RVSO CD
"Best of the Best"
Click here for audio samples
Concert Series III
January 2010
8:00p Friday, January 22, SOU Recital Hall, Ashland
8:00p Saturday, January 23, Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater, Medford
3:00p Sunday, January 24, GPHS Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass
Year of the Search
Guest Conductor
Darko Butorac
Click here for bioDarko Butorac
Darko
Darko Butorac began his tenure as Music Director of the Missoula Symphony
Orchestra this season, and also in 2009, served as Principal Conductor of
the Northwest Mahler Festival in Seattle. His inspired performances,
imaginative programming and passion for working with musicians have earned
him international acclaim.
Butorac is the 2004 Grand Prize Winner of the Fourth Vakbtang Jordania International Conducting Competition where he was selected out of24 competitors from 17 different countries for the Gold Medal and Grand Prix. He also was awarded the Audience Favorite Prize. This led to professional engagements across three continents during the 2006-2008 seasons.
Throughout his career, Butorac has worked with such orchestras as the National Ans Centre Orchestra in Onawa, the Trondheim Symphony in Norway, the Mendoza Symphony in Argentina, the Xiamen Philharmonic in China, the Kharkov Symphony Orchestra and Kharkov Philharmonic in the Ukraine and the Canton Symphony Orchestra. He has also appeared with the Danish National Radio Symphony as part of the prestigious Nikolai Malko Conducting Competition. An avid opera conductor, he has worked with the Fidenza Opera Festival in Italy and the Montana Lyric Opera. Future guest conducting engagements include performances with the Charleston Symphony, the Rogue Valley Symphony and a return engagement with the Xiamen Philhannonic. Previously, Butorac served as the Director of Orchesrras at Northern Arizona University. During his tenure the orchestra program expanded significantly - the concert season grew to eight concerts plus two fully staged operas. He also helped estahlish a visiting guest artist residency and presented numerous concerts that featured enhanced use of multi-media.
In March 2005, be was invited to participate in the American Symphony Orchestra League National Conducting Preview with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. The preview showcased eight young conductors from across the world "carefully chosen for their talent, accomplishments, and qualifications who are ready to assume important professional conducting responsibilities with American orchestras."
Butorac studied at the renowned American Academy of Conducting at the Aspen Music Festival in 2003 and 2004, and was named the Assistant Conductor of the Aspen Opera Theater Center during his second summer, assisting noted opera conductors Arnold Oestman and Julius Rudel.
Darko Butorac received his Master of Music degree from lndiana University, where be conducted over thirty concerts with the school's five major ensembles. He has also worked extensively at the Brevard Music Center, Aspen Music Festival and the University ofToronto, his alma mater. His principal mentors are David Effron, Jorma Panula and David Zinman.
Catherine Manoukian, violinConcert Sponsors
Catherine Manoukian's performance is sponsored by Paul & Rebecca Smith
C.P.E. Bach - Symphony No. 3 in F Major
Brahms - Concerto for Violin
Catherine Manoukian, violin
Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 4
All are invited to Mr. Butorac's pre-concert talk one hour before each performance. Free.
Ashland Springs Hotel is pleased to support the Rogue Valley Symphony
with accommodations for their Year of the Search conductor finalists and
solists.
Catherine Manoukian, Violin
"... gorgeously expressive ... scintillating performance ..."
The Strad Magazine
Catherine Manoukian's professional career began at the age of twelve when she won the grand prize at the 1994 Canadian Music Competition. The same year, she debuted with the Vancouver Symphony, playing Paganini's First Violin Concerto. She was born in Toronto, began studying violin with her father, and made her first stage appearance at the age of four. From 1994 to 2000, she studied with the late, world-renowned violin pedagogue, Dorothy DeLay, in New York.
She has won critical acclaim for her solo work with many major North American and international orchestras, including the CBC Radio Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and those in Istanbul, Tokyo, Osaka, and Armenia. She has collaborated with such conductors as Mario Bernardi, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Roy Goodman, Peter Oundjian, Tomomi Nishimoto, Sekyou Kim, Eduard Topchjan, Jonas Alber, and Keith Lockhart.
As a recitalist, Ms. Manoukian has played in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Los Angeles, Toronto, Paris, Osaka, and Tokyo, and as a chamber musician, she has performed with the Aspen, Caramoor and Newport International Festivals. She has produced five major CDs, ranging from transcriptions of Chopin to Shostakovich, Khatchaturian, Franck, and Strauss.
Her extra-musical education includes undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in history and philosophy. She is currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in philosophy at the University of Toronto, where her research has been on the nature of rationality and she is working on giving an account of deviant belief-forming processes. She holds a CGS doctoral research grant, awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.
Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Wq 183, H665 (1775-76)
CPE Bach -- Germany, 1714-1788
CPE (Carl Phillip Emanuel) was the second most famous in the amazing Bach family which from 1555 to 1840 produced such a solid succession of musicians that the words Amusician@and "Bach" were synonymous in central Germany. Music was the family business, a craft to be learned from parents and uncles. They were a close family, with good reason: as late as the 17th Century, musicians did not have rights of citizenship. The Bachs got together frequently to play.
Sessions always began with a Lutheran chorale; then came the quodlibets, the jam. (A quodlibet is a piece of music combining several different melodies, usually popular tunes, in counterpoint).
CPE's son Forkel described them playing "folksongs, comic, often indelicate," all improvised with different texts and "extemporare harmonizing. They not only enjoyed a hearty laugh at it themselves, but provided equally hearty and irresistible laughter in all who heard them."
