Concert Series III
January 2012
Friday, January 27, SOU Recital Hall, Ashland, 7:30 pm
Saturday, January 28, Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater, Medford, 7:30
pm
Sunday, January 29, GPHS Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass, 3 pm
Season Sponsor
Jim Collier
Soloist Accomodations
shland Springs Hotel
Britten: Four Sea Interludes
from Peter Grimes
Françaix: L’horloge de Flore (Flower Clock) for oboe and orchestra
Satie, arr. Debussy: Gymnopédies No. 1 and 3 for oboe and orchestra
Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3, “Scottish”
Conductor Martin Majkut will give a FREE pre-concert talk one hour before each performance.
Free ticket vouchers for students
Program Notes
Click here for Program Notes Especially for Young People [PDF] by Nancy Golden
Neil Tatman, Oboe
“. . . emotional and technical brilliance!”
The Arizona Republic
Oboist Neil Tatman comes to us from Tucson, where he joined the full-time faculty of the University of Arizona School of Music in 1999. He leads at least four lives–as teacher, as guest oboe soloist, as chamber musician, and as orchestral oboist.
Most recently, in 2011 he was appointed principal oboist for the Reno Philharmonic. He performed as principal oboist for the Sacramento Symphony from 1978 to 1996, continues to play principal oboe for the Arizona Opera Orchestra and associate principal for the Carmel Bach Festival. Last year he was recognized for his thirty years of continuous service as principal oboist for the Music in the Mountains Festival in Nevada City, California, where he often performs as featured soloist.
An enthusiast for new musical composition, Dr. Tatman has collaborated in many world premiere performances with the symphony orchestras in Sacramento, San Diego, Tucson, Reno, and San Francisco; with chamber groups at Arizona Musicfest, Indiana University, and the International Double Reed Society; and as a member of the Arizona Wind Quintet.
Before his move to Tucson, he taught at The University of the Pacific and California State University-Sacramento. He grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and completed his graduate degrees at Indiana University, where he studied with Ray Still, John Mack. Marc Lifschey, and Joseph Robinson, and for English horn, with Thomas Stacy.
In addition to his busy professional lives, Dr. Tatman shares a fifth and lively life with his wife, violinist Mutsuko Ikenochi Tatman, and their eight-year-old identical twin daughters.
Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes (1945)
Benjamin Britten ~ England, 1913-1976
His love of the sea and fascination with England’s rugged fishing communities run like the tides through the Four Sea Interludes which Britten designed to link the scenes in his opera, Peter Grimes. His goal for the opera was “to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea.” He did so with a magnificent eloquence that re-established opera in England. His vision came directly from his experience of life on the Suffolk coast. To anyone who has lived on the Oregon coast, his music rings exquisitely true.
Britten began composing seriously at ten and also became a polished pianist and conductor. When he was twenty-three, he met Peter Pears, the tenor who became his life-partner and professional collaborator. A man whose Christianity led him to abhor war and fascism, Britten left England for America in 1939, largely because he was so deeply disillusioned by the war that was engulfing Europe.
In America he found the best of all possible mentors, the legendary conductor, Serge Koussevitsky, who commissioned Peter Grimes. Britten is said to have “found himself” here, and, ironically, his English roots, as well. In 1942, he and Pears returned to England. They settled in a coastal village, organized festivals to showcase their work, and together and separately, created a wealth of diverse and lasting music. Many a child worldwide has first met classical music through Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
The titles of the four Interludes are self-explanatory: in Dawn, a new sun shimmers over a flat gray sea; in Sunday Morning, the bright sound of church bells travels clearly across the water; in Moonlight, deep swells rock the darkness; and finally, in Storm, the sea flings the full force of its fury against one small boat. Britten used lavish percussion in the Interludes--timpani, side and tenor drums, tam-tam and gong, cymbals, tambourine, celeste, xylophone, and harp–but no chimes. He created the bell sounds with horns and high woodwinds.
The Flower Clock [L’horloge de Flore] (1959)
Jean Françaix ~ France, 1912-1997
With The Flower Clock, we celebrate the one hundredth birthday of one of France’s most popular contemporary concert pianists and composers, Jean Françaix. Born just a year before Britten, Françaix conceived an entirely different music. On the one hand, says Music Director Martin Majkut, “there are the raw natural forces of Britten’s Sea Interludes, and, on the other hand, the idyllic and idealized celestial-like pastures of France. It is a juxtaposition of an environment where one has to fight to survive with another where everything is plentiful and effortless.”
