C H O R A L S P O N S O R Howard and Troth Family Fund of the

Community Foundation of Collier County Florida

C A R M I N A B U R A N A

Friday, October 20, 2017 • 7:30 p.m. • Mark C. Smith Concert Hall • Von Braun Center

Huntsville Community Chorus • Billy Orton, Artistic DirectorHuntsville Community Chorus Children’s Chorale • Lea Hoppe, Director

Gregory Vajda, Music Director and Conductor • Huntsville Symphony Orchestra

M O D E S T M U S S O R G S K Y ( 1 8 3 9 – 1 8 8 1 )orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

P I C T U R E S AT A N E X H I B I T I O N Promenade I. Gnomus (The Gnome) Promenade II. Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle) Promenade III. Tuileries IV. Bydlo (The Oxcart) Promenade V. Ballet des poussins dans leurs coques

(Ballet of Unhatched Chickens) VI. Samuel Goldberg und Schmuyle (The Rich Jew and the Poor Jew) VII. Limoges: Le marché

(The Market at Limoges) VIII. Catacombæ, selpulchrum romanum

(The Roman Catacombs) IX. La cabane sur des pattes de poule

(Baba Yaga, The Hut on Fowl’s Legs) X. La grande porte de Kiev

(The Great Gate of Kiev)

I N T E R M I S S I O N

C A R L O R F F ( 1 8 9 5 – 1 9 8 2 )

C A R M I N A B U R A N ACantiones profanæ (Profane Songs from Beuren)

F O R T U N A I M P E R AT R I X M U N D I (Fortune, Empress of the World)O Fortuna (O Fortune)Fortune plango vulnera (I wail with Fortune’s wounds)

I . P R I M O V E R E (Springtime)Veris leta facies (The lithe face of Spring)Omnia sol temperat (The sun warms everything)Ecce gratum et optatum ver (Behold the pleasant, long-awaited spring)

U F D E M A N G E R (In the Meadow)Tanz (Dance)Floret silva nobilis (The noble woods are blossoming) Chramer, gip die varwe mir (Merchant, give me colors)Reie: Swaz, hie gat umbe / Chum geselle min (Round Dance: Those who whirl around / Come, my sweet)Were diu werlt alle min (Were all the world mine)

I I . I N TA B E R N A (In the Tavern)Estuans interius ira vehementi (Burning inside with rage)Olim lacus colueram (Once I swam in the lake)Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis (I am the abbott of Cockaigne)In taberna quando sumus (When we are in the tavern)

I I I . C O U R D ’ A M O U R S (The Court of Love)Amor volat undique (Cupid flies everywhere)Dies nox et omnia michi sunt contraria (Day, night, and everything are against me)Stetit puella rufa tunica (A girl stood in a red dress)Circa mea pectora multa sunt suspiria (In my breast there are many sighs)Si puer cum puellula moraretur in cellula (If a boy and a girl linger in a little room)Veni, venias (Come, o come)In trutina mentis dubia (In the uneasy scales of sentiment)Tempus est iocundum (Now is the time for merriment)Dulcissime (Sweetest one)

B L A N Z I F O R E T H E L E N A (Blancheflour and Helen)Ave formosissima (Hail, most beautiful lady)

F O R T U N A I M P E R AT R I X M U N D I (Fortune, Empress of the World)O Fortuna (O Fortune)

C H R I S T I E W E B E R , soprano

R O D E R I C K G E O R G E , tenor

A N D R É C H I A N G , baritone

H U N T S V I L L E C O M M U N I T Y C H O R U S • B I L LY O R T O N , Artistic Director

H U N T S V I L L E C O M M U N I T Y C H O R U S C H I L D R E N ’ S C H O R A L E • L E A H O P P E , Director

C O N C E R T S P O N S O RDr. Alice Chenault and Dr. Milton Harris

G U E S T A R T I S T S S P O N S O R Shirley and George McCrary

36 • HSO SEASON 63 • FALL

Friday, October 20, 2017 • 7:30 p.m. • Mark C. Smith Concert Hall • Von Braun Center

