A Grand Finale

Dear Friends,

It is my honor to welcome you to the 54th season of the Ashland Symphony Orchestra. We look forward to seeing and hearing what our Grammy Award winning Music Director and Conductor, Michael Repper, in his second year, has in store for us. Michael’s enthusiasm, talent, and ability to “think outside the box” in dynamic, innovative, and delightful ways were evident in his inaugural year. He and our outstanding musicians presented an array of both familiar and new musical offerings and we look forward to more of that this year. As always, we strive to unite, educate and enrich our community through the engaging and transformative power of orchestral music experiences. We hope you find it inspiring and refreshing. Happy listening!

Allan Andersen, President
ASO Board of Directors

Dear Ashland Symphony Orchestra Patrons,

It is my great privilege to welcome you to our concerts at the marvelous Robert M. & Janet L. Archer Auditorium. I am incredibly proud to be taking the helm as Ashland’s new Music Director, and to continue to grow this jewel of Ashland County. We are going to make tremendous music together and enjoy a wonderful communal spirit. Our concerts are a place for everyone – come and enjoy, and be sure to introduce yourself! Our musicians and I are incredibly proud to share our work with you, and we hope you enjoy every minute!

Michael Repper
Music Director and Conductor
Ashland Symphony Orchestra

I am excited to be celebrating my 10^th season with the ASO! This “Fabulously (un)familiar” season will bring you works by the old masters: Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. But you will also hear the world premiere of Stefan Swanson’s Symphony No.2 “Lipsky”, Iubilo by Brian Nabors, Starburst by Jessie Montgomery, and the artistry of the young cellist Aurelia Faidley-Solars, just to name a few of the unfamiliar musical experiences you will have.

Free tickets for children and students and the ASO Fan Club, for students in 9^th-12^th grade and college students, and the new ASO Fan Club Jr, for students in 4^th-8^th grade, bring young listeners to our concerts.

Be sure to invite your friends, family, and colleagues to come listen to what people are talking about!

Martha Buckner
Executive Director
Ashland Symphony Orchestra

Michael Repper is one of the most sought-after young conductors in the world. With work spanning four continents, Mr. Repper has an international reputation for engaging and exciting audiences of all spectrums, and for promoting new and diverse musical talents. In 2023, he became the youngest American conductor to win a Grammy® Award in Best Orchestral Performance.

Mr. Repper is the Music Director of the Ashland Symphony Orchestra, Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, Northern Neck Orchestra of Virginia, and the Principal Conductor of Sinfonía por el Perú, the elite youth orchestras and choruses representing one of South America’s most versatile social impact music programs. Recognizing his success at these ensembles, and his growing profile as a guest conductor all over the world, Mr. Repper was awarded a Solti Foundation US Career Assistance Award in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

His album with the New York Youth Symphony, which features debut recordings of works by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, and Valerie Coleman, achieved widespread critical acclaim, reached #1 on the Billboard Chart, a won a GRAMMY® Award, the first youth orchestra to achieve this milestone.

Mr. Repper has collaborated on large-scale productions of symphonic and theatrical works with the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Ravinia Festival, Peabody Institute of Music, and the New School of Music, among others. An avid pianist, he regularly performs as a soloist alongside his orchestras and choruses, and as an orchestral player as well. Most recently, he played in the Chicago Symphony for their performances of Bernstein’s Mass, which was broadcast on PBS Great Performances. ​

​Alongside the standard repertoire, Mr. Repper is especially invested in programming new music and showcasing fresh talent. His ensembles have performed dozens of world premieres and pursued innovative commissions, as well as a variety of Carnegie Hall premieres from established and emerging composers. Mr. Repper was the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conducting Fellow for two seasons, and he served as the BSO’s New Music Consultant. A trusted ear, Mr. Repper is asked to assist and cover at orchestras nationwide, including the St. Louis Symphony, and for Naxos recordings with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra. His experience with choruses has been recognized with significant positions, including his tenure as the Music Director at the Baltimore Basilica, the first Catholic Cathedral in the United States. Internationally, Mr. Repper has performed with some of the most highly regarded ensembles and in the world’s greatest venues, including the São Paulo Symphony, and at the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona.

His discography includes the aforementioned album of music with the New York Youth Symphony, alongside an album with the Grammy-Nominated Metropolis Ensemble and Grammy-Winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus (“Musical America”), and several with the Peabody Institute as an Assistant Conductor. With the New York Youth Symphony during the Coronavirus pandemic, he was one of the first to pioneer the practice of distanced orchestral performance videos, and he made two performance appearances on CNN, the final one with Platinum-Artist Billy Ray Cyrus.

Mr. Repper complements his work with professional orchestras with a firm commitment to education, and travels worldwide to work with ensembles of young musicians. As Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Maryland, he ushered in a slate of innovative educational programming, such as the Reinecke Youth Chamber Music Scholarship and Fellowship Program. He conducts several masterclasses each year for orchestras from all over the United States on behalf of the New York Philharmonic, and conducts side-by-side and educational concerts with major orchestras, including the Baltimore Symphony and the Colorado Symphony.

Mr. Repper’s most influential conducting mentors are Marin Alsop and the late Gustav Meier. He believes that a conductor’s main role is to connect people and to use performance as a vehicle for positive change. He aims to promote a diverse and inclusive future for the arts, and to pay forward the passion for community that his mentors demonstrated to him.

BOULANGER, Lili: D’un Matin de Printemps (“Of a Spring Morning”)

Instrumentation: 2 Flutes, Piccolo, 2 Oboes, English horn, 2 Clarinets, Bass clarinet, 2 Bassoons, 4 Horns, 2 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, Tuba, Percussion, Harp, Strings

Duration: 4 minutes

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) lived a remarkable life, albeit sadly a very short one. Even though she succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 24, she had already become a very respected composer, and was the first woman to win the famed composition Prix-de-Rome (a storied French prize from the 1600s that offered a bursary for artists to study and create art in Rome for three to five years). She was born into a musical family. Her father, Ernest, was a cellist who had also won the Prix-de-Rome, and her sister Nadia is considered one of the most influential composition teachers in the history of music.

This work, along with a similar work D’un Soir Triste, is a short work for full orchestra that Lili completed near the very end of her life. It reflects a very mature sense of orchestration and melodic composition, with an impressive and varied use of textures. Of its time, one can see the inspirations of the impressionist movement that was in style in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, but we also get a true sense of individualism that comes with great composition.

The work has experienced a resurgence in the last several years as the parts were finally engraved – like many other works by women, it was covered up for decades and orchestras are only recently beginning to pay Lili Boulanger the attention her music so richly deserves!

–Michael Repper

TCHAIKOVSKY, Piotr Ilyich: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture

Instrumentation: 2 Flutes, Piccolo, 2 Oboes, English horn, 2 Clarinets, 2 Bassoons, 4 Horns, 2 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, Tuba, Timpani, Percussion, Harp, Strings

Duration: 20 minutes

Even a cursory review of the lives of most of the significant composers of the nineteenth century – from Berlioz to Verdi – shows them to have been fascinated with the timeless art of Shakespeare.  In fact, it is a major trait of Romanticism as an intellectual movement to have plumbed the depths of his work for archetypes of the human condition.  And it is telling that generations of young composers took personal initiative to school themselves so.  Tchaikovsky is representative, and his concert overture, Romeo and Juliet, is typical of the many compositions of the times that drew inspiration from the playwright.

Composed just as Tchaikovsky turned twenty-nine years old, it’s a relatively early work.  The composer had composed his first programmatic work, Fatom (fate) – he soon tore up the original score – only the year before, and the first version of his first symphony three years previous.  So, almost all of the orchestral music that has established his durable popularity was yet to come.  In fact, his beloved fifth and sixth symphonies, as well as The Nutcracker, lay roughly two decades in the future.  But, withal, this work has taken its place with the masterpieces of his maturity.  That being said, Romeo and Juliet did not take that place without a somewhat checkered history.

Three versions of it evolved, as the composer labored to create the successful, final iteration.  The première (1870) of his first take was not successful at all, owing to numerous technical and conceptual problems, and Tchaikovsky made extensive changes, most of which are in the final version.  Finally, about ten years later, the composer made a few more changes, and that is the version we all hear, today.   All throughout the initial composition of Romeo and Juliet Tchaikovsky was guided in great detail by Mily Balakirev, the informal leader of the famed group of Russian nationalistic composers known as the “mighty handful,” the others being Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.  Located in St. Petersburg, they were self-taught followers of Glinka, and sought to establish a Russian school of musical style.   Balakirev and Tchaikovsky (by then, living in Moscow) had established an informal relationship earlier, and Romeo and Juliet was the result of a kind of collaboration between the two men.  Balakirev had suggested the subject matter, and even the rough sonata form, which associated the introduction with Friar Laurence, the first theme with the conflict between the Capulets and the Montagues, and the second theme with the lovers.  Balakirev made significant suggestions for revisions to the composition, and evidently Tchaikovsky took several of them to heart – even dedicating the work to him.  On the other hand, most scholars seem to agree that the result is still totally Tchaikovsky’s composition, and that Balakirev cannot legitimately be considered the younger man’s mentor.

