Strings n’ Things

Jorja Fleezanis to open SGLS Season

The Southern Great Lakes Symphony will open its 2009-2010 season with a concert entitled Strings and Things on Sunday, November 15th at 3:00 at the Flat Rock Community Auditorium. The soloist for the event is world renowned Violinist-Jorja Fleezanis playing works by J. S. Bach and Ernest Chausson.

Ms. Fleezanis grew up in Detroit, Mich., the daughter of Greek immigrants. She studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Cincinnati Conservatory and later won a spot in the Chicago Symphony. She left Chicago to serve as concertmaster of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and, ultimately, associate concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. In 1989, she accepted Edo de Waart’s invitation to serve as concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra, a position she held for 20 years. The longest-tenured concertmaster in the orchestra’s history — Fleezanis has played a pivotal role in the ensemble and the world of orchestral music. When appointed in 1989, she was only the second woman in the U.S. to hold the title of concertmaster in a major orchestra.

In 1994, she made headlines by premiering John Adams’ Violin Concerto — a work commissioned for her by the Minnesota Orchestra — with then-music director Edo de Waart leading the orchestra. The concerto has since secured a place for itself in the world’s violin repertoire, and Fleezanis gave acclaimed encore performances of it on Minnesota Orchestra subscription concerts 10 years after its premiere. In November 2002, Fleezanis again introduced a new violin concerto that had been penned for her and commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra — Sir John Tavener’s Ikon of Eros. She was later featured in the Minnesota Orchestra’s recording of the same work. As an annual soloist with the orchestra, Fleezanis is known for her sense of musical adventure, and she has introduced many relatively unknown concertos to the orchestra’s seasonal offerings. These include concertos by Barber, Britten, Ligeti, Sessions and Weill, as well as Gubaidulina’s Offertorium, Hartmann’s Concerto Funebre, Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 4, Martin’s Polyptich and the Tippett Triple Concerto with Principal Viola Thomas Turner and Principal Cello Anthony Ross.

With Thomas Turner, she also gave the American premiere of Britten’s Double Concerto for Violin and Viola. In her final solo appearance as concertmaster, Fleezanis performed Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1.

Fleezanis is now Professor of Music (Orchestral Studies: Violin) and the Henry A. Upper Chair in Orchestral Studies at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Ms Fleezanis was married to the late musicologist-Michael Steinberg.

Ernest Chausson was born in Paris into a prosperous bourgeois family. His father made his fortune assisting Baron Haussmann in the redevelopment of Paris in the 1850s.
To please his father, Chausson studied law and became a lawyer at the Court of Appeals; but, in truth, he had little or no interest in the law. He frequented the Paris salons, where he met celebrities such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Odilon Redon, and Vincent d’Indy. He dabbled in writing and drawing before definitively deciding on his career.

In October 1879, at the age of 25, he began attending the composition classes of the opera composer Jules Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire. Chausson had already composed some piano pieces and songs. Nevertheless the earliest manuscripts that have been preserved are those corrected by Massenet.

From 1886 until his death in 1899, Chausson was secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique. He received many of the Paris artistic elite in his salon, including the composers Henri Duparc, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Isaac Albéniz, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev, and the impressionist painter Claude Monet. Chausson also assembled an important collection of Impressionist art which he displayed in his home at 22 boulevard de Courcelles, near Parc Monceau.

When only 44 years old, Chausson died in Limay (Yvelines) as a result of a freak accident. It appears that he lost control of the bicycle he was riding on a downhill slope of his estate, ran straight into a brick wall, and perished instantly. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. A small park called Place Ernest-Chausson in the 17th arrondissement of Paris is named in his honor.

Also on the program will be a performance of the Capriol Suite by Peter Warlock. The SGLS will be augmented by members of the Downriver Honors Strings. Mark DAngelo Director.

Completing this concert for the whole family, will be a performance of Prokofiev’s orchestral story-Peter and the Wolf. Peter and the Wolf is a composition by Sergei Prokofiev written in 1936 after his return to the Soviet Union. It is a children’s story (with both music and text by Prokofiev), spoken by a narrator accompanied by the orchestra. The narrator for the performance will be Glenn Miller.
Peter, a Soviet Young Pioneer, is at his grandfather’s home in a forest clearing. One day Peter goes out into the clearing, leaving the garden gate open, and the duck that lives in the yard takes the opportunity to go swimming on the nearby pond. She starts arguing with a little bird (“What kind of bird are you if you can’t fly?” – “What kind of bird are you if you can’t swim?”). Peter’s pet cat sneaks up on them, and the bird —warned by Peter— flies to safety in a tall tree while the duck swims to safety in the middle of the pond.
Peter’s grandfather scolds Peter for being outside in the meadow (“Suppose a wolf came out of the forest?”), and, when Peter defies him, saying that “Pioneers are not afraid of wolves”, his grandfather takes him back into the house and locks the gate. Shortly afterwards “a big, grey wolf” does indeed come out of the woods. The cat quickly climbs into the tree, but the duck, who has excitedly jumped out of the pond, is chased, overtaken and gulped down by the wolf.

Pioneer Peter fetches a rope and climbs over the garden wall into the tree. He asks the bird to fly around the wolf’s head to distract him, while he lowers a noose and catches the wolf by his tail. The wolf struggles to get free, but Peter ties the rope to the tree and the noose only gets tighter.
Some hunters, who have been tracking the wolf, come out of the forest ready to shoot, but Peter gets them to help him take the wolf to the zoo in a victory parade (The piece was first performed for an audience of pioneers during May Day celebrations) that includes himself, the bird, the hunters leading the wolf, the cat and grumpy grumbling Grandfather (“What if Peter hadn’t caught the wolf? What then?”) In the story’s ending, the listener is told that “if you listen very carefully, you’d hear the duck quacking inside the wolf’s belly, because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive.”

The SGLS is now celebrating its 55th season, presenting concert events for the entire family for the 2009-2010 season. All concerts are open to the public with a special invitation to families with children. Groups of 10 or more can call for group rates. Students are FREE w/ adult.

The SGLS performance takes place at the beautiful and acoustically perfect Flat Rock Community Auditorium on Sunday, November 15th at 3:00 pm. Tickets are $25. Tickets can be purchased by calling 734.246.2890 or order online at www.sgls.org If not sold out; tickets will be available at the door. The auditorium is handicapped accessible.