Program
The Dallas Winds
Gold, Silver, Bronze & Brass
Jerry Junkin, Artistic Director & Conductor
Original Concert: September 18, 2012 8PM
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
Olympic Fanfare and Theme (1984) – John Williams, Arr. James Curnow
Kaddish (1976) – W. Francis McBeth
In memory of Howard Dunn & W. Francis McBeth
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, op 26 (1921) – Sergei Prokofiev, trans. Donald Patterson
i. Andante—Allegro
ii. Tema con variazioni
iii. Allegro, ma non troppo
Christina Long, piano
Church Windows (1925) – Ottorino Respighi, trans. Jose Schyns
i. The Flight into Egypt
ii. St. Michael Archangel
iii. The Matins of St. Claire
iv. St. Gregory the Great
Mary Preston, organ
Program Notes
John Williams
(Born: 1932 – Long Island, New York)
One of the most popular and successful composers of the modern age, John Williams is the winner of five Academy Awards, 17 Grammy Awards, three Golden Globes, two Emmys and five awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Best known for his film scores and ceremonial music, Williams is also a noted composer of concert works, and a renowned conductor.
By 1984 John Williams’ film music from Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, and E.T. the Extraterrestrial, was familiar to audiences the world over. It was only natural that the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee would turn to the city’s most famous composer music to write a fanfare to use during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games.
While it was an honor to be asked to compose such a piece, the prospect was not without its challenges for Williams. Leo Arnaud’s fanfare, from his Bugler’s Dream suite written in the 1930s, had become synonymous with the Olympics in 1968, when ABC began using it for all its televised coverage. Any new composition would compete with the attachment listeners had developed to Arnaud’s theme. At the same time, the opening fanfare was to be played by herald trumpets at all of the medal ceremonies and official Olympic events, so it had to be based on the harmonic overtones these instruments were capable of producing. The music also needed to be broken into small chunks ABC could use as “bumpers” before and after commercial breaks.
Williams met all of these challenges with aplomb, creating a piece that is the very definition of “goose bump” music. The composer told Jon Burlingame in 1992 that his music was intended to musically represent “the spirit of cooperation, of heroic achievement, all the striving and preparation that go before the events and all the applause that comes after them.” Williams conducted the premiere of the work at the opening ceremonies of the 23rd Olympiad on July 28, 1984 at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
W. Francis McBeth
(March 9, 1933 – January 6, 2012)
Born in Ropesville, Texas at a time when the Panhandle town had fewer than 400 residents, William Francis McBeth’s career as a composer, conductor, and music educator eventually took him all around the world and exerted a strong influence on wind ensemble composition through the last half of the 20th century. He attended Irving High School, in Irving, Texas, where he met his wife, Mary Sue White, while both were members of the Irving Tiger Band. McBeth did his undergraduate work at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, and graduate work at the University of Texas—Austin, where he studied under Clifton Williams.
From 1957 until his retirement in 1996, McBeth served as Professor of Music and Resident Composer at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. While there he continued to compose as well as serving as the conductor for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Little Rock. In 1962 he conducted the Arkansas All-State Band, which included a tenor saxophone player named Bill Clinton.
The Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead, said by the bereaved each morning and evening for eleven months, then on the anniversary of the death thereafter. McBeth’s Kaddish was commissioned by and dedicated to Howard Dunn and the Richardson High School Band of Richardson, Texas. The premiere performance was in March 1976 with the composer conducting. The work was written as a memorial for James Clifton Williams, McBeth’s beloved teacher. The “heartbeat” that runs throughout the piece in the percussion is a rhythmic quote from the Chorale of Williams’ Caccia and Chorale.
Tonight’s performance is in memoriam of Howard Dunn, founding conductor of the Dallas Wind Symphony, and the late W. Francis McBeth.
Sergei Prokofiev
(April 27, 1891 – March 5, 1953)
Sergei Prokofiev’s career as a composer seems to have taken the typical 20 th century Russian composer’s story and turned it on its head. His earliest works, dating from 1902-1904, were a series of compositions for piano that employed all the challenging rhythms and dissonant harmonies of the modern era. As he gained fame as a composer, his music became more conventional in form and harmony. His Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major
falls into this later compositional period.
