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

1. Andante; Allegro
2. Andante con moto
3. 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