Huntsville Community Chorus • Billy Orton, Artistic DirectorHuntsville Community Chorus Children’s Chorale • Lea Hoppe, Director

Gregory Vajda, Music Director and Conductor • Huntsville Symphony Orchestra

P R O G R A M N O T E SM U S S O R G S K Y / R AV E LP I C T U R E S A T A N E X H I B I T I O N

The artistry of draftsman and painter Victor Hartmann was not widely known outside of Saint Petersburg, although Hartmann was a prolific illustrator and contributed to the design of a great state monument at Novgorod. He associated with the artistic circle of the composer Mily Balakirev from the late 1860s, by which means he befriended composer Modest Mussorgsky—but their acquaintance lasted only a few years, as Hartmann died suddenly of an aneurysm just short of age forty.

Some months later, the Academy of Fine Arts exhibited several hundred of his works, many of them inspired by travels around the Russian Empire. This event is the subject of Mussorgsky’s best-known music, the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, which transforms select images into vivid musical miniatures. Mussorgsky’s impressions are the only surviving representations of most of these artworks, as many of Hartmann’s originals are now long lost.

Scion of a landed, prominent aristocratic family, Mussorgsky showed early promise as a pianist. Though he continued his musical studies well into adulthood, family tradition demanded that he enter the military and then pursue a career in the civil service for a time. As a composer, he was a striking original, viewed by some contemporaries as a diamond in the rough. He was an enthusiastic creator of art song and opera. Boris Gudonov, not a critical success but nonetheless popular with audiences, is his most renowned stage work.

Pictures at an Exhibition was composed in June of 1874, when Mussorgsky’s career and health were in decline. This music—compelling and evocative, enchanting and terrifying by turns—was a private memorial shared among friends, and would go unpublished during the composer’s lifetime. By the early twentieth century, however, it had entered the repertoire of a number of great piano virtuosos. This growing momentum was partially the result of a blockbuster orchestral treatment by Maurice Ravel.

Ravel’s orchestration of Pictures was neither the first nor the last, but it has certainly proven to be the most popular. The project was undertaken in 1922 on a commission from Serge Koussevitzsky, who premiered the arrangement with the Boston Symphony and retained exlusive rights to it for some years.

Ravel omits two instances of the famous promenade theme between paintings, but otherwise leaves the original intact. The most technically gifted and imaginative of orchestrators, he uses Mussorgsky’s pianistic contrasts between light and shadow or whisper and growl to inform his orchestral palette, which is rougher in character and more stark in delivery than Ravel’s typical light-handed style. Percussion is employed creatively throughout, as are special effects from the strings, and the music bursts with inspired touches: low reeds imitate somber Orthodox chant, high violins and piccolo illustrate the quarrels of children in the marketplace, and a somber, noble saxophone stands lonely and pensive beneath the towering gloom of castle ruins. [ca. 35’]

O R F FC A R M I N A B U R A N A

“Everything I have written to date can be destroyed,” Carl Orff declared to his publisher in 1937. “With Carmina Burana my collected works begin.” The Frankfurt premiere was a success, to be sure. Even so, Orff could not have known that the global popularity of his choral-orchestral cantata would eclipse not only his prior work, but all the music he was to produce over forty years to come. Carmina Burana was the only one of its author’s works to gain notoriety. It is the first in a trilogy of secular cantatas, the balance of which is very seldom heard; but “O fortuna” is one of the most widely recognized selections in all of Western music, a near-universal symbol of incapacitating dread.

Profoundly influenced by the primitivism of Stravinsky, Orff showed little concern for the classical canon running from Bach through Brahms or for the burgeoning avant-garde of the 1920s. Instead he chased a Hellenistic vision of unity between music, dance, and the visual arts, not unlike the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner—except that the opulence of high Romanticism was for Orff less suitable to the task than a Jungian return to roots: emphatic rhythms, simple melodies, and intoxication through repetition.

