Performance

Spring 2023

Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra

May 10 - 11, 2023

This event occurred as part of the 22/23 Hop Ensemble season. This is an archived view.

The evening begins with William Grant Still's "Mother and Child," arranged for string orchestra, followed by two exquisite classical-era symphonies, Mozart's 40th and Schubert's 5th.

22/23 Hop Ensemble

The Program

The Hop Presents

Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra
Filippo Ciabatti, director

Thursday, May 11, 8:00 pm
Rollins Chapel • Dartmouth College • 2023

Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra

Filippo Ciabatti, director
Marcia Cassidy, assistant conductor
Leslie Sonder, librarian
Ida Claude ’22, Jehan Diaz ’22 TH, Elizabeth Lee ’24, Jason Pak ’24, student managers

Violin I
Teddy Glover ’25
Helena Seo ’25
Jessica Jiang ’25
Mina Lacheva
EmmaLee Holmes-Hicks
Ida Claude ’22
Sophia Chang Stauffer ’22, G
Ryan Shannon
Ira Morris
Kenneth Mok

Violin II
Jackson Spurling ’23
Annie Mills ’26
Zoe Hu ’25
Jessie Wang ’23
Melanie Dexter
Marcia Cassidy F
Randy Hiller
Jessica Amidon

Viola
Jason Pak ’24
Mac Waters G
Leslie Sonder F
Lysander Jaffe
Katrina Smith
Noralee Walker
Rebecca Hallowell

Cello
Hannah Kim ’23
Woojin Chung ’23
Jack Ryan ’23
Elizabeth Lee ’24
Ava Rosenbaum ’26
Hannah Spindler ’23
Tyler Grubelich ’26
Liam Tassiello ’26
Ethan Hodess ’25

Bass
David Vargas Estrella ’23
Alex Ponasik ’26
Paul Horak TH ’94
Nicholas Browne F

Flute
Laura del Sol Jimenez

Oboe
Michelle Farah
Jason Smoller

Bassoon
Stephanie Busby
Francesca Panunto

Horn
Patrick Kennelly F
Nathaniel Alden ’23

F = Dartmouth faculty
G = Graduate student
TH = Thayer
Italics = Guest musician

Program

Approximate duration: 90 minutes with intermission

Mother and Child William • Grant Still (1895–1978)

Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
I. Molto Allegro
II. Andante
III. Menuetto. Allegretto-Trio
IV. Finale. Allegro assai

Intermission

Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485 • Franz Peter Schubert (1797–1828)
I. Allegro
II. Andante con moto
III. Menuetto. Allegro molto
IV. Allegro vivace

Program Notes

William Grant Still
Mother and Child
William Grant Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi, on May 11, 1895, and died on December 3, 1978, in Los Angeles. Inspired by three works of contemporary African American art, he wrote his Suite for Violin and Piano in 1943 for the husband-wife violin-piano duo Louis and Annette Kaufman. Its middle movement, a reflection on a piece from Sargent Johnson’s Mother and Child series, proved especially popular, and Still finished an arrangement for string orchestra shortly after its 1944 premiere in Boston.

In 1934, to escape the tumult of New York and the Eurocentric, ultramodern zeitgeist of its art music scene, William Grant Still moved permanently to Los Angeles. On the face of it, the move was perplexing; Still’s East Coast career was blossoming, with the symphonic poem Africa, the Azande-set ballet Sahdji, and the “Afro-American” Symphony No. 1 achieving success in the early 1930s. But Still chalked up his fortune to a one-year visit to Los Angeles in 1929-1930, during which he arranged music with jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman and found the time and serenity to engage his creative ambitions and write serious concert music. “California did something to me,” he recalled in a 1967 interview. “There was just something about this section of the country that seemed to satisfy me, more so than any [other part of the country]…When I came here, it was like coming home.”

