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Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
This work was commissioned by the Winston-Salem Piedmont Triad Symphony with funds provided by the Frederick S. Upton Foundation and the North Carolina Arts Council. It is dedicated to Sarah Johnson and Peter Perret.
Writing for the violin has always been both a challenge and a labor of love for me. Since my musical training in stringed instruments included only a year's study on the viola, coming to understand the intricacies of the violin technique has been a real challenge.
My life-long love for the violin started when, as a boy, I attended concerts of the Cleveland orchestra and heard Heifetz, Menuhin (a prodigy in knee pants) and many other great violinists. The expressive capacity of the instrument in the hands of a master combined with a great orchestra was and still is overpowering to me.
The Concerto draws on many strands of my musical background. The first movement is a chaconne based on a twelve-tone theme. It is made up of some twenty-seven variations which sometimes demand pyrotechnical display and at others call for intense lyricism or lighthearted playfulness. The slow movement is a “blues” which reflects my war years when I led a swing band as part of my duties as an Army bandleader. The mood of the music is summed up in a line which occurred to me as I was composing: “There's a lotta blues around here, and they ain't goin' way.” In keeping with that idea, the movement just trails off until it is rather rudely interrupted by the Finale. Here again the music is out of my jazz experience and the earlier influence of Gershwin, Copland, and Harris. The movement is nonetheless in a straightforward sonata form within which a fugue is included. -ROBERT WARD
Suite from The Scarlet Letter
This work was commissioned by the Winston-Salem Piedmont Triad Symphony with the support of the North Carolina Arts Council.
Hawthorne's magnificent story proved to be an endless source of inspiration and a great challenge. In planning the work Rick McCullough, the choreographer, and I have tried to accomplish in the “story ballet” the same close interweaving of plot and music that prevails in Bernard Stambler's libretto and my music for the opera, “The Crucible,” based on the play by Arthur Miller. Each scene involves a principal dramatic climax in Hawthorne's novel, but also affords opportunities for solo, ensemble and general dances. Musical ideas are specifically associated with characters or elements of the story and recur with appropriate variations as relevant through the entirety of the ballet. This results in a cyclic-symphonic structure in which I have tried to stress the rhythmic and dance elements at all times. It envisions a final work in which dance, mime and music are inseparably joined.
I. Stiff-necked Puritans and Gossips- The townspeople gather for the condemnation of Hester Prynne as an adulteress.
II. The Secret Pledge - Hester and her child, Pearl, are visited in their prison cell by her estranged husband, Chillingworth, who pledges her to secrecy about their marital tie.
III. The Elf-child and the Minister - Seven years later, Reverend Dimmesdale, Hester's secret lover and father of Pearl, restrains the rigid Puritans from taking Pearl away from Hester.
IV. Revelation, Guilt and the Scourge - Chillingworth visits the guilt-ridden Dimmesdale. He inadvertently discovers the relationship of Hester and Dimmesdale, who orders him to leave when Chillingworth craftily tries to induce Dimmesdale to confess. Alone again, the minister scourges himself in punishment for his sins.
V. Wild night of Remorse - At midnight, tormented by the demons of his conscience, Dimmesdale goes to the scaffold where Hester was condemned. In the northern lights which suddenly suffuse the dark sky, he sees a great scarlet letter. Chillingworth, and then Hester and Pearl on the way home from the deathbed of the Governor, find the distraught minister, and he is led away.
VI. A Flood of Sunshine- Hester, who has told Chillingworth she will no longer keep her pledge of secrecy, now meets Dimmesdale again after the many years they have been kept apart. Their renewed passion is heightened by their plan to sail away from Boston and from their agony. At the height of their joy, Hester tears off the scarlet letter and throws it aside. Pearl, who has been off playing, finds it. When Dimmesdale tries to embrace her in fatherly fashion, she resists him and insists that Hester put the hated symbol of her adultery back on her breast.
VII. Expiation on the Scaffold - The townspeople, joined by friendly Indians and sailors, gather for the installation of their new Governor. They are deeply moved by Dimmesdale's sermon. As he leaves the meeting house, he sees Hester and Pearl. Driven by his guilt and the knowledge that he cannot avoid his punishment, he mounts the scaffold to make public confession. Hester and Pearl rush to his side, but he cannot be saved. His torment has been too great, and he dies in Hester's arms. -ROBERT WARD
Robert Ward - Robert Ward was born in 1917 in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers at the Eastman School of Music; with Frederick Jacobi, Bernard Wagenaar, Albert Stoessel and Edgar Schenkman at the Juilliard Graduate School; and with Aaron Copland at the Berkshire Music Center. He has served on the faculties of Queens College, Columbia University and the Juilliard School of Music, where he was also Assistant to the President from 1952 to 1956. He was Director of the Third Street Music School Settlement from 1952 to 1955. He was Executive Vice President and Managing Editor of Galaxy Music Corporation and Highgate Press until 1967, when he became President of the North Carolina School of the Arts. Until his retirement in 1987, he was the Mary Duke Biddle Professor of Music at Duke University.
Sarah Johnson - Sarah Johnson began playing the violin in her native Iowa, and made her debut with the Minneapolis Symphony at the age of ten. She is a 1975 graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Ivan Galamian, Jaime Laredo and members of the Guarneri Quartet. She is a member of the music faculty of the North Carolina School of the Arts.
Before coming to North Carolina, she was founder and director for eight years of a successful chamber music series in Charleston, South Carolina, Sarah Johnson & Friends at the Dock Street Theatre. She was the first recipient of the South Carolina Performing Artist Fellowship, and has toured under the auspices of the South Carolina, North Carolina and Southern Arts Federation touring programs. For five years she was on the distinguished roster of Affiliate Artist and in 1984 made her European debut at the Spoleto Italy Festival.
Before embarking on her career as a soloist and recitalist, she played with the Saint Paul Chamber and Orpheus Ensemble. She is an active proponent of music by women composers and a frequent performer of new works. She and her husband, artist Jeremiah Miller, live in Belews Creek, North Carolina.
Peter Perret - Born in Minnesota in 1941 to a European Family of artists and musicians, Peter Perret has been Music Director of the Winston-Salem Piedmont Triad Symphony since 1979. Under his direction the orchestra has become one of the premier performing ensembles in the Southeast.
His mentors include James Dixon, Sergiù Celibidache and Franco Ferrara of the famed Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and René Defossez of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.
After a promising start as an oboe virtuoso, Maestro Perret pursued a conducting career, winning competitions in Besançon, France and in Florence. After working as a television producer for the Swiss Television Network and forming its first music department, he was named Principal Conductor of the Capetown Symphony. He served the Buffalo Philharmonic as Exxon/Arts Endowment conductor for three years before coming to Winston-Salem.
Maestro Perret has recorded with the Hessischer Rundfunk Sinfonie Orchestra and the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande. He taught conducting and orchestra studies for eight years at the North Carolina School of the Arts. In 1989 the Winston-Salem Symphony premiered his “Symphonie Elegiaque.” Brahms First Symphony, Sherwood Shaffer's “Concerto for Orchestra” and Morton Gould's “Diversions” for Tenor Saxophone and orchestra are also available on compact discs, performed by the Winston-Salem Piedmont Triad Symphony under the direction of Maestro Perret.
Winston-Salem Piedmont Triad Symphony - Established in 1946, the Winston-Salem Piedmont Triad Symphony is a professional orchestra of 81 musicians. Among its rich resources, the Symphony counts members of several professional ensembles, including the Razoumovksy String Trio, Clarion Wind Quintet and Matrix Brass Quintet. Over the years, the orchestra has been enriched by the presence of the distinguished schools of music in the area. Most of its principal players are members of the faculties of the North Carolina School of the Arts, Wake Forest University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Salem College. Under the direction of Peter Perret since 1979, the Symphony has been acclaimed as a leading orchestra of the Southeast. The Symphony receives support from the Arts Council of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Recorded at Brendle Recital Hall of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, on May 18 and 19, 1994.
Recorded and Produced by William Allgood, Allgood Productions, Atlanta, GA.
Design and Illustration by Henderson Tyner Art Co., Winston-Salem, NC
Photography by David Rolfe
The recording of “Suite from The Scarlet Letter” and “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, The Arts Council of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, and the Lovett Foundation, with additional support from Wake Forest University and individual donors.
An Apogee AD 500 analog to digital converter was used in the production of this recording. Microphones used included two Microtech-Gefell UM 92-S, two AKG 414B-ULS, two AKG 461, to Audio Technica 4033, two Neumann KM 84i.s
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© ROBERT WARD
WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL.
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