Program Notes
RODION SHCHEDRIN
NAUGHTY LIMERICKS, CONCERTO FOR
SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Duration: ca. 10 minutes
Overview
Rodion Shchedrin is one of the handful of Russian composers
of the generation after Shostakovich whose music has
made an impact in the West. His father, a well-known
musical theorist and writer on music, encouraged Rodion’s
musical interests with piano lessons, but the boy’s formal
training was interrupted by the German invasion in 1941.
Shchedrin resumed his musical education in 1948 at the
Choir School in Moscow, where he began to compose, and
he entered the Moscow Conservatory three years later to
study piano and composition. By the time he graduated in
1955, Shchedrin had established a distinctive idiom with a
string quartet, a piano quintet and the Piano Concerto No. 1,
which incorporate the styles of both folk music from various
Russian regions and the simple urban street song known as
the chastushka. The First Piano Concerto attracted sufficient
attention that he was named to represent the U.S.S.R. at
the Fifth World Festival of Democratic Youth in Prague in
1954. The following year he composed The Humpbacked
Horse, which became widely popular in its original form as a
ballet, as well as in two orchestral suites and a film version.
Shchedrin subsequently wrote about current trends in
his country’s music in official publications, received many
awards (most notably the Lenin Prize in 1984), was made a
People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R. in 1981, and visited the United
States on cultural exchange programs in 1964, 1968 and
1986. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1965 to
1969. He has since worked as a free-lance composer, and
now divides his time between Moscow and Munich.
What To Listen For
The Russian chastushka is a short, simple song for one, two
or more singers with rhymed texts on an apparently limitless
number of topics. Shchedrin explained, “In a chastushka
there is always humor, irony and a sharp satire of the status
quo, its defenders and the ‘leaders of the people.’ Even such
powerful or dreaded names as Marx, Lenin and Stalin have
been ridiculed in chastushki. Everything that occurs in the life
of the people, from events of historic importance to the most
intimate sensations, finds its way into chastushki. In Naughty
Limericks, conceived as a virtuosic orchestral work, I treat
only the comic and dance chastushka tunes. The concertante
style and virtuosic effects are, to my mind, inherent in this
type of chastushka.”
THE FLORIDA OR 50 CHESTRA | 2017-2018
JAMES NEWTON HOWARD
VIOLIN CONCERTO
Duration: ca. 25 minutes
Overview
James Newton Howard was born in Los Angeles in 1951
into a musical family — his grandmother was a violinist with
the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in the 1940s — and
started piano lessons when he was four. He attended high
school at the rigorous Thacher School in Ojai and began his
professional training at The Music Academy of the West in
Santa Barbara as a piano student of Leon Fleisher. He then
went to USC for advance study but dropped out after a few
weeks because he “wanted to do other things than practice
the piano.” For the next few years, Howard played in a rock
band and worked as a session musician with such top-notch
entertainers as Diana Ross, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Rod
Stewart and Olivia Newton-John before joining Elton John’s
band in 1975, with whom he started arranging, composing
and recording. He scored his first film in 1985 — the comedy
Head Office — and over the next decade established himself
as one of Hollywood’s most versatile and prolific composers.
He received his first Oscar nomination for Defiance in 2008,
and has gone on to earn seven more Academy Award nods
(The Prince of Tides, The Fugitive, Junior, One Fine Day, My
Best Friend’s Wedding, The Village, Michael Clayton), an
Emmy (Gideon’s Crossing), a Grammy (The Dark Knight, with
Hans Zimmer), three World Soundtrack Awards (I Am Legend,
Michael Clayton, Charlie Wilson’s War), ASCAP’s Henry Mancini
Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from BMI. In 2016,
James Newton Howard became Artistic Director of the Henry
Mancini Institute at the University of Miami.
What To Listen For
Howard composed his first concert work, I Would Plant a Tree,
in 2008 for the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa, California,
and the success of that piece led to a commission from the
orchestra five years later for a violin concerto for them to
premiere with James Ehnes; that performance took place
on March 12, 2014 at Segerstrom Hall, conducted by Carl St.
Clair.
“The Concerto begins,” Howard wrote, “with the violin
hesitantly exploring an emerging melodic line. The orchestra
feels weightless. The violin seeks to reveal the theme until
the orchestra, as if frustrated with the indecision of the
soloist, takes control and confidently affirms the theme. The
first of two cadenzas in the concerto appears about seven
minutes in.
“For me, the centerpiece of the concerto is the second