Program Notes

Fanfare opens with a bold statement from the brass section featuring discordant tension and harmonic resolve: growth and strength.  Following this brief introduction, the music shifts to a lighthearted, cheerful, and exuberant pace. As the name suggests, the piece is designed to showcase the power of the symphony, celebrating this wonderful new chapter in our orchestra’s lifetime.

We tend to talk about careers as having “arcs” or “trajectories,” but neither of those words quite does justice to Xavier Dubois Foley’s young career. “Rocket-like ascent” would probably be more accurate, and Foley’s rocket-like ascent is still very much in process, so there’s no telling just how high into the firmament he’ll end up.

But Dvořák can also be taken to represent another ideal, one perhaps more prevalent in America than in Europe: the rags-to-riches, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps ethic seen of the Horatio Alger stories. The son of a small-town butcher, Dvořák originally planned on following his father’s trade, but a benevolent uncle recognized the boy’s musical gifts and sent him to Prague to study.

The younger son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Gershwin began teaching himself piano around the age of seven, when his parents arranged for an upright instrument to be hoisted into the window of their apartment so that his older brother could study it. His brother, Ira, was of a more literary turn of mind, though, and was relieved when George hogged the instrument so continuously that Ira was permitted to stop his lessons. 

E pluribus unum, it says on the back of all minted United States coins: “Out of many, one.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a better musical depiction of that motto than Ives’ Second.

Coincident Dances is inspired by the sounds found in New York’s various cultures, capturing the frenetic energy and multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighborhood. The work is a fusion of several different sound-worlds: English consort, samba, mbira dance music from Ghana, swing, and techno.

- Jessie Montgomery

The way that depression sometimes makes every single minute detail, choice, and experience feel huge, almost melodramatic in scope; the way it simultaneously renders all those hyper-saturated details, choices, and experiences numbing; the harrowing, contradictory space between numbness and nigh-operatic feeling.

Tchaikovsky was one of the most personal and emotionally direct of composers, and so his difficult inner life is indeed pretty directly relevant to his music; you can’t exactly blame the fifth edition’s editors for wanting the composer’s demise to equal his music in drama

Pärt is a citizen and the best-known export of Estonia, the tiny country on the Baltic Sea that between 1940 and 1991 was subsumed by the USSR. He spent much of the 1960’s battling Soviet censors because he insisted on using a Serialist approach to composition, turning out music in the hyper-mathematical, dissonant style introduced by Arnold Schoenberg.