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Image for BON VOYAGE! - Copy
BON VOYAGE!
featuring the 2025 Poland and Czech Republic Tour Orchestra

Sunday, July 13, 2025 | 1:00 pm

Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts

WELCOME

Good Afternoon!

Thank you so much for attending this concert by the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra. It is an honor to perform for you. The program we will present today and in Europe honors the traditional orchestral canon and reflects some of our country’s greatest composers. It is our hope that you will savor the special, vibrant music-making of our beloved youth orchestra. The musicians on stage are each wonderful young individuals who represent many backgrounds and, as young people do, pursue varied interests beyond music. Together, as an orchestra, they are a powerful and transcendent expression of what is good in the world. We believe that this American orchestra truly reflects the best qualities of our country.

We hope you enjoy our concert, and that the music we make and feelings we share today remain with you as fond memories of our time together. As we begin our journey, best wishes from your friends at the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra, and thank you for giving us this wonderful experience.

Carter Simmons, Artistic and Music Director

PROGRAM

BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824-1884)

         “Vltava” (“The Moldau”) from Ma Vlast (My Fatherland)

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) / Orch. Bright Sheng

Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2, “Black Swan”

SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981)

Essay No. 2 for Orchestra, Op. 17 (1942)

Intermission

PABLO de SARASATE (1844-1908) 

Carmen Fantasy, Op. 25

Clark Snavely, violin

EDWARD “DUKE” ELLINGTON (1899-1974) / Orch. Ron Collier 

“Lake” and “Giggling Rapids” from the Ballet The River

JOHN WILLIAMS (b. 1932)       

Adventures on Earth

MUSICIANS

FIRST VIOLIN

FIRST VIOLIN 
Clark Snavely, Concertmaster
Cecilia Koth, Concertmaster
Sofia Castanho-Bollinger, Concertmaster
Arisa Okamoto, Concertmaster 
Isabella Nichols 
Jasmine Storck 
Max Letellier 
Christianna Ebel 
Hans Hemann 
Caleb Endres 
Brynn Nelson 
Andrea Hanna 
Kayami Jackson 
Madeline Bingenheimer 
Zindzi Frederick 
Jenna Johnson 
Valkyrie Ladd 
Titus Veldhouse 

SECOND VIOLIN 
Ben Christiaansen 
Jennifer Hong 
Maia Cardew 
Mark Stein 
Aaron McGarry 
Flynn O’Rear 
Krish Vasudev 
Alexander Chen 
Yiwen Ma 
Lucas Labeau 
Brianna Cimoch 
Ipek Yilmaz 
Suraksha Kodgi 
Brady Ahler 
Michelle Drane 
Ava Kelly 
Aris Arvanetes 

VIOLA 
Sonya Wilhelm, Principal
Katelynn Lesinski 
Charlotte Stevenson 
Rem Leach 
Lauryn Klinger 
Alexandra Streit 
Spencer Laga 
Claire Fifarek 
Haley Burns 
Akilah Muhammad 

CELLO 
Noor Salameh, Principal
Gabrielle Peck 
Gunnar Conine 
Nathan Hansen 
Rebecca DeBoer 
Rylee Stelpflug 
Ella Smullen 
Carlos Recinos 
Emma Pingitore 

BASS 
Braden Sulok, Principal
Isabella McGinley, Principal
Benjamin Levin 
Ariana Smith 

HARP 
Maydine Bellot

PIANO and 
CELESTE
Lucas LaBeau

FLUTE
Sophie Gerew
Shreya Girish
Zackary Muñoz
Scotland Nicholson
Abhinay Reddy
Jane Tretheway

PICCOLO
Zackary Muñoz
Abhinay Reddy

OBOE
Abby Debbink 
Lydia Morency
Elisabeth Young 

ENGLISH HORN
Elisabeth Young 

CLARINET
Lilly Beane
Autumn Lee 
Rebecca Redlich 
Aaron Srok 
Sydney Stanford 

BASS CLARINET
Lilly Beane

BASSOON
Gavin Hansen
Presley Hansen 
Andrea Wisniewski 

HORN
Shaurya Bansal 
Mina Gates 
Eli Hoffmann 
Meera Rao 
Elijah Samuelson 
Peter Weyers 
Brooks Wisniewski 

TRUMPET
Milo Ascher 
Emmah Bagin 
Sarah Downes 
Oscar Endres 
Hudson Simmons 

TROMBONE
Gabriel Coutinho 
Erich Haefer 
Grace O’Connell 
Josie Sagan 

TUBA
Ryan Nelson

TIMPANI and PERCUSSION
Logan DeWaide 
Daniel Grady 
Kyler Katanik 
Isaac Visser

PROGRAM NOTES by Roger Ruggeri © 2023

Bedrich Smetana  
  b. March 2, 1824; Leitomischl, Bohemia; d. May 12, 1884; Prague
“Vltava” (“The Moldau”), from the Symphonic Cycle Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”)

The father of Czech identity in art music, Smetana spent the first thirty-odd years of his life speaking only the language of his country’s German dominators. Having shown exceptional talent as a child, Smetana became a formidable piano soloist; at age 21, he confided to his diary: “By the grace of God and with his help I shall one day be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition.” After some successful years in Sweden, he returned to a homeland that was generally apathetic to his goal of creating a national music. Undaunted, he devoted himself to learning the Czech language and to creating a musical celebration of Czech nationalism, a goal perhaps most successfully reached with his opera, The Bartered Bride (1866). 

On his way to these achievements, Smetana struggled for years as a young composer and piano virtuoso. Musically impressed by meeting Berlioz and Robert and Clara Schumann, his early maturity was decidedly influenced by a friendship with Franz Liszt, which began around 1840. After years of correspondence, Liszt sent the Czech composer some newly published scores of his symphonic poems; within a year, Smetana visited the famed pianist and composer in Weimar (September 1857). This contact with Liszt convinced Smetana that the future of music was involved with the expression of literary subjects through the radical new form of the symphonic poem.

It was in this realm that Smetana created his crowning symphonic achievement, a cycle of six related symphonic poems under the collective title of Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland,” or “My Country”). Calling it “the most heroic instrumental work since Beethoven,” John Clapham points out that they “extended the scope and purpose of the symphonic poem beyond the aims of any later composer.”

The second work of this set, “Vltava” (“The Moldau”) reflects the beauty of the Czech landscape. Of this work, composed November 20 - December 8, 1874 (and orchestrated in 1880), the composer wrote:

Two springs pour forth their streams in the shade of the Bohemian forest, the one warm and gushing, the other cold and tranquil. Their waves, joyfully flowing over their rocky beds, unite and sparkle in the morning sun. The forest brook, rushing on, becomes the River Moldau, which, with its waters speeding through Bohemia’s valleys, grows into a mighty stream. It flows through dense woods in which are heard the joyous sounds of the hunt, the notes of the hunter’s horn sounding ever nearer and nearer. It flows through emerald meadows and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dance. At night in its shining waves the wood and water nymphs hold their revels, and in these waves are reflected many a fortress and castle, witnesses of bygone splendor of chivalry and the vanished martial fame of days that are no more. At the Rapids of St. John the stream speeds on, winding its way through cataracts and hewing the path for its foaming waters through the rocky chasm into the broad river-bed in which it flows on in majestic calm toward Prague, welcomed by time-honored Vysehrad, to disappear from the poet’s gaze in the far distance.

Johannes Brahms
  b. May 7, 1833; Hamburg; d. April 3, 1897; Vienna
Intermezzo in A Major, Opus 118, No. 2 (“Black Swan”)

In 1892, Brahms wrote six piano pieces which he grouped together as Opus 118; this, his penultimate set of piano pieces, was first performed in London in January, 1894. Brahms generally applied the title Intermezzo to works of a smaller size and more neutral character. A notable exception to this is the second work of the group, the A-major Intermezzo, a more sizable composition with an unusually extensive amount of contrapuntal writing for a character piece. As always, Brahms disregards Lisztian virtuosity for its own sake, preferring instead to focus on poetic expressions.

In 2006, the Chinese-American composer, conductor, and pianist Bright Sheng was commissioned to contribute a work for the Seattle Symphony’s project “Hear music—the Sound of Starbucks.” He responded with an engaging orchestration of this Brahms Intermezzo, which Sheng entitled Black Swan. Born in Shanghai in 1955, Sheng has been living in the United States since 1982 and is a faculty member at the University of Michigan. In celebration of Gerard Schwarz’s twenty-six years as Music Director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 2010, Sheng added an orchestration of Opus 118, No. 1, to make a two-part work which he entitled Prelude and Black Swan.

Samuel Barber
  b. March 9, 1910; West Chester, PA; d. January 23, 1981; New York City
Essay No. 2 for Orchestra, Opus 17

If I’m writing for words, then I immerse myself in those words, and I let the music flow out of them. When I write an abstract piano sonata or concerto, I write what I feel. I’m not a self-conscious composer. One of the physical nurturing components that make my music sound as it does is that I live mostly in the country. I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens when I compose, I really haven’t the faintest idea.
                                  Samuel Barber (1971)
A man whose personal economy and clarity expressed itself in lyrically romantic music, Barber first developed the idea of creating a concise orchestral tone poem entitled Essay with his Opus 12 of 1937.  He returned to this mode of expression with the present work of 1941, and again in 1978 with a Third Essay, Op. 47; each new essay became larger in instrumentation and duration. 

The original Essay for Orchestra was introduced by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on a broadcast of November 5, 1938. Its success prompted Bruno Walter, who was also desiring to perform some new American music on his programs with the New York Philharmonic, to ask the rising young composer for a similar composition. Just before being inducted into the U.S. Army, Barber responded with the Essay No. 2. Walter and the Philharmonic premiereed it on April 16, 1942.

In a manner reminiscent of the literary form whose name it bears, the Second Essay develops from the expressive solo flute melody at its outset. A subsequent melody is advanced by violas and a third theme by the brass. Solo clarinet initiates a fugato subject derived from the first theme. Further melodic transformations reveal themselves as the music develops through varied textures on its way to a triumphal closing chorale.

Pablo Sarasate
  b. March 10, 1844; Pamplona, Spain; d. September 20, 1908; Biarritz
Carmen Fantasy, Op 25

A staple of the Romantic virtuoso’s repertoire was pyrotechnical variations on operatic themes well-known by the public. There are countless works in this genre for all instruments, but the ones which retain special validity are those which are based on operas still in the modern repertory. Certainly, one of the best examples of this type of work is Sarasate’s brilliant Carmen Fantasy, based on themes from Bizet’s beloved opera of 1875.

The foremost Spanish violinist of his day, Sarasate began study at the Paris Conservatory with Alard at the age of twelve. A prize student and promising composer, he embarked on a concert career which eventually carried him throughout the world. The Stradivarius which Sarasate played for the majority of his life, was given to him by Queen Isabella of Spain when he was still a lad. Sarasate was such a dominant figure that several contemporary composers dedicated works to him; notably those of Saint- Saëns (Concerto No. 1 and Symphonie Espagnole) and Bruch (Concerto No. 2 and the Scottish Fantasy).
Of Sarasate, Gustave Chouquet writes that his “distinguishing characteristics were not so much fire, force and passion, though of these he had an ample store, as purity of style, charm, brightness of tone, flexibility and extraordinary facility. He generally avoided the music of Paganini and his followers, partly for want of taste for it and partly because of the long stretches required, his hand being very small. He was long remembered for his rendering of the solos he wrote for himself and played so exquisitely, giving the spirit of Spanish dance translated into terms of the violin virtuoso.”

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
  b. April 29, 1899; Washington, D.C.; d. May 24; 1974; New York City
“Lake” and “Giggling Rapids,” from the Ballet The River

Often acclaimed as the most important composer in jazz history, Ellington gained the affectionate nickname of “Duke” because of his strikingly dignified manner. The son of pianists, Ellington began the study of piano at the age of seven. Developing from his early ragtime influences, he gathered a band of fine musicians around him and, by the late-1920s shared with Louis Armstrong the leadership of the jazz world from the throne room of the Cotton Club in Harlem. Not content to merely repeat the formulas which led to his success, Ellington continued to refine and expand his concepts. From the symphonic gestures contained in Black, Brown and Beige, a five-movement suite for his own band, he went on to write musical comedies, film scores (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959), and, in the last decade of his life, three large-scale liturgical works.

