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SUNDAY, JANUARY 19, 2025 | 2:00 PM | SID WILLIAMS THEATRE

VIS shares the hidden treasures in these works, offering a glimpse into the creative process of the composers. It is fascinating to think about the stories behind these pieces and why they were not finished, remained unpublished or not performed during the composer’s life… yet they have become beloved pieces in the orchestral repertoire.

CONDUCTOR: Cosette Justo Valdés

PROGRAMME

BEETHOVEN:   Symphony No. 10

Jocelyn MORLOCK  Interloper

Charles IVES   The Unanswered Question

J.S. J.S. BACH   The Art of the Fugue

Felix MENDELSSOHN   Symphony No. 4 “Italiana”

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VIS shares the hidden treasures in these works, offering a glimpse into the creative process of the composers. It is fascinating to think about the stories behind these pieces and why they were not finished, remained unpublished or not performed during the composer’s life… yet they have become beloved pieces in the orchestral repertoire.

CONDUCTOR:
Cosette Justo Valdés

PROGRAMME

BEETHOVEN:
Symphony No. 10

Jocelyn MORLOCK
Interloper

Charles IVES
The Unanswered Question

J.S. J.S. BACH
The Art of the Fugue

Felix MENDELSSOHN
Symphony No. 4 “Italiana”

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Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 1770– 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the classical and romantic eras in classical music, he remains one of the most recognized and influential musicians of this period, and is considered to be one of the greatest composers of all time.

Beethoven was born in Bonn, the capital of the Electorate of Cologne, and part of the Holy Roman Empire. He displayed his musical talents at an early age and was vigorously taught by his father Johann van Beethoven, and was later taught by composer and conductor Christian Gottlob Neefe. At age 21, he moved to Vienna and studied composition with Joseph Haydn. Beethoven then gained a reputation as a virtuoso pianist, and was soon courted by Prince Lichnowsky for compositions, which resulted in Opus 1 in 1795.

The piece was a great critical and commercial success, and was followed by Symphony No. 1 in 1800. This composition was distinguished for its frequent use of sforzandi, as well as sudden shifts in tonal centers that were uncommon for traditional symphonic form, and the prominent, more independent use of wind instruments. In 1801, he also gained notoriety for his six String Quartets and for the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. During this period, his hearing began to deteriorate, but he continued to conduct, premiering his third and fifth symphonies in 1804 and 1808, respectively. His condition worsened to almost complete deafness by 1811, and he then gave up performing and appearing in public.

During this period of self exile, Beethoven composed many of his most admired works; his seventh symphony premiered in 1813, with its second movement, Allegretto, achieving widespread critical acclaim. He composed the piece Missa Solemnis for a number of years until it premiered 1824, which preceded his ninth symphony, with the latter gaining fame for being among the first examples of a choral symphony. In 1826, his fourteenth String Quartet was noted for having seven linked movements played without a break, and is considered the final major piece performed before his death a year later.

 

Read more on Wikipedia.org…

Symphony No. 10
by Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven‘s Symphony No. 10 in E♭ major is a hypothetical work, assembled in 1988 by Barry Cooper from Beethoven’s fragmentary sketches for the first movement. All the sketches assembled were clearly intended for the same symphony, which would have followed the Ninth, since they appear together in several small groups, and there is consensus that Beethoven did intend to compose another symphony. Cooper’s score was first performed at a concert given in 1988 by the Royal Philharmonic Society, London, to whom Beethoven himself had offered the new symphony in 1827. The score is published by Universal Edition, Vienna, and appeared in a new edition in 2013.[1] In 2019, artificial intelligence was used to reconstruct the third and fourth movements of the symphony, which premiered 9 October 2021, titled Beethoven X: The AI Project.[2]

Read more on Wikipedia.org

Jocelyn Morlock
Canadian Composer

Jocelyn Morlock (14 December 1969 – 27 March 2023) was a Canadian composer and music educator based in Vancouver, British Columbia.[1] Her piece My Name is Amanda Todd won the 2018 Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year.

