Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 7:30pm
Meyerson Symphony Center + Livestream

Fanfare

(7:15 in the Meyerson lobby)

Legacy [3’20”]
BJ Brooks

Dallas Winds Brass & Percussion
Ogechi Ukazu, conductor

Program

The Magnificent Seven [7’00”]
Elmer Bernstein, arr. Jacco Nefs

Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia, from Spartacus Ballet Suite No. 2 [9’00”]
Aram Khachaturian, arr. Jacco Nefs

In the Name of Her Majesty [13’00”]
arr. Ingo Luis, tr. Jacco Nefs

– INTERMISSION –

Echoes of the Past  (WORLD PREMIERE) [18’00”]
Michael Udow

Casablanca Suite [9’00”]
Max Steiner, arr. Jacco Nefs

Dallas Winds Personnel

STRING BASS/ELECTRIC BASS
Andrew Goins

ACOUSTIC/ELECTRIC GUITAR
Dennis Langevin

PIANO
Cameron Hofmann

HARP
Naoko Nakamura
Mallory McHenry

TIMPANI
Joe Ferraro, Principal

PERCUSSION
Roland Muzquiz, Principal
Michael McNicholas
Drew Lang
Steve Kimple
Steve McDonald
Brandon Kelly

PERSONNEL MANAGER
Gigi Sherrell Norwood

MUSIC LIBRARIAN
Chrystal Stevens

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
Ramon Muzquiz

FOUNDER / EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Kim Campbell
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT
Grace Lovrien
DIRECTOR OF CONCERT OPERATIONS
Gigi Sherrell Norwood
DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION
Todd Toney
BOOKKEEPER
Lenore Ladwig Scott

Program Notes

The Magnificent Seven

Elmer Bernstein
April 4, 1922—August 18, 2004

Elmer Bernstein was an American composer best known for the more than 150 film scores he wrote over his five-decade career. In addition to the score for The Magnificent Seven, Bernstein composed music for To Kill a Mockingbird, The Ten Commandments, The Great Escape, True Grit, National Lampoon’s Animal House, Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers, Cape Fear, and The Three Amigos, among many others. In 1968 he won the Best Original Music Score Oscar for Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Born in New York City, he took an early interest in the theater, dancing and acting in a Broadway production of The Tempest. At the age of twelve he won a piano scholarship to The Juilliard School and was introduced to composer Aaron Copland.

After a stint in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, Bernstein headed west to seek his fortune in Hollywood. There he began composing for film in 1952, but quickly ran afoul of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, which accused him of being a communist. He wasn’t exactly blacklisted for not naming names—he testified that he had never attended a meeting of the Communist Party in his life—but he was relegated to working on less-than-prestigious films, like Robot Monster and Cat-Women of the Moon.

By 1956 he was getting more respectable assignments again, including scores for The Man With the Golden Arm, and The Ten Commandments, although his contributions often remained uncredited, as they did when he was asked to compose the score for The Magnificent Seven.

The 1960 film The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese film, Seven Samurai. In the American version, seven gunslingers, played by Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn, and Horst Buchholz, are hired by the citizens of a Mexican village, to protect the village from a gang of bandits.

Today, the film is recognized as one of the best in the Western genre. Bernstein’s original score was nominated for an Oscar. Listeners old enough to remember the days when cigarettes were still advertised on television may recognize the music from commercials for Marlboro cigarettes, playing on the image of the rugged, adventurous cowboy.

Adagio of Spartacus and Phyrgia

From Spartacus Ballet Suite No. 2
Aram Khachaturian
June 6, 1903—May 1, 1978

When you say, “Spartacus,” most people of a certain age flash on Kirk Douglas and a hundred extras in togas proclaiming, “I am Spartacus!” as part of Roman slave rebellion. The 1960 film, Spartacus, is credited with helping to break the Hollywood blacklist that crippled the careers of writers, composers, directors, and actors who were suspected of being communist sympathizers. Both Howard Fast, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, and Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay, had been blacklisted.

This is not that Spartacus.

The legend of Spartacus dates to the first century BC, when a Thracian gladiator escaped slavery and raised a rebellion against the Roman Republic. In the centuries since, Spartacus has inspired numerous philosophers, historians, politicians, and storytellers as a symbol of the powerless rising against the oppressive bootheel of the powerful. Communist leader Karl Marx listed Spartacus as one of his great heroes.

Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian was one of those inspired storytellers, but it’s possible he also saw the legend of Spartacus as a road back into the good graces of the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Khachaturian launched his career to great acclaim in 1936, and quickly rose to prominence not only as a composer but as the head of state-sponsored Union of Soviet Composers, where he championed technically brilliant music in the “formalist” style. By 1947 younger composers rose up against Khachaturian’s restrictions. He was removed from his office with the composers’ union and banished to his native Armenia.

By late 1948, however, Khachaturian had won reinstatement with Moscow’s musical establishment with his score for the film biography Vladimir Illyich Lenin. In 1950 he began work on his third and final ballet, Spartacus. Completed in 1954, Spartacus became an international hit, and saw Khachaturian hailed as “People’s Artist of the Soviet Union.”

Tonight’s performance is a transcription of the “Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia,” the most popular movement from that ballet.

In the Name of Her Majesty: James Bond Medley

arr. Ingo Luis (b. 1961)

Ian Fleming introduced the world to British super-spy James Bond with his 1952 novel, Casino Royale. Since that time, through novels, short stories, films, television, radio, and even comic books, Agent 007 has stood for ultimate cool, and the epitome of manliness.

Not that his image hasn’t changed with the times. Bond first swaggered onto the screen in the form of Sean Connery in 1962’s Dr. No. With his sexist tropes and improbably-named female companions, Bond captured the imagination of a whole generation of young men, before morphing into Roger Moore’s more comic take through the 1970s and ‘80s; Pierce Brosnan’s full-on action hero of the 1990s; and Daniel Craig’s grittier, more realistic interpretation spanning the years 2006 through 2021.

A variety of composers, including Monty Norman, John Barry, George Martin, and Marvin Hamlisch, have built memorable soundtracks from the driving electric guitar and bass line of that first film. Composer, arranger, and bass trombone player Ingo Luis has created tonight’s medley out of music from nine different Bond films: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Octopussy.

You need only watch the film trailer for Dr. No to realize the Bond franchise practically invented the action hero film genre. Through 25 films over 60 years Bond has taught us how to prepare a martini, employ the latest technological gadgets, remain cool under pressure, defeat the evil geniuses, and evolve with the times. Nobody does it better.

Echoes of the Past  **WORLD PREMIERE**

Michael Udow
(b. March 10, 1949)

Mesa Verde, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Colorado, was inhabited by Ancestral Puebloan peoples dating to 7500 BC. By 1285, due to severe and prolonged droughts, the cliff dwellings were abandoned. Looking closely at scorched trees burnt from centuries of forest fires, one might notice images of animals, human forms, Native American Kachinas, and the remains of bewitchingly shaped trees. The adage, “seeing the trees through the forest” is apropos.

Photographic images of selected trees became the storyboard upon which the film animation and music were created. One might elect to conjure up an image that, unlike Icarus, these Ancestral Puebloans have returned to Earth to live again through the devastated forests. The accompanying film documents these images with a fanciful treatment in animation which may provoke thoughtful dialogue as to the health of planet Earth.

Casablanca Suite

Maximillian Raoul Steiner
(May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971)

Hailed as one of the greatest Hollywood films of all time, Casablanca has earned a permanent place in movie history. Is it the wartime setting? The cast of quirky yet idealistic characters? The endlessly quotable lines? Maybe it’s all of the above, elevated by Max Steiner’s sweeping score.

Steiner was born in Austria, but fled to England, then America in the face of World War I. A child prodigy, he was recognized as a competent professional in composing, arranging, and conducting by the time he was fifteen.

Settling in Hollywood in 1929, he took his place next to such composers as Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Bernard Herrmann, pioneering the tradition of writing musical scores for films. Over the course of his career, he was nominated for 24 Academy Awards for such films as Gone With the Wind, The Searchers, and 1933’s King Kong.

In 1942 he was hired to write the score for the Warner Brothers’ wartime romance, Casablanca. Although he would have preferred to ditch the now iconic Herman Hupfeld song, As Time Goes By, replacing it with a composition of his own, that proved impractical. Instead, he adopted As Time Goes By as a major theme throughout his score, and was nominated for yet another Oscar.

The suite of music included in tonight’s performance was written by Steiner after the film’s release, intended for concert performances by a symphony orchestra. Tonight’s transcription was, once again, created for wind ensemble by the masterful Jacco Nefs.

–program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood