PROGRAM NOTES SPONSORED BY THOMAS WARD

A native of San Juan, Argentina, Juan Pablo Jofre Romarion (also known as J. P. Jofre) is an award-winning bandoneon player and composer. He has been repeatedly highlighted by The New York Times and praised as one of today’s leading artists by Great Performers at Lincoln Center. He has performed and given lectures at Google Talks, TEDtalks, Juilliard and many other places around the world. For the world premiere of his Bandoneon Concerto, the Mercury News wrote that Jofre “is an electrifying composer-bandoneon player.” He currently leads the J. P. Jofre Quintet, and the ensemble has been touring internationally since the release of their last album Manifiesto.

Written in 2010, Universe is an energetic Allegro dedicated to the composer’s brother, Bautista. The work blends traditional and contemporary tango rhythms and harmonies, creating a vibrant and dynamic musical landscape. Adaptable to various instruments, Jofre’s Universe is performed tonight in a version for bandoneon and chamber ensemble. Typically preceded by an extended bandoneon solo, the main section features chromatically rising and falling harmonic support above which strings put forth percussive jabs. The work becomes gradually more lyrical. Jofre echoes the dramatic mood shifts that audiences may associate with Ástor Piazzolla, one of the defining voices in Argentinian bandoneon music.

Today the name of Strauss is synonymous with Viennese dance music. And though there are many such dances and also many such Strausses, the name usually summons up a waltz written by Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825-99), the so-called “Waltz King.” This afternoon’s selection, however, comes from a larger work written for the stage. By far his most popular operetta is Die Fledermaus (The Bat), which premiered in Vienna in April 1874. The work’s overture perfectly typifies the genre, filled with all the operetta’s main themes juxtaposed in a kind of sonata form structure. Themes in the first group are in duple meter and include numerous march and gallop ideas. The second group features the beloved waltz, which ranks among Strauss’ finest. The entire overture, in fact, can claim to be one of his best creations – sparkling orchestration, a perfect curtain-raiser filled with brilliant themes ranging from tender to comic.

Today’s performance features the recent arrangement of the Overture to Die Fledermaus by Zachary Wadsworth. According to Wadsworth, “There might not be a single piece of music more inherently Viennese than this overture. In just eight and a half minutes, Strauss deploys every bit of his compositional wit and whimsy, whirling between punchy fanfares, memorable Waltzes, and heart-melting Adagios. In my reduction of this piece for chamber ensemble, I have tried to preserve the opulent spirit of the overture while also leaning into some of its more colorful moments with post-Romantic orchestrational techniques.”

Distinguished emerita from the University of Virginia, composer Judith Shatin relishes the sounds – all sounds – of the world in which we live. Combining her interests in natural sounds with their manipulation by means of electronics, Shatin has received commissions from around the globe: creating musical installations to celebrate important cultural and historic spaces, composing music for film, and working with a myriad of ensembles. She is not averse to more traditional inspirations, such as musical predecessors and great poetry.

Dreamtigers was inspired by a prose poem of that name by Jorge Luis Borges. It was composed in 1996 during Shatin’s residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and dedicated to Mike Rosensky, the guitarist involved in its premiere. According to Shatin:

Borges describes his joyous memory of tigers from his youth and how, while dreaming, he believes he can conjure them up. But he only sees bits and pieces, mirages that dissolve in the end. To me, both the title and piece were suggestive: when composing it often seems that one is trying to pin down the ephemeral in a material way, to give body to image and idea. The title also suggests something of animal struggles, and the sense of wrestling is one that exists in my compositional process as well. Dreamtigers unfolds in one movement, with transformations that curl back on themselves and ultimately evaporate.