In The Flower Clock, Françaix’style is quintessentially French, light and airy, elegant, pleasurable, accessible. The subject is the luxuriously quaint notion, first suggested by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus in 1751, that a circular pattern of living plants whose flowers open at different times of day could function as a clock. The idea was fashionable for a while in the great gardens of the 19th Century. Nobody expected real timekeeping; the habits of living plants are far too variable for such reliability.
The Flower Clock is soloist Neil Tatman’s favorite oboe concerto. “I love this piece very much,” he says, because it is a “gold mine of joyful movements” and it brings out the “very best of the modern French oboe’s musical personalities ...I feel this is my favorite oboe concert of all time.” Françaix wrote seven vignettes, for seven flowers, and carefully labeled each movement with its hour of blossoming. Be forewarned, however. The composer was known for his sense of humor, and not all the flowers bloom when he says they should. Citing the Night Blooming Cereus plants in his own garden, Dr. Tatman advises against trying to match up flowers and times. Far better, he says, to just “sit back and enjoy a beautiful experience.”
Gymnopédies No.1 and 3, arr. Debussy (1888)
Erik Satie ~ France, 1866-1925
Working a generation earlier, it was Satie, another Frenchman, who according to Debussy, anticipated most of the advances of 20th Century music, from organized total chromaticism to minimalism. Nevertheless, said Debussy, “He was a gentle medieval musician lost in this century.” A man of many contrasts, he wrote delicious melodies, sweet and unbelievably lyrical, while at the same time casting himself as the naughty boy of the Paris night club scene. He constantly reinvented his public image, designing his costume to represent his current self image: bourgeois-functionary-with-bowler-hat, priest’s habit, “Velvet Gentleman.” He started his own church, with himself as the only member. He wrote successfully for major cultural journals. He was deemed “worthless” by the Paris Conservatoire, which he, in turn, likened to “a sort of local penitentiary.” Even on his earliest scores, he scorned the usual directions (allegro, andante) for more colorful instructions: “Light as an egg,” “With astonishment,” “Work it out yourself.”
Satie put together a sparse livelihood conducting the orchestras at the notorious Le Chat Noir cabaret, and later for the Auberge de Clos, both popular artist hangouts where he knew all the avant garde of his post-impressionist day–painters, writers, sculptors, poets, dancers–as well as musicians like Ravel and Debussy. He influenced the Cubists and the Dadaists; he worked in ballet; he invented new scales and new harmonies. He played with light and shadow. His work was simple, lyrical, and because he rejected the classical tradition of development, often quite short. He wrote the Gymnopédies as piano solos, inspired by Flaubert’s novel, Salammbo. Ten years later, in 1897, Debussy orchestrated them for orchestra and oboe.
Symphony No. 3, A Minor, Op. 56 “Scottish” (1842)
Felix Mendelssohn ~ Germany, 1809-1847
Music Director Majkut calls Mendelssohn “a divinely gifted genius, effortless in his writing, endlessly playful and fundamentally optimistic.” He is thought by many to have been more of a prodigy than Mozart, reaching in his teens the level of music maturity that Mozart achieved in his early twenties. Certainly he led a happier and easier life, born to wealth and nurtured by the intelligentsia of Berlin. He was a talented painter, a fine writer, a brilliant conversationalist in four languages, the happily married father of four children. As the most celebrated conductor in Europe, he retrieved Bach’s music from obscurity and promoted it with persistence. Goethe, Chopin, and Liszt were among his close friends. Historians label him an “impressionistic conservative, a romantic steeped in classic tradition.”
Mendelssohn traveled incessantly for the sheer pleasure of it. He made several grand tours of Europe, one lasting several years, and often visited England, where he enjoyed celebrity status. Of an evening at the palace, he would accompany the young Queen Victoria while she sang his songs. He often wrote music about his travels; his 1829 trip to Scotland produced two masterpieces, Overture, The Hebrides and Symphony No. 3. In a letter home he described the exact moment of inspiration for the symphony: “We went, in the deep twilight, to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved ... The adjoining chapel is now roofless; grass and ivy grow abundantly in it; and before the ruined altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything around is broken and moldering, and the bright sky shines in. I believe I found the beginning of my Scotch Symphony there today.”
And indeed, he opened the work with the A minor phrase that flashed into his mind when he first saw the castle. Critics still argue about how Scotch the music might be. Shortly after his Scotland journey, Mendelssohn declared, “No national music for me! Ten thousand devils take all nationality!” Although it quotes no folk tunes directly, many feel the sound is clearly Scottish. On the other hand, Robert Schumann praised it extravagantly for its accurate images of Italy. Erik Satie might instruct us to listen for ourselves!
-- Nancy Golden