Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
15 January 2008

Scott Yoo , guest conductor
Allen Harrington, saxophone

 

Jocelyn Morlock (b. 1969)
New composition
Canada Council commission / World premiere performance

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936)
Concerto for saxophone and strings, op. 109, in e flat major

Intermission
Refreshments are available upstairs in the concert hall.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Fantasia para saxophone

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Octet

1. Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco
2. Andante
3. Scherzo (allegro leggierissimo)
4. Presto

We acknowledge the support
of the Canada Council for the Arts
which last year invested $26.3 million
in music throughout Canada.

Concert sponsor / Anonymous
Season sponsor / The Great-West Life Assurance Company
Print media sponsor / Winnipeg Free Press
Radio media sponsors / CBC Radio Two 98.3,
CBC Radio One 990 and Golden West Radio
Chamber Chatter sponsor / PricewaterhouseCoopers
Electronic media sponsor / Shaw Cable

Scott Yoo

Scott Yoo is the Music Director of the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival in California and is currently in his thirteenth season as Music Director of the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble he co-founded in 1993. He was recently given the coveted title of ‘Artistic Collaborator’ with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and also continues to serve as the Resident Conductor for the Colorado College Summer Music Festival. In addition to leading Metamorphosen in its subscription series at Jordan Hall in Boston, he has conducted the ensemble in debut performances in New York and Washington D.C. Highlights of the 2001/02 season for Mr. Yoo and Metamorphosen included a 26-city US tour and a CD release with violinist Mark O’Connor for Sony Classical.

The 2005/06 season saw Yoo conduct the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, the Louisiana Philharmonic, the Virginia Symphony, and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. He continued his ongoing relationship with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in both subscription concerts and the directorship of a festival of the music of Elliot Carter in St. Paul. He returned to conduct the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in August, 2006 as well.

In the 2006/07 season, Mr. Yoo made subscription concert conducting appearances with the Utah Symphony, the Florida Orchestra, the Omaha Symphony, the Seoul Philharmonic and others. He returns to lead several projects with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra once again, conducts the New World Symphony in Miami again and will conduct the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in the Young Concert Artists Diamond Gala concert at Lincoln Center in April, 2007.

“Yoo and the orchestra vibrantly asserted the exuberant style of music-making.” (The Houston Chronicle.)

“Led by guest conductor and violinist Scott Yoo, the musicians delivered clean, crisp, rhythmically sharp accounts of two symphonies and the Violin concerto no. 5 — compositions that spanned Mozart’s career and demonstrated how much he grew as an artist.” (The Times-Picayune.)

Allen Harrington

Canada’s leading young saxophonist, Allen Harrington, teaches saxophone, bassoon, music theory, and chamber music at the University of Manitoba’s School of Music. A native of Saskatoon, he received a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Saskatchewan where he studied with Marvin Eckroth. He holds a Master of Music degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he was a student of Dr. Fred Hemke.

An active soloist, recitalist, adjudicator, chamber and orchestral musician, Allen maintains a busy schedule outside of his university teaching career. Recent solo engagements include performances with l’Orchestre Symphonique de Quebec, the Royal Chamber Orchestra of Wallonie (Belgium), the symphony orchestras of Winnipeg and Saskatoon and the Saskatchewan Chamber Orchestra. In the 2007/08 season he will be the guest artist for concerts with the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra and Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. He is also a featured soloist on the Saskatoon Symphony’s recent CD Passionscape.

Allen has had great success at music competitions both nationally and internationally. He won the Grand Award of the National Music Festival of Canada in 1999, making him only the second saxophonist ever to do so. In 2000, he placed first in woodwinds at the Canadian Music Competition finals, and first in chamber music at the National Music Festival. In 2004, he was awarded the Grand Prize at the International Stepping Stone Competition. More recently, in 2006 he became the first Canadian and only the second North American ever to reach the final round of the International Adolphe Sax competition in Dinant, Belgium. He finished in fourth place from a field of 144 of the finest saxophonists in the world under the age of 31, at this largest and most important saxophone competition in the world.

Allen was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 1998. He has played bassoon and contrabassoon with the Saskatoon and Regina Symphony Orchestras, and is currently a regular extra with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. He plays second bassoon for the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, and is a busy freelancer with other groups in and around Winnipeg.
With his duo partner Laura Loewen (piano), he has performed at the last two World Saxophone Congresses (Minneapolis, 2003, and Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2006), and the last two North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conferences. This past season they completed a two week recital tour through Atlantic Canada for the Debut Atlantic series.

