Sunday, February 27, at 3:00 pm
20th Season of Chamber Music Concerts

This program runs approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Lexus is the exclusive automotive sponsor of The Philadelphia Orchestra.

The Steinway Piano is the official piano of The Philadelphia Orchestra and The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

The Music

SONATINE, FOR BRASS QUINTET
COMPOSED IN 1951

EUGÈNE BOZZA
BORN IN NICE, APRIL 4, 1905
DIED IN VALENCIENNES, SEPTEMBER 28, 1991

Twentieth-century composers are a bit like the woodland beasts in that Russian story of the lost mitten: One after another, they manically wedge their way into the warmth, incessantly spinning ever-more elaborate stories about why it's so important they get inside. Eventually the mitten bursts and they're all left in the cold. To x-ray the allegory: The mitten is the history book, and the ticket in is a great yarn about newness—what makes your music revolutionary, evolutionary, important.

The marvelously capable composer Eugène Bozza is one of those countless creatures in the forest of modern music who never made it into the mitten. A prodigious talent coming of artistic age in Paris between the wars, Bozza lived through virtually the entire century, and was a coeval of every musical -ism imaginable (expressionism, futurism, objectivism, serialism, minimalism, maximalism). But none of them stuck to him, and he appears to have been quite fine with that. He composed music with no stories attached, immaculately crafted and attentive to the playing idioms of all instruments. He wrote music primarily for the players, and left the historical mitten largely alone.

Perhaps Bozza's Mediterranean birth-city helped determine his cloudless career: He was lucky enough to be born in Nice. He eventually left the coast for 1920s Paris; no country boy, he played the cosmopolitan game like the best of them, and cleaned up—a high spot at the Conservatory and a decade of premiere prix. Bozza secured a post as conductor of Paris' Opéra-Comique during the nightmarish decade between 1938 and 1948, and moved three years later to Valenciennes, where he directed the Ecole Nationale de Musique until his retirement in 1975.

While it might not tell a grand story of musical innovation, Bozza's work radiates a very precise color and tone, and three of its hallmarks inevitably trace back to the composer's time in Paris. Wit and eclecticism, defining much of Bozza's music, have always illuminated the City of Light, but Paris between the wars made both qualities into doctrines. Jean Cocteau's 1918 manifesto Le Coq et l'Arlequin opened the door with its sharp-tongued lashing of all music romantic or "impressionistic" in character. "We have had enough clouds, waves, aquaria, water-sprites, and nocturnal perfumes," Cocteau swiped. Music better get its drugged Wagnerian senses out of the 19th century and hit the music halls and the circus; let it shimmy with jazz-bands and chatter with machines. Everything must be bright and sharp, sharp and cutting, cutting-edge and au courant; parody and pastiche must give the old espressivo the boot.

That Bozza apprenticed in this environment comes across in virtually all his mature music, and today's Sonatine for brass quintet is no exception. Composed in 1951, the Sonatine emerged into a France painfully alienated from its prewar "harlequin years." But Bozza's pristine score sounds entirely—or almost entirely—unaffected by the preceding catastrophe, as if it had spent the intervening time catching up on its beauty-rest. The result is a work sunlit with facility—its humor as agile as its craftiness, its formidable virtuosity meant to come off sweatlessly dapper.

The opening Allegro is a marvel of articulate lightness; Bozza seems intent on proving how un-metallically buoyant brass instruments can sound. They dance balletically, on-point even. The second movement (Andante, ma non troppo) has funeral-march qualities, but the music unfolds with an expressive moderation less intent on lament than on giving the performers a chance to show off their lyrical side. The Scherzo returns to the spirit of the opening movement, the virtuosity now notched up a bit. Only the opening of the last movement briefly halts this dandying charm, making way for a "Fanfare" composed of two bizarre near-quotations. The first comes from the climax of Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, one of the composer's most blistering anti-war statements; the other comes from Ravel's Mother Goose Suite. Is Bozza suggesting that the horrors of the recent past are (or ought to be) dissipating into fairy tales? His reply is as inscrutable as it is amiable—a Tarantella, historically branded a kind of "death dance" but played out here with restrained celebration.

—Seth Brodsky

PIANO TRIO NO. 1 IN D MINOR, OP. 32
COMPOSED IN 1894

ANTON ARENSKY
BORN IN NOVGOROD, BETWEEN JUNE 30-JULY 12, 1861
DIED IN TERIOKI, FINLAND (NOW ZELENOGORSK, RUSSIA) BETWEEN FEBRUARY 12-25, 1906

"Why do we always hear Russian music spoken of in terms of its Russianness instead of simply in terms of music?," Igor Stravinsky asked the audience at a 1939 lecture on "The Avatars of Russian Music." You can still ask his question today, about the Piano Trio No. 1 by Anton Arensky. He's a composer whose elusive biography forces commentators hither and thither in search of a concrete identity. And more often than not, they fret, flinch, and poof—Arensky becomes yet one more victim of "Musical Russianness." But, alas, no avatar: No, Arensky becomes a little man of Russian music, asked to stand in the back of the photo behind the taller ones, Stravinsky, Glinka, Musorgsky, and—most often—the two poles of 19th-century Russian music, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. While the former worshipped Mozart, the latter came to represent the "main architect of the Russian style." Rimsky-Korsakov was also Arensky's teacher, and his 1909 memoirs, My Musical Life, gives us one of the only windows into Arensky's own life. Sadly, the window is cracked by a teacher's strangely damning assessment:

In the Autumn, death carried off AS Arensky. A former pupil of mine … [he] did work much at composition, but that is just where he began to burn the candle at both ends. Revels, card-playing, health undermined by this mode of living, galloping consumption as the final result, dying at Nice, and death at last in Finland … [he] kept aloof, all by himself, as a composer, recalling Tchaikovsky in this respect.

Besides getting the death date wrong, Rimsky also kicks his bitter obituary closed like a coffin lid: "In his youth," he concludes, "Arensky had not escaped entirely my influence; later he fell under that of Tchaikovsky. He will be soon forgotten." Ah, the wounded words of a master rejected! Yet it's interesting to read Rimsky between the lines: He covertly condemns his former pupil not just for running to Tchaikovsky, but also for running from a national musical heritage—running from his Russianness. "Arensky was one of the most eclectic Russian composers of his generation," David Brown writes in the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. But what is a Russian composer who freely forfeits his Russianness?

Though not much is known about its origins, Arensky's D-minor Piano Trio represents a number of things for the composer. For one, it is a hauntingly sensual score, sentimental, unabashedly eager to please, and yet, at the same time, twisted expressively inward as if biting its tongue. It's just perfectly unlike any other piano trio, and has long served as Arensky's ticket into the repertoire, obstructing his forgotten-ness. But the Trio also represents an answer to the question above—what is a Russian composer who freely forfeits his Russianness? Arensky's score replies with a fascinating twist: While it does "escape almost entirely" Rimsky-Korsakov's influence, it doesn't "fall under that of Tchaikovsky." Composed in 1894, Arensky's Trio doesn't sound like an homage to either side of Russian music, but to another side altogether—the German chamber music tradition of the mid-1800s, specifically the piano trios of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Such echoes give Arensky's "eclecticism" the hue of nostalgia, peering over decades and national boundaries, pining for a chamber music no longer really alive. And in this the Trio echoes yet another inheritor of the post-Beethoven line, Brahms. Intercepting the sound of Brahms's earlier chamber works, Arensky's Trio intensifies its own nostalgia. It's a striking irony that Arensky wrote a work haunted by 1860s Brahms the very year Brahms himself declared his career officially finished—for the second time. (If only Brahms had been Russian!)

The opening Allegro moderato unfolds a violin melody both solemn and folkish; its contours could be Slavic, or perhaps Tchaikovsky-doing-Slavic. But it is after the theme's restatement in the piano that Arensky lets loose the first of the Trio's marvels: The piano tightens its accompaniment into a tumble of arpeggios, and as it outlines a rising bass the cello pours forth a breast-bursting melody. The moment could be Schumann's, and the fact that it isn't becomes part of the expressive effect. Though Arensky's second movement scherzo (Allegro molto) has been compared to Mendelssohn's own piano trio scherzos, Schumann haunts this scene as well. Arensky's strange mix of skittish, pent-up musical loops, surrounding a trio of almost drunken waltzing, strike a perfect Schumannian pose of obsessive-meets-compulsive.

The third movement is arguably the Trio's heart: a slow Elegìa (Adagio) with muted strings memorializes the work's dedicatee, Karl Davidoff, first cellist of the St. Petersburg Opera and later director of the Conservatory. The main melody, begun by cello, provides an ideal proscenium for the movement's dreamily suspended middle section. The Allegro non troppo finale unfolds in echt Brahms-as-Gypsy mode, seeming to conflate the first and third movements of the older composer's Piano Quintet from 1864. Though Schumann returns in a series of frenetic tremolos and falling suspensions, it is again Brahms who possesses the Trio's close. Here the Elegìa returns; the herioc allegro-swagger is all but forgotten, and the music retreats into memories of its earlier self—first sadly, then in defiant anger. Perhaps Arensky had already heard Brahms's 1891 Clarinet Quintet, which ends the same way. Either way, Arensky's first Trio provides a remarkably satisfying answer to that $64,000 question: What is a Russian composer who freely forfeits his Russianness? A composer.

—Seth Brodsky

LA REVUE DE CUISINE, FOR VIOLIN, CELLO, CLARINET, BASSOON, TRUMPET, AND PIANO
COMPOSED IN 1927

BOHUSLAV MARTINU
BORN IN POLICKA, BOHEMIA, DECEMBER 8, 1890
DIED IN LIESTAL, SWITZERLAND, AUGUST 28, 1959

You know the story: kitchen utensils, getting into trouble again. Pot loves Lid, Lid loves Pot, but Twirling Stick, ever-insidious, complicates—woos Pot away from Lid. Now Dishcloth's flirting with Lid, dejected; moral bankruptcy lurks around every corner. A sudden threat of violence: Lid has stirred the ire of Broom; the two stand off. By this point, however, Pot knows he/she had a better thing going with Lid. Where's Lid?

Lid is gone! Until: A very large foot kicks Lid onto the stage. Lid is back! The two protagonists shuffle towards each other in euphoric but inanimate relief. Ethically stunted Twirling Stick takes to Dishcloth … but little does he/she know. And so, roughly, goes the plot of Martinu's ballet La Revue de cuisine, literally "The Kitchen Review."

What is it about "surrealism" that makes objects misbehave? Why must good clocks go gloopy, bicycle wheels perforate perfectly fine stools, and apples usurp the space of men's heads? Arriving in 1923 Paris—surrealism's fertile crescent—Martinu must have asked these questions, too. It was all new to him: He had born in a small Czech town in 1890, shy but also voraciously curious; it seemed inevitable he would seek out Paris, and when he did, he wasted little time making objects behave naughtily. Martinu would leave Paris for the U.S. in 1940 when the Germans invaded, and would go on to less transgressive things—symphonies, string quartets, concertos. But his ballets from the '20s constitute their own idiosyncratic project in surrealism: The Revolt from 1925, for instance, stages a rebellion by disgruntled musical notes. They call a strike; the conservatories shut down, the critics commit collective suicide, and Igor Stravinsky has to flee to a desert island in the Pacific. On tourne! from 1927 and 1928's Le Raid merveilleux complete the mutiny of objects; they're ballets without dancers, using only puppets, cartoons, and props. Of course, in late 1920s Paris, surrealism was no longer a new thing. Already a decade had passed since the first performance of Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles des Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tirésias"); it was in the play's prologue that its author first coined the infamous s-word. Apollinaire also coined surrealism's basic method: Put things that don't belong together together. "When man wanted to imitate walking," Apollinaire famously pointed out, "he created the wheel, which does not resemble the leg. In this way he made surrealism without knowing it."

