Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra

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Concert Series II

November 2009

8:00p Friday, November 6, SOU Recital Hall, Ashland
8:00p Saturday, November 7, Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater, Medford
3:00p Sunday November 8, GPHS Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass

Rhett Bender, Saxophone

Saxophonist Rhett Bender is an active soloist and clinician who performs and presents master classes for the World Saxophone Congress, Chengdu China International Contemporary Music Festival, Monta Saxophone Festival, and several others.In 1998 he won first prize in the prestigious Ladies Musical Club of Seattle's Debut Tour Competition, and in 1995, as a founding member of the Athens Saxophone Quartet (now the Globe Saxophone Quartet), he won first prize in the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors Chamber Music competition. He is a founding member of the Siskiyou Saxophone Quartet, whose tours of Mexico and China have prompted dozens of new works for saxophone quartet. His trio Trillium, with hornist Jody Schmidt and pianist Alexander Tutunov, recently played in Guiyan and Sichuan Provinces in China, as well as in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He directs the sixteen-member Siskiyou Saxophone Orchestra, which toured Yantai and Shanghai, China last summer.

Dr.Bender is a Yamaha performing artist and clinician. He is Professor of Music and Graduate Coordinator at Southern Oregon University, where he also directs the summertime Siskiyou Saxophone Workshop and the Ashland Chamber Music Workshop.

Visit Rhett Bender's website

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Terry Longshore, Percussion

Maracas soloist Terry Longshore is well known in the world of professional percussionists as a performer, composer, and educator. He has performed internationally and throughout the United States, both as soloist and with such ensembles as the percussion duo Skin and Bones, the multi-media quintet Sonoluminescence, the flute/percussion duo Caballito Negro, and the flamenco ensemble Dúo Flamenco. He has performed locally for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Britt Festivals, and his international festival performances have included Bang on a Can Festival in New York, the Festival of New American Music, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series, and Cycle of Percussion at the National Center of the Arts in Mexico City.

He has recorded with composers Mark Applebaum and William Kraft, and publishes his own work through Go Fish Music. He is currently Associate Professor of Music and Director of Percussion Studies at Southern Oregon University. He is a Yamaha Performing Artist and an artist endorser for Remo drumheads, Vic Firth sticks and mallets, and Zildjian cymbals.

Visit Terry Longshore's website

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Symphony No. 20 in D, K. 133 (1772)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- Austria, 1756-1791

Mozart was six when he wrote his first menuett, nine when he wrote his first symphony, and all of sixteen when he wrote Symphony No. 20. He was, of course, a true prodigy--equally expert at piano, violin, and composition--but he also possessed knowledge of the world far beyond his years. By the time he turned sixteen, he had worked in Vienna, the music capital of the world; Munich and most of the other large cities in Germany; Brussels; Paris; London; and Amsterdam. Plus, he had just come home to Salzburg from his third working tour to Italy. He had observed a wealth of life styles, performed for royalty, and learned the tricks of traveling on the cheap. He was as rich in experience as he was in talent. As a result, "Mozart's music is at once easy and hard to listen to: easy, because of its grace, its never-ending melody, its clear and perfect organization; hard, because of its depth, its subtlety, its passion." (Schonberg)

Three "hammer blow" chords open the symphony, reflecting the operatic overtures Mozart had just heard in Italy. In contrast, the first theme repeats at the end of the movement with soft springs doubled by trumpets. The serenade-like second movement is rich in melody, pairing a solo flute with the first violins. The strings play with mutes, and the basses play pizzicatto. The third movement is a traditional minuet, and the finale is a long jig-like dance.

