Program Notes: Celebrate Asia

By A. Kori Hill

Too often, creative and intellectual people under 18 are labeled “precocious,” as if their pursuits are only possible/expected/natural once the child has settled into adulthood. The Seattle Symphony’s Merriman-Ross Family Young Composers Workshop, now in its 31st year, works against this assumption. The program provides teen composers with professional development training, coaching with major figures in their field and opportunities to get their works performed by professional orchestra musicians. August Baik is an alum.

Having wrapped up his high school studies earlier this year, Baik is pursuing a degree in Piano Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. His last composition completed in the workshop was his Chuseok Overture for Orchestra (2023). Encouraged by the Young Composers Workshop director Angelique Poteat to write something that didn’t center piano, Baik turned his attention to the orchestral ensemble. The title comes from the Korean holiday of the same name, a three-day event focused on commemoration. “I wanted to write a celebratory piece,” Baik shared in a Q&A prior to his overture’s premiere. “Getting to work with Angelique, who was a Young Composer, I wanted to commemorate the young composers here and also the young composers of the past as well as the amazing symphony members that you’re going to hear.” 

The Chuseok Overture is built upon on a main theme that slowly emerges in the morose introduction. It fully blossoms into a more animated section that makes up the meat of the piece, where the theme passes from violins to solo trumpet to flute and is further fragmented across the orchestra in a polyphonic call-and-response. Baik shifts from pessimistic celebration and somber reflection, most apparent in the third, lyrical section, as the orchestra diminishes slowly, resignedly into the ether. 

The oeuvre of Paul Chihara may be viewed by some as eclectic. He’s composed for the concert stage and movie studios, and created works that range from tonal to serialist. He counts Neville Marriner, Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn among his collaborators; Nadia Boulanger and Gunther Schuller as his teachers. And regardless of what composition of his you start with — be it his Concerto for viola and orchestra (1963) or the Concerto-Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra (2022) — you step into a sound world where the communication of a story, a feeling or a state of being is key to your experience.

The Concerto-Fantasy was composed from 2019 to 2021. Written for virtuoso Vietnamese pianist Quynh Nguyen and commissioned by the Vietnamese National Symphony Orchestra, the work was debuted by Nguyen with the VNSO on October 7, 2022, at the Hanoi Opera House. According to Nguyen, it was “a concert celebrating diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam.”

Chihara says his work is “a personal tribute and musical portrait of the soloist.” Sonic allusions to popular music from Vietnam and the U.S. appear throughout the four movements, which are played attacca, or without pause. As Chihara explains in his program notes (edited for length and clarity): “The first movement begins with an orchestral statement of the Concerto’s principal melody (played by a solo violin), an idee fixe which haunts the entire composition — a melody inspired by popular music from Vietnam which I heard on imported CDs. The piano enters immediately after this brief orchestral statement with the first movement’s theme, semplice and dolce, introduced by the soloist, a sweet portrait of Quynh Nguyen herself as a young (but very talented) pianist. The music becomes more animated, and leads directly to the second movement, which is very much in an American jazz idiom, both playful and innocent … But this idyllic mood is interrupted by the abrupt entrance of the third movement, with snare drums and distant trumpets. War has come to Hanoi … The music of this scherzo is not a descriptive War Symphony, but a sort of musical nightmare of violence, confusion and dread. 

“The fourth movement begins as a grateful hymn of praise and thanksgiving, and the lyric materials from the first three movements are reprised. There is a brief and threatening nightmare moment … But the moment is fleeting, and the concerto ends with the innocence of the opening movement … Love and peace have returned to this gorgeous country.”  

It is because of Fidelio — initially titled Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love — that we never got another opera from Ludwig van Beethoven. He had to revise it three times, and even after its 1805 premiere, he amended and edited for its successive performances: the 1806 version consists of two acts instead of three and the version performed in 1814 featured the shift from the original title to Fidelio.  

Even the overtures didn’t escape Beethoven’s editing pen. A total of four exist, though Leonore Overture No. 3 is performed and recorded most frequently. In Beethoven’s opera, Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, infiltrates a prison to save her husband, Florestan, from a death sentence. The musical drama unfolds in light sonata form. A martial rhythm in the flute and violins leads to classic Beethovenian chords and overt thematic material, connecting to the full, exuberant main theme. After an energizing development section where the theme unspools and leads into new material, a military call in the trumpet segues into the recapitulation. The coda heightens the excitement and thrill of the story to come, of Leonore’s triumph in freeing her husband and their return to domestic bliss.  

It’s no stretch to say that Morning Mood from Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 lives beyond the scope of its creator. A key sonic reference for satirical cartoons and live-action comedies, it is hard to hear it as the opening of a suite about a Norwegian folk hero, not to mention that Edward Grieg composed this material for Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play, Peer Gynt. But as Grieg’s Suite outlived the initial context for which it was created, so have two of the four movements of this concert repertoire staple.  

Grieg arranged two suites from his original, 26-movement score for Ibsen’s production. Suite No. 1 is the most popular, in no small part thanks to In the Hall of the Mountain King and Morning Mood. The relaxed, sunny theme begins in the solo flute, which is answered by solo oboe, until all the orchestral parts are involved in the musical evocation of the rising of the sun. The Death of Åse carries strain and tragedy as Gynt sits at the deathbed of his mother. Anitra’s Dance portrays the daughter of a Bedouin chief performing a dance (or what Grieg imagined the music to such a dance might sound like). And lastly, the iconicity of In the Hall of the Mountain King, drives the suite to an invigorating conclusion. The theme begins with a murmur in the lower strings, increasing in dynamics, texture, and meaty and articulations. Our hero Peer Gynt is in the domain of trolls, a situation that is dangerous but also fascinating.