UMS Concert Program, March 28, 1935: Choral Union Concert Series -- Cleveland Orchestra

Season: 1934-1935
Concert: Tenth
Complete Series: 2260
Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan

UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
CHARLES A. SINK, PRESIDENT EARL V. MOORE, MUSICAL DIRECTOR
Tenth Concert 1934-1935 Complete Series 2260
Fifty-Sixth Annual
Choral Union Concert Series
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA
Artur Rodzinski, Conductor
Thursday Evening, March 28, 1935, at 8:15 Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan
PROGRAM
Organ Chorale No. 1, E major.......Cesar Feanck
Arranged for orchestra by Arthur Loesser
Symphony, Op. 10.........Shostakovich
Allegretto--allegro non troppo Allegro Lento
Allegro molto
INTERMISSION
Overture-Fantasia, Romeo and Juliet.....Tschaikowsky
Suite from the Ballet Petrouchka......Stravinsky'
1. Legerdemain--the charlatan with his flute brings to life his puppets
2. Russian dance
3. In Petrouchka's quarters
4. The carnival resumed
Introduction
Nurses' dance
Dance of the coachmen and grooms
The masqueraders
E. William Doty, Organist, will give a concert, Sunday afternoon, March 31, at 4:15 in Hill Auditorium, and
The University Band, Bernard Hirsch, Acting Conductor, will give a concert, Wednesday evening, April 3, at 8:15, in Hill Auditorium. There will be no admission charge.
The Steinway Piano and the Skinner Organ are the. official concert instruments of the University Musical Society
ARS LONGA VITA BREVIS
PROGRAM NOTES
By Herbert Elwell
Organ Chorale No. 1, E major.......Franck
Arranged for orchestra by Arthur Loesser Cesar Franck was born December 10, 1822, at Liege; died November 8, 1890, at Paris.
Mr. Loesser has kindly provided the following comment on the Franck Chorale and his orchestral arrangement of it:
The Chorale in E major by Cesar Franck is the first of a set of three composed for the organ in 1890. Completed only a few months before his death, it displays Franck's maturest thought and feeling; it is, we may say, his quintessence, the true, the complete Franck. All the familiar features of his style and character are here: the dreamy, restless chromatic harmonies, always ultimately penetrated by a bright ray of major, the solemn rhythms, the classical polyphony, the feeling of triumph and of transfiguration at the end. Every bar, indeed, is an autograph.
A word about the function of the orchestration. The writer hopes it will be understood that he has not been animated by any absurd notion of "improving" the original or making it "more effective." Nor has he undertaken this labor with any idea of showing off his extremely problematical skill as an instrumentator. Rather has he endeavored, by as sympathetic as possible an adaptation of organ registration to orchestral masses and by a close adherence to the style of Franck's own orchestral writing, to make more available to a larger circle of hearers, as authentically as might be, a most characteristic composition of one of the very greatest musicians.
Arthur Loesser, a native of New York, has been a member of the piano faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music since 1926, and head of the ensemble department. At the Institute of Musical Art in New York he studied piano with Elizabeth Strauss, and theory with Sigismund Stojowski and Percy Goetschius. He graduated with highest honors and won the Morris Loeb Memorial Prize in 1911. His debut as a concert pianist was made at Berlin in 1913. This was followed by a New York debut in 1916. He has concertized extensively, appearing with major orchestras in this country and abroad. His appearances as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra have been in its ninth, eleventh, fifteenth, and sixteenth seasons. In 1920, Loesser gave several concerts in Australia and toured the Far East with Mischa Elman. In the years preceding his residence in Cleveland, he toured this country with Mme. Schumann-Heink, and, as a member of the String Wood Ensemble in New York, devoted considerable attention to performances of modern chamber music.
Symphony, Op. 10.....Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich was born September 16, 1906, at St. Petersburg; living at Leningrad.
This Symphony, completed in 1923, when the composer was only nineteen, was introduced to America by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, November 2, 1928. At this time very little was known about Shostakovich outside of Russia. Leonid Sabaneyeff, in his Modern Russian Composers, spoke of Shostakovich's early compositions as bearing strongly discernible traces of the influence of Glazounoff and the "imprint of the general St. Petersburg training." Other commentators on the music of Soviet Russia such as Victor Belaieff and Alfredo Casella mentioned Shostakovich not at all. From this comparative obscurity of a few years back, Shostakovich's star has suddenly risen to a point where he is now spoken of as "the most successful of the New Russian composers."
On the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, his October Symphony for orchestra and chorus, 1927, was played in four cities of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics--Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Karkoff, and it is repeated annually at the October festivities in Russia. This third symphony, written in 1929 and first performed at the May Day celebrations in 1930, is credited with having "stirred Russian audiences on each succeeding May Day." In short, the last few years have seen such an extensive growth of the reputation of this young man still in his twenties that he has come to be regarded as "a kind of composer-laureate to the Soviet State."
Besides his three symphonies, Shostakovich has composed chamber music, several pieces for piano, and a piano concerto, performed with the composer as soloist in 1933. Two ballets are included in his already large output--one, an "athletic ballet," The Golden Age, and the other "an industrial ballet," The Bolt. Both ballets, as
well as the composer's first opera, Nose, have been produced at Leningrad. This opera, inspired by Gogol's novel and written in 1927-28, is said to mark an important stage in Shostakovich's development. In it, according to S. Chenadanoff, "The composer has already to a certain degree commenced to adopt the new principles of operatic writing which he was later to carry much further in Katerina Izmailova, or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. This, his latest creation, received its American premiere in Cleveland on January 31st. Its success both in Moscow and Leningrad is said to have been extraordinary, and sufficient to place the author in the ranks of the leading contemporary composers. Its chief merits for Russians seems to lie in "its strong musical interpretations of the old social system and its decisive break with stuffy operatic traditions."
It is Shostakovich's music which will speak for him, however, on this occasion, and just how much there is in it of the revolutionary spirit may be judged from its content. It is cast in the usual four movements.
Overture-Fantasia, Romeo and Juliet .... Tschaikowsky
Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky was born May 7, 1840, at Votkinsk; died November 6, 1893, at St. Petersburg.
During the winter of 1868-69, when Tschaikowsky was still young and unknown, strU7gling to make a living by teaching and arranging songs for a publisher in Moscow, he fell madly in love with the opera singer, Desiree Artot, who shortly after married someone else. It was about this time that he received a suggestion from Balakireff, the great Russian nationalist and leader of the Five, to write the overture based on Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet. With an aching memory of Desiree, he set to work, and continued more or less under Balakireff's tutelage, some of which was by correspondence. Eventually he achieved a result which vindicated his suffering. The strong delineation, and, at times, truly Shakespearean fire of the overture testify to a rich, emotional experience.
The churchly harmonies of the'opening theme (clarinets and bassoons) are intended to suggest the Friar Laurence. This serves as an introduction to the stormy allegro depicting the strife of the opposing Montagues and Capulets. Then follows the love scene, consisting of two lyric themes, the first a richly expressive phrase given out by the English horn and muted violas, and the second, a deh'cious undulating passage in divided strings with mutes, which shortly forms an accompaniment to the ecstatic song of the lovers. There ensues a return to the tumultuous allegro, against which the solemn warning of Friar Laurence protests in vain. The love theme reappears with increasing and passionate intensity. There is a great climax. And then after a moment of portentous silence comes a dirgelike reminiscence of the love song (cellos, violins, and bassoon, above drumbeats, with bass pizzicato), which is afterward carried up in a mood of transfigured exaltation to the higher strings and sung in elegiac conclusion.
Suite from the Ballet Petrouchka......Stravinsky
Igor Fedorovitch Stravinsky was born June 17, 1882, at Oranienbaum, Russia; living in France.
The music of Petrouchka is regarded by many observers as marking the end of an epoch. With the devastating humor of this ballet, Stravinsky made a whole generation laugh at its own musical predilections, and thereby diverted music into new channels. More than this, Petrouchka is supposed to have voiced the spirit of a new age--the age of machines and disbelief. Man, in Petrouchka, is reduced to a ridiculously pathetic little automaton with an empty heart, seeking empty amusement. The gods of the musical past are dead, and if it is not unanimously conceded that Stravinsky has given us something in their place, it is at least evident that he has inspired voluminous comment on his influence upon our generation through the medium of music. Writers like Edith Sitwell and Paul Rosenfeld have expanded at length on the symbolic meaning underlying Petrouchka. The former finds that its rhythm "is but the anguished beat of the clown's heart as he makes his endless battle against materialism." "Beneath the music," writes Rosenfeld, "one hears always the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in it is not purely mechanical, nevertheless, completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridae a moment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously by the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. It has indeed a servant-girl grace, a coachman ardor, a barrel organ, tintype, popcorn, fortune-telling flavor."
Forty-Second Annual May Festival
Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, May 15, 16, 17, and 18
Four Evening Programs and Two Matinees
PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT
Conductors
Earl V. Moore .............................................Musical Director
Frederick Stock .......................................Orchestra Conductor
Eric DeLamarter .......................................Associate Conductor
Juva Higbee ......................................Young People's Conductor
Howard Hanson ............................................Guest Conductor
First Appearance in Ann Arbor
MARY MOORE...........................Coloratura Soprano
Metropolitan Opera Association
HELEN JEPSON ..............................Lyric Soprano
Metropolitan Opera Association MAXIM PANTELEIEFF ......................Bass-Baritone
(Boris) Russian Grand Opera Company
MYRTLE LEONARD ..............................Contralto
Metropolitan Opera Association
RUTH POSSELT ...................................Violinist
American Violin Virtuoso
WILBUR EVANS................:..................Baritone
American Baritone
Former Favorites
GIOVANNI MARTINELLI ............................Tenor
Metropolitan Opera Association JOSEF LHEVINNE ..................................Pianist
Renowned Recitalist PAUL ALTHOUSE ...................................Tenor
Metropolitan Opera Association ETHYL HAYDEN ..................................Soprano
American Soprano THEODORE WEBB ................................Baritone
American Baritone
PAUL LEYSSAC ...................................Narrator
New York Civic Repertory Theater
Organizations
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION..........................340 Voices
THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA....................70 Players
YOUNG PEOPLE'S FESTIVAL CHORUS......................400 Voices
Choral Works
BORIS GODUNOF, in English...................Moussorgsky
KING DAVID .....................................Honegger
SONGS FROM THE "DRUM TAPS" (world premiere) . .Hanson JUMBLIES (world premiere) ..................Dorothy James
Season Ticket Prices Reduced
The prices of season tickets have been reduced $1.00 each to the levels of $2.00, $3.00, and $4.00 (former prices, $3.00, $4.00, and $5.00) for holders of Choral Union "Festival Coupons," and to $5.00, $6.00, and $7.00 (former prices, $6.00, $7.00, and $8.00) for others. Subscribers of record to patrons' tickets will please mail in their orders promptly on special blanks mailed to each such subscriber. Orders from others will be filed and filled in the sequence of receipt. Address, with remittance, Charles A. Sink, President, School of Music, Ann Arbor, Michigan.