Concert I, 2024-2025 Season

Majestic Earth Movements

Bridges                                                                                                           

Courtney Bryan (b. 1982)

Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia. Her work has been presented in a wide range of venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blue Note Jazz Club, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. She frequently collaborates with visual artists, directors and writers.

Bryan writes about Bridges:

Bridges is a tribute to the city of Jacksonville, its diverse communities, and the bridges that bring them together. As Mary Carr Patton Composer-in-Residence with the Jacksonville Symphony, I have had the opportunity to learn about Jacksonville (and St. Augustine) by visiting museums and galleries, historic landmarks, educational institutions, and by meeting with contemporary artists, art supporters, and residents. A central inspiration for the music comes from my visits to several schools in different neighborhoods of Jacksonville where the young students improvised sound of their neighborhoods, particularly sounds of water, weather, and traffic.

Bridges begins with an acknowledgement of the early cultural encounters of Northeast Florida along the St. Johns River from the time of Ossachite to Cowford to Jacksonville, including the Timucua (Saturiwa), French, Spanish, West African, British, Seminole, and Americans. Following this are musical responses to my experiences while visiting Jacksonville. While bridges may separate the city, this piece celebrates how through people’s intentions and actions, they can bring the city together.

Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola                                          

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Mozart wrote this work in Salzburg in 1779 during his last sojourn in the city where he was born, where his father was employed, and where Michael Haydn (Joseph Haydn’s younger brother) was given the court organist job that Mozart had been subbing for. This time in Salzburg followed immediately upon the trip he took with his mother to Mannheim and Paris; a trip notable not only for its failure to secure Mozart permanent employment, but also for a doomed love affair in Mannheim and the sudden and devastating death of his mother in Paris. Despite the many disappointments and tragedies, however, Mozart learned a huge amount from the distinct musical cultures of these two cities, including the distinctly French fashion for concertante writing — that is, ensemble music in which several or many players get their chance at a star turn.

In concertante chamber music the players all get soloistic material in turn; in concertante symphonies, two or more orchestral players get prominent soloistic roles. Mozart wrote two complete concertante symphonies — one for flute and harp, actually written in Paris, and this better-known one for two strings, including the rarely-featured viola, for which Mozart is said to have had a particular fondness. Two more, for piano and violin, and violin, viola and cello respectively, remain incomplete. Another, for four wind instruments, is of uncertain origin.

Late eighteenth-century music (Mozart, Haydn, and their contemporaries) is often described as modeling social processes — not because it takes groups of people to play it, which is true of most music, but because the way both the different parts (high and low, strings and winds, etc) and the different phrases relate to one another. That musical sociability is especially clear in this work as the two soloists imitate, question and answer, one-up, contradict, and even blissfully agree. Even the extraordinary (and justly famous) middle movement, which begins like a tragic operatic aria, with a single tune and clear accompaniment, turns into a complex web of relationships once both soloists engage. We do not know who played or listened to this work in its original performance, but we can imagine that it gave them as much pleasure as it does us.

Symphony no. 5                                                                                             

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Jean Sibelius is a complicated figure. He lived over 90 years, but composed almost nothing for the last 30 years of his life. He is the pre-eminent symbol of Finnish music, but he grew up in Finland as a Swedish-speaking Russian subject, and constructed his Finnish identity slowly and very consciously. He thought of himself as a modernist, but rejected the principal modern-musical trends of the early twentieth century.

His Fifth Symphony (he wrote seven in all) took many years to reach its final version. Begun in 1914, its final version (the one most often played today, and the one we will perform) was premiered in 1919 and published two years later. It counts as a relatively late work, written, according to musicologist James Hepokoski, as he was presenting himself as a lonely soul forging a unique aesthetic path and finding both solace and inspiration in nature. This was toward the end of a career spent traveling to European and American cities to great success, especially in Britain and the US. Once he returned home for good, his villa Ainola, situated in the forest outside Helsinki, remained his retreat until his death.

The symphony is in three movements: the first being in two parts, first slow, then fast. It begins with strikingly rudimentary material, like lumps of musical clay waiting to be shaped into something. We hear bits of fanfare-like music, but without the definite rhythm that we would normally expect from a fanfare. This motive actually derives from Sibelius’s incidental music to Strindberg’s fairy-tale play Swanwhite. After a couple of repetitions, it develops a faster stepwise “tail,” which has a more discernible beat. The whole first section of this movement plays the fanfare-like material (mostly in the brass and winds) off against more stepwise— and often faster — ideas which are often in the strings. The music speeds up and turns into a fast waltz-like idea, in which we can still hear the “tail” from the opening, and some remnants of the fanfare. It ends in a blaze of excitement.

In contrast to the opening of the first movement, the second movement is all about a definite rhythm, which would match the words “I love this MU-sic.” It is a far cry from both the fogginess and the frenzy of the first movement, but Sibelius continues to pit long hymn-like lines in the winds and brass against faster passages in the strings.  The last movement begins as a kind of emotional counterpart to the fast section of the opening movement— it’s a  quick folk-like tune, this time played in particularly excited fashion by the strings (two really fast bow- strokes to every note). But before long the French horns take over the celebrations with a striking, slower, see-sawing idea which turns into the most important material of the movement. This unusual tune is said to be Sibelius’s response to the sight and sound of the migrating swans flying above his forest home. It is the most easily memorable and noble material in the symphony, and suggests the power and majesty of both the northern landscape and its non-human inhabitants.

 © Mary Hunter 2024