At 7:30 PM on Saturday, March 24, 2018, Virginia’s City Of Fairfax Band, Robert Pouliot music director, presents a musical program designed to make you want to get on your feet and dance right into spring. Selections range from the operatic to swing, with plenty more in between. Tickets are $15. The concert will be held at the Ernst Community Cultural Center of Northern Virginia Community College, 8333 Little River Turnpike, Annandale VA 22003.
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Thunder & Lightning Concert Polka (Johann Strauss II, 1825-1899). Johann Strauss The Younger composed more than 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, gallops, marches, and other varieties of dance music, as well as several operettas and a ballet. In his lifetime, he was known as “The Waltz King” and received most of the credit for the popularity of waltz music in 19th century Vienna. With the composition of the Thunder & Lightning Polka, Johann Strauss elevated the polka from an Eastern European peasant romp to a dance form embraced by Vienna’s high society. The dazzling Thunder & Lightning quick polka has become such a concert favorite that it is played every year – along with The Blue Danube Waltz – at the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Day Concert. The polka is scored to evoke dramatic stormy weather elements through the strategic use of timpani and the clashing of cymbals, with punching szforzando accents. The piece ends with as much excitement and energy as it begins, never flagging for a second.
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Symphonic Dance No. 2, “The Maskers” (Clifton Williams, 1923-1976). Clifton Williams was a noted American composer, pianist, French hornist, mellophone player, music theorist, conductor, and teacher. His reputation as a virtuoso French horn player came from his performing career with the symphony orchestras of Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Houston, Oklahoma City, Austin, and San Antonio. Clifton Williams was graduated from Louisiana State University in 1947, then studied composition with Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music. Original compositions by Clifton Williams have become essential parts of the repertoire for wind bands all over the world. Symphonic Dance No. 2, “The Maskers” is from a group of five pieces originally commissioned by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra. In refashioning the dances for symphonic band, Williams achieved a dimension of sound and color that adds fresh excitement to wind band music. In hearing the Maskers,” the listeners’ imagination may entertain visions of colorfully costumed dancers at a masked ball. First performance of the piece in its wind band form was conducted by Frederick Fennell in December 1967 at the University of Miami School of Music, where Williams was Chair of the Theory-Composition department.
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Four Scottish Dances (Malcolm Arnold, 1921-2006). Malcolm Arnold studied composition with Gordon Jacob and trumpet with Ernest Hall at the Royal College of Music, London. In 1941 he joined the trumpet section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, becoming principal by 1943. After two years of war service and one season with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he returned to the London Philharmonic in 1946. By then music composition was already becoming his priority. He won the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1948, allowing him a year’s study in Italy. When he came back he concentrated on composition entirely. He wrote symphonies, operas, ballets, concertos, overtures, choral works, and song cycles. Arnold also scored some 80 motion pictures, winning an Oscar for his score to The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). His orchestral pieces include several sets of British “national dances” – English, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Welsh, Scottish. The first performance of Arnold’s Four Scottish Dances was at the Royal Festival Hall on June 8, 1957, with the composer conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra. A brass band arrangement was published in 1984. The concert band arrangement by John Paynter (1928-1996) was published in 1978.
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Polka & Fugue from “Schwanda” (Jaromir Weinberger, 1896-1967). Weinberger, born in Prague, grew up hearing Czech folk songs at his grandparents’ farm. He started playing the piano at age 5. By age 10 he was composing and conducting. At age 14 he entered the Prague Conservatory as a second-year student. In 1939, after extensive travels in the USA, Bratislava, and Vienna, Weinberger fled Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. He taught in New York and Ohio, and became a U.S. citizen in 1948. Of the hundred or so pieces Weinberger composed – including operas, operettas, choral pieces, and orchestral music – just about the only one still remembered is his opera Schwanda the Bagpiper, which became popular world-wide after its 1927 premiere. The opera is still performed occasionally, and the Polka and Fugue from Schwanda has become a favorite band and orchestra program piece. The Polka is a jolly tune in a bumptious folk style that suggests peasants dancing. The contrasting Fugue adds musical sophistication with deliberate, charming simplicity. The symphonic band arrangement is by Glenn Cliffe Bainum (1888-1974).
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Cool/Fugue, From Symphonic Dances From West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein, 1918-1990). Leonard Bernstein wrote three symphonies, two operas, five musicals, and lots more. During the 1960s, his TV series of Young People’s Concerts made him famous nationwide. After Jerome Robbins came up with the idea of a modern musical based on Romeo & Juliet, it took six years before West Side Story premiered. Originally, the action was to take place on New York’s Lower East Side, with tensions flaring between Catholics and Jews at the convergence of Passover and Easter. That project went nowhere. But Moving the action to the West Side and shifting to a clash between the Polish-American Sharks and the Puerto Rican Jets fired up the authors’ imaginations so much that they took some dramatic and musical risks, which were not all well received. One of the original producers backed out two months before rehearsals started. Columbia Records initially decided against recording Bernstein’s score – too depressing and too difficult, they said. Despite all the setbacks, the authors and producers stuck with it because they knew they were creating something extraordinary. After its Broadway debut in 1957, West Side Story played 732 times before going on tour. The 1961 film version won 10 Academy Awards. Symphonic Dances From West Side Story was premiered by the New York Philharmonic on February 13, 1961. The 2008 transcription for concert band, from which tonight’s selection comes, is by Paul Lavender.
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Shall We Dance? (arr. Akira Miyagawa, 1961 – ). The King And I was a huge Broadway hit in 1951. The Rodgers & Hammerstein musical won Tony Awards for Best Musical, plus Best Actress (for Gertrude Lawrence, as Anna) and Best Featured Actor (for Yul Brynner, as the King of Siam). The King and I was loaded with hit tunes – “Getting to Know You,” “Hello, Young Lovers,” “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” “We Kiss in a Shadow,” “I Have Dreamed,” “Something Wonderful,” and “Shall We Dance?” All of those – but especially Shall We Dance? – have lived on as stand-alone popular standards that continue to entertain. Arranger Akira Miyagawa has fashioned Shall We Dance? into a high-energy concert piece showcasing the tune in varied styles of swing, rhumba, and jungle beat before concluding in grandioso style. Akira Miyagawa is involved in widely ranging compositional, directorial, and performing activities in Japan, including leading the Osaka Municipal Symphonic Band as artistic director.
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Dance Suite – Aragon 1945-1952 (Ira Hearshen, 1948 – ). Ira Hearshen is one of America’s most popular and successful orchestrators and arrangers. He has written for many Hollywood films, such as Toy Story and The Scorpion King. He has also written for the concert stage, especially wind band, notably his Pulitzer-nominated Symphony on Themes of John Philip Sousa (1997). On commission from the City of Fairfax Band Association, Hearshen composed an original suite of concert music inspired by popular dance tunes from the heyday of Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom. Built in 1926, the Aragon Ballroom by the end of WW2 was drawing thousands of people every week. The crowds were attracted by the danceable sounds of just about every top group from the big band era. Each night, listeners throughout Midwestern USA and Canada tuned in to powerhouse radio station WGN for an hour-long program of dance music live from the Aragon stage. The music of Ira Hearshen’s Aragon 1945-1952 Dance Suite is all original. Yet it is enriched by tantalizing hints and suggestions of unforgettable hit dance songs like “Sentimental Journey,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “Dance Ballerina Dance,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” The premiere of Ira Hearshen’s Aragon Dance Suite was by performed by the City of Fairfax Band in 2015.
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