Five American Portraits, commissioned by the Soni Fidelis Wind Quintet celebrates American cultural life though musical depictions of five influential Americans: H.L. Mencken, John Cage, Henry Ford, Edger Allan Poe, and Theodore Roosevelt. Each figure is animated by a different instrument of the woodwind quintet. Despite Gryc’s noble efforts to capture the innovation and ingenuity of Americans throughout history, he aptly recognizes his oversights:
Exploiting the contrasting voices of the wind quintet allows the composer to both capture and critique each the life and times of each historical figure.
H.L Mencken (1880-1956) was a journalist, satirist, linguist, and controversial cultural critic whose complex views on war, religion, politics, and economics often suggested cognitive dissonance when viewed through the lens of the twenty-first century. In this work, Mencken is represented by the clarinet; it’s a virtuosic, fast-paced first movement that is punctuated by long notes dominating the musical texture, as if an otherwise busy mind is suddenly captivated by a particularly fascinating idea.
John Cage (1912-1992), an avant-garde composer and music theorist who was perhaps best known for his composition 4’33” and for pioneering compositions written for prepared piano. Influenced by East and South Asian culture and philosophy, Cage came to see music as “a purposeless play …an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”. Creative thought in this movement is portrayed by a liberated and lyrical flute solo interposed by the clarinet and oboe.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) was a capitalist visionary, and the founder of the Ford Motor Company. He developed the assembly line as a means of mass production and brought the automobile to the American middle class with the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908. Upbeat, rhythmic, and cheery, this is a melodic and asymmetrical march for the oboe that evokes a productive and well-run factory.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is best known for his poetry and short stories that showcase mystery and the macabre and is credited with pioneering the genre of detective stories. His short life was marked by tragically losing his young wife and first cousin Virginia Clemm in 1946 and being unable to turn his considerable literary success into meaningful financial gain. The adversity in Poe’s life is represented by a slow and introspective bassoon solo. Perhaps the most lyrically beautiful movement in the quintet, the soprano-voiced woodwinds “chatter” throughout, joining the solo bassoon at times in a duet or trio illustrating Poe’s wife Virginia.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was President of the United States from 1901-1909 and Governor of New York from 1899-1900. Considered one of the great historical U.S. presidents, Roosevelt championed progressive policies such as anti-trust and environmental conservation. Depicted first by a majestic and dignified horn solo, the finale perks up when the oboe enters, followed by the flute, constantly building rhythmic energy through the use of accents and hemiolas until the very end.
Few composers have had the distinction of their hometown being renamed posthumously in their honour; his birthplace, the village of Liveni, is now known as George Enescu, Botoșani County, Western Moldavia, Romania. George Enescu remains one of Romania’s greatest musicians and one of the most outstanding of many Romanian artists who achieved international fame.
Considered a child prodigy, Enescu was sent to the Vienna Conservatory in 1888 as the first non-Austrian student ever to study there, and gave his first public performance at age 8. Like Mozart more than a century earlier, Enescu was already writing music as a young child, and the earliest notable work that survives is titled Pămînt românesc, which translates as Romanian Land. It is inscribed “opus for piano and violin by George Enescu, Romanian Composer, aged five years and a quarter”.
An aubade is music intended for the morning, specifically the early morning, and is thought to evoke the parting of lovers at dawn. This Scherzo and Trio was composed in Paris in 1899, the same year Enescu, known in France as Georges Enesco, completed his studies at the Paris Conservatoire in violin, harmony, and composition under Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré.
A love and appreciation for his Romanian homeland and heritage continued to inspire both composition and performance throughout the composer’s life; many of Enescu’s mature works rely on Romanian folk music. Understanding that temperamental tastes influence the durability of style in classical music, he sought to promote the music of contemporary twentieth-century Romanian composers including Constantin Silvestri, Mihail Jora, and Jonel Perlea. Following a collaboration with Ravi Shankar’s brother Uday, it seems that Enescu’s respect for the genre of Folk music had deepened and expanded to include Eastern traditions. He is thought to have first introduced his former student, Yehudi Menuhin, to the Indonesian Gamelan Orchestra.
Enescu spent both world wars in Bucharest. Despite wartime slowing down an otherwise fast-paced musical life, he managed to split his time between Paris and Bucharest when not touring other European centres. It was during WWI that he first led an orchestra, conducting performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, works by Berlioz, Debussy, and Wagner, as well as some of his own compositions. In 1923, Enescu embarked on his first American tour as a conductor and subsequently appeared with numerous major orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Late in life, he began teaching at the Mannes School of Music in New York City.
