Romance, Revenge, & Revelry Program Notes
Conducted by Maestro Lowell Graham
Saturday, April 27th, 2024 | 7 PM
Union Colony Civic Center
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Las notas de programa de Nuestra Canica Azul
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Program notes for the 2023 Christmas Brass concerts.
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A week before the Battle of Bull Run, Sullivan Ballou, a Major in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers, wrote home to his wife for a final time. "Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield." At the battle, Major Sullivan received a mortal wound.
The GPO will read his heartfelt letter over Jay Ungar's "Ashokan Farewell" at Salute to Service.
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Kodály’s Concerto for Orchestra – not to be confused with his Hungarian countryman Béla Bartók’s more famous, identically titled work written in 1943 – was completed in 1940, for the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and was conducted in February of the following year by the orchestra’s music director, Frederick Stock. It is in a single large-scale span of three connected movements (as is Liszt’s A-major Piano Concerto, heard next on this program) divided into five contrasted sections, the whole rife with the mood and at times actual quotation of Hungarian folk melody, as differentiated from the gypsy melodies which Liszt mistakenly regarded as his country’s folk music.
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