UMS Concert Program, May 3,1975: The Ann Arbor May Festival -- The Philadelphia Orchestra

Concert: Fourth
Complete Series: 3947
Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan

The University Musical Society
of
The University of Michigan
Presents
ANN ARBOR
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
Eugene Ormandy, Music Director and Conductor William Smith, Assistant Conductor
EUGENE ORMANDY, Conducting
Soloist GRACE BUMBRY, Soprano
Saturday Evening, May 3, 1975, at 8:30 Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan
program
Overture to The Marriage oj Figaro, K. 492.......Mozart
Concert Recitative: "Ch'io mi scordi di te" and
Aria: "Non temer, amato bene," K. SOS.......Mozart
Grace Bumbry
"Three Places in New England"...........Ives
(Full Orchestra Version) The St. Gaudens in Boston Common Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut The Housatonic at Stockbridge
INTERMISSION
"Ernani, involami" from Ernani..........Verdi
Miss Bumbry
Concerto for Orchestra............Bartok
Andante non troppo; allegro vivace Allegro scherzando
Elegy: andante non troppo
Intermezzo intcrrotto: allegretto Finale: presto
The Philadelphia Orchestra records exclusively for RCA Red Seal Available on Columbia Records
Fourth Concert Eightysecond Annual May Festival Complete Concerts 3947
Continuing "Summer Fare"
Chicago Symphony String Quartet and Brian Minor, Saxophonist.......Monday, July 7
Beethoven: Quartet in F minor, Op. 95; Leon Stein: Quintet for Saxophone and String Quartet (1957); Ravel: Quartet in F.
In Rackham Auditorium
Barbara Cook, Broadway star, and The Festival Chorus, Donald Bryant, Conductor . Wednesday, July 16
Broadway musical selections, and the Finale from "Candide" by Leonard Bernstein; Negro spirituals and American folksongs, in special arrangements by Mr. Bryant.
In Hill Auditorium
Igor Kipnis, Harpsichordist........Wednesday, July 23
Anonymous: Three early 16thcentury Italian pieces; Handel: Suite No. 5 in E major; Sweelinck: Toccata in G minor, Ballo del granduca, Fantasia Chromatica; Dussek: The Sufferings of the Queen of France; Bach: Partita No. 3 in A minor; Soler: Fandango.
In Rackham Auditorium
Judith Blegen, Soprano.........Thursday, July 31
Handel: "Care selve" from Atalanta, and "O Had I Jubal's Lyre" from Joshua; Schubert: Auf dem Wasser zu singen, Du bist die Ruh, Die Forelle; Strauss: Ich schwebe, Heimkehr, Schlagende Herzen; Massenet: "Adieu, notre petite table" from Manon; Gounod: "Je veux vivre" from Romeo el Juliette; Ives: Feldeinsamkeit, Canon, Mists, New River, Serenity; Milhaud: Chansons de Ronsard.
In Rackham Auditorium All concerts begin at 8:30; tickets at $6, $5, and $3.
197576 Concert Season
CHORAL UNION SERIES
Ten concerts in this 97th season, beginning October 5 with the Hague Philharmonic, Jean Martinon conducting ... all in Hill Auditorium.
CHOICE SERIES
Choose your own series of four or eight concerts from a roster of fifteen performances in the Power Center--ballet, modern, and ethnic dance, guitar recitals, opera, and jazz.
CHAMBER ARTS SERIES
String quartets, piano trios, early music groups, harpsichord and guitar recitals comprise this 13th annual series of eight concerts in Rackham Auditorium.
ASIAN SERIES
Four concerts of music, dance, and folk opera, from Burma, Tibet, Japan, and North India, in Rackham Auditorium.
Brochure available with complete information and order form.
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
Burton Memorial Tower, Ann Arbor, Michigan 4S104 Phones: 6653717, 7642538.
