Bridge Ensemble Leeds at St Matthew’s Church on Saturday 4th July, 3pm, conducted by Yannis Daoutis.

Hiawatha Overture (1899)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 – 1912)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer and conductor. His three hugely popular cantatas, based on the poem The Song of Hiawatha by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, were performed by choral societies around the world during the early half of the Twentieth Century (including at the Royal Albert Hall each summer). This overture was written in 1899 to precede one such performance and then adopted as a permanent opening piece for the trilogy.

Coleridge-Taylor’s father was a Krio (Creole) physician from Sierra Leone, descended from ‘Black Loyalists’ – African Americans who escaped slavery by fighting for the British during the American Revolution and were subsequently relocated to Nova Scotia, then West Africa. Meeting Coleridge-Taylor’s father in London, his mother was an English woman, and his father likely returned to Sierra Leone without knowing she was pregnant.

Coleridge-Taylor presented musical abilities from a young age and his London family encouraged study in the violin, sending him to the Royal College of Music, where he later moved to Composition. While still a student he produced several successful compositions, championed by Charles Villiers Standford and Edward Elgar and the conductor Malcolm Sargent.

Coleridge-Taylor was invited to the United States for three trips, where he was able to more keenly explore his own heritage. He was encouraged by the friends and activists he met there to draw more on music from West Africa – he wanted to integrate it into the classical tradition, as he considered Brahms to have done with Hungarian music and Dvořák with Bohemian music. In London, Coleridge-Taylor had already heard spirituals performed by the African American university choir, Fisk Jubilee Singers. Perhaps recognising a similar history of displacement and oppression in the Hiawatha poem, it is not surprising that as the rich central theme of the Hiawatha Overture rises out from the string section, we hear not a tune drawn from a Native American source but the clear reworking of African American song ‘Nobody Know The Trouble I’ve Seen’.

(Read more: The significance of Hiawatha)

American Suite Op. 98b (1895)

Antonin Dvorák  (1841 – 1904)

1. Andante con moto
2. Allegro
3. Moderato (alla polacca)
4. Andante
5. Allegro

Dvorák was a popular Czech composer who often used folk styles and rhythms, particularly from his from his Bohemian background, in his music. He was invited to become director of an American Conservatory of Music in 1892 and stayed there until 1895. During his residence there he composed his 9^th Symphony “From The New World”, a cello concerto, his string quartet in F major entitled ‘The American’ and a Suite in A Major Op. 98, first for piano and then orchestrated to become known as ‘The American Suite’.

While in the States, Dvorák met Harry Burleigh, an African American baritone and composer, who introduced Dvorák to the sounds of Black American music. (A few years later, Burleigh would be a soloist in an all African-American production of The Song of Hiawatha performed for Coleridge-Taylor when he visit the States.)

This ‘American’ suite is in five movements and reflects both the American influence and the folk music of Czech emigrants which Dvorák listened to whilst in America. Each short movement develops strong themes, using ideas from the 1^st movement in the 5^th movement to round off the set. The “American” tone is particularly typified in his use of syncopation. The 3^rd movement is like a polonaise (Polish style dance) and the 4^th movement is a lyrical nocturne. The 5^th movement closes the suite with a fast-paced allegro.

– INTERVAL 20 minutes –

Please use the aisle on the kitchen side to queue for drinks, at the hatch, then help yourself to a cake plate!
Toilets are at the bottom of the tea queue aisle; there is an accessible toilet in the Vestry, please ask an usher or orchestra member if you need help to find it.

Letter from Home

Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990)

Copland was an American composer, writer, teacher, critic, pianist and conductor – perhaps the most recognised American composer. Copland’s music typifies the vast American landscape and spirit, which he called his accessible “vernacular” style and set the tone for what many consider the sound of American music. His best-known works were written during the 1930s and 1940s: including the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, and the instantly recognisable Fanfare for the Common Man.

Copland studied in Paris but also toured extensively to Europe, Africa and Mexico. He often stayed in the small town of Tepoztlán in Mexico with his fellow Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, and this is where Copland composed Letter from Home – writing by candlelight as there was no electricity in the town. It was written in 1944 during World War II as a commission from band leader Paul Whiteman and his Radio Hall of Fame Orchestra, to be broadcast as an expression of American life and sentiment during the war years. The piece is said to reflect a soldier’s longing, and the comfort of receiving a letter from home while serving abroad. However, writing while isolated and away from home himself, Copland also received his own letters – from his sister, informing him of the death of his mother, and recounting his brother Ralph’s experiences in the army.

