MASTERWORKS • 2014/15

AN EVENING OF COPLAND

COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor

Friday, November 28, 2014 at 7:30 pm

Boettcher Concert Hall

COPLAND An Outdoor Overture

COPLAND Billy the Kid, Ballet in One Act

Open Prairie: The Pioneers

A Street in New Mexico (ca. 1877)

Billy Kills His Mother’s Murderer, Alias (as Cowhand)

Billy Grows Up (ca. 1885), Kills Alias (as Land Agent)

Billy Cheats Garrett at Cards: Their Quarrel

Billy Besieged, Captured by Garrett, Turned Sheri!:

Battle

Dance After Battle: Cowboys and Gun-girls

Billy in Prison, Kills Alias (as Jailer) and Escapes

Billy Lost, Betrayed by Alias (as Indian Guide)

Billy Finds Refuge with His Mexican Sweetheart

Garrett, Led by Alias (as Guide), Kills Billy

Billy’s Funeral (ca. 1886): Mourning Mexicans

Open Prairie: The Pioneers

—INTERMISSION—

COPLAND El Sálon México

COPLAND Rodeo, Ballet in One Act

Buckaroo Holiday

Corral Nocturne

Ranch House Party

Saturday Night Waltz

Hoe-Down

PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

MASTERWORKS BIOGRAPHIES

ANDREW LITTON, conductor

Andrew Litton currently serves as Music Director of Norway’s Bergen

Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Director of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra

in Denver, Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest, and

Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth Symphony. He guest conducts

the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies and has a discography

of over 120 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy®, France’s

Diapason d’Or, and many British and other honors. First appointed Bergen

Philharmonic Music Director in 2003, Litton will have the distinguished honor to celebrate

the orchestra’s 250th Anniversary in 2015. It is one of the world’s longest established

orchestras.  In recognition of Litton’s achievements with the Bergen Philharmonic, Norway’s

King Harald knighted Litton with the Royal Order of Merit.  Under Litton’s leadership the

Bergen Philharmonic has taken numerous tours, including debuts at the London BBC Proms

and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, as well as appearances at Vienna’s Musikverein, Berlin’s

Philharmonie, and New York’s Carnegie Hall - the capstone of its &rst American tour in 40

years. Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic record for the BIS and Hyperion labels, and have

won extraordinary critical acclaim for their Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, and Proko&ev series.

Andrew Litton, a graduate of the Fieldston School, New York, received his bachelor’s and

master’s degrees from Juilliard in piano and conducting. The youngest-ever winner of the BBC

International Conductors Competition, he served as Assistant Conductor at Teatro alla Scala and

Exxon/Arts Endowment Assistant Conductor for the National Symphony under Rostropovich. His

many honors in addition to Norway’s Royal Order of Merit include an honorary Doctorate from

the University of Bournemouth, Yale University’s Sanford Medal, and the Elgar Society Medal.

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A special thank you to these supporters who have helped to make

the recording of this music possible.

Col. Philip Beaver and Mrs. Kim Beaver

Bob and Cynthia Benson

Drs. Paula and William Bernstein

Colorado Symphony Guild Inc.

Tom and Noel Congdon

Mr. and Mrs. Scott Cromie

Mrs. Sandy Elliott

Dr. Everette J. Freeman

Mr. Paul E. Goodspeed and Ms. Mary Poole 

Jennifer Heglin

Mary Rossick Kern and Jerome H. Kern 

Dr. Christopher Ott and Mr. Jeremy Simons

Fred and Connie Platt

SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 3

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES

AARON COPLAND: (1900-1990)

An Outdoor Overture (1938)

The work is scored for two $utes and piccolo, pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns, two

trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, piano (doubling celesta), and strings. The duration

is approximately nine minutes. Last performed by the orchestra on January 7 and 8, 2000, with Marin

Alsop conducting.

Copland wrote, “An Outdoor Overture owes its existence to the persuasive powers of Alexander

Richter, head of the music department of the High School of Music and Art in New York City.

