Yakimenko & Strauss UnTuxed

Nodoka Okisawa, conductor

Fidor Yakimenko: Nocturne in D major for Strings
(1876-1945)

Richard Strauss: Don Juan, Op. 20
(1864-1949)

Nodoka Okisawa, conductor

Nocturne in D Major
Fidor Yakimenko
b: Pisky, Ukraine / September 20, 1876
d: Paris / January 8, 1945
Composed: 1910
First WSO performance

Fidor Yakimenko was Stravinsky’s first harmony tutor. A St. Petersburg Conservatory alumnus, Yakimenko later moved to Paris, composing diverse music, and later embraced Ukrainian themes. Nocturne in D major is a pastoral with warmly shifting tonal centres.

The chief claim to fame of Fidor Yakimenko (Fyodor Akimenko) is that he was Igor Stravinsky’s first harmony teacher at the secondary school Stravinsky attended in 1899. It was a short period of 14 lessons, as Stravinsky found the orthodox Akimenko “insensitive.” Akimenko had studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov, and himself became a professor there from 1919 until 1923, after which he moved to Paris.

Stravinsky would make his name supplying music for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It’s interesting to note that Diaghilev admired Yakimenko’s talent, considering the ballet The Ice House, with score by Yakimenko, worthy of a Paris production while the company was preparing Daphnis and Chloe with music by Ravel.

Yakimenko composed an opera, several orchestral works, songs and characterful piano pieces. His late work was strongly marked by Ukrainian themes, featuring works such as Ukrainian Suite and Ukrainian Pictures, Christmas carols and choral arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs.

Yakimenko’s brief Nocturne in D major is a pastoral song-without-words whose chromatic, warmly shifting tonal centres certainly belie anything straitlaced. It is ironic that the forgotten Yakimenko composed his Nocturne during the debut year of The Firebird ballet, which brought Stravinsky immediate acclaim as Russia’s most promising young nationalistic composer.

Music

Igor Stravsinky, The Firebird
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 9

Art

La Danse, Henri Matisse

Literature

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Howard’s End, E. M. Forster

History

The Royal Canadian Navy is founded
The Mexican Revolution begins

Don Juan
Richard Strauss
b: Munich, Germany / June 11, 1864
d: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany / September 8, 1949
Composed: 1888
First performance: November 11, 1889 (Weimar) conducted by the composer
Last WSO performance: 2012, Alexander Mickelthwate, conductor

Strauss’s masterpiece Don Juan was born from Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina’s character, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, his own passion, and Hungarian poet Nicolaus Lenau’s narrative. It intertwines love, idealism, and disillusionment, showcasing passionate orchestral brilliance. The work includes a swaggering opening, a horn theme, a ravishing oboe, strategic silence, a jarring trumpet note, and a quiet end.

From its roots in the 1630 drama El Burlador de Sevilla (The Seducer of Seville) by Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina, the fantastic character of Don Juan has inspired many literary and musical representations. It was Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni that piqued Richard Strauss’s curiosity to set the Spanish lothario’s exploits to music.

When Strauss saw Paul Heyse’s play Don Juans Ende in 1885, while at the same time encountering the music of Wagner and Liszt, the young composer knew he had his material. Based on Liszt’s one-movement tone poem model, Don Juan became Strauss’s first certifiable masterpiece and a brilliant success at its premiere in 1889.

Shortly after beginning his sketches in 1887, Strauss fell in love with and married the fiery singer Pauline de Ahna. The impassioned love themes in Don Juan were clearly the result of this romance, but it was a poetic drama by the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet Nicolaus Lenau that gave Strauss his narrative.

Lenau’s Don Juan is more an idealist than a rakish seducer. He pursues a vision of the “ideal woman’’ incarnate from all women on Earth, yet without success among his so-called conquests. Disillusioned but resigned to his fate, he dies in a swordfight. With dazzling skill piloting all available orchestral resources, Strauss digs into the passions of the human psyche contained in Lenau’s feverish narrative. Soon after the premiere. the 25-year-old composer became world famous.

