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0 a B o u t t h e a r t i s t s British organist and conductor mar tin neary, who was former Organist and Master of the Choristers at Winchester Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, is specially noted for championing contemporary church music, and for his groundbreaking performances of music by Bach and Purcell. Neary is a frequent visitor to the United States; with the Winchester Cathedral Choir he appeared at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, and at Alice Tully Hall with the Westminster Abbey Choir. In 984 he spent a semester at UC Davis as artist-in-residence, during which time he trained the chamber choir for a performance of Handel’s Dixit Dominus. He is currently in California again serving as artist-in-residence at UC Davis, and leading performances in Los Angeles and San Diego marking the 50 th anniversary of the birth of Mozart. Neary read theology and music at Cambridge University and later studied conducting at Tanglewood under Erich Leinsdorf and with André Marchal in Paris. He has received numerous awards; among them are an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Southampton and his appointment as Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order by the Queen, in recognition of his services for choosing and directing the music at the funeral of Princess Diana. Described as having a “lovely, ornamented soprano” and praised for her “silken renderings of Mozart’s legato arias,” soprano Bharati soman has performed leading roles with companies throughout Northern California. She previously appeared with the UCDSO in a February 005 performance of Richard Swift’s For Roses Only. As a concert soloist, Soman has also performed with the Kensington Symphony Orchestra, Camellia Symphony Orchestra and Golden Gate Philharmonic, and given recitals for Oakland Lyric Opera. In 005 she was a Finalist in Orlando Opera’s Rehfuss Singing Actor Competition and placed in Eugene Opera’s Belle Voci National Competition. Upcoming engagements include the role of Curly’s Wife (Of Mice and Men) with Cinnabar Theater. Kendall Gladen, 007 Adler Fellow, participated in the 005 Merola Opera Program where she performed the role of Baba the Turk in The Rake’s Progress. The mezzo-soprano will be seen in the title roll of Bizet’s Carmen with the UCDSO on May 6, 007. As a young artist with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, she performed the roles of the Abbess in Suor Angelica and Mother Albine in Thais. Previous roles include the Old Prioress in The Dialogues of the Carmelites, Madame Flora in The Medium, Nancy in Albert Herring and Dorabella in Così fan tutte. She was a regional finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and received an Encouragement Award from the Sullivan Foundation and a Career Achievement Award from the Monsanto Fund. She is a graduate of Washington University and a student of American soprano Carmen Balthrop. Sean panikkar is quickly becoming known for his “surpassing musicality and passion, commanding selfconfidence and gorgeous expression.” The American tenor of Sri Lankan descent made his San Francisco Opera debut as Chaplitsky in The Queen of Spades, but was first introduced to San Francisco audiences at the Merola Opera Program’s Yerba Buena Gardens Concert, where he sang Nadir in excerpts from Les Pêcheurs de perles. He went on to sing the title role in the Opera Center’s production of Le Pauvre Matelot and has since performed in Company productions of Fidelio and Norma. Last fall he appeared with the Company as Edmondo in Manon Lescaut and as the Shepherd and the Young Sailor in Tristan und Isolde. He was a Metropolitan Opera National Council Pittsburgh District winner and Great Lakes Regional Finalist (Encouragement Award winner). Panikkar completed his Bachelor and Master of Music Degrees at the University of Michigan, where he studied under the direction of Luretta Bybee and Martin Katz. Jeremy Galyon, baritone and a 007 Adler Fellow, was seen as Nick Shadow in the Merola Opera Program production of The Rake’s Progress. After spending four years as a resident artist with Binghamton’s Tri-Cities Opera he recently returned there to perform the role of Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor. Other roles with Tri-Cities Opera include Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro, Sparafucile in Rigoletto, Colline in La Bohème, and Dulcamara in The Elixir of Love. He has been a Young Artist with the Glimmerglass Opera, where he performed the roles of Larkens in The Girl of the Golden West and Masetto in Don Giovanni. Other engagements include Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Chicago Opera Theatre and Second Armored Man in The Magic Flute with the Florida Grand Opera. His awards include Regional Finalist for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and an Opera Index Encouragement Award.
