2023-2024 Season
2024 spring program: Breathing through the power of nature - songs of the river and the moon
Explore the forces of the waterways and the moon through classical music, song, film, and filmed dance. Musicians of the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra perform works for chamber ensembles at the intimate stage of Lost Nation Theater limited to 140 seats per concert. Featuring works of Bach, Foote, Gounod, Mozart, Premo, and Dvorak! This concert features many wonderful soloists from the Vermont music community, including MCO flutists Laurel Maurer and Brooke Carleton, Evan Premo bassist and Mary Bonhag soprano, and Letitia Quante as both guest conductor for the concert and violin soloist in Bach’s gorgeous Brandenburg Concerto #4 in G Major.
The MCO is thrilled to be partnering this year with the Green Mountain Film Festival after a 3 year hiatus, and will feature two films from their showcase of narrative, documentary and experimental features and shorts by Tori Lawrence. The GMFF is led by a new leadership team and Advisory Board and under the nonprofit fiscal sponsorship of ORCA Media, Montpelier’s community media center.
The ticketed concert will take place March 15th at 7 pm and March 16th at 4 pm at Lost Nation Theater. Join us for a pre-concert artist talk with the filmmakers, dancers and musicians, free of charge on March 15th from 6-6:30 pm at Lost Nation Theater.
Bringing kids to the performance? Check out this cartoon about The Magic Flute from Met Opera (scroll down to An Illustrated Synopsis).
2024 spring program & Extended NOTES
Concert Program
W.A. Mozart, Overture to the Magic Flute, K 620 (1791), for orchestra
Evan Premo (b. 1985), My River Runs to Thee, Movement IV, (2021) for string quartet, double bass and soprano adapted for string ensemble and soprano
Arthur Foote, A Night Piece for Flute and Strings, 1919, with film “Osterlen” by Tori Lawrence (2024)
Antonin Dvorak, Song to the Moon, from the Opera Rusalka, Opus 114, (1901)
Intermission
Charles Gounod, Petite Symphonie, CG 560 (1885) with film “Green Mountain Project” by Tori Lawrence (2023)
J.S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto #4, BWV 1049 (1721)
Program Notes from the Film Makers:
Österlen (2024)
Filmmaker/Choreographer/Editor: Tori Lawrence
Featuring dancers: Cole Bjelic, Ellie Goudie-Averill
Österlen was created and filmed at the Brunakra Artist Residency in 2019. Set in rural southern Sweden, the short black/white film is a meditation on the interior journey of the soul as it becomes absorbed back into the land and sea.
GREEN MOUNTAIN PROJECT
Directed by Tori Lawrence | USA | 2023 | Dance Film | 11 min
Featuring dancers Emily Climer, Ellie Goudie-Averill, Marie Haas
Film scanned and developed by Colorlab
A collaboration between choreographer-filmmaker Tori Lawrence and dancers Emily Climer, Ellie Goudie-Averill, and Marie Lynn Haas. Together, the four created site-specific choreography through improvisational scores for the dancers and the camera. Using a vintage Bolex H-16 REX-5 camera, the movement-driven footage was shot on 16mm color film in and around the landscapes of Rochester, Vermont during the summers of 2018 and 2019. Much of the footage was shot on location at Liberty Hill Farm (special thanks to Beth and Bob Kennett).
Program Notes About the Music
Overture to The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Premiere: Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, Vienna, 1791 Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte is a sublime fairy tale that moves freely between earthy comedy and noble mysticism. Mozart wrote the opera for a theater located just outside Vienna with the clear intention of appealing to audiences from all walks of life. The story is told in a singspiel (“song-play”) format characterized by separate musical numbers connected by dialogue and stage activity—an excellent structure for navigating the diverse moods, ranging from solemn to lighthearted, of the story and score. The composer and the librettist were both Freemasons, the fraternal order whose membership is held together by shared moral and metaphysical ideals, and Masonic imagery appears throughout the work. The story, however, is as universal as any fairy tale.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) was the son of a Salzburg court musician and composer, Leopold, who was also his principal teacher and exhibited him as a musical prodigy throughout Europe. His achievements in opera, in terms of beauty, vocal challenge, and dramatic insight, remain unsurpassed, and his seven mature works of the genre are pillars of the repertory. He died tragically young, three months after the premiere of Die Zauberflöte, his last-produced opera. (La Clemenza di Tito had its premiere three weeks before Die Zauberflöte, but its score was completed later.) The remarkable Emanuel Schikaneder (1751–1812) was an actor, singer, theater manager, and friend of Mozart’s. He suggested the idea of Die Zauberflöte, wrote the libretto, staged the work, and sang the role of Papageno in the opera’s premiere. After Mozart’s death, Schikaneder opened the larger Theater an der Wien in the center of Vienna, a venue that has played a key role in the city’s musical life from the time of Beethoven to the present day. The former main entrance to the theater is called the “Papageno Gate,” a tribute to both men. (Source: Met Opera)
My River Runs to Thee by Evan Premo
Movement IV. Blue Sea: lakes, oceans, and a prayer, of the composition for string quintet and soprano by Evan Premo. The last movement has been adapted for string ensemble and soprano in 2024 for the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra. Enjoy this recording of the original piece for string quartet here.
A Night Piece for Flute and Strings by Arthur Foote
Shining as a beacon to late bloomers everywhere, Foote did not begin music lessons until he was 12 years old. He made up for lost time rapidly, however, and entered Harvard five years later to study both music and law. He directed the Harvard Glee Club, and in 1875 earned the first Master of Arts degree in music awarded by an American university. After graduation he established a private studio in Boston, where he was also organist at the First Unitarian Church for 32 years, becoming a founding member of the American Guild of Organists and its president for four years.
