BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY NEWSLETTER
Vol. XIII, No. 2 -
January 2006
THE BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY
BARRY BRISK, MUSIC DIRECTOR
Plow That Broke the
Plains
Pare Lorentz, whose 1936 documentary The Plow That
Broke the Plains provided the context for the orchestral suite to be
performed by the Beach Cities Symphony on January 27th, was a socially conscious
environmentalist and conservationist decades ahead of his time. Based on his
reputation as a well-known movie critic and as an advocate of Roosevelt’s New
Deal, Lorentz was hired by the Resettlement Administration (later part of the
Department of Agriculture) to set up a government film program focusing on the
problems of the American farmer.
In his 1992 memoir, FDR’s Moviemaker, Lorentz described why
the Dust Bowl became his first documentary subject. A native of West Virginia,
he remembered driving through the Midwest as a teenager and being impressed by
“the huge arc of sky.” Most vividly, he recalled “. . . one day in New York
when I was working at Newsweek and a heavy, slow-moving gray cloud, dust
from the drought-stricken Great Plains, blew down in the middle of Manhattan
Island and settled like an old blanket over the tower of the New York Times
building at Times Square.” With total artistic control and a clear idea of his
priorities, Lorentz hired first-class professional photographers, including the
famed still photographer Paul Strand, and then chose Virgil Thomson to
write the score. Finally, Lorentz himself wrote the narration and asked
Metropolitan Opera Company baritone Thomas Hardie Chalmers to be the voice of
the film.
The Plow That Broke the Plains is an affecting blend of images,
music, and words. Only a half-hour long, it evokes the vast loneliness and
beauty of the Great Plains, the tragedy of the over cultivated land, and the
plight of Dust Bowl migrants who had, in the film-maker’s words, “no place to
go . . . and no place to stop.”
Lorentz went on to make movies for other government agencies,
including a 1946 documentary of Nazi war crimes revealed through the Nuremberg
trials. He died in 1995 at the age of 86.
Burton Goldstein’s Concert
Suite
This composition received its world première at our concert on
October 21, 2005. This work was funded in part by the Composer Assistance
Program of the American Music Center. After the performance, Dr. Goldstein
(pictured onstage, left) told Daily Breeze reviewer Kari Sayers that the
experience of sitting in the audience while the Beach Cities Symphony was
playing his new work was like being a back-seat driver, wanting to take over
but realizing he had to let go his desire for control.
The occasion became even more
special when Dr. Goldstein introduced Concert Suite with an entertaining
description of how he writes:
“Like many composers who live near
Hollywood, I am two composers . . . . As Composer Number One, I write “modern
classical” music. I use pencil and paper, maybe a piano, and I write out all
the notes for all the instruments and let real players interpret the music on
stage. As Composer Number Two, I write commercial music using computers and
synthesizers and play all the parts myself. This kind of music has to make a
point quickly and convincingly to a large audience. Tonight is the first night
that Composers One and Two have met on stage, because this is the first time I
have made a work for classical orchestra based on my film trailer music.”
Dr. Goldstein explained that many times the music in a trailer is
not actually in the film, either because the score has not yet been written or
because nothing in it is suitable for a one-minute recap of movie highlights. Producers
instead rely on a library of short, vivid compositions that express the
emotions of their subject and capture the attention of their TV audience.
As an example, Dr. Goldstein offered
Concert Suite’s second movement Allegro, which has been used for
trailers of Godzilla, Shrek, and Arabian Nights. as well as for
CNN’s logo during the Iraq invasion and for the TV legal drama “The Practice.”
“In Hollywood,” concluded Dr. Goldstein, “all things are possible.”
Bradley Cohen
Beach Cities Symphony Principal Clarinet Bradley Cohen was
born in Los Angeles in 1961. He graduated from University High and later earned
a degree in Music Performance from California State University, Northridge. His
principal teachers have been David Howard and Charles Bay. Mr. Cohen has also
studied with Michelle Zukovsky, Yehuda Gilad, and David Shifrin.
Mr. Cohen was Associate Principal Clarinet of the Young Musicians
Foundation Debut Symphony and has toured in Europe and Japan with the CSUN wind
ensemble. He has played Principal Clarinet for the Beach Cities Symphony since
1988 and is frequently singled out by reviewers for the quality of his tone and
interpretive skills. He soloed with this orchestra in Carl Nielsen’s Clarinet
Concerto in 1998 and in Claude Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie in 2002.
Mr. Cohen is a freelance musician,
clarinet teacher, and reluctant computer security consultant. In addition to
the Beach Cities Symphony, he performs regularly with several local symphonies,
a wind quintet, and a Klezmer band. He lives in Culver City with his two cats,
Spot and Sheri.
In the early 1920s, according to Phillip Ramey, a longtime friend
and colleague of Aaron Copland, the composer turned to jazz after
deciding his influences and works had become “too European.” Copland wrote the
jazz-influenced Clarinet Concerto in 1947-48 upon receipt of a commission from
Benny Goodman, who was initially intimidated by the difficulty of the solo
cadenza and the fast tempo. Thus, the world première was delayed until November
28, 1950, when it was performed in an NBC Symphony of the Air broadcast
conducted by Fritz Reiner with Goodman as soloist.
Mr. Cohen says, “The Copland
[concerto] is one of my favorite pieces in the literature for clarinet and
orchestra. It is truly fun both to play and to listen to. It has a little
something for everyone, from the very ethereal melodies soaring above the
strings in the opening, to the influence of Copland’s trip to South America and
his love of Latin rhythms, and the co-mingling of American jazz throughout the
cadenza and the fast movement. It is a work I have wanted to perform for a very
long time.
This performance of the Copland is in memory of Laurie. I know she
is listening.”
PROGRAM NOTES
January 27,
2006
Orchestra Suite from
The Plow That Broke the Plains
Virgil Thomson
(1896-1989)
Thomson, who was born in Kansas City,
Missouri, studied piano and organ at Harvard and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
His friendship with Gertrude Stein in that city led to his most famous musical
work, the comic opera Four Saints in Three Acts, using Stein’s
deliberately confusing libretto. Paris was Thomson’s home base until 1940, when
he became music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. Despite his
exposure to European influences, Thomson’s compositions exhibit a distinctly
American flavor. Aaron Copland, among others, acknowledged being affected by
Thomson’s score for the ballet Filling Station and by the scores for The
Plow That Broke the Plains and The River.
The Plow That Broke
the Plains, released in 1936, is a half-hour documentary on the history of
the Dust Bowl and subsequent migration of its victims. Its director, Pare
Lorentz, was set on “rendering the landscape through the music of its people.”
After viewing the uncut film, Thomson took this as his goal also. His score
uses familiar cowboy ballads, popular tunes, church music, blues riffs, and
solemn anthem-like chords to complement Lorentz’s environmentally evangelical
message. When Thomson later premièred the Orchestral Suite, he named its six
short movements after major sections of the film. In the printed score, each
section is prefaced by an excerpt from Lorentz’s text, narrated in the original
documentary by the Metropolitan Opera baritone Thomas Chalmers.
--Toni
Empringham
Concerto for Clarinet
and Orchestra
Aaron Copland
(1900-1990)
Jazz clarinet great Benny Goodman
(1909-1986) commissioned the Clarinet Concerto in 1947. Goodman was exploring more “legit” music for
the clarinet at the time and had also recently commissioned works from Bela Bartok
and Paul Hindemith. Copland wrote most
of the work in Rio, which is reflected in the melodies and rhythms of the
second movement. Goodman only had the exclusive rights to première the work for two
years, and he nearly missed his opportunity.
He complained to Copland that certain parts of the work were too hard
for a jazz man like him. Copland made
some adjustments, and Goodman gave the première on November 6th, 1950, with the NBC
Symphony under Fritz Reiner.
Copland describes the concerto’s form
as follows in his autobiography:
“The first movement is a languid song form composed in 3/4 time,
rather unusual for me. The second movement, a free rondo form, is a contrast in
style -- stark, severe and jazzy. The movements are connected by a cadenza
which gives the soloist considerable opportunity to demonstrate his prowess.
Some of the second movement material represents an unconscious fusion of
elements related to North and South American popular music: Charleston rhythms,
boogie-woogie and Brazilian folk tunes. The [original] instrumentation being
clarinet with strings, harp and piano, I didn't have a large battery of
percussion to achieve jazz effects, so I used slapping basses and whacking harp
sounds to simulate them. The concerto finishes off with a clarinet glissando --
or 'smear' in jazz lingo.”
Copland’s Clarinet Concerto is a
staple in the literature for the instrument, especially in the United States,
and is often performed with an arrangement for clarinet and piano created by
the composer. It has been recorded
many times, including twice by Benny Goodman (1950, 1963) with Copland
conducting.
Tonight’s performance of the Copland
is in memory of Laurie. I know she is listening.
--Bradley
Cohen
Symphony No. 2, Op.
