MENDELSSOHN & NEEDLEMAN
Her previous appointments include Chief Conductor of the Flanders Symphony Orchestra( 2019 – 20 / 2024 – 25), Principal Conductor of Cappella Academica( 2006 – 2011), Kapellmeister at Komische Oper Berlin( 2012 – 2016), and Music Director for Theater Basel( 2019 – 20). With the Flanders Symphony Orchestra, Poska continues her recording of the complete Beethoven Symphony cycle for the Fuga Libera label.
Katherine Needleman
Katherine Needleman
Katherine Needleman joined the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as principal oboist in 2003, the same year she won first prize at the International Double Reed Society’ s Gillet-Fox Competition. As soloist, she has appeared with The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, the Richmond Symphony, the Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra, the Haddonfield Symphony, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Columbia, in addition to her frequent appearances with the Baltimore Symphony. She has performed as guest principal oboist with the New York Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New Zealand, and San Diego.
Devoted to the music of our time, Ms. Needleman has premiered numerous works and has commissioned works by Luis Prado, Cha-Yu Hsu, and David Ludwig. She gave the American premiere of Ruth Gipps’ Oboe Concerto, conducted and played the American premiere of Brenno Blauth’ s Concertino, and gave the West Coast premiere of Christopher Rouse’ s Oboe Concerto with Marin Alsop conducting.
Ms. Needleman began her Lockdown Oboe Solo Concerts during COVID-19 quarantine which covered a broad survey of repertoire for oboe solo from the past 100 years. These broadcasted performances reached an audience of 75,000 and growing.
A Baltimore native, Ms. Needleman attended high school at the Baltimore School for the Arts, but left early to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She served on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University for 15 years and is currently on faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller
Béla Bartók
Born: March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary( which later became Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) Died: September 26, 1945, in New York City
ROMANIAN FOLK DANCES [ 1915, ORCH. 1917 ]
As a recent graduate of the Budapest Academy of Music, Béla Bartók grew fascinated by the folk music of his homeland, a region where national borders shifted depending on political developments. While spending six months of 1904 in the resort village of Gerlice Puszta in northern Hungary( now Ratkó, Slovakia), he became entranced by the songs he overheard being sung by a Transylvanian housekeeper. He notated some of them, and several months later he wrote to his sister,“ Now I have a new plan: to collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to elevate them, adding the best possible piano accompaniment, to the level of art-song.”
Within months he published his first such effort, a group of Transylvanian and Hungarian pieces, and after that there was no turning back. By 1906 he began to collect Slovak folk music and two years later music from Romania; his Romanian collection on its own would eventually reach 3,400 melodies. Later research trips would bring him into direct contact with folk music of Ruthenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and North Africa.
Beginning in 1909, his Romanian friend Ion Bușiția helped plan these trips, and it is to him that Bartók accordingly dedicated his Romanian Folk Songs, composed in 1915 as piano solos. He orchestrated and slightly revised the set two years later. These are pieces like those described in his letter to his sister— intact melodies accompanied by original harmonizations. One of his most frequently performed works, Romanian Folk Dances is also heard in various transcriptions, most notably an arrangement for violin and piano by violinist Zoltán Székely, who performed it often with the composer. Bartók initially titled this suite Romanian Folk Dances from Hungary, reflecting the fact that when he collected the pieces in Transylvania that region was within Hungarian borders. After the Treaty of Trianon redrew the map, he renamed the set simply Romanian Folk Dances. Its short movements are to be played without a break. Apart from the concluding two-section dance, each movement uses a melody from a different region of Transylvania, and together they display quite an array of melodic-harmonic modes— Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Aeolian, as well as more exotic modes of seemingly Arabic descent.
Instrumentation: Two flutes( one doubling piccolo), two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and strings.
Bohuslav Martinů
Born: December 8, 1890, in Polička, Bohemia( today Czechia) Died: August 28, 1959, in Liestal, near Basel, Switzerland
CONCERTO FOR OBOE AND ORCHESTRA [ 1955 ] In 1923, Bohuslav Martinů left his native
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