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Fantasia for Soprano Saxophone & Chamber Orchestra (1959)
Heitor Villa-Lobos -- Brazil, 1887-1959

The most famous of all South American composers, Villa-Lobos created a unique language, "European music spoken with a strong Brazilian accent" (Duarte). "My music is natural," he said, "like a waterfall." His output was enormous, more than 2,500 works, and what he wrote he could play, no matter what the instrument. Except for a handful of childhood lessons on cello, clarinet, and guitar, he was completely self-taught and proud of it: "One foot in the academy and you are changed forever." He told friends, "I learned music from the popular musicians, the dancers and the percussionists of Carnaval, from the sound of the streets of Rio and from nature. So for me there are no boundaries between classical and popular music." As a young adult he traveled extensively as a guitarist in the hinterlands of Brazil, and played with the chõroes (itinerant folk-musical bands) of Rio de Janerio. He spent most of the 1920s in Paris, where he formed lifelong friendships with many of the artistic luminaries of the day--Andrés Segovia, Artur Rubinstein, and such composers as Milhaud, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Copland.

One of his great interpreters, guitarist Julian Bream, wrote, "Villa-Lobos was larger than life, quite extraordinary ... He wore loud checked shirts, smoked a cigar ... but he had a great heart. His music will endure because of its joy." This short, singing concerto is a delightful example. Its blend of popular and classical ideas, free-flowing melodies, and infectious rhythms combine to showcase the lyrical qualities of the saxophone in the irrepressible style of Villa-Lobos.

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Pataruco: Concerto for Venezuelan Maracas and Orchestra (1999)
Ricardo Lorenz -- Venezuela, 1961-

The prominent Venezuelan Ricardo Lorenz is one of that charmed handful of contemporary composers who achieves success in his lifetime--he receives frequent commissions from major orchestras and at any one time, somewhere in the world, several of his works are in performance. He currently teaches composition at Michigan State University.

For Lorenz, "What stands between composing music and the world feels like a void that I simultaneously crave and loathe ... Inside the void I care only about musical flow, elegance of gesture, rhythmic intricacy, and unexpected harmonic shifts. Outside of the void I strive to evoke human drama through music, often fantasizing that I can be an agent of change or that, in the least, my compositions are imaginary solutions to real problems ..."

Speaking of Pataruco, he says, "I admit, the idea sounds preposterous at first. A concerto for maracas and orchestra? You have to be kidding! I guess that's why I titled this work Pataruco ... In Venezuelan slang, Pataruco is the nickname given to someone or something provocative and cocky ... Playing the maracas in Venezuela has developed into a highly virtuosic art form ... As far as the music is concerned, I did not aim at sounding authentic ... I did not intend for Pataruco to sound like Venezuelan folk music. Instead, while the maracas do play typical gestures, the orchestra serves as a sonic quilt which wraps around the kaleidoscope of patterns created by the maracas, at times responding to it and at other times teasing it."

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Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 (1812)
Ludwig van Beethoven -- Germany, 1770-1827

For Beethoven music was "a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy." Ever the contrarian, he was a humanist in an era of unquestioned religious doctrine; a republican in an age of princes, kings, and clashing empires. Too much an outsider to expect acceptance, he nevertheless achieved enormous musical success, simply because he wrote music that was too eloquent to ignore--the result, he said, of "tones that sound, and roar, and storm around me until I have set them down in notes." And the storms were mighty in 1812. He was outraged by Napoleon's imperial march through Europe, hopeful that a new treatment might cure his deafness, and almost giddy with the anticipation of at last finding true love. All too soon, his deafness would deepen and his lady would turn him down. His only satisfaction would be Napoleon's crushing defeat in Russia. When he premiered the Seventh Symphony in 1813, he dedicated the concert for the benefit of wounded Austrian and Bavarian soldiers.

Rehearsals did not begin smoothly. Beethoven's hearing loss made him a difficult conductor to follow, and as journalist Franz Glögg reported, the violinists refused to play a passage that they considered "incapable of performance." But Beethoven begged them to practice the parts at home; they did, and "the next day ... the passage went excellently, and the gentlemen themselves seemed to rejoice that they had given Beethoven the pleasure." According to eye witnesses, the premiere met with "almost ecstatic" applause.

Because of its driving, infectious rhythms, Wagner called this symphony "the apotheosis of dance." Speaking of the fourth movement, musicologist Charles O'Connell agreed: "Here the fundamental, the primal source of all music--rhythm--holds complete sway. There is an almost savage, primitive joy in these measures; a fierce exaltation of the purely physical that could be expressed only through rhythm." Paul Grabbe suggests these notes:

-- Nancy Golden

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