After considering the project for several years, Ellington composed The River in 1970. Written in collaboration with choreographer Alvin Ailey, it was first presented by the American Ballet Theatre at New York’s Lincoln Center on June 25, 1970. At that time, the music was introduced as “Seven Dances from a Work in Progress Entitled The River.” Five days after that premiere the ballet took the somewhat more extensive form of: “Spring [Prologue],” “Spring Run,” Meander,” “Giggling Rapids,” “Falls,” “Vortex,” “Lake,” “Mainstream (Riba),” “Two Cities,” “The Sea (Mother),” and “Spring [Epilogue].” Orchestrated by Ron Collier, this music also exists as a seven-movement Suite from The River. An allegory of human life from birth to death, this imaginary voyage down an African river bears the composer’s preface: “…of birth…of the well-spring of life…of reaffirmation…of the heavenly anticipation of rebirth…” 

After the lush scenic landscape of “The Lake,” one of the best-known excerpts from this music is the rapid jazz waltz “Giggling Rapids.” After a piano introduction performed by Lucas LaBeau, the winds advance this jazzy idea, punctuated by brass figures and warm string passages.

John T. Williams
  b. February 8, 1932; Flushing, NY
Adventures on Earth

Among the foremost contemporary composers of symphonic film scores is the redoubtable John Williams, a man who simultaneously produces concert works and exciting movie music. Drawing upon heroic elements within the modern Romantic tradition, Williams combines contemporary techniques with time-honored musical gestures as he creates his particularly effective film scores, including the Superman series, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars series and his evocative music for the extraterrestrial visitations of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. of 1982.

Particularly stirring and uplifting was the music that Williams created for E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial). It gained legendary status in Hollywood when it became known that Steven Spielberg elected to cut the film to fit the natural flow of Williams’s music. About twenty years after the film’s creation, Williams decided to create a concise tone poem, entitled Adventures on Earth. Utilizing music from the memorable bicycle chase and final scenes, the work employs themes and motives associated with adventure, flying and wonder.

Image for BON VOYAGE! - Copy
BON VOYAGE!
featuring the 2025 Poland and Czech Republic Tour Orchestra

Sunday, July 13, 2025 | 1:00 pm

Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts

WELCOME

Good Afternoon!

Thank you so much for attending this concert by the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra. It is an honor to perform for you. The program we will present today and in Europe honors the traditional orchestral canon and reflects some of our country’s greatest composers. It is our hope that you will savor the special, vibrant music-making of our beloved youth orchestra. The musicians on stage are each wonderful young individuals who represent many backgrounds and, as young people do, pursue varied interests beyond music. Together, as an orchestra, they are a powerful and transcendent expression of what is good in the world. We believe that this American orchestra truly reflects the best qualities of our country.

We hope you enjoy our concert, and that the music we make and feelings we share today remain with you as fond memories of our time together. As we begin our journey, best wishes from your friends at the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra, and thank you for giving us this wonderful experience.

Carter Simmons, Artistic and Music Director

PROGRAM

BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824-1884)

         “Vltava” (“The Moldau”) from Ma Vlast (My Fatherland)

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) / Orch. Bright Sheng

Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2, “Black Swan”

SAMUEL BARBER (1910-1981)

Essay No. 2 for Orchestra, Op. 17 (1942)

Intermission

PABLO de SARASATE (1844-1908) 

Carmen Fantasy, Op. 25

Clark Snavely, violin

EDWARD “DUKE” ELLINGTON (1899-1974) / Orch. Ron Collier 

“Lake” and “Giggling Rapids” from the Ballet The River

JOHN WILLIAMS (b. 1932)       

Adventures on Earth

MUSICIANS

FIRST VIOLIN

FIRST VIOLIN 
Clark Snavely, Concertmaster
Cecilia Koth, Concertmaster
Sofia Castanho-Bollinger, Concertmaster
Arisa Okamoto, Concertmaster 
Isabella Nichols 
Jasmine Storck 
Max Letellier 
Christianna Ebel 
Hans Hemann 
Caleb Endres 
Brynn Nelson 
Andrea Hanna 
Kayami Jackson 
Madeline Bingenheimer 
Zindzi Frederick 
Jenna Johnson 
Valkyrie Ladd 
Titus Veldhouse 