After settling in Los Angeles, Still composed ten operas (for him, the ultimate genre) and two more ballets and found himself showered in awards and honorary degrees. His style broadened from the idiom he had stuck to in New York (essentially neo-Romantic with African American influences), eventually embracing a new multiculturalism that combined African, African American, Latin American, Indigenous, Asian, and European influences in an inspirited reflection of the city’s ethnic diversity.

Not that Los Angeles was without hardship for Still. Legalized segregation (via restrictive covenants) and racist policing effectively confined Still and other Black Angelenos to the neighborhoods around Central Avenue. Then there was the deep-seated racism of Hollywood and commercial music, industries he depended on to pay the bills. This came to a head in 1942, when he landed a lucrative contract as music director on Stormy Weather (with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne, and Cab Calloway) but quit over the film’s representation of Black Americans and their music.

The Suite for Violin and Piano, composed in 1943, offered Still a respite from the hassles of the music industry and a canvas to represent Black America in concert music the way he thought it should be. Its middle movement, arranged here for string orchestra as the stand-alone Mother and Child, is a tender, lyrical sojourn to Still’s pre- Los Angeles neo-Romanticism, as sincere as the best of his New York work. The form is a ternary palindrome, with primary (A) material that’s comfortable at first, then confident, finally soaring. The middle (B) section presents its own ABA structure in miniature, a little anxious to start, but gaining nerve and a blues-inflected attitude. At the exact middle, the sweetest cadenza for solo violin drifts down to settle into a hushed and humble folksong.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, and died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna. He finished his “great G minor” symphony in July of 1788, putting out a version with revised orchestration in 1791. Tonight the original orchestration will be heard, without the clarinets added in the revision; the score calls for flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons, and horns, and strings.

The summer of 1788 was a very productive period for Mozart, even by his famously prolific standard. In rapid succession between the end of June and the beginning of August, he completed two lengthy piano trios, the famous Sonata facile for piano, his last violin sonata, and a set of three symphonies—his final explorations of the genre. The second of these, the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, is one of only two minor-key symphonies he ever wrote. He certainly didn’t waste the opportunity: this is some of Mozart’s most difficult music (at times verging on the bewildering), simmering with Sturm und Drang angst. A single bar’s worth of shadowy G-minor murmurs in the lower strings—unusual, in Mozart’s era, to open with melody-less accompaniment—sets an unmistakably urgent tone for the Molto allegro. The gentle second theme, in B-flat major, offers a graceful moment of respite, but a sudden lurch into distant F-sharp minor announces a world of disorder in the development section. The harmonic footing is precarious from the start: as this warped doppelgänger of the primary theme proceeds, it constantly slides further down the chromatic scale, soon giving way to fiery contrapuntal arguments and obsessive repetitions of the opening gesture. Slippery chromaticism steers a winding path back to the home key to recapitulate both themes, but the plaintive coda, softly sighing at first, recalls the violent side of this urgency.

Don’t let the Andante’s major key and slow tempo fool you: this isn’t any run-of-the mill middle movement, but rather a full-fledged sonata-form drama of equal substance and complexity as the first. Unexpected pathos-laden dissonances abound here, with plenty of sojourns to remote harmonic worlds along the way. The main themes convey a deeper sadness than any of the first movement’s prima donna sighs: each is introduced with the sparsest accompaniment, and neither can find the strength, in the hesitant gestures of its melody, to escape its own hollow ostinato (repeated pulsing eighths for the first, falling fourths for the second).

Back in G minor, the Minuet’s character is all stern arrogance, lording over the ballroom with emphatic crossrhythms and three-measure phrases. In the pastoral G-major Trio, though, pastoral winds sing a gentler song, closing with a gorgeous (but all-too-brief) horn duet. To commence the finale, the first violins ask a series of quietly urgent questions, each answered with a deafening tutti. This movement is another sonata, oscillating between nervous agitation, operatic lyricism, and sheer ferocity. At the outset of the development section, we hear the most bewildering music of the whole symphony: A version of the primary theme launches an upward flourish, but immediately shatters into constantly-modulating twonote shards that banish any memory of harmonic home. Highly contrapuntal battles between winds and strings ensue, no less furious for their intricacy. But a singleminded focus soon prevails, simmering and resolute to the final bar.

Franz Schubert
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485
Franz Peter Schubert was born in Vienna on January 31, 1797, and died on November 19, 1828, in Vienna. He wrote his Fifth Symphony in September and October of 1816; its first performance was in a private concert that autumn at the Vienna home of violinist Otto Hatwig. The score calls for exactly the same forces as did Mozart’s original orchestration of the Fortieth: flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons, and horns, and strings.

By the 1816 premiere of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, the teenage composer had already completed over 300 solo songs, dozens of partsongs, four masses, four singspiel operas, seven string quartets, and myriad smaller works— all before turning twenty years old. What’s more, most of these were penned only since 1815. Even were he a fulltime composer, Schubert’s extraordinary productivity during these years would beggar belief, but in fact he was a full-time, year-round schoolteacher, a student of Antonio Salieri, and a private music teacher, all while keeping up a cosmopolitan social life with friends from his boardingschool days. The source of Schubert’s unparalleled creative drive is hard to fathom. He couldn’t have been in it for fame and fortune—despite having written more music in two years than most composers do in a lifetime, he hadn’t received a single mention in a newspaper or a single public performance in Vienna, nor had any of his music been published. Rather, Schubert’s early work was the project of an eager amateur, intended for the private satisfaction of himself, his teacher, and his inner circle.

Like its bright-eyed composer, the Fifth Symphony brims with a bildungsroman (dare I say a shounen?) protagonist’s enthusiasm. This is the work of a gifted apprentice, fluently embellishing the legacy of Haydn and Mozart though not yet painting with a distinctive stroke. Still, there are tinges of the mature Schubert here: the eminently singable themes (often starting on the third degree of the scale), each phrase raising a question perfectly and naturally answered by the next; the harmonic penchant for the flat submediant and parallel minor; and the amiable demeanor infusing the whole.

But glimpses of the grown-up Schubert don’t wholly explain why the Fifth remains the most popular of his early symphonies. Its perennial appeal makes more sense when the work is understood on its own terms, as a Classical statement not merely imitative of the eighteenth-century masters, but worthy of comparison to the best of Mozart’s symphonies. Facilitating the fluency and balance of its form are the Fifth’s crystal-clear textures, achieved with chamber-sized orchestration. With just one flute and two horns (no clarinets, trumpets, or timpani) joining the double reeds and strings, every melody soars unhindered, while the fine-tuned kinetics of the accompaniment gleam like the inner workings of a transparent clock.

In the buoyant, tuneful Allegro, an irrepressible momentum pushes every gesture ahead in merry pursuit of its next phrase. Even the recapitulation, where the typical sonata sits back and relaxes in the tonic key, has its own secret tectonic impulse: the primary theme returns in the wrong key (a perfect fourth too high), delaying the long-awaited return to B-flat until the reprise of the lyrical second strain.

The two middle movements might be the best Mozart music Mozart never wrote, but an extended visit to the key of the flat submediant (and tonalities even further afield) in the supremely heartfelt Andante con moto reminds us that this is Schubert, after all. Probably this symphony’s most famous music, the G-minor minuet is an unmistakable reference to the corresponding movement in Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. Certainly the chromaticism in the melody is just as stern, the forte dynamic and minor key just as jolting after the soft E-flat major resolution of the Andante. Still, the texture is much simpler, and the G-major Trio even gentler and more pastoral than that of the Mozart work. Then it’s right back, in the Allegro vivace finale, to sonata form and the cheery world of the opening movement, totally unperturbed by the occasional dramatic gesture.

