© Duston Todd
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Nadège Foofat
© Elliott O'Donovan
The Program
Nadège Foofat, guest conductor
Jennifer Higdon - Cold Mountain Suite (Co-commissioned work)
Aaron Copland - Appalachian Spring Suite
George Gershwin - Lullaby
George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
WWS Co-commission is made possible by the WW Symphony Guest Composer/Artist Fund - Underrepresented Voices
Concert Snapshots
Higdon's Cold Mountain Suite was modified four times during its initial performances. The Walla Walla Symphony will play the final version.
Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring Suite was originally written as a ballet score for choreographer Martha Graham and premiered in 1944. The music was so well-loved that Copland later adapted it into an orchestral suite.
Gershwin’s Lullaby was composed in 1919-1920 but wasn’t published until 1968, long after his death. The piece was brought to public attention by Harold Spivacke from the Library of Congress, giving people a chance to hear a lesser-known side of Gershwin’s music.
George Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue while riding a train to Boston, where he imagined the piece as a musical ‘kaleidoscope’ of American life, blending the country’s unique energy and diversity into a new sound.
Want to learn more? Click the button below to explore articles about the composers and the pieces, and read the program notes.
Explore the Music
WINE SPONSOR
Wine from our wine sponsor will be available before the concert and during intermission for $5/glass (all proceeds benefit the Walla Walla Symphony).
About the Guest Artists
Stephen Beus, piano
American pianist Stephen Beus has earned international acclaim, winning first prizes in the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition and the Vendome Prize International Competition. He also received the Max I. Allen Fellowship of the American Pianists Association.
As a result of winning the Juilliard School Concerto Competition, Beus made his Carnegie Hall debut with the Juilliard Orchestra, performing Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3. He has since performed as a guest soloist with orchestras worldwide, including the Gulbenkian Symphony, Oxford Philomusica, and the Royal Philharmonic of Morocco, as well as numerous U.S. orchestras, including the Walla Walla Symphony.
Beus has also given solo recitals at prestigious venues such as Wigmore Hall, Salle Gaveau, and Merkin Hall. Born in eastern Washington, he began piano lessons at age 5 and made his orchestral debut at age 9. He holds degrees from Whitman College, Juilliard, and Stony Brook University and currently teaches at Brigham Young University.
To learn more, visit www.stephenbeuspiano.com.
Nadège Foofat, guest conductor
Nadège Foofat is a conductor, violinist, violist, and advocate for cultural innovation. She is the Founder and Director of Classical at the MSV in Winchester, Virginia, and serves as Choral Director at Brambleton Middle School in Ashburn, Virginia.
Born in Calgary, Alberta, Nadège began her musical journey early, performing nationally and serving as principal viola of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada at 14. She later attended Juilliard, studying viola performance.
Over the past decade, Nadège has guest conducted major orchestras across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including the Nashville Symphony, the Hamburg Philharmonic, and the Lithuanian State Orchestra. As Assistant Conductor to Kent Nagano at the Hamburg State Opera, she helped produce significant opera productions.
Nadège champions new music and has worked with composers like Jonathan Newman and pop star Natalie Merchant. She holds advanced degrees from the University of Montreal, Yale University, and The Juilliard School.
To learn more, visit www.nadegefoofat.com
Dig Deeper
On This Day - 31 December: Jennifer Higdon Was Born (Interlude)
Jennifer Higdon and "Dreaming Up Musical Worlds" (Classical Radio Boston)
Midday Thoughts: The Many Versions of Appalachian Spring (Aaron Copland.com News)
“charming and kind”: George Gershwin’s Lullaby (G. Henle Publishers)
Gershwin’s “Rhapsody” at 100; Still Capturing the American Character (Library of Congress)
Program Notes
JENNIFER HIGDON
Born December 31, 1962, in Brooklyn, New York
Cold Mountain Suite (2023) - WWS Co-commission
Last WWS performance: First performance at this concert
Approximate length: 17 minutes
This work was premiered on October 7, 2023, by the Tuscon Symphony Orchestra conducted by José Luis Gomez. It is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings.
Jennifer Higdon is one of America's most acclaimed and most frequently performed living composers. She is a major figure in contemporary Classical music, receiving the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto, a 2010 Grammy for her Percussion Concerto and a 2018 Grammy for her Viola Concerto, and a 2020 Grammy for her Harp Concerto. Most recently, Higdon received the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University, given to contemporary classical composers of exceptional achievement who have significantly influenced the field of composition. Higdon enjoys several hundred performances a year of her works, and blue cathedral is today's most performed contemporary orchestral works, with more than 650 performances worldwide. Her works have been recorded on more than sixty CDs, and her Percussion Concerto recording was recently inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Higdon's first opera, Cold Mountain, won the prestigious International Opera Award for Best World Premiere. Dr. Higdon holds the Rock Chair in Composition at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Set during the American Civil War, Higdon’s 2015 opera Cold Mountain, tells the story of a soldier changed by the war. He worries that he cannot love anyone because of what he has seen during battles. Likewise, the opera shows how this affects those around him.
The composer, like many others throughout history, created a suite of the opera’s music, which turned out to be a completely different exercise in composition. She wrote:
“I realized that the opera’s order makes sense for the story I’m telling but that doesn’t mean it’s the most interesting order of music if you’re listening without knowing the story. So, I had to figure out a different order. My brain got very used to the way that the music unfolded and suddenly I had to rethink it with orchestra and try to figure out transitions, writing some new music to kind of get us from place to place in the suite. Instruments were going to be singing the melodies where normally there had been a person and what order should this new arrangement go in to keep it the most interesting for the audience and for the orchestra too. To keep it engaging. So, it was very hard.”
“Very hard,” perhaps, but the music is engaging and powerful. It is a wonderful example of a new breed of concert music that is meaningful, but approachable to a wide section of any audience.
© 2024 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com
AARON COPLAND
Born November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York
Died December 2, 1990, in North Tarrytown, New York
Appalachian Spring Suite (Ballet for Martha) (1943-1944)
Last WWS Performance: April 15, 2014
Approximate length: 25 minutes
The first performance of this work, in its original version for thirteen instruments, took place on October 30, 1944, at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Copland’s suite for full orchestra was first performed on October 4, 1945, by the New York Philharmonic, with Artur Rodzinski conducting. This larger version is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, with timpani, percussion, piano, harp, and strings.
Described by Leonard Bernstein as the “Dean of American Music,” Aaron Copland delighted in his role as its elder statesman in the later years of his life. Perhaps this is due to the seventy years he was involved in various musical endeavors. Before launching his compositional career with his resounding Organ Symphony in a 1925 New York concert, he had studied at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in Paris since 1921. Among the distinguished faculty, noted pedagogue Nadia Boulanger’s reputation stood above all others, teaching generations of American composers from Copland to Philip Glass. Barely in his twenties, Copland’s reputation rested as a renegade among composers, using harmonies that were often dissonant and abrasive.
In the late 1930s, the composer began to face the reality of shrinking audiences at orchestral concerts. He knew there must be a way to draw people back into the concert hall and to energize orchestral music. Copland’s new “simple” style, which often quoted folk music, used an approachable musical language in an effort to remedy the problem. He often incorporated jazz-inspired rhythms and elements of popular music to express his ideas, while drawing listeners closer to his music.
Having composed several works for the stage and screen in the 1930s, among them his captivating scores for the film versions of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Wilder’s Our Town, Copland became well established in those circles. In 1939 Copland composed the incidental music for Irwin Shaw’s Quiet City. Four years later in 1943, he was in Hollywood writing the music for his fourth film, The North Star – an irresistible piece of wartime propaganda with a stellar cast and a screenplay by Lillian Hellman, created to build a sense of trust among the American people for our Soviet allies – when Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge contacted him with a commission for a new ballet for the renowned dancer-choreographer Martha Graham. Copland agreed to compose what would be his fourth ballet.
Once Coolidge, Copland, and Graham agreed on the terms, all that remained to be determined was the subject. In time, the two collaborators settled on the story, as told by a program note in the published score.
“…a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-build farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple [is] left quiet and strong in their new house.”
Beginning work on the score while still in Hollywood, Copland continued during a subsequent vacation in Mexico. He finished the work the following summer during a teaching stint at Harvard University. Copland was aware of the small stage and pit in the Coolidge Auditorium at Washington’s Library of Congress. Because of these limitations, the work was scored for a compact chamber ensemble of just thirteen instruments. The version most often performed today is the suite that Copland arranged a few months later to be played by full orchestra. For this version, the composer removed just one ten-minute block of music from a single location in the score, resulting in a sense of continuity seldom found in such suites.
Despite the rural atmosphere often attributed to this music, Copland used only one pre-existing melody – the familiar “Simple Gifts,” heard near the end of the ballet. Perhaps most interesting of all is that the title of the work did not come about until the day before the performance. Martha Graham stumbled across the exhortation “O Appalachian Spring!” in Hart Crane’s epic poem “The Bridge,” and it seemed to fit perfectly. The official title of the score remains “Ballet for Martha.” Copland wrote,
"I have been amused that people so often have come up to me to say, ‘When I listen to that ballet of yours, I can just feel spring and see the Appalachians,’ But when I wrote the music, I had no idea what Martha was going to call it! Even after people learn that I didn’t know the ballet title when I wrote the music, they still tell me they see the Appalachians and feel spring. Well, I’m willing if they are!"
©2024 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com
GEORGE GERSHWIN
Born (Jacob Gershovitz) on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York
Died on July 11, 1937, in Hollywood, California
George Gershwin was a first generation American of Russian-Jewish parents. By his late teens, he had learned the piano and became a “song-plugger’ in New York’s Tin Pan Alley - the area where the popular music publishing trade was centered. Gershwin would sit at the piano in the Remick showroom playing the latest sheet music for customers. From this experience, he became keenly aware of popular musical styles and began to compose his own songs, often with his younger brother, Ira, as lyricist. Over the course of only eight years, the Gershwins became established as the leading creative team on Broadway. Later Broadway successes produced many jazz standards, but it is his concert music that has endeared him to attendees of orchestra concerts.
Lullaby (1919)
Last WWS Performance: First performance at tonight’s concert
Approximate length: 9 minutes
This work was premiered in 1967 by the Juilliard String Quartet.
At 21 Gershwin wrote a short piece at the piano that was intended to be played at the parties where he was a regular fixture. Simply called Lullaby, this work eventually appeared for string quartet and, finally, for orchestra. It also appears in his opera Blue Monday. It wasn’t until 1967 that the original string quartet received its first public performance. There is not much to say about this work beyond what Ira Gershwin remarked in 1968 upon the work’s publication, “It may not be the Gershwin of Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, and his other concert works, but I find it charming and kind.”
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Last WWS Performance: First performance at tonight’s concert
Approximate length: 18 minutes
This work received its premiere on February 12, 1924, by the Palais Royal Orchestra under the baton of Paul Whiteman. Gershwin was the soloist. The convoluted 1924 Ferde Grofé orchestration calls for flute, oboe, four types of clarinets, heckelphone [tenor oboe], five types of saxophones, pairs of horns, trumpets, flugelhorns, and trombones, with added euphonium, bass trombone, and tuba, two pianos, celesta, banjo, timpani, percussion, drum set, violins, basses, and accordion. The more streamlined 1942 revision on this program is scored for solo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two alto saxophones, tenor saxophone, two bassoons, three horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, banjo, and strings.
It was his background as a song plugger that George Gershwin brought with him when he decided to write works for the concert hall, beginning with a grand experiment in 1924 that brought the world the Rhapsody in Blue as a work in the jazz idiom that changed the course of American music. Scholars often equate its impact to that of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring eleven years earlier. Gershwin showed that many popular musicians are talented in many ways – in response to the accusation that has been hurled by an elitist musical establishment since vernacular music was first marketed in this country in the eighteenth century. The Rhapsody is refined and structured and pays allegiance more to the piano showpieces of Liszt and Tchaikovsky than to more popular forms, such as Joplin’s ragtime and W. C. Handy’s blues.
The popular story behind the composition of the Rhapsody is that the famous bandleader Paul Whiteman approached Gershwin in 1924 about composing a jazz-flavored work for the composer to play with Whiteman’s band. The bandleader believed that jazz music had made great progress since its beginnings and wanted to show that its influence was a positive addition to America’s multi-hued musical palette. Gershwin agreed, but became too busy to act on the idea and eventually forgot the conversation. When Whiteman discovered that a rival bandleader was planning a concert featuring symphonic works in the jazz idiom, he booked his band in New York’s Aeolian Hall and planned a similar concert of his own – at an earlier date. Most versions of the story have Gershwin hearing of the upcoming premiere from a newspaper advertisement before he had written a single note of the work. In a letter to a friend a few years later, Gershwin details a much more plausible version.
“I was summoned to Boston [on December 23, 1923] for the promotion of Sweet Little Devil. I had already done some work on the rhapsody. It was on that train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety bang that is so often stimulating to a composer – I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise – I suddenly heard – and even saw on paper – the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind, and tried to conceive of the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston, I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.”
The composer most likely wrote the work in the 110th Street apartment in Manhattan that he shared with his parents and siblings. He left for the final rehearsals of Sweet Little Devil in Boston on January 25, 1924, so it is likely that the work was completed by that time.
Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s arranger, had been a regular fixture at the apartment, stopping by daily to collect finished pages so he could create the arrangement for the premiere. It was not until Gershwin’s Concerto in F in late 1925 that the composer would feel comfortable with his own orchestrations.
The premiere on February 12, 1924, was one of the most anticipated events of the New York concert season. Attendees included dignitaries from a cross-section of the music industry – from Broadway, Fred and Adele Astaire; from the classical field, violinists Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz, conductor Leopold Stokowski, composers Leopold Godowsky, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Rachmaninoff; and bandmaster John Philip Sousa. Billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” the concert featured nearly two dozen works and lasted about three hours. Rhapsody in Blue was the next-to-last work on the program, representing a culmination of influences and serving as the musical focus.
Rhapsody in Blue opens with one of the most familiar moments in music – a sultry slide of over two octaves played by a lone clarinet. Although Gershwin wrote this as a seventeen-note scale, the clarinetist of the Whiteman band, Ross Gorman, played it as the now-famous slide. Gershwin liked Gorman’s interpretation and changed his score. The remainder of the work is segmented into many sections constructed from five major themes, most of which feature the piano in a tour-de-force of popular and romantic techniques. A difficult cadenza, improvised by Gershwin at the premiere from a blank page in his piano part, lies at the heart of the work.
For a work so new in such a variety of ways, it has always seemed appropriate that the title is also novel. After all, what does Rhapsody in Blue mean? The solution is simple. George Gershwin’s brother and lyricist, Ira, suggested the name after attending an exhibition of paintings by James McNeill Whistler. Ira found that the titles of the paintings – Nocturne in Black and Gold, Symphony in White, etc. – were overtly musical. Rhapsody in Blue seems completely appropriate.
©2024 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com