Haydn & Respighi
Ronald Feldman, Music Director
RESPIGHI
Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 1
MOZART
Sinfonia Concertante in Eb Major, K.297b for Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, and Horn
Britta Swedenborg, AuD, CCC-A, flute
Matt Lee, oboe
Benjamin Steinhorn, MD, PhD, bassoon
Orlando Pandolfi, horn
HAYDN
Symphony No. 96 in D Major, “Miracle”
Concerts will be presented without intermission.
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Longwood Symphony, at its core, is deeply committed to the health and safety of our audience, musicians and staff.
Proof of vaccination and masks are required for all guests.
All audience members must present proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 (including a BOOSTER for all who are eligible) upon arrival. Proof of a negative COVID-19 test will be allowed for children under the age of 5 only. Please visit our Health & Safety Guidelines page for more details and to review additional protocols.
Ticketing Update
NEC’s Jordan Hall will be welcoming audiences at a reduced capacity (about 50% of the hall). They will require 3’ of distancing between each guest in order to ensure safe distancing at all times. When you purchase tickets and select your seats, please note that any blacked out seat will be unavailable and must remain unoccupied.
About the Soloists
+ Britta Swedenborg, AuD, CCC-A, Flute
Dr. Britta Swedenborg (flute) is a Senior Audiologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston. She works with patients of all ages and has a variety of responsibilities including diagnostic hearing evaluations, rehabilitation including hearing aids and cochlear implants, fitting patients with hearing protection for preventative care, and intraoperative nerve monitoring primarily during neurosurgery. Britta became interested in audiology through her desire to combine her passions for music and biology. She is constantly challenged in the quickly growing and changing field of hearing health.
Originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, Britta started playing in the Minnesota Youth Symphony orchestras in 7th grade. She completed a double major in flute performance and biology at Carleton College and continued playing during her doctoral studies at Northwestern University. In college, she also played the accordion and was a member of an Astor Piazzolla tango band. Britta has played flute and piccolo with the Longwood Symphony Orchestra for over eight years. In addition to playing in the orchestra, Britta is part of a woodwind quintet, the Accidental Quintet. She was drawn to playing with the LSO because of its unique mission of combining music with medicine – much like her decision to make audiology her career.
+ Matt Lee, Oboe
Matt Lee is a doctoral student in Population Health Sciences in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he works on policy evaluation and obesity prevention research. He has a particular interest in identifying cost-effective strategies that improve population health while addressing health inequities in the United States, especially as they relate to issues of food access, environment, and advertising. Matt is a proud alum of the University of California Berkeley, where he played oboe and English horn with the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under the directorship of David Milnes and the UC Berkeley Chamber Orchestra under the directorship of Jennifer Huang. He has studied with a diverse range of oboists, including Sarah Rathke, Kyle Bruckmann, and Elizabeth England. In addition to playing in orchestras, Matt enjoys exploring ways to increase the accessibility of classical music and has performed previously in smaller chamber settings through the Groupmuse community network. Currently, he plays with the Longwood Symphony Orchestra and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Orchestra. He lives in Boston with his roommate, Melody, and their collection of not-dead-yet house plants.
+ Benjamin Steinhorn, MD, PhD, Bassoon
Benjamin Steinhorn began his woodwind studies on the saxophone with Jan Berry before switching to the bassoon, studying with William Buchman, Richard Ranti, Ronald Haroutunian and Ann Dufek. He completed his undergraduate studies in physics at MIT where he played with the MIT symphony orchestra and was an active member of the MIT Chamber Music Society. During his time at MIT, Benjamin was selected to perform Carl Maria von Weber’s Andante and Hungarian Rondo for bassoon and orchestra and received the Emerson Fellowship for musical performance studies. He received an MD from the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and a PhD in biophysics from Harvard where he studied cardiovascular redox signaling in the lab of Thomas Michel. Since starting medical school in 2012, he has been an active member of the LSO. Currently, Benjamin is a resident physician in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and has clinical and research interests in cardiac anesthesia and critical care medicine.
