Concert poster for the Community Women's Orchestra's Family Concert showing Cadence Liu, composer and flute soloist, holding a flute, surrounded by an illustration of a wreath with woodland animals.

Young Artist Showcase - A Family Concert

Alberic Magnard • Suite in Ancient Style

Cadence Liu (Composer and Flute Soloist) • Flute Concerto

Intermission

Benjamin Britten • Matinées Musicales

Gioachino Rossini • La Cenerentola Overture

PODIUM NOTES

Welcome to our 39th Concert Season!

This year holds much promise for the Community Women’s Orchestra. We continue to welcome new members to the orchestra and are excited about the future.

As always, we celebrate the voices of female composers, and over the course of the season we present composers whose backgrounds and influences are as diverse as the music they have composed. The companion pieces to our featured work serve to bind the program into a cohesive whole, offering our listeners a varied musical experience and some exposure to less known composers and works.

Today’s Annual Family Concert this year is particularly exciting in that it features the World Premiere of the Flute Concerto by Cadence Liu, performed by the composer herself. Cadence Liu is a high school senior with a promising musical future and as you will hear, already a highly accomplished flutist and composer.

I first learned of Cadence’s work through June Bonacich, the Community Women’s Orchestra Composer-in-Residence, who was her instructor in the Pre-College Division of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. June insisted I take a good look at it, as she was convinced it would be a great success.

I had no idea what to expect when I began studying the score. I found it to be highly sophisticated, formally anchored with a solid musical structure, and some curious musical choices. I kept asking, “is this really what you want?” And ever sure, Cadence replied, “ Yes!”

Her musical language is bold and original. She works in broad strokes with unusual sonorities, beautiful orchestration and intricate rhythmic gestures. She has deftly composed an orchestral accompaniment for herself that keeps the flute seamlessly in the limelight.

Her work is clearly informed by extensive exposure to orchestral music. Cadence has provided program notes to guide your listening experience, or perhaps better yet, to help you reflect upon it. I encourage our audience to simply listen to fully absorb the premiere performance of this amazing composition.

Coincidentally, our opening piece, Alberic Magnard’s Suite for Orchestra in Ancient Style, Opus 2, is also the work of a young composer. This is a five-movement work, modeled after Baroque dance forms and scored for small orchestral forces: pairs of woodwinds and horns, a solitary trumpet, strings and timpani, plus a handful of notes for the bass drum and triangle. The five movements, Francaise, Sarabande, Gavotte, Minuet and Gigue strongly bear an affinity with J.S. Bach, and we know Magnard was studying counterpoint at the Paris Conservatory around his time, so it is not surprising. But the scoring is far more novel in its use of instrumental timbre. It is notable in its tender use of the English Horn in various instrumental combinations, including with solo cello and in the elegant wind “harmonie” episodes that punctuate the Sarabande and Minuet. These episodes mostly feature the wind section with little or no contribution by the strings. Magnard makes up for this with robust contrapuntal string passages in the Francaise, Gavotte, and Gigue.

There are so many recurring thematic elements in this suite, with similar themes traversing consecutive movements, that one can soon lose track of the formal model that was intended. We find a lot of experimentation also, as one might suspect of an early opus. The quiet ending is a bit of a surprise after a rousing hunting song. Chalk it up to youth! Alberic Magnard was probably a student in Paris when he wrote this piece. It was his second opus, and the first attempt at an orchestral piece. Sadly, he only had 22 opuses total, and did not live to realize his full creative potential. Magnard died in 1914 at the age of 49, defending his home in the war. He is remembered as a hero of the French Revolution.

If you are wondering why Magnard, and what he has to do with women composers, you may appreciate this back story. I discovered Alberic Magnard accidentally while researching the works of Charlotte Sohy, a lesser known French composer most worthy of our attention. The two were close friends and compatriots during the French Revolution. Sohy’s Great War Symphony, is a significant masterwork of this era which has only recently been recently discovered and recorded. I am eager to bring one of her works across the pond, ideally as a part of our 40th Anniversary Celebration in 2024-25, and hope to pair it with Magnard’s Hymn to Justice.

Benjamin Britten and Gioachino Rossini offer a nice segue into the playful genre of Italian Opera but without the stage, props or singers.

In Matinées Musicales Britten drew on the music of Rossini to construct two charming and witty suites. The tunes are Rossini’s, but the framework and decor are pure Britten. The second suite, which we are performing today, is also in five movements, though unlike Magnard each movement is entirely self-contained.

There is something for everyone: rousing brass, playful percussion, tender melodies for strings and winds and many comic elements. Rossini wrote great tunes and Britten was a masterful orchestrator. It's a winning combination.

We close the program with another youthful work, La Cenerentola Overture, penned by the 25 year old Gioachino Rossini as the overture to the opera dramma giocoso, or “drama with jokes”. The overture consists of a patchwork of material drawn from various other of the composer’s works. This sequence was not my idea but in fact was part of Britten’s master plan for the perfect ending to the Matinées Musicales.

Read more about this history of La Cenerentola and Britten’s Matinées Musicales.

Martha Stoddard, Music Director

CADENCE LIU, FLUTIST AND COMPOSER

Cadence Liu is a high school senior from Foster City, California. She studies flute under Catherine Payne and composition under Arkadi Serper and June Bonacich in the Pre-College Division of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is a flutist of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, and has been honored for her playing by the National Flute Association, YoungArts Foundation, and Tanglewood Institute.

Cadence’s compositions evoke ecstatic movement and song to promote emotional healing and open channels to the divine. Recent works include a programmatic piece for wind trio and piano as well as an acapella setting of portions of the Requiem mass. She is passionate about reinventing sacred vocal music and rekindling the power of the voice and shared rhythm in her instrumental works.

CONCERTO FOR FLUTE AND ORCHESTRA

This concerto was born in 2021, at the piano of Ms. Bonacich’s Composition Fundamentals Class. Originally a flute and piano sonata, Ms. Bonacich encouraged me to reimagine the piece as a concerto, and gifted me the opportunity to premiere it with CWO. As my compositional style evolved over the next two years, this concerto became my calling card, accumulating edits and feedback from many corners of the music world. It remains a work in flux, as I am currently composing a second movement.

The piece is dominated by its opening 2-note motif, which shape shifts from bold declaration to pleading desolation to off-kilter dance and back again. A host of other melodies burst through the seams: one flows playfully like a Chinese lute; another trudges through the bow strokes of the low strings; yet another is chanted over stillness by the solo flute. However, the driving force of the piece is rhythm, which hooks up the musicians and audience to a shared external lifeblood. I urge listeners to tap into this lifeblood by moving to the beat during rhythmic sections, while becoming very still during slow ones to feel hidden gears move within themselves. In doing so, listeners transform the piece from a passive entertainment to a collaborative healing experience.

CWO MUSICIANS

VIOLIN 1
Claire Baffico, Concertmaster (on leave)
Anne Nesbet, Acting Concertmaster
Elizabeth McDaniel
Anita Engles
Jody Requero
Erica Vander Mause
Stephanie Brener
Pam Johann

VIOLIN 2
Cathryn Bruno, principal
Nahal Rose Lalefar
Nirmala Jayaraman
Suzy Logan
Joan Rosen
Dora Chin
Lisa Summerlin
Ann Clements

VIOLA
Tiffany Rodriguez, principal
Tim Schoof
Linda Kay
Ada Naiman
*Christina Walton

CELLO
Jane Lo, principal
Sara Jayne McDonald
Shraddha Pingal
Emilie Bergman
Nancy Manheim
Nancy Ellis
Sally Goldman

BASS
Nancy Kaspar, principal
Carol DeArment
Hélène Foussard
Kim Spalding

FLUTE
Kristin Brooks-Davidman, principal
Dawna Stebbins

PICCOLO
Dawna Stebbins

OBOE
Wendy Shiraki, principal
Amy Kahn

ENGLISH HORN
Wendy Shiraki

CLARINET
Karen Tyger Fisher, principal
Claire Evensen
Kathy Hennig

BASSOON
Barbara Jones, principal
Donna Wiley

FRENCH HORN
Lisa Bress
Sue Crum
Sharon Seto

TRUMPET
Sue Leonardi, principal
Christine Krezel

TROMBONE
Annalise King

BASS TROMBONE
Jenna Pohlman

TUBA
Amy Chinn

TIMPANI
Cynthia Seagren

PERCUSSION
June Bonacich
Kathy Hennig
Kate Mangotich

HARP
*Carla Gee

*Guest Musicians

2023 - 2024 CONCERT SEASON

March 3, 2024

Emily Mayer • Faust Overture

Cecile Chaminade • Callirhoë Suite, Op. 37

Lili Boulanger • D’un matin de Printemps

Mary Fineman • It’s about Love

June 2, 2024

Martha Stoddard • Parodies

Adolph Schreiner • The Worried Drummer

Amy Beach • Bal Masque

Antonin Dvorak • Symphony No. 8 in G Major

Programming is subject to change.

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