n o t e s Although the combination of organ and orchestra had long been in use in Handel’s time, the organ usually played a subordinate role, serving as part of the basso continuo (along with a viola da gamba and/or bassoon) that accompanies nearly all Baroque music. The promotion of the organist to the rank of concert soloist was an invention of one of the great organists of the day: George Fridric Handel ( 685– 759). Tonight’s concerto was one of his first, and it was performed by the composer himself, in between acts of one of the earliest of his famous oratorios. The first movement is in the style of a French overture: its stately dotted rhythms and regular phrasing are reminiscent of the overtures that Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote for the royal opera at Versailles. The soloist plays along with the orchestra (as he would if he were merely a member of the continuo), but steps into the spotlight during the final cadence. The second movement, however, is an Italian form in which an ensemble ritornello (or “thing that returns”) alternates with solo passages. In each solo passage, the level of harmonic complexity and virtuosic display increases. The solo part in the third movement is written for the right hand alone, offering possibilities for the organist to embellish a simple melody, with each phrase punctuated by orchestral chords. Although Handel probably played something new in each performance, he wrote out one of his solos when the concerto was published, giving us a fortunate opportunity to see the inner workings of Baroque improvisatory performance practice. The last movement was popular enough to earn a nickname, “the Minuet in the Oratorio Esther,” thus allowing us to guess at the date of its first performance. It starts off with a rollicking tune, but, in contrast to the solo concerti of the classical era, it ends quietly—an appropriate way to “dissolve and fade” back to the action of the oratorio. The familiar bust of Beethoven depicts a heavyset man with a luxuriant head of hair and a ferocious scowl: a commanding presence that radiates power and purpose. Yet the man who wrote the Ninth Symphony was in reality old (a decade beyond the average Viennese lifespan), sick much of the time and concerned about his finances. His music, too, presents itself to us in a false light: long familiarity causes us to hear the Ninth Symphony as a succession of events that are both logical and inevitable. In 8 4, they were neither. Take, for example, the first movement. Initially, both key and meter are unclear. The open fifth A–E is ambiguous, and there is no discernable melody. It is not until we hear the lyrical, major-key second theme that we realize that the jerky dotted rhythms on open fifths were in fact the primary theme. The listener is on no firmer ground in the second movement: instead of the expected slow movement, we hear a scherzo. It features an unexpected timpani solo and a tempo so fast that the conductor must treat measures as beats: Beethoven marks some passages ritmo di tre (or quattro) battute, that is, beating one 3/4 pattern for every three measures or one 4/4 pattern for every four measures. The timpani solo signals the change from four-measure patterns to three-measure patterns. These shifts do not disturb us today but they would have seemed peculiar to listeners who still thought of a scherzo as a sort of modernized minuet-and-trio dance form. The third movement gives the listener some respite: it is calm variation set in a major key. But Beethoven has once again done the unexpected: it is a double variation form. There are two alternating themes in contrasting, almost-unrelated keys (B-flat and D major, which have only three notes in common). The contrast solves the problem of how to write a symphonic-scale variation set that holds the listener’s interest; Mahler and Bruckner used this technique in several of their symphonies. These movements were unsettling to their first audience, but the last movement was nothing short of revolutionary. The startling clash of a fortissimo A against B-flat in the opening chord, the imitation of an operatic recitative by the double basses, the verbatim quotation of the themes of the earlier movements, the continuation of the third-movement variation form, and, of course, the vocal soloists and chorus: none of these things had ever been heard in a symphony before. Equally revolutionary, perhaps, was what the voices sang: in joy, all men become brothers. The words were Beethoven’s own, added to lines taken from a poem by Friedrich Schiller. As a new musical world emerged from the chaos of this last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony, so the common people emerged from the end of feudal society and the devastation of the Napoleonic wars, to create the modern, and postmodern, world. —Beverly Wilcox handel: concer to for organ and orchestra, op. 4 no. 2 for organ solo; oboes I-II, strings composed early in 735 in London first per formed March 735 as an entr’acte for the oratorio Esther published by John Walsh, London, 738 Duration: about 0 minutes Beethoven: symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125 for soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone solo, chorus; flutes, piccolo, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, contrabassoon; 4 horns, trumpets, 3 trombones; timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum; strings composed 8 3– 4. Text of finale excerpted from An die Freude, written by Friedrich Schiller in 785, with added words by Beethoven. first per formed May 7, 8 4 at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna published by B. Schott’s Sons, Mainz, 8 6 Duration about 70 minutes
Page 1 and 2: D e p a r t m e n t o f m u s i c p
Page 3 and 4: a B o u t t h e a r t i s t s Prais
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Page 7 and 8: cynthia Bates Cynthia Bates concert
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Page 15 and 16: John R. Berg, Ph. D. and Anne M. Be

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