Mountain Festival Overture - Seth Grosshandler

Program Notes for Mountain Festival Overture The composer writes: When Cornelia Laemmli Orth asked me to write a piece for the Symphony of the Mountains, I knew that the piece would open a concert that included Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland and the Juno Concerto for Banjo and Orchestra by Béla Fleck. I also knew that Maestro Orth wanted a short and festive piece. With these guidelines, I set to work. I first created a title – “Mountain Festival Overture” – to reflect the piece’s festive nature, its opening position in the concert and its premier by the Symphony of the Mountains. I then studied the Copland and Fleck works. And then I tried to cast myself back to my youth, when the first mountains I ever saw were the Great Smoky Mountains (on a family road trip from Chicago to Florida to visit my grandparents). I remember clearly the excitement of the terrain and the lush, verdant landscapes. With this background, I created a piece that has an “A-B-A” structure. The beginning and end (the “A” sections) are fast, driving and syncopated, and the middle “B” section is slower and lyrical. The orchestration takes advantage of the very large orchestra required for the concert as a whole, and I tried to take advantage of the high range of the piccolo, the xylophone and the glockenspiel and the low range of the tuba, double bass and contrabassoon, as well as the four (!) percussion players, who play two sets of timpani, the tam-tam, triangle, marimba, xylophone, glockenspiel, crotales, temple blocks, claves, suspended cymbal, crash cymbal, snare drum, tenor drum and bass drum. I am grateful to Maestro Orth and the Symphony of the Mountains for the opportunity to write this piece, and I hope the conductor, the orchestra and the audience enjoy playing it and listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing it.