Strauss knew he would get more publicity by avoiding a specific program for Don Juan. Nonetheless, the swaggering opening material and the horn theme in the middle clearly belong to Don Juan. The women and his memories of them follow in various guises, the ravishing oboe theme reflecting both Pauline and her imagined ideal. The silence in the closing pages sets up the final sword thrust, a jarring trumpet note, followed by a quiet, willing death.

Music

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade

Art

The Night Café, Vincent van Gogh

Literature

The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Oscar Wilde
Le Rêve, Émile Zola

History

Vincent van Gogh cuts off his left ear
George Eastman patents the first roll-film camera and registers the brand name “Kodak”

MUSICIANS

FIRST VIOLINS

Gwen Hoebig,
  Concertmaster
The Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté Memorial Chair, endowed by the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation
Karl Stobbe,
  Associate Concertmaster
Jeff Dydra,
  Assistant Principal
Mona Coarda
Tara Fensom
Hong Tian Jia
Mary Lawton
Sonia Lazar
Julie Savard
Jun Shao
Rebecca Weger**
Momoko Matsumura (guest)
Erika Sloos (guest)

SECOND VIOLINS

Chris Anstey,
  Principal
Elation Pauls,
  Assistant Principal
Karen Bauch
Kristina Bauch,
Elizabeth Dyer
Bokyung Hwang
Rodica Jeffrey
Susan McCallum
Takayo Noguchi
Jane Radomski
Liudmyla Prysiazhniuk (guest)

VIOLAS

Elise Lavallée,
  Acting Principal
Dmytro Kreshchenskyi,**
  Acting Assistant Principal
Marie-Elyse Badeau
Laszlo Baroczi
Richard Bauch
Greg Hay
Michael Scholz
Michaela Kleer (guest)

CELLOS

Yuri Hooker,
  Principal
Robyn Neidhold,
  Assistant Principal
Ethan Allers
Arlene Dahl
Alyssa Ramsay*
Sean Taubner
Emma Quackenbush
Grace An (guest)
Samuel Nadurak (guest)

BASSES

Meredith Johnson,
  Principal
Daniel Perry,
  Assistant Principal
James McMillan
Eric Timperman*
Emily Krajewski
Taras Pivniak**

FLUTES

Jan Kocman,
  Principal
  Supported by Gordon & Audrey Fogg
Alex Conway
Laurel Ridd (guest)

PICCOLO FLUTE

Alex Conway,
  Principal

OBOES

Beverly Wang,
  Principal
Robin MacMillan
Caitlin Broms-Jacobs (guest)
Kelsey Nordstrom (guest)

CLARINETS

Micah Heilbrunn,
  Principal
Alex Whitehead

BASSOONS

Kathryn Brooks,
  Principal
Elizabeth Mee
Allen Harrington (guest)

HORNS

Patricia Evans,
  Principal
Ken MacDonald,
  Associate Principal
  The Hilda Schelberger Memorial Chair
Aiden Kleer
Caroline Oberheu
Michiko Singh

TRUMPETS

Chris Fensom,
  Principal
Isaac Pulford
  The Patty Kirk Memorial Chair
Paul Jeffrey,
  Associate Principal

TROMBONES

Steven Dyer,*
  Principal
Keith Dyrda,
  Acting Principal
Kyle Orlando**

TUBA

Justin Gruber,
  Principal

PERCUSSION

Andrew Johnson,
  Principal
Caroline Bucher (guest)
Brendan Thompson (guest)

TIMPANI

Andrew Nazer (guest)

HARP

To be determined
  Endowed by W.H. & S.E. Loewen
Alanna Ellison (guest)

PERSONNEL MANAGER

Isaac Pulford

MUSIC LIBRARIAN

Michaela Kleer

ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN

Aiden Kleer

* On Leave
** One-year appointment