Overture Magazine: 2016-2017 Season September - October 2016 | Page 19

program notes { works — is the Fifth, scored for soprano and an orchestra of eight cellos, an earthy ensemble unique to this composer, himself a cellist. In the opening Aria/Cantilena — in the haunting style of the Brazilian modhina — the soprano is also treated instrumentally, singing or humming a wordless vocalise, doubled by the first cellos, over guitar-like plucked cellos. In the middle, she chants a poem in praise of the evening sky written by Ruth Valadares Corrêa, the Brazilian soprano who sang this song’s premiere. The second movement, Dansa/Martelo, is a fleet song imitating, with its melodic patterns and onomatopoetic words, birdsongs that Villa-Lobos had notated in northeastern Brazil. The song’s rhythms follow the embolada folk-song style of the same region. “Martelo” probably refers to the fast “hammering” rhythmic pattern with which the song opens. 30 Instrumentation: Soprano and an orchestra of celli. Piano Concerto in F George Gershwin Born in Brooklyn, New York, September 26, 1898; died in Hollywood, California, July 11, 1937 While George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue of 1924 has become an ubiquitous showpiece in both classical and pops concerts, it is by no means the only work that America’s favorite composer wrote for piano and orchestra. Well worth discovering and every bit as appealing is his longer and more adventurous Concerto in F, which takes the Rhapsody’s attractive mixture of jazz and classical elements and builds them into a fullfledged three-movement concerto. Although he had only the Rhapsody as a concert-hall piece under his belt, Gershwin boldly set to work on his Concerto just one year later, completing it with characteristic speed between July and November 1925. Commissioned by Walter Damrosch for the New York Symphony Orchestra, it represented a far more ambitious step into the alien world of classical music than the Rhapsody, written for Paul Whiteman’s congenial jazz orchestra. Originally feeling ill-equipped as an orchestrator, Gershwin had turn