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Live from the New World Center! It's a musical homecoming as NWS conducting alumnus Christian Reif joins Fellows and audience to experience music that is beautifully reflective and celebratory. Gushing with lush Romanticism and energy, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade is the musical remedy our hearts need. Gustav Mahler became composer and poet for his autobiographical, folk-inspired Songs of a Wayfarer, sung by Grammy Award-winning and frequent Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. The trumpets return with a “call to awaken” in Schumann’s First Symphony, bringing the New World Center to life and officially kicking off NWS’s 34th season. 

This concert is in honor of Susana Ibargüen.

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Program

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Ballade in A minor for Orchestra, Op. 33 (1898)
Approximate duration: 12 minutes

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor received the last part of his name from his father, who had returned home to Sierra Leone (the British colony in Africa originally established as a refuge for freed and escaped slaves) without learning that a white British woman was pregnant with his son. Samuel’s mother gifted her son with an auspicious name modeled after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the boy’s grandfather passed on an even greater gift by introducing Samuel to his own instrument, the violin.

Coleridge-Taylor went on to enroll at London’s Royal Academy of Music at the age of 15 as a violinist, and three years later he began composition lessons as well (having already published his first score at 16). He got a boost in his early 20s when a major British festival asked the more established composer Edward Elgar for a new work; unable to accept, Elgar recommended Coleridge-Taylor instead, describing him as “far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men.” Coleridge-Taylor composed this Ballade for the occasion, and he dedicated it “to my friend, A.J.J.”—a reference to another influential champion, Elgar’s friend and publisher August Jaeger.

The Ballade label was more typically applied to piano music, and it implied a composition with some element of storytelling, like the ballad poetry of olden days. Coleridge-Taylor didn’t specify any story for this Ballade, but he wrote it in the wake of a transformational encounter with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, sparking the composer’s interest in African-American traditions that would come to occupy his remaining years. The main theme of the Ballade has a folksy quality rendered through a European lens, not unlike the material that turns up in Dvořák’s “American” works from earlier in the decade. Coleridge-Taylor’s impressive command of orchestration and his fluidity in developing his motives organically show him to be a true heir to the Brahms-Dvořák-Elgar lineage, sharing their mastery of impeccable orchestral construction in abstract forms.

Gustav Mahler

Songs of a Wayfarer (1885)
Approximate duration: 14 minutes

Gustav Mahler was born into a German-speaking, upwardly mobile Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic. Although he focused on composition as a student at the Vienna Conservatory, his meteoric rise as a conductor soon crowded out his composing, leaving him only limited time to explore the two genres he was most attracted to in his own music: songs and symphonies.

In 1884, while working in Kassel, Germany, Mahler become infatuated with a soprano in the choir he led. He wrote her love poems, some of which he set to music in the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), completed in 1885 in its original version for baritone and piano. He orchestrated the cycle sometime before the first public performance in Berlin in 1896, but in the meantime, he had already folded some of the “Wayfarer” melodies into his First Symphony that was gestating during the same period.

Mahler’s earnest love poems mimicked the style of a beloved volume of German folk poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn). The first song, imagining the young woman on the day she marries another man, milks the melodramatic weeping and sorrow, contrasted with the carefree sight of a blooming flower and a tweeting bird. Idyllic sounds from outdoors return in the second song, with its chirping finch and blooming bell flowers on a sunny morning. The third song takes the metaphor of “a knife in my breast” to its furthest extreme, registering the pain of seeing the woman walking from afar in a yellow field and beholding her blue eyes, golden hair and silvery laugh. Those blue eyes become the centerpiece of the lovesick fourth song and its farewell message.

Robert Schumann

Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38, “Spring” (1841)
Approximate duration: 30 minutes

In 1840, the year Robert Schumann finally married his darling Clara, he composed almost nothing but songs—168 of them. The next year, he turned his attention to orchestral music, even though past efforts had produced only two draft movements of a symphony from 1832 and numerous other false starts. This new Schumann, happily married and supported by a partner with a musical mind to match his, began an orchestral frenzy: By year’s end, he had completed two symphonies, a Fantasy for piano and orchestra and a “Symphonette” which later became the Overture, Scherzo and Finale.

Schumann’s First Symphony followed on the heels of a song cycle he co-authored with Clara titled Liebesfrühling, or Love’s Springtime. He needed only four days in January to draft the Symphony, and the orchestration was ready the following month. Schumann attended the Symphony’s debut on March 31 by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by his friend Felix Mendelssohn. With a few revisions that summer, his First Symphony was complete.

In his sketches, Schumann inscribed titles for each movement: Frühlingsbeginn (Beginning of Spring), Abend (Evening), Frohe Gespielen (Merry Playmates), and Voller Frühling (Spring at its Height). He eventually suppressed those headings, and in later correspondence he downplayed the extramusical associations. Clara, for her part, linked the Symphony to a spring-themed poem by their friend Adolph Böttger, noting a resemblance between the poem’s meter and the rhythm of the Symphony’s opening fanfare motive. That theme announces the majestic and suspenseful introduction, and a sped-up version of the same theme later launches the movement’s up-tempo portion. Only five measures into the work, a sudden modulation ventures to an unexpected key, establishing a sense of harmonic wanderlust in which the musical atmosphere, like spring itself, is apt to change at any moment. The Larghetto continues with similar harmonic disturbances, slipping out of its gorgeous first melody into a surprising new key area.

The opening of the Scherzo resolves a chord left hanging at the end of the previous movement; but it turns out to be a bit of a prank, with that arrival contradicting the actual key setting of the movement. The restlessness persists through the finale, with migrations through various major and minor keys shifting the mood capriciously.

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel's masterpiece as a collective call for justice.