Tuesday, April 9, 2024, 7:30pm
Meyerson Symphony Center + Livestream

Fanfare

7:15pm, Meyerson lobby

Fanfare from “La Peri”
Paul Dukas/arr. Mathie
The Texas Trombone Academy Premier Ensemble
Tony Bianchetta, conductor

Program

Rocky Point Holiday [5’00”]
Ron Nelson

Concert for Trombone [25’00”]
Chick Corea/arr. John Dickson

1. A Stroll
2. Waltse for Joe
3. Hysteria
4. Joe’s Tango
   

Joseph Alessi, trombone
John Dickson, piano

— INTERMISSION —

Symphony No. 4 [31’00”]
David Maslanka

Dallas Winds Musicians

BASS TROMBONE
Barney McCollum

EUPHONIUM
Donald Bruce, principal
Danny Chapa

TUBA
Nick Beltchev, principal
Juan Alonso
Jason Wallace

STRING BASS
Andrew Goins

PIANO
Cameron Hofmann

HARP
Naoko Nakamura

ORGAN
Bradley Hunter Welch

TIMPANI
Jacob Hord

PERCUSSION
Roland Muzquiz, principal
Drew Lang
Steve McDonald
Jon Lee
Brandon Kelly
Nate Collins
Jose Uzcategui
Bill Klymus
Andy Eldridge

Livestream

Scott Probst – Audio Engineer
Christopher Cook – Remote Cameras
Cameron Conyer – Technical Engineer
Adam Ellard – Director
Savannah Ekrut – Switcher, Camera
Lydia Amstutz – Titles, Camera
Ciara Negley – Camera
Todd Toney – Score Reader
David Lovrien – Title Design

Program Notes

Rocky Point Holiday
Ron Nelson
(December 14, 1929—December 24, 2023)

A native of Joliet, Illinois, Ron Nelson received his Bachelor of Music degree in 1952, master’s degree in 1953, and Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1957, all from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in New York. He studied in France at the Ecole Normale de Musique and at the Paris Conservatory under a Fulbright Grant in 1955. Dr. Nelson joined the Brown University faculty the following year and taught there until his retirement in 1993.

Nelson trained as an orchestral composer, and originally wrote for strings. As his career progressed, however, he began to realize how difficult it was to get any new work performed by a symphony orchestra.  But his years at Eastman had introduced him to Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble.  He became aware of the need for challenging new wind repertoire. 

“In the band field, they’re hungry for new works,” Nelson said in a 1997 interview with Bruce Duffie.  “I would have conductors call me up and ask, ‘Do you have anything for us this year?’  You have no idea what that does to a composer, to be wanted.”

He wrote Rocky Point Holiday in 1969, commissioned for the University of Minnesota Concert Band, Frank Bencriscutto, conductor. 

“It was for their Russian tour and Frank wanted an American piece to open his program.” Nelson recalled.  “This was a pivotal moment in my notion of wind ensemble scoring in which I focused on orchestrating in an extremely transparent way.  Others have commented that they felt Rocky Point marked a change in the overall philosophy for scoring for wind band.”

Nelson wrote the work while on vacation at Rocky Point – a favorite seaside resort in Rhode Island, which has now closed.  The composition is an exciting virtuosic work that unites elements of jazz and classical construction into a new indigenous American style.

Concerto for Trombone
Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea
(June 12, 1941—February 9, 2021)

Chick Corea was one of those legendary jazz musicians whose name is known even to people who don’t listen to jazz.  Although, if you don’t listen to jazz you might be a little fuzzy about what exactly he was legendary for.

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Corea grew up in a musical family.  His father was a Dixieland jazz trumpeter.  The elder Corea started his son on piano at age four and gave him his first drum set at age eleven. Corea would play both throughout his long career—primarily piano, but every now and then he’d sit in on percussion.  Versatility was one of his legendary attributes.

That versatility went far beyond his skills as an instrumentalist, however.  Steeped in his father’s music, he grew up listening to Dixieland, big band, and swing, learning from the legends of prior generations like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young.  But Corea’s love of the piano also led him to study great classical pianists.  He absorbed their influences as eagerly as he soaked up jazz.

His classical studies led him to composition.  At the peak of his career, he was lauded as the composer of such jazz standards as Spain, 500 Miles High, and Windows.

With so many talents to share with his fellow musicians, it didn’t take long for Corea to become a valued collaborator.  He started performing professionally when he was still in high school, and reportedly dropped out of the Juilliard School because he had so many paying gigs he didn’t have time to attend classes as well.

From the 1960s on he recorded and toured with the top names in jazz, including Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Al Di Meola, and Jean-Luc Ponty.  Years later he collaborated with Bobby McFerrin, Béla Fleck, and Christian McBride.  He formed his own groups, adding the title “bandleader” to his resume. But he also played solo, recording two albums of piano improvisations in 1971.