Composing, on the other hand, just isn't that easy. Such is the paradox of musical surrealism: You've got to know exactly what you're making, because you've got to write it all down. Revue exemplifies this point beautifully; despite its wacky plot about love appliance-style, the score is a cut diamond musically, its stylistic cheekiness spotlighted by incisive details, acrobatic technical agility, and an unflagging attention to instrumental idiom and color. Martinu considered La Revue one of his most perfect scores. The opening March's pounding bar-piano accompaniment has a swarthy sound, but Martinu is scrupulously sober about mis-coordinating all its accents—"drunken pianist" = cubist pianola. Acknowledging Martinu's inspired montage of popular dance styles—tango and Charleston among others—La Revue shows a clear debt to Stravinsky, whose recent L'Histoire du soldat provided an undeniable model. Martinu may have banished Stravinsky to a Pacific island in The Revolt, but he had to bring him back for La Revue.

In 1930 Martinu arranged the longer ballet into its four main set-pieces, each a dance with its own rhetorical attitude and demographic. The opening Prologue (Allegretto) begins with a cartoonishly noble trumpet fanfare, but immediately tumbles into the cubist pianola music, and then into a march of lucidly confused temperament. An extremely droll Tango (Lento) follows, its pungently sensual atmosphere composed along with an uncomfortably funereal undertone. Eventually the listener can begin to smell something else—a quietly blistering parody of Ravel's Bolero. The Charleston (Poco a poco allegro) immediately follows. Actually, no: It is preceded by one of La Revue's most delectable moments, a written-out portrait of a warm-up jam-session, one instrument after another picking up the tune and starting to groove. The Finale (Tempo di marcia) loops back to the work's opening trumpet fanfare, but quickly turns into a melee of previous moments, half-medley, half-collage. Through the ruckus emerges an almost-but-not-quite paraphrase of James P. Johnson's original Charleston tune itself. But eventually a Deus ex machina swoops down in the form of a churchy Amen-cadence. Devout utensils? Unclear, but the final radio-announcement in Martinu's Revolt offers a perfect voice of reason here as well: "The notes are back again, the situation is calm. Everything goes well. Ladies and gentlemen, we wish you a good night."

—Seth Brodsky

OCTET FOR WIND INSTRUMENTS
COMPOSED IN 1923

IGOR STRAVINSKY
BORN IN LOMONOSOV, RUSSIA, JUNE 17, 1882
DIED IN NEW YORK, APRIL 6, 1971

An imaginary conversation: Stravinsky begins, looking you straight in the eyes. "My Octet is a musical object." You wonder: What is a musical object? A reasonable question, but you're afraid to ask and Stravinsky doesn't bother to tell. Instead he forges ahead with his austere logic. Stravinsky (poker-faced, quietly dogged): "This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical material with which it is composed. The differences of matter determine the differences of form. One does not do the same with marble that one does with stone. …" You (slightly perplexed): "Yes, of course, but … these are notes. And notes express something different than …" Stravinsky, haughtily interjecting: "My Octet is not an 'emotive' work, but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves." You pause. In themselves? "Well," you say, "now you're being deliberately cagey. How do you even define …" Stravinsky, butting in again: "I have excluded all nuances between forte and piano; I have left only the forte and piano." Now that's it. "Simply not true!," you say. "I've seen the score! I've heard the music! There are crescendos, diminuendos, all sorts of dynamics." Stravinsky's stone face twitches for the first time, and you stop and watch as the tiniest, wryest smile slowly lifts the corners of composer's mouth. He got you, again.

"My Octet is a musical object" is the first sentence of Stravinsky's now notorious essay "Some Ideas About My Octet," which appeared in The Arts in January 1924; the Octet itself was premiered by Stravinsky (in his conducting debut) at the Paris Opera House on October 18, 1923. In the later text Stravinsky makes all sorts of deadly serious assertions, each pushing the envelope further than the last one, all of them coming together to suggest a musical work of steely, scary, utterly remorseless severity. Forte. Piano. Life. Death. Shouldn't we view this sincerely? This is after all the composer of The Rite of Spring, whose closing "Sacrificial Dance" forces a poor girl to dance herself to death in mechanical spasms. The Octet may have done away with human sacrifice, but that's no reason to consider it anything but utterly serious. And then you hear the Octet's opening bars. You (secretly): What on earth was he talking about?

In truth Stravinsky's Octet is one of the great charmers of 20th-century chamber music. There is virtually nothing of the Rite in it, nothing fervid and biological, no rigid tower of communal musical terror. Actually, the score is positively suave—droll, debonair, elegantly aloof, music that sports its humor and its smarts like a custom-tailored tux.

But the most telling mismatch here between Stravinsky's words and Stravinsky's music isn't a mismatch of tone. It's a clash of styles. Literally: The Octet, far from being an abstract sculpture hewn from marble, is a stylistic Tower of Babel. Though Stravinsky's brand of choc-a-block is never anything less than immaculate, the "materials" he exploits were never meant to build the same object. All kinds of music here: the high, the not so high, the shamelessly low; oldies as far back as Gregorian chant, newbies as recent as Paris' latest Latin-American dance imports. The Mozart-esque tangles with the Haydn-esque; the Bach-ian and Offenbach-ian, mix it up; Rossini's farce numbers are never that far away. But Stravinsky throws in other building blocks too-can-can, vaudeville, samba, even a bit of slapstick soundtrack à la early Charlie Chaplin. This score has long been branded the first of Stravinsky's "neo-classical" works, the weirdness that makes it "neo" holds a great deal more than just the dust of the old masters.

The demure trills which open the first movement, for instance, cobble together some of the more adorable mannerisms from Haydn's symphonic introductions of the late 1700s. But Stravinsky throws us a curve-ball with his movement's title, "Sinfonia" (Lento—Allegro moderato), which itself refers less to Haydn's "classical" era than to the Baroque age of Bach's inventions and sinfonias. "Bach's Two-Part Inventions were somewhere in the remote back of my mind," Stravinsky said of the score's rondo-like last movement. And indeed, if you leap to the Octet's end (Tempo giusto), Haydn is still hanging around, along with Mozart, but a rigorous Bachian counterpoint nevertheless constitutes the last movement's pith. Until—the last bars, where, in a true feat of rhetorical switcharoo, Stravinsky evicts the neo-Baroque polyphony for a … rhumba? Samba? Not quite either, but far too South-American-cool to provide the capstone to this technical feat. Arguably the oddest and most enchanting movement of the Octet is its middle "Theme and Variations." Here everything is beautifully out of order, spliced into a perfectly disorienting montage of parallel musical histories. This emerges already with the movement's structure: It is, as Stravinsky puts it, "the first variation that recurs rather than a theme in its original state." And in fact the "theme" of the movement was written only later, after the middle variation; the variations as a whole are a funfair of affects. All except the last: "The final variation, the fugato," Stravinsky explains, "is the culmination of everything I had attempted to do in the movement, and it is certainly the most interesting episode in the whole Octet."

So again you ask: What on earth was he talking about? Stravinsky would become more easygoing and anecdotal later on. In 1936 he told an entirely different story about the Octet. It materialized not as an object but a dream "in which I saw myself in a small room surrounded by a small group of instrumentalists playing some attractive music. They were playing bassoons, trombones, trumpets, a flute, and a clarinet. I awoke from this little concert in a state of great delight and anticipation and the next morning began to compose."

But perhaps Stravinsky actually had it right with his earlier essay—as long as you take it with a massive grain of salt. In fact he plays the same game in his text as he does in his music—to perplex with utter clarity, to put forth a simple thought crookedly, in such a way that you think you've never heard anything like it before. Jean Cocteau has often been cited to put the effect of Stravinsky's music into words, but perhaps no words work better than a passage from Cocteau's preface to Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel. Here a poet speaks about what the poet must do. Yet he could be speaking just as well of Stravinsky's captivatingly strange score, with its meticulously skewed collection of musical clichés from all ages, assembled into an impossibly perfect object of sound:

The poet must extricate objects and feelings from their veils and their mists, to show them suddenly, so naked and so alive that a man can scarcely recognize them. They strike him then with their youth, as if they had never become old, official things.

This is the case with commonplaces, old, powerful, and universally admitted, in the way that masterpieces are, but whose beauty and originality no longer surprise us, because we are used to them.

In our spectacle, I rehabilitate the commonplace.

—Seth Brodsky

Program notes commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra Association; copyright © 2005 Seth Brodsky

Luba Agranovsky, piano, is a native of Moscow and a graduate of the Gnessin Academy of Music. She is a winner of the Israel Broadcast Authority Competition and the Carlo Soliva International Chamber Music Competition, as well as various Russian piano competitions. She has appeared with numerous Israeli orchestras and has also made many recordings for Israel Radio and Israel TV. During the last 10 years, Ms. Agranovsky has been performing regularly as a chamber music recitalist and solo pianist throughout Germany, Italy, England, Scotland, Russia, Israel, the United States, and Canada.

Angela Anderson joined the bassoon section of The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1997 after having served as second bassoon of the San Jose Symphony. A native of Champaign, Illinois, she also held positions with the San Antonio Symphony and the Fremont Symphony. Ms. Anderson has served on the faculties of Southwest Texas State University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Santa Clara. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California. Her teachers have included Artemus Edwards, Norman Herzberg, Dennis Michel, and Matthew Kerr.

David Bilger has held the position of principal trumpet of The Philadelphia Orchestra since 1995. Prior to joining the Orchestra, he held the same position with the Dallas Symphony. As a soloist, he has appeared with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Dallas and Houston symphonies, Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, and others, and he has performed recitals across the U.S. Mr. Bilger has also appeared with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, with which he recorded Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto. He recently released a recording of new electro-acoustic music for trumpet and synthesizers with composer Meg Bowles. Mr. Bilger is currently on the faculties of Curtis, Temple University, and Swarthmore College, and he has performed master classes at numerous institutions. He was educated at Juilliard and the University of Illinois.

Roger Blackburn, trumpet, joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1974, after serving as associate principal trumpet of the Houston Symphony. Prior to that he was principal trumpet of the Israel Philharmonic and co-principal trumpet of the Saint Louis Symphony. Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, he attended the Curtis Institute, where he studied with Samuel Krauss, former principal trumpet of The Philadelphia Orchestra. Upon graduation, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study trumpet with Helmut Wobisch at the Academy of Music in Vienna, Austria.

Blair Bollinger is the bass trombonist of The Philadelphia Orchestra. He was raised in Georgia and joined the Orchestra in 1986, following his graduation from the Curtis Institute of Music. As a soloist, Mr. Bollinger has performed with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, and the Savannah (Georgia) Symphony. He was winner of the 1986 Philadelphia Orchestra Senior Student Competition, the only trombonist to win the Competition since it began in 1934. He has performed recitals and given master classes in Israel, Chile, Japan, and throughout the U.S. Mr. Bollinger's recordinging, Four of a Kind, is available on the Summit Records label. He is a clinician for the Edwards Instrument Company and is on the faculty at Temple University.

Robert Cafaro, cello, studied with Lorne Munroe and William Stokking. A native of New York City, Mr. Cafaro was awarded first prize at the Suffolk Symphony Young Artist Competition and the Five Towns Competition in Long Island, New York. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where he won the Juilliard Cello Concerto Competition in 1979. Prior to his joining The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1985, he was a member of the Baltimore Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He is a faculty member at the College of New Jersey and the Hartwick College Summer Music Festival and Institute.

David Cramer, associate principal flute, is a native of Cleveland and attended the Curtis Institute of Music. His teachers have included William Hebert, Murray Panitz, James Pappoutsakis, and Barbara Peterson. Mr. Cramer has participated in the Tanglewood and the Central City Colorado Opera festivals. Before joining The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1981, he was a member of the Montreal and Pittsburgh symphonies. He has appeared as soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Haddonfield (NJ) Symphony, the West Jersey Chamber Symphony, and the Temple University Orchestra. Mr. Cramer has served on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University and currently teaches at Temple University.

Jeffrey Curnow joined The Philadelphia Orchestra as associate principal trumpet in 2001. He received a bachelor's degree at Temple University. Mr. Curnow pursued graduate studies at Wichita State University, where as a graduate assistant he became a member of the Wichita Symphony. In 1983 he was appointed principal trumpet of the New Haven Symphony. Soon after he became a member of the New York Trumpet Ensemble and four years later joined the Empire Brass Quintet. In 1995 Mr. Curnow was appointed principal trumpet of the Dallas Symphony. He is also an educator, clinician, adjudicator, arranger, and producer, and he has taught at Wichita State University and the University of Connecticut.

Barbara Govatos, a member of the Orchestra's violin section since 1982, is the founder and music director of the Academy Chamber Players. She has appeared as soloist with the Dallas Symphony, the Delaware Symphony, and the Juilliard Orchestra. She has also performed at the Marlboro Festival and the Marblehead Festival. She founded the Home-Aid Concerts, which assist in the funding of shelters and the care of the homeless in Philadelphia. She also serves as music director of the Delaware Chamber Music Festival.

John Koen, cello, joined the Orchestra in 1990. He performs chamber music with several Philadelphia area ensembles, such as the Mondrian Ensemble, the Philadelphia Chamber Ensemble, and Network for New Music. He also performs regularly as a soloist with the Lansdowne Symphony, of which he is principal cello. He was a nominee for the 1998 Gay/Lesbian American Music Awards for his performance of Robert Maggio's Winter Toccata, which Mr. Koen commissioned, on the recording titled Seven Mad Gods. Mr. Koen graduated from Curtis following studies with David Soyer and Peter Wiley, former and current cellists of the Guarneri String Quartet, and Orlando Cole at the New School of Music.

Jay Krush, tuba, is a native of the Philadelphia area. A founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Chestnut Brass Company, he has performed with that ensemble for 27 years and on recordings for the Sony Classical, Polygram, Naxos, Newport Classic, Albany, Crystal, and Musical Heritage Society labels. He is also tubist with the Pennsylvania Ballet Orchestra and is on the faculty of the Boyer College of Music at Temple University. An active composer, Mr. Krush has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and American Composers Forum, among others.

Dmitri Levin, violin, was born in Minsk and studied at the School for the Musically Talented before entering the Moscow Conservatory, where he was a student of Yuri Yankelevich. After completing his studies he served as principal second violin with the Minsk Opera and Ballet Theater. Mr. Levin emigrated to the United States in 1977 and joined the Pittsburgh Symphony in 1979. During his five-and-a-half year tenure there, he served as co-principal second violin for two seasons, and he gave two solo appearances. He joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1984.

Daniel Matsukawa, principal bassoon, came to The Philadelphia Orchestra from the National Symphony, where he was principal bassoon for three seasons. Born in Argentina to Japanese parents, he moved to New York at age three and began studying the bassoon at 13. He was a scholarship student of the pre-college divisions of both Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Harold Goltzer and Alan Futterman. He went on to study at Juilliard for two years before attending Curtis, where he was a pupil of retired Orchestra principal bassoon Bernard Garfield. As a chamber musician, Mr. Matsukawa has performed at the Marlboro, Tanglewood, Aspen, Blossom, and Pacific music festivals. Previously he was principal bassoon with the Virginia Symphony and acting principal with the Saint Louis and Memphis symphonies.

Ricardo Morales, principal clarinet, joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in June 2003. Previously, he was with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, where he was appointed principal clarinet in 1993 at the age of 21. A native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, he began studying at the Escuela Libre de Musica and continued his studies at Indiana University and the Cincinnati College Conservatory. Mr. Morales was also principal clarinet of the Florida Symphony. He has appeared as soloist with the Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, Florida, and Columbus symphonies, and with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and James Levine in Carnegie Hall and on two European tours. Mr. Morales has been an active recitalist and has given numerous master classes. He currently serves on the faculties of the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College, and the Verbier Academy in Switzerland.

Julie Nishimura, piano, is the faculty accompanist for the music department at the University of Delaware and on the accompanying staff of California Summer Music. She has performed in Merkin Hall, Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall, and Verizon Hall, as well as throughout Europe. Ms. Nishimura has been a guest artist in the Philadelphia Orchestra Connection and Chamber Music series, the Delaware Chamber Music Festival, and the Delaware Symphony's Chamber Music Series and is a member of Trio Arundel and the Vandermark Ensemble, which will make its debut in 2005 at Weill Recital Hall. As co-artistic director of Distant Voices Touring Theatre, she is currently touring Distant Voices, a dramatic reading with piano based on her father's WWII internment camp journals, and September Echoes, based on the events of September 11, 2001.

Matthew Vaughn joined the Orchestra in 1999 as associate principal trombone. Prior to that he was assistant principal and acting principal trombone of the San Antonio Symphony and he served in the United States Air Force Concert Band. He has performed with the Atlanta and National symphonies and has been featured as a soloist with the San Antonio, Indiana University, and Richmond (Indiana) symphonies and the United States Air Force Band. Born in Dallas and raised in Richmond, Indiana, Mr. Vaughn earned a Bachelor of Music degree and a Performer's Certificate from Indiana University, and did graduate work in conducting at Indiana and George Mason universities. He taught trombone and was a member of the faculty brass quintet at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

David Wetherill, co-principal horn, joined The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1978. Born in Philadelphia, he studied at the Curtis Institute of Music. Upon graduation, he accepted the position of principal horn at La Scala in Milan. He then became principal horn in Pierre Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain, of which Mr. Wetherill is a charter member. He has maintained an active schedule as a solo artist and chamber musician. He regularly tours internationally as a performer and teacher and is also recognized as a virtuoso of the natural horn. He has appeared as a soloist with The Philadelphia Orchestra on numerous occasions; the last being in 1998.

GENERAL TERMS
Arpeggio: A broken chord (with notes played in succession instead of together)
Cadenza: A passage or section in a style of brilliant improvisation, usually inserted near the end of a movement or composition
Chord: The simultaneous sounding of three or more tones
Coda: A concluding section or passage added in order to confirm the impression of finality
Da capo: Repeated from the beginning
Fugato: A passage or movement consisting of fugal imitations, but not worked out as a regular fugue
Fugue: A piece of music in which a short melody is stated by one voice and then imitated by the other voices in succession, reappearing throughout the entire piece in all the voices at different places
Minuet: A dance in triple time commonly used up to the beginning of the 19th century as the lightest movement of a symphony
Op.: Abbreviation for opus, a term used to indicate the chronological position of a composition within a composer's output. Opus numbers are not always reliable because they are often applied in the order of publication rather than composition.
Rondo: A form frequently used in symphonies and concertos for the final movement. It consists of a main section that alternates with a variety of contrasting sections (A-B-A-C-A etc.).
Scherzo: Literally "a joke." Usually the third movement of symphonies and quartets that was introduced by Beethoven to replace the minuet. The scherzo is followed by a gentler section called a trio, after which the scherzo is repeated. Its characteristics are a rapid tempo in triple time, vigorous rhythm, and humorous contrasts.
Sonata form: The form in which the first movements (and sometimes others) of symphonies are usually cast. The sections are exposition, development, and recapitulation, the last sometimes followed by a coda. The exposition is the introduction of the musical ideas, which are then "developed." In the recapitulation, the exposition is repeated with modifications.
Tremolo: In bowing, repeating the note very fast with the point of the bow.
Trill: A type of embellishment that consists, in a more or less rapid alternation, of the main note with the one a tone or half-tone above it

THE SPEED OF MUSIC (Tempo)
Adagio: Leisurely, slow
Allegretto: A tempo between andante and allegro
Allegro: Bright, fast
Andante: Walking speed
Andantino: Slightly quicker than andante
Lento: Slow
Moderato: A moderate tempo, neither fast nor slow
Tempo giusto: Appropriate tempo (or strict tempo)
Tempo di marcia: Tempo of a march

TEMPO MODIFIERS
Molto: Very
Ma non troppo: But not too much
Poco a poco: Little by little

DYNAMIC MARKS
Crescendo, decrescendo (or diminuendo): Increasing or decreasing volume
Forte (f): Loud
Piano (p): Soft