Long before the music was performed in any form, the Three Places almost became four, as Ives noted in his Memos: "There was another movement, started but never completed, about the Wendell Phillips row and the mob in Faneuil Hall." The three movements that were completed were given at least three other titles--Orchestral Set No. 1, New England Symphony, Three New England Places--before Ives settled on the present one. The moods of the three movements reflect his own deepfelt responses to the sites identified in the respective titles.
The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored Regiment). In 1897 a monument by Augustus SaintGaudcns was erected in Boston Common to the memory of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (183763) and the regiment of Negro soldiers he organized and led during the Civil War. The lines Ives inscribed in his score may have been derived in part from words spoken at the unveiling ceremony:
"Moving--Marching--Faces of Souls ! Marked with generations of pain, PartFreers of a Destiny, Slowly, restlessly swaying us on with you Towards other Freedom!
"Above and beyond that compelling mass
Rises the drumbeat of the commonheart,
In the silence of a strange and sounding afterglow--
Moving--Marching--Faces of Souls!"
Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut. The second movement is a fantasy describing a child's dream during a FourthofJuly picnic at the park on the site of General Israel Putnam's 17781779 winter quarters. The particular picnic Ives recalled was made memorable for him by the entrance of two bands at the same time, from different sides of the park, playing in different rhythms, and the recreation of this stunning effect has made this movement probably the bestknown single piece in the composer's entire output. The piece represents, more or less, a combination of two shorter works Ives had composed for theater orchestra in 1903, the "Country Band" March and the Overture and March "1776." The appearance of "The British Grenadiers" among the American tunes does not represent a conflict: it was one of several English tunes taken over by the Americans in the 1770s and fitted with Yankee texts.
The Housatonic at Stockbridge, Ives noted, "was suggested by a Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took near Stockbridge the summer after we were married. We walked in the meadows along the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember. Robert Underwood Johnson, in his poem 'The Housatonic at Stockbridge,' paints this scene beautifully." Lines from Johnson's poem, beginning "Contented river! in thy dreamy realm," are printed in the score.
--Richard Freed
Recitative: "Sorta e la notte" and
Aria: "Ernani, involami" from Ernani......Giuseppe Verdi
(18131901)
In his operas Verdi stuck closely to the conventions he inherited from his predecessors of the bel canto era--Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. He composed them, therefore, in a series of separate "numbers": recitatives, arias, ensembles and cabalettas (sections at the end of arias, etc., in quick uniform rhythms), and recognized the human voice as the most expressive of all instruments, never allowing the orchestra to usurp its position of preeminence.
Ernani was Verdi's fifth opera, written when he was thirty years of age. It contains many of the commonplace features of the Italian opera of the early nineteenth century, which he ultimately enobled in such scores as Rigolctto and La Traviata, and completely transcended in the incom?parable Otello and Falstaff of his last years. In spite of the fact that Ernani contains flashes of dramatic urgency and eloquence and what Frances Tovey calls Verdi's "savage sincerity," it is in general an acquiescence to banal proceedings, full of theatrical absurdities and musical weaknesses.
The story takes place in Aragon about 1519. Elvira, a Spanish lady of rank, is about to be married to the elderly Grandee of Spain, Don Gomez de Silva. She, however, is in love with John of Aragon, who, after his estates had been confiscated, became known as the bandit chief Ernani. The recitative, aria, and cabaletta heard on tonight's program occur at the opening of Scene II in Act I. Elvira, alone in her apartment, awaits Silva. She broods over her enforced marriage, which she seems powerless to prevent, and expresses her happiness at the prospect of being united with Ernani. It is one of the more enduring passages from the opera, rich in vocal display, but full of a genuine expression of despair and joy:
Recitative: Night is departing, and Silva does not return. Ah! that he never would, with his odious
protestations of love. I belong only to Ernani! Aria: Ernani, fly with me, prevent this hateful marriage. With you a barren desert would
become an Eden of enchantment.
Cabaletta: I scorn everything that does not tell my heart of Ernani; nothing can turn hatred to love. Hasten the hour of my flight. To the heart in love, all delay is torture.
--Glenn D. McGeoch
Concerto for Orchestra...........Bela Bartok
(18811945)
The final years of World War II saw the creation of a number of major orchestral works by such composers as Britten, Copland, Hindemith, and Shostakovich which established themselves immediately in the public favor and have retained their appeal with conspicuous success to the present day. Outstanding among all these, then and now, are the Fifth Symphony of Prokofiev and the Concerto for Orchestra of Bartok, each of which appears now as its respective composer's most successful work for orchestra. In the directness and intensity of their impact, these two works show a remarkable similarity, despite the different styles involved. Prokofiev described his Fifth as "a symphony on the spirit of man," while the term Bartok used was "lifeassertion"; in both are broadly expressed elements of mourning and of triumphant good humor.
Bartok's health was poor when he came to America in 1940, and he virtually abstained from creative effort until he received the commission for the Concerto for Orchestra from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in May 1943, delivered to him in the hospital to which he had been confined three months earlier. Within a few weeks his wife was able to write to Joseph Szigeti, who had been instrumental in arranging the commission: "One thing is certain: Bela's conviction that 'under no circumstances will I ever compose a new work again' is over." Bartok was well enough to leave the hospital shortly after that; he started work on the Concerto at Saranac Lake in late August and by October 8 the score was finished. Serge Koussevitzky conducted the premiere in Boston on December 1, 1944, and pronounced the work "the best orchestral piece of the last 25 years"; Bartok subsequently added a 22bar coda to the original Finale, and the work quickly took a prominent place in the repertory of orchestras everywhere.
The Concerto fulfills the implication of its title in that it docs include sections which display the various choirs of the orchestra, but it is in effect really a symphony in five movements, organized symmetrically around the central slow movement, which is separated from the outer ones by a pair of scherzos (the same structure as that of Bartok's Fourth String Quartet). "The general mood of the work," Bartok wrote, "represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious deathsong of the third to the lifeassertion of the last one."
--Richard Freed
Eugene Orniandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra
The 197475 season marks the 75th anniversary of The Philadelphia Orchestra and, simul?taneously, Eugene Ormandy's 75th birthday. This is Mr. Ormandy's 39th year as Music Director and Conductor of the Orchestra, a record unequaled by any living conductor of any other major orchestra. Born in Budapest in 1899, he became a child prodigy violinist at the age of five, and came to the United States in 1921 as a solo violinist. He soon combined his performing and conducting talents, and in 1931 became Music Director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. In 1936 Mr. Ormandy was appointed Music Director and Conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra, where he has now spent more than half of his life. With this Orchestra he has traveled many thousands of miles throughout the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Mainland China. As a guest conductor, he has led every major European orchestra and also made appearances in Australia and South America. This week is Maestro Ormandy's thirtyninth annual consecutive visit to conduct The Philadelphia Orchestra at Ann Arbor's May Festival.
The Orchestra was formed in 1900 by a group of music lovers who decided that Philadelphia should have its own professional symphony orchestra, and from its first concert on November 16, 1900, The Philadelphia Orchestra has been recognized as one of the world's leading artistic institutions. A German musician, Fritz Scheel, became its first conductor, followed by another German, Carl Pohlig, who together laid the foundations for a great orchestra. In 1913 Leopold Stokowski became the third conductor of the Orchestra, first bringing it to Ann Arbor for concerts in 1913 and 1914, and later for the 1936 May Festival. The maestros Stokowski and Ormandy are credited with building The Philadelphia Orchestra into the worldrenowned ensemble that it is today. Perhaps its most famous tour was to Mainland China in September of 1973, when it became the first United States orchestra to perform there. Mr. Ormandy conducted four concerts in Peking and two in Shanghai on that important ambassadorial mission. This week's series of Ann Arbor concerts marks The Philadelphia Orchestra's fortieth consecutive appearance in the May Festival.