Tuesday, May 14, 2024, 7:30pm
Meyerson Symphony Center + Livestream

Fanfare

7:15pm, Meyerson lobby

To Usher in a New Era
Shawn Gurk
Dallas Winds Brass & Percussion
Jeremy Kondrat, conductor

Program

A Joyous Trilogy [15’00”]
Quinn Mason

I.   Running
II.  Reflection
III. Renewal

In This Circle [23’00”]
Hila Plitmann, Composition & Lyrics
Drew Dickey, Setting & Orchestration
Hila Plitmann, soprano

1. Wave
2. The Art of Flying
3. Outbreath

— INTERMISSION —

Lola Flores [3’50”]
Alfred Sadel & Terig Tucci, arr. John Krance

Fiesta del Pacifico [8’45”]
Roger Nixon

Pineapple Poll [12’30”]
Sir Arthur Sullivan, arr. Charles Mackerras/W.J. Duthoit

1. Opening Number
2. Jasper’s Dance
3. Poll’s Dance
4. Finale

Dallas Winds Personnel

Livestream

Adam Ellard – Director
Lydia Amstutz – Titles
Ciara Negley – Switcher
Todd Toney – Score Reader
Scott Probst – Audio Engineer
Christopher Cook – Remote Cameras
Tom Pilkinton – Technical Engineer
David Lovrien – Title Design

Program Notes

A Joyous Trilogy
Quinn Mason

Composer Quinn Mason “wanted to create a composition that was the very embodiment of happiness and cheerfulness, an accessible work that would put any listener in a good mood.”

The first movement, ‘Running’ has an always-moving and never-waning energy that keeps going and going. The second, ‘Reflection,’ is a gentle and introspective meditation featuring solo trombone. The third, ’Renewal,’ picks the energy back up, a little more spirited and zestful this time, and keeps it going to the very end, complete with dynamic and vibrant interplay between all the orchestral sections.

Quinn Mason dedicated this work to “Will White, a friend and mentor for many years now, and one of the most joyous people I know!”

– Jeff Eldridge (Principal Bassoon, Harmonia Orchestra)

This transcription was created especially for and dedicated to Prof. Jerry Junkin and the University of Texas Wind Ensemble.

In This Circle
Hila Plitmann, orch. Drew Dickey

Plitmann completed work on In This Circle in December 2023. Inspired by a poem written by the 13th century Iranian poet, scholar, theologian, and mystic Rumi, the work speaks of the wisdom gained by age; the spirit’s embrace of its own nature; and a growing understanding of the connectedness of all life and all ages. While remaining completely grounded in the classical style, In This Circle draws on alternative rock, R&B, Hip-Hop, electronic music, and other popular music idioms.

In This Circle was commissioned by Jerry Junkin, at the University of Texas, and Rob Carnochan, at University of Miami.  The work is dedicated “In appreciation and recognition of Jerry Junkin.”

Lola Flores (Paso Doble)
Alfred Sadel (1897-1973) and Terig Tucci (1930-1989), arr. John Krance

Terig Tucci was an Argentinian composer who was also proficient on the piano, violin, and mandolin.  His work was first performed professionally when he was 20 years old. In 1923, after building a reputation as a musician in his native Buenos Aires, Tucci moved to New York City, where he eventually landed a steady gig with the NBC Radio orchestra in 1930.  By 1932 he had moved into management, heading RCA Victor’s budding, and increasingly lucrative, Latin American division.  In 1940, still at RCA Victor, he got a side job arranging music for the CBS Pan American Symphony Orchestra.

He retired from RCA in 1964, but continued to write from his home in Queens, New York, until his death.

Alfred Sadel was a Venezulean singer, actor, and recording artist who is co-credited with composing Lola Flores, alongside Tucci.  Born Manuel Alfredo Sanchez Luna, he took the professional name Sadel after he came to the United States because there were already two other Latin American singers named Sanchez.

He expressed an early interest in music and was singing solos in church as a young boy. Although his family could not afford a formal education for him, his career was supported by a number of patrons as he moved from local singing sensation up the ladder of success until he was performing in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and New York.  He began a serious study of Italian opera while under contract to the Metro-Goldwin-Mayer studio, where he was being groomed to follow in movie tenor Mario Lanza’s footsteps. Later in his career he performed in such European opera capitals as Barcelona, Salzburg, and Milan.

Lola Flores was an actual person.  Maria Dolores “Lola” Flores Ruiz was a Spanish actress, flamenco dancer and singer who reportedly had a huge stage presence, charming audiences in her hometown of Jerez de la Frontera at the age of sixteen before being discovered and moving to Madrid to star in Spanish movies. 

