final fast and quirky Galop.
Johann Strauss II (1825–1899)
Emperor Waltz, Op. 437 (1889)
“Waltz King” Johann Strauss II wrote the Kaiser-Walzer in 1889 to celebrate a toast made by Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I when he visited German Emperor Wilhelm II in August of that year. That occasion was intended as a “toast of friendship” from the Austro-Hungarian to the German Empire. Strauss premiered Op. 437 in Berlin on October 21, 1889.
One scholar, using rather florid prose, described the Kaiser-Walzer as “the most beautiful flower that has come during the century from the Strauss dynasty in Vienna.” After a lengthy introduction, strings present the familiar majestic waltz tune. A lighthearted second section follows, and Strauss reprises the main waltz in the final coda.
Program Notes by Elizabeth Schwartz
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Waltz No. 2 from the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1 (1938)
Shostakovich originally composed what has become known as the Waltz No. 2 in 1955-56 for his score (Op. 99) for the film The First Echelon (Pervyi eshelon), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, which had its premiere on April 29, 1956. The waltz was also included in the Suite from The First Echelon (Op. 99a) arranged by Shostakovich and Levon Atovmyan in 1956. The BSO has never performed the Waltz No. 2, but Keith Lockhart led a Boston Pops performance of the waltz in a program celebrating the Ballet Russes in May 2009.
In the late 1950s an anonymous person, probably Shostakovich himself, arranged an orchestral suite from ballet, musical theater, and film music of the 1930s to 1950s, that was mistakenly identified for many years as the Suite for Jazz Orchestra, No. 2; it is now known correctly as the Suite for Variety Orchestra. Waltz No. 2 is the seventh of eight numbers in the Suite for Variety Orchestra.
Between 1929 and 1970, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote scores for almost forty films in a variety of genres, from the eccentric silent feature The New Babylon, to hardcore Stalinist propaganda docudramas like The Fall of Berlin, to probing versions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear. The First Echelon (Pervyi eshelon) was Shostakovich’s only collaboration with Mikhail Kalatozov (1903-1973), a distinguished auteur director best known for his classic World War II film The Cranes Are Flying (1957).
The scenario follows a group of enthusiastic young volunteers who travel to barren, remote Kazakhstan to participate in the campaign launched by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for the settlement and agricultural development of the “virgin lands.” Shot by acclaimed cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, the film depicts their difficulties in adjusting to the harsh climate and primitive living conditions, but in good Socialist Realist fashion focuses on the ability of Communist Party officials to lead the collective and triumph over adversity and human weaknesses (alcoholism, jealousy, romantic misadventures).
Shostakovich’s score includes a cheerful overture, several diegetic (that is, performed within the film’s narrative) “mass” songs, fanfares, and two brief sequences set to the music of Waltz No. 2 playing from a loudspeaker. The first occurs in the opening minutes as the arriving volunteers dance in a blizzard. Its reprise occurs during a summertime celebration of the completion of the first permanent dwellings. The full version included in the First Echelon Suite, Op. 99a, is the source for Waltz No. 2 in the Suite for Variety Orchestra.
The “variety” in the orchestration comes from the inclusion of instruments associated with a dance band—four saxophones, guitar, and accordion, creating a casual, circus-like atmosphere. Following traditional ABA waltz form, the outer sections are primarily in C minor and the middle section (in two short episodes) in E-flat major and A-flat major. A sense of unsteadiness results from the subtle shifting between these related tonalities, as does the contrast between the light, suave, irresistible main theme (with prominent quarter note rests in the last phrase) and the underlying darkness of the surrounding accompaniment. An ironic “oom-pah-pah” beat pulses in the double basses and snare drum. The alto saxophone announces the simple, melancholy theme at the outset, later handed off to crooning trombones.
For the broad public, the unassuming, slightly lascivious little Waltz No. 2 has become one of Shostakovich’s most recognizable (and most frequently rearranged) compositions. Its fame soared when Stanley Kubrick used it to brilliant effect during the opening moments of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), an erotic psychological mystery drama starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Program Notes by Harlow Robinson
Johann Strauss II (1825–1899)
Frühlingsstimmen, Op. 410 (1882)
Johann Strauss, Jr. was the undisputed king of dance music in 19th century Vienna. Starting around the age of nineteen and following in the footsteps of his father and namesake, Strauss composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, and quadrilles that earned him the title of “Waltz King” among Vienna’s musical elite. Straus’s penchant for writing so-called “light music” rather than heavier concert fare—symphonies, concertos, and chamber music—has occasionally led to his marginalization in musical histories, but Strauss’s contemporaries clearly counted him among the brightest lights in the crowded Viennese firmament. One famous story recounts Strauss’s wife Adele approaching the great master Johannes Brahms for an autograph. Upon such a request, Brahms would typically inscribe a few measures of his most well-known music, and then sign his name underneath. On this occasion, however, he chose instead to inscribe a few measures from Strauss’s famous “Blue Danube” waltz, and then wrote beneath it: “Unfortunately, NOT by Johannes Brahms.”
Frühlingsstimmen (“Voices of Spring”) began as so many of Strauss’s compositions: intended to entertain the audience at a charity performance for Vienna’s elite. The original performance featured the orchestral waltz you hear today augmented by a soprano soloist. The soprano part was written for Bianca Bianchi, a star of the Vienna Court Opera, with a text evoking the singing of birds as the landscape awakens from its winter slumber. The text was provided by Viennese poet Richard Genée, a frequent collaborator with Strauss and the librettist for Strauss’s most famous operetta, Die Fledermaus. The piece was such a smash success at the charity performance that Strauss quickly retooled the piece for orchestral performance and debuted the instrumental version seventeen days later. In subsequent years, the piece became a staple in performances by Viennese artist Hans Tranquillini, who performed under the stage name of Baron Jean and described himself as a Kunstpfeifer (“artistic whistler”). While you may not be up to the standards set by Tranquillini, don’t be surprised to find yourself whistling this charming tune on your way out of the hall this evening.
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Waltz from Cinderella, Op. 87 (1840–44)
The fact that the first two acts of Cinderella were composed during the dissolution of Prokofiev’s marriage to Lina and the start of his public life with Mira, calls certain aspects of the piece into question. He had made statements to the press about how he hoped to make the character of Cinderella a “real person” and not simply a fairy tale archetype. He wanted to see her “feeling, experiencing and moving among us.” Whether the desire to add a third dimension to his heroine was meant to confirm a new devotion to Mira or hint at some lingering sympathy for Lina, or both, is impossible to divine now. But Prokofiev was working on an autobiography during that same 1941 summer, so it seems likely the reflective mood engendered by that process found its way into Cinderella. Both the ballet and the memoir had to be shelved when Germany invaded, however, and Prokofiev soon turned his attention to an opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He and Mira were able to return to Moscow in 1943 and he got back to work on the ballet in due course, reckoning at last with his own delayed midnight and completing the orchestration in 1944. When the premiere finally happened in 1945 it was at the Bolshoi, not the Kirov, but the commissioning company got its turn just one year later (with a production the composer greatly preferred). Three orchestral collections were drawn from the score in 1946 as well and tonight’s compilation is based on numbers from Suites 1 and 3. The story of Cinderella is well known, but Prokofiev’s intentions for the ballet version are worth considering in light of its protracted and emotionally freighted timeline. “What I wished to express above all else in the music of Cinderella,” he claimed, “was the poetic love of Cinderella and the Prince, the birth and flowering of that love, the obstacles in its path, and finally the dream fulfilled.”
Program Notes by Jeff Counts
Johann Strauss II (1825–1899)
Overture to Die Fledermaus (1874)
Nothing screams “Vienna!” like Johann Strauss, Jr.’s, operetta Die Fledermaus. Memorable tunes, one following another, have made it an audience favorite since its première at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien on April 5, 1874. Today the work is popular around New Year’s Eve when waves of champagne make their way into glasses all over the world. There is a basis for the seasonal popularity of the operetta, though. One of its sources is the French play Le Réveillon, the plot of which involves the traditional dinner and festivities celebrated in French-speaking countries on both Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The play, by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, the librettists of Bizet’s opera Carmen(!), was translated to German and eventually ended up in Strauss’ hands where he molded it into the sparkling stage work it is.
Strauss’ music successfully transports the comedy from Paris to Vienna, a belief enthusiastically endorsed by the Earl of Harewood. As editor of The New Kobbé’s Opera Book, he writes, “The work as a whole – plot as well as score – is a masterpiece, the finest product of the Viennese operetta school, and a cornucopia of fresh, witty, pointed, memorable melody.”
The operetta’s overture – performed tonight – has become a part of the standard orchestral repertoire. In his essay about the entire operetta, the Earl of Harewood writes, “The overture, a potpourri, is one of the most popular ever written.” Indeed, it is both a potpourri, or collection, of melodies from the operetta itself and very popular. If you have never seen Die Fledermaus, do so. It is guaranteed that you will love it. You will find it very difficult not to either jump up from your seat and start dancing or hum or whistle a melody, or perhaps even do both!
Program Notes by Geoffrey Decker