SECOND VIOLIN 
Ben Christiaansen 
Jennifer Hong 
Maia Cardew 
Mark Stein 
Aaron McGarry 
Flynn O’Rear 
Krish Vasudev 
Alexander Chen 
Yiwen Ma 
Lucas Labeau 
Brianna Cimoch 
Ipek Yilmaz 
Suraksha Kodgi 
Brady Ahler 
Michelle Drane 
Ava Kelly 
Aris Arvanetes 

VIOLA 
Sonya Wilhelm, Principal
Katelynn Lesinski 
Charlotte Stevenson 
Rem Leach 
Lauryn Klinger 
Alexandra Streit 
Spencer Laga 
Claire Fifarek 
Haley Burns 
Akilah Muhammad 

CELLO 
Noor Salameh, Principal
Gabrielle Peck 
Gunnar Conine 
Nathan Hansen 
Rebecca DeBoer 
Rylee Stelpflug 
Ella Smullen 
Carlos Recinos 
Emma Pingitore 

BASS 
Braden Sulok, Principal
Isabella McGinley, Principal
Benjamin Levin 
Ariana Smith 

HARP 
Maydine Bellot

PIANO and 
CELESTE
Lucas LaBeau

FLUTE
Sophie Gerew
Shreya Girish
Zackary Muñoz
Scotland Nicholson
Abhinay Reddy
Jane Tretheway

PICCOLO
Zackary Muñoz
Abhinay Reddy

OBOE
Abby Debbink 
Lydia Morency
Elisabeth Young 

ENGLISH HORN
Elisabeth Young 

CLARINET
Lilly Beane
Autumn Lee 
Rebecca Redlich 
Aaron Srok 
Sydney Stanford 

BASS CLARINET
Lilly Beane

BASSOON
Gavin Hansen
Presley Hansen 
Andrea Wisniewski 

HORN
Shaurya Bansal 
Mina Gates 
Eli Hoffmann 
Meera Rao 
Elijah Samuelson 
Peter Weyers 
Brooks Wisniewski 

TRUMPET
Milo Ascher 
Emmah Bagin 
Sarah Downes 
Oscar Endres 
Hudson Simmons 

TROMBONE
Gabriel Coutinho 
Erich Haefer 
Grace O’Connell 
Josie Sagan 

TUBA
Ryan Nelson

TIMPANI and PERCUSSION
Logan DeWaide 
Daniel Grady 
Kyler Katanik 
Isaac Visser

PROGRAM NOTES by Roger Ruggeri © 2023

Bedrich Smetana  
  b. March 2, 1824; Leitomischl, Bohemia; d. May 12, 1884; Prague
“Vltava” (“The Moldau”), from the Symphonic Cycle Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”)

The father of Czech identity in art music, Smetana spent the first thirty-odd years of his life speaking only the language of his country’s German dominators. Having shown exceptional talent as a child, Smetana became a formidable piano soloist; at age 21, he confided to his diary: “By the grace of God and with his help I shall one day be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition.” After some successful years in Sweden, he returned to a homeland that was generally apathetic to his goal of creating a national music. Undaunted, he devoted himself to learning the Czech language and to creating a musical celebration of Czech nationalism, a goal perhaps most successfully reached with his opera, The Bartered Bride (1866). 

On his way to these achievements, Smetana struggled for years as a young composer and piano virtuoso. Musically impressed by meeting Berlioz and Robert and Clara Schumann, his early maturity was decidedly influenced by a friendship with Franz Liszt, which began around 1840. After years of correspondence, Liszt sent the Czech composer some newly published scores of his symphonic poems; within a year, Smetana visited the famed pianist and composer in Weimar (September 1857). This contact with Liszt convinced Smetana that the future of music was involved with the expression of literary subjects through the radical new form of the symphonic poem.

It was in this realm that Smetana created his crowning symphonic achievement, a cycle of six related symphonic poems under the collective title of Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland,” or “My Country”). Calling it “the most heroic instrumental work since Beethoven,” John Clapham points out that they “extended the scope and purpose of the symphonic poem beyond the aims of any later composer.”

