Blog - Page 9 of 12 - Port Townsend Symphony Orchestra

April 26, 2019August 11, 2019

CONCERT: FORGOTTEN HEROES

It has been another wonderful year of music making with the orchestra and a you to present these performances to the enthusiastic audiences in Port Townsend, Jefferson County, and the region. Always happy and grateful for your presence, support, and encouragement.

I have always been fascinated with composers and pieces that are not often heard and this program is an example.

The Afro-American Symphony by William Grant Still is the first symphony composed by an African-American composer. It was, in his time, performed by a number of leading American orchestras but has not been regularly performed in the past few decades.

The Overture by Fanny Mendelssohn is the only orchestra-alone work she wrote, although she has written several oratorios. The Overture was not published until 1994, almost 150 years after her death. For this reason, the Overture is only available for rental if an orchestra is interested in performing it. This is yet another reason to support our orchestra: so we can keep playing pieces that are rarely heard.

April 23, 2019August 11, 2019

AFRO-AMERICAN SYMPHONY by William Grant Still, 1895-1978

William Grant Still is the most influential African-American composer of the early 20th century. He was born in Woodville, Mississippi, in 1895 and started his musical career as an oboist in the pit orchestra of an All-Black musical, “Shute Along”, in 1921. He began composing when he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, this during the era of Jim Crow segregation when Oberlin was one of just a few major schools to admit black students.

His 1931 “Afro-American Symphony” was one of the first works by a black composer to be performed by a major symphony orchestra. Its first performance met with controversy in the press because some critics felt the piece belonged with jazz groups like the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, the group that premiered Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” There certainly is that distinct classical jazz sound and feel of Gershwin’s music in this symphony. In Still’s own words he “wanted not to portray the higher type of colored Americans, but the sons of the soil, who still retain so many of the traits peculiar to their African forebears and who have not responded completely to the transforming effect of progress.”

April 23, 2019August 11, 2019

MAYA DOW, Trumpet

Maya started playing the violin when she was five years old, then switched to trumpet in fifth grade, which she has stuck with ever since.

Now, as a freshman in high school, she plays with the Port Townsend High School band.

During middle school she was in the All-State band, and this year she is going to compete in the State solo competition inn Ellensburg.

This spring, Maya will be playing trumpet in the school play, Cabaret.

Besides music, Maya loves to write screenplays and argue on the PTHS mock trial team, which she has done for the past two years. She also plays basketball, volleyball, and is on the Knowledge Bowl team at school.

April 16, 2019August 11, 2019

THE SEA HAWK by Erich Wolfgang Korngold 1897-1957

The Sea Hawk, 1940 (loosely based on the novel by Rafael Sabatini)

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in May of 1897 in Brno, Austria-Hungary. He was a child prodigy and son of eminent music critic Julius Korngold. By his early teens he had composed a successful ballet (Der Schneemann — The Snowman), a piano sonata played by Arthur Schnabel throughout Europe, and two operas conducted by Bruno Walter. By age 23 he became the conductor of the Hamburg Opera, and by 33 he was a professor of music at the Vienna State Academy.

At the request of his Austrian friend, director Max Reinhardt, and due to the rise of the Nazi regime, Korngold moved to the U.S. in 1934 to write music for Hollywood films. His first score was for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935). His next work was for “Captain Blood” (1935), which helped boost the career of Errol Flynn, a Hollywood newcomer and an actor Korngold would work with in years to come. Korngold received an Oscar for both “Anthony Adverse” (1936) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938). Overall, he wrote music for sixteen Hollywood films. Along with Max Steiner (“King Kong”, “Casablanca”, “Gone With The Wind”) and Alfred Newman (“Mark of Zorro”, “Wuthering Heights”, “Hunchback of Notre Dame”), he was one of the founders of great film music.

April 16, 2019August 11, 2019

TUSKER BEHRENFELD, Violist

Tusker began playing the viola in seventh grade. Having started the violin at the age of four, he fell in love with the sound of the viola the very first time he heard it played. Though he an still rip a Scottish fiddle tune on the violin, his heart is with the viola.

This spring he will be travelling to Ellensburg to compete in the State solo competition on viola.

This is Tusker’s second year with the Port Townsend Symphony Orchestra and his first year as principal violist for the Port Townsend High School Orchestra.

He enjoys singing and has sung in the Port Townsend Youth Chorus for the past seven years.

Tusker is on the high school track team, Knowledge Bowl team, PTHS robotics team, and is in the Students for Sustainability club. He enjoys mountain biking, scuba diving, travel, backpacking, fishing, and designing and building just about anything.

April 9, 2019September 12, 2025

OVERTURE IN C MAJOR by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel 1805-1847

Fanny Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, Germany, the oldest of four children of a distinguished family headed by Abraham Mendelssohn. Her brother Felix was, as was she, a musical prodigy and truly gifted composer. She was first given piano instruction by her mother and was taught in the “Berliner-Bach” tradition. By the age of thirteen Mendelssohn could play all twenty-four preludes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier by memory. Her brother Felix grew to discover she was a far superior pianist than was he. People began to comment, “She plays like a man,” which was the highest praise for a woman at that time.

