Thursday, April 6, 2023 | 7:30 pm | Wentz Concert Hall | Naperville, Illinois
With Special Guests
The Dundee-Crown Wind Ensemble, William Brocker and Miles Bohlman, conductors
The Chicago Brass Band, Dr. Mark A. Taylor, conductor
From the Music Director
Welcome to the second season of The Naperville Winds, an organization comprising musicians from across Chicagoland (and beyond) who share one common mission–to perform the finest wind band literature available at the highest level possible. This ensemble coalesced quickly; the energy and excitement at the first rehearsal on August 26, 2021 was palpable, and, immediately after rehearsal, it was clear that we were at the beginning of a truly special journey.
The road to today’s performance hasn’t been easy. In order for a major ensemble to establish itself in the time of COVID, it must overcome myriad problems and challenges. We faced these head-on, knowing full-well the daunting challenges we’d face, and we overcame them all, together. The collective “brain trust” of the ensemble–through each member’s experience, outside-the-box thinking, and quick problem solving skills–has allowed us to deftly navigate around the detours and roadblocks and continue on our path, unwaveringly, toward our shared goal. Our mere existence as an ensemble is, therefore, not just a celebration of music, but a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
It has been an absolute joy to make music with the members of The Naperville Winds over the past year and a half. I am humbled by the collegiality, selflessness, energy, and of course, talent, that each member brings to the table. I strongly believe that The Naperville Winds will soon be a household name for lovers of wind band repertoire throughout the nation and the world. I sincerely hope you will support us throughout this incredible journey!
Sincerely,
Sean Kelley, D.M.A.
Music Director, The Naperville Winds
Repertoire
The Dundee-Crown High School Wind Ensemble
William Brocker and Miles Bohlman, conductors
Vientos y Tangos
Michael Gandolfi (b. 1956)
Vientos y Tangos (Winds and Tangos) was commissioned The Frank L. Battisti 70th Birthday Commission Project and is dedicated to Frank Battisti in recognition of his immense contributions to the advancement of concert wind literature. It was Mr. Battisti’s specific request that I write a tango for wind ensemble. In preparation for this piece, I devoted several months to the study and transcription of tangos from the early style of Juan D’arienzo and the “Tango Nievo” style of Astor Piazzolla to the current trend of “Disco/Techno Tango,” among others. After immersing myself in this listening experience, I simply allowed the most salient features of these various tangos to inform the direction of my work. The dynamic contour and the various instrumental combinations that I employ in the piece are all inspired by the traditional sounds of the bandoneon, violin, piano, and contrabass.
– Program note by composer
Sòlas Ané
Samuel Hazo (b. 1966)
Sòlas and Ané are two Gaelic words meaning Joy (Solas) and Yesterday/Yesteryear (Ané). It was named for the absolute pleasure Margene Pappas, director of bands at Oswego High School in Oswego, Illinois, had spending every day living the music with her students. This is what Margene enjoyed the most. Sure, the byproducts of her teaching included Oswego High School’s performances at the Midwest Clinic, Tournament of Roses Parade, and IMEA All-State Convention. And yes, her accolades included the Sudler Legion of Honor, Phi Beta Mu Hall of Fame, Mr. Holland’s Opus Award, and far too many more to list. But Margene is the epitome of the phrase, “Winners aren’t in it for the race. They just love to run.” Turning on the band room lights every morning for 37 years was Margene Pappas’ passion.
Sòlas Ané was premiered on May 28th, 2006. That day was declared “Margene Pappas Day” in Oswego and the concert featured her present band as well as an Oswego High School alumni band comprised of some of the top professional musicians and music professors in the world. Sadly, the title, Sòlas Ané, gained a deeper and most unfortunate meaning as, one half hour after her final concert, on a day named after her, Margene’s father passed away of pneumonia in Champaign, IL.
–Program note by composer
Incantation and Dance
John Barnes Chance (1932-1972)
The present title of this work suggests a religious orientation, but not towards any of the established religions of a Western or Eastern culture. To the standard deities one offers prayers — incantations are uttered in rituals of magic, demonic rites, and the conjuring up of spirits, evil and benign. The opening Incantation is full of mystery and expectation, wandering, unstable and without tonality. The Dance also begins quietly, but percussion instruments quickly begin, one by one, to drive a rhythmic pattern of incredible complexity and drive. As other instruments are added, the dance grows wilder and more frenzied. The brasses hammer out ferocious snarls — the woodwinds fly in swirling scales. Here there is no pretty tune but a paroxysm of rhythm, a convulsion of syncopation that drives on and on, mounting in tension, to a shattering climax of exaltation.
