HEYWARD CONDUCTS ENIGMA VARIATIONS
Kurt Weill’ s Lost in the Stars with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the world premiere of Giorgio Battistelli’ s opera, Wake for the Birmingham Opera Company.
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Jonathon studied conducting at the Boston Conservatory of Music and London’ s Royal Academy of Music. In 2023, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music; an honor reserved for Academy alumni.
Elena Urioste
Elena Urioste is a musician, writer, yogi, and entrepreneur whose passion and honesty resonate across solo and chamber music repertoire. As a soloist, she has appeared with major U. S. orchestras including the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Minnesota Orchestras, and with leading ensembles such as the London Philharmonic and BBC Symphony
Elena Urioste
Orchestra. She has performed concertos at Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw, and Royal Albert Hall, and given recitals at Wigmore Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Konzerthaus Berlin. Regularly invited to festivals including Marlboro, Ravinia, Aldeburgh, and the BBC Proms, her 2025 – 26 season features appearances with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, and the Baltimore Symphony.
Urioste’ s discography includes collaborations with pianist Tom Poster:
Franz Galo
Le Temps retrouvé( 2024), From Brighton to Brooklyn( 2022), and The Jukebox Album( 2021). She also appears on Max Richter’ s The New Four Seasons: Vivaldi Recomposed and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’ s Violin Concerto and Romance for Chineke! Records. Founder and Artistic Director of Chamber Music by the Sea, she co-directs Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, Wigmore Hall’ s Associate Ensemble since 2020, with recordings for Chandos including Transfigured( 2023), and Brahms / Le Beau piano quartets( 2024).
A graduate of the Curtis Institute and Juilliard School, Urioste was a BBC New Generation Artist( 2012 – 14). She co-founded Intermission, integrating music, movement, and mindfulness, and earned her RYT-200 yoga certification in 2019. She performs on a c. 1706 Alessandro Gagliano violin and Nicolas Kittel bow, generously loaned through the Stradivari Society.
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By Paula Maust
Ethel Smyth
Born: April 22, 1858, in Sidcup, Kent, England Died: May 8, 1944, in Woking, England
OVERTURE TO THE WRECKERS [ 1906 ]
In 1886, English composer Ethel Smyth took a walking tour of Cornwall, a Celtic nation in southwest England. Smyth was so captivated by the tales of Cornish villagers robbing ships that she returned to the region several times to visit the crime scenes and conduct interviews. In her memoirs, she recalls:“ Ever since those days I had been haunted by impressions of that strange world of more than a hundred years ago; the plundering of ships lured on to the rocks by the falsification or extinction of the coastal lights; the relentless murder of their crews; and with it all the ingrained religiosity of the Celtic population of that barren promontory.”
Smyth then engaged Henry Brewster to produce a libretto based on her notes about Cornwall, which became the opera The Wreckers. Immediately after finishing the music for the opera in 1904, Smyth began tirelessly advocating for a premiere of the work. It was five years before the first fully staged production took place in London. The Wreckers begins with a dramatic overture in which we hear music representing the myriad of plot lines and characters: there are sounds of seafaring life, Celtic songs, aural depictions of storms, and an underlying sense of foreboding terror. The final moments of the overture are particularly ominous as a series of detached, repeated chords signals the chaos that is to come.
Instrumentation: Two flutes( second doubling piccolo), piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, suspended cymbal, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, tambourine, harp, organ, and strings.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Born: August 15, 1875, in London, England Died: September 1, 1912, in Croydon, Surrey, England
VIOLIN CONCERTO IN G MINOR, OP. 80 [ 1911 ]
In his brief life, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor achieved international fame for his compositions, was appointed Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music in London, conducted performances of his music at the White House, and was the first Black conductor to direct a performance of the New York Philharmonic. Around the turn of the 20th century, Coleridge-Taylor began collaborating with Maud Powell, the first violinist trained in the U. S. to be recognized as an international performing artist. Notably, Powell made
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