30, “Romantic”
Howard Hanson
(1896-1981)
Much credit must go to Howard Hanson
for the good health in which American music finds itself today. Through forty
years as head of the Eastman School of Music, he influenced an entire generation
of home-grown composers. His series of
American Music Festivals at Eastman helped promote the once-unpopular notion
that American composers could produce music equal in artistic worth to that of
their European contemporaries. His
great number of spectacular recordings with the Eastman Philharmonia and the
Eastman-Rochester Symphony are still sought after among collectors. He spoke and argued in favor of American
music at every opportunity, and his own compositions helped to prompt the
dawning national awareness that a specifically American sound in music was not
waiting to be invented, but was already alive and growing. As a composer he
never moved into the mainstream 20th century, preferring to continue in the
style of the late-Romantics, and he stated that Sibelius and Grieg were his two
most significant influences.
Hanson entitled his Second Symphony
the “Romantic.” Commissioned by Serge
Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary, this
symphony was first performed November 28, 1930, with Koussevitzky conducting.
The “Romantic” Symphony is a cyclic work in three movements: an expansive
Allegro moderato that is preceded by an atmospheric Adagio introduction, an
Andante “with tenderness” that contains some themes derived from those of the
first movement, and a glowing and vigorous Allegro con brio whose main theme is
lifted almost exactly from the first movement. Hanson's style throughout is
romantic, tonal, with asymmetric rhythms at times, and a preference for the low
instrument registers. The theme that
crowns the symphony’s concluding measures is known to many as the “Interlochen Theme,” an aural souvenir of
experiences at the famed Interlochen National Music Camp in Michigan. Hanson, who began work on the Second
Symphony in 1928 while a guest conductor there, composed this theme on the
front porch of the camp’s president, Dr. Joseph Maddy. When he conducted the symphony at
Interlochen the year after its première in Boston, the composer made the camp a
public gift of the theme for use as its broadcast signature. It is still played at the conclusion of every
concert at Interlochen to this day. Although in 1944 Hanson received the
Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 4, his Second Symphony remains the most
popular and most frequently performed.
--Bill
Malcolm
MAKING $$$ AND SENSE
In 2005, the Beach Cities Symphony Association
earned nearly $350 thanks to those who registered their Albertsons &
Sav-On cards in the Marsee Auditorium lobby or by calling our information
number: 310-379-9725. Another way to register is via our web site. For
instructions, go to http://BeachCitiesSymphony.org
and click on the Supporters link at the top of the page. Once there, you will
also find instructions for bringing revenue to the symphony through eScrip
and Amazon.com.
Our revenue from Amazon in 2005 was
close to $80. We can surely double--or triple--that amount in 2006 if you
remember to do your on-line shopping by starting with the Amazon link from the
Symphony’s web page. Remember: these
are all ways to bring much-needed funds to the Beach Cities Symphony at no
additional cost to you.
WELCOME
TO OUR NEW BEACH CITIES SYMPHONY ASSOCIATION MEMBERS:
Ann Lee Antletz Patricia Arand
Stephen Campbell Thomas
Casey Merle Fish, Jr.
Gary Hall Patricia Hanna
Wendell & Madelyn Harter
Wendy Liu Alfred &
Betty Lopez
Beverly Lovelace Helen Mallet
Nola O. Pinter Frances
Teague Al & Fleur Yano
Thank you for supporting our organization!
Thanks also to donors of raffle prizes:
Borders Books & Music in Torrance, Jewelers at 245 Main
Street, Lily’s Flowers & Gifts, and Second City Bistro
In our Members’ Raffle
on October 21, 2005, Charles Zamites of Redondo Beach and Frank Voit of Gardena
won CDs donated by Borders Books & Music. David Steybe of Rancho Palos
Verdes won the floral centerpiece from Lily’s Flowers & Gifts in Torrance.
In the special raffle, Mary Papavasiliou won the sapphire and diamond bracelet
from Jewelers at 245 Main Street [El Segundo], and Dan Dixon won the
certificate for dinner for two at Second City Bistro [also El Segundo].
Prizes for the special
raffle on January 27 will once again include dinner for two at Second City
Bistro, as well as a brand-new Kodak EasyShare 5-megapixel digital camera donated
by Al and Pat Chavez.
BEACH CITIES
SYMPHONY 2005-2006 CONCERT SEASON
January 27, 2006
Virgil Thomson: Suite from “The Plow That Broke the
Plains”
Aaron Copland: Clarinet Concerto. Bradley Cohen,
soloist
Howard Hanson: Symphony No. 2, “Romantic”
March 24, 2006
Carl Maria von Weber: Euryanthe Overture
Jean Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D, op. 47. Elmer Su,
soloist
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 in A, op.
92
May 12, 2006
Gioachino Rossini: Barber of Seville Overture
MTAC Artists of the Future soloists: to be announced
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol, op. 34
Beach Cities Symphony News
Text:
Toni Empringham Graphics: Ralph
Dame Editor-in-Chief: Margaret
McWilliams
BCSA,
P.O. Box 248, Redondo Beach, CA 90277-0248
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This page was last updated on January 7, 2006.