"A Night in Russia"

Tuesday, May 13, 7:30 pm
Community Arts Center, Williamsport

Conducted by Tomasz Golka. Music from Russia and Armenia, including Khatchaturian's "Sabre Dance" and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Former WSO music director and award-winning trumpeter Rolf Smedvig will perform Arutiunian's Trumpet Concerto. Pre-Concert Talk with Dr. Gary Boerckel, 7:00 pm in CAC Capitol Lounge. Sponsor: M&T Bank. Guest Artist Sponsor: Attorneys for the Arts. Tickets can be ordered at the CAC box office by phone (570-326-2424 / 800-432-9382) or online through the CAC. Special rates are available for families and groups.

SABRE DANCING WITH GOLKA
“A Night in Russia” is the final round in the WSO’s search for a new music director. Flashing sabres and whirling dancers are the vision in Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance,” one of the highlights of the WSO’s May 13th concert.

Khachaturian (1903-1978) was born in Georgia into a poor family. He grew to love the folk music of Armenia, Azerbaijian, and Georgia. With almost no musical education, he learned tuba by ear so he could play in a local band. He spoke only Armenian until he was nineteen, when, in 1921, he moved to Moscow to attend music academy. He was admitted on the basis of his raw talent and ambition, even though he’d never been to an opera or a symphony concert. By 1951 he was a full professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

Today, Khachaturian is placed alongside Sergei Prokofiev and Dimitri Shostakovich as “titans of Soviet music,” but Khachaturian remained devoted to his ancestry. He said, “My horizon is bounded by the songs and instruments of my people.”

According to Marin Alsop (music director of the Baltimore Symphony), orchestras largely avoided Khachaturian’s music since the 1950s, but he is experiencing a comeback. “He is a very underperformed composer, and somewhat underrated as well,” said Alsop in an interview on National Public Radio. “His music has a little bit of the edginess of the 20th century sound, with the dissonances coming in. At the same time it marries this beautiful neo-romanticism and lush orchestration, and the over-the-top approach. I think he can be quite relevant these days.”

Composed around 1940, “Sabre Dance” is from Khachaturian’s Gayane ballet, a tale of discord in the lives of married people against the backdrop of the Soviet Union. The middle section replays a melody from an Armenian folk song. Gayane took months to prepare, but Khachaturian took but one night to compose “Sabre Dance.” He was both surprised and pleased that it became his best-known work.

Because of its exciting rhythmic energy and catchy melodic edge, “Sabre Dance” has cut its own swath in symphonic literature. It has been adapted for bluegrass, jazz (Woody Herman), vocal groups (The Andrews Sisters), and many times for progressive rock. The piece has charted on mainstream radio as an orchestral version (1948) and a hard rock version by Dave Edmunds & Love Sculpture (1969), played even faster than the original. In addition to being the theme song of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, “Sabre Dance” has been used to liven up movie characters (The Hudsucker Proxy, One Two Three), and it is regularly played to accompany circus acts (acrobats, plate spinners).

“A Night in Russia” will be conducted by Tomasz Golka. Since winning First Prize at the 2003 Eduardo Mata International Conducting Competition, thirty-year-old Golka has appeared in performances of over one hundred major works with the Seattle, Fort Worth, Louisville, Charleston, and Florida West Coast symphony orchestras.

As a conducting fellow at the 2006 Tanglewood Music Festival, Golka worked with James Levine and conducted a historic performance of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale with legendary composers Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and John Harbison as narrators. Other recent highlights include a highly successful European debut in the city of his birth (Warsaw, Poland), conducting Sinfonia Varsovia in National Symphony Hall, with his pianist-brother Adam Golka as soloist.

As an avid supporter of living composers, Golka has several world premieres under his belt, including Henryk Gorecki’s Sinfonietta, Fabian Panisello’s Cuadernos para Orquesta, and Eleanor Trawick’s Triple Play.

Golka has served as Cover Conductor for the Cleveland Orchestra as well as the Houston and New Jersey Symphonies. He has toured Mexico several times, appearing with virtually all of the country’s top orchestras.

Based in New York City, he has held four music director positions before his current assignment as M.D. of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra. He studied conducting with David Effron at Indiana University and Gustav Meier at the Peabody Conservatory, and he holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in violin from Rice University.