American soprano Ann Toomey, whom Naples Daily News proclaimed, “…is a brilliant Floria Tosca…[whose] rich voice projects power that doesn’t disintegrate under adversity” is a former member of the Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, a 2016 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions national semifinalist and 2019 Richard F. Gold Career Grant Recipient. Recently, she made her European debut, to critical acclaim, performing the title role in Suor Angelica at the Berlin Philharmonie, under the baton of Kirill Petrenko.

Highlights of the immediate past and current season include Woglinde in Das Rheingold with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, the Una poenitentium in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony, Meg Page in Sir John in Love as well as a crossover recital at Bard SummerScape, Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd with Dayton Opera, the Mother in Amahl and the Night Visitors with Opera San Antonio, and First Lady in Die Zauberflöte with Glyndebourne Festival, as well as the cover of Micaëla in Carmen.

In recent seasons, Ms. Toomey sang the title role of Tosca with Sarasota Opera, Opera Naples and Livermore Valley Opera, the Witch in Into the Woods with Tulsa Opera, Ortlinde in Act III of Die Walküre with Detroit Opera, Lady Billows in Albert Herring with the Princeton Festival, the title role in Die Kathrin with the Chicago Folks Operetta, returned to Wolf Trap Opera to perform the title role in Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah and to the Lyric Opera of Chicago as the Lady in Waiting cover in Macbeth.

During the 2018-2019 season, she performed as Musetta in La bohème with Lyric Opera of Chicago, completing her three-year residency with the Ryan Opera Center. She debuted at Lyric Opera of Chicago as First Lady in Die Zauberflöte and was also seen as the Fifth Maid in Elektra. She covered several roles during her time in Chicago, including Elettra (Idomeneo), Fiordiligi (Così fan tutte), and Micaëla (Carmen).

Ann Toomey is a native of Detroit, and currently lives in Chicago.

JOSÉ PABLO MONCAYO
Born 1912, Guadalajara
Died 1958, Mexico City

Huapango

José Pablo Moncayo studied at the Mexico City Conservatory and later joined with fellow composers Daniel Ayala, Salvador Contreras, and Blas Galindo to form the “Group of Four,” dedicated to furthering the cause of Mexican music. Moncayo was named pianist and percussionist in the Mexico Symphony Orchestra by Carlos Chavez, and he conducted the National Symphony Orchestra from 1949 until 1952. Moncayo died just a few days short of his 46th birthday.

Huapango, his most popular work, was composed in 1941. A huapango is a lively dance from the Vera Cruz region, and Moncayo constructs his Huapango as a sequence of orchestral dances based on three songs from the coastal plain between Vera Cruz and Alvarado: Siqui Siri, Balaju, and El Gavilan. Fast outer sections frame a more lyric episode in the center, and along the way there is an extended part for harp. At the close, trumpet and trombone engage in a lively duel, tossing bits of folk melody back and forth as Huapango pounds its way to a colorful close.

Moncayo’s former teacher, Carlos Chavez, led the premiere of Huapango with the Mexican National Orchestra on August 15, 1941.

— Program Note by Eric Bromberger

GABRIELA LENA FRANK
Born 1972, Berkeley, CA

Three Latin-American Dances for Orchestra

I. Introduction: Jungle Jaunt
This introductory scherzo opens in an unabashed tribute to the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein before turning to harmonies and rhythms derived from various pan-Amazonian dance forms. These jungle references are sped through (so as to be largely hidden) while echoing the energy of the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera, who was long fascinated with indigenous Latin-American cultures.

II. Highland Harawi
This movement is the heart of Three Latin American Dances and evokes the Andean harawi, a melancholy adagio traditionally sung by a single bamboo quena flute so as to accompany a single dancer. As mountain music, it evokes the ambiance of mystery, vastness, and echo. The fast middle section simulates what I imagine to be the zumballyu of Illapa , a great spinning top belonging to the Peruvian-Inca weather deity of thunder, lightning, and rain. Illapa spins his great top in the highland valleys of the Andes before allowing a return to the more staid harawi. The music of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok is alluded to.

III. The Mestizo Waltz
As if in relief to the gravity of the previous movement, this final movement is a lighthearted tribute to the mestizo or mixed-race music of the South American Pacific coast. In particular, it evokes the romancero tradition of popular songs and dances that mix influences from indigenous Indian cultures, African slave cultures, and western brass bands.

—Program Note by Gabriela Lena Frank

SAMUEL BARBER
Born 1910, West Chester, PA
Died 1981, New York City

Knoxville: Summer of 1915, op.24

James Agee (1909-1955) was a writer of unusual gifts: He was a poet, novelist, critic, and screenwriter. He died suddenly at 46, and his reputation rests on two extraordinary works: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a study of Southern sharecropper families, and his novel A Death in the Family, left in manuscript at his death and published posthumously in 1957; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. The novel tells the story of the closely knit family of Jay and Mary Follett and their children Rufus and Catherine; that family is shattered by the death of the father in an automobile accident.

Much earlier, in 1938, Agee had written a sort of prose-poem, composed in one sudden burst of stream-of-consciousness, a piece he called Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Several pages long, it is a vision of childhood as recalled through the eyes of a child; Agee had grown up in Knoxville, and he set out to recreate his memory of being five years old. When, after his death, his editors prepared A Death in the Family for publication, they used Knoxville: Summer of 1915 as a poetic prologue to that novel.

Barber had come to know Knoxville when it was still a separate work, and In 1947, for soprano Eleanor Steber, he made a setting for high voice and orchestra, using approximately the final third of Agee’s text. This was first performed on April 9, 1948 with Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony, but Barber, concerned about the balance between soprano and large orchestra, rescored it for smaller orchestra, and it was published in this chamber-orchestra version.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 may be the single most beautiful creation in American music. Barber recognized that Agee’s prose-poem captures a universal experience, and his music, by turns nostalgic and bittersweet, is worthy of the text (Agee was pleased with Barber’s treatment). Musically, Knoxville is a sort of rondo: It is sectional in structure, and a few basic themes return in various forms throughout. It opens quietly as the boy sets the scene: a summer evening, quiet, with people watering their lawns or talking. A moment of agitation intrudes as a streetcar passes, clanging and sparking in the night, and then (“Now is the night one blue dew”) the mood changes, almost magically. The family takes quilts out into their backyard and lies looking up at the stars (“On the rough wet grass”). The boy recalls and enumerates, with perfect childlike simplicity, the members of his family around him in the dark and their boarders. It is a moment of security, warmth, and wholeness, but—as the reader of the novel knows—a moment that will be shattered by subsequent events. Perhaps some of the profound impact of this child’s vision is the inevitable knowledge that this night cannot last. But for these few rapt moments, it does, and the boy blesses those around him and is put to bed, momentarily secure—but also adrift and alone in the world.

—Program Note by Eric Bromberger

LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Born, 1918, Lawrence, MA
Died, 1990, New York City

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Although West Side Story has become one of the most popular musicals ever, its creation involved a number of risks. Central among these was the decision to adapt Romeo and Juliet to a contemporary New York setting: The warring Montague and Capulet families are transformed into rival street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, while Romeo and Juliet become Tony and Maria. And the grim ending of Shakespeare’s play made for a conclusion seldom experienced in a Broadway musical.

Yet West Side Story–first produced in Washington, D.C. on August 19, 1957–turned out to be a huge success (it ran on Broadway for over 1,000 performances), and Bernstein’s music is probably his most memorable score. Central to the original conception of West Side Story was the importance of dance. Jerome Robbins was both choreographer and director of the original production, and some members of the cast were chosen for their abilities as dancers; their singing ability was considered of secondary importance. The dance sequences remain some of the most impressive parts of the musical.

Several years after the premiere, Bernstein made an orchestral suite of the dances from the musical, and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story were first performed by Lukas Foss and the New York Philharmonic on February 13, 1961. The dances follow the action of the play and in some movements incorporate bits of the songs. A brashly energetic Prologue (which requires finger snapping from the orchestra) leads to a section based on the song Somewhere, which envisions a more peaceful world. A Scherzo leads to Mambo, set at the high school dance, which both the Sharks and Jets attend. Tony and Maria dance together in the Cha-Cha (which quotes the song Maria), and their Meeting Scene is depicted by a quartet of muted violins. Tensions rise in the eerie, twisting Cool Fugue, and Rumble accompanies the fight in which the rival gang leaders Bernardo and Riff are killed. A flute cadenza prefaces the Finale, which incorporates Maria’s I Have a Love, and after so much vitality and violence, the Symphonic Dances come to a subdued close.

—Program Note by Eric Bromberger