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Teddy Abrams—Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year and NWS alumnus—joins Latin ensemble People of Earth for a celebration of culture and expression. Aaron Copland, founder of the American Sound, takes a detour south of the border as he depicts a raucous dance using Mexican folk tunes that overflow with color and vitality. Gabriela Lena Frank deftly blends her Peruvian heritage with her admiration of Benjamin Britten in Concertino Cusqueño. Passion, turmoil and excitement exude from the pages of Leonard Bernstein’s beloved score for West Side Story and Cuban-American drummer, composer and University of Miami professor Dafnis Prieto introduces a new work for the People of Earth global music collective. 

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Program

Aaron Copland

El Salón México (1936)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

At the invitation of his friend Carlos Chávez, Aaron Copland first visited Mexico in 1932. One highlight of the trip was a night spent at a dance hall in Mexico City, a scene that inspired Copland to compose El Salón México. Completed in 1936, the colorful tone poem was Copland’s first great popular success, and it opened up rich new stylistic territory that he continued to explore in Rodeo and Billy the Kid, his ballets set in the American West.

Copland incorporated popular Mexican tunes that he learned from published sheet music, and he also evoked the sounds  of local mariachi bands, as heard in the trumpet solo at the beginning and the swaying dance rhythms throughout the score. Copland described feeling a “live contact with the Mexican people” in that dance hall, and his musical tribute captures “the electric sense one gets sometimes in far-off places, of suddenly knowing the essence of a people—their humanity, their separate shyness, their dignity and unique charm.”

Gabriela Lena Frank

Concertino Cusqueño (2012)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

When Gabriela Lena Frank appeared on a list of “the top 35 female composers in classical music” compiled in 2017 by The Washington Post, chief critic Anne Midgette pointed to the significance of Frank’s “multiculturalism” and her practice of “mingling folk feeling with compositional sophistication.” Born in Berkeley to a mother of Peruvian-Chinese heritage and a father from a Lithuanian-Jewish background, Frank has embraced her ancestry, especially her connection to Peru, where she has traveled extensively.

Ms. Frank provided the following program note:

Concertino Cusqueño, written to celebrate the fine players of The Philadelphia Orchestra on the eve of Yannick Nézet-Ségun’s inaugural season as Music Director, finds inspiration in two unlikely bedfellows: Peruvian culture and the British composer Benjamin Britten. As a daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, I’ve long been fascinated by my multicultural heritage and have been blessed to find western classical music to be a hospitable playpen for my wayward explorations. In doing so, I’ve looked to composers such as Alberto Ginastera from Argentina, Béla Bartók from Hungary, Chou Wen-Chung from China and my own teacher, William Bolcom, from the U.S. as heroes: To me, these gentlemen are the very definition of “cultural witnesses,” as they illuminate new connections between seemingly disparate idioms of every hue imaginable.

To this list, I add Britten, who I admire inordinately. I wish I could have met him, worked up the nerve to show him my own music, invited him to travel to beautiful Perú with me... I would have shared chicha morada (purple corn drink) with him, taken him to a zampoña panpipe instrument-making shop, set him loose in a mercado (market) streaming with immigrant Chinos and the native Indio descendants of the Incas. I would have loved showing him the port towns exporting anchoveta (anchovies), the serranos (highlands) exporting potatoes, and the selvas (jungles) exporting sugar. And I know Britten would have been fascinated by the rich mythology enervating the literature and music of this small Andean nation, so deeply similar to the plots of his many operas, among other works.

Concertino Cusqueño melds together two brief musical ideas: The first few notes of a religious tune, Ccollanan María, from Cusco (the original capital of the Inca empire Tawantinsuyu, and a major tourist draw today) with the simple timpani motif from the opening bars of the first movement of Britten’s elegant Violin Concerto. I am able to spin an entire one-movement work from these two ideas, designating a prominent role to the four string principal players (with a bow to the piccolo/bass clarinet duo and, yes, the timpanist). In this way, while imagining Britten in Cusco, I can also indulge in my own enjoyment of personalizing the symphonic sound by allowing individuals from the ensemble to shine.

– Gabriela Lena Frank

Leonard Bernstein

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1960)
Approximate duration: 23 minutes

The idea for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story first came from the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who suggested to Bernstein that he consider a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The initial concept centered on Jews and Catholics on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and playwright Arthur Laurents drafted a scenario he called East Side Story. Later the Jews were recast as Puerto Ricans, and the setting shifted from Manhattan’s Jewish tenements of the east to the Hispanic tracts west of Central Park (an entire neighborhood that would soon be razed to make way for Lincoln Center, the arts complex where Bernstein later directed the New York Philharmonic). When Bernstein couldn’t secure his preferred lyricists, the Broadway veterans Comden and Green, it cleared space for a promising new talent, the young Stephen Sondheim.

 The instrumental suite, Symphonic Dances from West Side Story remains one of the composers’ most recognizable contributions to the concert stage and includes such highlights as “Something’s Coming” with its sizzling cross-rhythms, along with punchy brawl of “Mambo,” capping a dance-off between the rival gangs. In “America,” Bernstein exploited a rhythmic rub between groups of three beats and two beats, a staple of Afro-Caribbean dance music. This suite closes with the show’s great ballad, “Somewhere,” a hymn to the possibility of a happy ending—although it ends ominously, with an unsettled, dissonant interval. This particular dissonance, known as an augmented fourth or “tritone,” appears as a signature sound throughout the score, from the opening Prologue to the yearning rise in “Maria.”

Dafnis Prieto

Tentación: Concerto for People of Earth and String Orchestra (2022; NWS co-commission)
Approximate duration: 25 minutes

As a teenager at the National School of Music in his native Cuba, the percussionist Dafnis Prieto studied classical music and traditional Afro-Cuban styles. He soon expanded his horizons to jazz, and he moved to New York at 25 to learn from and play with legends from all corners of the Latin jazz scene. A MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2011 and a Grammy Award in 2018 for Best Latin Jazz Album are among the many honors that have placed Prieto at the pinnacle of his art as a composer and bandleader. For this work, co-commissioned by New World Symphony with the Louisville Orchestra and other partners, Prieto created a group concerto to feature the Latin music ensemble People of Earth along with orchestral strings.

Mr. Prieto provided the following program note:

Tentación is a love story, or better said, an imaginary love story driven by the powerful law of attraction: the seductive quality that makes us dream for a better and happy future inside and around ourselves, diving into a vast range of feelings and emotions. This story involves many sides of an imaginary “but at the same time” real relationship—the sweet, the bitter, the similarities, the differences, the conversations, the advice, the challenges, the suggestions, the ups and downs. It involves real sensations caused by the imaginary states of willing, of dreaming, and desire. The music reflects in sounds and lyrics two worlds, real and imaginary, with the real provoked by the imaginary.

– Dafnis Prieto

– © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.