S C H U M A N N A N D S T R A U S S

Saturday, May 5, 2018 • 7:30 p.m. • Mark C. Smith Concert Hall • Von Braun Center

Emilio Colón, celloGregory Vajda, Music Director and Conductor • Huntsville Symphony Orchestra

R I C H A R D S T R A U S S ( 1 8 6 4 – 1 9 4 9 )

D O N J U A N , op. 20, TrV 156

R O B E R T S C H U M A N N ( 1 8 1 0 – 1 8 5 6 )

C E L L O C O N C E R T O I N A M I N O R , op. 129I. Nicht zu schnellII. LangsamIII. Sehr lebhaft

Emilio Colón, cello

I N T E R M I S S I O N

S T R A U S S

D O N Q U I X O T E , op. 35, TrV 184 (Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character) Introduction “Don Quixote loses his sanity after reading novels about knights, and decides to become one” Theme “Don Quixote, knight of the sorrowful countenance”; “Sancho Panza” Var. I “Adventure at the windmills” Var. II “The victorious struggle against the army of the great Emperor Alifanfaron” Var. III “Dialogue between knight and squire” Var. IV “Unhappy adventure with a procession of pilgrims” Var. V “The knight’s vigil” Var. VI “The meeting with Dulcinea” Var. VII “A ride through the air” Var. VIII “The unfortunate voyage in the enchanted gondola” Var. IX “Battle with the magicians” Var. X “Duel with the Knight of the White Moon” Finale “He returns to his senses – The death of Don Quixote”

Emilio Colón, cello Charles Hogue, viola

C O N C E R T S P O N S O RThe Jurenko Foundation – Ruth Jurenko,

Carole and Buddy Jones, and Janet and David Brown

G U E S T A R T I S T S P O N S O RCadence Bank

P R O D U C T I O N S P O N S O RREALTORS® of Note

64 • HSO SEASON 63 • SPRING

P R O G R A M N O T E SS T R A U S SD O N J U A N , op. 20

Richard Strauss, the product of a conscientious education in Munich under the guiding hand of his musician father, absorbed the classicist principles on which he had been reared while also feeling acutely a youthful urge to transcend them. His earliest major successes as a composer were his “tone poems” for orchestra, continuations of the format established a generation earlier by Liszt. The first of these, Don Juan (1888), was Strauss’ breakthrough work and a provocatively original statement: it put him on the map in no uncertain terms, at a time when he was only just settling into his first professional appointment as master of music to the court of Weimar. There, the legacies of Liszt and Wagner loomed large. Strauss was mentored for a time by Liszt’s daughter Cosima, who encouraged his forays into a new kind of music for orchestra as an alternative to the classical symphony.

By composing major works to embody literary programs, the young Strauss allowed himself endless possibilities for experimentation with musical rhetoric, form, and orchestration even as the familiarity of the subject matter helped guarantee the complicity of his audiences. Don Juan evokes the Renaissance legend of a flamboyant womanizing libertine from Seville eventually forced to repent and atone, as retold in a play by Strauss’ contemporary, the poet Nikolaus Lenau.

Like Lenau’s script, Strauss’ music imagines Don Juan as less a hapless hedonist and more a frustrated idealist. The verve and sheen with which the character and his exploits are brought to life may have been inspired by the composer’s own burgeoning romance with the soprano Pauline de Ahna, whom he would soon marry. This is exuberant, heart-pounding stuff, and the demands placed on the musicians of the orchestra are at times extreme—Don Juan is a regular fixture on audition lists the world over. [ca. 16’]

S C H U M A N NC E L L O C O N C E R T O I N A M I N O R , o p . 1 2 9

The work of Robert Schumann represents the full flowering of Romanticism in music; his was one of the era’s most intensely personal and daringly creative voices, and his friendship helped enable the ascension of younger composers whose achievements at times largely overshadowed his own. Schumann’s experiments and innovations were grounded in a scholarly study of ancient, pre-classical music, an interest he passed on to Brahms in particular. Schumann was aided and inspired by his wife Clara Wieck—the first great female concert pianist in history, a composer in her own right, and mother of the couple’s eight children.

Schumann’s fate was not a happy one. Increasingly tortured by crescendoing mental illness (the cause of which is still the subject of fierce debate), by his early forties he had attempted suicide and required permanent institutional care. By the time of his death in a Bonn sanitorium in 1856, Schumann was plagued by extreme

episodes of catatonia, schizophrenic paranoia, and unrelenting auditory hallucinations which he frequently attempted to transcribe into finished music. He was unaware that he was sometimes simply hearing his own themes from years past.