The source material for Carmina Burana is a curated collection of medieval poems found in 1803 at the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuren. Dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these lyrics were written by Goliards, rebellious ecclesiastical students of cultured background and scholarly attainment whose irreverent, often comic handiwork satirized dogma and romanticized life beyond the walls of the abbey. Many of the texts, which range from medieval German and Provençal to various dialects of Latin, are likely intended to be sung, although no musical notation accompanies them in the source.

Orff’s cantata was conceived as the musical component to a feast for the senses including dynamic set-pieces, costumes, and solo and company dances. It is now heard chiefly in the concert hall and is performed with visual elements only rarely, generally by opera companies.

Orff aims not for narrative so much as for pageantry, and it is in that light that Carmina Burana is most insightfully enjoyed. In lieu of a comprehensive and cohesive story, we are presented with a series of discrete vignettes, like the leaves of some secular book of hours. Here a young man pines away in the chill of his lonely chambers, while in the woods young women whirl merrily around a clearing; students in the tavern patter cheerfully over their beers, hardly noticing as a swan turns on the spit, singing dolefully of the lake he once knew, and an unlucky gambler is tossed penniless into the night. The music is songlike and easily digestible, illuminated by the composer’s percussive orchestrations. Modal melody, diatonic harmony, and straightforward prosody contribute to the medieval ambience, though Carmina is scored for a large and thoroughly modern ensemble. Free of the complex machinations of classical development, the lyrics are thrust forward in a revue of timeless human emotion carried through the four stages of Fortuna’s Wheel: I shall reign—I reign—I have reigned—I am without a realm. [ca. 65’]

HSO SEASON 63 • FALL • 37

G U E S T A R T I S T S

C H R I S T I E W E B E RS O P R A N O

• Appearances with Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, Huntsville Youth Orchestra, Nashville Com-munity Chorus, Orchestra Sul Ponticello

• Opera roles include Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni), Hanna (The Merry Widow), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Mimi (La bohème), Juliette (Roméo et Juliette)

• Winner, NATSA Competition, Professional Division, 2008

R O D E R I C K G E O R G ET E N O R

• Appearances with Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra, Pensacola Symphony Orchestra, La Folle Journée Festival (France), the National Chorale at Lincoln Center, Opera Birmingham, Krasnoyarsk State Opera and Ballet, Royal Dublin Society

• Opera roles include Rodolfo (La bohème), Tamino (Die Zauberflöte), Sportin’ Life (Porgy and Bess), Nemorino (L’elisir d’amore)

• Faculty, University of Montevallo; College of Fine Arts Distinguished Teacher Award, 2014

A N D R É C H I A N GB A R I T O N E

• Appearances with New Orleans Symphony Chorus, Richmond Symphony Orchestra, LaGrange Symphony Orchestra, Opera Birmingham, Mobile Opera, Portland Opera, Virginia Opera, Ash Lawn Opera

• Opera roles include Fiorello (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Falke (Die Fledermaus), Yamadori (Madama Butterfly), Guglielmo (Cosi fan tutte)

• Faculty, University of South Alabama; winner, Grand Concours de Chant for French Song, 2010

H U N T S V I L L E C O M M U N I T Y C H O R U S A S S O C I A T I O N• Established in 1946, the HCCA is Huntsville’s longest continuous-running performing arts group• The Symphonic Chorus, Chamber Chorale, Children’s Chorale, Youth Chorale, and other

ensembles perform throughout the year• Summer musical theater productions provide a creative outlet for area youth• Proudly an all-volunteer, non-profit community choral organization; for more information,

visit thechorus.org

B I L LY O R T O NA R T I S T I C D I R E C T O R

L E A H O P P ED I R E C T O R , H C C A C H I L D R E N ’ S C H O R A L E

38 • HSO SEASON 63 • FALL