Jocelyn Morlock

Jocelyn Morlock completed her doctorate in composition at UBC in 2002. Her music has been performed across Canada as well as in the United States and Europe. Her quartet, Bird in the Tangled Sky, was played at the 1999 ISCM World Music Days in Romania, and was recorded by Toronto’s Continuum ensemble for their self-titled debut CD. Bird in the Tangled Sky also won the first annual CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composers competition. In June of 2002, Morlock’s Lacrimosa represented Canada at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers (Paris, 2002), where it was a recommended work. It has since been broadcast in twenty-one countries. In 2005, Morlock wrote the imposed piece, Amore, for the Montreal International Music Competition, where it was performed by forty-three singers.

She has written music for ArrayMusic, the Burney Ensemble, CBC Radio Orchestra, Continuum Contemporary Music, Ensemble Symposium, GroundSwell, Ian Hampton, Musica Intima and Steven Isserlis, the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Joseph Petric, Tiresias, the Turning Point ensemble, violinist Mark Sabat, the Vancouver New Music Ensemble, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the Windsor Canadian Music Festival among others.

Morlock’s compositions tend to explore unusual timbres made possible by extended playing techniques, at times in combination with relatively tonal or modal idioms. She enjoys experimenting with music of many styles and eras. She is also a proud member of Sekaha Gong Gita Asmara, Vancouver’s only Balinese gamelan ensemble.

Alexander Glazunov
Concerto for saxophone and strings

Although Adolphe Sax had invented it a century earlier, it was not until the 1930s that the saxophone finally took off as a concert instrument. In Europe, the principal instigators were the Frenchman, Marcel Mule, and the German expatriate, Sigurd Rascher.

In 1933, Rascher attended a concert featuring Mule’s pioneering saxophone quartet performing a new work in that nascent genre by Alexander Glazunov.

Glazunov was also an expatriate, having left the Soviet Union in 1928. At the time, he had been the director of the Petersburg Conservatory since 1905, but the privations of the 1920s, together with the bickering and maneuvering that had come to characterise the Conservatory’s administration, had drained his enthusiasm for his job as well as his creative energies as a composer. The former adversity is well-documented; like everyone else, Glazunov was undernourished, and he spent at least one winter having to wear his fur coat indoors when at home. The situation at the Conservatory must have taken an equal toll psychologically on the old master, as by all accounts Glazunov was a dedicated and beloved advocate for his faculty and students (demonstrated, for instance, by his personal intervention on behalf of the young and impoverished Shostakovich).

But to return to Paris and 1933: the 26-year-old Rascher, overcome by Glazunov’s quartet, went backstage to meet the composer, asked if he might play for him, and afterwards dared to suggest the idea of a saxophone concerto. The composer assented readily, and had the manuscript ready a mere five months later.

Like most of Glazunov’s compositions after 1905, the concerto is in a traditional 19th century idiom, and the alert listener will hear numerous references, borrowings and tributes, mainly from Brahms (the A major Piano quartet, the 1st symphony) and Tchaikovsky (the Violin concerto).

Fantasia para saxophone
Heitor Villa-Lobos

Villa-Lobos’s personality was that of a dynamo, crackling with enthusiasm, energy and occasionally raw chaos. His preferred work environment appears to have been the latter. According to a colleague’s recollection: “At almost all times, the television set was turned on without sound, showing either ‘westerns’ or wrestling. When no one was rehearsing at the piano, the tape recorder or phonograph would be playing also. A group of three to eight people would be conversing at the same time in different languages… Amidst [everything] Villa-Lobos sat at an oblong table covered with music and composed.”

The Fantasia belongs to the last period in Villa-Lobos’s output, one that centered on instrumental virtuosity in general and concerto writing in particular. The first movement features swirling solo figurations and arpeggios, marvels of fluidity that rise like sparks or ripple like banners on the breeze. The movement begins with a section in typically Brazilian asymmetric rhythms, but soon turns to an introspective quadruple meter. Still, there’s a subtle sway in play, a shift and slide to the rhythms as tunes get passed back and forth, never quite at the same rate or with the same inflection. The second movement opens with a solo from Villa-Lobos’s favourite instrument, the cello, accompanied in the strings by another of the composer’s favourites — thick, clustery chords. With the soloist’s entrance, however, we are transported into the ethereal whole-tone harmonies of Debussy, amidst which the saxophone floats with delphic purity.