Bohuslav Martinů was an extraordinarily prolific composer from what is now the Czech Republic, having written about 400 works over his lifetime. Eventually finding his primary compositional voice in Neoclassicism after an exploratory period in Paris during the 1920s, Martinů’s music began to incorporate the influences of jazz and Moravian folk themes as his writing moved away from the Romantic style in which he had been trained at the Prague Conservatory. Serenade No. 1, written in 1932, typifies Martinů’s texturally complex and harmonically colourful work during this period. His work was stylistically aligned, in many ways, with his 20th century musical contemporaries, such as Stravinsky, including in the departure from strict neoclassical form as he entered his mature years as a composer.
Serenade No. 1 is a chamber work for six players, and although Martinů was no stranger to crafting music from unusual combinations, this work stands out for featuring a trio of violins and three alto-voiced instruments (clarinet, horn, and viola). Lacking in this sextet is a bass instrument, and a piano, which is present in the vast majority of Martinů’s orchestral compositions and has significant representation in his chamber music works.
This work was preceded in 1930 by a chamber orchestra composition titled Serenade, and followed by three other Serenades, all written in 1932. Martinů also wrote a later Serenade in 1951 while living in the United States and focusing on orchestral writing. These compositions, which range in size from a trio to a small orchestra, feature between one and four solo violins in keeping with Martinů’s desire to experiment with instrumentation. Although the musical origins of a serenade suggest light-hearted music for the evening, and are especially evocative of a romantic greeting while passing the beloved’s balcony, Martinů has emphasized the importance of form in the neoclassical genre by adhering to a three-movement structure (fast-slow-fast) in this short work.
The opening of the first movement, “Allegro Moderato”, is characterized by off-beat accents in the string parts which play tricks on the listener’s sense of pulse, while the clarinet and horn trade lyrical moments. Thus, a rising line continues into an abbreviated development section before returning to the original rhythmic material. During the second movement “Larghetto”, the sustained notes in the wind parts, marked piano and pianissimo, colour the moving line of the violin trio until a tender solo in the clarinet signals that the movement is coming to an end. The final movement, “Allegro”, is fast and rhythmic, with short virtuosic solos for each instrument. The work concludes brightly and suddenly.
There are only a few musical themes in the classical genre more iconic than the repeating Promenade from Mussorgsky’s ten-movement piano masterpiece, Pictures at an Exhibition. In the often-performed orchestral adaptation of this work, created in 1922 by composer Maurice Ravel, the Promenade is most prominently heard throughout the work as a trumpet solo, and as such, is a cornerstone of orchestral repertoire for the trumpet. In the arrangement performed at this concert, the Promenade is featured on various instruments throughout the ensemble.
The origin of Mussorgsky’s virtuosic Pictures at an Exhibition, and its posthumous publication are inseparable from the composer’s personal and professional difficulties. Mussorgsky enjoyed a friendship and a lively artistic exchange with Viktor Hartmann, the artist, architect, and designer who created the now-lost pictures, which inspired the composition. However, Hartmann’s sudden death in 1873, only a few years after the passing of Mussorgsky’s mother, and the family’s sudden impoverishment following Tsar Alexander II’s Emancipation Edict, troubled the composer deeply. During the late 1860s, Mussorgsky faced artistic estrangement and ostracism due to divergent musical ideals from The Mighty Handful, a group of five Russian composers including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui, Mily Balakirev, and Alexandr Borodin. He descended further into addiction even as his most successful and well-loved work, the opera Boris Godunov, received multiple performances in spite of its lukewarm response from critics.
Notwithstanding the challenges of this period in the composer’s life, Pictures at an Exhibition was written in only three weeks, during June of 1874. Updating a friend on the progress of the work, Mussorgsky breathlessly exclaimed — “Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord. Like roast pigeons in the story, I gorge and gorge and over-eat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.” The music is famously representational of Russian folk tropes, such as the movement titled “Baba Yaga: The Hut on Fowl’s Legs”, and contains many evocative musical devices designed to produce a visceral response in the listener. While the work’s reception among Mussorgsky’s fans was overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic, many of the composer’s colleagues were uncomfortable with the radicalness of Pictures at an Exhibition; a reaction which served to worsen Mussorgsky’s insecurities, and the work was not published until 1886 by Rimsky-Korsakov, five years following Mussorgsky’s death.
Ravel’s arrangement of the original work for piano was created at the behest of conductor Serge Koussevitzky shortly before his tenure as conductor of the Boston Symphony. In the orchestral version of Pictures at an Exhibition, the strange and wonderful imagery in Mussorgsky’s music is heightened by Ravel’s brilliant orchestration. The arrangement on this program, created especially for the Regina Symphony Chamber Players by Andrew Ager, is freely adapted from the original piano score for eleven musicians.
