For more information or photographs, contact DSO Director of Community Engagement Mark Mobley 302.656.7442, ext. 104; markm@delawaresymphony.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
11 November 2008
Delaware Teacher of the Year to appear before DSO concert; David Amado conducts lush, exotic scores; soprano Mary Wilson returns
Friday, November 14, 2008 and Saturday, November 15, 2008
8:00 p.m.
The Grand Opera House
818 N. Market St.
Wilmington, Delaware
Pre-concert conversations at 7:00 p.m.
David Amado, conductor
Mary Wilson, soprano
TAKEMITSU Tree Line
RAVEL Sheherezade
SIBELIUS Symphony No. 2
Tickets $27-$52, student tickets $10.
www.delawaresymphony.org
Grand Opera House box office (800) 37-GRAND
WILMINGTON -- The Delaware Symphony is a leader in music education, reaching tens of thousands of students each season. In its November Classical Series concerts, which feature lush music and the return of soprano Mary Wilson, the orchestra honors classroom teachers who inspire young minds every day.
Friday and Saturday, November 14 and 15, the orchestra welcomes prominent Delaware music educators to the Grand Opera House stage for pre-concert conversations. Friday at 7 p.m. (one hour before the concert), Mark Teesdale, the newly-named 2009 Delaware Teacher of the Year, appears in a half-hour question and answer session with DSO Director of Community Engagement Mark Mobley. They will discuss the ways knowledge of and love for music can improve a child's chances for success -- and an adult's enjoyment of life. On Saturday at 7 p.m., the DSO's guest is Brian Endlein, director of bands at William Penn High School in New Castle.
Teesdale, a veteran of a quarter-century in the classroom, teaches 4th and 5th graders at Lake Forest Central Elementary School in Felton. Out of almost 7500 teachers statewide, he was selected from a pool of 19 teachers of the year at the district level. Endlein's William Penn Marching Colonials recently placed 4th in the Tournament of Bands Chapter 9 Championships in Annapolis, a competition for mid-Atlantic bands, at which the group was also named "Most Improved Band."
In these concerts, one of Maestro David Amado's favorite singers returns for a program celebrating the beauty of nature. Mary Wilson, called "a fine lyric soprano with focused, lustrous tone and sterling enunciation" by the Philadelphia Inquirer, last appeared with the DSO in January 2007. In these concerts she will sing the Sheherezade songs by Maurice Ravel. The program opens with Tree Line, a meditation on the outdoors by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. After intermission, Maestro Amado leads the DSO in the Second Symphony by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. [See program notes below.]
The DSO's Grand Opera House season runs from September to May and includes a new series, DSO Plugged In, which ranges from music by John Williams ("Star Wars," the Indiana Jones films) in the fall to music of Led Zeppelin in the spring. Subscriptions and single tickets are on sale now at (302) 652-5577.
JP Morgan is the Delaware Symphony Orchestra season sponsor. The Pre-concert Conversations are partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
About David Amado
In spring 2008, the Delaware Symphony Orchestra and Music Director David Amado reached agreement on a two-year contract extension, keeping him at the helm of the orchestra through the 2010-11 season. Amado, one of America's finest young conductors, joined the DSO as music director before the 2004-05 season. His tenure has brought dramatic growth in ticket sales and fund raising; in the 20
07-08 season, audiences were up over the previous two seasons.
Maestro Amado has been praised by the press, audiences and fellow musicians for his performances which combine deep musical insight and visceral energy. His innovative programming, his articulate and approachable demeanor and his natural and instinctive music-making combine to make him a formidable musical presence. He has gained attention not just in Wilmington, but throughout the state and across the country.
Maestro Amado continues to be an enduringly popular figure in Saint Louis, Missouri where he was the Associate Conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra from 2001-2004. Recent engagements include a debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra (after which he was immediately reengaged), the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic and the Detroit Symphony. He will conduct the Virginia Symphony November 22 at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, in a program of music by Mendelssohn, Debussy and Holst.
A native of Merion, Pa., David Amado received his bachelor's degree in piano performance from The Juilliard School and his master's degree in orchestral conducting from Indiana University. He undertook his postgraduate studies with Otto-Werner Mueller at The Juilliard School, where he was a recipient of the Bruno Walter Memorial Award. Maestro Amado lives in Wilmington with his wife, violinist Meredith Amado, and their three children.
About Mary Wilson
Soprano Mary Wilson is acknowledged as one of today's most exciting young artists. Cultivating a wide-ranging career singing chamber music, oratorio and operatic repertoire, her "bright soprano seems to know no terrors, wrapping itself seductively around every phrase" (Dallas Morning News). She continues to receive critical acclaim from coast to coast: "The discovery was Mary Wilson, a fine lyric soprano with focused, lustrous tone and sterling enunciation" (The Philadelphia Inquirer), "Her fast passages were flawless in intonation and seemingly easy in execution (the mark of a first-rate technique), and "Her feel for the sound and meaning of words was impeccable; her mastery of Handel's grand leaps and wide-ranging runs was total" (San Francisco Classical Voice).
Ms. Wilson's appearances for the 2007-2008 season included debuts with Musica Angelica for Bach Cantata No. 51 and Handel Gloria; both the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony and Florida Bach Festival for Carmina Burana; and the Portland Symphony for Barber Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and Brahms Ein Deutches Requiem. She is excited to return for a program of Mendelssohn and Beethoven with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Nicholas McGegan; the Fauré Requiem with St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Bernard Labadie; Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 with Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Handel's Messiah with American Bach Soloists; and the Bach B Minor Mass with Los Angeles Master Chorale and Grant Gershon. Ms. Wilson will also sing leading roles in two operatic comedies this season: Rosina in Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Dayton Opera, and Queen Isabella in Soler's Una cosa rara at Opera Theatre of St. Louis.
She recently created the role of Grand Duchess Christina in world premiere performances of Philip Glass' Galileo Galilei in both Chicago and New York, where Opera News lauded Ms. Wilson's talent, saying "surely Glass intends for all of his singers to reflect the vocal lines as naturally as she does."
Ms. Wilson was a 1999 National Finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, awarded the Adams Fellowship at the Carmel Bach Festival in California, and is the recipient of a career grant from Opera Theatre of St. Louis' prestigious Richard Gaddes Fund for Opera Singers. She was named a 2004 "Emerging Artist" by Symphony Magazine, the publication's first-ever compilation of up-and-coming classical soloists. Ms. Wilson holds performance degrees from St. Olaf College and Washington University in St. Louis and currently resides in Memphis, Tennessee.
About the program
Lives in Music by Mark Mobley
Some music is impersonal - whether it's a made-to-order pop song or the foofy ballet music that can grind an opera to a dramatic halt. The three pieces on this program are stamped by their composers' personalities.
World War II made Toru Takemitsu a composer. He wasn't particularly musical as a child, though his father played the Japanese flute called shakuhachi, listened to jazz and once won a contest for imitating bird sounds. Then two pieces of music reached out to the young man in unexpected ways. After he was drafted into the army as a teenager, an officer played him a record of French chanteuse Lucienne Boyer's "Parlez-moi d'amour," a simple, sentimental melody crooned to a piano that sounds like a music box on its last legs. After the war, Takemitsu heard César Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue for piano on a radio station run by the occupying American forces. He soon made the unlikely decision to spend his life writing music.
Takemitsu was basically self-taught and saw the impressionistic music of Claude Debussy as his ideal. He managed to emerge both as Japan's leading composer and the only one to be widely performed in the west. He wrote his Tree Line for the London Sinfonietta.
"The tree line in the title," Takemitsu wrote, "refers to a row of acacia trees luxuriously growing near the mountain villa which is my workshop. A stroll under the long line of acacia trees lining the hilly slopes always soothes my mind. The work was written as an ‘homage' to these graceful and yet dauntless trees.
"The music proceeds like a tapestry, woven around D-natural and B-flat in various modes, along with its main line of tonal variation."
We move from music about a daytime stroll to music about avoiding the perils of daybreak. Maurice Ravel once said, "I only begin to live at night." As a mature composer, he'd be linked with Debussy as a pillar of impressionism - the way you can't hear the name Lennon without also thinking about McCartney.
But as a young man, Ravel was a kind of sprite dandy, with a taste for the exotic, the obscure, the occult. He was in an all-male social club called "Les Apaches" (hooligans), which also included Manuel de Falla, whose music the DSO will perform in May. Ravel would on occasion dress up in a tutu, a bearded ballerina dancing en pointe.
Ravel's fascination with certain aspects of femininity extended to the Thousand Nights and a Night, the story collection also known as the Arabian Nights. The frame story is fascinating: An Asian king discovers his wife in bed with a slave and has them both killed. He then decides that no wife can be faithful and concocts a plan only his local funeral director could love - every day he marries another woman, only to have her executed the next morning.
The country's savior is Scheherazade, who teams up with her sister to deceive the king. On her wedding night, as she and the king are about to go to sleep, the sister busts in with something along the lines of, "How's about one of your stories?" And Scheherazade launches into a tale with a cliffhanger ending, so the drowsy king is too curious about how it resolves to kill her the next day. And she goes on telling stories about Sindbad and Ali Baba and genies and treasure to stay alive. As the great Maryland novelist John Barth points out, it's the ultimate example of publish or perish.
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the most famous musical evocation of the stories, his symphonic poem Scheherazade. Ravel pondered an opera on the subject, and he did create a "Shéhérazade" Overture that he consigned to the junk drawer after just one miserable performance. He finally wrote a set of three Shéhérazade songs on texts by one of his fellow Apaches, Tristan Klingsor (a pen name drawn from Wagner that, in American operatic terms, is sort of like calling yourself Porgy Sportin' Life).
Ravel selected Klingsor's poems and had the poet read them out loud to him to verify the stresses on the page. The resulting music pleased the poet, who said Ravel turned his texts "into an expressive recitative, intensifying the inflections of the words into song, heightening all the possibilities of the words without subordinating them to the music."
Each of the songs is dedicated to a different woman: "Asie" to Jane Hatto, who sang the premiere; "La flute enchantee" to salon hostess Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux; and "L'indifferent" to soprano Emma Bardac, Debussy's mistress. Though the songs are typically performed by women, Ravel revealed later in life that they were originally conceived for a man.
The songs premiered in Paris in 1904; two years before that, and more than 2,000 miles northeast, an audience first heard a symphony that may or may not be a declaration of independence. In 1902, Finland was completing a century of Russian subjugation. Sibelius denied that his Second Symphony was a statement of Finnish nationalism, but it has much of the triumphant richness of his tone poem "Finlandia," written just a few years before.
It was also a particularly tough time for Sibelius personally - his youngest daughter died of typhoid fever in 1900 and his sister-in-law committed suicide around the same time. He had trouble figuring out this symphony, embarking first in a piece about Don Juan, then changing course to think of the music in terms of Dante's Divine Comedy. The completed piece has no program, though many contemporary listeners heard the future of a liberated Finland in its four movements.
The first movement begins warmly, with chords not unlike those announcing the arrival of the pianist in Brahms's First Concerto. Sibelius complained about performances of this movement: "This theme is the most joyful I have ever written. I don't understand why it is often played too slowly."
The second movement opens with pizzicato strings and a theme "meandering through the lower reaches of the orchestra like an amiable tapeworm," according to conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Sibelius originally conceived that passage as the approach of the Stone Guest. "Sitting in the twilight in my castle," the composer wrote in his sketches. "A stranger comes in. I ask him more than once who he is." When the bassoons begin, Don Juan has his answer. "Finally he strikes up a song. Then Don Juan sees who he is - Death." A major-key passage for the strings is marked simply: "Christus."
The scurrying third movement is tiny by comparison - at under five minutes, it has less than half the length of either of the preceding movements. It has echoes of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, and as the penultimate movements of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth symphonies do, it leads directly into the finale. It sounds like a harried sailor rushing on deck, only to open the door and greet a calm sea at dawn.
This music begins serenely and builds to a radiant climax. One of Sibelius' friends said he was present at the creation of the movement's main theme. In June 1899, Sibelius played at the christening of painter Axel Gallen's children. He accompanied the service, then improvised at the piano in Gallen's house, called Kalela. "Now you shall hear what impression Kalela and its moods make on me," he said, and launched into the radiant, hymn-like tune that has thrilled audiences, Finnish and foreign, for more than a century.
