World Premiere recording of Cantus by I'lana Cotton, commissioned for the Rogue Valley Symphony as part of its 50th anniversary season 
In Cotton's own words:
“Cantus is a large-scale, single-movement work.  It was envisioned as a complex musical telling of the stories of cosmic origins and the emergence of forms.  The piece begins with an auditory landscape of motion and orchestral flurry which seems chaotic at first.  But it gradually coalesces into harmonies, and then into motives and themes.

These are rooted in a single core melody, or cantus, of 20 notes, from which the primary materials of the piece were generated.  The cantus itself appears several times throughout the work, often nearly embedded in more complex tapestries, until it finally emerges as a solo song near the end of the work.

Various themes emerge which recur and are developed throughout the piece.  The Call theme appears in a first sequence of powerful chordal phrases.  It calls the opening chaotic flurries into a section of more orderly simultaneous melodies.  These melodies (including a first embedded version of the cantus) compete and interweave freely until they are eventually brought to a focal unison cadence.

This cadence becomes the ground (in the timpani) for the Spiritus theme – a single melody of long arching contours presented in a 3-voice canon for the strings.  This gives rise to a second strong chordal theme, The Response.

A middle section is comprised of two Dances, interspersed with variations of The Response.  The first dance is a light heterophonic texture of solo voices with dumbek, an African drum.  The second has a stronger monophonic texture along with field drum and wood block.

This leads to a compression of previous materials, which gains tension as it merges towards an epic arrival point.  That moment states The Response for the final time, followed by a renewal of The Call.  The denoument reveals the cantus as it is finally presented with its original counterpoints, then as an expressive melody sung by the solo oboe.  A final Call ushers in a hint of new cycles.”

Cantus

I'lana Cotton: Cantus

Rogue Valley Symphony with Bella Hristova, violin. Recorded live at the Craterian Theater in Medford, OR, November 12, 2017. The piece was co-commissioned by a consortium of eight orchestras, including the Rogue Valley Symphony.

The composer's words on the piece:

I started working on my violin concerto right around the time I got married with Bella Hristova, who (without coincidence) is the violinist I wrote the piece for. I only know of a few concertos written by composers for first performances by their spouses, and I don’t know of any that are motivated by the idea of marriage itself, as this one is. My concerto comes with musical references to partnership, empathy, and communion, as it imagines the before, during, and after a traditional wedding ceremony.

Even though the violin concerto doesn’t tell a specific story, I couldn’t help but write something personal. Both of our backgrounds are Eastern European, and the piece is full of dance music from that part of the world; including several dances native to her native Bulgaria. And like me, Bella comes from a musical family; including her father, Yuri Chichkov, whom she never got a chance to meet before he passed away while she was still a child. Chichkov was a wonderful and well-known Russian composer, who himself wrote a violin concerto. After a year of hunting, I tracked down that concerto and quoted from his second movement at a place in my own second movement – as a way to include him in our marriage. There are lots of other quotes in the piece, but that one is the most significant to me.

The first movement “Dances” begins with a loud crash–a jarring but transformative start to something new that transitions into a waltz-like music soon after. All told there are four dances in the first movement, connected by a cadenza and concluded by a Rachenitsa in its traditional irregular meter. The second movement “Ceremony” follows the progression of the wedding ritual. A slow unraveling processional is woven throughout the fabric of this movement, ending in musical rings created by the rise and fall of the violin against solo instruments in the orchestra. The third movement “The Festival” is my version of a Krivo Horo or “Crooked Dance” that captures the way people attempt to walk home after a great party. The music is celebratory to the end, reflecting the coming together of a community inspired by two people promised to preserve each other’s well-being for the rest of their lives.

David Ludwig - Violin Concerto

Rogue Valley Symphony with Tracy Silverman, electric violin. Recorded live at Grants Pass Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass, OR, January 21, 2018. Love Song to the Sun was co-commissioned by a consortium of four orchestras, including the Rogue Valley Symphony.

Program notes by the composer:

Love Song to the Sun is a visual electric violin concerto written by and featuring Tracy Silverman. Scored for full symphony orchestra with prepared and live interactive video projections by Todd Winkler, it tells the dramatic one-day life story of a tiny bug, seen through it’s eyes.

Albert Schweitzer said, “When man learns to respect even the smallest being of creation, whether animal or vegetable, nobody has to teach him to love his fellow man.”

Although we may be at the top of the food chain, we are no more alive than any other living thing. Even a gnat has a real life, full of water, sun and air; full of meaning and intentions; full of sensations, perceptions and awareness we can’t even imagine. When we look at the world through another being’s eyes, or when we walk in someone else’s shoes, we see that they are also making their way through their own world, struggling with their own problems and enjoying their own pleasures. By focusing on something as seemingly insignificant as a gnat, it becomes a sort of parable, reminding us that everything on this planet has exactly the same right to be alive.

So we follow a gnat through its miraculous 1 day quest against the odds, driven by a simple instinct to go towards the light, to follow the radiant waves, the siren song of it’s mother, the sun. Born underwater at dawn, it eludes predators, swims upward and struggles to break the water’s surface. It metamorphoses in a cocoon under the midday sun, and then flies off into the mating swarm. In the evening, it loses its mate and offspring to a bird and then follows the moon’s reflection back into the water at night.

The work is continuous with no break, lasts about 30 minutes, and is in 2 Acts with a solo interlude in the middle and an overture at the beginning.

Overture
Act 1
Sunrise—The Mother Sun
Morning—Swimming to the Sky
Noon—Cocoon: Doorway to the Sun
Act 2
Afternoon—The Mating Swarm
Dusk—Offspring
Night—The Father Moon

Dedicated to my parents, who drove me to a lot of violin lessons.

Tracy Silverman: Love Song to the Sun

Commissioned and Premiered by the Rogue Valley Symphony. Recorded live on February 18, 2018 at Grants Pass Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass, OR.

In the composer's own words: "Even though I am all the way on the east coast, "Rogue Sparks" was a celebratory piece to write, for myself as well. I concentrated on making the orchestra sparkle with accents and colors. Those are the "sparks" that I allude to in the title. And, of course, they are "Rogue" sparks - not only in honor of the fine RVS, but also their surprising manner in how these accents and colors appear in the work. Happy 50, RVS!"

Jonathan Leshnoff: Rogue Sparks

Commissioned and Premiered by the Rogue Valley Symphony. Recorded live on April 22, 2018 at Grants Pass Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass, OR.

Music by Ethan Gans-Morse
Poetry by Tiziana DellaRovere
Narration, singing, and drumming by Brent Florendo and Dancing Spirit

How Can You Own The Sky? is a journey in four stages, from the legend of creation, through the trials of the first peoples of Southern Oregon, into the devastation of the Rogue River Wars, and finally toward a more hopeful future of peaceful reconciliation, healing of past wrongs, and a return to Native American teachings of greater harmony with our world and all its inhabitants.

The Dancing Spirit Ensemble opens by performing and original melody, The Song of the Heart, by Brent Florendo.  Brent then narrates the poetic libretto of How Can You Own the Sky by DellaRovere before each of the four corresponding sections of this symphonic poem.  The following comments paraphrase Gans-Morse’s more extensive description of the work.

THE SACRED HOOP IS CREATED deals with the myths of creation for the Native American people of the Rogue Valley.  The orchestral introduction presents two recurring characters: Solo Violin (“The Giver”) and English horn (“The Beloved”). Two main themes follow, both based on aspects of The Song of the Heart, not yet fully realized but continuously unfolding.

THE SACRED HOOP IS PRESERVED is “reminiscent of a scherzo.”  It details the struggles of the Takelma people to come into harmony with the familiar landmarks of the Rogue Valley.  When they reach that harmony with each other and the land, The Song of the Heart is presented as an English horn solo, the first time we hear it fully formed in the orchestra.

THE SACRED HOOP IS BROKEN depicts “the nightmares of the Rogue River Wars of the 1850s.”  Gans-Morse sets it as a tragic passacaglia passed throughout the orchestra.  The results reflect the outcome of the nation-wide Indian Wars, with initial mutual devastation and loss of life giving way to the forced re-settlement of the Native American population onto reservations.  The Takelma, Shasta, and Athapascan people are driven on “Oregon’s own trail of tears” to the Siletz Reservation near the coast – and The Song of the Heart seems only a distant memory.

THE SACRED HOOP IS RESTORED “Out of the ashes of seeming annihilation, ‘The Giver’ returns [once again] in the guise of the solo violin.”  The violin teaches each section of the orchestra to participate in a “new declaration of hope and longing.”  This prepares for the final triumphant return of the Dancing Spirit ensemble and The Song of the Heart – and a hoped-for “new dawn of reconciliation between all peoples of Oregon and beyond.”

Ethan Gans-Morse: How Can You Own The Sky

Recorded live at Grants Pass Performing Arts Center on December 2, 2018

Raymond Horton: Make Gentle the Life of this World

Rogue Valley Symphony
Jeffrey Biegel, piano
Recorded live at Grants Pass Performing Arts Center on January 27, 2019

Christopher Theofanidis: Piano Concerto #2

Southern Oregon's own symphony orchestra since 1967