FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2007

Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College

Crenshaw Blvd. at Redondo Beach Blvd.

FREE ADMISSION and FREE PARKING

Concert time: 8:15 p.m., pre-concert lecture: 7:30 p.m.

Information: (310) 379-9725 or (310) 539-4649 or http://BeachCitiesSymphony.org.

PROGRAM

Charles Gounod: Ballet Music from Faust

George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue

Anli Lin Tong, piano soloist

Maurice Ravel: Pavane for a Dead Princess

Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Suite

PROGRAM BIOGRAPHIES

Anli Lin Tong, Piano Soloist

Born in Taiwan, Anli Lin Tong was first recognized as a talented pianist at age 9, when she emerged from over 200 contestants to win First Prize in the first nationally-televised piano competition on Taiwan Television. That same year, she met and was invited by the late Mieczyslaw Munz to study at the Juilliard School in New York. Under the official sponsorship of Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, Ms. Tong traveled to New York, where she became the youngest pupil of Munz’s class at Juilliard. She received her Bachelor and Master of Music in Piano Performance from Juilliard, where her major teacher was Martin Canin, a protégé of Rosina Lhevinne, the teacher of the celebrated American pianist Van Cliburn. Later studies include master classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum with Jacob Lateiner and doctoral studies on full scholarship at UCLA under Vitaly Margulis.

Anli Tong’s concerts have taken her to three continents on such stages as the Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, Taipei Symphony Hall, the Bordeaux Opera House, and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. As a concerto soloist, she has appeared with the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra in the National Arts Festival, the Chinese Fine Arts Orchestra, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, the Bratislava Chamber Orchestra, the Livic Chamber Orchestra, and the Beach Cities Symphony. In solo and chamber music alike, her performances continue to garner critical acclaim. Ms. Tong has performed benefit concerts for a number of worthy causes, including raising funds for earthquake victims in Taiwan and for a medical clinic that serves the poor of Mexico.

Ms. Tong has also served her profession by creating forums for young people to learn and appreciate classical music. Her piano students have emerged as top prize winners in prestigious competitions that include the Los Angeles Philharmonic Kaper Awards, the Los Angeles Liszt Competition, the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Soloist Award, and the International Institute of Young Musicians Competition. Her teaching demonstrations were featured in the 2005 World Piano Pedagogy Conference at Anaheim Convention Center, and she has served as Secretary and Vice-President of the International Rachmaninoff Piano Competition. In 2006 she inaugurated the Young Audience Concert Previews at Beach Cities Symphony concerts with the co-sponsorship of the Music Teachers Association of California’s South Bay Branch, of which she currently serves as a Vice-President.

Anli Tong most recently performed George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on July 4, 2007, with the Burbank Philharmonic at the Starlight Bowl. In tonight’s performance, Ms. Tong once again lends her artistry to bring the beauty and magic of this uniquely American music to our audience, and to benefit the newly-launched Beach Cities Symphony Young Instrumentalist Scholarship Fund.

PROGRAM NOTES

BALLET MUSIC FROM FAUST

Charles Gounod (1818-1893)

Gounod’s opera Faust was first presented at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris in March 1859. That version had spoken dialogue interspersed with musical numbers like a Broadway show and no ballet music. The opera’s success prompted Gounod to craft recitatives from the spoken parts for a production in Strasbourg. Soon, productions all over France and Germany made Faust a staple of the operatic repertoire.

When the venerable Paris Opéra finally mounted its first Faust in March 1869, it was necessary to add ballet music. The Paris Opéra had a tradition that extended back to the 17th century of including ballet within operas, and maintained its own corps de ballet. In the late Romantic era, when such international composers as Wagner and Verdi mounted productions at the Paris Opéra, they added ballets to accommodate French taste, and Gounod was treated no differently. The consequence was that eight dances were written for the 1869 production. Today, most productions of the opera Faust reduce or eliminate the dances (the last one I played in used just three). However, the charm of these dances moves many conductors to program them as concert pieces; these are what we are hearing this evening.

