FRIDAY, MAY 25, 2007

Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College

Crenshaw Blvd. at Redondo Beach Blvd.

FREE ADMISSION and FREE PARKING

Concert time: 8:15 p.m., pre-concert lecture: 7:30 p.m.

Information: (310) 379-9725 or (310) 539-4649 or http://BeachCitiesSymphony.org.

PROGRAM

Barry Brisk: Serenade for Orchestra (World Première)

MTAC Artists of the Future soloists:

Pablo de Sarasate Zigeurnerweisen: Joseph Lee

Henryk Wieniawski Polonaise de Concert in D: John Heffernan

Robert Schumann Concerto in A Minor, 1st Movement: Emmelyn Hsieh

Camille Saint-Saëns Concerto No. 2, Op. 22, 1st Movement: Sharon Kwon

George Enesco: Romanian Rhapsody No. 1

NOW HEAR THIS: Young Audience Previews! Young audience members who come to the Artists of the Future concert will be able to attend their own pre-concert lecture. While Music Director Barry Brisk enlightens grown-ups at his regular 7:30 p.m. presentation, children and teens from grades one through high school will be invited to the mezzanine level. Four students have been chosen by their music teachers and coached by Anli Lin Tong, who heads the Artists of the Future competition and is the innovator of this program. They are 1) Audrey Hung (Student of Lenee Bilski), Fourth Grade, Mira Catalina School, 2) Scott Andrew Camden (Student of Eunee Yee), Senior, Alpha Omega Academy, 3) George Johnson (Student of Darlene Vlasek), Senior, Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, and 4) Charlice Lin (Student of Patricia Arand), Senior, University of Southern California. These young presenters will talk about the composers and concertos which competition winners will be playing later in the evening. Audio clips will enhance the lectures, and the more adventurous students have been encouraged to role-play by assuming the identity of their subjects. Presenters will be rewarded by gift certificates donated by Sandra Clay, owner of A’Muse. Look for lobby signs directing young people to this very special event at 7:30 p.m. on May 25.

PROGRAM BIOGRAPHIES

BARRY BRISK

BARRY BRISK has been Music Director and Conductor of the Beach Cities Symphony since 1994. A native of Southern California, he was a Music Composition major at Mount St. Mary’s College in Brentwood before moving to Vienna. He studied at the Academy of Music (now the University of Music) under the world-renowned Hans Swarowsky, earning a Diploma in Conducting, and eventually returned to this area to pursue a professional career.

In addition to his post with the Beach Cities Symphony, Maestro Brisk has appeared as guest conductor for numerous Southern California orchestras, including the Inland Empire Symphony, the Westside Symphony Orchestra, the West Los Angeles Symphony, the Topanga Symphony, the Burbank Philharmonic, the Livic Chamber Orchestra (Torrance), the United Chinese Musicians Symphony Orchestra of Los Angeles, and the Central Coast Philharmonia in Santa Barbara. Farther afield, he has conducted the Orquestra Sinfonica de Veracruz (Mexico), the American Opera Workshop in Vienna, and the Vienna Chamber Orchestra.

Maestro Brisk is also a violist in several symphonies, a teacher of conducting and composition, and a composer. His most recent work, Serenade, will receive its world première at our May 2007 concert. His articles have appeared in Musical America, Opera Quarterly, and The Inner Voice, newsletter of the Southern California Viola Society.
Maestro Brisk's family consists of his wife, Cathy, an expert on ancient Greek and Roman coins; their son, Philip, who has just received his Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA; and Philip's wife, Marilyn.

JOHN HEFFERNAN, age 15, started violin lessons in the sixth grade with Wendy Chow and later with his current teacher, Way-Chung Wong. John attends Mira Costa High School where he is a member of the school’s string ensemble and its symphony orchestra. He augments his music education at the Colburn School of Performing Arts and is concertmaster of the Colburn Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dr. Joni Lynn Steshko and Ronald Leonard. He also plays first violin under the instruction of Dr. Richard Naill.

John was concertmaster of the symphony orchestra at the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program in 2005. In the summer of 2006, he attended the Interlochen Arts Program and the Idyllwild Arts Program. At Interlochen he was a member of the advanced strings quartet program and played in the Pacifica Quartet and the Avalon Quartet. As a member of the Idyllwild Arts Festival Orchestra, he performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. For the past two years John has been selected as a member of the Southern California School Band & Orchestra Association’s High School Honors Groups Symphony Orchestra and was assistant concertmaster in 2007. In April 2006, he was the first place winner in the American String Teachers Association (ASTA) Recital Competition. He went on to compete in the finals of the ASTA Greater Los Angeles Intermediate Violin Competition representing Area III.

John is a member of the Mira Costa High School Track & Field program and maintains a 3.9 GPA. His goal is to be a professional violinist and to travel the world.

EMMELYN HSIEH is 15 years old and an honor roll freshman at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. She began her piano studies at the age of four and has been a student of Sylvia Ho since 1999. She has won numerous awards at the Southwestern Youth Music Festival, including first place in the open concerto and open Chopin categories, and at the Southern California Junior Bach Festival. In 2003, Emmelyn placed first alternate at the State Concerto Competition (Southern Division). In addition, she received the Dr. Kim Music Academy Junior Pianist Award at the 2004 MTAC Scholarship Auditions.

Besides practicing the piano, Emmelyn enjoys drawing and volleyball and is the co-captain of the FroshSoph Girls Volleyball team. In 2006, she entered the Visual Arts category of the Reflections Program and was awarded first place by the PVP Council. That same year, she participated in the annual Science Fair. She received second place in the regional and honorable mention in the Los Angeles County for the Engineering Applications category. In her spare time, she volunteers at the Palos Verdes Peninsula Library and assists the kids in creating crafts.

Tonight marks Emmelyn’s second solo performance with the Beach Cities Symphony. She won the Artists of the Future Concerto Competition in 2003 at age 12 and performed the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12. K. 414.

SHARON KWON, who is 14, began her piano studies at the age of three with her mother, Mary Kwon. At age seven she commenced her studies with Mihyang Keel and has since received numerous awards in various competitions and auditions.

Sharon won first prize at the California Association of Professional Music Teachers (CAPMT) Sonata Competition in 2000 and won many prizes in the Southwestern Youth Music Festival (SYMF). She also received the grand prize at the Ensemble Festival of MTAC in 2001. She was a winner at Cypress College Piano Competition (CCPC) and was also a silver medalist at the Southern California Bach Festival in 2002. In 2005, Sharon received first prize in the MTAC Scholarship Competition and has performed three concertos since the age of 10. Her debut was with the South Bay Festival Orchestra at the Colburn School of Performing Arts under the direction of Maestro Wayne Reinecke. She won first prize in the young pianist category in the 2004 SYMF, resulting in her second solo performance under the direction of Dr. Frances Steiner at Colburn’s Zipper Hall Auditorium. Sharon again performed with Maestro Reinecke and the South Bay Festival Orchestra at the James Armstrong Theatre in 2005.

Sharon is a freshman at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, where she is studying for the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program. She is on the school’s JV girls’ tennis team and track team. She loves to read, make her own music, and play the piano for her church.

JOSEPH LEE, age 15, made his orchestral debut at age nine with the South Bay Youth Chamber Orchestra. Since that time, he has been featured as soloist with the Santa Monica College Symphony Orchestra, the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony, and the Carson Symphony. This spring he soloed with the Torrance Symphony under the baton of Maestro Frank Fetta and received the 2007 Making a Difference award sponsored by the Torrance Symphony and the Daily Breeze. His recent competitions have resulted in top awards in ASTA (American String Teachers’ Association), Southern California Complete Works (Grand Prize), and the Southwestern Youth Music Festival (SYMF), including the top honor as Young Violinist of 2006. Joseph is a Lene Fe’Bland scholar and a freshman honor student at West High School. He is an avid Trojan fan, and concertmaster of the Orchestra da Camera at the Colburn School of Performing Arts. He studies with Gail Gerding Mellert and enjoys sharing his musical gifts within the community and with his church.

PROGRAM NOTES

Serenade for Orchestra (World Première)
Barry Brisk

The first ideas for this piece came to me while my wife, Cathy, and I were hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, in the summer of 2005. When you do a lot of hiking, hours are spent trudging up and down narrow trails, leaving your mind free to wander where it will. I began mulling over a musical idea, which then expanded itself into four sections. This was a general idea, which wasn’t so specific as to have notes and rhythms. When we got back to the motel, I made an outline of these ideas so as not to forget them. For the rest of the week, every time we hit the trails my mind went to work. I even thought of famous paintings whose moods I wanted to capture. Despite this obsession I still managed to notice the natural beauties of the mountains, the flowers, and the animals.

When we returned to Los Angeles, I got out music paper and pencils and began making sketches. The further I got, the more I realized this wasn’t going to work. The musical ideas were too complex. I did decide to keep the references to the famous paintings. But if you are going to write a piece about paintings, you need an introduction and a conclusion. So two more movements were added, bringing the total up to six movements for this work in progress. When I mentioned my idea to a colleague, he immediately said, “Oh, Pictures at an Exhibition.” I replied, “No, it’s not like that at all.” Then I realized I had to get rid of all allusions to paintings, or the pieces would be labeled as a spin-off from Mussorgsky. That is when I gave the movements the titles that were emotions, with no reference to other art works.

As with many musical compositions, the movements were not composed in the performance order. The six movements were composed in the following order: two, four, five, three, one, and six. Since I had very specific ideas as to each movement, I wrote them in the order in which they wanted to happen. In other words, some ideas simply presented themselves before others, and that made them easy to work with. The final order of the movements had been pre-determined, so it didn’t matter when they were written. With one exception; the Finale was written last because it is a collage of the first five movements. The rough draft was composed between July and November 2005. The final draft was finished the following December.

The Serenade for Orchestra was composed with the Beach Cities Symphony in mind.

