Masterworks 3: Parker Plays Gershwin Program Notes

LINDA ROBBINS COLEMAN

• Born in 1954 in Des Moines.

MUSIC FROM THE CELEBRATION! (A SYMPHONIC JUBILEE)

• First performed on April 16, 2000 in St. Cloud, Minnesota, conducted by Lawrence Eckerling.
• These concerts mark the first performances of this piece by the Des Moines Symphony.

(Duration: ca. 6 minutes)

Linda Robbins Coleman was born in Des Moines, graduated from Drake University, and became the first Iowa woman to have music performed by a major symphony orchestra and to serve as Composer-In-Residence with any orchestra. Her residencies include Drake Theatre, the Wartburg Community Symphony and Orchestra Iowa. An accomplished pianist, she has been performing since age six and worked professionally as a jazz and classical soloist and collaborator.

Coleman has received more than 70 commissions for compositions ranging from solo and chamber to symphonic music, and from jazz to theatre and film. Her music has been performed and broadcast across North America and in Europe, South America, and Australia. In 2021, her symphonic poem For a Beautiful Land was included on the American Discoveries CD by the Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania, and received the American Prize for Orchestra Performance. Diversions, a concerto for flute and orchestra, was commissioned and premiered by the Southeast Iowa Symphony in 2021. In 2024, soloist Rose Bishop performed Diversions at the 39^th Annual International Festival of Flutists in Lima, Peru. Coleman’s latest commissioned work, Suite for Strings was premiered by the combined Drake Symphony and Valley High School Orchestras in 2024. Her music is listed in Daniels’ Orchestral Music, published by Rowman & Littlefield.

Her many awards and grants include those from Meet the Composer, the American College Theatre Festival at the Kennedy Center, American Music Center, Houston International Film Festival, and National Endowment for the Arts. She became a Member Laureate with Sigma Alpha Iota music fraternity in 1999. In 2008 she was awarded the Drake Alumni Achievement Award and membership into their Dignitas Society.

Coleman co-founded the Friends of Drake Arts and the Iowa Composers Forum and has served on committees and boards for numerous organizations including the International Conductors Guild. She is a published poet and writer and has worked as an editor, educator, historian, publicist, and coordinator for numerous organizations and groups throughout the United States and abroad. Additionally, she served as a caregiver to elderly relatives for more than three decades.

Her most recent project, Boyhood's End, by William S.E. and Linda Robbins Coleman, was published in 2023. It is the remarkable true story of a young man finding his way through a changing culture and a world at war. Set during World War II, this book is the culmination of William and Linda's 40-year-long personal and professional partnership, having collaborated on more than 30 theatre productions, dozens of scholarly articles, books, plays, and music. Their advocacy and contributions to non-profit arts organizations and individual artists have been celebrated here and abroad. Their book Voices of Wounded Knee, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2000, was the first to give equal weight to the testimony of Native Americans and is considered the definitive book on the Massacre of 1890. Both books are available online and through booksellers.

The composer wrote: “The Celebration! (A Symphonic Jubilee) is a suite in five movements. It was commissioned by the St. Cloud Symphony for their 25th anniversary celebration. The music was to be ‘peppy, tonal, and tuneful,’ and it certainly achieves that goal. Each movement has its own personality and highlights various instruments of the orchestra, from the piccolo to the percussion. It is a celebration of music, life, friends, love, joy, and the glory of that most marvelous musical instrument of all, the orchestra.

“Imagine that you arrive at a luxurious mansion, wearing your best evening apparel, with The Invitation in your pocket. Inside you find a celebration filled with beautiful people, fascinating conversations, and delightful entertainment. It is a Hollywood fantasy come to life. A cymbal crash is heard, then a trombone slide, and the party is off and running. Over the years, some audience members have also said that the music evokes images of a carnival or a circus. You may take your pick, decide for yourself, or imagine your own scenario. Above all, have fun!

“Of course, every celebration has The Life of the Party, often resulting with a lampshade on somebody’s head! The movement begins with the cowbell (!) and transforms into a vaudevillian honky-tonk that turns into a German oom-pah band. Ed Sullivan with his trained dog acts, jugglers, and plate-spinners would be proud. This movement has also been arranged for piano duet, euphonium quartet, chamber strings, and various other ensembles.”

The Celebration! (A Symphonic Jubilee) has enjoyed dozens of performances including orchestras in California, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Pennsylvania. Orchestra Iowa featured the suite on their 80th Anniversary American Extravaganza celebration. In July 2024, the suite was the final work on the Allegro Orchestra concert titled Linda and Ludwig in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The concert, with the composer in attendance, featured three of Coleman’s symphonic works and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8.

The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, castanets, crash cymbals, suspended cymbals, snare drum, glockenspiel, triangle, cowbell, ratchet, maracas, claves, sandpaper blocks, tom tom, harp, piano and the usual strings consisting of first violins, second violins, violas, violoncellos and double basses.

GEORGE GERSHWIN

• Born September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York;
• died July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California.

CONCERTO IN F

• First performed on December 3, 1925 in New York, conducted by Walter Damrosch with the composer as soloist.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony on December 31, 1983 with Yuri Krasnapolsky conducting and Earl Wild as soloist. Five subsequent performances occurred, most recently on March 16 & 17, 2019 conducted by Joseph Giunta with Aaron Diehl as soloist.

(Duration: ca. 32 minutes)

Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony and one of America’s most prominent musical figures for the half-century before World War II, was among the Aeolian Hall audience when George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue exploded above the musical world on February 12, 1924. He recognized Gershwin’s genius (and, no doubt, the opportunity for wide publicity), and approached him a short time later with a proposal for another large-scale work. A concerto for piano was agreed upon, and Gershwin was awarded a commission from the New York Symphony to compose the piece and appear as soloist at its premiere and a half dozen subsequent concerts. The story that Gershwin then rushed out and bought a reference book explaining what a concerto is probably is apocryphal. He did, however, study the scores of some concertos of earlier masters to discover how they had handled the problems of structure and instrumental balance. He made the first extensive sketches for the work while in London in May 1925. By July, back home, he was able to play large fragments of the evolving work for his friends, tentatively entitled “New York Concerto.” The first movement was completed by the end of that month, the second and third by September, and the orchestration carried out in October and November, by which time the title had become simply Concerto in F. He gave the premiere with Damrosch the following month in Carnegie Hall.

 Gershwin provided a short analysis of the Concerto for the New York Tribune: “The first movement employs a Charleston rhythm. It is quick and pulsating, representing the young, enthusiastic spirit of American life. It begins with a rhythmic motif given out by the kettledrums, supported by other percussion instruments and with a Charleston motif introduced by bassoon, horns, clarinets and violas. The principal theme is announced by the bassoon. Later, a second theme is introduced by the piano. The second movement has a poetic, nocturnal atmosphere that has come to be referred to as the American blues, but in a purer form than that in which they are usually treated. The final movement is an orgy of rhythms, starting violently and keeping the same pace throughout.”

 Though Gershwin based his Concerto loosely on classical formal models, its structure is episodic in nature. His words above do not mention several other melodies that appear in the first and second movements, nor the return of some of those themes in the finale as a means of unifying the work’s overall structure.

The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, glockenspiel., xylophone, triangle, woodblock, whip, tam-tam, and the usual strings.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

• Born December 16, 1770 in Bonn;
• died March 26, 1827 in Vienna.

SYMPHONY NO. 7 IN A MAJOR, OP. 92

• First performed on December 8, 1813 in Vienna, under the composer's direction.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony on January 14, 1962 with Frank Noyes conducting. Eight subsequent performances occurred, most recently on March 24 & 25, 2018 conducted by Joseph Giunta.

(Duration: ca. 40 minutes)

In the autumn of 1813, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, approached Beethoven with the proposal that the two organize a concert to benefit the soldiers wounded at the recent Battle of Hanau — with, perhaps, two or three repetitions of the concert to benefit themselves. Beethoven was eager to have his as-yet-unheard A major Symphony of the preceding year performed, and thought the financial reward worth the trouble, so he agreed. The concert consisted of this “Entirely New Symphony” by Beethoven, marches by Dussek and Pleyel performed on a “Mechanical Trumpeter” fabricated by Mälzel, and an orchestral arrangement of Wellington’s Victory, a piece Beethoven had concocted the previous summer for yet another of Mälzel’s musical machines, the clangorous “Panharmonicon.” The evening was such a success that Beethoven’s first biographer, Anton Schindler, reported, “All persons, however they had previously dissented from his music, now agreed to award him his laurels.”

The Seventh Symphony is a magnificent creation in which Beethoven displayed several technical innovations that were to have a profound influence on the music of the 19th century: he expanded the scope of symphonic structure through the use of more distant tonal areas; he brought an unprecedented richness and range to the orchestral palette; and he gave a new awareness of rhythm as the vitalizing force in music. It is particularly the last of these characteristics that most immediately affects the listener, and to which commentators have consistently turned to explain the vibrant power of the work. Perhaps the most famous such observation about the Seventh Symphony is that of Richard Wagner, who called it “the apotheosis of the dance in its highest aspect ... the loftiest deed of bodily motion incorporated in an ideal world of tone.” “Beethoven,” John N. Burk added, “seems to have built up this impression by willfully driving a single rhythmic figure through each movement, until the music attains (particularly in the body of the first movement and in the Finale) a swift propulsion, an effect of cumulative growth which is akin to extraordinary size.”

A slow introduction, almost a movement in itself, opens the Seventh Symphony. This initial section employs two themes: the first, majestic and unadorned, is passed down through the winds while being punctuated by long, rising scales in the strings; the second is a graceful melody for oboe. The transition to the main part of the first movement is accomplished by the superbly controlled reiteration of a single pitch. This device both connects the introduction with the exposition and establishes the dactylic rhythm that dominates the movement. The Allegretto scored such a success at its premiere that it was immediately encored, a phenomenon virtually unprecedented for a slow movement. In form, the movement is a series of variations on the heartbeat rhythm of its opening measures. In spirit, however, it is more closely allied to the austere chaconne of the Baroque era than to the light, figural variations of Classicism.

The third movement, a study in contrasts of sonority and dynamics, is built on the formal model of the scherzo, but expanded to include a repetition of the horn-dominated Trio (Scherzo – Trio – Scherzo – Trio – Scherzo). In the sonata-form Finale, Beethoven not only produced music of virtually unmatched rhythmic energy (“a triumph of Bacchic fury,” in the words of Sir Donald Tovey), but did it in such a manner as to exceed the climaxes of the earlier movements and make it the goal toward which they had all been aimed. So intoxicating is this music that some of Beethoven’s contemporaries were sure he had composed it in a drunken frenzy. An encounter with the Seventh Symphony is a heady experience. Klaus G. Roy, the former program annotator for The Cleveland Orchestra, wrote, “Many a listener has come away from a hearing of this Symphony in a state of being punch-drunk. Yet it is an intoxication without a hangover, a dope-like exhilaration without decadence.” To which the composer’s own words may be added. “I am Bacchus incarnate,” boasted Beethoven, “appointed to give humanity wine to drown its sorrow.... He who divines the secret of my music is delivered from the misery that haunts the world.”

The score calls for piccolo, flutes, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons in pairs, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and the usual strings.