Classical music was always part of the mix, along with Spanish music, Japanese music, and whatever else he stumbled onto that sounded interesting.  He played acoustic.  He went electric. He recorded with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2008. And somewhere along the way he won 27 Grammy Awards, out of more than 70 nominations.

That Sydney Symphony gig wasn’t a one-off.  In 1999 he adapted his jazz standard Spain into a piano concerto to perform with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.  In 2004 he composed his String Quartet No. 1—his first composition that didn’t include a piano.  Beginning in the early 2000s, Corea spent more and more of his time exploring classical music’s contemporary forms. Mozart was an influence, as was George Gershwin. 

Corea’s last completed work was the trombone concerto you’ll hear tonight, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for their principal trombone, Joseph Alessi. The idea was Alessi’s, hatched when conductor Alan Gilbert took him to hear Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone play a late-night set at Birdland.  One of the works Ozone played was Corea’s Brasilia.

In a May 22, 2023, feature by Nate Chinen, written for WRTI classical and jazz radio in Philadelphia, Alessi recalled the moment.  “I’ve been trying to convince a composer of that stature to write a trombone concerto,” he said.  “I was unsuccessful with John Adams and John Williams, and people like that.  But when I heard Brasilia that night, something came over me, and I said, ‘God, I wonder if Chick Corea would ever write a trombone concerto.”

Makoto texted Corea, then got back with Alessi the next day to give him Corea’s phone number; the jazz legend was interested. Corea invited Alessi to his home in Clearwater, Florida, for two collaboration sessions as the work took shape.  The result was a concerto of four contrasting movements, always with the trombone out front. Rooted in both classical and jazz, the concerto is a challenge for any trombonist.

The work premiered with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in August 2021, seven months after Corea died of cancer.  In May 2023 Alessi brought the work home to the New York Philharmonic.  Tonight’s performance marks the premiere of the concerto as adapted for wind ensemble.

“Up until this point, I’ve been the caretaker of the performances,” Alessi told journalist Chinen.  “The musical mind of Chick Corea will live on forever, and so will his spirit.  So to be part of this and to join classical music with jazz through this composition—it’s an unbelievable opportunity for me, but a chance to honor him as well.”

Symphony No. 4
David Maslanka
(August 30, 1943—August 7, 2017)

One of the most admired contemporary composers for wind ensemble, David Maslanka wrote on a grand scale, dealing with epic themes of life, death, and the interconnectedness of all being in the universe.  Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Maslanka studied composition with Joseph Wood at the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio, and spent a year at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.  He did his masters and doctoral studies in composition at Michigan State University where his principal teacher was H. Owen Reed.  Although he taught on the college level for many years, in 1990 he retired from academia and devoted the last twenty-seven years of his life to his commissioned compositions.

Among his 150 works are more than 50 pieces for wind ensemble, including ten symphonies, seventeen concertos, a Mass, and many concert pieces. His chamber music includes four wind quintets, five saxophone quartets, and many works for solo instrument and piano. In addition, he has written a variety of orchestral and choral pieces.  His works have been performed around the world, including in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

Of his Symphony No.4, Maslanka wrote:

“It is possible to describe the technical aspects of a work – its construction principles, its orchestration – but nearly impossible to write of its soul nature except through hints and suggestions.

 

“The roots of Symphony No. 4 are many. The central driving force is the spontaneous rise of the impulse to shout for the joy of life. I feel it is the powerful voice of the Earth that comes to me from my adopted western Montana, and the high plains and mountains of central Idaho. My personal experience of the voice is one of being helpless and torn open by the power of the thing that wants to be expressed – the welling-up shout that cannot be denied. I am set aquiver and am forced to shout and sing. The response in the voice of the Earth is the answering shout of thanksgiving, and the shout of praise.”

Maslanka wove the melodies of several familiar hymns into his symphony—most prominently the hymn he calls Old Hundred, which is also known as the Doxology.  Other hymn tunes, including two Bach chorales, and original melodies based on a traditional hymn-like structure, form the backbone of Symphony No. 4.

“I have used Christian symbols because they are my cultural heritage,” Maslanka wrote, “But I have tried to move through them to a depth of universal humanness, to an awareness that is not defined by religious label. My impulse through this music is to speak to the fundamental human issues of transformation and re-birth in this chaotic time.”

Another source of inspiration for Maslanka in this symphony was his long-time fascination with the life of Abraham Lincoln, particularly as portrayed in Carl Sandburg’s biography of our 16th president.

Maslanka saw Lincoln as a model for our modern age, writing, “For me, Lincoln’s life and death are as critical today as they were more than a century ago. Lincoln maintained in his person the tremendous struggle of opposites raging in the country in his time. He was inwardly open to the boiling chaos, out of which he forged the framework of a new unifying idea. Confirmed in the world by Lincoln was the unshakable idea of the unity of the human race, and by extension the unity of all life, and by further extension, the unity of all life with all matter, with all energy, and with the silent and seemingly empty and unfathomable mystery of our origins.”

–Program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood