Reserved seat tickets available on March 1; General Admission tickets available on March 8.
Enjoy UCF Music’s premier band ensembles in a beautiful concert setting.
PROGRAM
UCF Symphonic Band
Tremon Kizer, director
For ‘The Presidents’ Own’, John Williams
Named by President Thomas Jefferson in 1801, “The President’s Own” United State Marine Band, at over 200 years of age, is one of our country’s most venerable musical organizations, and recognized as one of the finest of its kind anywhere in the world.
As a former member of an Air Force Band myself, one can imagine my delight and pride when I was invited to conduct the Marine Band in a concert of my music at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in 2003. Working with them on several other occasions over the ensuring years, I’ve come to think of the Band and its directors Colonel Tim Foley, Colonel Mike Colburn, and Lt. Colonel Jason Fettig as colleagues and friends, and felt extremely privileged and honored when in 2013, I was asked to write a piece celebrating the ensemble’s 215th anniversary.
In writing “For The President’s Own”, I tried to create a worthy salute to the Band and its players, whose breathtaking virtuosity is always on display whenever they perform. In equal measure, their service to our country is consistently combined with their dedicated service to music itself, and we are all greatly in their debt.
-John Williams
Rest, Frank Ticheli
Created in 2010, Rest is a concert band adaptation of my work for SATB chorus, There Will Be Rest, which was commissioned in 1999 by the Pacific Chorale, John Alexander, conductor.
In making this version, I preserved almost everything from the original: harmony, dynamics, even the original registration. I also endeavored to preserve carefully the fragile beauty and quiet dignity suggested by Sara Teasdale’s words.
However, with the removal of the text, I felt free to enhance certain aspects of the music, most strikingly with the addition of a sustained climax on the main theme. This extended climax allows the band version to transcend the expressive boundaries of a straight note-for-note setting of the original. Thus, both versions are intimately tied and yet independent of one another, each possessing its own strengths and unique qualities. This version was commissioned by Russ Mikkelson, in memory of his father Elling Mikkelson.
-Frank Ticheli
Niagara Falls, Michael Daugherty
Michael Daugherty’s Niagara Falls was commissioned by the University of Michigan Symphonic Band in honor of its 100th anniversary and is dedicated to its conductor H. Robert Reynolds. The work was premiered by that ensemble on October 4, 1997 at “Bandarama”, conducted by H. Robert Reynolds at Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The composer writes:
Niagara Falls, a gateway between Canada and the United States, is a mecca for honeymooners and tourists who come to visit one of the most scenic waterfalls in the world. The Niagara River also generates electricity for towns on both sides of the border, where visitors are lured into haunted houses, motels, wax museums, candy stores, and tourist traps, as well as countless stores that sell “Niagara Falls” postcards, T-shirts, and souvenirs. This composition is another souvenir, inspired by my many trips to Niagara Falls. It is a ten-minute musical ride over the Niagara River with an occasional stop at a haunted house or wax museum along the way. Its principal musical motive is a haunting chromatic phrase of four tones corresponding to the syllables of Niagara Falls, and repeated in increasingly gothic proportions. A pulsing rhythm in the timpani and lower brass creates an undercurrent of energy to give an electric charge to the second motive, introduced in musical canons by the upper brass. The saxophones and clarinets introduce another level of counterpoint, in a bluesy riff with a film noir edge. My composition is a meditation on the American Sublime.
-Michael Daugherty
Esprit de Corps, Robert Jager
Based on The Marines’ Hymn, this work is a kind of fantasy-march, as well as a tribute to the United States Marine Band. Full of energy and drama, the composition has its solemn moments and its lighter moments (for example, the quasi-waltz in the middle of the piece). The composer intends that this work should display the fervor and virtuosity of the Marine Band and the musical spirit and integrity of its conductor, Colonel John R. Bourgeois, for whom the initial tempo marking, “Tempo di Bourgeois,” is named. Colonel John Bourgeois is a dramatic, spirited conductor, who reflects the excitement of the music being played. When a tempo is supposed to be “bright” he makes sure it is exactly that. Because the tempo of Esprit de Corps is to be very bright, the marking just had to be “Tempo di Bourgeois!”
UCF Wind Ensemble
Chung Park, conductor
Overture to Candide, Leonard Bernstein (Arr. Clare Grundman)
Candide was written in 1955, the result of a collaboration for the musical theater between composer Leonard Bernstein and playwright Lillian Hellman and others. Their production was based on Voltaire’s novella of 1758 which satirized the fashionable philosophies of his day. The overture is a tribute to life, full of passion, excitement, enthusiasm and exuberance. It requires speed and precision from the musicians.
The first production of Candide received mixed reviews and soon closed. The music remained popular over the ensuing decades and numerous rewrites, including operatic versions, were crafted in the quest for the perfect production.
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was an iconic American musician who achieved fame as a pianist, composer, educator and conductor. He studied at Harvard and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He was long associated with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with whom he made over half of his more than 400 recordings.
-Palatine Concert Band
Cousins, Herbert Clarke
John Almeida, trumpet; Michael Wilkinson, trombone
Cousins was composed in 1904 by Herbert Clarke. The composition was written as a cornet and trombone duet with band accompaniment for himself as the cornet soloist and Leo Zimmerman as the trombone soloist. Cousins combined the requisite technical displays of the time with an increased warmth and lyricism of style, focusing on melodic flow even in extremely difficult passages.
Herbert L. Clarke (1867–1945) was an American cornetist, composer, conductor, teacher and one of the most influential musicians at the turn of the 20th Century. As bandsman and featured soloist, he toured the world once, the United States and Canada thirty four times, Europe four times, and performed at the Paris, Chicago, Atlanta, Buffalo, Glasgow, Panama, San Francisco, and St. Louis expositions. Clarke’s early musical instruction was on violin and at 13 years of age he was a second violinist in the Philharmonic Society Orchestra of Toronto. About this time he began to play his brother Ed’s cornet and was soon earning fifty cents a night playing in a restaurant band.
-University of South Florida Symphonic Band and Austin Symphonic Band
Commando March, Samuel Barber
Tremon Kizer, guest conductor
Samuel Barber, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, was one of America’s most gifted composers. A child prodigy, he started composing at age seven and wrote his first opera three years later. At age fourteen he entered the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In the early 1930s Barber decided to study abroad and became a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1935. He received numerous prizes and awards including two Pulitzer prizes, the American Prix de Rome, three Guggenheim fellowships, an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Barber served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War. While assigned to the Technical Training Command in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he was asked to compose a march for the band stationed there. He completed the Commando March in 1943 and described it as representing a “new kind of soldier, one who did not march in straight lines” but “struck in stealth with speed, disappearing as quickly as he came.” It was premièred by the Army Air Forces Technical Training Command Band in Atlantic City on May 23, 1943. Sergei Koussevitzky admired the work and commissioned an orchestral version for performance by the Boston Symphony that same year.
-The President’s Own US Marine Band
Concertino for Trombone, Ferdinand David
Matthew Kerr, trombone
Concertino for Trombone was composed by Ferdinand David (1810-1873). A virtuoso violinist and composer, David was born in the same house in Hamburg where renowned composer Felix Mendelssohn had been born the previous year. David became the first violinist of a string quartet in Dorpat and was making concert tours by the age of 19. Meanwhile Mendelssohn had promised Carl Traugott Queisser, a young trombone virtuoso, that he would write a trombone concerto for him, but never had time to do so. Ferdinand David, his good friend and by now concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, finished what Mendelssohn had initially set out to do with the completion of this Concertino for Trombone and Orchestra.
The Concertino in E Flat for Trombone and Orchestra was composed in 1837 and dedicated to famous trombone soloist Karl Traugott Quessier. Quessier had originally asked Mendelssohn to write a piece for him, but Mendelssohn did not have time and recommended that David compose it instead. The concertino consists of 3 movements: Allegro maestoso, Marcia funebre (Andante), and Allegro maestoso. Quessier gave the premiere performance at the Gewandhaus with Mendelssohn conducting, and the piece became a success both in Germany and abroad.
-Palatine Concert Band and The Dodge Area Symphony
Selections from Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin (Arr. Russell Bennett)
This “folk” opera with music by George Gershwin was first performed in 1935. The libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin tells the story of Porgy, a beggar living in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina, and his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of the stevedore Crown, her violent and possessive lover. The opera featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring artistic choice at the time. After an initially unpopular public reception, it eventually became one of the best-known and most frequently performed American operas. A film followed in 1959.
George Gershwin (1898-1937) was a gifted writer of popular songs, musical comedies, a folk opera and other art music. Born Jacob Gershovitz in Brooklyn, New York, he left high school to work on Tin Pan Alley. He found early success with “Suwanee.” He teamed up with his older brother Ira as lyricist and wrote over a dozen successful musical comedies. He blended jazz and popular and classical music and was widely successful. His early death resulted from a brain tumor.
-Palatine Concert Band
Washington Post March, John Philip Sousa
During the 1880’s, several Washington, DC, newspapers competed vigorously for public favor. One of those, the Washington Post, organized what was known as the
Washington Post Amateur Authors’ Association and sponsored an essay contest for school children. Frank Hatton and Beriah Wilkins, owners of the newspaper, asked Sousa, then leader of the Marine Band, to compose a march for the award ceremony.
The ceremony was held on the Smithsonian grounds on June 15, 1889. President Harrison and other dignitaries were among the huge crowd. When the new march was played by Sousa and the Marine Band, it was enthusiastically received, and within days it became exceptionally popular in Washington. Next to The Stars and Stripes Forever, The Washington Post has been Sousa’s most widely known march. He delighted in telling how he had heard it in so many different countries, played in so many different ways.
-The Gift of East Bay Scout Band
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