Ravinia 2021 - Issue 4

CARL VAN VECHTEN (BONDS, STILL, HOLT) PAVILION 7:30 PM TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2021 LARA DOWNES, piano RACHEL BARTON PINE, violin ,)E7$<O $/,ɨ/$N',NG, cello MEMBERS OF THE CHICAGO SINFONIETTA PAUL ZAFER, violin KAREN NELSON, violin BECKY COFFMAN, viola ANN GRIFFIN, cello Rising Sun Migration and Renaissance BONDS Selections from Spiritual Suite * II. The Bells III. Troubled Water Lara Downes BONDS “Dream Variation” from Three Dream Portraits Ifetayo Ali-Landing; Lara Downes STILL Summerland from Three Visions * (arr. Timothy Holley) Ifetayo Ali-Landing; Lara Downes HOLT Nora’s Dance * Lara Downes PRICE Sketches in Sepia * Lara Downes PRICE Andante con espressione * Rachel Barton Pine; Lara Downes STILL Gamin from Suite for Violin and Piano * Rachel Barton Pine; Lara Downes PRICE Piano Quintet in A minor * Allegro non troppo Andante con moto Juba Scherzo Members of the Chicago Sinfonietta; Lara Downes HARDIN ARMSTRONG “Just For a Thrill” * (arr. Jeremy Siskind) Lara Downes COOKE “A Change Is Gonna Come” * (arr. Jeremy Siskind) Lara Downes There will be no intermission in this program. * First performance at Ravinia MARGARET BONDS (1913–72) Selections from Spiritual Suite “Dream Variation” from Three Dream Portraits African American composer Margaret Bonds was born in Chicago, the daughter of physi- cian and civil rights activist Monroe Alpheus Majors and piano teacher and church organ- ist Estella C. Bonds, who divorced when she was four years old. A precocious pianist and composer, Margaret studied piano at Coleridge-Taylor Music School with Tom Theodore Taylor and began taking private composition lessons with Florence Price and WilliamDawson at age 13. Bonds commenced her undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in 1929, studying piano with Emily Boettcher Bogue and composition with Arne Oldberg and Carl M. Beecher. Four years lat- er, a Julius Rosenwald Scholarship supported her graduate studies at Northwestern. Bonds earned national recognition in 1932 as a recipient of the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation Award for her song “Sea Ghost,” also making her New York City recital debut as a pianist at Town Hall. The following year, Bonds performed John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino with the Chicago Symphony Or- chestra at the Chicago World’s Fair, making her the first African American soloist ever to appear with the orchestra. After complet- ing her master’s degree, Bonds performed around Chicago as a pianist, taught private music lessons (her students included Pulitzer Prize–winning pianist-composer Ned Rorem and pianist Gerald Cook), and briefly ran her own music school, the Allied Arts Academy. Bonds moved to New York City in 1939, mar- ried Lawrence Richardson the following year, and entered the Juilliard Graduate School for advanced studies in piano and composi- tion (on a scholarship from Roy Harris) in 1941. She performed throughout the 1940s as a piano soloist and member of a piano duo with her former student Cook. Organiza- tions across the country presented Bonds’s Margaret Bonds (1956) compositions with growing frequency during the next two decades, and her spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” (1963) became universally known and sung. Northwestern University honored her with an Alumni Merit Award in 1967, and Mayor Richard Daley proclaimed January 31, 1967, “Margaret Bonds Day” in the City of Chicago. Bonds fulfilled a deep inner longing with the composition of S piritual Suite for solo piano. Having enjoyed spirituals at the end of vocal recitals by contralto Marian Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, and soprano Abbie Mitchell in her youth, Bonds yearned to end her own performances with spiritual arrangements for piano. “I learned some settings of African folk songs of [Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor and some of his spirituals, but they didn’t have enough of the ‘American Gospel’ feeling. I began to experiment for myself and set several for pia- no.” Bonds performed two movements of the Spiritual Suite —now known as The Bells and Troubled Water , the movements performed on this occasion—in September 1952. Joan Holley performed the complete three-move- ment suite, with the first movement The Valley of the Bones , on April 12, 1942, at New York’s Town Hall. Artistic collaboration with poet Langston Hughes, whom Bonds met in 1936, proved most rewarding. Over the next three de- cades, she composed several vocal works on Hughes’s texts, including the large-scale Christmas cantata about The Three Wise Men entitled The Ballad of the Brown King (1954), the music-theater piece Shakespeare in Harlem (1959), the song cycle for male cho- rus and piano Fields of Wonder (1964), and several songs for solo voice and piano, in- cluding The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1942) and the song cycle Three Dream Portraits (1959), which drew poems from his collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932). Bonds selected “Minstrel Man,” “Dream Variation,” and “I, Too” to combat racial stereotypes of African Americans, to represent the depth to their sorrow and joy, and to protest their in- equitable treatment. WILLIAM GRANT STILL (1895–1978) Summerland from Three Visions (arranged by Timothy Holley) Gamin from Suite for Violin and Piano More than any other musician, William Grant Still deserves the title “Dean of African American composers.” His historical impor- tance would have been assured by one fact alone—his Symphony No. 1 (“Afro-Ameri- can”) became the first large-scale symphony by a musician of color to be performed by a major orchestra, when Howard Hanson conducted the Rochester Philharmonic Or- chestra in the world premiere on October 29, 1931. Still holds further distinction as the first musician of color to conduct a major Amer- ican orchestra, to have an opera performed RAVINIA MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 7 – SEPTEMBER 24, 2021 40