Foote had a keen interest in German music, traveling to the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, among numerous trips to Europe. But he also took a few lessons with Stephen Heller in Paris, and A Night Piece speaks late German chromatic Romanticism with a French accent, as if Fauré had revised Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. It was premiered as the first part of the Nocturne and Scherzo for Flute and String Quartet in San Francisco in January 1919, acquiring the title A Night Piece for Flute and Strings when it was published four years later in a version for string orchestra. (It has kept the later title even when performed in the original version with string quartet – the manuscript is untitled.) The work is a rhapsodic fantasy, formally articulated in its alternation of passages led by the flute with sections for the strings alone. Gently luxurious reveries frame darker and more urgent music – “fresh and spontaneous, plentiful in melody and colored with beauty,” as San Francisco Examiner critic Ray Brown wrote of the premiere. (Source: John Henken, LA Philharmonic)
Song to the Moon from the Opera Rusalka by Antonin Dvorak
Premiere: National Theater, Prague, 1901. The only opera by the great Czech composer Antonín Dvorˇák that has (so far) gained an international following, Rusalka is in many ways a definitive example of late Romanticism. Folklore, evocations of the natural and the supernatural worlds, and even a poignant interpretation of the idea of a love-death are all contained in this very human fairy tale. The opera tells of a water nymph (the title character) who longs to become human so she can win the love of a prince. The story has a strong national flavor as well as universal appeal, infused by the Romantic supernaturalism of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine (previously set as an opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tchaikovsky, and others) and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. The opera was written for the National Theater in Prague, an institution with a mission to develop Czech consciousness and patriotism during a time when the country was subjected to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The composer’s national consciousness, the folkloric ambience of the piece, and the fact that it’s written in Czech have all assured the opera’s popularity with the Czech public, for whom it is considered a national treasure.
Antonín Dvorˇák (1841–1904) was a Czech composer celebrated during his lifetime for his chamber, choral, and symphonic music. His many works to achieve international popularity include the String Quartet No. 12, “The American,” the Piano Trio No. 4, “Dumky,” the Requiem, the Slavonic Dances, the Cello Concerto, and nine published symphonies. Dvorˇák was especially popular in London and in New York, where he served for a while as director of the short- lived National Conservatory of Music. It was here that Dvorˇák experienced African-American and Native American music, some of which would influence his most successful composition, the Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” Yet he also composed nine operas, including Rusalka, and was puzzled that his success as a symphonic composer prevented him from being taken seriously as an opera composer beyond his native Bohemia. Jaroslav Kvapil (1868–1950) was a Czech author and poet. He wrote the libretto for Rusalka before meeting Dvorˇák, who became enthusiastic about the work when the director of the National Theater in Prague showed it to him. (Source: Met Opera)
Petite Symphonie by Charles Gounod
French composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893) is perhaps best known for his opera Faust and his Ave Maria. He was a life-long Parisian, excepting a four-year stay in Rome after winning the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1839. He came from an artistic family, including an artist father and pianist mother who was his first teacher. He went on to study with Anton Reicha and later at the Paris Conservatoire. Also a lifelong church devotee who almost entered the priesthood, he was a prolific composer of sacred vocal and choral works.
Gounod wrote Petite Symphonie late in his career, in 1885, for flutist/impresario Paul Taffanel and his Societé de Musique de Chambre pour Instruments a Vent (Chamber Music Society for Wind Instruments), which premiered it in Paris on April 30 of that year. Its instrumentation is simply harmonie ensemble plus a single flute, reflecting both the somewhat backward-looking philosophy of the Societé and the importance of Taffanel. It uses the standard symphonic form from 100 years prior. The first movement has a slow introduction followed by an allegro in sonata form. The second is a gorgeous andante cantabile, almost an aria for flute. The third is a spritely scherzo with trio. The finale is another allegro that sparkles with lightness and energy. While the piece does show several Romantic-era tendencies, including long melodic lines and some surprising harmonic motion in development sections, it is at its heart a throwback to an earlier, simpler era where form and harmony were clear as day. (Source: Andy Pease)
Brandenburg Concerto #4 by J.S. Bach
Like all of the six concertos that Bach sent to the Margraf of Brandenburg, younger brother of the King of Prussia, in 1721, the Fourth “Brandenburg” Concerto is for an unusual, perhaps unique combination of instruments, as if Bach were seeking to overwhelm the Margraf with the sheer variety of his musical ability. He probably succeeded all too well — the musicians of the Margraf’s small musical establishment may well have been intimidated by the set; in any event it appears they never played the concertos.
Taking as his point of departure the concerto grosso, in which a small group of soloists stands out from a larger ripieno (accompaniment) group, Bach scored this concerto for solo violin and two solo flutes against a body of strings. Bach specified “flauto,” by which he meant end-blown recorders, instead of the ancestor of the modern flute (which he called “flauto traverso”), but in modern performances flutes have inherited the parts. This combination naturally sounds very bright, particularly since the flute parts lie fairly high. One result is an almost precious perkiness, particularly in the first movement.
Bach uses his forces differently in each movement. The jaunty, good-humored opening Allegro is a complicated tapestry, with the colors of the flutes and solo violin interwoven in the texture. In the second movement the flutes answer the phrases of the larger group (Bach refers to them in the score as “echo flutes”), with no accompaniment but the solo violin; the high flute parts allow the violin to function as a kind of bass, relatively speaking. The finale is a combination of concerto style and formal fugue, with the tutti sections corresponding with fugal expositions and the solo sections constituting the freer episodes. Though Bach was not normally given to virtuosic display, he gives the violin two extended moments of pure flash: a sequence of rapid scales in the first movement, and a shimmering passage of arpeggiated bowings on alternating strings, known in the fiddling trade as “bariolage,” in the last movement. (Source: Howard Posner, LA Philharmonic)