Page 14 - Phil TheWayHome program digital version_Neat

Program Notes

hymn texts (including this one) to celebrate. After being sung to more than
twenty melodies, “Amazing Grace” found a worthy partner in William Walker’s
American tune “New Britain,” first appearing in The Southern Harmony (1835,
600,000 copies) and the groundbreaking collection The Sacred Harp (1844).

Originally composed for solo organ, Hailstork’s Fanfare on Amazing Grace is a
4-minute explosion of joyous sound. As in Bach’s organ preludes, the familiar
tune’s phrases broadly emerge from ornate counterpoint, here in the form of
fanfares. Hailstork has crafted many arrangements from his original, expanding
its scope to brass choir, chamber ensemble, and full orchestra. The Virginia
Symphony first recorded the version heard today in 2011, and the National
Symphony Orchestra opened the first concert of its 86th season (2016-17)
with it, dedicating the performance to the newly opened National Museum of
African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., with the composer
in attendance. Music critic Ramona Harper wrote on that occasion, “Grand and
sweeping with a strong percussive quality, this piece was perfectly suited to
the occasion and left one with a progressive sense of marching forward.” Don
Patterson’s arrangement of the same Fanfare was premiered by “The President’s
Own” United States Marine Band during that ensemble’s worldwide broadcast
performance at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration.

Cold Mountain Suite (2019) Jennifer Higdon
(b. 1962)

Jennifer Higdon’s opera Cold Mountain (2015 Santa Fe Opera premiere; 2016
Philadelphia revision) was originally planned for San Francisco, to mark the 150th
anniversary of the end of the American Civil War. From 2009, she worked with
librettist Gene Scheer (b. 1958) to adapt Charles Frazier’s best-selling 1997 novel,
in which a Confederate soldier (Inman) deserts after the nine-month siege of
Richmond-Petersburg, Virginia. The book’s setting was important to her choice
of subject: “I grew up in the South, so I felt like I knew the pacing of the story,
the characters, the physical place. If you open the front of the book, there’s a
map showing Cold Mountain and you can actually follow the ridge of the Smoky
Mountains over to the Tennessee farm where I spent half of my childhood.”
The main dramatic action of the opera focuses on the Home Guard’s pursuit
of Inman as he travels from a Raleigh veteran’s hospital to his western North
Carolina home (Acts 1-2, set in 1865); the opera’s Epilogue is set ten years later.

Gene Scheer estimated that roughly a quarter of the lines in the finished
PAGE 12 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra
PAGE 12 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra