Repertoire & Program Notes

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

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) | “Bacchanale” from Samson et Dalila

Camille was born on October 9, 1835 in Paris, and died on December 16, 1921 in Algiers. He composed Samson et Dalila in 1867-1874. The opera was premiered on December 2, 1877 in Weimar, conducted by Eduard Lassen. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 7 minutes.

The story of Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila is set in Gaza, Palestine about 1,150 B.C.E. The mighty Samson, leader of the Hebrews during their bondage to the Philistines, kills Abimelech, Satrap of Gaza, in a scuffle. The Philistine High Priest urges vengeance upon the Hebrews, but the Philistines are themselves dispersed by the Hebrews. Dalila emerges from the Philistine temple bearing garlands for the victorious Hebrews, and approaches Samson. Bewitched by her beauty, Samson prays to heaven to be able to resist her temptations. He cannot, and is lured to Dalila’s house, where she uses her wiles to discover that his hair is the source of his strength. She shears his locks, leaving him powerless, and he is seized by the Philistine soldiers with whom she has been plotting his capture. The next scene shows Samson, his eyes plucked out, chained to the wheel in a Philistine mill. The opera’s final tableau is set in the Temple of Dagon, where the Philistines are celebrating their suppression of the rebellious Hebrews. Samson, mocked by the Philistines and particularly Dalila, is led in by a child. Realizing that he is chained to the main pillars supporting the temple roof, he prays for a brief return of his former strength. His prayer is answered, and he topples the pillars, burying himself and his enemies. The Bacchanale accompanies the ballet depicting the revels in the temple of Dagon at the beginning of Act III.

Mason Bates (b. 1977) | Children of Adam, Songs of Creation for Chorus and Orchestra

Mason bates was born on January 23, 1977 in Philadelphia. Children of Adam was composed in 2018 and premiered on May 12, 2018 in Richmond, Virginia by the Richmond Symphony and Chorus, conducted by Steven Smith. The score calls for two piccolos, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings. Duration is about 27 minutes.

Mason Bates brings not only his own fresh talent to the concert hall but also the musical sensibilities of a new generation — he is equally at home composing “for Lincoln Center,” according to his web site (www.masonbates.com), as being the “electronica artist Masonic® who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York City, where he was a lounge DJ at such venues as The Frying Pan — the floating rave ship docked off the pier near West 22nd Street.”

Bates was born in Philadelphia in 1977 and started studying piano with Hope Armstrong Erb at his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. He earned degrees in both English literature and music composition in the joint program of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, where his composition teachers included John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, and Samuel Adler, and received his doctorate in composition from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 as a student of Edmund Campion and Jorge Lidermann. Bates was Resident Composer with the California Symphony from 2008 to 2011, Project San Francisco Artist-in-Residence with the San Francisco Symphony in 2011-2012, and Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2012-2013; he held a residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2010 to 2015, and is the first-ever Composer-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. through the 2019-2020 season. He also teaches in the Technology and Applied Composition Program of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Bates’ rapidly accumulating portfolio of orchestral, chamber, vocal, theatrical, film (notably Gus Van Sant’s 2014 The Sea of Trees starring Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts), and electronic compositions includes commissions and performances by major orchestras in Canada, the United States and England. In addition to being recognized as the most-performed American composer of his generation and named “2018 Composer of the Year” by Musical America, Bates has received a Charles Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship, Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, ASCAP and BMI awards, a Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, a two-year Composer Residency with Young Concert Artists, and the 2012 Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities. Among his recent works is The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, premiered by Santa Fe Opera in July 2017, which received the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Opera.

Bates wrote, “Children of Adam is a collection of exuberant celebrations of creation, from American poets to sacred and Native American texts. The title comes from a Whitman poem that appears throughout the work in the form of brief ‘fanfare intermezzos.’ His celebrations of sensuality, considered provocative at the time, explore the connection of the body and the soul. Between these choral fanfares, each movement of the work offers a different perspective on creation.

“Presented as a pair, the two Psalms offer colorful imagery of fertility, from crops to children — who are compared to olive shoots sprouting around the kitchen table. The harp is given a prominent part in the role of the ‘ten-stringed lyre’ mentioned in the text. Later in the work, another biblical text comes in a darker vein, with the Book of Genesis’ description of the creation of the world conjured in music both frightening and, ultimately, impassioned. An interesting secular complement to these sacred texts are two poems by Carl Sandburg, who describes the creations of the Industrial Age in a highly reverent manner in Prayers of Steel.

