Pictures At An Exhibition

Thursday,
September 24, 2009
7:00 PM (Note new time)

Friday,
September 25, 2009
7:00 PM (Note new time)

Moxley Carmichael Masterworks Series
Tennessee Theatre
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Lucas Richman, conductor
Jami Rogers, soprano
Bill Williams, Narrator

Still: The American Scene: The South
Barber: Knoxville, Summer of 1915
Williams: Suite from "The Reivers"
Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures At An Exhibition

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Pictures at an Exhibition

This opening program of the Knoxville Symphony’s 2009-10 Season is a gallery filled with musical imagery and reminiscences. The three works before intermission all draw sustenance from the American South, two of which are based on Pulitzer-Prize-winning texts. John Williams’s suite from his score of the 1969 film adaptation of William Faulkner’s last novel, The Reivers, includes portions of the film’s sparkling and witty narration brilliantly captured from the original source by screen writers Irving and Harriet Ravetch. These performances of the suite are KSO premieres. Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer 1915 is based on a 1938 autobiographical sketch by Knoxville’s own James Agee, later used as a prologue to his novel, A Death in the Family. These KSO performances of Barber’s work celebrate the births of both the composer and James Agee, the centennials of which occur during the course of this season.

The American Scene, Suite II: The South

William Grant Still, born May 11, 1895, at Woodville,  Mississippi; died December 3, 1978, at Los Angeles.

Premiere: The three scenes that comprise this suite were premiered at different times on the weekly Peabody-Award-winning program, The Standard School Broadcast, on the NBC Radio Network originating (from 1943 to 1968) in famous Studio A at the NBC Radio City Building in San Francisco. This program was broadcast Thursdays continuously from 1928 to 1975 and sponsored by Standard Oil Company of California. The Standard School Broadcast Symphony Orchestra was largely drawn from members of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and was conducted for many years by Carmen Dragon. Florida Night premiered on the March 31, 1960 broadcast, while Levee Land and A New Orleans Street were premiered earlier on the February 5, 1959 broadcast. The first complete performance of the entire suite occurred November 18, 1990 in Memphis, Tennessee on an ambitious program by the Rhodes (College) Orchestra conducted by Jack Abel that included all five suites comprising Still’s The American Scene.    

KSO Performance History: These Masterworks Series performances of this suite are KSO premieres.  

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (one doubling on piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, suspended cymbal, triangle, tambourine, glockenspiel, chimes, harp, celesta, and strings.

            From the 1931 premiere of his Afro-American Symphony in Rochester, New York, the stature of this versatile and prolific American composer was assured. Born in the South, educated for a time at Wilberforce and Oberlin Colleges in Ohio (later studying privately with Edgard Varèse and George Whitfield Chadwick), engaged for years as a professional performing musician from West Coast to East (he spent much of 1929-30 as an arranger for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra), from May 1934 Still called Los Angeles home. It was there in 1957 that he composed his five three-movement suites that he called The American Scene: The East, The South, The Old West, The Far West, and A Mountain, A Memorial, and A Song. The composer’s program notes simply describe these suites as “presenting musical pictures of America and Americans past and present.” This second suite is particularly evocative of the composer’s early surroundings and blues influences – he worked as one of W.C. Handy’s foremost “house” arrangers in Memphis (1916-7) and New York City (1919-21).

Suite from The Reivers

John Towner Williams, born February 8, 1932, at Floral Park on  Long Island, near New York City.

Premiere: This music was written for the film, The Reivers,  released December 25, 1969. Burgess Meredith was the narrator in the film. This suite was recorded in Boston’s Symphony Hall February 9-11, 1991 by the Boston Pops Orchestra with Burgess Meredith reprising his role as narrator and the composer conducting. That recording was released on CD by Sony Classical in 1994 and is still commercially available.

KSO Performance History: These are the first performances of this suite by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.

Instrumentation: Assisting the narrator in telling the story are 3 flutes (one doubling on piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, 3 percussionists, harp, piano/celeste and strings

            These performances of this suite by narrator Bill Williams, Maestro Richman and the KSO are believed to be the first conducted by someone other than the music’s creator, John Williams, the leading, and most prolific, screen composer of his generation. Lucas Richman first came across this suite in 1987 when he was retained as the “cover” conductor for John Williams in a series of concerts with the Houston Symphony. As such, Lucas Richman was prepared to step in had Williams become ill or indisposed (which did not occur) and, thereby, became familiar with this engaging score. The composer has graciously allowed his colleague to conduct these KSO premieres.

