Cleveland Winds

Cleveland Winds In Concert, November 7, 2011, 7:30 PM

The Cleveland Winds, under the direction of Birch Browning, begins its third season with a concert on November 7, 2011 at 7:30 PM in Waetjen Auditorium on the campus of Cleveland State University. The repertoire for the concert will include Edward Gregson’s Celebration, Dennis Nygren’s setting of Victor Babin’s Hillandale Waltzes for clarinet and wind ensemble, featuring soloist Bobby Davis, and Walter Hartley’s Concerto for 23 Winds. Joining us for this concert will be the CSU Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Prof. Howard Meeker.

Read a preview of the concert at ClevelandClassical.com.

Program Notes

Celebration was commissioned by the Royal Liverpool philharmonic Society to mark its 150th anniversary. Edward Gregson writes:

I was particularly pleased to receive the invitation to write this piece, as it gave me an opportunity to compose a work which would celebrate not just the birthday of a great orchestra, but the skills of a fine group of players, allow them to demonstrate both their virtuosity and their capacity for sustained, sensitive playing. It seemed appropriate to make it a sort of miniature Concerto for Orchestra (albeit with the strings), and desipte its brevity I have highlighted each departmet of the ensemble in turn before bringing them together at the end.

It opens with a fanfare (announced by three spatially separated trumpets and tubular bells), essentially exuberant music which plays an important part later on. This leads into the second section, basically scherzo-like but with an expressive central passage. Instruments are introduced in the order: flutes, clarinets, oboes, bassoons. A brief tutti ushers in a simple chorale, marked molto sostenuto. The development follows, often highly charged rhythmically, and using material from the first two sections plus a new idea heard on trumpets. The music rises to a climax which moves directly into a reprise of the chorale, in combination with the opening fanfare, to bring the work to a trimphant conclusion.

Russian-born Victor Babin is best known in the United States as a duo-pianist with wife Vitya Vronsky, and as Director of the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1961 – 1972. The Hillandale Waltzes for clarinet and piano was composed towards the end of World War II. The piece was arranged and edited by Dennis Nygren in the summer and fall of 1990, and premiered on December 4, 1990 by the Kent State University Wind Ensemble conducted by Wayne Gorder, with the  arranger as soloist. Prof. Nygren has served as the professor of clarinet at KSU since 1983.

Walter Hartley (b.1927) wrote his Concerto for Twenty-three Winds in 1957 for the Eastman Wind Ensemble. He sent the following comments to conductor Frederick Fennell:

The work is in four movements roughly corresponding to those of the classical symphony or sonata in form, but it is textually more related to the style of the Baroque concert, being essentially a large chamber work in which different soloists and groups of soloists play in contrast with each other and with the group as a whole. The color contrasts between instruments and choirs of instruments are sometimes simultaneous, sometimes antiphonal; both homophony and polyphony are freely used…The first and last movements make the most use of the full ensemble; the second, a Scherzo, features the brass instruments, the slow third movement, the woodwinds. The harmonic style is freely tonal throughout. There is a certain three-note motif (ascending G-A-D) which is heard harmonically at the beginning and dominates the melodic material of the last three movements.

Our Soloist

Robert Davis, Clarinet, from Shaker Heights, Ohio, received his Master’s of Music in Voice at Cleveland State University as a student of Professor Elizabeth Unis Chesko. Robert received his BM from the Cleveland Institute of Music as a student of Linnea Nereim, Bass Clarinet, The Cleveland Orchestra, and his Artist Diploma as a student of Ronald deKant, from the University of Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music. He also had additional studies with Franklin Cohen, Principal Clarinet, The Cleveland Orchestra. By the age of 19, Robert was performing as an extra musician with The Cleveland Orchestra. He has also performed with the Canton, Akron, and Youngstown Symphonies and in past summers has been a member of the Ashlawn Opera Orchestra (Virginia). He was also the former Principal Clarinet of the Opera in the Ozarks Orchestra (Arkansas). Robert is currently performing with the Lakeside Symphony (Ohio) in the summer. Robert has attended the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the Sarasota Music Festival. He performs with the Gateway Chamber Players in Clarksville, TN. With the Gateway Chamber Players, he recorded Mozart’s Gran Partita for Summit Records (release date- March 2010). He has received awards from the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM) and the American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL). After returning from graduate school in late 2003, Robert began studying voice. He has sung in master classes for Robert Page and Garnett Bruce (director) has performed at Alice Tulley Hall in New York City as a member of the Duffy Liturgical Singers. He was a member of the Cleveland Opera Chorus and performed in the opera, Turandot. He made his solo opera debut as the Sailor in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneus. He continued with the world premiere of Mozart/El-Dabh, King of Egypt, as Gastone in Verdi‘s La Traviata, and Borsa in Verdi’s Rigoletto, all with Opera Circle. Robert is currently Director of Bands at The Cleveland School of the Arts.

Directions and Tickets

The concert will be in Waetjen Auditorium on the campus of Cleveland State University. Directions to campus can be found here. Patrons will be able to park in the main garage, now called Central Garage, that is accessible from East 21st Street via Chester Avenue. Parking is free provided that you mention to the attendant that you will be attending the CSU Wind Ensemble concert. This concert is free and open to the public, but donations to the Cleveland Winds will be gladly accepted.

Cleveland Winds and Friends, March 7

Our second concert will be on Monday, March 7, 2011 at 7 PM in Waetjen Auditorium on the campus of Cleveland State University. We are very pleased to announce that Professor Howard Meeker, Director of Instrumental Music at Cleveland State University, will be our guest conductor. Professor Meeker will be conducting Ingolf Dahl‘s Sinfonietta. We are also pleased to announce that two of the area’s finest wind bands will be sharing the concert stage with us that evening. Our two guest ensembles will be the North Royalton Community Band, led by Cleveland Winds percussionist Mark Wozniak, and the Cleveland Heights High School Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Brett Baker.

