Guest cellists thrive, while Sphere does “90s Retro”
By Peter Alexander November 16 at 10:25 p.m.
Erin Patterson, principal cellist of the Boulder Symphony will step forward as soloist with the orchestra Friday evening for a concert under director Devin Patrick Hughes.
Patterson will play Dance for cello and orchestra by English composer Anna Clyne. Other works on the program will be Sibelius’s Finlandia and the Symphony No. 2 in E minor by Rachmaninoff.
Currently serving as composer-in-residence with the Helsinki Philharmonic in Finland, Clyne has written a long list of orchestra, chamber, vocal and choral works. She currently lives and works in New York City. Her Dance, essentially a concerto for cello and orchestra, is a five-movement work, based on a five-line poem by Rumi:
Dance when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance when you’re perfectly free.
Both other works on the program and staples of the orchestral repertoire. Written in 1899, Finlandia remains the best known of Sibelius’s works for orchestra. As musical protest against Russian control of Finland, for many years the score had to be performed under other names to bypass Russian censorship.
Composed in 1906–07, Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony was an important milestone for the composer. The 1897 premiere of his First Symphony had been a failure. Rachmaninoff became depressed after the performance, and doubted his abilities as a composer. For his Second Symphony, he moved to Dresden, Germany, to have time for composing away from Russia, which was in turmoil during the pre-Revolutionary era. After completing and extensive revision of the score, he was able to present the symphony in St. Petersburg in January, 1908.
The performance was a great success, and the symphony won an award for the composer. This event restored Rachmaninoff’s confidence, and the Second Symphony, while subject to considerable later revisions, has remained one of his most popular compositions.
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Boulder Symphony, Devin Patrick Hughes, conductor
With Erin Patterson, cello
- Sibelius: Finlandia
- Anna Clyne: Dance for cello and orchestra (Colorado premiere)
- Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E minor, op. 27
7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17
Grace Commons Church
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The Longmont Symphony also features a cello soloist for their concert Saturday evening. Clancy Newman, who is a composer as well as cellist, will perform Schelomo, Hebrew Rhapsody for cello and orchestra with the LSO and conductor Elliot Moore at
7 p.m. in Vance Brand Civic Auditorium.
Other works on the program will be Beethoven’s Overture to Coriolan and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.
Born to Australian parents in Albany, New York, Newman won the International Naumburg Competition in 2001 and an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2004. In addition to his solo performances around the world, he has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Musicians form Marlboro. His most original compositional project is “Pop-Unpopped,” in which he has written solo cello caprices based on the top pop song every month for a year.
Composed in 1915–16, Schelomo (Solomon) was the final work of Bloch’s Jewish Cycle of works that drew on Jewish folk and synagogue melodies and rhythms of the Hebrew language. Written for solo cello and orchestra, Schelomo is the best known of these works, and is today considered a standard piece in the cello repertoire. It is written in a single movement that encompasses three interrelated sections.
When he wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1937, Shostakovich was under a cloud of suspicion caused by the brutal criticism of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. A review of the opera putatively dictated by Stalin himself was titled “Muddle Instead of Music” and suggested that “things could end very badly” for the composer if he did not change aesthetic directions.
Shostakovich clearly considered the symphony a reply, deferentially subtitling it “A Soviet Artist’s Responses to Just Criticism.” The symphony’s premiere received 30-minute ovation, no doubt responding to the bold, brassy and triumphalist final movement. Whether the finale was a serious artistic statement, or a parody of the vulgar taste of Stalin and his retinue of followers, has been widely debated. In any case, the symphony has remained popular with concert audiences world wide.
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Longmont Symphony Orchestra
Elliot Moore, conductor
With Clancy Newman, cello
- Beethoven: Overture to Coriolan
- Ernest Bloch: Shelomo, Hebrew Rhapsody for cello and orchestra
- Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5, op. 47
7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 18
Vance Brand Civic Auditorium
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Colorado’s Sphere Ensemble, a Denver-based ensemble of 14 string players, will give a musical tour of the ‘90s from five different centuries, with performances at the Boulder Public Library Canyon Theater (7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 18) and the Savoy in Denver (2700 Arapahoe St. 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19; details and tickets below).
The creative program, titled “90s Retro” without specifying a century, has arrangements for the Sphere instrumentation of music form the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and contemporary eras. This is keeping with Sphere’s approach to programming, which typically includes arrangements made by members of the group.
As part of the presentation of the music from the ‘90s of different centuries, Sphere ties the music to prominent events form the same years. For example, the opera Alcide, for which Marina Marais wrote the Overture that Sphere will perform, was written in the same year as the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon invented Champagne, 1793. This was one year after the Salem with trials and the year Mt. Etna in Sicily erupted.
Just over a century later, in 1796 the British pianist/singer/composer Maria Hester Park wrote a Sonata in C that Sphere has arranged for the concert. Around the same time, Napoleon Bonaparte was appointed commander of the French army in Italy and John Adams was elected the second president of the United States. With such details, Sphere gives context to the music they will perform.
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“90s Retro”
Sphere Ensemble
- Josquin des Prez: “Nymphes des bois” (Nymphs of the woods; 1497)
- John Dowland: “Can She Excuse my Wrongs” (1597)
- Marin Marais: Overture to Alcide (1693)
- Maria Hester Park: Sonata in C (1796)
- Teresa Carreño: Serenade for Strings (1895)
- Chen Yi: Romance and Dance for strings (1995)
- “90s Pop Radio,” arr. Sphere
7:30 p.m Saturday, Nov. 18
Boulder Public Library Canyon Theater
5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19
The Savoy, 2700 Arapahoe St., Denver
TICKETS for in-person attendance and Livestream.
Sharps & Flatirons 