The Reivers was the first complete film score composed by Williams, and it was nominated for an Academy Award. 45 more nominations followed, and Williams has taken the Oscar on five occasions. The film is an adaptation of William Faulkner’s last (and, essentially, only comic) novel published in 1962 and winning for its author his second Pulitzer Prize. The story, set in 1905, is that of 11-year-old Lucius “Loosh” Priest of imaginary “Jefferson, Mississippi,” and through whose memory the story is told. He recounts his adventure with two roguish family retainers, Boon Hogganbeck and Ned McCaslin, as they steal Loosh’s grandfather’s yellow Winton Flyer (the first automobile in town), embark on a joyride to Memphis where they stay at Miss Reba’s “boarding house [for] young ladies” (a brothel), and become involved in a shady deal concerning a race horse, a horse race, and the yellow Winton Flyer. Still, Loosh, many years later, claims the escapade as “my moment of glory. . .the best game of all.”

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for Soprano and Orchestra, Op. 24

Samuel Barber, born March 9, 1910, at West Chester, Pennsylvania; died January 23, 1981, at New York City.

Premiere: April 9, 1948 in Boston’s Symphony Hall by soprano Eleanor Steber with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky conducting.

KSO Performance History: Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was first performed by the KSO on November 22, 1949 with Uta Graf, soprano, led by the KSO’s third Conductor, David Van Vactor. The most recent KSO performances occurred May 1 and 2, 2004 on the Chamber Classics Series with Katherine Erlandson Soroka, soprano. Music Director Lucas Richman conducted, then in his first season as the KSO’s seventh Conductor.

Instrumentation: in addition to soprano solo, flute (doubling on piccolo), oboe (doubling on English horn), clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, trumpet, triangle (optional, one note), harp, and strings.

Duration: 16 minutes.

            It seems that Knoxville struggled for some 50 years on how it might pay tangible, lasting tribute to its most widely-known literary son, James Agee (1909-55). In conjunction with scholarly forums, period photo exhibits, a concert of music inspired by his writing (including the present work), a dramatic production of All the Way Home (adapted from A Death in the Family), and a festival of films connected with his life and art (Agee wrote the screen play for, among other films, The African Queen, for which he received an Oscar nomination), Knoxville dedicated in April 2005 James Agee Park at the northwest corner of Laurel Avenue and James Agee (formerly Fifteenth) Street in the Fort Sanders neighborhood, only a block from the 1505 Highland Avenue address where, in summer 1915, as Agee would later write, “I lived. . .so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” The park is a contemplative place, even in fall when the nearby UT campus is bustling, just as Agee’s words, too, can have a calming effect on a soul in troubled times.

In January 1947, as his aunt Louise and father Roy both faced their mortality, Samuel Barber was overwhelmed reading an autobiographical sketch by Agee, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, that was first published in The Partisan Review in 1938 and later included as a prologue to Agee’s posthumously published autobiographical Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family (1957). Barber wrote years later: “[t]he summer evening [Agee] describes in his native Southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home” in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “Agee’s poem moved me deeply” and “my response was immediate and intense.” Barber completed a text in a few days based on Agee’s sketch and planned a setting for high voice and orchestra.

The following month, the American soprano Eleanor Steber commissioned Barber for a work, and he completed his Knoxville piece for soprano and full orchestra on April 4^th. Due to a prior commitment which kept him in Rome, Barber was unable to attend the premiere a year later, but the performance was well received. Steber was in fact moved by Agee’s words in much the same way as was the composer, exclaiming “[t]hat was exactly my childhood in Wheeling, West Virginia.”

            In 1949 while attending a rehearsal for a radio broadcast of this work by soprano Eileen Farrell and the CBS Orchestra conducted by Bernard Herrmann, Barber's original notion to score Knoxville for a chamber orchestra was rekindled. Encouraged by Farrell and colleague William Strickland, Barber quickly realized such a version and it was debuted in that form on April 1, 1950 at Dumbarton Oaks, the home of Robert Woods Bliss in Washington, D.C., with Farrell and a small orchestra of about twenty musicians conducted by Strickland. Barber published the score only in this form (in 1952), dedicated to his father.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 flows leisurely, the soprano imparting the conversational flow of Agee’s unaffected prose as the chamber orchestra gives atmospheric support, not only to the text, but also to everyday eventide surroundings: people going by, as well as horses and buggies, autos, streetcars, and “[t]he dry exalted noise of the locusts.”

Pictures at an Exhibition

 Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel, born March 7, 1875, at Cibourne; died December 28, 1937, at Paris.

Premiere: Originally composed by Mussorgsky as a piano suite in 1874, Ravel’s orchestration was premiered October 19, 1922 at the Paris Opéra on a concert series presented and conducted by Serge Koussevitzky who had commissioned Ravel to orchestrate the music.

KSO Performance History: This orchestration was first performed by the KSO October 16, 1973 led by Arpad Joo as he concluded his very first concert as the orchestra’s fourth Conductor. It was notably performed on two KSO programs at Knoxville Civic Auditorium presented by The 1982 World’s Fair, June 9 and 10, 1982 and September 22 and 23, 1982, led by the KSO’s fifth Conductor, Zoltan Rozsnyai. The KSO’s most recent performance occurred September 13, 2002, concluding the Gala Opening Concert of Kirk Trevor’s last season as the orchestra’s sixth Conductor.  