“The central movement of the cycle is a setting of Tolepe Menenak (‘Turtle Island’) from the Mattaponi Indians, whose reservation is close to my family’s farm in King & Queen County, Virginia. It was incredibly inspiring to explore a creation text whose roots are so close to that of my own family. The text, in native East Coast Algonquian, was sung to me by Sharon Sun Eagle at the reservation, where I visited with my first piano teacher Hope Armstrong Erb. She has continued to be a mentor to me, and the work is dedicated to her.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) | Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, “Eroica”

Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770 in Bonn and died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna. He began work on his Third Symphony in 1803 and completed it during the spring of the following year. It was first heard at a private concert in Vienna conducted by the composer in December 1804 at the palace of Prince Joseph Lobkowitz. The score calls for woodwinds and trumpets in pairs, three horns, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes.

The year 1804 — the time when Beethoven finished his Third Symphony — was crucial in the modern political history of Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte had begun his meteoric rise to power only a decade earlier, after playing a significant part in the recapture in 1793 of Toulon, a Mediterranean port that had been surrendered to the British by French royalists. Britain, along with Austria, Prussia, Holland, and Spain, was a member of the First Coalition, an alliance that had been formed by those monarchial nations in the wake of the execution of Louis XVI to thwart the French National Convention’s ambition to spread revolution (and royal overthrow) throughout Europe. In 1796, Carnot entrusted the campaign against northern Italy, then dominated by Austria, to the young General Bonaparte, who won a stunning series of victories with an army that he had transformed from a demoralized, starving band into a military juggernaut. He returned to France in 1799 as First Consul of the newly established Consulate, and put in place measures to halt inflation, instituted a new legal code, and repaired relations with the Church. It was to this man, this great leader and potential savior of the masses from centuries of tyrannical political, social, and economic oppression, that Beethoven intended to pay tribute in his majestic E-flat Symphony, begun in 1803. The name “Bonaparte” appears above that of the composer on the original title page.

Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor of France in 1804, and he was crowned, with the new Empress Josephine, at Notre Dame Cathedral on December 2nd, an event forever frozen in time by David’s magnificent canvas in the Louvre. Beethoven, enraged and feeling betrayed by this usurpation of power, roared at his student Ferdinand Ries, who brought him the news, “Then is he, too, only an ordinary human being?” The ragged hole in the title page of the score now in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna bears mute testimony to the violent manner in which Beethoven erased Napoleon from this Symphony. He later inscribed it, undoubtedly with much sorrow, “To celebrate the memory of a great man.”

The “Eroica” (“Heroic”) is a work that changed the course of musical history. There was much sentiment at the turn of the 19th century that the expressive and technical possibilities of the symphonic genre had been exhausted by Haydn, Mozart, C.P.E. Bach, and their contemporaries. It was Beethoven, and specifically this majestic Symphony, that threw wide the gates on the unprecedented artistic vistas that were to be explored for the rest of the century. For the first time, with this music, the master composer was recognized as an individual responding to a higher calling. After Beethoven, the composer became regarded as a visionary — a special being lifted above mundane experience — who could guide benighted listeners to loftier planes of existence through his valued gifts. The modern conception of an artist — what he is, his place in society, what he can do for those who experience his work — stems from Beethoven. Romanticism began with the “Eroica.”

The vast first movement opens with a brief summons of two mighty chords. At least four thematic ideas are presented in the exposition. The development is a massive essay progressing through many moods, all united by a titanic sense of struggle. It is in this central portion of the movement and in the lengthy coda that Beethoven broke through the boundaries of the 18th-century symphony to create a work not only longer in duration but also more profound in meaning. The beginning of the second movement — “Marcia funebre” (“Funeral March”) — with its plaintive, simple themes intoned over a mock drum-roll in the basses, is the touchstone for the expression of tragedy in instrumental music. A development-like section, full of remarkable contrapuntal complexities, is followed by a return of the simple opening threnody. The third movement is a lusty scherzo; the central section is a rousing trio for horns. The finale is a large set of variations on two themes, one of which (the first one heard) forms the bass line to the other. The second theme, introduced by the oboe, also appears in the finale of Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, Contradanse No. 7, and Variations and Fugue, Op. 35. The variations accumulate energy, and, just as it seems the movement is whirling toward its final climax, the music comes to a full stop before launching into an Andante section that explores first the tender and then the majestic possibilities of the themes. A brilliant Presto led by the horns concludes this epochal work.

©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Featured Artists

Colorado Symphony
Brett Mitchell, conductor
Colorado Symphony Chorus

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