French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) helped shape a new direction in musical style at the same time that similar developments were occurring in visual art. Debussy was trained in the classical tradition. Following success at the Paris Conservatory, he was talked about as one of the brightest lights in the generation after Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck, and Gabriel Fauré. Debussy had an uneasy relationship with his reactionary professors but still managed to earn the coveted Prix de Rome in 1885. Fairly early in his studies, Debussy began to explore non-traditional harmonies that better captured the exoticism brought to his doorstep by such events as the great Exposition Universelle in 1889. Although he resisted being labeled a musical “Impressionist” – recall the term was used derisively in relation to visual artists – Debussy’s approach to non-directional harmony creates an atmospheric, amorphous soundscape in sync with similar developments by Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne.

In the early 1880s, young Debussy began an affair with a married fellow student, Marie Vasnier. Marie inspired a flood of songs from Debussy’s pen over the next few years, including a setting of three poems by Paul Verlaine. A true titan in French poetry, Verlaine contributed meaningfully to numerous trends, symbolism above all, and created an experimental, highly evocative and eclectic body of works. In Fêtes galantes (which translates as Gallant Celebrations or perhaps Courtship Parties), Verlaine pays homage to a specific artwork by Antoine Watteau that builds on the older tradition of outdoor recreation. In 1882 Debussy sketched three songs on poems from that collections: En sourdine (Muted), Fantoches (Puppets), and Clair de lune (not THE Clair de lune for piano solo).

En sourdine opens with a quietly crystalline timbre, marked by “exotic” pentatonic scales that evoke the Far East. The voice steals in almost without warning in its darker low register. A hint of bells permeates Debussy’s accompaniment, though the poem itself remains rooted in a sylvan paradise. By contrast, the Puppets portrayed in the following song are dizzingly active. The vocal line, punctuated by occasional nonsense vocalizing, circles and soars, while the piano presents a vigorous toccata. In Clair de lune Debussy’s love of parallel chords – harmonies that simply shift and slide from one to the next – provides a luminous backdrop to the moonlit scene unfolding before our ears.

A decade later Debussy dipped back into Verlaine’s volume for three more poems – Les Ingénus (The innocents), Le Faune (The faun), and Colloque sentimental (Sentimental conversation) – thereby creating a set of six Fêtes galantes in total. The later pieces inhabit a noticeably different realm, more nearly atonal and more gestural, epigrammatic. The mysterious ambience certainly matches the mood of Colloque sentimental, whose words bleakly open: “In the old park’s desolation and frost, two spectres have been evoking the past.” But even the companion songs, voicing more positive sentiments, share the same austerity. Les Ingénus wonderfully blossoms during its B section, but too quickly the drooping chromatic figures return just as soon as “night falls.” The subject in song 5 updates Debussy’s own Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894) based on Mallarmé’s long, sensual text. This new faun is old and made of terracotta; where Mallarmé’s active, amorous faun inspired sumptuous instrumental colors from Debussy a decade earlier, Verlaine’s faun is a spectator, inanimate and unmoved by the lovers’ bliss.

INTERMISSION

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) exploded onto the international scene by virtue of three scintillating scores written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Presented in Paris between 1910 and 1913, Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring were fully-danced ballets complete with choreography by Mikhail Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky. Over the past few seasons, Staunton Music Festival has proudly presented the latter two scores in fantastic new arrangements made by Brian Smith and Peter White. This afternoon, it is our pleasure to complete the trio with the world premiere of Smith and White’s Firebird for two pianos and three percussionists.

With Firebird, the earliest of the three projects, Diaghilev hoped to reverse the ballet troupe’s struggling financial position by presenting something distinctly Russian in character – and hence “exotic” for Western European audiences circa 1910. However, despite working together in 1909 on another ballet project, Stravinsky was not Diaghilev’s first choice to create Firebird. Not until both Nikolai Tcherepnin and Anatoly Lyadov failed to deliver did Stravinsky receive the commission.