Instrumentation, as orchestrated by Maurice Ravel: 3 flutes (two doubling on piccolos), 3 oboes (one doubling on English horn), 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, alto saxophone, timpani, xylophone, snare drum, tamtam, triangle, whip, ratchet, cymbals, bass drum, glockenspiel, suspended cymbal, chimes, 2 harps, celesta, and strings.  

            Mussorgsky met Viktor Hartmann, a well-traveled St. Petersburg artist and architect, in 1870. They became such good friends that when Hartmann died unexpectedly in August 1873 of an aneurysm at age 39, Mussorgsky was taken aback, as was the music critic that had introduced them, Vladimir Stasov. These two helped organize a celebratory exhibition of more than 400 of Hartmann’s works at St. Petersburg’s Academy of Fine Arts in February and March 1874, some of the pictures displayed being loaned from Mussorgsky’s private collection. Mussorgsky visited the exhibition numerous times and, from June 2 through 22, composed a highly-emotive ten-movement piano suite inspired by the drawings and images he saw.

The piano suite was published posthumously in 1886, and its colorful and powerful music soon attracted (and still does) the interest of many musicians setting it for full orchestra. The orchestration by Maurice Ravel is a virtuoso piece by a master of orchestral color, the conductor Arturo Toscanini calling it “a textbook in orchestration.” That is exactly what Serge Koussevitzky hoped for when he commissioned Ravel to orchestrate the piece in 1922. The commission gave Koussevitzky sole conducting rights for a number of years and, when the orchestration appeared in print, it was by Koussevitzky’s publishing house, Editions Russes de Musique, rather than Ravel’s publisher, Durand. Koussevitzky was also the first to record Ravel’s orchestration in 1930 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he was Music Director from 1924 to 1949. Since its publication, Ravel’s is by far and away the orchestration of this music most often performed.

            The opening Promenade recurs in the piece, intended by the composer to depict his roving through the Hartmann exhibition. Its strong rhythm and asymmetrical meter resemble many traditional Russian melodies. The clumsy scurrying of The Gnome (Hartmann’s sketch, now lost, was of a gnome with crooked legs) is depicted by flurried tempos, lurching starts and unexpected stops. The connecting Promenade, about half as long as before, is now more pensive, leading to a dream-like medieval scene of The Old Castle, before which performs a troubadour, represented here in Ravel’s orchestration by the saxophone. The Promenade reappears even more briefly, but extroverted, as a bridge to the animated playing of children in the garden of the Tuileries in Paris. Bydlo, which is Polish for “cattle,” depicts the travails of a peasant navigating a deeply furrowed and muddied path with a heavily loaded, oxen-drawn cart with enormous, solid-wood wheels capable of keeping the load above the mud, but adding to the harsh burden of both beast and peasant. The music seems to carry the weight of the world, so one can only imagine today the hardship in the task depicted by this music. The Promenade reappears for a final time, halting and dark - although at least two later brief references to its melody are made – leading to a bright scherzino depicting Hartmann’s extant design sketch of costumes for The Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells used in an 1870 production of Trilby at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre.

With Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle (sometimes known as “Two Polish Jews, Rich and Poor”), we have two Hartmann pictures that were contributed by the composer to the 1874 exhibition. The opening grave, near-unison Andante reveals the rich, dignified Goldenberg, while the poorer, more talkative Schmuÿle is heard in the chattering of the high-pitched, muted trumpets. The Marketplace at Limoges, a town in central France, is another scherzo, as two women quarrel violently. This leads to The Catacombs, underground burial chambers in Paris from the Roman era. As we move in for a closer look at “the Dead in a Dead Language,” a brief fragment of the Promenade music can be heard. The Hut on Hen’s Legs, another Hartmann drawing that survives, is of a distinctively Russian-style clock in the shape of the abode of the fabled Russian flying-witch, Baba Yaga. A powerful and flighty scherzo feroce encases a central, mysterious Andante. Without pause, we confront The Great Gate of Kiev. This drawing by Hartmann won a national competition for the design of a monumental gate to commemorate Czar Alexander II’s narrow escape from an assassin’s bomb in 1866. The gate was never constructed. A broadly cast rondo that is easily the longest subject of these pictures, this finale builds toward a tremendous climax made ever more eloquent by a final cadence that comes to a dramatic near-standstill.