About the Artists

The recipient of the 2020 American Prize in Conducting (college/university division), Filippo Ciabatti, a native of Florence, Italy, is the Director of Orchestral and Choral Programs at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, and the Artistic Director of the Upper Valley Baroque Ensemble. Additionally, in 2022, he will serve as Interim Music Director of Opera Company Middlebury.

As guest conductor, Mr. Ciabatti has appeared with numerous opera companies and orchestras in Europe and North and South America, including Opera North (New Hampshire), Lyric Theatre at Illinois, Aurora Festival Orchestra (Sweden), Vermont Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Toscana dei Conservatori (Italy), Park ICM Orchestra (Missouri), Universidad Central Orchestra (Colombia), and the Concord Orchestra (Massachusetts). In 2020, he served as cover conductor for the Music Director of the Portland Symphony Orchestra (Maine). At the Hopkins Center, he conducted members of the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra in a collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company.

As a conductor, Mr. Ciabatti has collaborated with artists including Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster David Kim, baritone Nathan Gunn, cellist Gabriel Cabezas, pianist Sally Pinkas, flutist Luciano Tristaino, and mandolinist Carlo Aonzo. An advocate for contemporary music and collaborations between musical genres, he premiered a secular oratorio composed by renowned jazz composer Taylor Ho Bynum and commissioned a cello concerto by composer Noah Luna, aired during the NPR show From the Top. In 2018, he led a Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra tour to Italy, performing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in prominent venues and festivals, in collaboration with the Orchestra Toscana dei Conservatori.

In 2018, he was invited to be a Conducting Fellow at the Aurora Music Festival (Sweden), under the direction of Jukka-Pekka Saraste. During the festival, he conducted Hannah Kendall’s 2017 composition, The Spark Catchers, in the Konserthuset Stockholm.

As a collaborative pianist and vocal coach, Mr. Ciabatti is on the faculty of Camerata de’ Bardi, the Young Artists Program of Teatro Grattacielo in New York City, and the summer opera programs “Opera Viva!” in Verona (Italy) and “Scuola Italia per Giovani Cantanti Lirici” in Sant’Angelo in Vado (Italy). In 2021–2022, he served as Music Director of the Young Artists Program of Opera Middlebury. He has played for masterclasses of Renée Fleming, Nathan Gunn, Isabel Leonard, William Matteuzzi and Donald George. In Italy, he worked as vocal coach for the Cherubini Conservatory, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Florence Opera Academy.

Mr. Ciabatti holds advanced degrees in piano, choral conducting and orchestral conducting from Italy and the United States.

Marcia Cassidy, assistant conductor, is a long-time member of the faculty of Dartmouth College. She came to Dartmouth in 1987 as a member of the Franciscan String Quartet. The quartet concertized extensively in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Japan to critical acclaim and was honored with many awards including first prize in the 1986 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Ms. Cassidy currently teaches violin and viola students and directs and coaches in the chamber music program. As the assistant to the Dartmouth Symphony, Ms. Cassidy participates in and advises all aspects of running the orchestra and enjoys playing alongside her students. In addition to her Dartmouth commitments, Ms. Cassidy is an active orchestral and chamber musician, playing with groups such as the Vermont Symphony, Opera North, Juno Orchestra, and period performance chamber ensembles, Musicians of the Old Post Road and Upper Valley Baroque.

Nathaniel Alden ’23, horn, is a physics and math major from St. Paul, Minnesota. This is his first term in DSO after playing in the wind ensemble all 4 years, and he is excited about the opportunity to play with such a high-caliber ensemble. He is also grateful for the musical guidance of Patrick Kennelly, the Dartmouth horn teacher. Outside of music he has been a captain of the Nordic ski club and of the ultimate frisbee B team, and also enjoys hiking and canoeing. After graduation he will be pursuing a physics PhD at the University of Chicago.