In 1950, when she signed a five-film contract, she became the highest-paid performing artist in Spanish history.  She continued to sing, dance and act in many popular films, and toured throughout Europe, Latin America, and the United States. She died in 1995, at the age of 72, but not before she became an entertainment icon, the subject of television programs and documentaries, and the matriarch of a whole family of entertainers.

Like just about everyone else in the field of mid-century Spanish language entertainment, Terig Tucci and Alfred Sadel were enchanted by Flores.  In 1955 they sought to capture her spirit in a work that has become a wind ensemble standard. Although it was dedicated to the fiery singer and actress, you will most likely associate the opening fanfare with the bullfighting arena, as Anglo music producers frequently use the tune to underscore action sequences in that setting.

Fiesta Del Pacifico
Roger Alfred Nixon (1921-2009)

Composer, conductor, and teacher Roger Nixon was born and raised in California’s Central Valley, in and around Modesto, California.  His musical studies were only interrupted by a four-year stint in the U. S. Navy during World War II.  Following the war, he completed his masters and doctorate degrees and built a career teaching at Modesto Junior College and then San Francisco State University. 

Most of his compositions were written for wind ensemble, although he also wrote occasional pieces for symphony orchestra, choral and chamber ensembles, solo piano, and opera. Fiesta del Pacifico is his best-known work, drawing on the musical and cultural traditions of his native state, in honor of the grand cultural celebration hosted by the city of San Diego.

The Fiesta del Pacifico festival was a community-wide celebration of San Diego, and California’s Spanish and Mexican cultural heritage.  First launched in 1955, the festival was mounted annually through 1959, when the city fathers of San Diego abandoned it in search of a more lucrative way to draw tourists to their city. But when it was a thing, the Fiesta del Pacifico was a big, beautiful thing, lasting for weeks and featuring parades, races, a rodeo, a beauty pageant, lots of street dances, and a grand theatrical production outlining the history of San Diego, called The California Story.

Pineapple Poll
Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900)

Sir Arthur Sullivan was the musical half of the classic British power team Gilbert and Sullivan.  W. S. Gilbert wrote the bright, witty librettos and Sullivan wrote the sprightly, hummable music that made such featherweight operettas as The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, and H.M.S. Pinafore audience favorites from 1875 to the present day.

But Sullivan was, at heart, a serious composer.  The fluff he and Gilbert staged at London’s Savoy Theatre might have paid the bills, but Sullivan’s list of credits went far beyond Iolanthe and The Gondoliers.  He composed 24 operas outside his work with Gilbert, 11 major orchestral works, and countless additional choral works, ballets, songs, instrumental pieces, and hymns, including Onward, Christian Soldiers.

Sullivan’s father was a military band leader, and Arthur began his musical studies as a child. He claimed to have learned to play all the instruments in his father’s band and written his first tune at the age of eight.  By the age of twelve, he was well on his way to a career in music, studying under the Reverend Thomas Helmore, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. He continued as a vocal soloist and composer there long after his career as a boy soprano in the children’s choir ended.

As an adult, Sullivan was in continual demand as a composer, and wrote a number of what he considered to be serious works as side projects to his operettas with Gilbert.  Sullivan (but not Gilbert) was knighted for his service to music in 1883, after which Sullivan really, really wanted to devote more time to music that was not operetta.  His partnership with Gilbert began to unravel in 1890 over a dispute involving carpet, and by 1891 Sullivan began to devote more and more of his time to grand opera and ballet.  He died in 1900 from a combination of kidney disease, heart disease, and bronchitis.

Pineapple Poll has the sort of topsy-turvy history that is completely appropriate for a Gilbert and Sullivan piece that’s not actually a Gilbert and Sullivan piece. 

In 1870, the year before he met Sullivan, W. S. Gilbert was a struggling writer who made a few fast farthings from a series of satirical poems that he sold to the comic magazine Fun under the pseudonym Bab.  These poems inspired many of the plot points in his later, more famous libretti and were eventually collected in book form as Bab Ballads.

Fast forward to 1950, when Sullivan’s music passed into the public domain and Sir Charles Mackerras, famed conductor of the English National Opera, asked choreographer John Cranko to create a comic ballet to cash in on Sullivan’s now royalty-free audience favorites.  Cranko selected one of the Bab Ballads, “The Bumboat Woman’s Story,” as the basis for his work.  Mackerras stitched the story by Gilbert together with music drawn from a wide variety of non-theatrical Sullivan works, creating a sort of Frankenstein suite that nevertheless—according to a review in Musicweb International—“quite simply sparkles like freshly popped champagne.”

–Program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood