Halloween with Sinfonia

The PRINCETON UNIVERSITY SINFONIA is a full symphony orchestra that unites eager, music-loving Princeton University undergraduate and graduate students, as well as community friends, to explore diverse symphonic repertory from four centuries. Its members are passionate musicians with diverse interests and backgrounds who come together for the rich rewards of making music together and for others.

DR. RUTH OCHS is a passionate and sought-after conductor and educator based in central New Jersey. Since 2002 she has been conducting at Princeton University in various capacities. Soon after beginning graduate studies in the Department of Music at Princeton, she took over directorship of the Princeton University Sinfonia and quickly steered its growth from a chamber orchestra into a full-size symphonic orchestra performing repertory from the baroque to the most recent, including accompanying a fully-staged version Mozart’s Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe in 2019. Under Dr. Ochs’ leadership, the orchestra regularly premieres new compositions by Princeton University undergraduate composers. She also serves as Associate Conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra and has led the ensemble in a variety of performances, including on its tour of Spain in 2019. Off the podium, her work in the classroom and introducing concert programs puts into action her belief that performers and audiences alike benefit from a closer understanding of the materials and makers of a musical composition.

Passionate about nourishing and inspiring community and youth musicians, Dr. Ochs also shares her time with local musical initiatives in central New Jersey. She is now in her eighteenth season as conductor and music director of the Westminster Community Orchestra, with whom she has led successful opera gala performances, collaborations with youth ensembles from the Westminster Conservatory of Music, and popular family and holiday concerts. Musical outreach lies close to her heart, and she has taken small ensembles of Princeton University musicians to perform in Mercer County elementary schools. In 2019 she received the Princeton University Pace Center for Civic Engagement’s Community Engagement Award.

Ruth Ochs holds degrees in music, orchestral conducting, and music history, from Harvard University (magna cum laude with highest honors in music), the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton University, respectively. As a Fulbright Scholar, she studied musicology at Humboldt Universität in Berlin, Germany, and, as a student of the Polish language, she studied at the Uniwersytet Jagielloński in Kraków, Poland. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Princeton University’s Department of Music.

On the surface, this program intends to fill each of us with some Halloween spirit. The music also often uses nature as its backdrop. You will tread through supernatural woods (MacDowell) and visit a mysterious lake (The Enchanted Lake, Liadov) covered by eerie stillness, incandescence, and mysterious motions emerging from its depths. Elsewhere you will trace the course of the mighty Czech river, Vltava, or, as it called in German, the Moldau.

There is another, subtle subtext to our program. These haunted sonic depictions of nature also offer uncomfortable premonitions of a version of our world ravaged by climate abnormalities. It is all too easy now to imagine a haunted forest after a climate change-related fire, or the tragic drying up of a mountain lake. As an exercise in acknowledging nature’s fragility alongside its creative potential, our concert poster design embraces nature via cyanotype, or sun-printing. We harvested bits of backyard vegetation and laid it on sun-print paper to bask in the sun’s glory. The process turned drying leaves and flower petals into skeletal remains. The resulting blueprinted designs formed the basis of six unique posters. All six are on display tonight in Richardson’s foyer. Special thanks to our own gifted designer and violinist, Lauren Dreier. Princeton University’s Print and Mail Services did wonderful work in their print reproduction.

The story behind Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain involves witches gathering up on the mountain to revel and talk sinful gossip. They await the arrival of Satan and dance to glorify him. Surreal shadows and supernatural spirits dominate until, eventually, church bells sound from afar and disperse the spirits before daybreak. Disney’s original animated movie Fantasia popularized this satanic music. Notably, that version of the music was an adaptation made by Mussorgsky’s friend, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1886, after the composer’s death.

American composer Edward MacDowell is best known for the piano piece, “To a Wild Rose.” His romantic musical style worked well in symphonic settings, including his several programmatic orchestral suites. “In the Haunted Forest” opens the first collection. Besides his dark orchestration, where he gives the lower-range instruments prominence, the music is filled with chromatic runs and stark outlines of the “tritone,” historically known as the devil’s interval.

Bedřich Smetana’s Má Vlast (My Fatherland) is a set of six symphonic poems based on Bohemian history and landscape, and the second work, Vltava, or “The Moldau,” is an enduring favorite. The great river Vltava flows its course through the Bohemian countryside and forest before entering the heart of Prague where its banks are crossed by bridges and hugged by historic architecture, including Vyšehrad, the former castle of Bohemian kings. In 1880 Smetana offered this programmatic guide to Vltava:

Two springs pour forth their streams in the shade of the Bohemian forest, one is warm and gushing, the other cool and tranquil. Their waves, joyfully flowing over their rocky beds, unite and sparkle in the morning sun. The forest brook, rushing on, becomes the river Moldau, which, with its waters speeding through Bohemia’s valleys, grows into a mighty stream. It flows through dense woods from which come the joyous sounds of the chase, and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer and nearer.

It flows through emerald meadows and lowlands, where a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dancing. At night, in its shining waves, wood and water nymphs hold their revels, and in these waves are reflected many a fortress and castle—witnesses of the bygone splendor of chivalry and the vanished martial fame of days that are no more. At the Rapids of St. John the stream speeds on, winding its way through cataracts and hewing the path for its foaming waters through the rocky chasm into the broad river bed, in which it flows on in majestic calm toward Prague, welcomed by time-honored Vyšehrad, to disappear in far distance from the poet’s gaze.

The 2010 Dreamworks Animation film How to Train Your Dragon is a timeless coming-of-age film that depicts the life of Norse teenager Hiccup and his newfound dragon companion Toothless. John Powell composes an engaging score that not only plays on the boldness of Viking mysticism, but the wonder, romance, and adventure woven into the film. This arrangement features motifs from “This to Berk”, “Dragon Battle”, “Test Drive” and “Romantic Flight”.

Jacques Offenbach turned the Orpheus myth on its head with his comic opera Orpheus in the Underworld, originally from 1858. Offenbach’s first version had only a brief overture and a Viennese colleague, Carl Binder, extended it with melodies and dance tunes, including the music-hall favorite, the “Can-Can.” We hope you enjoy our program!

(special thanks to Amelia Brown for her note on How to Train your Dragon)