Incantation and Dance was premiered as Nocturne and Dance by Herbert Hazelman and the Greensboro High School Band on November 16, 1960. The original version (saved by Hazelman) has several interesting differences, including 31 additional measures. It was programmed at the NBA convention in New Orleans in June 1995 by Robert Pouliot and the City of Fairfax Band.
– Program note from “Program Notes for Band“
Personnel
Click to view members of the Dundee-Crown High School Wind Ensemble
Chicago Brass Band
Fantastic Brass
Gilbert Tinner (b. 1965)
Swiss composer Gilbert Tinner excels in many musical fields, including as a trombonist, pianist, composer, and arranger. He composed his original work Fantastic Brass as an expression of his passion for brass and rhythm instruments. He presents an original melody, which than transforms through a series of different musical styles, including Broadway, soft-shoe, big band jazz, and a lovely ballad. Along the way, all of the different sections of the brass band are highlighted in their strikingly varied colors and nuances.
-Program note provided by Chicago Brass Band
A Quiet Moment
Philip Sparke (b. 1951)
British composer Philip Sparke was commissioned to write A Quiet Moment by the family of Milwaukee-area band director James Krofta after his passing. Among his teaching positions, James had served as band director at both Kettle-Moraine High School and Marquette University. His family notes that a highlight of James’s career
was the opportunity to conduct his band performing Philip Sparke’s The Year of the
Dragon for a major festival. Through this lovely piece and the many students he
taught, James’s memory lives on.
-Program note provided by the Chicago Brass Band
A Gabrieli Fantasy
Bert Appermont (b. 1973)
The Chicago Brass Band gave the North American premiere of Belgian composer Bert Appermont’s masterpiece A Gabrieli Fantasy at the 2023 Gateway Brass Band Festival in St. Louis on March 18, 2023. This major competition work opens by quoting one of the iconic antiphonal brass choir compositions of Giovanni Gabrieli, his Canzon a 12 in Echo written in 1608. From there, the piece progresses through a lively Toccata, a lovely Chorale, a playful Scherzo, and a furious Finale. In each section the original Canzon melodies and motifs can be heard, but transformed into new characters and moods.
-Program note provided by the Chicago Brass Band
Click to view members of the Chicago Brass Band
Personnel
Intermission (12 minutes)
The Naperville Winds
Rocky Point Holiday
Ron Nelson (b. 1929)
Rocky Point Holiday was a commission from Frank Bencriscutto and the University of Minnesota band for a tour of Russia. It was composed between 1968 and 1969. Bencriscutto had heard Nelson’s orchestral work Savannah River Holiday and decided he wanted something virtuosic to take with him on the Russian tour. When asked about the limitations of the band, Bencriscutto told him there were none. “I’m going to write a tremendously difficult piece,” Nelson warned him. “That’s fine,” replied Bencriscutto, and thus Rocky Point Holiday was born. Nelson says, “This was a pivotal moment in my notion of wind ensemble scoring, in which I focused on orchestrating in an extremely transparent way.”
The bulk of the work on the composition occurred while Nelson was on vacation at a Rhode Island seaside resort. Rocky Point is an amusement park over a hundred years old, located in Warwick Neck, RI. It was closed down in the mid-1990s due to a lack of funds.
– Program note by Nikk Pilato
A Child’s Garden of Dreams
David Maslanka (1943-2017)
A Child’s Garden of Dreams was commissioned by John and Marietta Paynter for the Northwestern University Symphonic Wind Ensemble. It was composed in the summer of 1981 and was premiered by Northwestern in 1982. It is based on a particularly fascinating case study from famed psychiatrist Carl Jung’s book, Man and His Symbols.
Jung wrote, “A very important case came to me from a man who was himself a psychiatrist. One day he brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his 10-year-old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had had when she was 8. They made up the weirdest series of dreams I have ever seen, and I could well understand why her father was more than just puzzled by them. Though childlike, they were uncanny, and they contained images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible to the father…In the unabridged German original, each dream begins with the words of the old fairy tale: ‘Once upon a time.’ By these words the little dreamer suggests that she feels as if each dream were a sort of fairy tale, which she wants to tell her father as a Christmas present.”
