Page 22 - Phil 25-26 opening night DIGITAL program book

Program Notes

Boston society ladies: it’s a light waltz, in the same key and a very similar
melody to her Bal masqué. In this orchestration, she develops her mostly
right-hand original melody into generous solos for flute, trumpet, oboe
and creates new countermelodies for divided horns and piccolo. Her
percussion parts (glockenspiel, timpani, triangle) are at once supportive
and humorous, requiring three distinct percussionists.
At the premiere, the BSO program stipulated, “The audience is
respectfully requested to preserve silence during the performance of this
number.” Performance time is only five minutes, leaving us yearning for
more time on the dance floor. During her lifetime the BSO featured her
music on fourteen different concerts, even pairing her Gaelic Symphony
with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade on their 1898 concert at New York’s
“Old” Metropolitan Opera House at Broadway and 38th Street.
After Dr. Beach’s death in 1910, she toured Europe for three years
with American prima donna soprano Marcella (Marcia) Craft. They
rejuvenated at spas and museums, and then “Mrs. H.H.A. Beach”
resumed her career as a concert pianist as “Amy Beach.” She received
rave reviews in Leipzig and Berlin for her Gaelic Symphony and Piano
Concerto, op. 45. Just before war broke out in 1914, she returned to the
United States, splitting her time between concertizing in New York
(winters living in the American Women’s Club on 57th) and a cottage in
Centerville on Cape Cod.
From 1921-1941, she composed mainly during annual stays as a Fellow
at the scenic, secluded MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New
Hampshire. Through the support of “Colonists” [her words] such as
playwright Thornton Wilder, sculptor Basha Paeff, and Colony Founder
Marion MacDowell, she completed and edited over one hundred and
fifty works for publication between 1890-1940: the royalties from her
music still support that thriving institution.

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Lincoln Portrait (1942) Aaron Copland
(1900-1990)
Aaron Copland’s musical style was a unique synthesis of many
approaches, encouraged by his early teachers Rubin Goldmark and
Nadia Boulanger. Goldmark, one of the leading post-WWI teachers of
composition, emphasized a constructivist method (repeating germinal
units to form larger ones) that informed Copland’s later work with both

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