A native of Marietta Georgia and an alumnus of the Perlman Music Program, bassist Xavier Foley graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2014 Sphinx Competition and the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant. He has performed as soloist with many major orchestras and as chamber musician in venues like Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.

Jointly commissioned by the Sphinx Organization, Carnegie Hall and the New World Symphony, For Justice and Piece was premiered in 2019. Foley writes: ” My double concerto For Justice and Peace was created to mark the 400th year of slavery ever since the arrival of the first slave ship in Jamestown Virginia, and to embody the struggle that African Americans went through colonial times to modern times.”

In an interview on the Violin Channel, Foley said: “For Justice and Peace ended up featuring both a gavel and a chorus – the players in the string orchestra would sing the vocal parts in addition to playing their instruments …”

“Both the gavel and the chorus represent past experiences of the first African slaves in Jamestown. The gavel in the work represents the multiple occasions where African Americans attempted to seek justice in a courtroom that, over time, became less of a place of fair judgement for the person of color. The chorus in the concerto was used to represent the moments where African slaves would sing together in an attempt to evoke feelings of comfort and joy during a time where a majority of privileges and basic human rights were revoked on the basis of skin color. The lyrics were personally chosen to reflect the slaves’ plea for equity and justice…”

The two principal themes in the single-movement Concerto bear echoes of the spirituals and hymns that have formed the backbone of much African-American music.

Prokofiev was a composer caught between two cultures. Born into an affluent musical family, he left the Soviet Union in the summer of 1918, shortly after the 1917 Revolution. For the next 17 years he lived in Paris and toured the United States, returning to his native country in the mid-1930s never to leave again.

The year 1917 was a traumatic one for Russia. The February Revolution had deposed the Tsar, and the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. Meanwhile, on the international front, Russia was losing disastrously in its war against Germany and Austria. In the spring and summer of that year Prokofiev retired to a village not far from Petrograd (now and formerly St. Petersburg) and, as if oblivious to the earth-shattering turmoil around him, composed at a furious pace. Among the creations of that period was his sunny Symphony No. 1, which he subtitled “The Classical.”

The Symphony was an experiment. An accomplished pianist, Prokofiev routinely composed at the piano, although he noticed: “…thematic material composed without the piano was often better in quality…I was intrigued with the idea of writing an entire symphonic piece without the piano…So this was how the project of writing a symphony in the style of Haydn came about…it seemed it would be easier to dive into the deep waters of writing without the piano if I worked in a familiar setting.” This delicate, nostalgic Symphony premiered in Petrograd in April 1918 with the composer on the podium, amidst civil war and social upheaval.

The overall Classical style of the Symphony makes it easy to forget that it is a twentieth-century creation. The opening Allegro conforms to the standard first movement sonata allegro form, with occasional twentieth-century harmonies. The second theme is a caricature of the eighteenth-century Rococo style, played on the tips of the violin bows “con eleganza” like a mincing dancing master – but with a less than elegant surprise sforzando at the cadence. The graceful Larghetto theme in the second movement, introduced first by the violins then joined by a flute, shows what a little musical creativity can do with a simple descending scale.

The short Gavotte replaces a traditional minuet/trio movement. Prokofiev’s is a clumsy dance, whose melody contains awkward octave leaps and strange grace notes in the bassoon. The Trio is accompanied by a bagpipe-like drone. Prokofiev loved this movement, recycling and expanding it some 20 years later in the Capulets’ Ball for his ballet Romeo and Juliet.

The Molto vivace finale is a sonata form, rather than the usual rondo, but has the persistent dynamic drive of a Haydn finale. In composing it, Prokofiev played a game with himself, in which he attempted to eliminate all minor chords.

Georges Bizet was yet another of those composers who showed precocious brilliance but never lived long enough to fulfill the promise. The difference, however, between Bizet and Mozart, who died at about the same age, is that Mozart left over 600 completed compositions, many of them masterpieces, while Bizet is known primarily for a single work, the opera Carmen.

Although he did not come from a family of professional musicians, Bizet’s parents recognized his talent and supported his ambition to become a composer. Encouraged by his father, he entered the Paris Conservatory at the extremely young age of ten. There, he excelled to the point of winning the coveted Prix de Rome, a composition prize that allowed the winners to study abroad for three years.

At age 17, during his final year at the Paris Conservatoire, Bizet wrote the Symphony in C, a youthful masterpiece that was not published – and probably never performed – during his lifetime. Perhaps its resemblance to the Symphony No. 1 by Charles Gounod, which Bizet had transcribed for piano, deterred him from making it public. The manuscript lay uncataloged for over 60 years among his papers at the Conservatory. It was eventually brought to the attention of famed conductor Felix Weingartner, who finally premiered it in Basle in 1935.

The Symphony exudes youthful energy, excluding the second movement, which is achingly romantic. The opening movement is an energetic Allegro, classical in form but employing thematic material more characteristic of the mid nineteenth century. The second movement is an oboist’s dream and nightmare. In performance it’s one of the repertory’s great licks. But its long, sinuous chromatic theme often shows up on orchestral auditions to test whether the first and second oboes create the kind of blend that will make them virtually indistinguishable from each other. While two oboists share the long phrase, it should sound as if only has been playing.

The third movement, a lively scherzo, opens almost like a fanfare in triple, time followed by a contrasting whirling theme in the violins. Oddly, the trio is based on the same theme but transformed and re-orchestrated into a country dance accompanied by faux bagpipes. The long finale begins with a quiet chattering theme in the violins and flutes but breaks into a contrasting fanfare-like melody; these two themes plus a third reminiscent of the second strain of the scherzo are repeated in various permutations but not truly developed in the classical sense. Bizet learned a little trick from Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in making his initial theme into the final cadence of the piece. Bizet’s youth shows in the Symphony’s wealth of wonderful melodies but in a relatively unsophisticated harmonic development.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com