ÿþ <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.75 (Macintosh; U; PPC) [Netscape]"> <title>May 26, 2012 Concert</title> </head> <body background="5th.gif" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#660000" vlink="#660000"> <blockquote> <center> <table> <tr> <td border=0><a href="index.html"><img src="tinylogo.bmp"></a></td><td valign=center border=0><a href="index.html"><img src="MenuHome.bmp"></a><a href="info.html"><img src="MenuAbout.bmp"></a><a href="contact.html"><img src="MenuContact.bmp"></a><a href="CurrentConcert.html"><img src="MenuConcerts.bmp"></a><a href="roster.html"><img src="MenuOrchestra.bmp"></a><a href="outreach.html"><img src="MenuOutreach.bmp"></a><a href="support.html"><img src="MenuSupport.bmp"></a></td> </tr> </table> </center> <center> <br> <a href="program1.html">October 29, 2011</a> | <a href="program2.html">December 10, 2011</a> | <a href="programMLK.html">January 15, 2012</a> | <a href="program3.html">March 10, 2012</a> | <a href="program4.html"><b><big>May 26, 2012</big></b></a> | <a href="prior_seasons.html">Prior Seasons</a> <br> <small> <br> <a href="program4.html#Soloist">Soloist</a> | <a href="program4.html#Notes">Notes</a> </small> </center> <br> <br> <table align=center> <tr> <td align=center> <h2>Saturday, May 26, 2012, 7:30 pm</h2><br> <h3><a href=directions.html>Santa Monica Civic Auditorium<br> 1855 Main Street, Santa Monica</a></h3><br> <a href="gross.html">Allen Robert Gross, conductor</a><br> <a href="program4.html#Soloist">Steven Vanhauwaert, Piano</a><br><br> </td> </tr> </table> <table align=center> <tr> <td> <center><big><b>Concert Program</big></b> <br><br> </center> <ul> <li>Nicolai: Overture to "The Merry Wives of Windsor"</li> <li>Grieg: Piano Concerto</li> <li>Schumann: Symphony No. 3 ("Rhenish")</li> </ul> </td> </tr> </table> <hr width="50%" size="1" align="center"> <a name="Soloist"></a> <b><h2>Steven Vanhauwaert, Piano</h2></b> <table> <tr> <td valign=top> <img SRC="VanHauwaert.jpg" ALT="Steven Vanhauwaert, Piano" BORDER=0> </td> <td width=5%></td> <td> Hailed by the Los Angeles Times for his "impressive clarity, sense of structure and monster technique", Steven Vanhauwaert has garnered a wide array of accolades, amongst which the Maurice Lefranc award, the Rotary Prize, the Galiot Prize and the USC Concerto Competition. In October 2004 he won the Grand Prize at the Los Angeles International Liszt Competition, which enabled him to tour through the US and Hungary. Steven performs frequently throughout Europe and the US, both solo as in chamber music groups. His performances are broadcast regularly on K-MZT, K-CSN, K-USC, WHKB, W-UOT, K-UAT and KLARA. Mr. Vanhauwaert studied in Brussels at the Royal Conservatory with Boyan Vodenitcharov. He continued his musical development in Los Angeles with professors Kevin Fitz-Gerald, James Bonn and John Perry at the USC Thornton School of Music. <p> He has appeared in major venues with orchestras such as the Pacific Symphony, the Flemish Symphony, the USC Symphony, the Bryan Symphony, Collegium Instrumentale, the Concord Jazz Ensemble, the Auburn Symphony, the Eastern Sierra Chamber Orchestra, the Peninsula Symphony and Prima la Musica, amongst others. His China solo debut tour in June 2010, culminating at the National Center of Performing Arts in Beijing, was received with great critical acclaim and lead to an immediate reinvitation for the next season. <p> He has given recitals and masterclasses all over the US. Steven has been a frequent guest in festivals such as Jacaranda, the Festival of Flanders, the Eastern Sierra Music Festival, Musik Zentral, the Malibu Coast Music Festival, the Sundays-at-Two series, the Sundays Live Series, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and Euterpe among many others. He has been invited to perform in major concert venues such as the Concertgebouw Brugge, the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Bovard Auditorium in Los Angeles, the Singel of Antwerp, the Great Hall of the Brussels Conservatory, the Great Hall of the Budapest Liszt Conservatory, as well as numerous other prestigious venues in Bulgaria, Hungary, China, the US, the Netherlands, France, Canada, Austria and Spain. <p> </td> </tr> </table> <br> <hr width="50%" size="1" align="center"> <br> <br> <a name="Notes"> <img SRC="programnotesbanner.jpg"><p> Otto Nicolai was one of the most esteemed musicians of his generation. Like Mendelssohn (who was half a year older), he was a child prodigy, and studied with Zelter in Berlin. As a composer and conductor, he achieved many successes in Italy and especially Vienna, where he founded the Vienna Philharmonic in 1842. After Mendelssohn s death, Nicolai replaced him as Kapellmeister at the Berlin Cathedral. An eclectic composer, Nicolai achieved his one lasting success with <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>, written while