Program Notes by Tamsin Lorraine Johnston
Five American Portraits, commissioned by the Soni Fidelis Wind Quintet celebrates American cultural life though musical depictions of five influential Americans: H.L. Mencken, John Cage, Henry Ford, Edger Allan Poe, and Theodore Roosevelt. Each figure is animated by a different instrument of the woodwind quintet. Despite Gryc’s noble efforts to capture the innovation and ingenuity of Americans throughout history, he aptly recognizes his oversights:
Exploiting the contrasting voices of the wind quintet allows the composer to both capture and critique each the life and times of each historical figure.
H.L Mencken (1880-1956) was a journalist, satirist, linguist, and controversial cultural critic whose complex views on war, religion, politics, and economics often suggested cognitive dissonance when viewed through the lens of the twenty-first century. In this work, Mencken is represented by the clarinet; it’s a virtuosic, fast-paced first movement that is punctuated by long notes dominating the musical texture, as if an otherwise busy mind is suddenly captivated by a particularly fascinating idea.
John Cage (1912-1992), an avant-garde composer and music theorist who was perhaps best known for his composition 4’33” and for pioneering compositions written for prepared piano. Influenced by East and South Asian culture and philosophy, Cage came to see music as “a purposeless play …an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”. Creative thought in this movement is portrayed by a liberated and lyrical flute solo interposed by the clarinet and oboe.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) was a capitalist visionary, and the founder of the Ford Motor Company. He developed the assembly line as a means of mass production and brought the automobile to the American middle class with the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908. Upbeat, rhythmic, and cheery, this is a melodic and asymmetrical march for the oboe that evokes a productive and well-run factory.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is best known for his poetry and short stories that showcase mystery and the macabre and is credited with pioneering the genre of detective stories. His short life was marked by tragically losing his young wife and first cousin Virginia Clemm in 1946 and being unable to turn his considerable literary success into meaningful financial gain. The adversity in Poe’s life is represented by a slow and introspective bassoon solo. Perhaps the most lyrically beautiful movement in the quintet, the soprano-voiced woodwinds “chatter” throughout, joining the solo bassoon at times in a duet or trio illustrating Poe’s wife Virginia.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was President of the United States from 1901-1909 and Governor of New York from 1899-1900. Considered one of the great historical U.S. presidents, Roosevelt championed progressive policies such as anti-trust and environmental conservation. Depicted first by a majestic and dignified horn solo, the finale perks up when the oboe enters, followed by the flute, constantly building rhythmic energy through the use of accents and hemiolas until the very end.
Few composers have had the distinction of their hometown being renamed posthumously in their honour; his birthplace, the village of Liveni, is now known as George Enescu, Botoșani County, Western Moldavia, Romania. George Enescu remains one of Romania’s greatest musicians and one of the most outstanding of many Romanian artists who achieved international fame.
Considered a child prodigy, Enescu was sent to the Vienna Conservatory in 1888 as the first non-Austrian student ever to study there, and gave his first public performance at age 8. Like Mozart more than a century earlier, Enescu was already writing music as a young child, and the earliest notable work that survives is titled Pămînt românesc, which translates as Romanian Land. It is inscribed “opus for piano and violin by George Enescu, Romanian Composer, aged five years and a quarter”.
An aubade is music intended for the morning, specifically the early morning, and is thought to evoke the parting of lovers at dawn. This Scherzo and Trio was composed in Paris in 1899, the same year Enescu, known in France as Georges Enesco, completed his studies at the Paris Conservatoire in violin, harmony, and composition under Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré.
A love and appreciation for his Romanian homeland and heritage continued to inspire both composition and performance throughout the composer’s life; many of Enescu’s mature works rely on Romanian folk music. Understanding that temperamental tastes influence the durability of style in classical music, he sought to promote the music of contemporary twentieth-century Romanian composers including Constantin Silvestri, Mihail Jora, and Jonel Perlea. Following a collaboration with Ravi Shankar’s brother Uday, it seems that Enescu’s respect for the genre of Folk music had deepened and expanded to include Eastern traditions. He is thought to have first introduced his former student, Yehudi Menuhin, to the Indonesian Gamelan Orchestra.
Enescu spent both world wars in Bucharest. Despite wartime slowing down an otherwise fast-paced musical life, he managed to split his time between Paris and Bucharest when not touring other European centres. It was during WWI that he first led an orchestra, conducting performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, works by Berlioz, Debussy, and Wagner, as well as some of his own compositions. In 1923, Enescu embarked on his first American tour as a conductor and subsequently appeared with numerous major orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Late in life, he began teaching at the Mannes School of Music in New York City.
Bohuslav Martinů was an extraordinarily prolific composer from what is now the Czech Republic, having written about 400 works over his lifetime. Eventually finding his primary compositional voice in Neoclassicism after an exploratory period in Paris during the 1920s, Martinů’s music began to incorporate the influences of jazz and Moravian folk themes as his writing moved away from the Romantic style in which he had been trained at the Prague Conservatory. Serenade No. 1, written in 1932, typifies Martinů’s texturally complex and harmonically colourful work during this period. His work was stylistically aligned, in many ways, with his 20th century musical contemporaries, such as Stravinsky, including in the departure from strict neoclassical form as he entered his mature years as a composer.