                      Notes by Rudy Ennis
© 2009 The Mozart Works

 Jami Rogers Biography

American soprano Jami Rogers-Anderson has been praised for her "flawless coloratura line" and for her "remarkably sweet voice."  She has performed extensively all over the United States, as well as Canada, Europe, and South America. Ms. Rogers-Anderson has performed extensively in the operas of Mozart, particularly as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, including productions at New York City Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, L’Opera de Montreal, Sarasota Opera, Michigan Opera Theater, as well as several others. Other Mozart roles include Servilia in La Clemenza di Tito with Opera Theater of St. Louis; Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro with Hawaii Opera, Aspasia in Mitridate with Wolf Trap Opera, and Zerlina in Don Giovanni with St. Barth’s Music Festival. 

Ms. Rogers-Anderson also appeared as Juliette in Romeo et Juliette with Hawaii Opera Theater, Cleveland Opera, and El Paso Opera; Sophie in Werther with Los Angeles Opera and Boston Lyric Opera; Adele in Die Fledermaus with Kentucky Opera and Opera Grand Rapids. She appeared in numerous performances with the New York City Opera, including Gilda in Rigoletto, Fido (the roller skating dog) in Britten’s Paul Bunyan – telecast on PBS’ Live from Lincoln Center, as well as Fire and The Nightingale in L’enfant et les Sortileges. 

Other roles include Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia with the Palm Beach Opera; Poucette in Manon at the Metropolitan Opera; Iris in The Tempest and Papagena with The Dallas Opera; Musetta in La Boheme and Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore with Knoxville Opera; Mabel in Pirates of Penzance with Cleveland Opera; Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos with Sarasota Opera; Marie in La Fille du Regiment and Counegonde in Candide with Lake George Opera; and Magnolia in Showboat with the Hattiesburg Meistersingers.    She also recently traveled to Paris to sing the high flying role of Hilda Mack in Has Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, under the baton of Roger Eppele for a concert, radio broadcast, and recording with L’Orchestre du Radio France.

 On the concert stage she was soprano soloist in a national NPR broadcast of Handel’s Messiah with the Atlanta Symphony under Robert Shaw; the Angel in Elijah at Carnegie Hall with the Orchestra of St. Lukes, and the soprano soloist in Poulenc’s Gloria with the Atlanta Youth Symphony both with Mr. Shaw conducting. Ms. Rogers-Anderson recently had the privilege to collaborate with Maestro Erich Kunzel in two concerts: Viennese Favorites with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a concert of waltzes with the Cincinnati Pops.   She has also performed Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the Savannah Symphony, Carmina Burana with the Knoxville City Ballet, as well as numerous concerts of operatic highlights. Ms. Rogers-Anderson has also performed in recital at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and with the New York Festival of Song at Weil Hall with Stephen Blier.

 Ms. Rogers-Anderson is the National Winner of the 1996 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and a 1995 winner of the Opera Index Awards in New York City, the recipient of the Hyndman Award for Professional Development from the Opera Theater of St. Louis, and first prize winner of the Young Patronesses of the Florida Grand Opera International Vocal Competition. 

 Ms. Rogers-Anderson earned her Bachelor of Music degree, graduating magna cum laude from Boston University, as well as receiving an Artist’s Diploma degree from Boston University’s Opera Institute, where she studied with renowned American soprano and teacher, Phyllis Curtin. She was privileged to attend the university on full scholarship for her entire tenure of study.

 As a teacher and clinician, Ms. Rogers-Anderson taught at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. She has also given recitals and masterclasses at State University of New York, Potsdam, at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, at Southern Mississippi,  as well as with the young artists of various opera companies. This year she begins as a professor of voice at Pellissippi State University in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, tenor Kevin Anderson, and their son Beckett.

Bill Williams Biography

Bill Williams, former co-anchor of Action 10 News, retired in December 2000 as one of East Tennessee's most highly respected broadcast journalists.

He was called back to the anchor desk for most of 2006 when his former replacement, Ted Hall left Channel Ten. Now, he has officially "retired" again, although Bill will still be seen on Channel 10 broadcasting some of his favorite projects.

Among those is "Monday's Child, the adoption program originated by Bill back in 1980. More than a thousand of the special needs children introduced on the program have found permanent homes and loving families.

Bill is also continuing his work with "Mission of Hope," an outreach program to aid the people trapped in the pockets of poverty in the mountains of rural Appalachia. The "Mission of Hope" began in 1996, in response to reports Bill had broadcast on the plight of the poor in the mountains.

He will also be seen with "Our Stories," the Emmy-nominated series of reports remembering some the most significant people and events seen on Channel 10 during the past half-century.

Of the many awards Bill has received from the broadcast industry and the community at large, among the most prized are the "Silver Circle Award" from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the Honorary Doctor of Divinity Degree conferred on him by Carson Newman College

Semi-retirement for Bill will continue to be far from "retiring." In addition to his continuing projects at Channel 10 he appears frequently before community and church groups. Still, he and his wife Wanda have more hours for their favorite activity - spending time with their three grandchildren.