Copland’s original composition for the band was rearranged in 1947 for a larger orchestra, then a further revision in 1962 brings the version you will hear today. The opening atmosphere is one of calm and sentimentality. It features solo instruments such as clarinet and trumpet, often responded to by the strings. The piece works towards a climax with extremes in instrumental ranges, perhaps the sounds of Copland wrestling with his own grief, depression and loneliness. The texture becomes thinner with a polyphonic (multi-voiced) melody heard in the woodwind. The strings return with a phrase from the opening and a muted trumpet repeats a snatch of a previous solo. The final section returns to an idea of ‘home’ and comfort with just a touch of nostalgia and sadness.

Ethiopia’s Shadow in America (1932)

Florence Price (1887 – 1953)

Price was an African-American classical composer, pianist and music teacher, active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. She wrote over 300 works including four symphonies, four concertos, choral works and chamber music. Born in Little Rock, Akansas, Price found success as a composer and creative inspiration alongside other creative members of the Chicago Black Renaissance after the family moved to Illinois.

Many of her pieces were not published because white publishers and conductors feared a backlash for promoting a woman of colour, and were lost for a time after her death of a stroke at 66. Fortunately many of her compositions were found again in 2009 in her abandoned summer house. Ethiopia’s Shadow in America is one of these compositions – written in 1932 but possibly first performed by full orchestra only in 2015. As a music critic stated in The New Yorker in February 2018, “not only did Price fail to enter the canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration. That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.”

Price divided her work into three parts:

1. Introduction & Allegro – “The Arrival of the Negro in America when first brought here as a slave”
2. Andante – “His Resignation and Faith”
3. Allegro – “His Adaptation – A fusion of his native and acquired impulses”

The three movements blend together telling the historical story of enslaved Africans and their experience in America. The music reflects Price’s love of melody, her rich orchestration and harmonic interest. A solo clarinet introduces the adagio, followed by folk-type melodies and dramatic harmonic episodes. Percussion and strings take up the Allegro where a syncopated idea winds through the rest of the movement. The hymn-like second movement features a solo violin melody, accompanied by a string choir. The melody is then handed over to cello, dying away with melodic echoes from French horn, clarinet and oboe. The final movement bursts into a folk-like dance full of orchestral colour. There is a moment of reflection before the dance whirls away to a conclusion.

Price wrote that in music of the African diaspora, “Rhythm is of pre-eminent importance. In the dance, it is a compelling, onward-sweeping force that tolerates no interruption.” We are thrilled to be playing her piece today, not least because we were rehearsing it to perform in March 2020, but we were prevented by the Covid pandemic, when lockdown ended ensemble music-making for so long.

Danzón No. 2

Arturo Márquez (1950 – )

Arturo Márquez is a Mexican composer, reflecting the forms and styles of his native Mexico in his orchestral work. He was introduced to the world of Latin ballroom dancing in the 1990s. The traditional ‘danzón’ was an old salon dance from Cuba which became very popular in Veracruz and Mexico City. Márquez consulted with dancer Irene Martinez on the rhythms, form and melodic contours, and listened to old recordings of Danzonera orchestras, before composing his series of Danzones.

Danzón No. 2 was commissioned by the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s department of Musical Activities and premiered in 1994 in Mexico City. It is one of the most performed Mexican pieces of contemporary classical orchestral music and is a celebration of Mexican culture and rhythms. It achieved worldwide popularity after featuring in the programme of Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s 2007 Proms performance with his dynamic young Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra.

Danzón No. 2 is full of lightness, sensuality and also seriousness, playing with monotonous crossing rhythms, and is still danced today in Veracruz and Mexico City.

Programme notes by Elaine Levene

Thank you for attending our concert today! This event is ‘Pay What You Decide’ – if you would like to make a contribution, please put it in the bucket as you pass or via card at the door. We will be splitting proceeds between Bridge Ensemble, to help us cover our costs today, and the Disasters Emergency Committee Venezuela Earthquake Appeal, so please give generously! If you’d rather donate to DEC directly, visit donation.dec.org.uk now.