The repertoire for the rest of the Cleveland Winds’ portion of the concert will feature Aaron Copland’s Emblems, led by Music Director Birch Browning.

Program Notes

Sinfonietta – Ingolf Dahl

The form of this Sinfonietta is akin to an arh or to the span of a large bridge: the sections of the first movement correspond, in reverse order and even in some details, to the sections of the last. For example, the opening fanfares of the back-stage trumpets are balanced by those at the close of the work; the thematic material that ends the first movement opens the last, although in altered form. The middle movement is itself shaped like an arch: it begins with an unaccompanied line in the clarinets and ens with a corresponding solo in the alto clarinet. The center of the middle movement which is the center of the whole work–a gavotte-like section, and the lightest music of the entire Sinfonietta–is the “key-stone” of the arch.

The tonal idiom of the work grows out of the acoustical properties of the symphonic band: a wealth of overtones. Thus I feel that bands call for music with more open and consonant intervals than would be a string ensemble or a piano. The Sinfonietta is tonal, and centered aournd A-flat major. At the same time, however, its corner movements are based on a series of six tones (A-flat, E-flat, C, G, D, A) which, through various manipulations, provide most of the work’s harmonic and melodic ingredients and patterns. The six tones were chosen to permit all kinds of triadic formations. Furthermore, their inversion at the interval of the major sixth yields a second six-tone set which comprises the remaining six tones of a complete twelve-tone row.

The six-tone set is introduced tone by tone by the opening back-stage trumpets, and as it reappears in its original form and in transpositions, it constitutes the entire tonal content of this fanfare.

Throughout the two corner movements, the set appears in various guises, from the blunt unison statement which opens the last movement to the almost unrecognizable metamorphoses elsewhere. It also provides melodic as well as harmonic frameworks. Thus in the first movement, it serves as focal point in the march tune which opens the principal rondo section; it also motivates the succession of tonalities in the cadenza-like modulatory episode for the clarinet section, which goes from A-flat via E-flat and C major, and so forth, to A major, i.e., to the key farthest removed from the initial A-flat. (When the cadenza reaches the A, the rondo section returns.)

The First Movement, “Introduction and Rondo,” proceeds by simple alternation between march-like refrains and rhythmically looser episodes. A culmination is reached at the point at which the entire clarinet section, punctuated by the brass and percussion, breaks into the brilliant cadenza mentioned above. The movement closes in full tutti and with a drum pattern which traditionally would stand at the beginning of a march, but which here ends it.

The Second Movement, “Notturno Pastorale,” consists of alternations and superimpositions of several musical forms in a single movement. These forms are: a fugue, a waltz, and a gavotte. The fugue subject first hides in a lyrical saxophone solo. It derives from the tetrachord E-flat, F, G-flat, A-flat, but through octave displacements and rhythmic shifts, etc., each of its appearances is slightly different from all others, as if it were refracted by different lenses at each entry.

Superimposed upon the fugue is the waltz which alternately recedes into the distance and returns to the foreground. By contrast, the middle section–Gavotte–is of a much simpler fabric: a lightly accompanied oboe tune.

It will be noted that the second movement, unlike the first, avoids most of the “conventional” band sounds. There is no tutti, and the texture is often densely polyphonic or, as in the Gavotte, uncommonly thin and airy.

The tonality of D-flat–the classical sub-dominant key-relative to the first movement. Throughout, there is a gravitational temptation toward further sub-dominants: to G-flat, then to C-flat, and so on.

The Third Movement, “Dance Variations,” begins with the most straightforward presentation of the six-tone set. Thereupon the set, serving as the basso ostinato of this passacaglia-like movement, undergoes countless set-derived transformations. (The term “variations” here refers to the ostinato.) Appearing above these bass variations we hear a multitude of different little tunes in shifting colors. And all this proceees along a key-scheme that goes through most of the circle of fifths, beginning several time over on the key level of A-flat. A lyrical middle section provides contrast. Toward the end, after a rhythmic tutti, the instrument, in commedia dell’arte fashion, bow out one by one.

- Ingolf Dahl

Emblems – Aaron Copland

In May, 1963, I received aletter from Keith Wilson, President of the COLLEGE BAND DIRECTORS NATIONAL ASSOCIATION, asking me to accept a commission from that organization to compose a work for band. He wrote: “The purpose of this commission is to enrich the band repertory with music that is representative of the composer’s best work, and not one written with all sorts of technical or practical limitations.” That was the origin of “EMBLEMS”.

I began work on the piece in the summer of 1964 an completed it in November of that year. It was first played at the CBDNA National Convention in Tempe, Arizona, on December 18, 1964, by the Trojan Band of the univeristy of Southern California, conducted by William Schaefer.

Keeping Mr. Wilson’s injunction in mind, I wanted to write a work that was challenging to young players without overstraining their technical abilities. the work is tripartite in form: slow-fast-slow, with the return of the first part varied. Embedded in the quiet, slow music the listener may hear a brief quotation of a well known hymn tune, “Amazing Grace”, published by William Walker in The Southern Harmony in 1835. Curiously enough, the accompanying harmonies had been conceived first, without reference to any tune. It was only a chance perusal of a recent anthology of old `Music in America’ that made me realize a connection existed between my harmonies and the old hymn tune.

An emblem stands for something — it is a symbol. I called the work EMBLEMS because it seemed to me to suggest musical states of being: noble or aspirational feelings, playful or spirited feelings. The exact nature of these emblematic sound must be determined for himself by each listener.

- Aaron Copland