Numerous folk traditions contain a “firebird,” a creature clearly redolent of a phoenix but with other distinct meanings. First, its appearance portends both a blessing and a curse. It typically appears at the start of a hero’s demanding quest. In other sources, it is the reward for a successful completion of that quest. The plot developed by Fokine and Alexandre Benois depicts the Firebird as half-woman, half-bird. She has been captured by Prince Ivan – aka Ivan Tsarevich, a ubiquitous hero in Russian myth. When Ivan decides to release her, the Firebird gives him a magical tail feather as talisman in his struggle against Kashchei the Immortal. The Firebird’s gift proves decisive, Ivan defeats the evil Kashchei, liberating the many princesses who had been held prisoner, and marries the most beautiful one of all.

The complete Firebird ballet score contains about an hour of music. But realizing that occasions for a full performance would be limited, Stravinsky himself made no fewer than three different symphonic suites (each lasting between 22-28 minutes) in 1911, 1919, and 1945.

Stravinsky himself admitted that the figure of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov loomed large in his mind during the creation of Firebird. Rimsky gave private composition lessons to Stravinsky between 1902 and 1908. Rimsky was also a master orchestrator; the symphonic textures and tonal colors he produced in works like Scheherazade, The Golden Cockerel, and – perhaps most germane – an opera titled Kashchei the Immortal (1902) were revolutionary and deeply admired by Stravinsky. The younger man also has a problematic habit of writing pseudo-folktunes that are sometimes his own ideas, but sometimes have been lifted from older sources without proper credit. Moreover, several themes in Firebird directly quote works by Rimsky-Korsakov even though Stravinsky claimed to be writing this ballet in “revolt” against the older man’s influence.

Beyond orchestration and thematic borrowing, Stravinsky seems to have derived his use of leitmotif organization directly from Rimsky rather than its more famous innovator, Richard Wagner. Leitmotifs are specific recurring melodic or harmonic ideas associated with characters, objects, or emotions. Their presence helps provide narrative clarity above and beyond explicit words or staging information. The very first music heard in Firebird perfectly demonstrates how leitmotifs can be employed. These distinctive falling and rising chromatic scales (originally scored for low strings) are used by Stravinsky to summon both Kashchei and the Firebird. The details need not detain us, but just know that the core pitches of the Firebird’s motif overlap with the outline of Kashchei’s. Other motifs soon appear, sprinkled across the texture but not yet supplanting the eerie rumbling below.

Overall, Firebird is cast in two Tableaux plus Introduction. The first contains the majority of the action, including Ivan’s capture of the Firebird, her supplication and eventual release, the emergence of the Princesses, Ivan’s capture and confrontation with Kashchei, and the latter’s death. Tableau Two provides a shorter denouement and celebration of good’s triumph over evil. As the music unfolds, even in purely instrumental settings, we must recall that Firebird was originally a piece of choreography, structured for on-stage dancing. As such, Stravinsky writes music that is highly sectional, very gestural and filled with contrasts. Passages stop abruptly at times with striking changes in dynamics or simply a percussive crash and sustained harmony – after which the action proceeds for the next scene.

Any arrangement of Firebird faces a daunting challenge. The original work boasts an incredibly colorful and rich orchestration. The forces required are massive; Stravinsky derided his scoring as “wastefully large” because it calls for over 100 players, including three harps, four Wagner tubas, two piccolos, two contrabassoons and English horn, in addition to the standard complement of strings, winds, and brass. Attempting to distill such a grandiose sonic palette down to just pianos and percussion, Smith and White comment:

Firebird simply has too much content for 20 fingers on piano and only four hands on percussion. With five players, we were able to more effectively translate the vivid orchestral colors, rhythmic complexity, and dramatic sweep of Stravinsky’s original Firebird into a chamber ensemble format. Although this evening’s performance will not include the entire nearly hour-long ballet score, it will feature several selections from the ballet—some of the full work’s most enchanting music—that are not included in any of Stravinsky’s symphonic Firebird suites, making this arrangement an expanded suite. We hope this creative reimagining of Firebird not only offers listeners a fresh perspective on one of the 20th century’s most beloved orchestral scores, but also introduces audiences to lesser-known gems from the full ballet.

Jason Stell, © 2026