Program Notes
MICHAEL IPPOLITO
TRIPTYCH
World Premiere
Commissioned by The Florida Orchestra
Duration: ca 24 minutes
Overview
Michael Ippolito made a precocious start as both composer
and performer. He was soloist in his own Piano Concerto with
the Tampa Bay Youth Orchestra when he was fifteen; three
years later The Florida Orchestra premiered his Waltz at the
University of South Florida’s Composer Showcase. Ippolito
undertook his professional training at the Cincinnati College-
Conservatory of Music, where he studied composition with
Joel Hoffman and Michael Fiday and improvisation with
Alan Bern, and at Juilliard, where his principal teacher
was Pulitzer-, Oscar-, Grawemeyer- and Grammy Awardwinning
composer John Corigliano. In 2014, he joined the
faculty of Texas State University in San Marcos, where he is
now Assistant Professor of Composition. His compositions
have been inspired by an apparently omnivorous range
of influences — Ansel Adams photographs, Croatian folk
songs, poems by Carl Sandburg and Siegfried Sassoon,
Japanese haiku about mushrooms, old-time radio shows,
paintings and sculptures by the Spanish surrealist Joan Miró,
descriptions of the Medieval celebration of “drunkenness
and bawdy humor, social inversion, ceremonial parody and
licensed foolishness” known as The Feast of Fools — and been
performed and commissioned by several of the country’s
leading orchestras, chamber ensembles and soloists. Among
Ippolito’s distinctions are a Charles Ives Scholarship from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Palmer Dixon Prize
from the Juilliard School, multiple ASCAP Plus Awards and
Frederick Fennell Prize.
What To Listen For
Michael Ippolito wrote “Triptych was composed for the 50th
anniversary season of The Florida Orchestra. I saw this piece
as an opportunity to celebrate my hometown orchestra
as well as reflect on the environment where I grew up. In
thinking about how to approach this composition, I found
three passages of literature that spoke to Florida’s sense of
place.
“The first movement, Cypress Cathedral, was inspired by
a section of Henry David Thoreau’s 1851 lecture, Walking:
‘When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood,
the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen,
most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a
THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2017-2018
sanctum sanctorum.’ This image of a swamp as sanctuary
or sacred place resonated with me for a variety of reasons,
and it seemed especially fitting since I always thought
being surrounded by cypress trees felt like being in a Gothic
cathedral, with swooping columns and vaulted ceilings.
This movement has a mysterious atmosphere, with gently
rising and falling lines, florid melodies for the winds, and an
outburst that evokes a giant organ chord.
“The second movement, On the Curl’d Clouds, is based on
a passage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘All hail, great
master! Grave sir, hail! I come/To answer thy best pleasure:
be’t to fly,/To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride/On the curl’d
clouds, to thy strong bidding task/Ariel and all his quality.’
Ariel speaks these words to Prospero after creating the titular
storm of the play. This movement is based on the image of
Ariel, a trickster sprite, conjuring up a massive storm; it
begins as a light wisp of a scherzo and gradually builds into a
cataclysmic explosion. The entire movement is constructed
as a sort of spiral in which familiar music returns more
compressed and more intense each time, each rotation of
the spiral shorter than the last.
“The last movement, Barque of Phosphor, takes its title from
the first line of Wallace Stevens’ poem Fabliau of Florida. This
poem combines imagery that could come straight out of a
postcard beach scene with whimsical and profound images,
like the ‘barque of phosphor’ — the moon re-imagined as a
luminescent ship sailing into the night sky. My music loosely
follows the contemplative mood and imagery of the poem,
beginning with a strange, high melody representing the
moon. While in Stevens’ poem the moon is rising, I imagined
that the viewer might in fact be sinking. The melody
returns several times throughout the movement, each time
accompanied by lower harmonies as the perspective sinks
lower. After an expansive development, the piece comes to
an end, submerged and swallowed up by the never-ending
surf.”
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
RHAPSODY ON A THEME OF PAGANINI FOR
PIANO AND ORCHESTRA, OP. 43
Duration: ca. 22 minutes
Overview
The legend of Nicolò Paganini has haunted musicians for
over two centuries. Gaunt, his emaciated figure cloaked
in priestly black, Paganini performed feats of wizardry on
the violin that were simply unimagined until he burst upon
the European concert scene in 1805. Not only were his
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