The “Friar Laurence” introduction is a solemn evocation of the church through skillful writing for low woodwinds that masterfully imitates a small reed organ.  Little by little Tchaikovsky draws the ominous mood out, teasing us with intimations of the conflict to come, in the manner with which so much of the drama in his later ballets is spun out.  Eventually, the main theme explodes as the Capulets and the Montagues battle, and, after a bit of teasing, the familiar “love theme” is heard, colored poignantly by the English horn.  Now, that all three protagonists have been introduced, Tchaikovsky builds the conflict with a vengeful return to the battle, replete with palpable swordplay from the percussion section.  You’ll find the same pictorial talent displayed years later in the attack of the mice in the Nutcracker.  But, love triumphs – if only for a bit – and the theme of the lovers soars out in the quintessential orchestration so familiar from a thousand cultural uses:  lush strings and “heart-throbbing” horns.  Conflict resumes, this time with sinister bits of Friar Laurence’s theme, and finally the death of the star-crossed lovers is clear.  The timpani taps out a dirge as an epilogue, with an intimation of the pair’s transfiguration in the rest of the orchestra.  Dramatic orchestral hammer-strokes seal their fate and conclude the tragedy.

–Wm. E. Runyan

© 2015 William E. Runyan

BEACH, Amy: Concerto, piano, op.45, C-sharp minor

1. Allegro moderato
2. Scherzo (Perpetuum mobile): Vivace

• Largo

1. Allegro con scioltezza

Instrumentation: 2 Flutes, Piccolo, 2 Oboes, 2 Clarinets, Bass clarinet, 2 Bassoons, 4 Horns, 2 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, Tuba, Timpani, Percussion, Strings

Duration: 40 minutes

Work on the piano concerto began in 1897 and it was clearly intended not only as a major composition, but also as a way for Beach to return to the concert platform that she missed so acutely. Reminders of this surrounded her at the time: in 1895 her father died and her mother Clara moved in with Amy and her husband. The tensions between these three, particularly in terms of Beach’s musical career, cannot have been easy to bear. The first performance took place in Symphony Hall, Boston, on 7 April 1900 with the composer as soloist, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Gericke. The two-piano score was published the same year by the firm of Arthur P Schmidt, with a dedication to the Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño (1853–1917), one of the greatest soloists of the age (Sir Henry Wood described her as ‘this great woman who looked like a queen among pianists – and played like a goddess’). Carreño wrote a gracious letter accepting the dedication with delight, and she tried to arrange a performance with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1901. However, these plans came to nothing and Carreño never played the work, so the task of advocating the concerto fell squarely on Beach herself. She once wrote that a composition could be ‘a veritable autobiography’, and the piano concerto has elements that can certainly be considered in this way. Several of the themes are quotations from earlier songs, and the idea of a piano soloist (Beach) pitted against an orchestra (the forces in her upbringing and home life that conspired to make her career so difficult) is a persuasive one. Beach herself, however, gave nothing away in her own programme note on the work:

The work is in four movements, the last two being connected.

The first, Allegro [moderato], is serious in character, piano and orchestra vying with each other in the development of the two principal themes, of which the second is songlike in character. There is a richly worked out cadenza for the solo instrument near the close of the movement.

The second movement, Scherzo, bears the subtitle ‘perpetuum mobile’, and consists of a piquant etude rhythm unbroken throughout the piano part, set against an orchestral background that sings the melody in the stringed instruments. This is a short movement, with a brief cadenza for the piano before the final resumption of the principal theme.

The slow movement is a dark, tragic lament, which, after working up to an impassioned climax, passes through a very soft transition directly into the last movement, a bright vivacious rondo.

Before the close there comes a repetition of the lament theme, with varied development, quickly followed by a renewal of the rondo and then a coda.

The four-movement structure is perhaps an echo of Brahms’s second piano concerto, and as Beach herself suggests in her note, the soloist and orchestra are in a state of tension, even opposition – ‘vying with each other’, as she puts it. This is apparent throughout the long first movement, which is much the most extended of the four. The second movement quotes from her song ‘Empress of Night’, setting a poem by her husband, with a dedication to her mother. The figurations of the piano accompaniment are transformed in the concerto into the soloist’s perpetuum mobile theme, which – in this new guise – consumes and all but buries the main melody of the song. The slow movement quotes from the song ‘Twilight’, another setting of her husband’s verse; freed of Dr. Beach’s rather stiff words, the music develops with a tragic intensity that is all the more remarkable given the conciseness of the movement. The rondo finale is marked Allegro con scioltezza, indicating fluency and agility. The soloist takes the lead throughout, introducing each idea, and growing in confidence and domination. If we accept the evidence for an unstated autobiographical programme lying behind this work, then Beach’s finale has the soloist (herself) emerging triumphant and free. It was to be a prophetic metaphor: in 1910 her husband died, and her mother’s death came early the next year. Free at last to make her own professional decisions, Beach in her early forties was able to pursue her career as a concert pianist, and she undertook several successful tours in Europe, and while she continued to compose, it was performing that gave her the greatest pleasure before she retired from concert-giving in 1940. In Musical America in 1917, she declared that ‘the joy of giving of your highest powers is beyond description… When I play there is only limitless enthusiasm and enjoyment.’

–Nigel Simeone © 2017

Grammy nominated Canadian-American pianist and conductor Kara Huber is quickly establishing herself as a celebrated member of the new class of concert pi

anists. Hailed as “absolutely dazzling…in a word, flawless” (New York Concert Review) in her Carnegie Hall debut, Ms. Huber combines the polish and warmth of an old-school soloist with the charisma and flair of the new generation of piano virtuosi.

Ms. Huber has performed across North America, Europe, and Australia, including lauded solo appearances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Piano Virtuoso Series at the Canadian Opera Company, the Rising Stars Piano Series in Southampton, New York and Steinway Series at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. An in-demand recitalist, Ms. Huber seeks to excite and delight diverse audiences through her creative and engaging programming.

On the orchestral stage, Ms. Huber’s past seasons include appearances with the Louisville Orchestra, Oakville Symphony, Scarborough Philharmonic, and York Symphony Orchestra. She has worked under the baton of Charles Dutoit, Gerard Schwarz, Teddy Abrams, Denis Mastromonaco and Michael Roháč, in addition to a performance conducting and performing with the Canadian Chamber Orchestra.

Ms. Huber has received numerous prizes and awards for her performances, including the Audience Favorite Award in the Cincinnati World Piano Competition. She received training from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music with Awadagin Pratt and The Glenn Gould School of The Royal Conservatory of Music with John Perry and Leon Fleisher. Dr. Huber recently completed a DMA in piano and conducting at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, taught at the University of Louisville School of Music, and is currently instructor of piano at the Interlochen Arts Academy.

The Ashland Symphony Orchestra thanks

Our ushers and volunteers
Aidan Campbell, Assistant Technical Director
Seth Morrison, Stage Manager
Bryce Bishop, Assistant Stage Manager
Jen Burford, House Manager
Mark Gorsuch, Volunteers Coordinator

Ashland City Schools for its continued support of the arts

Roger Price, Professional Voice Actor & Announcer, www.RogerzVoice.com

Please silence all electronic devices.
No flash photography or audio/visual recording permitted.
No food or drink permitted in the Robert M. & Janet L. Archer Auditorium.

Thank you for your cooperation.

In 1997, Bob and Jan Archer established the first donor fund through the Ashland County Community Foundation to benefit the Ashland Symphony Orchestra. The ASO then partnered with the ACCF in 1999 and created the “Ashland Symphony Orchestra Fund in Memorium of James E. Thomas”. Since then, three new agency funds and fourteen additional donor advised or designated funds have been established! The Ashland County Community Foundation can assist you in creating a fund to benefit the Ashland Symphony Orchestra now or as part of your estate plan. For more information, call the Foundation at 419-281-4733.

Donations may be made to existing endowments at any time. Contact the Foundation for more information www.ashlandforgood.org.

*To contribute to these funds, please send donation to Ashland Symphony Orchestra, 401 College Ave., Ashland, OH 44805.

The Ashland Symphony Orchestra is thankful for the following funds:

Robert M. & Janet L. Archer Fund est. 1997

Ashland Symphony Orchestra Fund in Memorium of James E. Thomas est. 1999*

ASO Podium Endowment Fund in Honor of Maestro Arie Lipsky est. 2018*

ASO Harold Weller Music Education Endowment Fund est. 2019*
gift from Nick & Edna Weller Charities: Harold & Betsy Weller and Thomas Weller

ASO Rev. John H. Landrum Memorial Endowed Chair for Flute 2 est. 2020*
gift from Marybelle H. Landrum

Ashland Symphony Orchestra est. 2000

Mary M. Case Memorial Fund est. 2005

Ann K. Guthrie Fund est. 2009

Arie Lipsky Honorary Endowment Fund est. 2010

Kopp Family Fund est. 2011

Dr. Alvin W. Garrett Fund est. 2017

William and Marlene Rose Fund est. 2017

J. Robert and Ruth L. Tipton Fund est. 2017

Dr. JoAnn Ford Watson Fund est. 2017

Dr. Beverly Bixler Fund est. 2018

Billy Harris Charitable Fund est. 2018

Lawrence and Catherine Hiner Endowed Chair for Percussion of the ASO Fund est. 2020

John R. Donelson for the benefit of the ASO est. 2021

Elizabeth Pastor Fund for the benefit of the ASO est. 2021

F. Dean and Joan Bartosic Family Fund for the benefit of the ASO est. 2023