The Cello Concerto in A minor is a masterpiece of the genre, dating from the composer’s promising years as a director of music in Düsseldorf prior to his final illness. It is often spoken of alongside the great concertos by Dvor�ák and Elgar, though it has only recently been played as frequently. Schumann did not hear it performed before his death. A capable cellist himself, if not one of professional caliber, he intimately understood the instrument’s greatest strengths. The concerto is written in three movements, with the explicit indication that they should segue one into the next without discernible pause. At one point the soloist enters into a dialogue with the principal cellist of the orchestra, a unique feature sometimes interpreted as an allusion to the relationship between the composer and his beloved Clara. Certainly the first two movements read like an extended love letter. But the rollicking finale sports an unusual landmark, a virtuoso cadenza for the soloist which, quite atypically, is accompanied by the orchestra rather than being punctuated by the silence of the ensemble. [ca. 25’]

S T R A U S SD O N Q U I X O T E , op. 35

The tale of Don Quixote of La Mancha, authored by Miguel de Cervantes (ca. 1547–1616), remains a crown jewel of Spanish literature, a major influence as one of the first modern novels, and either the source or the earliest known inscription of a wide variety of now-common sayings: “tilting at windmills,” “other fish to fry,” and “wild goose chase,” to name but a few.

Cervantes tells the story of a minor nobleman who has read so many medieval romances that he begins to see the world as just such a fantasy. Recruiting a frumpy farmer as his obliging squire Sancho Panza, Don Quixote sets out across the local landscape on his rather sickly and cantankerous steed Rocinante, determined to right wrongs and conquer foes.

Windmills are misinterpreted as fearsome, malevolent ogres; a herd of bleating sheep is imagined to be a battalion under the charge of an evil emperor; pilgrims carrying a statue of the Madonna are mistaken for a band of ruffians abducting a damsel in distress. Don Quixote is unaware that everyone he meets immediately understands him to be mad. He is eventually commanded to return home, shaken and unfulfilled, by a well-meaning villager pretending to be a superior warrior. Cervantes’ quirky narrative continues to confound critics and appreciators today: is the work a profound moral critique, a silly picaresque, or both at once? In any case, it has inspired numerous derivative works, from a famous sketch by Picasso, to Broadway’s The Man of La Mancha, to one of the orchestral masterworks of Richard Strauss.

Ritter is the German word for “knight,” and in telling the story of this particular Ritter, the composer was paying homage to Alexander Ritter, a violinist of the Meiningen court orchestra and an important influence. Strauss’ fidelity to the novel is fastidious. He crafts each of his chosen scenes with the attention and finesse of a fine engraving by Doré. The tone poem is constructed as a set of variations on a

HSO SEASON 63 • SPRING • 65

G U E S T A R T I S T

E M I L I O C O L Ó NC E L L O

• Recent performances with the National Symphony of Istanbul, National Symphony of Ukraine, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra; recitals at the Concertgebouw, Casals Festival, Nevada Chamber Music Festival

• Recordings for Enharmonic, Klavier, and Zephyr labels, among others• Faculty, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University; founder, International

Chamber Orchestra of Puerto Rico; courses offered at Paris Conservatoire, Franz Liszt Academy of Music, Toho Gakuen Tokyo

single theme, this structure ingeniously mirroring Don Quixote’s own singular fantastical obsession. Don Quixote is represented by a solo cellist, and the sundry moods of the abused and unenthused Sancho Panza are portrayed by a viola with occasional help from a euphonium and a bass clarinet.

Don Quixote boasts some of Strauss’ most endearing orchestral music. It is a great joy to perform. Its cinematic display includes novel

orchestral effects such as a “wind machine” in the percussion section and the employment of specialized playing techniques in the brasses and woodwinds to emulate the bleating of the “army” of sheep met in the second variation. The protagonist’s fascination with fantasy is evoked by beautiful, melancholic arpeggiations introduced by the clarinet—this figure is featured prominently in the introduction and again at the conclusion, where it signals the resignation and death of the enterprising hero of la Mancha. [ca. 45’]

C O N C E R T M A S T E R

N I C H O L A S PA P P O N E • Principal Violin II, Huntsville Symphony Orchestra; Assistant Concertmaster, Chamber Orchestra of New York• Soloist performances with New Westchester Symphony, NY Session Symphony; recent appearances at Rutgers University,

Philadelphia Academy of Music, Chamber Music at the Evergreens• Chamber performances with members of the Emerson String Quartet, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York Philharmonic• Graduate, Manhattan School of Music

66 • HSO SEASON 63 • SPRING