Friday, November 19, 7:30 pm, Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, VT
Sunday, November 21, 3 pm, Latchis Theater, Brattleboro, VT
The Windham Orchestra will present Rhapsody in Blue, its first concert of the 2010-11 season, on Friday, November 19 in Saxtons River, VT and Sunday, November 21, in Brattleboro, VT.
The Brattleboro Music Center is delighted to have Hugh Keelan as Music Director for the Windham Orchestra’s 41st concert season. Maestro Keelan has created a series of concerts that combine great symphonic works with intriguing, out of the mainstream, orchestral gems that are sure to please this season’s concertgoers.
Opening concerts in November feature Hugh Keelan as both conductor and pianist. The program combines a pair of works by American composer George Gershwin, the Cuban Overture and Rhapsody in Blue with Keelan as soloist; with the Symphony in d minor by Romantic Belgian composer César Franck.
Tickets $15, students and seniors $7.
Purchase tickets by calling the BMC at 802-257-4523
Or on-line at:
Friday, Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, VT
Sunday, Latchis Theatre, Brattleboro, VT
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Born on Kingston-upon-Thames in England, Hugh Keelan has been a pianist since age 8, later also a violist. At the age of 16 he conducted Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. He went on to study Music at Cambridge, his primary mentor being Robin Holloway, graduating with a Double First, the Hughes Prize ‘for outstanding excellence’, and the award of a coveted Harkness Fellowship (comparable to a Rhodes Scholarship) that allowed him to study conducting at Indiana University and Mannes College. Remaining in New York for private study with Vladimir Kin (from the Leningrad school of Mravinsky and Rabinovich,) he worked at the American Opera Center at the Juilliard School.
In the spring of 2006, Maestro Hugh Keelan performed as piano soloist in Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto with the Erie Philharmonic in addition to conducting Die Meistersinger Prelude, Till Eulenspiegel and Afternoon of a Faun. These performances capped Maestro Keelan’s tenure as Music Director of the Erie Philharmonic, following his 15-year tenure as Music Director of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, an orchestra of extraordinarily high quality, calling on the finest players from New York and Philadelphia.
Maestro Keelan is admired as an arranger and composer; and is known for his ability to connect deeply with the performers with whom he works, and through them communicating an extraordinary power and enthusiasm to the audience.
The Symphony in D minor (1888) is the most famous orchestral work and the only symphony written by the 19th-century Belgian composer César Franck.
“In my first season as Music Director of the Windham Orchestra, I want to bring the orchestra’s musical center of gravity a little further into the nineteenth century, and Franck's Symphony seems an ideal opening move,” explained Keelan.
“Though in some ways difficult to play (just ask the second violins about some of the figurations they have to negotiate as they support the music's shifting harmonies), it is from top to bottom an ensemble piece, and a performance of it lives by the quality of sound that the full ensemble makes. Apart from that ever-favored and specially treated guest, the harp, all instruments are in active play for the whole symphony, even the extra cornets and those nineteenth-century exotics, the bass clarinet and English horn.”
“César Franck had amazing control of his musical material: no surprise from the academic at the Conservatoire, the tenured organist at Sainte-Clotilde for 41 years (in which time he was heard and admired by Liszt), the prodigious young piano virtuoso”, said Keelan. “However, for me the music's glory is the marriage between technical mastery and the voluptuous, even ecstatic, nature of the content: the harmonies and melodies, the spiritual and sensual uplift.”
George Gershwin’s Cuban Overture, originally titled Rumba, was the result of a two-week holiday in Havana, Cuba in 1932. Caribbean rhythms and Cuban native percussion, with a wide spectrum of instrumental color and technique, dominate the overture. It is a rich and exciting work with complexity and sophistication, illustrating the influence of Cuban music and dance.
“This is a highly advanced work, though the form is simple: a fast rumba, a slow central section suggestive of nighttime, an excited return or coda incorporating a mosaic of the opening ideas, a final chord pyramid and blaze-up after a brief cadenza,” explains Keelan.
“Cuban Overture is popular in intention - the initial title was simply Rumba - but the middle sostenuto section may be Gershwin's most technically advanced writing. By slow and barely noticeable degrees, in the real time of listening to the music, he incorporates the learned and challenging devices of canon and polytonality: gently, the vertical and horizontal elements of music seem to creep into a further dimension. The harmonic and melodic threads get denser and more complex, finally exhaling with unison melody over parallel common chords. The testament to his mastery is simply that the listener is never lost. It is agreeable to imagine that Ravel, who rejected Gershwin's application for study saying that classical training would corrupt his jazz style, would have been proud.”
Gershwin had a lot of fun with the solo quartet of Cuban percussion, so much so that he hand-sketched the "Cuban Sticks, Bongo, Gourd, Maracas" in his autograph score with a diagram explaining their prominent placement close to the conductor. The Windham Orchestra's performances honor Gershwin's demands in this regard, and incorporate some significant elements from the composer's final wishes that do not appear in the standard printed performing materials.
George Gershwin originally composed Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 for solo piano and jazz band – combining elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. Ferde Grofé later orchestrated the composition.
“This work, particularly in Grofé's final reworking, holds the essence of the concept of 'crossover', and it is surely one of the most important,” explains Keelan. “Tin Pan Alley comes to Aeolian Hall; the Symphony Orchestra 'plays' the Hollywood Bowl; Classical musicians embrace jazz, ragtime and stride; a popular song writer and music hall pianist dons the cape and tails of a concert virtuoso as though to play a Rachmaninoff concerto.”
“There is something endlessly delicious and thoroughly crossed-over about the crazy energy of the orchestra against the languid glance and gaze of Gershwin's carefully notated, thoughtful episodes and commentaries for solo piano.”
Rhapsody in Blue tickets $15, students and seniors $7.
Purchase tickets by calling the BMC at 802-257-4523
Or on-line at:
Friday, Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, VT
Sunday, Latchis Theatre, Brattleboro, VT
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