The second work of this set, “Vltava” (“The Moldau”) reflects the beauty of the Czech landscape. Of this work, composed November 20 - December 8, 1874 (and orchestrated in 1880), the composer wrote:

Two springs pour forth their streams in the shade of the Bohemian forest, the one warm and gushing, the other cold and tranquil. Their waves, joyfully flowing over their rocky beds, unite and sparkle in the morning sun. The forest brook, rushing on, becomes the River Moldau, which, with its waters speeding through Bohemia’s valleys, grows into a mighty stream. It flows through dense woods in which are heard the joyous sounds of the hunt, the notes of the hunter’s horn sounding ever nearer and nearer. It flows through emerald meadows and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dance. At night in its shining waves the wood and water nymphs hold their revels, and in these waves are reflected many a fortress and castle, witnesses of bygone splendor of chivalry and the vanished martial fame of days that are no more. At the Rapids of St. John the stream speeds on, winding its way through cataracts and hewing the path for its foaming waters through the rocky chasm into the broad river-bed in which it flows on in majestic calm toward Prague, welcomed by time-honored Vysehrad, to disappear from the poet’s gaze in the far distance.

Johannes Brahms
  b. May 7, 1833; Hamburg; d. April 3, 1897; Vienna
Intermezzo in A Major, Opus 118, No. 2 (“Black Swan”)

In 1892, Brahms wrote six piano pieces which he grouped together as Opus 118; this, his penultimate set of piano pieces, was first performed in London in January, 1894. Brahms generally applied the title Intermezzo to works of a smaller size and more neutral character. A notable exception to this is the second work of the group, the A-major Intermezzo, a more sizable composition with an unusually extensive amount of contrapuntal writing for a character piece. As always, Brahms disregards Lisztian virtuosity for its own sake, preferring instead to focus on poetic expressions.

In 2006, the Chinese-American composer, conductor, and pianist Bright Sheng was commissioned to contribute a work for the Seattle Symphony’s project “Hear music—the Sound of Starbucks.” He responded with an engaging orchestration of this Brahms Intermezzo, which Sheng entitled Black Swan. Born in Shanghai in 1955, Sheng has been living in the United States since 1982 and is a faculty member at the University of Michigan. In celebration of Gerard Schwarz’s twenty-six years as Music Director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 2010, Sheng added an orchestration of Opus 118, No. 1, to make a two-part work which he entitled Prelude and Black Swan.

Samuel Barber
  b. March 9, 1910; West Chester, PA; d. January 23, 1981; New York City
Essay No. 2 for Orchestra, Opus 17

If I’m writing for words, then I immerse myself in those words, and I let the music flow out of them. When I write an abstract piano sonata or concerto, I write what I feel. I’m not a self-conscious composer. One of the physical nurturing components that make my music sound as it does is that I live mostly in the country. I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens when I compose, I really haven’t the faintest idea.
                                  Samuel Barber (1971)
A man whose personal economy and clarity expressed itself in lyrically romantic music, Barber first developed the idea of creating a concise orchestral tone poem entitled Essay with his Opus 12 of 1937.  He returned to this mode of expression with the present work of 1941, and again in 1978 with a Third Essay, Op. 47; each new essay became larger in instrumentation and duration. 

The original Essay for Orchestra was introduced by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on a broadcast of November 5, 1938. Its success prompted Bruno Walter, who was also desiring to perform some new American music on his programs with the New York Philharmonic, to ask the rising young composer for a similar composition. Just before being inducted into the U.S. Army, Barber responded with the Essay No. 2. Walter and the Philharmonic premiereed it on April 16, 1942.

In a manner reminiscent of the literary form whose name it bears, the Second Essay develops from the expressive solo flute melody at its outset. A subsequent melody is advanced by violas and a third theme by the brass. Solo clarinet initiates a fugato subject derived from the first theme. Further melodic transformations reveal themselves as the music develops through varied textures on its way to a triumphal closing chorale.