In a 1962 interview, Madame Lina Llubera Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife, recalled her husband’s working method in 1921, when he wrote the piano concerto:
Prokofiev toiled at his music. His capacity for work was phenomenal. He would sit down to work in the morning ‘with a clear head,’ as he said, either at the piano or at his writing desk. He usually composed his major works in the summer, in the mountains or at the seaside, away from the turmoil of city life. Always he sought places where the rhythm of work was not interrupted, where he could rest and take long walks. So it was with the Third Piano Concerto, which he completed during the summer of 1921 while staying at St. Brévin-les-Pins, a small village on the
Atlantic coast of Brittany in France.
The composition was not a sudden inspiration for Prokofiev. The plan for a large virtuoso work to follow the first two piano concertos emerged in 1911, but he made little progress on it except for one passage he eventually placed at the end of the first movement. By 1913, he later recalled in his memoirs:
I had composed a theme for variations, which I kept for a long time for subsequent use. In 1916-1917, I had tried several times to return to the Third Concerto. I wrote a beginning for it (two themes) and two variations on the theme for the second movement.
At that time, he was also working on what he called a “white” quartet—playable on the white keys of the piano—but abandoned it because he thought the result would be monotonous. He shuttled two themes from this aborted quartet into the Concerto. “Thus,” he continued in his autobiography, “when I began [in 1921] working on the Third Concerto, I already had the entire thematic material with the exception of the subordinate theme of the first movement and the third theme of the finale.”
Prokofiev completed the Third Concerto in time to take it on his 1921 American tour, which also included the world premiere in Chicago of his opera The Love for Three Oranges. The excitement (and publicity) surrounding that production generated a sympathetic interest in the new Concerto played by its composer, and the work was a considerable success at its first performance, given on December 16, 1921 with conductor Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Despite a cool reception when it was introduced to New York only a month later, Prokofiev’s Third Concerto has become one of the most popular works of 20th-century music, and is a staple of the concert repertoire.
Ottorino Respighi
(July 9, 1879 – April 18, 1936)
Ottorino Respighi was one of the last great composers of the Romantic/tonal tradition. Like Brahms and Dvorak before him, and such contemporaries as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger, Respighi found his inspiration in the folk and early music of his country.
Although he composed operas, ballets, and numerous choral and chamber works, Respighi is most loved today for the tone poems he composed to capture the spirit of the world he saw around him. From the beautiful stained glass windows in Rome’s cathedrals to a reptile research facility in Brazil, everything caught his imagination. His best-known works are the three tone poems, Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals.
In 1925 Respighi combined his fascination with early Italian music with his facility for tone poems to create the four “symphonic impressions” that make up Church Windows. Using bits of old liturgical melodies and harmonies, plus echoes of Gregorian chant, Respighi successfully married the ancient to the modern in these works, with no specific church windows, or even Biblical scenes, in mind. Then he reportedly sat down with friends and family members to brainstorm titles for the four movements.
The slow opening movement suggested “the passing of a chariot beneath a brilliant, starry sky,” which led the brainstorming group to the Biblical story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt after Jesus’ birth.
The upheavals in the second movement sounded like “a clash of weapons—a battle in the skies,” so the title “St. Michael Archangel” was chosen, inspired by the following: “And a great battle was made in the Heavens: Michael and his Angels fought with the dragon, and fought the dragon and his angels. But these did not prevail, and there was no more place for them in Heaven.” (Revelation 12:1-7)
Respighi’s friend, the respected literature professor Claudio Guastalla, heard something “mystical, pure and convent-like” in the third movement. The brainstormers linked that impression to a story in which the ailing St. Claire, founder of the Franciscan Order of Nuns, was “miraculously borne by the angels from her sick-bed to the Church of St. Francis, in order to be present at the entire Holy Service of Matins.” They called that movement “The Matins of St. Claire.”
The final movement is a fantasia on the Gloria from the Mass of the Angels. Edward Johnson calls it “a kind of Papal Coronation in sound.” They named it “St. Gregory the Great,” after the pope credited with codifying the Christian chant in the sixth century. The score bears the superscription: “Ecce Pontifex Maximus! Bless the Lord. Sing the Hymn to God. Alleluia!”
The work was completed in early 1927 and first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Serge Koussevitsky, on February 27 of that year.
–Program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood