Opera Workshop's Musical Discoveries

 Audiences for this spring’s HSU Opera Workshop concerts on March 28 and 29 will be among the first to experience recently rediscovered music from Portugal, including excerpts from a satirical opera never before heard on the West Coast. 

“Every second spring the Opera Workshop explores a special topic within the genre of dramatic vocal music,” explained director and HSU Music professor Elisabeth Harrington. This year’s concert results from the work of music scholar Dr. Ricardo Bernardes, who has “unearthed and edited selections of Portuguese vocal music and agreed to make them available for our performance.” 

Among his discoveries is an 18th century operatic farce that he found in a Washington archive. He provided his edited excerpts to the Opera Workshop for this work's West Coast premiere. 

Entitled "A Saloia Namorada," it’s about “a country girl in love,” Harrington said. “Themes include patriotism and the perennial ‘neutral ground’ for all operas: love triangles!” 

 This opera by Antonio Leal Moreira (music) and Domingos Caldas Barbosa (libretto) is historically significant as “the only known Portuguese opera from the 18th century that included composed recitative, rather than spoken dialogue. Several of our students have been working on short sections of the recitatives to include between their arias and duets.” 

Chris Parreira and Sean Laughlin review diction
with soprano and native of Portugal Ana Cruz 

Aiding the authenticity is soprano Ana Cruz, who is completing her HSU degree in Vocal Performance. “A native of Portugal, Ana has been the diction coach for the opera class this semester,” Harrington said. 

The concert features music from medieval to modern, including a liturgical piece in Latin ("Dixit Dominus") and an Italian aria ("Aria Alcione"), both also edited by Ricardo Bernardes. “They reflect the deep influence of European style on Portuguese music.” 

 Harrington will be among the 13 singers in the concert. John Chernoff accompanies on harpsichord, with Kinu Manabe on bass. 

 Humboldt County brass player Gregg Moore, who taught music in Portugal for ten years, performs with Ana Cruz on two pieces in the genre called Fado. With origins in the 19th century or earlier, Fado (“fate” or “destiny”) is a popular Portuguese song style, recently added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list. 

HSU Opera Workshop performs on Friday and Saturday, March 28 and 29 at 8 p.m. in Gist Hall Theatre on the HSU campus. Tickets are $10, $5 seniors and children, and $3 HSU students, from the HSU Ticket Office (926-3928) or at the door. Produced by the HSU Music Department.

All This Jazz: HSU Battle of the Orchestras

 The Humboldt Symphony plays jazz, the HSU Jazz Orchestra plays classical, and together they play an orchestral work by Duke Ellington: is it blurring musical boundaries or HSU’s orchestra slam? You be the judge at Fulkerson Recital Hall on Saturday March 8. 

 The HSU Symphony under the direction of Kenneth Ayoob performs Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to West Side Story, which melds classical, jazz and popular music elements. A major hit as a stage show, this concert version was adapted from the landmark 1961 film by Maurice Peress, New York Philharmonic assistant conductor to Bernstein.

 “Our part of the concert features pieces with a jazz feel and background,” Ayoob noted. The Symphony gets more specifically jazzy with Calvin Custer’s Salute to the Big Bands, which incorporates melodies made famous by Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Glenn Miller and other 1940s bands, including excerpts from “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and “Sing Sing Sing.”

 “When Ken Ayoob told me that the Symphony was going to encroach on the Jazz Orchestra's territory with this piece,” said Jazz Orchestra conductor Dan Aldag, “I decided to return the favor by programming a piece of classical music arranged for big band.”

 So the Jazz Orchestra will perform a jazz band version of a song by 19th century French composer Leo Delibes, “The Maids of Cadiz.” Though the song was recorded by Benny Goodman and Miles Davis, this 1950 band arrangement by Gil Evans was only recently rediscovered.

The two orchestras combine for the evening’s centerpiece, Duke Ellington’s Harlem, conducted by Aldag. “This is generally acknowledged as one of Ellington's finest extended works,” he said. 

 The Jazz Orchestra gets back to jazz roots with the raucous “Better Git It In Your Soul” by Charles Mingus. 