--Barry Brisk

Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs)
Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908)

Born in Pamplona, Spain, Sarasate was a violin prodigy who gave his first concert when he was seven years old. As an adult, he performed on three continents--Europe and the Americas--and was renowned as a composer for violin as well as for the skill and beauty of his playing. (In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League,” Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson attend a concert at which Sarasate is the featured performer.) Works written for him include Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 2, Saint-Saëns’ Violin Concerto No. 3, and Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. Zigeunerweisen, which premièred in 1878, is a captivating showcase for solo violinist with orchestra that shows the influence of Spanish folk and gypsy music popular at the time.

--Toni Empringham

Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 22
First movement: Andante sostenuto
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Saint-Saëns had a long, multi-faceted career in music, and three of his talents--as composer, pianist, and conductor--came together to bring the Second Piano Concerto before the public. While he was composing the concerto in the spring of 1868, one of his friends, the renowned pianist Anton Rubenstein, came to Paris for a series of performances to be conducted by Saint-Saëns. Rubenstein then decided to make his own conducting debut, with Saint-Saëns as soloist. The composer rushed to finish his work in progress, completed it in 17 days, and gave its première on May 13, 1868, with scarcely enough time to practice the difficult material he had written. A unique feature of the Second Concerto is the way it begins with a slow movement instead of following the usual fast-slow-fast movement sequence. Another unusual feature is the way the solo piano rather than the orchestra opens the work, in this instance with an arresting, majestic cadenza that leads to an operatic series of answering chords from the ensemble. The theme introduced after the orchestra enters is said to have originated in an exercise by Gabriel Fauré, one of Saint-Saëns’ pupils in the early 1860s.

--T.E.

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54
First movement: Allegro affettuoso
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Schumann was a leading figure of the early Romantic period. As a youth, he produced poems and plays in addition to songs and piano pieces. After his marriage to the pianist Clara Wieck, daughter of his piano teacher, Schumann turned to the composition of larger works such as concertos, symphonies, and oratorios. The first movement of the Concerto in A minor, originally a Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, was completed in 1841. In 1845 he added the second and third movements, and the première took place in Dresden on December 4, 1845 with Clara as soloist. During the span of those five years, Schumann composed some of his most famous works, including the “Spring” Symphony; the oratorio Paradise and the Peri; three String Quartets, Op. 41; and two song cycles, Op. 39 and Op. 48. After this burst of creativity, Schumann’s physical and mental health deteriorated, and at his own request he was committed to an asylum for the last two years of his life. The lyric beauty of this concerto is made more intense by our knowledge of its composer’s sad ending.

--T.E.

Polonaise de Concert in D major, Op. 4
Henri Wieniawski (1835-1880)

Initially Henri Wieniawski, a child prodigy, was taught by his mother, then by Jan Hornziel, the violinist of the Grand Theatre in Warsaw, and Stanislaw Seroczynski, the soloist and concertmaster of the Budapest Opera. In 1843, at the age of eight, Wieniawski went to Paris to study with Lambert-Joseph Massart at the Paris Conservatory, from which he graduated three years later, winning the first prize and a gold medal. As a composer, Wieniawski mainly wrote for the violin and produced some of the most challenging works in the repertoire.

The Polonaise de Concert in D major, published by the time he was 18, is a work in which musical inspiration may have been, as critics later maintained, subordinated to the virtuoso's need to demonstrate his sheer technical prowess. However, the two Polonaises and two Violin Concertos hugely impressed European audiences, launching Wieniawski's international career as a violinist-composer. This great virtuoso-composer remains well respected today; in Poland his name is honored by international competitions for violinists and violin-makers, held every five years in Pozna. He is honored on Polish coins and postage stamps as well.

--Bill Malcolm

Romanian Rhapsody
Georges Enesco (1881-1955)

Although Georges Enesco achieved worldwide fame as a composer with his two Romanian Rhapsodies at the age of 20, he was also one of the greatest violinists in history, a conductor, music organizer, and teacher. He studied first at the Vienna Conservatory, and later at the Paris Conservatory. His teachers included Massenet and Fauré, and one of his own pupils was Yehudi Menuhin. Despite his internationalism, he maintained ties with his native Romania, serving as court violinist to Queen Elisabeth of Romania, conductor of the Bucharest Philharmonic, founder of the Enesco Prize for composition. Moreover, he made it one of his life missions to revitalize Romanian music. He said Romanian folk music “is influenced not by the neighboring Slavs, but by the Indian and Egyptian folk songs introduced by the members of these remote races, now classed as gypsies, brought to Romania as servants of the Roman conquerors. The deeply Oriental character of our own folk music derives from these sources and possesses a flavor as singular as it is beautiful.” The two Romanian Rhapsodies appeared in 1901. Both were introduced at a Pablo Casals concert in Paris on February 7, 1908, with Enesco conducting.

--B.M.

Information

Beach Cities Symphony Association, Inc.

P.O. Box 248

Redondo Beach, CA 90277-0248

Beach Cities Symphony News information: 310-379-9725, 310-539-4649, or http://BeachCitiesSymphony.org or info@BeachCitiesSymphony.org.

Editors: Toni Empringham, Margaret McWilliams

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Last modified May 9, 2007

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