Concert Series I

September 2009

8:00p Friday, September 25, SOU Recital Hall, Ashland
8:00p Saturday, September 26, Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater, Medford
3:00p Sunday, September 27, GPHS Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass

Year of the Search
Guest Conductor

Chelsea Tipton II

Click here for bio

Chelsea Tipton II

Chelsea Tipton's website

Entering his seventh and final season as Resident Conductor of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, American conductor Chelsea Tipton II has won over audience and critics alike with his vibrant musicality, accessibility, versatility, and extraordinary commitment to education outreach. In the fall of 2009 Tipton will be starting his tenure as Music Director of the Symphony of Southeast Texas in Beaumont. As a sought-after guest conductor, Tipton has appeared with major orchestras in the United States, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the New World Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philhannonic, the Louisiana Philhannonic Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra among others. In 2004, Tipton led the Boston Pops Orchestra in their annual Gospel Night Concert that the Boston Globe called an "impressive debut".

The 2009-10 season will include guest conducting engagements with the Atlanta Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Charlotte Symphony, Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra, Eastern Music Festival in addition to regular Toledo Symphony season appearances that feature him in the Classics, Pops, and Family Cpocert series. Last season marked Tipton's return to Carnegie Hall conducting the Sphinx Competition Showcase gala concert that was the culmination of a ten city tour with the orchestra. Other highlights include a last minute replacement for Robert Spano to conduct an all Gershwin season finale with the Brooklyn Philhannonic. The New York Times applauded Tipton for "[leading] sweeping and vibrant performances of 'Rhapsody' and 'An American in Paris.'"

His strong commitment toward education is shown though his dedicated work with the Sphinx Competition to promote African American and Hispanic emerging artists in classical music, in addition to working with the New World Symphony to involve local high school students in concerts. Prior to his appointment with the Toledo Symphony, Tipton was Associate Conductor with the Savannah Symphony Orchestra for four seasons and Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra for three seasons. He has held faculty positions at Central Michigan University (CMU) as Assistant Professor where he was Director of the CMU Symphony and a Visiting Professor in clarinet and chamber music at Western Michigan University. He has served on the faculty of the Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival in New Hampshire, and served four seasons as Assistant Conductor with the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina during the summers.

Tipton earned a Master of Music degree in orchestral conducting from Northern lllinois University and a Bachelor of Music in Clarinet Performance from the Eastman School of Music, with additional studies at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Hancock, Maine. As a clarinetist, Mr. Tipton has perfonned with several orchestras, including the Rochester Philharmonic, the Heidelberg Festival Opera Orchestra (Germany), and the Chicago Sinfonietta. He has appeared on the NBC Today Show with Wynton Marsalis and has performed as a section clarinet player with James Galway and the Eastman Philharmonia, Wynton Marsalis and the Easnnan Wind Ensemble and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra on recordings with RCA Classical, CBS Masterworks and Pro Arte labels.


Beethoven - Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor”
Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique

All are invited to Mr. Tipton'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.Ashland Springs Hotel link

 

Roberto Plano
Piano

"... artistic maturity beyond his years ... "
The New York Times

Italian pianist Roberto Plano, one of the six winning finalists at the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has earned an enviable reputation for creating radiant colors at the piano, as well as for his sympathetic collaborative playing. His friendliness is "contagious" and he is "devoted to creating for his audiences the emotional atmosphere that composers have crafted." (Cathy Fuller, NPR)

It was winning First Prize at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2001 that launched his international career. He has also placed among top winners in the 2005 Van Cliburn, in the 2003 Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, in the 2001 Sendai in Japan, and in the 2000 Jose Iturbi in Spain. In 2003 he won "Best Ensemble Performance" at the Honens Competition for his performances with cellist Shauna Rolston and soprano Ingrid Attrot.

Mr. Plano has appeared with orchestras in Italy, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Japan, USA, and Canada. He has performed recitals throughout North America, including performances at Alice Tully Hall in New York City's Lincoln Center, where he performed the American premiere of Luis de Pablo's Retratos y Transcripciones, and at Severance Hall in Cleveland. He regularly plays recitals in Milan, Paris, and Munich.

His recordings include a CD of works by Chopin, Liszt and Scriabin on Italy's Sipario Dischi label and a disc of works by Liszt on the Azica label. He is a favorite guest on several American radio programs, including NPR's Performance Today, WNYC in New York, and Classics in the Morning at WGBH in Boston.

He makes his home in the small town of Travedona Monate near Milan, Italy where he teaches regularly at the new International Piano Academy "Lake Monate," which he created with his wife last summer. He also teaches regularly at Music International Masterclasses in Portogruaro, Italy. In his spare time he enjoys composing hymns for organ and choir for his hometown church.

Visit Roberto Plano's website

 

Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (1811)
Ludwig van Beethoven B Germany 1770-1827

"An emperor among concertos," proclaimed Beethoven's English publisher at its 1811 premiere in Leipzig, but it was a different story when Carl Czerny introduced the music to Vienna a year later. Here reviewers called Beethoven "proud and overconfident." They criticized his refusal to "write down to his audience,"claiming, "He can be understood and appreciated only by connoisseurs." But ordinary people got it and history quickly agreed with the Leipzig critic who had earlier written, "It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, most effective but also one of the most difficult of all existing concertos."

