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PROGRAM NOTES for APRIL 15, 2010 concert: 7 PM

November Sky
David Felder (b. 1953)

November Sky is the third work in the composer's "Crossfire" series, a group of works featuring the playing of a virtuoso soloist interacting with his/her own electronically altered sonic image. NeXT computers were used to process a huge library of archetypal flute sounds, made by the soloist using only an acoustic flute doubling piccolo, alto, and bass flutes, with computer processed sounds. This library of acoustic flute sounds was then used to create the four channels of computer-processed flute sounds employed in November Sky . The work was realized at the SUNY, Buffalo Computer Music Studios, and the Banff Centre. Rick Bidlack and Scott Thomas assisted the composer in the realization of the computer portion of the work.

David Felder writes "All of the musical materials were derived from a single melodic line that is played about halfway through the piece. The large scale form is roughly articulated by four sections approximately coordinated with the changes of instrument from piccolo through bass flute. Each section offers increasingly reflective and distant perspectives on the musical material in the manner of ever-deepening meditation. The title refers obliquely to the psychologically shifting perspectives that accompany seasonal change; particularly the affect surrounding the inexorably failing light as fall gives way to winter."

The work was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts for flutist Rachel Rudich, who premiered November Sky on November 15, 1992.

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

After his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck offered him a regular allowance, Tchaikovsky had the financial independence that allowed him to travel to Italy for the first time in 1878. He settled in Florence, which later became the inspiration for his string sextet Souvenir de Florence (1890), and where he completed his Symphony No. 4. In November 1879 Tchaikovsky returned to Italy, where in Rome he composed the Capriccio Italien in January and February of 1880. Tchaikovsky was inspired in part, at least, by his Russian predecessor, Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857); he wrote in a letter to his patroness von Meck "I want to compose something like the Spanish fantasias of Glinka." In his May 24 letter to von Meck the composer noted "I have only just finished scoring the Italian Fantasia... Now I shall start arranging it... for four hands". Two days earlier, Tchaikovsky had told his publisher Petr Jurgenson that he had decided to make his own arrangement for piano duet, for fear that it would be held up if this task were entrusted to his friend Sergei Taneyev.

In September 1880 the piano duet arrangement by the composer appeared in print, before the full score and orchestral parts, which were first published that November. Tchaikovsky's piano arrangement of the Capriccio Italien has been described as "scrupulously analytical in its representation of the orchestral score, a kind of monochrome cartoon for a grand fresco." Several other arrangements of the work by other hands appeared shortly afterwards, including ones for solo piano and two pianos, as well as for piano four hands. Arrangements of orchestral works for piano were often the only method that allowed many listeners, and performers for that matter, to enjoy works composed for orchestra, before the advent of music recording.

The composer's brother Modest identified the opening fanfare of the Capriccio Italien as a trumpet call Tchaikovsky heard every day from the barracks of a cavalry troop beside his hotel in Rome, and the final tarantella is a dance known in Italy as "Cicuzza." Nicholas Rubinstein conducted the first performance of the orchestral version of Capriccio Italien in Moscow on December 18, 1880.
 

String Quintet in C major, Op. 163, D. 956
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Schubert's String Quintet in C major, Op. 163, D. 956, is one of the essential masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire.  Composed during the summer of 1828, only two months before his death on November 19, it was Schubert's final instrumental composition. The transcendental beauty of the work is generally recognized as his most deeply sublime composition. The work lay unperformed for twenty-two years, receiving its premiere performance on November 17, 1850, at the Musikverein in Vienna; it was not published for another three years.

The string quintets of Mozart were written for two violins, two violas and cello, and their popularity resulted in that grouping becoming more or less the standard for most subsequent composers, including Beethoven. Schubert's work, however, is written for the unusual configuration of two violins, viola, and two cellos, enhancing the richness of the quintet texture's lower register.

The opening Allegro ma non troppo movement is broadly expansive, as in other late works by Schubert, such as the Symphony No. 9, "The Great," and the Piano sonata in B-flat major, D. 960, accounting for more than a third of the total length of the four movement piece. The two outer sections of the Adagio movement are characterized by an ethereal tranquility, abruptly broken by the turbulent middle section; the plaintive quality of the movement is perhaps all the more poignant for the modern listener, who knows of Schubert's impending early death. The boisterous Scherzo movement creates a lively soundscape, only to be interrupted by the slow march in the movements' trio section, marked Andante sostenuto, which has been described as a pre-echo of the music of Gustav Mahler. The principal theme of the final Allegretto movement is a Hungarian dance tune, while the subsidiary theme takes the listener back to the music of a Viennese café, with the work ending in a brilliant coda.

Jan Jezioro