Morlock was born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba on 14 December 1969.[5] She studied piano with Robert Richardson, Sr. and completed a Bachelor of Music in piano performance at Brandon University (B.Mus. 1994), where her teachers included Gerhard Ginader (electroacoustic music) and T. Patrick Carrabré (composition).[6] She received both a master’s degree and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia (M.Mus. 1996, DMA 2002) where her composition teachers included Stephen Chatman, Keith Hamel, and the late Russian-Canadian composer Nikolai Korndorf.

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Charles Ives
American modernist composer

Charles Edward Ives (/aɪvz/; October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American actuary, businessman, and modernist composer.[1] Ives was amongst the earliest American internationally renowned composers to achieve recognition on a global scale.[2] His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an “American original”.[3][4][5] He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones.[6] His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.[7]

Sources of Ives’s tonal imagery included hymn tunes and traditional songs; he also incorporated melodies of the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

Read more at Wikipedia.org

The Unanswered Question
composed by Charles Ives

The Unanswered Question is a musical work by American composer Charles Ives. Originally paired with Central Park in the Dark as Two Contemplations in 1908,[a] The Unanswered Question was revised by Ives in 1930–1935. As with many of Ives’ works, it was largely unknown until much later in his life, and was not performed until 1946.

Against a background of slow, quiet strings representing “The Silence of the Druids“, a solo trumpet poses “The Perennial Question of Existence”, to which a woodwind quartet of “Fighting Answerers” tries vainly to provide an answer, growing more frustrated and dissonant until they give up. The three groups of instruments perform in independent tempos and are placed separately on the stage—the strings offstage.

Read more at Wikipedia.org

Johann Sebastian Bach, (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Art of Fugue, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the Goldberg Variations as well as for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After becoming an orphan at age 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph Bach, after which he continued his musical development in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar—where he expanded his repertoire for the organ—and Köthen—where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St. Thomas) in Leipzig. He composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university’s student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened in some of his earlier positions, he had a difficult relation with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by King Augustus III of Poland in 1736. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.

 

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The Art of the Fugue
composed by Johann Sebastian Bach

The Art of Fugue, or The Art of the Fugue (German: Die Kunst der Fuge), BWV 1080, is an incomplete musical work of unspecified instrumentation by Johann Sebastian Bach. Written in the last decade of his life, The Art of Fugue is the culmination of Bach’s experimentation with monothematic instrumental works.

This work consists of fourteen fugues and four canons in D minor, each using some variation of a single principal subject, and generally ordered to increase in complexity. “The governing idea of the work”, as put by Bach specialist Christoph Wolff, “was an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.”[1] The word “contrapunctus” is often used for each fugue.

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Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn’s compositions include symphonies, concertos, piano music and chamber music. His best-known works include his Overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the oratorio Elijah, the overture The Hebrides, his mature Violin Concerto, and his String Octet. The melody for the Christmas carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is also his. Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words are his most famous solo piano compositions.

A grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family. He was brought up without religion until the age of seven, when he was baptised as a Reformed Christian. Felix was recognised early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalise on his talent.

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Symphony No. 4 "Italiana"
composed by Felix Mendelssohn

The Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. Posth. 90, MWV N 16, commonly known as the Italian,[1] is an orchestral symphony written by German composer Felix Mendelssohn.

The work has its origins, as had the composer’s Scottish 3rd Symphony and The Hebrides overture, in the tour of Europe which occupied Mendelssohn from 1829 to 1831. Its inspiration is the colour and atmosphere of Italy, where Mendelssohn made sketches but left the work incomplete. Below is a snippet of a letter he wrote to his father:

This is Italy! And now has begun what I have always thought … to be the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it. Today was so rich that now, in the evening, I must collect myself a little, and so I am writing to you to thank you, dear parents, for having given me all this happiness.[2]

In February he wrote from Rome to his sister Fanny,

The Italian symphony is making great progress. It will be the jolliest piece I have ever done, especially the last movement. I have not found anything for the slow movement yet, and I think that I will save that for Naples.

Mendelssohn completed the symphony in Berlin on 13 March 1833, in response to an invitation for a symphony from the London (now Royal) Philharmonic Society. He conducted the first performance himself in London on 13 May 1833 at a London Philharmonic Society concert. The symphony was first performed in the United States by the Germania Musical Society, Carl Bergmann conducting, at Boston on 1 November 1851.

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