Pablo Sarasate
  b. March 10, 1844; Pamplona, Spain; d. September 20, 1908; Biarritz
Carmen Fantasy, Op 25

A staple of the Romantic virtuoso’s repertoire was pyrotechnical variations on operatic themes well-known by the public. There are countless works in this genre for all instruments, but the ones which retain special validity are those which are based on operas still in the modern repertory. Certainly, one of the best examples of this type of work is Sarasate’s brilliant Carmen Fantasy, based on themes from Bizet’s beloved opera of 1875.

The foremost Spanish violinist of his day, Sarasate began study at the Paris Conservatory with Alard at the age of twelve. A prize student and promising composer, he embarked on a concert career which eventually carried him throughout the world. The Stradivarius which Sarasate played for the majority of his life, was given to him by Queen Isabella of Spain when he was still a lad. Sarasate was such a dominant figure that several contemporary composers dedicated works to him; notably those of Saint- Saëns (Concerto No. 1 and Symphonie Espagnole) and Bruch (Concerto No. 2 and the Scottish Fantasy).
Of Sarasate, Gustave Chouquet writes that his “distinguishing characteristics were not so much fire, force and passion, though of these he had an ample store, as purity of style, charm, brightness of tone, flexibility and extraordinary facility. He generally avoided the music of Paganini and his followers, partly for want of taste for it and partly because of the long stretches required, his hand being very small. He was long remembered for his rendering of the solos he wrote for himself and played so exquisitely, giving the spirit of Spanish dance translated into terms of the violin virtuoso.”

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
  b. April 29, 1899; Washington, D.C.; d. May 24; 1974; New York City
“Lake” and “Giggling Rapids,” from the Ballet The River

Often acclaimed as the most important composer in jazz history, Ellington gained the affectionate nickname of “Duke” because of his strikingly dignified manner. The son of pianists, Ellington began the study of piano at the age of seven. Developing from his early ragtime influences, he gathered a band of fine musicians around him and, by the late-1920s shared with Louis Armstrong the leadership of the jazz world from the throne room of the Cotton Club in Harlem. Not content to merely repeat the formulas which led to his success, Ellington continued to refine and expand his concepts. From the symphonic gestures contained in Black, Brown and Beige, a five-movement suite for his own band, he went on to write musical comedies, film scores (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959), and, in the last decade of his life, three large-scale liturgical works.

After considering the project for several years, Ellington composed The River in 1970. Written in collaboration with choreographer Alvin Ailey, it was first presented by the American Ballet Theatre at New York’s Lincoln Center on June 25, 1970. At that time, the music was introduced as “Seven Dances from a Work in Progress Entitled The River.” Five days after that premiere the ballet took the somewhat more extensive form of: “Spring [Prologue],” “Spring Run,” Meander,” “Giggling Rapids,” “Falls,” “Vortex,” “Lake,” “Mainstream (Riba),” “Two Cities,” “The Sea (Mother),” and “Spring [Epilogue].” Orchestrated by Ron Collier, this music also exists as a seven-movement Suite from The River. An allegory of human life from birth to death, this imaginary voyage down an African river bears the composer’s preface: “…of birth…of the well-spring of life…of reaffirmation…of the heavenly anticipation of rebirth…” 

After the lush scenic landscape of “The Lake,” one of the best-known excerpts from this music is the rapid jazz waltz “Giggling Rapids.” After a piano introduction performed by Lucas LaBeau, the winds advance this jazzy idea, punctuated by brass figures and warm string passages.

John T. Williams
  b. February 8, 1932; Flushing, NY
Adventures on Earth

Among the foremost contemporary composers of symphonic film scores is the redoubtable John Williams, a man who simultaneously produces concert works and exciting movie music. Drawing upon heroic elements within the modern Romantic tradition, Williams combines contemporary techniques with time-honored musical gestures as he creates his particularly effective film scores, including the Superman series, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars series and his evocative music for the extraterrestrial visitations of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. of 1982.

Particularly stirring and uplifting was the music that Williams created for E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial). It gained legendary status in Hollywood when it became known that Steven Spielberg elected to cut the film to fit the natural flow of Williams’s music. About twenty years after the film’s creation, Williams decided to create a concise tone poem, entitled Adventures on Earth. Utilizing music from the memorable bicycle chase and final scenes, the work employs themes and motives associated with adventure, flying and wonder.