Prosperous Voyage

PROGRAM NOTES

Welcome to a new season—a new chapter, a new adventure! I am thrilled to officially begin the 2025/26 season as the new Artistic Director and Conductor of the St. Cloud Symphony. Tonight, we celebrate this moment of renewal and wish everyone on board a prosperous voyage. Together, we look ahead with excitement as we steer this wonderful ship—our orchestra—through the waters that lie ahead. The music on tonight’s program is a perfect reflection of this journey. We open with a bold and resounding declaration in Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Mendelssohn then offers us a blessing—Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage—as we set sail. Like Earth narrowly escaping the comet NEOWISE, we steer clear of danger in Zare’s NEOWISE, only to embark on a journey of both glory and deception along the mighty Rhine in Wagner’s Siegfried’s Rhine Journey. Finally, we marvel at the beauty of sound and the forces of nature in Smetana’s Moldau.

Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man
Commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony in 1943 as a patriotic gesture during World War II, Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man is both direct and powerful, yet unmistakably American in its modern voice. Though he struggled to find the right title, Copland ultimately chose one that reflected his deepest convictions: to honor the common man, whose quiet heroism was found not on the battlefield, but on the home front.

Mendelssohn: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
Inspired by two poems by Goethe, Mendelssohn transforms their spirit not into song, but into orchestral sound. He captures each poem’s essence with striking imagination. The first, Calm Sea, forms the slow opening of the overture: music that is hushed, still, and almost motionless. Its beauty is tinged with unease, for in the age of sail a calm sea was no blessing, but a dreaded omen of being stranded. Mendelssohn then bridges into the fast section with a sense of release—flutes flutter like birds heralding freedom. This carries us into the second poem, Prosperous Voyage, where winds and brass surge with excitement, propelling us through treacherous waters, exultant hymns, and the promise of new horizons. Rather than concluding with triumphant fanfare, the overture subsides in a gentle sigh of relief—one of the most distinctive and surprising endings in the orchestral repertoire.

Roger Zare: NEOWISE
During the summer of 2020, a rare sight emerged in the night sky. Comet NEOWISE rounded the sun and spent weeks visible to the naked eye during July. Only discovered months earlier, NEOWISE became the most impressive comet we’ve seen in decades. This piece portrays the journey of comet NEOWISE through the inner solar system from our viewpoint on Earth, beginning distantly and hazy with a solo clarinet singing over a mysterious string texture. As the comet flies by, the music becomes more expansive before fading away into the distance with an echo of the opening clarinet melody.

(Notes by: Roger Zare)

Wagner: Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
Richard Wagner’s Siegfried’s Death, written in 1848, was the seed from which his massive four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen grew. Over nearly three decades, that sketch expanded into a seventeen-hour saga drawn from Norse and Germanic myth, weaving together themes of love, power, betrayal, and redemption. What began with the death of the young hero Siegfried ultimately became the dramatic climax of the cycle’s final opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). From this opera comes Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, one of the most frequently performed excerpts from the Ring. Wagner paints images through sound that perfectly capture, dawn to sunrise, tenderness and heroism, the flowing Rhine, as well as deception and destiny in this brief excerpt from the epic opera. Arranged for concert performance by Wagner’s protégé Engelbert Humperdinck, the piece distills the cycle’s grandeur into a single journey. In it, we hear not just Siegfried’s adventure but Wagner’s vision of love, fate, and the end of an old order.

Smetana: The Moldau (Vltava) from Ma Vlast
Before Dvořák, there was Bedřich Smetana, the first composer to fully weave Czech (Bohemian) folk music into classical concert tradition, helping to create what we now call nationalistic music. His most famous orchestral achievement is the cycle of six symphonic poems Má vlast (My Fatherland), each portraying aspects of Bohemia’s landscape, history, or legends. Of these, The Moldau has become the most beloved. Through vivid tone painting, Smetana captures the river’s course—from bubbling springs to a mighty current—so clearly that listeners can almost feel the Moldau rushing past them. Poet and composer Václav Zelený distills the essence of this magnificent work with striking clarity: “This composition depicts the course of the Moldau. It sings of its first two springs, one warm the other cold, rising in the Bohemian forest, watches the streams as they join and follows the flow of the river through fields and woods… a meadow where the peasants are celebrating a wedding. In the silver moonlight the river nymphs frolic, castles and palaces float past, as well as ancient ruins growing out of the wild cliffs. The Moldau foams and surges in the Rapids of St. John, then flows in a broad stream toward Prague. Vysehrad Castle appears on its banks. The river strives on majestically, lost to view, finally yielding itself up to the Elbe.”

Program notes by Kornel Thomas