ADRIAN — After an October season-opener featuring one of Aaron Copland’s two Wild West-themed ballet scores, “Billy the Kid,” the Adrian Symphony turns to the composer’s other such work, “Rodeo,” for its November concert.
The concert, the second in a season-long exploration of Copland’s music, is at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 10, at Adrian College’s Dawson Auditorium. A Classical Conversation, free to all ticketholders, begins at 2:10 p.m. in the auditorium.
Tickets are $25/$33/$39 for adults, $25/$31/$37 for senior citizens, and $13/$17/$20 for students. They are available by calling 517-264-3121; online at adriansymphony.org; at the ASO office in Mahan Hall, Adrian College, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays; or at the door beginning two hours prior to the concert.
Following up last season’s deep dive into the music of Igor Stravinsky with a season centered on Copland’s works, several of them ballet scores, gives the ASO’s audiences a look at what was going on in American dance just a few years after Stravinsky was writing for the ballet stage. “It’s been fun to connect the two time frames,” ASO Music Director Bruce Anthony Kiesling said.
As was the case with “Billy the Kid,” the ASO will perform the full ballet score to “Rodeo,” not just the four dance episodes that make up the more generally performed suite: “Buckaroo Holiday,” “Corral Nocturne,” “Saturday Night Waltz,” and “Hoe Down.”
The full score adds a few minutes’ more music, largely in the form of another episode in the middle of the piece, “Ranch House Party,” that features a honky-tonk piano theme.
While “Buckaroo Holiday” is “one of the hardest pieces in the repertoire, deceptively so” because it’s full of rhythmic traps, and “Hoe Down” is an exuberant, rollicking dance number, in Kiesling’s mind the two quieter movements, the Nocturne and the Waltz, “are the reason to do the piece,” he said. “It’s just such gorgeous music.”
The afternoon’s program begins with one of Copland’s earlier works, “El Salón México.” Copland wrote it after a visit to Mexico, including a stop at a nightclub named El Salón México, that led him to use some of the music he heard during his trip.
“It’s Copland being an ethnomusicologist before they had a word for it,” Kiesling said. “I’ve loved this piece for a long time. It’s fun to come back to it.”
The piece is a contrast of styles, from the sort of music enjoyed by upper-class Mexicans, to working-class music, to a peasant dance. “It’s a pretty meaty opener,” Kiesling said. “It starts with a big brass fanfare but then gets quieter and more intimate, so you get this really interesting texture and contrast. There’s a great clarinet part, and a really, really big finish to bring it home.”
The major work on Nov. 10’s program is Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major, performed by guest artist Fabiola Kim.
Kim, the winner of numerous prizes including the Irving M. Klein International Competition for Strings, has performed with orchestras around the world. A Juilliard graduate, she is currently an assistant professor of music at the University of Michigan.
Kiesling collaborated with Kim previously on the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, and finds her to be exactly the sort of violinist to tackle such major difficult works. The Tchaikovsky concerto is one “where you need a really monster player,” he said. “You need someone special — a presence, not just a good player.”
It’s a work that violinists “are wisely hesitant to perform,” he said. In fact, after it was first performed by Joseph Joachim in 1879, other violinists deemed it unplayable. Some violinists simply don’t like to play it, however, because they think the oboe soloist actually has the best melody in the whole piece.
But with its big first movement, melodic second movement, and a folk-influenced finale that will be familiar to plenty of audience members even if they think they don’t know this particular concerto, “I’m glad to do it,” Kiesling said. “It’s an exciting piece.”
What does the ASO’s music director hope people take away from this concert?
Kiesling answers that question, in part, by contrasting the “season of Copland” with last year’s “season of Stravinsky.”
Whereas Stravinsky’s ballet scores used mythological or folklore characters as their topics, “Copland writes stories about real people,” he said, and “Rodeo” “is one of his pieces with American archetypes. I hope people see those archetypes. ‘Rodeo’ is an intimate story of regular people. It’s a coming of age story. … And it’s really great music.”