Bill Malcolm

RHAPSODY IN BLUE

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

I recently heard a recording of Rhapsody in Blue in which George Gershwin himself was the soloist (his performance was captured on a piano roll). The recording sounded somewhat foreign in that it was accompanied by Ferde Grofé’s original orchestration for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, a band of 23 musicians (plus violins) composed of five doubling reed players, brass, a rhythm section, banjo, and accordion. One reason for this collaboration was a time constraint: Rhapsody was composed in a mere three weeks in January 1924. Another reason is that Gershwin, who was a largely self-taught musician, did not have sufficient knowledge of orchestration at that time to have done that task himself. He produced a two-piano version that Grofé, Whiteman's top arranger best known as the composer of The Grand Canyon Suite, orchestrated page-by-page as the originals came from the composer's pen.

Despite the rushed composition and orchestration, the première took place on February 12, 1924, in New York's Aeolian Hall. It was a smashing success; although the critics mostly panned it, the audience loved it. Gershwin, as soloist, decided to keep his options open as to when Whiteman would bring in the orchestra, so he did not write out one of the pages for solo piano-- only the words "Wait for nod" were scrawled by Grofé on the band score. Gershwin improvised some of what he was playing, and as he did not write out the piano part until after the performance, we do not know exactly how the original Rhapsody sounded. The impact, however, was far-reaching. Soon classical composers were writing “serious” music using jazz idioms. For all intents and purposes, Rhapsody in Blue legitimized jazz as serious musical expression and made Gershwin more famous than he might ever have imagined.

The version heard this evening is one that Grofé rescored in 1942 for a more conventional full orchestra (without accordion, etc.) and a completed piano part. Both start with the famous clarinet riff originally tailored for for Russ Gorman, the first-chair clarinetist in the Whiteman band. The music then continues rhapsodically--that is, without rigid form--to an energetic conclusion.

B. M.

PAVANE FOR A DEAD PRINCESS

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Ravel’s beautiful Pavane, which the composer originally wrote for solo piano in 1899, has been an audience favorite since its orchestrated version premièred in 1911. Of the more than 40 renditions currently available on iTunes, the shortest is Ravel’s own interpretation at just over five minutes. Pianists and conductors misled into turning the work into a funereal meditation would do well to remember the composer’s comment on his Pavane pour une enfante défunte: “I chose [the title] only for its euphonious qualities.” The emphasis belongs on the evocative word pavane, a stately sixteenth-century court dance which, as Ravel explained, “could have been danced by such a little princess as painted by Velásquez.”

Toni Empringham

NUTCRACKER SUITE

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

“The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” a nineteenth-century tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, takes place on Christmas Eve and features a seven-year-old girl, a wooden doll that magically comes to life, a battle between the forces of good and evil, and an ending that rewards fidelity and love. Tchaikovsky’s ballet, based on Marius Petipa’s scenario of this story, was choreographed by Lev Ivanov and had its première in St. Petersburg in 1892. Later that same year the composer completed the Nutcracker Suite (Op. 71a), an orchestral version featuring eight dances from the original two-act stage work which made its début before the first performance of the complete ballet. One of the most famous numbers from the suite, “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” features the celesta, a keyboard instrument first used by Tchaikovsky in The Voyedova (a symphonic poem) in 1891. The celesta’s enchanting sound, and the immediately recognizable melody of the dance itself, have been only slightly tarnished by overuse in advertising jingles every December.

While its association with the Christmas season helped to establish the popularity of The Nutcracker throughout Europe after its initial success, it was George Balanchine’s production, first performed by the New York City Ballet in 1954, that transformed The Nutcracker into a holiday institution in America. On December 19, 2007, New Yorkers and out-of-towners witnessed the 2,000th performance of Balanchine’s dazzlingly elegant staged version. For non-traditionalists, interesting variations using Tchaikovsky’s music include, most notably, Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker! and Mark Morris’s Hard Nut.

T. E.

Information

Beach Cities Symphony Association, Inc.

P.O. Box 248

Redondo Beach, CA 90277-0248

Beach Cities Symphony News information: 310-379-9725, 310-539-4649, or http://BeachCitiesSymphony.org or info@BeachCitiesSymphony.org.

Editors: Pat Chavez, Margaret McWilliams

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Last modified January 17, 2008

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