Scott Speck, conductor
Laura Noah, timpani • Peter Ferry, timpani
Saenger Theatre
Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. • Sunday, February 9, 2025 at 2:30 p.m.
Steve Reich Clapping Music
Philip Glass Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra
Sergei Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet – Op. 64bis, 64ter and 101
This concert, including intermission, runs approximately 1 hour, 35 minutes
TakeNote! Learn More, Enjoy More
Enhance your concert experience with Take-Note! Join music experts and explore the world of classical music from an in-depth perspective. This informative pre-concert talk begins at 6:30 p.m. before Saturday classical performances and 1:30 p.m. before Sunday classical performances in Room 1927 adjacent to the Saenger entrance on Joachim Street.
Brings the kids for FREE on Sundays!
Bring the kids for FREE on Sunday!
Through MSO’s Big Red Ticket program, sponsored by Alabama Power Foundation and the Figures Foundation, students in grades K-12 can attend any classical Sunday matinee FREE when accompanied by a paying adult. It’s a great cultural opportunity and an amazing concert experience! Seats are limited, so please purchase tickets by phone at 251-432-2010. Please no children under 5 and no babies in arms. Want to bring a student on a Saturday? Student tickets are just $10.
From our Music Director
The MSO’s January concert opens with Steve Reich’s groundbreaking Clapping Music, a minimalist marvel that challenges conventional notions of rhythm and ensemble performance. Featuring precise handclap patterns that gradually shift and evolve, Reich’s composition mesmerizes with its hypnotic simplicity and intricate rhythmic interplay. Speaking of rhythm, we next present Philip Glass’s Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists, starring our own Principal Timpanist Laura Noah alongside guest percussionist Peter Ferry. Glass’s mesmerizing concerto is a rhythmic blast, showcasing the timpani’s versatility and expressive power in a dialogue that spans resonant depths and ethereal heights.
The concert concludes with a suite from Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. Many musicians list this piece among their favorites to perform, and it’s easy to hear why: Prokofiev’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragic love story unfolds with vivid orchestral colors and emotional intensity, driving the iconic tale with passion and turmoil. From the tender Balcony Scene to the fiery Death of Tybalt, our orchestra brings Prokofiev’s evocative melodies to life, immersing our audience in a torrent of love, fate, danger and beauty.
– Scott Speck, Music Director
Our Soloists
Laura Noah, timpani
Laura Noah is very familiar to MSO audiences. She has been as our Principal Timpanist since 2007. She is a professional musician and educator residing in Mobile, and is also Principal Timpanist for the Pensacola Symphony, Mississippi Gulf Coast Symphony, Meridian Symphony, Mobile Opera and Pensacola Opera. In February 2024, Laura performed the Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra by Philip Glass with the Mercer University Wind Ensemble under the direction of Dr. Brittan Braddock. She will be the featured soloist for Glass’s Concerto Fantasy in February 2025 with the Mobile Symphony under Music Director Scott Speck.
Laura Noah is a Pearl/Adams Regional Education Artist and an active Percussive Arts Society member. She served as PAS Alabama Chapter President from 2021-2024, is a current member of the Symphonic Committee, and served as the Socioeconomic point person for the PAS Diversity Alliance from 2020-2023.
Laura is the Director of Percussion and Assistant Director of Athletic Bands at the University of West Florida, where she directs the UWF Percussion Ensemble and the UWF Argo Marching Band Drum Line. Laura also works with her husband, Sean, and the McGill-Toolen Catholic High School Band program coaching the Prep Band percussionists and is the instructor and arranger for the McT Band Front Ensemble.
Peter Ferry, timpani
Peter Ferry is an American percussionist acclaimed for his virtuosic expressivity and dedication to creating arresting musical experiences. Called “an artist of vision… presenting percussion in a stunning thoughtful way” (Democrat and Chronicle), Ferry puts audience experience first and shares his passion for percussion with contagious enthusiasm. The Chicago-Sun Times has called him “the ingenious percussionist Peter Ferry.”
An advocate for new music, Ferry collaborates with leading composers, having premiered works by Meredith Monk, Shawn Okpebholo, and John Luther Adams. As a soloist and chamber musician currently based in Phoenix, his performances have spanned the U.S., Canada, South America, and Europe, bringing him to the world’s finest institutions including Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His debut at age 18 led to solo engagements with notable orchestras like the Chicago Philharmonic and Mobile Symphony Orchestra.
Beyond percussion, Ferry has explored boundary-pushing projects with artists like Manual Cinema, earning praise from The New Yorker for “endlessly imaginative” shows. As Assistant Director of Artistic Planning for Alarm Will Sound, Ferry has led and staged ambitious performances at the Park Avenue Armory and Philharmonie de Paris. He has been a guest with GRAMMY-winning Third Coast Percussion and Eighth Blackbird.
As an educator, Ferry regularly coaches students while on tour, sharing his insights at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, New York University, and the Juilliard School. Ferry trained at the Eastman School of Music with performer/pedagogue Michael Burritt.
Ferry proudly endorses Marimba One, Vic Firth/Balter Mallets, and Zildjian.
Find out more about Peter Ferry here. (https://www.peterferry.com)
Program Notes
Clapping Music
Steve Reich
BORN October 3, 1936 | New York, New York
In reaction to the complexity of the modern music of the first half of the twentieth century, composers in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s turned towards minimalism. Borrowing from the minimalist movement in the visual arts, they sought to reduce their artistic materials to the essentials and to impose a formal regularity on their compositions. They intentionally simplified all elements of their musical vocabulary. The pioneers of this musical style were La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich.
Steve Reich’s contribution to minimalism is largely outlined in his essay “Music as a Gradual Process.” He wrote, “I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” He created a process that he called “phase shifting,” where one or more repeated phrases sounds at a slightly slower or faster tempo than the others, causing it to go “out of phase.” He accomplished this with recorded tape loops in his seminal compositions It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). And something similar occurs in live performance with Piano Phase (1967) and Clapping Music (1972).
A performance of flamenco music, with its animated clapping, inspired Reich to compose Clapping Music. He said that he wanted to “create a piece of music that needed no instruments beyond the human body.” The piece unfolds as two musicians clap the exact same rhythm in 12/8 meter. One performer claps the rhythm to a steady tempo throughout the entirety of the piece. The other performer claps the same rhythm, but periodically skips one eighth-note (or rest), thereby shifting the rhythm one eighth-note to the right. They do so until they have accomplished twelve shifts and are again in sync with their duet partner. The resulting music has a sense of ebb and flow as the “phases shift” in and out of sync with each other.
This piece is scored for two musicians clapping.
Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra
Philip Glass
BORN January 31, 1937 | Baltimore, Maryland
American composer Philip Glass is one of the most influential composers of our time. He is perhaps best-known for the minimalist music heard in his acclaimed operas (including Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha) and film scores (The Hours, The Truman Show, and Kundun, among others). But the composer has eschewed the label “minimalist” and instead describes himself in more flexible terms as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” This description gives him leeway to bring in different styles beyond the slow harmonic changes, repetitive melodies, and steady pulse of twentieth century minimalist music.
This more complex style can be heard in his Concerto Project, which Glass undertook beginning in 2000. He composed — or gathered from previous compositions — a set of eight concerti arranged into four volumes. Volume 1 contains his Cello Concerto and the Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra. Concerti for timpani are not a common occurrence, but they are also not new: examples can be found as far back at the Baroque period. Glass’s contribution to the genre enlists two timpanists to a play on a total of nine timpani in an intense, highly athletic work.
The Concerto includes three movements, with an extended cadenza between the second and third. The first movement is fast, with an opening rhythmic theme that may remind the listener of Mission Impossible. As the movement progresses, string harmonies and then a woodwind melody are layered under the rhythmic theme. The second movement is slower and more dramatic, with repetitive, slowly changing melodies, harmonies, and orchestration. An extended almost five-minute cadenza occurs between the second and third movements. The two timpanists engage in extended performance techniques including scraping the drumheads with hard mallets, playing with fingertips and bare hands, and playing with the stick end (rather than soft head) of the mallet. The cadenza speeds to a frenzy as the orchestra percussionists join the timpanists to transition seamlessly into the dance-like final movement.
This piece is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, 4 percussionists playing a large array of percussion instruments, harp, piano, and strings.
Selections from Romeo and Juliet Suites, op. 64bis, 64ter, and 101
Sergei Prokofiev
BORN April 23, 1891 | Sontsovka, Ukraine
DIED March 5, 1953 | Moscow, Russia
Following the Revolution of 1917, Sergei Prokofiev and many other artists and musicians left Russia. But only Prokofiev returned.
In 1934, Prokofiev’s diary reveals the careful calculations that preceded his unusual return to the Soviet Union. It shows that he returned with eyes wide open, fully aware that in the Soviet Union, an artist’s success or failure was dependent on social and political ideas and that one must pander to the whims of the Soviet critics. Prokofiev believed that his new simple aesthetic could succeed within the Soviet framework and so in 1936 — as performances and commissions were drying up in the United States and Western Europe due to the Great Depression — he returned.
At the end of 1934, he was already feeling the pull back to the Soviet Union through commissions. He was in negotiations with the Leningrad Opera House for the composition of a ballet on the story of Romeo and Juliet. When that agreement fell through, the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow commissioned the score. Prokofiev completed Romeo and Juliet in 1936, but it was rejected by the Bolshoi as too difficult to dance to. The piece did not receive its premiere until 1938 in Brno, Czechoslovakia.
Between its rejection by the Bolshoi and its premiere in Brno, a savvy Prokofiev took a gamble on himself. He extracted pieces of the ballet into two suites, certain that successful orchestral performances of his music would build demand for the full ballet. His strategy paid off, and the companies in Moscow and Leningrad were soon vying for the opportunity to stage the ballet. A January 1940 performance in Leningrad finally launched the work into the international repertory.
The two suites Prokofiev composed in 1936 and a third one completed in 1946 have endured in the orchestral repertoire. On this concert, you will hear pieces from each of the three suites, arranged in an order that outlines Shakespeare’s timeless story. Listen for some of the major plot points of Shakespeare’s tragedy, carefully illustrated by Prokofiev’s music.
In “Death of Tybault,” an energetic fight becomes tragic when percussive jabs give way to a final blow. The movement ends with the steady, low beat of a funeral procession.
Following a foreboding introduction, the music of the “Montagues and Capulets” contains somber music that, in the ballet, accompanied a warning to the two families to cease their fighting. The second half of this movement comes from the ballet’s “Dance of the Knights,” which includes a tenor saxophone solo, a rarity in orchestral music.
The dramatic “Romeo at the Grave of Juliet” features Prokofiev’s “love theme,” which had previously been heard played by the flute in “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting.” Low brass and woodwind instruments feature prominently in this movement. They evoke the depth and darkness of the tomb, while also providing a dynamic contrast to the sounds of the flute and violin, which Prokofiev associates throughout the ballet with Juliet and Romeo, respectively. The movement ends with Romeo’s heartbreak, heard in the the soft violins accompanied by throbbing cellos and basses, culminating in a sustained note played by the piccolo.
“The Death of Juliet” is the Adagio that ends the ballet. Music from “The Child Juliet” returns before the movement’s quiet end.
This piece is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (including bass drum, bells, cymbals, maracas, snare drum, tambourine, triangle, and xylophone), harp, celesta, piano, and strings.