 The Humboldt Symphony and HSU Jazz Orchestra concert is on Saturday March 8 at 8 p.m. in Fulkerson Recital Hall on the HSU campus in Arcata. Tickets are $8/$5, free to HSU students with ID, from HSU Ticket Office (826-3928) or at the door. An HSU Music Department production.

Jazz Orchestra Notes

Notes by Dan Aldag, director of the HSU Jazz Orchestra:

rehearsing "Harlem"

The Jazz Orchestra is playing a program specifically tailored to sharing a concert with the Symphony. Most obviously, we are collaborating with the Symphony on Duke Ellington's Harlem... It has become a frequently performed work by symphony orchestras around the world and is generally acknowledged as one of Ellington's finest extended works.

 The Jazz Orchestra's own set will begin with "I Am" by the young Boston-based composer Omar Thomas. I chose this work because Thomas wrote it in a through-composed style much more like typical symphonic writing than jazz's customary repeating forms.

When Ken Ayoob told me that the Symphony was going to encroach on the Jazz Orchestra's territory and play a "Salute to the Big Bands", I decided to return the favor by programming a piece of classical music arranged for big band. The great jazz arranger Gil Evans adapted Leo Delibes' song "The Maids of Cadiz" for Claude Thornhill's band in 1950 (the same year Ellington composed Harlem), but Thornhill never recorded it. Evans wrote a new arrangement of "Maids" for his first album with Miles Davis, Miles Ahead, and the original arrangement for Thornhill was only recently rediscovered by Ryan Truesdell and recorded by his Gil Evans Project for their Grammy-nominated 2012 CD Centennial.

The Jazz Orchestra will close the program with a piece decidedly different from the refined sounds that will precede it. Charles Mingus's "Better Git It In Your Soul" was inspired by his childhood attendance at "Holy Roller" church services, with congregants shouting and moaning and speaking in tongues. Ending the evening with this will bring the Jazz Orchestra back to jazz's roots in African-American vernacular music.

Ellington's Harlem

According to Duke Ellington in his 1973 autobiography, he wrote Harlem in the summer of 1950 while he was aboard the Isle de France returning from Europe. He writes that it had been commissioned by the NBC Symphony Orchestra “during the time when Maestro Arturo Toscanini was its conductor.”

 Just when or if the NBC Symphony Orchestra ever played Harlem is still in question.  Recently Professor Donald C. Meyer of the Lake Forest College music department found a 1951 New York Times story about a benefit concert in New York in which some 70 members of this orchestra plus the Ellington orchestra together played it, with Ellington conducting. The Ellington orchestra had previously played it in 1951, and recorded it live in Stockholm, Sweden for release in 1955.

 Stanley Slome, former secretary of the Duke Ellington Society Los Angeles chapter, has chronicled various orchestrations and performances in the 1950s, though some mysteries remain. However, the version performed by the Humboldt Symphony and Jazz Orchestra was orchestrated by Luther Henderson and Maurice Peress.

 In his liner notes to a 1989 CD, Peress writes “Duke, a master title-giver, described the work as a concerto grosso for jazz band and symphony orchestra... It is one completely integrated movement, the first part of which is held together by the word "Har-lem" (a minor third), intoned by the growl trumpet. The second half is built out of the street funeral dirge (Duke refers to an Elks Band) which begins as an eight-bar blues for three marvelously interwoven clarinets and builds to a climax combining both thematic ideas.”

 According to Peress, Ellington described Harlem in this way: "...The piece of music goes like this (1) Pronouncing the word "Harlem," itemizing its many facets---from downtown to uptown, true and false; (2) 110th Street, heading north through the Spanish neighborhood; (3) Intersection further uptown--cats shucking and stiffing; (4) Upbeat parade; (5) Jazz spoken in a thousand languages (6) Floor show; (7) Girls out of step, but kicking like crazy; (8) Fanfare for Sunday; (9) On the way to church; (10) Church---we're even represented in Congress by our man of the church; (11) The sermon; (12) Funeral; (13) Counterpoint of tears; (14) Chic chick; (15) Stopping traffic; (16) After church promendade; (17) Agreement a cappella; (18) Civil Rights demandments; (19) March onward and upward; (20) Summary--contributions coda.