Clinton Symphony Orchestra

Canadian pianist Lorraine Min has caught the attention of a Clinton Symphony patron, who has encouraged us to bring her here for performance. She has performed at the Ravinia and Tanglewood Festivals, in Europe, Asia, and Australia. She will perform the Piano Concerto No. 4 in C minor by Camille Saint-Saëns with our orchestra on April 27th.

Min earned her Bachelor degree from the Peabody Institute, and Masters and Doctoral degrees from the Julliard School.

The following are program notes for this piece written by William Driver:

Charles Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) composed five piano concertos in his long career. Numbers two, four, and five have proved to be the most popular with concert audiences over the years, as well as with recording companies. Some noted pianists have traversed the complete set, while others have put to record the second and fourth. Regardless, Saint-Saëns’ piano concertos have stood the test of time and are established works in the keyboard literature of any reputable pianist.

Keyboard instruments were central to Saint-Saëns life as a composer and performer. He was a master of the organ, so much so that Franz Liszt, a formidable organist in his own right, declared Saint-Saëns the ‘greatest organist in the world.’ In 1854, he became chief organist at the Church of St. Merry’s in Paris, and three years later, he assumed the same position at L’église de la Madeleine, a post he retained for twenty years. The organ is a key element in his third, last and most dazzling symphony, and is so designated in the title, Symphony No 3 in C minor, ‘Organ.’

The piano, not the organ, however, was Saint-Saëns instrument of choice for his tours and his compositions. It was his instrument at his debut at age five, and it was the instrument on which he gave his last public performance in 1921. He composed his first piano concerto in 1858. During his tours at home and abroad in the 1860s, this concerto garnered him a fair amount of success. He revised it in 1868 at about the time he was spurred to write a new piano concerto for a visiting dignitary.

In the spring of 1868, the great Russian pianist, composer, and conductor, Anton Rubinstein came to Paris for a series of concerto performances with Saint-Saëns as conductor for the occasion, Saint-Saëns set out to compose a new work within three weeks. He had the work ready for performance in seventeen days. The premiere performance took place on May 13, 1868, in Paris, with Rubinstein conducting and Saint-Saëns playing the Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor, Op 22. The performance was quite successful, and the concerto has been in the active repertoire since.

Like the Piano Concerto No 2, the Piano Concerto No 4 in C minor was composed in relative short order and premièred on October 31, 1875, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, with the composer as soloist. It is one of Saint-Saëns’ most popular piano concertos, second only to the Piano Concerto No. 2.

The Concerto No. 4 is based on fragments of an unfinished symphony which the composer wrote and then abandoned in his late teens. Why did he abandon the symphony idea, yet use the material for a piano concerto? A noted scholar, Daniel M. Fallon, offers several reasons. One, the material lacked the dramatic quality usually associated with a symphony; two, the lyrical theme of the second movement is “beautifully poetic, a quality that is best captured by the intimacy of the solo instrument”; and, three, the composer may have felt that by “transforming themes, he would be able to spin out a Finale from the germinal ideas in the draft.”

The formal layout of the Concerto is one that Saint-Saëns used again a decade later with his Symphony No 3 in C minor, “Organ”. The two movements of the Concerto, as in the Symphony, are in fact four movements, joined at notable junctions. Additionally, both compositions begin in C minor and end in C major and rely on thematic transformation to progress the music along. Regardless of its original source, the Piano Concerto No 4 in C minor, Op 44, “is a unique example of the piano concerto in the late nineteenth century.”

The Clinton Symphony Orchestra will present their “Youthful Visions” winter concert on Saturday, February 9, 7:30 pm, Morrison IL High School Auditorium. Please enjoy the following program notes about Jean Sibelius and his work Symphony No. 3 in C Major, Op. 52 .

Critic Karl Flodin wrote in 1907 after hearing the Symphony No 3 in C major, Op 52 of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957):

The symphony meets all the requirements of a symphonic work of art in the modern sense, but at the same time it is internally new and revolutionary – thoroughly Sibelian.

In early spring 1906, Sibelius informed his friend Axel Carpelan that his Third Symphony in C major was near completion. It was Carpelan who had suggested to Sibelius some years prior that he and his family vacation in Italy as inspiration for his monumental Second Symphony; consequently, Sibelius kept in close contact with Carpelan about his musical affairs. He proposed to conduct the first performance at the Philharmonic Society in London in the next spring. However, Sibelius failed to meet his proposed deadline, and, after some concentrated effort he penned the finale notes in time for its premiere at the Great Hall of Helsinki University with himself conducting. The London concert had to be postponed, however, and he eventually put the finishing touches to the work in time to conduct it at the Great Hall of Helsinki University on September 25, 1907. Interestingly, the orchestral parts for the finale did not arrive until the last rehearsal.

The material for the Symphony No 3 had been with Sibelius for some time. Parts of the score show the influences carried over from the First and Second Symphonies, particularly in the finale. He also drew motifs from works he never completed, such as a piano suite, a tone poem, and an oratorio.

The Symphony No 3 may well be Sibelius’s farewell to the opulent romanticism of his earlier works. While the symphony echoes elements of the magisterial eloquence and galactic monumentalism of the first two symphonies, it is much more cheerful and free-wheeling- and shorter – in its presentation. He seems to purposefully avoid the “excesses” of the symphonists of the time – Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, and Gustav Mahler. One might even call this work Sibelius’s “Classical” symphony in that he focuses on the development of his material in terms of “absolute music” in the mode of Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. There is nothing “programmatic” in this symphony. To Sibelius, in fact, Mozart was the most genuine of composers:

To my mind a Mozart allegro is the most perfect model for a symphonic movement. Think of its wonderful unity and homogeneity! It is like an uninterrupted flowing, where nothing stands out and nothing encroaches upon the rest.

Symphony No 3 in C major, Op 52, is in three movements with the finale combining a scherzo and finale into a single movement. Sibelius said this movement is “the crystallization of thought from chaos”. The scherzo portion “plays with several short motifs, blending and juxtaposing them in a seemingly endless variety of combinations”. As the finale approaches, the cellos introduce a march motif that begins hesitantly, then grows in intensity until it becomes the dominant theme to the end of the symphony.

One might suppose that the symphony lacks the typical Sibelian fire and nobility of its predecessors. One would be mistaken. A conductor who had witnessed Sibelius himself conducting the Third Symphony had this to say:

[It] was played in a vigorous manner, with markedly emphatic accentuation, so that it gave an impression of the heroic rather than pastoral.

~Program notes by William Driver

The Clinton Symphony Orchestra will present their “Youthful Visions” winter concert on Saturday, February 9, 7:30 pm, Morrison IL High School Auditorium. Please enjoy the following program notes about Sergei Rachmaninoff  and his work Vocalise, Op.34, No.14.

Vocalise is the fourteenth song in a series of fourteen published by composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) in 1915. Originally composed in 1912, Rachmaninoff revised the piece in 1914 (at age 41) before its publication in 14 Songs, Op 34. Unlike the other thirteen songs in the collection, Vocalise has no text, but utilizes a wordless vocalization from the soloist, and of the vocalist’s choosing. As Rachmaninoff explained to soprano Antonina Nezhdanova, “What need is there of words, when you will be able to convey everything better and more expressively than anyone could with words by your voice and interpretation?” Some critics have questioned Rachmaninoff’s decision to cast the song without words, as Nezhdanova herself did, but others have proposed that

Like Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff felt that not all music required text to convey intense emotion; rather, the absence of … is one of the contributing factors to its immense emotional intensity and sorrow.

Rachmaninoff and Nezhdanova premiered Vocalise on January 24, 1916. After the premiere, the composer arranged the piece for orchestra and soprano and for orchestra alone. In the years since its composition, others have also arranged the work for a variety of combinations of instruments. ~Program notes by William Driver

The Clinton Symphony Orchestra will present their “Youthful Visions” winter concert on Saturday, February 9, 7:30 pm, Morrison IL High School Auditorium. Please enjoy the following program notes about Edward Elgar and his work Salut d’amour, Op 12.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934) composed Salut d’Amour as a love song to his future bride, Alice Roberts. In the summer of 1888 (age 31), Elgar decided to take a holiday with his dear friend Dr. Charles Buck. As Elgar departed Worcester for Dr. Buck’s Settle, Yorkshire estate, Alice gave him a poem she had written entitled Love’s Grace. While at Settle, Elgar, much taken with Alice’s poem, decided to reciprocate with a short piece of music especially for Alice. He titled the piece Liebesgruss (Love’s Greeting), dedicated “To Carice”, a mashup of Alice’s forenames Caroline Alice. Elgar presented the musical love poem to his future bride on his return from Settle. They were married the following year. At the birth of their daughter two years later, they named her Carice.

Elgar sold the piece outright to the music publisher Schott for two guineas (approx. $2.50). Under its original title Liebesgruss, the piece did not sell well, so slowly in fact that Schott changed the title to Salut d’Amour, trusting that a more exotic name would enhance the appeal of the work. The firm also shortened Elgar’s name to Ed. Elgar to give the composer a more exotic air. Apparently, the ploy worked for sales increased dramatically to the publisher’s delight, but with no financial gain for Elgar.

Towards the end of 1888, Edward submitted three arrangements of the work – for solo piano, for violin and piano, and an orchestral arrangement in order to increase the prospects of performances. Later, Elgar composed a follow up to Salon d’Amour, Mot d’Amour (Liebesahnung or Love’s Word). Which some consider superior to its predecessor. It, however, is rarely performed today. ~Program notes by William Driver

The Clinton Symphony Orchestra will present their “Youthful Visions” winter concert on Saturday, February 9, 7:30 pm, Morrison IL High School Auditorium. Please enjoy the following program notes about Carl Maria von Weber and his work Der Freischütz .

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) is one of the great figures in German Romanticism. He embodied the ideal of the Romantic artist, inspired by poetry, history, folklore and myths to create a national opera that would reflect the uniqueness of German culture. Weber composed his opera Der Freischütz between 1817 and 1821, and the work received its premiere in Berlin on June 18, 1821 (he was 35). The overture to the opera, one of the most famous nineteenth century works in this form, breaks with the eighteenth century style of overtures that contained only suggestions of the themes that would follow in the opera proper. The overture is larger in scope and scored in broader, more romantic terms than the classical overtures of Mozart and Beethoven.

Utilizing dark orchestral colors, Weber sets the tone of the opera and allows the overture to have a more important function than usually occurred in opera. He further ties the overture to the rest of the work by introducing themes and motifs from various arias, rather than merely suggesting them, and using the overture to develop those ideas. Without giving away the essentials of the opera, Weber prepares the audience for what is to come. In fact, the overture to Der Freischütz is a model that served as the standard for generations of composers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ~Program Notes by William Driver