When Beethoven wrote the Emperor, imperialism was unavoidably in the air. Napoleon was marching through Austria and the noise of his bombardments often drove the composer down to his brother's cellar, where he buried his head under a pillow in a vain attempt to save what little was left of his precious hearing. An astute observer of the political world, Beethoven was furious at Napoleon for proclaiming himself emperor of France, for invading Austria, and for occupying Vienna. A friend once found him shaking his fist at a French officer: "If I were a general and knew as much about strategy as I do about counterpoint, I'd give you fellows something to think about."

He was feeling grievously frustrated at many levels, which may in part explain the innovative spirit in which he wrote this concerto. At the time, a cadenza was a free-form improvisational passage that normally appeared just before the end of a movement. Mozart had begun indicating a theme, but still, the artist could fly free. Starting with the Emperor, Beethoven changed this tradition by writing his cadenzas directly into the score, allowing no leeway at all. "Do not play a cadenza but attack immediately the following," he wrote on the score--"the following" being a passage that was spelled out to the last trill.

Instead of closing the first movement, the first cadenza of the Emperor splashes in immediately after the orchestra's opening chords and is soon followed by two more cadenzas. Instead of the piano, violins announce the principle theme and horns the second main idea. The piano floats above plucked strings. Three mighty chords end the movement.

The slow movement sets a soul-searching mood with melodies first sung by muted violins, then expanded by the piano. Pensive woodwinds take the melody high over rhythmic strings. Finally, bassoons softly sustain the key note. Above them come hints of the finale, which follows without break.

At last, the piano bursts forth with massive chords, rippling right-hand figures, trills in octaves, and irregular, syncopated figures in descending chords, all set against the massed voices of the orchestra. The structure is "boxes within boxes" as Beethoven plays with an inventive marriage of rondo and sonata forms. The result is what musicologist Charles O'Connell calls "grandeur and magnificence" from a "double genius."

 

Symphonie Fantastique: Episode in the Life of an Artist (1830)
Hector Berlioz -- France, 1803-1869

When Berlioz was in his early twenties, four translations took Paris by stormBtwo books, Goethe's Faust and DeQunicy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and two plays, the first French productions of Shakespeare's MacBeth and Romeo and Juliet.

These events spoke profoundly to the young composer. His Symphonie Fantastique was the indirect result, and its music has in turn cast equally long shadows of influence. Although many wrote him off as a wild-eyed, inconsequential light-weight, the late Edmond Downes believed that this symphony established Berlioz as the "father of a great line of radical Romantic orchestral composers that was to continue not only through Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, but [also] the Russians, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, and even through the French composers from Saint-Saëns to Ravel."

Much hoopla at the premiere claimed that the central love melody was inspired by Berlioz's hopeless longing for an actress whom he later married with disastrous results. In fact, he had not yet met the lady when he wrote the music. The theme came from much earlier compositions, which he said symbolized his first unrequited passion, when he was 12 and his flame was 18. He would love her all his life, ever and always unrequited. "The instant I saw her," he wrote, "I felt an electric shock. I loved her. That says everything."

Although critic Jacques Barzun dismissed Berlioz' program notes as "promotional aids for the unwary," Berlioz himself considered them essential for proper understanding of his music. We give them to you here as he wanted them to be published at every performance:

A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imaginations poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The dose of the narcotic plunges him into a deep slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.

  1. Reveries, passions. He recalls first that soul-sickness, those intimations of passions those seemingly groundless depressions and elations that he experienced before he first saw the woman he loves; then the volcanic love that she suddenly inspired in him, his frenzied anguish, his jealous furies, his returns to tenderness, his religious consolations.
  2. A Ball. He meets his beloved again during the tumult of a brilliant fête.
  3. Scene in the Country. On a summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds piping back and forth to each other a Ranz des vaches (traditional tune played by Swiss shepherds to call their flocks); this pastoral duet, the scenery, the quiet rustling of the trees, gently stirred by the wind, some prospects of hope he has recently foundBall combine to soothe his heart with unaccustomed calm, and lend a more smiling color to his thoughts. But she appears again, he feels a tightening in his heart, painful presentiments disturb himBwhat if she were to deceive him?--One of the shepherds takes up his simple tune again; the other no longer answers. The sun sets--distant roll of thunder--solitude--silence.
  4. March to the Execution. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and is being led to execution. The procession moves forward to the sounds of a march that is now somber and wild, now brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled sound of heavy steps gives way without transition to the noisiest clamor. At the end, the idée fixe returns for a moment, like one last thought of love interrupted by the death blow.
  5. Dream of a Witches' Sabbath. He sees himself at the Sabbath, in the midst of a frightful troop of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, come together for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries which other cries seem to answer. The beloved melody appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness; it is no more than a dance tune, base, trivial, and grotesque: it is she, coming to join the Sabbath.--A roar of joy at her arrival.-- She takes part in the devilish orgy.--Funeral knell, burlesque parody of the Dies irae.

Berlioz hoped his Symphonie Fantastique would be performed by an orchestra of more than 200 musicians, but his score actually calls for a conventional ensemble. He achieved an enormous variety of vivid orchestral colors by "copious doubling of parts" (musicians play two or more different instruments).

-- Nancy Golden