+ Orlando R. Pandolfi, Horn
Orlando R. Pandolfi (horn) has been an active performer in both Classical and Jazz idioms since high school. His early studies, influenced primarily by his father and two uncles, all professional musicians, included piano and trumpet lessons, but as a teenager his interest shifted from piano to jazz vibraphone, and later, from trumpet to French horn. After majoring in jazz studies at Berklee School of Music, and attending classes at The New England Conservatory in 20th Century Music and Conducting, he moved to New York City to study vibraphone with renowned jazz mallet artists David Samuels and David Friedman while finishing his Bachelors and a Masters Degrees in horn performance at The Juilliard School under the tutelage of Ranier C. DeIntinis and Myron Bloom. At Juilliard, he was a recipient of the E. and W. Naumberg Scholarship for Orchestral Instruments and twice winner of the Jerome Greene Fellowship in Music. He was also awarded teaching fellowships in both the Ear Training and Theory Departments, working under legendary master teacher, Mary Anthony Cox. He has been a guest instructor of horn at the University of Massachusetts, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and Amherst College. Mr. Pandolfi has performed and recorded throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. In 1989, he served as principal horn in the Nova Filarmonia Portuguesa in Lisbon, and in 1991-92, moved to Rome, Italy as guest instructor of horn at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and adjunct horn in the Orchestra Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the premier orchestra of that city. He has performed in over 350 concerts in Europe and has participated in numerous recordings. In addition, he has performed with the Gotham City Wind Quintet, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Winds, Oregon Symphony, Indiana University Summer Festival Orchestra, Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, Astoria (Oregon) Opera Festival, Opera Saratoga, Alabama Symphony, Springfield Symphony, New Haven Symphony, Symphony New Hampshire, Berkshire Symphony, Albany Symphony, The Boston Festival Orchestra, Longwood Symphony, Collegium Westchester (NY), Mohawk Trail Concert Series, and Portsmouth (NH) Symphony. He has been a guest artist at the Killington Music Festival and the Tampa / St. Pete Chamber Music Festival. He served as the horn instructor at Williams College from 2003 until 2011 and is currently Director of Music at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH where he lives with his wife, Penny. They have four sons, Logan, Beau, Anthony, and Leo.
About the Program
Program Notes by Steven Ledbetter
+ RESPIGHI Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 1
Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy, on July 9, 1879, and died in Rome on April 18, 1936. He composed three sets of Ancient Airs and Dances—in 1917, 1923, and 1931, respectively. The first suite calls for two flutes, two oboes and English horn, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, harpsichord, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.
Respighi wrote music of extraordinary color and orchestral brilliance, partly, no doubt, a consequence of his having studied orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov during the years he served as principal violist in the orchestra of the St. Petersburg opera. He continued to perform even after returning to Italy and making composition his principal activity. Though his best known works are the three large suites celebrating various facets of life in his native Rome (The Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals), Respighi also wrote eight operas. Moreover he was interested in early music, and this led to a number of “archaizing” works like the Piano Concerto in the mixolydian mode, and a Concerto gregoriano for violin. Some of his energetic attention to early Italian music was turned to the act of arranging older works in a more modern guise. The best known of these hybrids between musicology and composition are arrangements of Italian Renaissance and Baroque music under the titles Ancient Airs and Dances and The Birds, derived from compositions for lute and harpsichord respectively. They represented both a cheerful updating of the past and an assertion of nationalist pride, since each set drew upon the large body of Italian solo lute music published in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The first movement of Suite 1, the courtly Balletto de “Il Conte Orlando,” is a dance piece published by Simone Molinaro in 1599; the “Count Orlando” referred to is probably the title character of Ariosto’ s great epic Orlando furioso, which became a source of operas and other musical settings for more than a century. The Gagliarda was a dance in a moderately quick triple meter; this one was composed by Vincenzo Galilei, an amateur lutenist and composer who was also the father of the great astronomer Galileo. For the movement’s gentler middle section, Respighi draws upon an anonymous Italiana. The third movement is based on an anonymous Neapolitan Villanella, composed about 1600. The “villanelle” (“street song”) was a popular song form, often with a somewhat rough humor, more vigorous than the refined madrigal. The pizzicato strings suggest a lute or that accompanies a longing serenade. The final movement combines two different dances, both anonymous, from about 1600: a Passamezzo (literally, a “step and a half,” suggesting the rapid dance figure), interrupted by an energetic Mascherata, a type of villanella sung at a masked ball.
© Steven Ledbetter
+ MOZART Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon, K.297b, arr. Levin
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He evidently composed the Sinfonia Concertante in Paris in 1778, but there is a problem of authenticity discussed below. In addition to the solo instruments, the score calls for two oboes, two horns, and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes.
This Sinfonia Concertante for winds poses a real problem. It may have been composed during Mozart’s 1778 visit to Paris—or it may not be by Mozart at all. Mozart arrived in Paris on March 23, 1778. There Jean Le Gros, a concert impresario, commissioned a work in the genre that was then all the rage in Paris, a symphonie concertante, a kind of multiple concerto with several soloists. Mozart knew the players for whom the piece was intended, and he admired their playing enormously. They included the most renowned masters of their day on flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon. Mozart was clearly excited at the possibility of getting a performance from such a quartet, and he fulfilled the commission in about two weeks. But then something happened, and the piece was not performed during Mozart’s stay in Paris; his original score is lost.
In 1862 the cataloguer of Mozart’s works, Ludwig von Köchel, found a manuscript (not in Mozart’s handwriting) containing a sinfonia concertante said to be by Mozart. But the solo instruments are not exactly the same: rather than flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon, this piece calls for oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. Is this an arrangement of Mozart’s lost work? The scholarly debate continues to rage. But the scholarly issues may be put aside, perhaps, while actually listening to the sinfonia concertante. It seems clear that there is genuine Mozart in the piece, even if every detail does not come directly from him. Robert Levin has proposed that the orchestral part is essentially Mozart’s, and that the wind parts were adapted by someone at a later date to fit a particular ensemble. Admittedly this is purely hypothetical, but the work remains to intrigue us.
Certainly Mozart was an ideal composer for the genre of the “concertante symphony”: the prodigality of his invention, which also served him so well as an opera composer, was just what was required here, where each of several different solo instruments needed an opportunity to shine in competition with the others. Besides, his complete mastery of the possibilities of the wind instruments is demonstrated in score after score, so a work featuring flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon would be an invitation to delicious instrumental combinations.
Mozart designs themes especially well-suited to one instrument or another, giving each instrument its chance in the work, whether in the broadly laid out exposition of the first movement, or that movement’s extended development section; in the dialogue of the second movement, so redolent of chamber music; or in the variations of the finale, built on a simple whistleable tune that would surely have proved pleasing to the Parisian public—if in fact it was composed for them!
© Steven Ledbetter
+ HAYDN Symphony No. 96 in D major, The Miracle
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, during the night of March 31/April 1, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He wrote this symphony in London in 1791 and performed it at one of the concerts produced by Johann Peter Salomon during that year, possibly as early as the fourth concert in the series, given on April 1 (concert programs and newspaper reviews of the time never identify a symphony by key, so unless some specific musical detail is mentioned, it is not always possible to know which symphony was performed at which concert); in any event, it was certainly performed by the twelfth concert, the end of the series, on June 3. The symphony is scored for flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 20 minutes.
Haydn’s two extended visits to London, the first one beginning in January 1791 and the second ending in August 1795, made the Viennese realize that they had a truly great composer in their midst, a composer who aroused unprecedented enthusiasm from the large musical public in London, which had the most varied and active musical life of any place in Europe. Haydn’s major accomplishment for his London visits was the composition of his last twelve symphonies, capping off the extraordinary development that had seen the creation of over a hundred works in the genre in less than four decades.
He almost certainly made his debut in Salomon’s concert series, the first of which was given on March 11, 1791, in the Hanover Square rooms, possibly with the Symphony No. 96, which he had composed some weeks earlier, almost immediately after arriving in England. Curiosity was high. But over and over again the reviews noted that Haydn’s music was both “pleasing” and “scientific,” these two identifying Haydn’s unique accomplishment: the ability to write music that was at once immediately accessible and structurally significant with a fully refined technique.
The nickname for the symphony, The Miracle, was known only in England. It apparently came from an event at one of Haydn’s concerts. When he took his place at the piano to direct the performance (conductors at the time did not stand in front of the orchestra) the audience rushed forward to get a good look at him—just as a great chandelier came crashing down in the place where many people had just been sitting. This happy circumstance was instantly hailed as a miracle. There are skeptics as to the truth of the story. And in any case the anecdote apparently got connected to the wrong symphony!
Still, the nickname The Miracle might justifiably be applied to Symphony No. 96 purely on the grounds of its musical riches, were it not for the fact that Haydn composed eleven other symphonies for his London audience, each of which, in its own way, could be called miraculous.
As with all but one of the London symphonies, Haydn chose to begin with a slow introduction, a procedure that lends weight and dignity to the opening while serving at the same time to quiet the enthusiastic audience with a loud first chord, thereby ensuring that everyone would hear the actual (quiet) beginning of the movement proper. The introduction also reveals a move that Haydn makes several times in the course of the symphony, a sudden change from the major to the minor mode, momentary here, though it has wider implications later.
The main material of the Allegro is not so much melodic as rhythmic—more accompaniment than theme, though Haydn uses this purposely restricted material throughout the movement in a richly imaginative way. Particularly telling is the pick-up of three eighth-notes, which accumulate potential energy, releasing it on the downbeat to propel the music forward. That particular motive becomes ubiquitous as the movement proceeds. Haydn’s development takes us through the relatively dark key of C major, sequencing to land solidly on an F-sharp, followed by a surprising silence lasting almost three measures. Now, we are primed to expect a recapitulation after so dramatic a pause, but Haydn has a delicious surprise: a false reprise in G, which may sound convincing enough at first until he brings us around to the real return, signaled with a quiet scale passage in the first violins, not the horns and trumpets of the purposely misleading joke.
The Andante is a delicious, lighthearted play featuring woodwind obbligatos and the unusual presence of trumpets and timpani. It takes on a more serious tone with a turn to the minor and the more “academic” air of a fugato for the middle section. As the opening section returns and concludes, we have a delightful surprise: Haydn pauses on the chord that normally introduces the cadenza in a concerto, and suddenly two solo violins seize the moment. Followed by a flute and pairs of oboes, bassoons, and horns, they take off on a written-out ensemble cadenza, even closing with the traditional trills.
The minuet is Austrian to the core, from the sturdy grandeur of the main section, which would not have been out of place in any Viennese palace, to the gracefully countrified Ländler of the Trio, with the oboe singing over the simple “oom-pah-pah” of the strings. The final movement is one of those pieces in which Haydn employs all the means and all the elements of music to build up to what one writer of the day called “the highest degree of comic art.” Every idea is designed to mislead the listener in trying to guess what will come next and then boldly surprise with something different—yet still totally logical.
© Steven Ledbetter
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All programs are subject to change.