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Young Artists Orchestra
Featuring pianist Wei Luo presented by “Curtis to Colorado”
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Gabriela Frank: Three Latin American Dances
Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No.3
Borodin: Symphony No.2

Frank: Three Latin American Dances
American composer Gabriela Lena Frank grew up in California with a father of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and a mother of Peruvian descent. She often draws on her multicultural background in her work, and her Three Latin American Dances, which premiered in 2004, are no exception. The first dance, “Jungle Jaunt,” opens with what she calls “an unabashed tribute to the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein.” In contrast to that urban jungle of New York City, Franck draws on various Amazonian dance forms in the harmonies and rhythms, recalling the style of Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera.

The second movement, “Highland Harawi,” takes its name from a type of Andean music traditionally played by single bamboo quena flute in accompaniment to a single dancer. This melancholy music gives way to a fast middle section that Franck imagines to be like the “zumballyu”—the great spinning top—of Illapa, the Peruvian-Inca weather deity of thunder, lightning, and rain.

Franck has said that her music is, like her, “mestiza” or of mixed background. The last of her Three Latin American Dances is called “The Mestizo Waltz” in a pun on Franz Liszt’s famous “Mephisto Waltz.” It evokes the romancero tradition of Spanish folk ballads, mixing influences from indigenous Indian and African slave cultures with western brass bands.

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No.3
Born and trained in Russia, Sergei Prokofiev left home in 1918 to seek fame and fortune abroad. He worked and performed throughout the United States and western Europe, and along the way his composition style grew more diverse and avant garde. He dabbled in everything from ballets to operas to symphonies, always toeing the line between modernism and still remaining the crown jewel of Soviet composers.

Prokofiev wrote a total of five piano concertos, and No. 3 has earned the greatest popularity and critical acclaim. It’s also the most representative of that delicate balance of modern and traditional that he sought throughout his career. While the overall structure meets the standard concerto definition of three movements, the musical materials are anything but standard. The first movement opens with a subtle and sleepy theme, played by the clarinet, that hints of a Russian folk song. We enter a new world with the piano’s entrance and are off to the races, featuring dazzling (and terribly difficult) virtuosity by the soloist and a Hollywood-tinged romantic theme introduced in the strings. Listen for the castanets, an extremely rare occurrence of these percussion instruments in a context not connected to Spanish music.

The second movement is in the form of theme and variations, based on a slightly sarcastic but hesitant gavotte and dashing through an array of different moods. Prokofiev called the third movement an “argument” between the soloist and the orchestra, unfolding like one big crescendo. Here we find the concerto’s biggest virtuosic demands on its soloist, including the famously difficult double-note arpeggi, which pianists sometimes must manage with their knuckles. The piece rockets to a thrilling conclusion in a blaze of glory and ends—surprisingly but fittingly—on a C major ninth chord.

Borodin: Symphony No. 2
Although he is better known today as a composer, Alexander Borodin’s primary occupations were in chemistry and medicine. He had a keen interest in music, however, and practiced music and composition whenever he wasn’t researching organic synthesis and nucleophilic substitution. While he was working on his second symphony, he was also adjunct professor of Chemistry in the Medico-Surgical Academy at St. Petersburg. This account from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov gives us a window into what the dual life a chemist and composer looked like in the 1870s:

On visiting him I seldom found him working in the laboratory which adjoined his apartment. When he sat over his retorts filled with some colorless gas and distilled it by means of a tube from one vessel into another, I used to tell him that he was ‘transfusing emptiness into vacancy’. Having finished his work, he would go without me to his apartment, where he began musical operations or conversations, in the midst of which he used to jump up, run back to the laboratory to see whether something had not burned out or boiled over; meanwhile he filled the corridor with incredible sequences from successions of ninths or sevenths.

As a result of such a demanding non-musical career, it took Borodin about seven years to complete his Second Symphony. The first movement theme may sound familiar to some; it’s highlighted in the Broadway musical Kismet (1953), along with various other Borodin scores. The movement is meant to evoke a gathering of Russian warriors, and as Cesar Cui wrote at the time, “an atmosphere of grandeur.”

Borodin did not mention any program for the second movement, which is made up of a Scherzo and contrasting Trio section. It features virtuosic playing by the horn section as well as lyrical solos for the oboe and clarinet.

The third movement, Andante, portrays the legendary minstrel and storyteller Bayan. In the opening bars, the pizzicato strings and harp represent his zither, a type of plucked stringed instrument that is played from one’s lap. The dramatic music acts as accompaniment to the listener’s own imagined heroic epic.

Borodin intended for the finale, Allegro, to be a scene of great celebration and feasting by our heroes. The symphony’s opening music is recalled but, as Cesar Cui describes, “The first movement is like an everyday picture of some solemn ritual; the last movement is a vivid, motley, varied celebration of sparkling gaiety.”

Program Notes by: Angela Mitchell