Repertoire & Program Notes

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda:

Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980) | Holy Roller

Missy Mazzolli was born on October 27, 1980 in Abington, Pennsylvania. Holy Roller was composed in 2012 and premiered on May 18, 2012 by the Albany Symphony, conducted by David Alan Miller. The score calls for three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes.

Missy Mazzoli is a gifted artist of wide-ranging talents whose works, according to her publisher, the distinguished New York firm of G. Schirmer, “reflect a trend among composers of her generation to combine styles, writing music for the omnivorous audiences of the 21st century.” Mazzoli was born in 1980 in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington and studied at Boston University, Yale University School of Music, and Royal Conservatory of the Hague; her composition teachers included Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, David Lang, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Charles Fussell, Richard Cornell, Martin Amlin, and John Harbison. Mazzoli taught composition at Yale in 2006 before serving for the next three years as Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of young composers; in 2010, she was appointed to the faculty of New York’s Mannes College of Music. She was a Composer-Educator Partner with the Albany Symphony in 2011-2012 and has held residencies with Gotham Chamber Opera, Music Theatre-Group, and Opera Philadelphia, which premiered her Breaking the Waves, based on Lars von Trier’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning 1996 film of the same name, in September 2016; her most recent opera, Proving Up, premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in January 2018.

In June 2018 Mazzoli began a two-year tenure as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; three months later it was announced that she had been commissioned to write a new work for the Metropolitan Opera based on librettist Royce Vavrek’s adaptation of George Saunders’ best-selling novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Missy Mazzoli is also active internationally as a pianist, often performing with Victoire, an ensemble she founded in 2008 to play her own compositions; the group has released two CDs that have earned positive reviews from both the classical and indie rock communities. Mazzoli has received four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, the Detroit Symphony’s Elaine Lebenbom Award, and grants from the Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Barlow Endowment, and fulfilled commissions from such noted ensembles, institutions and artists as the Kronos Quartet, Young People’s Chorus of New York City, Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Whitney Museum of Art, cellist Maya Beiser, and pianist Emanuel Ax.

Mazzoli wrote that Holy Roller, commissioned and premiered in 2012 by the Albany Symphony, “is devotional music for a non-existent religion. This piece has its roots in melodies and harmonies from [English composer] Thomas Tallis’ 16^th-century Psalm settings, but the original material has been transformed, stretched, turned inside-out and all but obliterated by the orchestra. While writing this piece, I had in mind the visionary architecture of Ferdinand Cheval and Simon Rodia, men typically labeled ‘ousider artists.’ Cheval, a French postman, spent 33 years of his life creating Le Palais Ideal, an ornate palace made of rocks he picked up on his postal route. Simon Rodia was an Italian construction worker who, also over 33 years, built the now-iconic Watts Towers in Los Angeles out of steel pipes decorated with found objects. These artworks have always seemed to me to be monuments to a personal or even non-existent religion, private expressions of obsession and devotion. In a way, Holy Roller is my 'outsider architecture’ — a cathedral of found musical objects, a sonic temple of bottle caps and broken glass.”

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) | Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, “Organ”

Camille Saint-Saëns was born on October 9, 1835 in Paris and died December 16, 1921 in Algiers. He composed his Third Symphony in 1886 on commission from the Philharmonic Society of London; the score is dedicated “to the memory of Franz Liszt.” The composer conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the premiere on May 19, 1886. The score calls for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, organ, piano (four hands), and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes.

“There goes the French Beethoven,” declared Charles Gounod to a friend as he pointed out Camille Saint-Saëns at the Paris premiere of the “Organ” Symphony. This was high praise, indeed, and not without foundation. Though the depths of feeling that Beethoven plumbed were never accessible to Saint-Saëns, both musicians largely devoted their lives to the great abstract forms of instrumental music — symphony, concerto, sonata — that are the most difficult to compose and the most rewarding to accomplish. This was no mean feat for Saint-Saëns. The Paris in which Saint-Saëns grew up, studied, and lived was enamored of the vacuous stage works of Meyerbeer, Offenbach, and a host of lesser lights in which little attention was given to artistic merit, only to convention and entertainment. Berlioz tried to break this stranglehold of mediocrity, and earned for himself a reputation as an eccentric, albeit a talented one, whose works were thought unperformable, and probably best left to the pedantic Germans anyway.

Saint-Saëns, with his love of Palestrina, Rameau, Beethoven, Liszt, and, above all, Mozart, also determined not to be enticed into the Opéra Comique but to follow his calling toward a more noble art. To this end, he established with some like-minded colleagues the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 to perform the serious concert works of French composers. The venture was a success and did much to give a renewed sense of artistic purpose to the best Gallic musicians. Saint-Saëns produced a great deal of music to promote the ideals of the Société Nationale de Musique, including ten concertos and various smaller works for solo instruments and orchestra, four tone poems, two orchestral suites, and five symphonies, the second and third of which were unpublished for decades and discounted in the usual numbering of these works.

The last of the symphonies, the No. 3 in C minor, is his masterwork in the genre. Saint-Saëns placed much importance on this composition. He pondered it for a long time and realized it with great care, unusual for this artist, who said of himself that he composed music “as an apple tree produces apples,” that is, naturally and without visible effort. “I have given in this Symphony,” he confessed, “everything that I could give.” Of the work’s construction, Saint-Saëns wrote, “This Symphony is divided into two parts, though it includes practically the traditional four movements. The first, checked in development, serves as an introduction to the Adagio. In the same manner, the scherzo is connected with the finale.” Saint-Saëns clarified the division of the two parts by using the organ only in the second half of each: dark and rich in Part I, noble and uplifting in Part II. The entire work is unified by transformations of the main theme, heard in the strings at the beginning after a brief and mysterious introduction. In his “Organ” Symphony, Saint-Saëns combined the techniques of thematic transformation, elision of movements and richness of orchestration with a clarity of thought and grandeur of vision to create one of the masterpieces of French symphonic music.

©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Featured Artists

Colorado Symphony
Brett Mitchell, conductor
Olga Kern, piano

Preludes & Talkbacks

Preludes take place at 6:30 p.m. (FRI & SAT) and 12 p.m. (SUN) in Boettcher Concert Hall. This weekend's Preludes are hosted by Assistant Principal Viola Catherine Beeson. Catherine will take you on a deep dive into the music, with demonstrations from the stage.

There will be a Talkback on Sunday, January 12, 2020.

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