Suddenly the soloist breaks into this serene landscape, heralding the third movement with the same octave leaps it used to open the whole piece. In response, the orchestra embarks on a sinister theme in septuple metre, but when the saxophone picks it up it turns into a rhapsody, and the middle section directs our gaze to the open sky. The opening material returns with an extra beat and a sense of urgency, but the horns add to this a note of heroism, which carries to the close.

Octet
Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn was born into an affluent and musical Jewish family in 1809. On delivery, instead of crying, Mendelssohn sang a tune he had been working on, just to see how it would go over. Later in his infancy, he would often amuse himself while nursing by humming countermelodies to his mother’s lullabies, and at the age of three he wrote his first piano concerto, over a nice filling bowl of oatmeal. Later in the afternoon he became unhappy with it, and it was only after undertaking nine years of arduous training that he allowed any of his work to be published.

The previous paragraph approximates one of the popular views of Mendelssohn. Clive Brown, in the preface of his A Portrait of Mendelssohn, offers a more complete picture:

“Mendelssohn was cultivated, intellectually gifted to a remarkable degree, possessed tremendous mental and physical energy, and was motivated in both his life and his art by sincerely and deeply held aesthetic and moral convictions. At the same time, he had a lively sense of fun, was fundamentally kind and considerate, exhibited an extraordinary degree of charm, and aroused deep devotion in many who came in contact with him. Yet he was also capable of moody unsociability, violent fits of rage, abrupt rudeness, long-maintained resentment when he fancied he had been wronged or slighted, boisterous and sometimes insensitive high spirits, firmness bordering on inflexibility where he encountered anything that offended his artistic or moral creed, and even a degree of self-centred arrogance.

The Octet, op. 20, is at once a mature and youthful work. Composed when he was 16, it demonstrates Mendelssohn already in complete control of the chamber music idiom of the day (Beethoven and Schubert were both still alive). Previous string octets had generally been handled as double quartets, each playing antiphonally against the other; by contrast, Mendelssohn created an integrated ensemble, thus capitalizing upon a much wider array of combinations and textures.

Triumphant, positive, effusive, overflowing with joy, the first movement literally can’t contain itself, spinning out to a quarter-hour, breathless with delight, like someone suddenly coming upon a new and unimaginable joy, something so wonderful that there is nothing else for a certain space of time but that new knowledge, and a need to share it that cannot be delayed.

The second movement is harmonically and melodically the equal of Schubert, and holds some of the same turbulence and melancholy, but, at the deciding moment we are steered away from human tragedy and instead toward divine grace. At base, this is accomplished through a simple change of mode, with C minor’s dark aspect traded for a pellucid C major. The particular passage is extraordinary, and consists of a slowly rising scale in the violins and ‘celli, accompanied by much faster descending scales in the inner voices. Beatles fans will recognize this as the place from which George Martin stole that cool bit in Doctor Robert.

The Scherzo shares an obvious bond with the music of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the inspiration in this case being the Walpurgis-night dream in Goethe’s Faust. As Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny commented, “one feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial procession.”

The finale continues in much the same vein, but with a seemingly incongruous quote from Handel’s Messiah (“and He shall reign…”) stuck unceremoniously into the texture. The melody is related to the opening theme of the first movement, and the sentiment to the second; the energy is a direct continuation of the third. Mendelssohn the historian has built a bridge from this finale to the rest of the piece; Mendelssohn the composer has built one from his new music to that of the past. All that remains is the emergence of a compositionally integrative, yet historically evocative means to sew everything into a conclusive and satisfying whole: the Messiah motive becomes the subject of a fugue. And to that we all say “Amen.”.

 

 

MCO's 2008/09 season is sponsored by The Great-West Life Assurance Company.
Support has been received from Media sponsors The Winnipeg Free Press, CBC Radio One 990,
CBC Radio Two 98.3, Golden West Radio & Shaw Cable. MCO's Chamber Chatter newsletter
is sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Heartstrings gala
sponsor: Mackenzie Financial Corporation.

© 2008 Manitoba Chamber Orchestra