Mendelssohn was limited by the prevailing attitudes of the day toward women. Her father wrote in 1820, “Music will perhaps become a profession for your brother Felix, but for you it can and must be only an ornament.” Felix, however, was much more supportive of his sister’s music and had a number of her pieces published under his own name. She continued to compose privately even after she married painter Wilhelm Hensel in 1829.

April 9, 2019August 11, 2019

TOM BERG, Violinist

Checking in at 97, Tom is the oldest player in the Port Townsend Symphony Orchestra.

Tom began playing violin when he was about eight years old. His first violin was handmade by his great-grandfather in Norway. His parents purchased Tom’s second violin in about 1938 from a violin pawn shop in Portland, Oregon. It was a good violin; in fact, it is the same violin that Tom plays today.

During Tom’s career as a licensed mechanical engineer, he played with the Bremerton Symphony for more than two decades.

After moving to the Olympic Peninsula, Tom played with the Port Angeles Symphony for around a dozen years, and for the past 25 years he has played with the Port Townsend Symphony Orchestra.

February 19, 2019August 11, 2019

CARMEN SUITE NO. 1 by Georges Bizet, 1838-1875

French composer Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” written in 1874, became the world’s most performed opera. Despite its eventual success, Bizet died in Paris of a “broken heart” (a ruptured artery) at age thirty-seven due to the initial “failure” of the work.

Some critics considered this piece “indelicate” in its depiction of the opera’s subject matter — the downfall of a soldier after Carmen seduces and abandons him. However, the story appealed greatly to the Parisian theatre-goers.

The “Carmen Suite” contains music derived from the opera and was published between 1882 and 1887, years after Bizet’s death.

The opening prelude introduces the ominnous theme associated with both Carmen and her fate at the hands of her lover, Don Jose. The following aragonaise (a dance from the region of Aragon in Spain) is the festive yet sinuous music that opens the final act of the opera as crowds arrive for a parade outside the bullring. An intermezzo, a serenely melancholic section based on the prelude to the final act, leads to a seguiedille that Carmen sings to seduce Jose. The suite ends with a jaunty military march, “Les Dragons d’Alcala,” followed by the famous march “Les Toreadores,” the entry of the bullfighters, which is actually the opening piece of the opera.

February 19, 2019August 11, 2019

SARO BABIKIAN, Guitarist

Saro Babikian was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1995. He started playing the classical guitar at age 10. He attended the Solhi Al-Wadi Conservatory of Music in Damascus. In 2012 he performed at the Damascus Opera House in a concert hosted by the Ministry of Culture for outstanding students of the conservatory. Later that same year he moved to Los Angeles and continued his guitar studies with the renowned Armenian guitarist Sarkis Turgutyan. In 2015 he was admitted to the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music’s classical guitar program under the instruction of Scott Tennant and William Kanengiser. Saro also takes flamenco lessons with Adam Del Monte at USC. He graduated with honors with his Bachelor of Music degree in classical guitar in 2018 and has been awarded a scholarship from USC Thornton to continue his naster’s studies in classical guitar performance.

Saro has participated in numerous masterclasses with renowned musicians and guitarists such as David Russell, Pepe Romero, and Paul O’Dette. He has earned several awards in various guitar competitions including Honorable Mention at the Gohar and Ovanes Andriassian Classical Guitar Competition, and First Prize at an international music competition in Serbia. In 2017, Saro was invited as a guest artist to the 3rd Yerevan International Guitar Festival, in Yerevan, Armenia. He has composed several pieces for the guitar, including Tremolo for classical guitar, and has completed arrangements of a set of Armenian folk songs by Gomidas for guitar and voice. Saro is regularly invited to Armenia to hold guitar classes and to play concerts.

You can follow Saro Babikian on Facebook or Linked In.

February 12, 2019August 11, 2019

PAVANE POUR UNE INFANTE DEFUNTE by Maurice Ravel, 1875-1937

(Pavane for a Dead Princess)

Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure, France, a small Basque town near the Spanish border. He and his parents moved to Paris when he was very young. By the age of seven, he was taking piano lessons and studying harmony and composition. In 1889, at age fourteen, he passed the entrance exam into the Conservatoire de Paris by playing music by Chopin.

Ravel won the first prize in the Conservatoire’s piano competition in 1891, but otherwise did not stand out as a piano student. His ambition was to become a composer, but his early works were not well received by the faculty and he was expelled from the Conservatoire in 1895. In 1897 he was re-admitted and began to study with Gabriel Fauré who considered Ravel’s work “very imaginative.”

It was during this time, in 1899, that Ravel composed his first widely known piece: “Pavane pour une Infante Defunte.” The pavane was originally written for piano and it was played everywhere “by young ladies who did not play the piano very well.”

Eleven years later, Ravel orchestrated the piece into the form we hear today, a version featuring the tonal intricacies of a symphony.