still in Vienna but premiered in Berlin, two months before Nicolai s death in May 1849. With this <i>Singspiel</i> (a German opera with spoken dialogue; the story is derived, like Verdi s <i>Falstaff</i>, from Shakespeare), Nicolai s eclectic approach pays off handsomely, as he joins tuneful Italian idioms with his rigorous German training to create the most successful German comic opera of the first half of the nineteenth century, still widely performed today. <p> Edvard Grieg had mostly distaste for the instruction he received at the Leipzig Conservatory, where the prodigy was sent to study at age 15, but one of his teachers did introduce him to Robert Schumann s music, which along with the cause of Norwegian nationalism would become one of his most important musical influences. These influences bore early and particularly hardy fruit in the <i>Piano Concerto in A Minor</i>, composed at age 24 but intermittently revised until near the end of his life, nearly forty years after its 1869 premiere. That Grieg s Concerto owes much to the Schumann Concerto of the same key has long been obvious, but it has proved much more enduring as a repertory piece than its model. Although depending on Schumann s structure and thematic procedures, Grieg s Concerto owes its enduring success more obviously to its splendid variety of melodic materials, often with a folk basis, and to Grieg s remarkable ability to devise bewitching harmonic and instrumental settings for this kind of material. The  Norwegian flavor of the concerto stems most directly from Grieg s adaptation of the Halling (a Norwegian folk dance), and his incorporation of idioms native to the Hardanger fiddle. The latter was a folk instrument whose repertory captivated both Grieg and Ole Bull, the world-famous violinist who was instrumental in both sending Grieg to Leipzig and awakening his interest in Norwegian folk traditions. The concerto s opening flourish, based on a melodic figure common in Norwegian folk music, has long been a key to its success with the public, and is often quoted, perhaps most effectively as part of  Rosemary in Frank Loesser s <i>How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying</i> (1961), now enjoying its second full-scale revival on Broadway. <p> Robert Schumann s <i>Rhenish Symphony</i> (1850), though numbered his Third, was actually the last of his four to be composed. Schumann, who had recently moved to Düsseldorf, capital of the Rhine Province, drew particular inspiration for the work from the magnificent Cologne Cathedral, as may be heard especially in the grand scale of the work, and in the religious feeling of the short  extra movement inserted just before the finale. More broadly nationalistic are the work s many folk-like elements, especially those that derive from dance: the exuberant cross-rhythms in the first movement (three against two), the gentler Ländler in the second, and the lively main theme of the finale. In an interesting way, Schumann s <i>Rhenish</i>, composed at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, stands as a kind of symphonic crossroads for the century as a whole. Schumann adapts the stately beginning of Beethoven s <i>Seventh Symphony</i> for his own much more rambunctious beginning, borrows even more subtly from Schubert s <i> Great C-major Symphony</i> (in the finale), and even reuses a significant phrase from his own <i>First Symphony</i>. And, perhaps owing to these impressive roots, the symphony would grow additional  branches of its own: Brahms adapted Schumann s self-borrowing for the opening of his own <i>Third Symphony</i>, and Mahler another important champion of Schumann, despite chafing at his too-homogenous orchestration would pattern the  breakthrough in the finale of his <i>First Symphony</i> on a similar passage in Schumann s finale. <p> </a> <p> <hr width="50%" size="1" align="center"> <br> <p> <center> <a href="program1.html">October 29, 2011</a> | <a href="program2.html">December 10, 2011</a> | <a href="programMLK.html">January 15, 2012</a> | <a href="program3.html">March 10, 2012</a> | <a href="program4.html"><b><big>May 26, 2012</big></b></a> | <a href="prior_seasons.html">Prior Seasons</a> <br> <small> <br> <a href ="program4.html">Top</a> | <a href="program4.html#Soloist">Soloist</a> | <a href="program4.html#Notes">Notes</a> </small> <table> <tr> <td border=0><a href="index.html"><img src="tinylogo.bmp"></a></td><td valign=center border=0><a href="index.html"><img src="MenuHome.bmp"></a><a href="info.html"><img src="MenuAbout.bmp"></a><a href="contact.html"><img src="MenuContact.bmp"></a><a href="CurrentConcert.html"><img src="MenuConcerts.bmp"></a><a href="roster.html"><img src="MenuOrchestra.bmp"></a><a href="outreach.html"><img src="MenuOutreach.bmp"></a><a href="support.html"><img src="MenuSupport.bmp"></a></td> </tr> </table> </center> </blockquote> </body> </html>