Serenade No. 1 is a chamber work for six players, and although Martinů was no stranger to crafting music from unusual combinations, this work stands out for featuring a trio of violins and three alto-voiced instruments (clarinet, horn, and viola). Lacking in this sextet is a bass instrument, and a piano, which is present in the vast majority of Martinů’s orchestral compositions and has significant representation in his chamber music works.
This work was preceded in 1930 by a chamber orchestra composition titled Serenade, and followed by three other Serenades, all written in 1932. Martinů also wrote a later Serenade in 1951 while living in the United States and focusing on orchestral writing. These compositions, which range in size from a trio to a small orchestra, feature between one and four solo violins in keeping with Martinů’s desire to experiment with instrumentation. Although the musical origins of a serenade suggest light-hearted music for the evening, and are especially evocative of a romantic greeting while passing the beloved’s balcony, Martinů has emphasized the importance of form in the neoclassical genre by adhering to a three-movement structure (fast-slow-fast) in this short work.
The opening of the first movement, “Allegro Moderato”, is characterized by off-beat accents in the string parts which play tricks on the listener’s sense of pulse, while the clarinet and horn trade lyrical moments. Thus, a rising line continues into an abbreviated development section before returning to the original rhythmic material. During the second movement “Larghetto”, the sustained notes in the wind parts, marked piano and pianissimo, colour the moving line of the violin trio until a tender solo in the clarinet signals that the movement is coming to an end. The final movement, “Allegro”, is fast and rhythmic, with short virtuosic solos for each instrument. The work concludes brightly and suddenly.
There are only a few musical themes in the classical genre more iconic than the repeating Promenade from Mussorgsky’s ten-movement piano masterpiece, Pictures at an Exhibition. In the often-performed orchestral adaptation of this work, created in 1922 by composer Maurice Ravel, the Promenade is most prominently heard throughout the work as a trumpet solo, and as such, is a cornerstone of orchestral repertoire for the trumpet. In the arrangement performed at this concert, the Promenade is featured on various instruments throughout the ensemble.
The origin of Mussorgsky’s virtuosic Pictures at an Exhibition, and its posthumous publication are inseparable from the composer’s personal and professional difficulties. Mussorgsky enjoyed a friendship and a lively artistic exchange with Viktor Hartmann, the artist, architect, and designer who created the now-lost pictures, which inspired the composition. However, Hartmann’s sudden death in 1873, only a few years after the passing of Mussorgsky’s mother, and the family’s sudden impoverishment following Tsar Alexander II’s Emancipation Edict, troubled the composer deeply. During the late 1860s, Mussorgsky faced artistic estrangement and ostracism due to divergent musical ideals from The Mighty Handful, a group of five Russian composers including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui, Mily Balakirev, and Alexandr Borodin. He descended further into addiction even as his most successful and well-loved work, the opera Boris Godunov, received multiple performances in spite of its lukewarm response from critics.
Notwithstanding the challenges of this period in the composer’s life, Pictures at an Exhibition was written in only three weeks, during June of 1874. Updating a friend on the progress of the work, Mussorgsky breathlessly exclaimed — “Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord. Like roast pigeons in the story, I gorge and gorge and over-eat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.” The music is famously representational of Russian folk tropes, such as the movement titled “Baba Yaga: The Hut on Fowl’s Legs”, and contains many evocative musical devices designed to produce a visceral response in the listener. While the work’s reception among Mussorgsky’s fans was overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic, many of the composer’s colleagues were uncomfortable with the radicalness of Pictures at an Exhibition; a reaction which served to worsen Mussorgsky’s insecurities, and the work was not published until 1886 by Rimsky-Korsakov, five years following Mussorgsky’s death.
Ravel’s arrangement of the original work for piano was created at the behest of conductor Serge Koussevitzky shortly before his tenure as conductor of the Boston Symphony. In the orchestral version of Pictures at an Exhibition, the strange and wonderful imagery in Mussorgsky’s music is heightened by Ravel’s brilliant orchestration. The arrangement on this program, created especially for the Regina Symphony Chamber Players by Andrew Ager, is freely adapted from the original piano score for eleven musicians.
Program Notes by Tamsin Lorraine Johnston
The Regina Symphony Orchestra acknowledges that we are on Treaty 4 Territory, which is the traditional territory of the Cree, Saulteaux, Dakota, Nakoda, and Lakota Peoples, and the homeland of the Métis. In the spirit of reconciliation and collaboration, we commit to moving forward in partnership with the Indigenous people who live here and across Canada.
Monday to Friday | 9 to 4:30
Closed on stat holidays and Friday afternoons in the summer
Phone 306-586-9555