Matt Doran:  Comic Overture

"I like to compose more than anything else in the world," says Matt Doran, and it must be true, because at 92 he can boast having written ten operas, six symphonies, six concerti, songs, chamber pieces, and 70 pieces that involve the flute — about 220 pieces in all.
It’s not for the money. "Most composers know they're never going to be paid,” he says, pointing out that a composer will often pay to have copies of a work made and distributed. (He received royalty check from one publisher in the amount of $4.82.)
Dr. Doran’s compositions have been performed at Carnegie Recital Hall, radio KFAC in Los Angeles, and the Strauss Conservatory in Munich, with opera performances in Los Angeles, New York, Texas, Oregon and Kansas.
Dr. Doran, the latest in the series of Northwest Composers being featured by the Beaverton Symphony Orchestra, has lived in Hazel Dell, just north of Vancouver, since the mid-1990s, when he and his wife Theresa moved there from Los Angeles, where he taught music at Mount St. Mary’s College.
In World War II he played piccolo in an Army band, then attended the University of Southern California School of music, majoring in flute before studying composition under Pulitzer Prize-winning Ernst Toch.
The “Comic Overture” — AKA “Merry Overture for Orchestra” is a rollicking, playful piece that within six minutes passes the focus back and forth from strings to woodwinds, to brass and to percussion, in a way that conjures up scenes of the circus, or of an animated cartoon. It sets a mood, and the mood is definitely jolly.

Camille Saint-Saens:  Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, [1835-1921] the almost insanely talented French composer, organist, conductor, and pianist, was also intimately acquainted with violin technique, a fact that emerges clearly in his Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso.
He was 24 when a 15-year-old Spanish violin prodigy named Pablo de Sarasate sought him out and commissioned him to write a violin concerto. Saint-Saëns complied, producing his Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Major. The collaboration left both wanting more from each other: Four years later, Saint-Saëns produced the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in A minor, which Sarasate premiered in Paris on April 4, 1867. It quickly became, and has remained, one of Saint-Saëns’s most popular compositions.

Ludwig van Beethoven:  Piano Concerto No. 3 in c minor, 3rd movement

Beethoven himself was at the keyboard for the premier performance of his Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor on April 5, 1803. At the same concert, his Second Symphony and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives were also premiered.
The composer had not completed the score by the time of its premier. According to his friend Ignaz von Seyfried, who turned the pages for him that night, “I saw almost nothing but empty pages; at the most, on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me were scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all the solo part from memory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to set it all down on paper.”
The third movement begins in C minor with unaccompanied piano before the orchestra takes up the theme in a broken chord accompaniment. Towards the end, the mode shifts to C major and the piano breaks out into a virtuosic cadenza before the final brilliant Presto brings the piece to a close.

 

Antonin Dvorák: Cello Concerto in b minor, op. 104, 1st movement 

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) wrote his Cello concerto during a sojourn in New York City, while serving as Director of the National Conservatory there. For years, he had maintained that the cello, although a fine instrument for the orchestra, was totally unsuited for a solo concerto because of the nasal quality of its high notes and the “mumbling” sound of the bass.
But in 1894 he heard one of the teachers at the Conservatory, Victor Herbert, play his recently completed Cello Concerto No. 2 in E minor, Op. 30, and he reconsidered. (Herbert had been principal cellist in the orchestra that had given the premier performance of Dvorák’s “New World” symphony the year before.) Dvorák began work on his concerto that year and completed it three months later. Its premier performance was given the following year (1896) with the London Philharmonic.
Brahms, when he heard it in a private performance, reportedly remarked: "If I had known that it was possible to compose such a concerto for the cello, I would have tried it myself!”
The first movement opens with a lengthy introduction by the orchestra before the soloist picks up the theme; there follows a section with triple-stopped chords. In the coda, there are octaves and many double stops. It is a movement requiring great technical ability from the soloist.

Jean Sibelius:  Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Opus 43

“It has been said that Sibelius conceives a melody and its instrumental expression simultaneously; that he is incapable of dissociating melody and instrument. If so, he has developed this valuable faculty to the point of papal infallibility, for when a melody sings out from the orchestra of Sibelius, we somehow feel that that is the one inevitable voice through which the given melody could be proclaimed.”
That was Charles O’Connell, writing in 1934, when Sibelius was at the height of his popularity, in America as well as his native Finland. Sibelius (1865-1957) had taught himself to compose as a teen-ager, before going on to formal training in the Helsinki Music Institute. By the time of his graduation at age 23, his compositions had won him a state stipend to continue his study in Germany; a few years later he was awarded an annual government subsidy that allowed him to devote all of his time to composition.
Much of his music was patriotic, at a time when Russia was striving to strip Finland of its political autonomy. Finlandia, one of the numbers in a suite that he wrote in 1899 for a pageant portraying Finland’s history, became a rallying-point for national sentiment. It was to make him a household name, and it created abroad an awareness of Finland’s national aspirations.
His First Symphony premiered in Helsinki in April of 1899, followed quickly by the Second, known popularly as the "Symphony of Independence". Incidental music written in 1903 contained a memorable tune known as “Valse Triste.” The Violin Concerto had its premier in1904. Sibelius had been hard at work.
And when he wasn’t working, it seems, he was drinking — heavily — with his friends. A painting by one of them dating from 1894 depicts a bleary-eyed, disheveled Sibelius with three other men, one of whom has passed out. As his career and recognition took off, his drinking continued, until his wife and friends feared he would self-destruct. To save him from himself, they built for him and his family — his wife Aino and  six children — a villa in a forest just far enough outside of Helsinki to discourage casual visits. They moved into the villa in September of 1904. It was Sibelius’ home until his death in 1957.
His early style shows the influence of nineteenth-century German music and Tchaikovsky, but with the Symphony No. 2 these influences are overwhelmed by Sibelius’ own individual genius. A master of orchestral tone color, he is “able to establish within a few seconds a sound world that is entirely his own,” as the Oxford Companion to Music describes it. “[H]is thematic inspiration and its harmonic clothing were conceived directly in terms of orchestral sound, the substance and the sonority being indivisible one from the other.”
Armed with this ability, he sought, according to Grove Music Online “to plunge recklessly towards an essential truth hidden in sonority … itself, to reawaken sound back to its crude or primal essence, to do violence – abrupt violence – to the conventions. Thus Sibelius the ‘Finnish barbarian’ undertook his mission to validate himself by defamiliarizing sonic norms, endeavoring to startle sound awake with surprising strokes.”
His compositions were immensely successful in Finland, but less so elsewhere — with the exception of the United States and England, where he was broadly appreciated by critics and audiences through the first half of the twentieth century. But then his reputation plunged even there, led by charges such as Virgil Thompson’s that the Second Symphony was “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description.” Similarly dismissive attacks prevailed for decades … but through it all, audiences continued to appreciate the Violin Concerto and the Second Symphony. Led perhaps by the stubborn appreciation of audiences, a “substantial and long overdue reassessment of Sibelius seems to have begun,” reports Grove Music Online.
In the Second Symphony, O’Connell wrote in 1934, “we can observe the two most characteristic features of Sibelius' music — its strongly national character, and the amazing economy and effectiveness of its orchestration. This is the real Sibelius, terse, powerful and convincing; devoid of the factitious and the unnecessary, naked and pulsating and enormously vital.”
It is written in four movements, but there is no break between the third and fourth. Instead, a long crescendo at the end of the third leads directly into — again in the words of O’Connell — “the blazing and imperious proclamations” of the fourth in “a mighty song of triumph. This is the Sibelius of Finlandia”…