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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
December 4-5-6, 2009
84th Season / Subscription Concert No. 4
Michael Allsen
The Te Deum is among
the oldest and most joyful texts in the Latin liturgy, and the chanted Te Deum had a regular place in the
weekly liturgy of the Catholic Church. However, this text, with
its joyous tone of thanksgiving and acclamations of God, was also used
from the Middle Ages onwards as a song of thanksgiving to mark great
events—Te Deum was sung to
celebrate military victories, coronations, births of royal children,
and state visits. Composers employed by Catholic nobles quite
naturally turned to this text as the basis for joyous celebratory
music. The Te Deum by Joseph Haydn was apparently
composed for the empress Maria Theresa, and published in 1802 with a
dedication to her. However, it was first performed in September of
1800, while the British naval hero Horatio Nelson was visiting the
Esterházy family in Eisenstadt. Both the Mass and the Te
Deum were performed to honor Nelson during his 1800 visit, together
with a brief cantata, Lines from the
Battle of the Nile, that Haydn composed for Nelson’s mistress,
Lady Hamilton, and which was sung by her. Nelson was extremely
impressed by Haydn, and the two struck up a cordial friendship—at one
point, the admiral gave Haydn a watch in exchange for the pen that was
used to compose Lady Hamilton’s cantata. Haydn’s Te Deum is a choral work
throughout, without the solo sections that are heard in Haydn’s Masses
and other sacred works. He uses a three-part form in setting this
text. The opening section is a majestic chorus above an
orchestral continuo. At Te ego
quaesumus the character changes briefly to reflect the
supplicative lines “We therefore implore you to aid your
servants.” The final section returns to the cheerful texture of
the opening, and the work closes with a magnificent double fugue on the
words In te, Domine, speravi
(“In you, O Lord, I have put my trust”).
One of the most
popular Christmas songs of the last few years—Mary, Did You Know?—was
written as a lyric in 1984 by singer Mark
Lowry, as an interlude for a church Advent play. In an
interview several years later, Lowry said, “I tried to picture Mary
holding the baby Jesus on the first Christmas morning and wondered what
she was thinking about that child...when I wrote it, I felt there was
something special there, but I never imagined how wide-reaching it
would become.” In 1990, composer Buddy
Greene set the lyric to music, and the song quickly became a
holiday favorite, with recordings by some three dozen singers, and it
has become a hit for American Idol start Clay Aiken and several
others. It is heard here in a lush arrangement for soprano and
full orchestra.
Though he is
acclaimed as conductor and composer of concert music, John Williams is probably most
famous as a composer of over 80 film scores. Our program includes
the Madison Children's Choir singing two selections from Williams's
music for the Home
Alone movies. Home Alone
was the hit of the holiday season in 1990. This film, pitting
young Kevin (Macauley Culkin) against a pair of bumbling burglars was a
blend of sentimentality and slapstick nastiness. Home Alone II: Lost in New York,
released in 1992, successfully repeated the same formula.
Williams wrote music for both movies, and his scores feature just the
right mixture of naivety and naughtiness. Our program features
two of those songs, the sentimental Somewhere
in My Memory and the joyous Merry
Christmas, Merry Christmas.
Born in Italy,
organist and composer Pietro Yon emigrated
to New York City in 1907, where he held a series of prestigious posts,
eventually serving as organist at St. Patrick's cathedral from 1927
until his death. Yon was admired as a virtuoso performer, and
composed dozens of works for the organ. His catalog of works also
includes an oratorio, nearly two dozen masses, and many smaller choral
and keyboard pieces, but his best-known composition by far is the
Christmas song Gesù
Bambino, composed in 1917. It is heard here in an
arrangement for children's choir and soprano.
Our program
includes two works by Englishman John
Rutter. Rutter’s distinctive musical style, together with
his skill as choral conductor have made his a familiar name in the
world of choral music. His Shepherd’s Pipe Carol,
written while he was at school in the early 1970s, is one of the most
popular of his many Christmas carols. Its melody is a jazzy
syncopated tune that accompanies a host of people “on the way to
Bethlehem.” His more substantial Gloria was also
a relatively early work, composed while he was still in his 20s. The
work was commissioned in 1974 by a chorus in Omaha, Nebraska, but in
relatively short order it became a favorite of choruses throughout the
United States and England. (It has been heard several times at
these concerts.) The Gloria
text is drawn from the Latin Mass, and it has proved a fertile source
of inspiration to composers from the Middle Ages onwards. Rutter
provides the following description of his Gloria: “The Latin text,
drawn from the Ordinary of the Mass, is a centuries-old challenge to
the composer: exalted, devotional, and jubilant by turns.
My setting, which is based upon one of the Gregorian chants associated
with the text, divides into three movements roughly corresponding with
traditional symphonic structure. The accompaniment is for brass
ensemble, with timpani, percussion, and organ—a combination which in
the outer movements makes quite a joyful noise unto the Lord, but which
is used more softly and introspectively in the middle movement.”
It is heard here in a later version Rutter prepared for full orchestra.
An Englishman of
an earlier generation, Herbert Howells
was a composer, teacher, and one of the finest organists in
England. As a composer, Howells worked primarily in the Anglican
churh, producing a large repertoire of fine service works, hymns, and
carols. Though he was closely connected personally and
professionally with the two most prominent English composers of his
generation Howells was less self-consciously “English” and his works
often recall the English Renaissance in their style and contrapuntal
approach. One such work is his gorgeous carol A Spotless Rose,
composed in 1919 for unaccompanied chorus. The text is an English
adaptation of the 15th-century German carol Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen, but
the flowing melody and surprising harmonies are Howells’s own.
In 1717 George Friderick Handel moved to
England to compose and produce opera. For nearly two decades,
Handel was the most successful impresario in England, but by the 1730s,
Handel’s Italian opera had gone out of fashion, and he turned
increasingly to the English oratorio. His oratorios—dramatic renderings
of Biblical stories familiar to his English audiences—were enormously
successful, and their popularity endured and grew long after Handel’s
death. Messiah
of 1741 is, of course, Handel’s most enduring “hit,” but it is somewhat
unusual among his oratorios in that his text is a pastiche of direct
quotes from the St. James version of the Bible. The finale to our
first half is the concluding Hallelujah
chorus from Part II of Messiah.
And if you feel like following the lead of King George III and standing
for this great choral acclamation, go right ahead!
Michael W. Smith is a huge star in
Contemporary Christian music--a winner of several “Dove” awards, a
sought-after songwriter, and a popular singer in his own right.
His All is Well,
composed in 1989, is a wonderfully simple setting of words by Wayne
Kirkpatrick, that is well-suited to this emotional arrangement for
children's voices.
We include a
set of three songs featuring Ms. McNair, beginning with a holiday song
from a Broadway show—Jerry Herman’s
Mame—a hit 1966 musical
adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s semiautobiographical novel Auntie Mame. Mame told the story of the bohemian
and rather scandalous Mame Dennis, who finds herself responsible for
her young nephew Patrick at the peak of the Roaring 20s. Angela
Lansbury was the original Mame, in a production that ran over 1500
performances, and a 1973 movie version starred Lucille Ball in the
title role. The show spawned several popular songs, but the
biggest hit was the song Aunt Mame sings to Patrick in Act I, in which
she lets us know that We Need a Little
Christmas...whatever time of year it is! Composed some 30 years
earlier, Winter
Wonderland was one of many cheerful holiday songs that came out
of the Great Depression. It was a 1934 collaboration by lyricist Richard Smith and composer Felix Bernard, and was a No.2 hit
that year for the Guy Lombardo orchestra. The song, with its
cozy, sentimental imagery of snowmen and cold winter walks—and warming
by the fire afterwards—had tremendous staying power and was a hit for
both Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters in the 1940s. Since then,
it’s never left the list of holiday standards. The third song comes
from a very different world than Broadway and pop music. Let There Be Peace on
Earth (And Let It Begin With Me) was written by the husband-wife
team of Sy Miller and Jill Jackson, as they were at a
weeklong retreat on a California mountaintop. Miller later
recalled: “One summer evening in 1955, a group of 180 teenagers of all
races and religions, meeting at a workshop high in the California
mountains locked arms, formed a circle and sang a song of peace. They
felt that singing the song, with its simple basic sentiment—‘Let there
be peace on earth and let it begin with me,’ helped to create a climate
for world peace and understanding. When they came down from the
mountain, these inspired young people brought the song with them and
started sharing it...” This inspirational song has developed an
association with the Christmas season, but its appeal and intent are
much wider—it became, for example a widely-heard anthem of peace amidst
the anger and sadness following the 9/11 attacks. The grand
arrangement heard here is by James Kessler, chief arranger for the US
Army Band in Washington DC.
The Mt. Zion
Choir is featured in two new Gospel arrangements by its director,
Leotha Stanley. Composer Noel
Regney and his wife, lyricist Gloria
Shayne Baker wrote the Holiday standard Do You Hear What I Hear?
in 1962 and it became a huge hit for Bing Crosby in 1963, selling over
a million copies. Though usually heard as a sentimental song to
the Baby Jesus, Regney later said “I am amazed that people can think
they know the song, and not know it is a prayer for peace.” It
was written in October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
when nuclear war seemed imminent. Contrary to their usual
practice, Regney wrote the lyric, and his wife wrote the melody.
The result was a song that they found so moving that they couldn't bear
to sing it at first. The final stanza, with its “Pray for peace,
people everywhere!” makes this as appropriate in 2009 as it was in
1962. One of the best-known of Christmas hymns, Hark! The Herald Angels
Sing, is usually attributed to Felix
Mendelssohn, but the reality is more complicated. The
great hymn-writer Charles Wesley
was inspired in the 1740s by the sound of London church-bells on
Christmas morning to write the original text, Hark! How All The Welkin Rings
(“welkin” is archaic English for the sky). It acquired its
now-familiar words in the early 19th century, though was sung with a
different tune than today. Finally in 1855, an English organist,
William Cummings, adapted themes from a now-obscure Mendelssohn
cantata, Festgesang, to the
beloved tune we know for the hymn.