He had witnessed a performance of my high school opera, The Second Hurricane, and made up

his mind that I was the man to write a work for his school orchestra. I liked the idea of the High

School of Music and Art — that gifted students could prepare for their careers in the arts at

such a school without sacri&cing a general education. Richter won me over when he ex plained

that my work would be the opening gun in a campaign the school planned to undertake with

the slogan: ‘American Music for American Youth.’ I found this so irresistible that I interrupted

my orchestration for Billy the Kid in the fall of 1938 to write the piece. Mr. Richter suggested a

single movement between &ve and ten minutes in length and optimistic in tone which would

appeal to the adolescent youth of this country…. When I played the piano sketch for him,

Richter remarked that it seemed to have an open-air quality. Together we hit on the title An

Outdoor Overture. It is scored for the usual symphony orchestra, but without tuba. ‘Don’t forget

the percussion section!’ said Mr. Richter. The percussion section was therefore not forgotten.

The premiere performances of An Outdoor Overture were conducted by Alexander Richter on

December 16 and 17, 1938 with his school orchestra. The score is dedicated to the High School

of Music and Art.

“The piece starts in a large and grandiose manner with a theme that is immediately

developed as a long solo for the trumpet with a string pizzicato accompaniment. Shortly

afterwards, these same repeated notes, played broadly, give us a second, snappy march-like

theme developed in canon form [i.e., exact imitation]. There is an abrupt pause, a sudden

decrescendo, and the third, lyric theme appears, &rst in the +ute, then in the clarinet, and &nally,

high up in the strings. Repeated notes on the bassoon seem to lead the piece in the direction

of the opening Allegro. Instead, a fourth and &nal theme evolves — another march theme, but

this time less snappy, and with more serious implications. There is a build-up to the opening

grandiose introduction again, continuing with the trumpet solo melody, this time sung by all

the strings in a somewhat smoother version. A short bridge section based on a steady rhythm

brings a condensed recapitulation of the Allegro section. At a climactic moment, all the themes

are combined. A brief coda ends the work on the grandiose note of the beginning.”

o

PROGRAM 4 SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES

Billy the Kid, Ballet in One Act (1938)

The ballet is scored for two $utes and piccolo, pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns,

three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is

approximately 35 minutes. Last performance of the complete ballet was on April 22 and 24, 1987,

with Ballet West dancing and Varujan Kojian conducting the orchestra at the Auditorium Theater

(now the Ellie Opera House). Last performance of the Suite from Billy the Kid was September 17, 19,

and 20, 2009, with Je%rey Kahane leading the orchestra.

Aaron Copland was among the &rst Americans to study composition in Paris with the

legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who was to guide many of this country’s &nest

composers. When he returned home in 1924, Copland was determined to use Boulanger’s

training and inspiration to help found a unique style for American concert music, free from

the weighty Germanic traditions that had encumbered it for more than a century. He turned

&rst to the obvious indigenous music — jazz — in such works from the late 1920s as the

Piano Concerto and Music for the Theater, but he soon realized that that particular well of

inspiration would quickly run dry for a classical composer. After a short but fruitful excursion

through a more abstract style (Piano Variations, Short Symphony), Copland set out in another

direction, which he articulated in The New Music in the early 1930s: “I began to feel an increasing

dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed

that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum. Moreover, an entirely new public

for music had grown up around the radio and the phonograph. It made no sense to ignore

them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the e!ort to see if I

couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.”

Around that time Copland met Lincoln Kirstein, director of the American Ballet Caravan, the

adventurous predecessor of the New York City Ballet. Kirstein commissioned Copland to write a

ballet about Billy the Kid, the notorious outlaw of the Old West famed in ballad and legend. For

inspiration, Kirstein gave the composer a book of cowboy tunes, even though Copland admitted

a marked antipathy to such music at the time. As he studied the simple, una!ected songs,

however, he came to realize that they were not only an excellent source of material for the

new ballet, but that they also opened a path to the more straightforward, popular style that he

sought. His fondness for these songs grew as he worked with them, and he later admitted that

he could not imagine Billy the Kid without them. Among those he included in the ballet score

were The Old Chisholm Trail, Git Along, Little Dogies, Great Granddad, Good-bye, Old Paint and Bury

Me Not on the Lone Prairie, but he omitted Home on the Range because, he said, “I had to draw the

line somewhere.” The lean-textured folksiness that Copland devised for Billy the Kid was carried

into his other great ballets, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, works that exerted an impact on the

worlds of music and dance rivaling that of Stravinsky and Diaghilev in the 1920s. The popularity

of Copland’s ballets was both instantaneous and durable, and with them he became the most

respected, famous and frequently performed of all American composers.

