Tomorrow night it's time to fall in love all over again with a program of romantic music! On the menu - Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue plus the Warsaw Concerto and Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. The reception will not be held before the concert but at intermission. I wanted to share this incredible performance of the Mambo from West Side Story that you will hear us play. This is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra from Venezuela, just unbelievable!
Here are the program notes fro the concert, see you tomorrow
Ron Spigelman
Both the beginning and the end of tonight's program draws inspiration from William Shakespeare's most popular work, the tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Tonight's opening selection from Leonard Bernstein's musical West Side Story borrows extensively from Shakespeare's plot and characters. Bernstein was initially approached by choreographer Jerome Robbins in 1949 about collaborating on a present-day musical adaptation of the Shakespearean masterpiece. In the eight years that followed, the project suffered several setbacks and changes in personnel before receiving its Broadway premiere in 1957. The score for West Side Story requires much more orchestra personnel than most traditional Broadway shows due in large part to the extended percussion section needed by many of the numbers. Bernstein later created an orchestral suite of music from the show, simply titling it Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.
Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto was supposed to have been written by Sergei Rachmaninoff. This requires some explaining. The Warsaw Concerto is a one-movement piano concerto originally written for the 1941 movie Dangerous Moonlight, later titled Suicide Squadron. The producers wanted something resembling Rachmaninoff's Second or Third Piano Concertos, but Rachmaninoff refused to write a new piece or allow the use of these existing pieces. The task of writing the Warsaw Concerto fell to Addinsell, who had made a career of writing film music despite his lack of formal qualifications. Dangerous Moonlight's love-story plot revolves around the fictional composer of the concerto, a pianist and shell-shocked combat pilot who meets an American war correspondent in
Rhapsody in Blue remains one of George Gershwin's most popular works. Leonard Bernstein once wrote to Gershwin "The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together. The themes are terrific – inspired, God-given. I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky." The work was commissioned by band leader Paul Whiteman, who wished to have a concerto-like piece for an all-jazz concert he was to be giving. The concert was significantly long, and the story goes that the audience was noticeably bored until the opening clarinet glissando of the Rhapsody. It is also interesting to note that this opening clarinet glissando was not exactly one of Gershwin's original ideas. Whiteman's virtuoso clarinetist rendered the upper portion of the scale as a glissando rather than the notated 17-note scale: Gershwin heard it and insisted that it be repeated in the premiere performance.
The other "inspired melodist" to which Bernstein referred is the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky, influenced by Shakespeare enough to write music based on Hamlet and The Tempest, shows his skill as melodist in his Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. The work's "love theme" is instantly recognizable due to its use in popular culture. Work on Romeo and Juliet started after the premiere of Tchaikovsky's Fatum (Fate), which did not meet with the success he had planned. Friend and fellow composer Mily Balakirev was aware of two things: The failure of Fatum to achieve acclaim was a source of great disappointment for Tchaikovsky, and Tchaikovsky had just emerged from an infatuation with the Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt. Balakirev suggested using Romeo and Juliet as inspiration, and offered guidance during the compositional process. The work received several revisions between its premiere performance and the overture-fantasia version heard tonight, making this work a true "labor of love" for Tchaikovsky.
Kyle D. Vanderburg studies composition under Dr. Carlyle Sharpe at
