Join us for an exciting program played live by the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Pasternack featuring special guest artist, violinist Charlotte Marckx

Program:

Paul Hindemith:  Prelude to "Mathis der Maler"

Sergei Prokofiev:  Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor

Ottorino Respighi:  Pines of Rome

Scroll down for information about our soloist, program notes, and a feature by Diane Urbani de la Paz!

About our Soloist

     Violinist Charlotte Marckx has appeared as soloist with numerous orchestras in the United States, including the Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, Pasadena Symphony, Burbank Symphony, and Kalamazoo Symphony.  Ms. Marckx has also performed with the Seattle Chamber Music Society, Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, and Colburn Chamber Music Society, among others.  She made her debut with the Port Angeles Symphony in December 2019.

     Charlotte Marckx won both the Gold Medal and Bach Prize at the 2018 Stulberg International Competition and was a major prizewinner at the 2018 Johansen International Competition. She is also a four-time first-place winner of the Seattle Music Teachers Simon Fiset Competition and is a past winner of the KING-FM Young Artists Awards and Seattle Young Artists Music Festival Concerto Competition. In 2019, she was awarded a Fellowship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development as well as a College Scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.

     An accomplished fiddler, Ms. Marckx performs alongside her sister, cellist Olivia Marckx, in their genre-crossing duo Sempre Sisters. They have collaborated with Jon Kimura Parker, Chee Yun Kim, Noah Bendix-Balgly, Time for Three, Pink Martini, and Mark and Maggie O’Connor. The duo has been featured on NPR’s From the Top, Strings Magazine, and Classical KING FM 98.1, as well as at the Northwest Folklife Festival.

     Originally from Bellevue, Ms. Marckx began playing violin at age 5 ½ and studied with Jan Coleman and Simon James. She currently studies with renowned pedagogue Robert Lipsett at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles and in the summers at the Aspen Music Festival and Sounding Point Academy.

Program Notes:

          The three composers featured on tonight’s program were exemplars in the twentieth century of the highest artistic achievements of their respective countries.  Having developed some of the most distinctive musical voices of the century, each reacted in different ways to the tumultuous times in which they lived and worked.

          Paul Hindemith was already considered the greatest living composer in Germany, when he began working on his opera Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter) in the early 1930s.  Spurred by the burgeoning dictatorship of the Nazi party, Hindemith set the story of Renaissance painter, Mathias Grunewald (1475-1528), as an exploration of the dilemmas faced by the lone artist during times of violent social upheaval.  Grunewald, who lived during the slaughterous Great Peasant Revolt in Germany (1524-1525), is known for his vivid depiction of scenes from the life of Jesus Christ in the famous Isenheim Altarpiece paintings, still on display in Colmar, Alsace.   Tonight’s selection serves both as prelude to the first act of Hindemith’s opera as well as the first of three movements of a symphony Hindemith fashioned from the opera score in 1934.  The Engelkonzert (Angelic Concert)—the subtitle for the prelude—is Grunewald’s altarpiece painting showing Mary and the infant Jesus serenaded by angels. A medieval German song, Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang (Three angels were singing a sweet song), is quoted and varied throughout the prelude, first played by three trombones.

          Nearly contemporaneous with Hindemith’s opera, Sergei Prokofiev was completing two of his masterpieces: the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor (1935).  Prokofiev was on the verge of returning permanently to his beloved native Russia, after two decades of pursuing his career in the United States and Europe.  Regarding this move, the composer explained: “I care nothing for politics—I’m a composer first and last. Any government that lets me write my music in peace…is all right with me.”  Ironically, not long after Prokofiev and his family began making a new home in Moscow, the Soviet regime under Josef Stalin launched a harsh and frequently murderous campaign of direct interference with Soviet artists’ lives and creative work.  By government decree, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Shostakovich were jointly and infamously denounced in 1948 for the (fatuous) aesthetic abuses of ‘formalism’ and ‘bourgeois modernism’. 

          Prokofiev’s dramatic and energetic three-movement Violin Concerto No. 2, the last work he composed during his self-imposed exile, combines seamlessly the character of Slavic folk music with abrupt and often wild shifts in mood and harmony, sumptuous romantic melodies, colorful flourishes of instrumental writing, and fiendishly difficult and virtuosic passages for both solo violin and orchestra.

          Perhaps the best known Italian composer of the twentieth century, Ottorino Respighi—a generation older than Hindemith and Prokofiev—interestingly studied in Russia with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and in Germany with Max Bruch.  He first gained international recognition and significant material success with the publication of his orchestral composition, Fountains of Rome (1916), following it up with two subsequent multi-movement tone poems of similar inspiration, Pines of Rome (1924) and Roman Festivals (1928).   After Mussolini and his National Fascist Party came to power in 1922, although he never spoke out against the authoritarian regime, Respighi used his considerable influence to aid other artists, including the prominent political dissenter Arturo Toscanini.                                                                                                                          

          About Pines, Respighi wrote:  “While in his preceding work, Fountains of Rome, the composer sought to reproduce by means of tone an impression of Nature, in Pines of Rome he uses Nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and vision. The centuries-old trees which so characteristically dominate the Roman landscape become witnesses to the principal events in Roman life.”  He describes the following impressions represented in each movement:

          The Pines of the Villa Borghese  Children are at play in the pine groves of Villa Borghese; they dance round in circules, they play at soldiers, marching and fighting, they are wrought up by their own cries like swallows in the evening, they come and go in swarms.  Suddenly the scene changes, and...

          The Pines Near a Catacomb  ...we see the shades of the pine-trees fringing the entrance to a catacomb. From the depth rises the sound of mournful psalm-singing, floating through the air like a solemn hymn, and gradually and mysteriously dispersing.

          The Pines of the Janiculum  A quiver runs through the air: the pine-trees of the Janiculum stand distinctly outlined in the clear light of the full moon. A nightingale is singing.

          The Pines of the Appian Way  Misty dawn on the Appian Way: solitary pine-trees guarding the magic landscape; the muffled, ceaseless rhythm of unending footsteps.  The poet has a fantastic vision of bygone glories: trumpets sound and, in the brilliance of the newly-risen sun, a consular army bursts forth toward the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph to the Capitol.

When: Saturday, March 23, 7:30 p.m. Concert (6:30 pre-concert chat)

10:00 a.m. Public Dress Rehearsal

Where: Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 301 E. Park Avenue

Admission: $10 - $40 (reserved seating in the evening only)

Tickets are available on-line through our ticket portal, in person at Port Book and News in Port Angeles, by phone at 360-457-5579, or at the door.