Alfred Frankenstein, a noted critic and the long-time program annotator for the San Francisco

Symphony, wrote of the factual Billy the Kid, “His real name was William Bonney. He was born in

New York City in 1859, but grew up in Silver City, New Mexico, where his mother kept a boarding

house. He murdered his &rst man in a saloon in Silver City when he was twelve years old, and for

the next nineteen years was one of the most industrious and generally admired bandits of the

Southwest. Eventually he was captured, tried for murder, and condemned to death. He made a

sensational escape from the sheri!’s deputies, but one day he was shot down by Pat Garrett, a

sheri!, who was once his friend.”

SOUNDINGS 2014/15 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 5

MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTES

The score is prefaced by Copland’s synopsis of the ballet’s plot: “The action begins and closes on the open prairie. The central portion of the ballet concerns itself with the signi&cant moments in the life of Billy the Kid. The &rst scene is a street in a frontier town. Familiar &gures amble by. Cowboys saunter into town, some on horseback, others with their lassoes. Some Mexican women do a Jarabe that is interrupted by a &ght between two drunks. Attracted by the gathering crowd, Billy is seen for the &rst time as a boy of twelve with his mother. The brawl turns ugly, guns are drawn, and in some unaccountable way, Billy’s mother is killed. Without an instant’s hesitation, in cold fury, Billy draws a knife from his cowhand’s sheath and stabs his mother’s slayers. His famous career has begun. In swift succession we see episodes from Billy’s later life. At night, under the stars, in a quiet card game with his outlaw friends. Hunted by a posse led by his former friend Pat Garrett. Billy is pursued. A running gun battle ensues. Billy is captured. A drunken celebration takes place. Billy in prison is, of course, followed by one of Billy’s legendary escapes. Tired and worn in the desert, Billy rests with his girl. Starting from a deep sleep, he senses movement in the shadows. The posse has &nally caught up with him. It is the end.”

o

El Sálon México (1933-1936)

The piece is written for two $utes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, E-$at

clarinet, and bass clarinet; two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three

trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings. Duration is 11 minutes. Last performed by

the orchestra on May 14-16, 2004, with Akira Endo on the podium.

Copland explained that the inspiration for his El Sálon México was a visit south of the border

in 1932: “Perhaps my piece might never have been written if it hadn’t been for the existence of

the ‘Sálon México.’ I remember reading about it for the &rst time in Anita Brenner’s guide book.

Under ‘Entertainment’ she had this entry: ‘Harlem type nightclub for the peepul [sic], grand Cuban

orchestra, Sálon México. Three halls: one for people dressed in your way, one for people dressed in

overalls but shod, and one for the barefoot.’ Miss Brenner forgot to mention the sign on the wall

that said: ‘Please don’t throw lighted cigarette butts on the +oor so the ladies don’t burn their feet.’

The unsuspecting tourist should also have been warned that a guard stationed at the bottom of

the steps leading to the ‘three halls’ would nonchalantly frisk you as you started up the stairs just

to be sure that you had checked all your ‘artillery’ at the door. One other curious custom, special

to the Sálon México, might as well be mentioned here: when the dance hall closed its doors at

5:00 a.m. it hardly seemed worthwhile for the overalled patrons to travel all the way home, so they

curled themselves up on the chairs around the walls for a quick two-hour snooze before getting

to a seven o’clock job in the morning…. It wasn’t the music that I heard there, or the dances that

attracted me, so much as the spirit of the place. In some inexplicable way, while milling about in

those crowded halls, one really felt a live contact with the Mexican people — their humanity, their

separate shyness, their dignity and unique charm.... At any rate, I soon found myself looking for

suitable folk material for El Sálon México....”

In his preface to the orchestral score, Gerald Abraham commented on Copland’s technique in

this work: “Although the material of El Sálon México is practically all derived from three or four

melodies printed in the collections of Campos and Toor, none of these is quoted completely in

its original form. The operative word is ‘derived.’ Copland has mentally absorbed the spirit and