Summer Festival VII: “Brightmusic Goes Hollywood: The Chamber Music of Film Composers”

Concert No. 1 – 7:30 pm, Thursday, June 14
Malcolm Arnold, Divertimento for Flute, Oboe & Clarinet, op. 37
Ennio Morricone, “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission
Sergei Prokofiev, Quintet in G Minor, op. 39
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Piano Quintet in C Minor
Program notes below.
Musicians: Samuel Formicola (violin), Jarita Ng (viola), Meredith Blecha-Wells (cello), John Krause (double bass), Parthena Owens (flute), Lisa Harvey-Reed (oboe), Chad Burrow (clarinet) and Amy I-Lin Cheng (piano)
Concert No. 2 – 7:30 pm, Saturday, June 16
Nino Rota, Trio for Flute, Violin & Piano
Bernard Herrmann, Souvenirs de Voyage
Bernard Herrmann, Psycho Suite for String Quartet (arr. Richard Birchall)
Nino Rota, Trio for Clarinet, Cello & Piano
Program notes below.
Musicians: Gregory Lee (violin), Samuel Formicola (violin), Jarita Ng (viola), Jesús Castro-Balbi (cello), Parthena Owens (flute), Chad Burrow (clarinet), Amy I-Lin Cheng (piano) and Ruirui Ouyang (piano)
Concert No. 3 – 4:00 PM, Sunday, June 17
John Williams, Three Pieces from Schindler’s List for Violin & Piano
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Trio in D Major, op. 1
Dmitri Shostakovich, Piano Quintet in G Minor, op. 57
Program notes below.
Musicians: Gregory Lee (violin), Samuel Formicola (violin), Jarita Ng (viola), Jesús Castro-Balbi (cello), Amy I-Lin Cheng (piano) and Ruirui Ouyang (piano)
Concert No. 4 – 7:30 PM, Tuesday, June 19
John Williams, “Viktor’s Tale” from The Terminal
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Sonata for Clarinet & Piano, op. 128
Leonard Bernstein, Piano Trio
Miklós Rózsa, Piano Quintet in F Minor, op. 2
Program notes below.
Musicians: Gregory Lee (violin), Marat Gabdullin (violin), Samuel Formicola (viola), Jesús Castro-Balbi (cello), Chad Burrow (clarinet), Amy I-Lin Cheng (piano) and Ruirui Ouyang (piano)
(Programs subject to change)
Concerts will be performed at St. Paul’s Cathedral, 127 NW 7th St. in downtown OKC.
Concert 1 Program Notes
Written by Kimberly Powell
Malcolm Arnold: Divertimento for Flute, Oboe & Clarinet, Op 37 Twentieth-century British musician and conductor Malcolm Arnold was an accomplished composer of concert music, but the public better knew him during his career for his film scores, most notably Bridge on the River Kwai of 1957 for which he won an Academy Award. Serving also as principal trumpet of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1940s, Arnold also made celebrated contributions to the repertoire for winds. Written in 1952, the six-movement Divertimento for wind trio (flute, oboe and clarinet) provides each player an equal opportunity to offer music highly emblematic of the composer: inventive, tuneful, witty and idiomatic.
Ennio Morricone: “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission Ennio Morricone may be the world’s greatest living film composer. Admired for his versatile, expressive and innovative scores, Morricone is one of cinema’s great legends, sought after by filmmakers across the world. His long artistic career has generated music not only for film but also for theatre, radio and the concert hall. Morricone’s acclaimed Golden Globe-winning score for The Mission, set in eighteenth-century South America, offers an eclectic mix of styles that capture the confluence of cultures depicted in the film. The lyrical “Gabriel’s Oboe,” composed as the film’s main theme, has become immensely popular in both concert hall and mass media translations.
Sergei Prokofiev: Quintet in G minor, Op 39 Sergei Prokofiev has emerged as one of the most distinctive musical voices of the twentieth century, his wide-ranging compositions bridging the worlds of pre-revolutionary Russia and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Prokofiev’s work in the cinema engendered the charming Lieutenant Kijé and Egyptian Nights suites, as well as the moody and gripping score for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 landmark Russian epic, Alexander Nevsky. During his years in Paris, where he renewed acquaintances with Stravinsky and Diaghilev, Prokofiev wrote his unusually scored Quintet in G minor (1924) for a young choreographer who needed music for an evening of short ballets but had only five musicians available to perform: an oboist, clarinetist, violinist, violist and double bassist.