Woojin Chung ’23, cello, is an economics and mathematics major from Fishers, Indiana. He has enjoyed playing cello in the DSO since freshman year and is appreciative of having had the opportunity to continue playing music with a wonderful community of musicians. Woojin is incredibly thankful to his parents, mentors and friends that have supported him through his musical endeavors. Following graduation, he plans on pursuing a career in finance down in New York.

Ida Claude ’22, violin, is a government and music double major from Chicago, Illinois. She joined the DSO as a violinist her freshman fall, and some of her musical highlights include serving as a student manager for the orchestra, touring Italy with the DSO her freshman winter, playing in a myriad of chamber music groups, and playing electric violin in her band Frank. After graduation, Ida will spend her third summer working on the staff of the Marlboro Music Festival before moving to Boston to work as a healthcare consultant. Ida is forever grateful to her parents for supporting her musical endeavors, to Filippo and Marcia for their years of instruction and mentorship, and to all the lifelong friends she has made throughout her years in the DSO.

Hannah Kim ’23, cello, is a double major in biomedical engineering and music from Tampa, Florida. She has been playing in the DSO and various chamber groups since her sophomore year. She is an Eichler Fellow and has worked with the Aging Resources Center at DHMC to co-create and teach a class called “Music to My Ear, But What Do You Really Hear?” She also works as a TA in the music department. Her hobbies include cooking, photography and wandering through the Hood Museum. She is interested in exploring the intersection between music and medicine. After graduation, Hannah will be working as a clinical researcher studying women’s health and aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Jack Ryan ’23, cello, is an earth sciences major from Providence, Rhode Island. He has played in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra since his freshman year and has loved having music as a part of his life during college. Some of his favorite memories from DSO are the concertos the orchestra has performed with the winners of the concerto competition. Outside of orchestra, Jack loves traveling and spending time outdoors hiking, skiing or climbing. He also enjoys playing chamber music with family during the holidays.

Hannah Spindler ’23, cello, is a miology major and French minor from Keene, New Hampshire. She has played cello with the DSO since her freshman fall and is so grateful for the opportunity to play with such a talented group, as well as for the friendship and mentorship that DSO has provided along the way. In addition to DSO, she is involved in the triathlon team, sorority leadership and the French department as a drill instructor. She is excited to spend the next year in France, where she will teach English to high school students and explore as many museums, bakeries and concerts as possible.

Jackson Spurling ’23, a violinist from Bermuda majoring in Economics, has been a member of the DSO since his freshman year. He is grateful for the opportunity to play celebrated masterpieces from Prokofiev to Tchaikovsky and Mozart with such a high-caliber ensemble. In addition to the music, he values the strong sense of community the DSO provides. He will be pursuing a career in New York after graduation, and his passion for the violin remains unwavering thanks to the support of his friends, family and mentors.

David Vargas ’23, double bass, is a Neuroscience major from Santiago, Dominican Republic. He started playing the double bass at age 16, after several years of playing the electric bass. He is very grateful for being able to continue his path into classical music at the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra, appreciating the opportunity of performing profound and challenging repertoire with such a fascinating group of musicians. Outside of music, David has spent his time working as an event technician at the Collis Center for Student Involvement, tutoring at the Academic Skill Center and doing epigenetics research at the DHMC. After graduation, he hopes to stay in the Northeast working in education before pursuing a career in medicine.

Jessica Wang ’23, violin, is forever grateful for the friends and memories that she has made during her time playing with the DSO. She has played with the DSO since her freshman year, and is thankful for the opportunity to make music alongside her friends at such a high caliber. From apple picking trips to cabin overnights, DSO has been a mainstay in her undergraduate experience. Outside of DSO, she has played with the Coast Jazz Orchestra and received private instruction from Marcia Cassidy, Omar Chen Guey and Jakob Breitbach. She has also been involved in Pan-Asian community leadership, sorority leadership and the Eichler Fellowship. She is graduating with a major in quantitative social sciences and a minor in global health. After graduation she will be working at a primary care company in Boston.

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