The 20th Season Celebration
2 p.m. Oct. 30, 2022 * Musical Instrument Museum
Warren Cohen, conductor
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream
Jessica Carter (b. 1992)
Shadows – A Symphonic Miniature
Judith Bailey (b. 1941)
Trencrom, op. 16
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Adagietto from Symphony no.5
Intermission
Richard “Tony” Arnell (1917-2009)
Symphony no. 4, op. 52
- Andante; Allegro
- Andante con moto
- Allegro vivace
This concert is supported in part by grants from Hannah Selznick, the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
PROGRAM NOTES
By Warren Cohen
MusicaNova launches its 20th season with a concert reflecting several ideas. We wanted to:
- Look back on that first concert of Nov. 8, 2003.
- Showcase music that reflects the identity of the orchestra.
- Highlight ways in which the orchestra has changed and grown in over two decades.
The first concert featured Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer’s Night and a symphonic movement from Mahler. Neither of these works are obscure, but the focus of that first concert was music suppressed by the Nazi regime. Chillingly, Hitler and his henchmen banned the music of Mendelssohn and Mahler as “racially inappropriate” for Germans to listen to.
The goals of MusicaNova have always been to play new, neglected and suppressed music, but we also have done a fair amount of standard repertoire. Whenever we do well-known pieces, the attempt is always to recontextualize the music. We not only wish to make unfamiliar music familiar, we want to showcase familiar music in a different context. It is one thing to hear the Mendelssohn Overture; it is another to hear it in the context of a “forbidden” work.
The new is represented by the music of Jessica Carter, a 30-year-old composer who joins our roster of Composition Fellows. This concert includes a brief work of hers that invokes the spirit of Georges Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in quite a different way than Stephen Sondheim did. Carter’s piece sees it through the eyes of “the little girl without a shadow.” This work is a prelude to a longer work she is writing for our Schumann concert in December.
The neglected is represented by the music of Judith Bailey’s Trencrom. Bailey is from Cornwall, and the word “trencrom” in the Cornish language means “a crooked place on a hill.” When Bailey returned to Cornwall in 2001 she moved into a house that looks over Trencrom Hill and the landscape invoked in this music. Cornish is a “revived language” that disappeared as a native language in the late 18th century, and was deliberately revived, as a second language, by a limited number of speakers in the 20th century.
Also neglected has been the music of Richard Arnell, with MusicaNova at the forefront of an ongoing revival of his music. MusicaNova released the first recordings of Arnell’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies in 2005. Along with a series recorded by Martin Yates and the Scottish National Orchestra, we have been central to a renewed interest in a composer who no less a conductor than Sir Thomas Beecham called “the best orchestrator since Berlioz.” MusicaNova has played a number of his works in concert, including the Third, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and we will continue this tradition with our first performance of his beautiful Fourth Symphony.
MusicaNova Orchestra
Violin I
Julian Nguyen, concertmaster
John & Elizabeth McKinnon chair
Mo Farag
Luke Hill
Tiffany Steinweg
Dana Zhou
Grace Wills
Danny Yang
Debbie Youngerman
Violin II
Claire Sievers, principal
Katrina Becker
Marna Bowling
*Lisa Eisenberg
Jamilyn Richardson
Marj Sherman
Stephen H. Tillery
Patty Waxman
Viola
Allyson Wuenschel, principal
Dominique van de Stadt & Octavio Pajaro chair
*Cynthia DuBrow
Elizabeth Hanson
Jill Osborne
Dorene Pool
*Janet Quiroz
Cello
Maria Simiz, principal
David Connell chair
*Moria Bogardus
Lucas Buterbaugh
Jennifer Cox
Cindy Leger
Jennifer Son
Bass
Nathan Benitez, principal
*Alberto Allende
Samantha Olsen
Flute
*Jeanie Pierce, principal
Nancy Sowers
Piccolo
*Lisa Tharp
Oboe
Curtis Sellers, principal
Nina Gurin memorial chair
*Hannah Selznick
Denise and Rob Wilson chair
Clarinet
Kristin Fray, principal
*Tony Masiello
Bassoon
Benjamin Kearns, principal
*John Friedeman
French horn
Martha Edwards, principal
Gail Rittenhouse
Mike Lee
Alex Austin
Trumpet
Chris Albrecht, principal
Spencer Brand
Stephen Martin
Trombone
Brad Edwards, principal
*Bob Wittkamp
Andre Prouty
Tuba
Mickey Guinaugh
Percussion
*Sonja Branch, principal
Leger Strategies chair
Liz Guzman
Harp
*David Ice
*Liz McKinnon, personnel manager
Spencer Ekenes, librarian
*Orchestra members since the first season