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Piano Quintet in C minor Founder of twentieth-century England’s pastoral movement in music, Ralph Vaughan Williams first made a name as one of the leading collectors and researchers of traditional English folk music. Late in his career, Vaughan Williams began to write for cinema, first composing the acclaimed score to Michael Powell's 49th Parallel. He went on to complete eleven motion picture scores, his majestic seventh symphony developing out of his music for the film Scott of the Antarctic. Brahms was the source of study and inspiration for Vaughan Williams’ early Quintet in C minor, with scoring matching that of Schubert’s “Trout” quintet, though the expressive central Andante reveals Vaughan Williams’ distinctive lyrical voice.
Concert 2 Program Notes
Written by Kimberly Powell
Nino Rota: Trio for Flute, Violin & Piano Italian composer Nino Rota is best known for his film scores, though he had composed an oratorio and an opera by the time he turned 13. Rota later studied composition at the Curtis Institute of Music. His work in film dates back to the early forties, and his filmography includes nearly all of the noted directors of his time, his most famous scores written for films by Fellini, Zeffirelli and Coppola. In addition to his remarkable body of film scores, Rota was also a prolific composer of concert music, completing ten operas, five ballets and a number of orchestral, choral and chamber works. His mastery of both neo-classical and modernist techniques is revealed in his playful Trio for Flute, Violin & Piano from 1958.
Bernard Herrmann: Souvenirs de Voyage American composer and conductor widely recognized for his film scores, Bernard Herrmann studied at the Juilliard School and was part of a group of young composers associated with Charles Ives. Herrmann’s film career launched through his work with Orson Welles on the radio show Mercury Theatre on the Air. Herrmann scored the music for Welles’ highly acclaimed film Citizen Kane and later wrote his now-famous and distinctive film scores for a series of suspense films directed by Alfred Hitchcock. A composer of a variety of concert works throughout his career, Herrmann wrote his final concert piece, a clarinet quintet in 1967. Entitled Souvenirs de Voyage, the quintet reflects the composer’s time spent in England, its temperament deeply rooted in English and Irish culture.
Bernard Herrmann: Psycho Suite for String Quartet Bernard Herrmann’s film scoring was innovative in its day for introducing the use of the Theremin and other electronic instruments, first heard in his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still, a Sci-fi classic film. Among the composer’s most significant Hitchcock film scores were those for Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho, in which his masterful orchestration of strings, screeching in unison with each slash of Norman’s knife, has remained a paragon of suspense film sound tracks. The original scoring for strings only translates effectively to the string quartet arrangement commissioned by the Tippett Quartet from English cellist, composer, and arranger Richard Birchall.
Nino Rota: Trio for Clarinet, Cello & Piano All told, Nino Rota produced some 150 film scores, including soundtracks for all of the important Italian filmmakers of postwar cinema, as well as for leading French, American, German and Soviet directors. In a long association with Federico Fellini, Rota served the director’s vision, much as Bernard Herrmann did for Alfred Hitchcock. But, quite remarkably, the film career doesn’t tell the entire story of the composer, who stayed true to his generally lyric style while becoming well versed in all of the prevailing stylistic trends. His relatively late (1979) Trio for Clarinet, Cello & Piano shows us more of the Rota of the film world with stylistic nods to Wagner, Poulenc and Prokofiev.
Concert 3 Program Notes
Written by Kimberly Powell
John Williams: Three Pieces for Violin & Piano from Schindler’s List Celebrated for creating some of the most memorable music in movie history, American composer John Williams has scored more than 100 films, as well as music and themes for national network news and internationally profiled special events and occasions. Known for his lush symphonic style, his scores helped bring symphonic film music back into vogue. Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List from 1993 tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand Polish-Jewish refugees during WWII by employing them in his factories. Williams received an Academy Award and a Grammy for the film score. He later arranged three pieces from the film for violin and piano, The Theme from Schindler’s List, Jewish Town (Krakow Ghetto-Winter ‘41) and Remembrances for his friend violinist Itzhak Perlman, who was a featured guest artist in the original film score performance.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Trio in D major, Op 1 Austro-Hungarian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of the originators of the genre of grand film music. A child prodigy, Korngold saw his ballet Der Schneemann first staged in Vienna when he was just 11, and several of his operas produced during his teens. Over a number of years, Korngold traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Austria, producing film music for Hollywood and concert music for European audiences. His mastery of opera scoring revolutionized cinematic music, introducing rich and complex orchestration and new techniques to the rapidly developing film genre. He continued to compose concert works throughout his career; his Violin Concerto, written in 1937 for Jascha Heifetz, is perhaps his best known. The early and energetic Trio in D Major, Op 1, for piano and strings also dates from Korngold’s childhood, following his compositional studies with Alexander von Zemlinsky, and offers surprising complexity, overt lyricism and daring harmonic and rhythmic twists.
Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op 57 Dmitri Shostakovich emerged as one of the greatest composers of classic forms during the 20th century. Spending his entire life and career in Soviet Russia, Shostakovich offered remarkable range and character in his symphonies and string quartets, stage works and concerti, much of his music written under the pressures of government-imposed standards of Soviet art and music. His musical evolution was dramatic, distinctive and somewhat eclectic, his style assimilating the national heritage via Tchaikovsky, to the mainstream European tradition, with particular influences from Mahler and Hindemith. Though his G minor piano quintet was composed in the wake of his opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk, for which Shostakovich was severely criticized, the chamber work was immediately successful. The composer created an accessible yet highly crafted piece that won audiences over with its clear design, lyricism and effective scoring, despite its progressive harmonic language.
Concert 4 Program Notes
Written by Kimberly Powell
John Williams: “Viktor’s Tale” from The Terminal Creating some of the most iconic film scores of all time, composer John Williams has written much of his cinematic music for director Steven Spielberg, with whom he has collaborated for over forty years. For Spielberg’s The Terminal, a film about an Eastern European trapped in the international arrivals airport terminal in New York as his home country erupts into civil war, Williams took inspiration from the main character's origins and the film's lightly comic mood. The main theme "The Tale of Viktor Navorski," played by the clarinet, is offered in this performance in an arrangement with piano.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Sonata for Clarinet & Piano, Op 128 Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, one of Italy’s rising young composers during the 1930s, immigrated to the U.S. following Mussolini’s anti-Semitic policies. He settled in Hollywood and became a film composer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, composing over 200 film scores for MGM. His encounter with Andrés Segovia in Venice during the 1920s also inspired him to write for the guitar; Tedesco became over time one of the foremost twentieth-century composers for the instrument. Throughout his life, however, Tedesco composed concert music of all kinds and for nearly every instrument in the orchestra. The Sonata for Clarinet and Piano from 1945 is strongly emblematic of his rich neo-classical style, a work harmonically inventive, polyphonic and cinematic in color.
Leonard Bernstein: Piano Trio American conductor, composer, and pianist noted for his accomplishments in both classical and popular music, Leonard Bernstein is also remembered for his flamboyant conducting style, and for his charismatic concerts for young people. His music often made use of diverse elements, and he wrote quite skillfully for the stage, Wonderful Town, Candide and West Side Story among his best-known works. Bernstein’s only venture in writing an original score for film, his music for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront earned him an Academy Award nomination. His Piano Trio was composed in 1937 while he was a student of Walter Piston at Harvard University. Years later, some of the music found its way into Bernstein’s popular 1944 musical On the Town, filmed in 1949.
Miklós Rózsa: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op 2 Miklós Rózsa was one of the last of the great "classic" film and television composers and one of the most prolific. Although he remembered as the composer who created opulent film scores for some of Hollywood’s most lavish epics (El Cid, Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, Madame Bovary), Rózsa was also highly experimental. Often writing for “film noir" he, like Bernard Herrmann, utilized early electronic instruments to suggest pathos and psychological disorder. Throughout his life, Rózsa also composed a number of works for the concert hall. Much of this music reflects his interest in the folk music of his native Hungary and includes the early Piano Quintet in F minor, Op 2, one of the composer’s first published works and a piece revealing the composer’s neo-romantic sensibilities and essential dramatic flair.