A contemporary of Mozart's father Leopold, CPE was famous in the German courts as a teacher and keyboard composer, but we know him today as the inventor of the symphony. As Haydn said, "He is the father; we are the kids (die Buben)." The younger Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, von Weber, and Brahms all enthusiastically agreed.
CPE insisted, "I believe music must, first and foremost, stir the heart." This he did, bridging the periods from Baroque to Classical with Rococco artistry "at its most tasteful and daring" (Michael Tilson Thomas). Symphony No. 3 is one of the first symphonies to give wind instruments the prominence we expect to hear today. Unison chords introduce the music, followed by a long dominant build-up. Quirky shifts in mood frequently interrupt the flow, but the basic musical ideas roll cheerfully on with a remarkable sense of continuity.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, D Major, Op. 77 (1878)
Johannes Brahms -- Germany, 1833-1897
As did Beethoven and Mendelssohn before him, Brahms wrote his one and only violin concerto with a specific performer in mind. The artist was Joseph Joachim, an old friend from Hungary who was both a virtuoso violinist and an influential conductor.
The year was 1878. Finally, Brahms' second symphony had met with enough success to make the towering shadow of Beethoven looking over his shoulder seem far less forbidding. He was summering in a charming village near the Italian border where he said the very air bristled with melodies and one had Ato be careful not to tread on them.@ He would produce a masterpiece.
When he sent the score to Joachim, asking him to Aperhaps write a word here and there in the music, A Joachim took such great pains with it that their friend, the eminent German critic Eduard Hanslick, called the concerto "the ripe fruits of the friendship between Joachim and Brahms." Brahms was ultimately so satisfied with the work that he wrote to his publisher, "It is well to be doubted whether I could write a better concerto."
I. Allegro non troppo. Like CPE Bach, Brahms opens the music with a series of pronouncement chords. The somber-hued violas, cellos, and bassoons sing the principal theme in a long and fluid orchestral introduction which shifts abruptly to a sullen, angry mood. The violin enters with a flourish and a splash of bravura, settles into a song-like melody, then rises again to a vigorous climax.
II. Adagio. The oboe introduces a charming, pastoral melody, which the violin embroiders with a profusion of delicate tracery.
III. Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace. Playing in thirds, the violin introduces the first of three themes. Studded with intricate and brilliant passage work, the finale has been called a virtuoso's paradise.
Some think Brahms created the gypsy-like, Hungarian flavors and bold folkloric rhythms to honor Joachim. Others trace his inspiration back to his youth, when he toured with another Hungarian fiddler, the fiery virtuoso Ede Remenyi.
Symphony No. 4, F minor, Op. 36 (1878)
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky -- Russia, 1840-1893
CPE Bach was surrounded constantly by supportive family and the approving intelligentsia of Germany. Brahms was a loner and a bit of a grump, but withal, a deeply stable person who knew how to cope. In total contrast, Tchaikovsky probably never for a single day felt comfortable in his own skin. He never found a way to accept his own sexuality; he never found a way to believe that others could accept him as he was. His composing was his one solace. In all but moments of deepest despair, the act of writing music could save his day.
He composed Symphony No. 4 at a particularly turbulent time. When he started writing, he was confidently looking forward to a marriage that he hoped would resolve all of his emotional dilemmas. Work went well right up to the wedding day, but then came disaster. From day one, this marriage was such a horrendous experience for both parties that it ended permanently after only three weeks. For months afterwards, Tchaikovsky lived in a bizarre hell of emotional upheaval, teetering perilously close to insanity and attempting suicide at least once. When he finally began to recover, he was overwhelmed by the need to compose. On the mend and working again, he wrote to his patron, Mme. Von Meck, "Never before have any of my orchestral works cost me so much labour, but then never before have I felt such affection toward any of my compositions ... Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that this symphony is an exceptional piece and the best thing I've done up to the present."
In the same letter, he included specific program notes. Here Paul Grabbe comments in italics about what is happening in the music:
First Movement: "The introduction is the kernel of the whole symphony (sharply menacing, chilling, phrase uttered by French horns and bassoons). It stands for destiny--that fateful force which keeps the impulse toward happiness from ever being fully realized ... This force cannot be evaded ... Perforce one must submit, lamenting inwardly ... (Violas and cellos intone the symphony's first, graceful theme) following which the music, in turn tender, compassionate, and brooding, progresses to its end where the relentless warning phrase which opened the Symphony is stridently repeated."
Second Movement. "...expresses a different phase of sadness. (We hear the oboe's plaintive voice in a plain little melodyCvery Russian, very lonely.) It is that feeling of fleeting melancholy which comes to him who sits alone of an evening, tired from the day's work..."
Third Movement. "...expresses the flights of quickened fancy (passage
for plucked strings). In this mood, exhilarated slightly by wine
... one feels neither sadness nor gayety ... A
Fourth Movement. AIf thou canst find happiness in thyself, look for it
in others. (Following a vehement outburst from the orchestra, the
woodwinds take up a Russian folk tuneCsad yet persuasive.) Go
to the people. Observe how others find their joy ... Partake of their
merriment ... but no! No sooner hast thou been drawn away from thyself
than unrelenting fate appears again ... (the fate theme returns). Disregard
it! See how merry others can be ... Rejoice in their happiness! Life
will not be unbearable if you do."
-- Nancy Golden