“The father tried to explain the dreams in terms of their context. But he could not do so because there appeared to be no personal associations to them…The little girl died of an infectious disease about a year after that Christmas… The dreams were a preparation for death, expressed through short stories, like the tales told at primitive initiations… The little girl was approaching puberty, and at the same time, the end of her life. Little or nothing in the symbolism of her dreams points to the beginning of a normal adult life. When I first read her dreams, I had the uncanny feeling that they suggested impending disaster.”
“These dreams open up a new and rather terrifying aspect of life and death. One would expect to find such images in an aging person who looks back on life, rather than to be given them by a child. Their atmosphere recalls the old Roman saying, ‘Life is a short dream,’ rather than the joy and exuberance of its springtime. Experience shows that the unknown approach of death casts an ‘adumbratio’ (an anticipatory shadow) over the life and dreams of the victim. Even the altar in Christian churches represents, on one hand, a tomb and, on the other, a place of resurrection –- the transformation of death into eternal life.”
Maslanka selected five of the twelve dreams as motifs for the movements of this composition:
I. There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.
II. A Drunken woman falls into the water and comes out renewed and sober.
III. A horde of small animals frightens the dreamer. The animals increase to a tremendous size, and one of them devours the little girl.
IV. A drop of water is seen as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The girl sees that the drop is full of tree branches. This portrays the origin of the world.
V. An ascent into heaven, where pagan dances are being celebrated; and a descent into hell, where angels are doing good deeds.
– Program note by composer
Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Transcribed by Lucien Calliet (1891-1985)
Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral, with its medieval color and pageantry, prefaces her betrothal to Lohengrin, mystic Knight of the Holy Grail, who comes to deliver the people of Brabant (Antwerp) from the Hungarian invaders.
In the operatic presentation, a large double chorus (representing the people of Antwerp) adds its song of solemn praise to that of the orchestra. It is in this music, mystic yet powerful, that we find Wagner striking out with those new and intense musical thoughts that were to culminate in Tristan, The Ring, and Parsifal. Not quite emancipated from the musical speech of his operatic contemporaries, one finds in the Lohengrin score those unmistakable flights into musico-dramatic magnificence transcending all that preceded it in idiom and musical adventure.
In this transcription of Elsa’s Procession for symphony band, Lucien Cailliet, with his great talent for instrumentation, has succeeded in building into the instrumental framework of the modern band a true and delicate representation of all that Wagner so eloquently describes with orchestra and chorus.
In the present score, the instrumental solo voices of the original score are paralleled, the choral voices deftly absorbed in the rich instrumental texture and all the luxuriant Wagnerian color re-created in terms of the instrumentation for the band.
– Program note from score
Personnel
Click to view members of The Naperville Winds
Thanks To Our Sponsors
Corporate Sponsor
Sponsored In Part By
Corporate Partner
Full Circle Creative & Media Services
Gold Sponsor
$500 to $1000
Michael & Caroline Kelley
Sean Kelley
W.W. Grainger, Inc.
Silver Sponsor
$250 to $499
Bruce Spitzer
The Estoll Family
Bronze Sponsor
$100 to $249
Friends of The Naperville Winds
$1 to $99
Special Thanks To The Naperville Winds Leadership Team:
Setup Crew
Timothy Chernobrov
James Cross
Rudi Schwerdle
Section Managers
Section Managers
Whitney Bowden
Alyssa Arkin
Kevin Mulqueeny
Matt Pilmer
Aaron Newman
Lara Ward
Michael Townley
Kyle Baltzer
Elias Martinez
Fundraising & Gifts
Crystal Scewczyk
Logistics
Rudi Schwerdle
Public & Media Relations
Melissa Hickok
Secretary
Barbara Holland
Treasurer
Nathan Dickman
Band Representatives
Ken Kelly
Melissa Hickok
Claudia Andrews
Program Proofreading & Editing
Jennifer Wojcik
The Naperville Winds Advisory Board
Meghan Kats
Steve Klaus
James Osborne
Kim Richter
North Central College Camps & Conferences Office
Christopher Drennan
Laura Cooper
Jennifer Berozek
Andrew Butler
Collin Trevor
Pete Ellman, Ellman’s Music Center
Susan Chou, Chairperson, NCC Department of Music
Lawrence Van Oyen, NCC Director of Bands
Joe LaPalomento, NCC Instructor of Percussion
Juan Pastor, NCC Instructor of Music & Latin Percussion
Kim Richter, NCC Instructor of Bassoon & Music Director, Naperville Youth Symphony Orchestra
Stephen M. Caliendo, NCC Dean, College of Arts & Sciences
