{ Program Notes
the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the
title track on the Grammy-nominated
Road Movies album. Her latest recording
features Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony
Orchestra conducted by the composer.
Leila Josefowicz last appeared with
the BSO in October 2009, performing
Adams’ Violin Concerto with Robert
Spano conducting.
Women of the Baltimore
Choral Arts Society
The Baltimore Choral Arts Society,
now in its 48th season, is one of Maryland’s premier cultural institutions. The
Symphonic Chorus, Full Chorus, Orchestra and Chamber Chorus perform
throughout the mid-Atlantic region, as
well as in Washington, D.C., New York
and Europe.
For the past 17 years, WMAR
Television has featured Choral Arts in
an hour-long special, Christmas with
Choral Arts, which won an Emmy Award
in 2006. Music Director Tom Hall and
the chorus were also featured in a PBS
documentary called Jews and Christians:
A Journey of Faith, broadcast nationwide
and on National Public Radio in 2001.
On local radio, Mr. Hall is the host of
“Choral Arts Classics,” a monthly program on WYPR that features the Choral
Arts Chorus and Orchestra, and he is the
Culture Editor on WYPR’s “Maryland
Morning with Sheilah Kast.”
Choral Arts has appeared with the
National Symphony, and has made
regular appearances with the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra. Acclaimed artists
collaborating with Choral Arts have
Women
of the BCAS
16 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
included Chanticleer, Dave Brubeck, the
King’s Singers, Peter Schickele, Sweet
Honey in the Rock and Anonymous 4.
Tom Hall is one of the most highly regarded performers in choral music today.
Appointed music director in 1982, Hall
has added more than 100 new works to
the BCAS repertoire, and he has premiered works by contemporary composers
including Peter Schickele, Libby Larsen,
Robert Sirota, James Lee, III, Rosephanye
Dunn Powell and many other internationally acclaimed composers.
Hall is also active as a guest conductor
in the U.S. and Europe, including appearances with the Handel and Haydn Society
in Boston, the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, the Berkshire Choral Festival,
Musica Sacra in New York and Britten
Sinfonia in Canterbury, England. Mr.
Hall has prepared choruses for Leonard
Bernstein, Robert Shaw, Helmuth Rilling
and others, and he served as the Chorus
Master of the Baltimore Opera Company
for 10 years.
BCAS last appeared with the BSO in
January 2013, performing Prokofiev’s
Alexander Nevsky, with Music Director
Marin Alsop conducting.
About the concert:
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,
BWV 565
Johann Sebastian Bach
Born in Eisenach, Germany, March 21, 1685;
died in Leipzig, Germany, July 28, 1750
Arranged for Orchestra by
Leopold Stokowski
One of the most famous and spectacular
of all J.S. Bach’s works is the Toccata
and Fugue in D Minor for organ,
BWV 565, and it may also be the earliest piece of his to have won a place in
the standard repertoire. Though scholars do not know the exact date of its
composition, they believe it was written
between 1703 and 1707 when Bach was
organist at the Neuekirche in Arnstedt,
Germany. That would mean that he was
J.S. Bach
no older than 22 when he created this
dramatic organ showpiece.
Arnstedt was Bach’s first professional
appointment, and it came about when the
18-year-old musician, fresh out of school,
was hired as an “examiner” to try out and
evaluate the church’s new organ during
the summer of 1703. So impressed were
the church elders by Bach’s virtuosity that
they promptly hired him as their chief
organist despite having given the post
to another man just a year earlier. It was
an ideal launching pad for Bach’s career
because the position’s relatively light duties
left him plenty of time for composing. But
the church fathers found Bach to be a bit
of a handful for already he was showing
his irascible temperament as well as his
genius— even once drawing a sword on
someone who had insulted him!
A fascinating description of the young
Bach’s experimental approach to composition comes from his first biographer,
Johann Forkel, who got his information
directly from Bach’s sons. He writes that
Bach began as a “finger composer,” who
liked “to run or leap up and down the instrument, to take both hands as full as all
the five fing