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Geneva Concerts Presents:

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Thursday, 7 March 2002, 8:15 PM

Syracuse Symphony Orchestra

Daniel Hege, Music Director

A Tribute To Richard Rodgers
Celebrating his 100th Anniversary

Grant Cooper, Resident Conductor
Lisa Vroman, Soprano
Douglas Webster, Baritone

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The Program

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Rodgers & Hammerstein: Selections from Flower Drum Song
Rodgers & Hammerstein: Sound of Music from Sound of Music
Rodgers & Hammerstein: Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific
Rodgers & Hart: Where or When from Babes in Arms
Rodgers & Hart: I Wish I Were In Love Again from Babes in Arms
Rodgers & Hart: My Romance from Jumbo
Rodgers & Hart: There's A Small Hotel from On Your Toes
Rodgers & Hammerstein: Selections from King & I
Rodgers & Hammerstein: Shall We Dance from King & I

Intermission

Rodgers & Hammerstein: Carousel Waltz
Rodgers & Hammerstein: Soliloquy from Carousel
Rodgers & Hammerstein: If I Loved You from Carousel
Lerner & Loewe: Selections from My Fair Lady
Rodgers & Hammerstein: All-er-nothing from Oklahoma!
Rodgers & Hammerstein: People Will Say We're In Love from Oklahoma!

Grant Cooper

Resident Conductor Grant Cooper is currently in his fifth season with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. He leads Classics, Pops, Family, and Stained Glass concerts as well as educational, regional and summer park performances, and the annual production of The Nutcracker.

In addition to his work with the SSO, Mr. Cooper is Artistic Director and Conductor of the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra and a Professor of Music at Ithaca College. He is also artistic director of the Anchorage Festival of Music in Alaska and the Fredonia Bach and Beyond Festival.

A native of New Zealand, Mr. Cooper holds a degree in pure mathematics from the University of Auckland and a master of music degree from the University of Tulsa. He held a Tanglewood Fellowship and received several awards from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand. Mr. Cooper has served as music director of the Fredonia Chamber Players, the Penfield Symphony Orchestra, and the Empire State Ballet. Recent appearances as guest conductor have included the orchestras of Rochester, Buffalo, Spokane, Kansas City, and the Skaneateles Festival. This season he will return to Ottawa, Canada for the fifth successive year to conduct Thirteen Strings, a chamber music orchestra. He will also conduct two programs with the Stamford Symphony. Last season Mr. Cooper made his debut with Syracuse Opera, conducting Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.

Lisa Vroman

Guest soprano Lisa Vroman, who grew up in Adams, NY, recently starred on PBS as Johanna in Sweeney Todd in Concert, with Patti Lupone, George Hearn and the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus. Last year she starred on Broadway as Christine in The Phantom of the Opera. She was guest star of another PBS Special Hey, Mr. Producer!, the London Royal Gala Benefit honoring Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Ms. Vroman garnered Theatre Critics Awards as Christine in The Phantom of the Opera in a record-setting run in San Francisco. The first to play both Fantine and Cosette in Les Miserables, Ms. Vroman also appeared as Lucy Brown in The Threepenny Opera at The American Conseratory Theatre (ACT), and as Laurie Moss in Aaron Copland's The Tender Land at the Cabrillo Music Festival. She has performed with the Greater Miami Opera, Lake George Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, and has starred regionally as Eliza in My Fair Lady, Maria in West Side Story, Guenevere in Camelot, and Carrie in Carousel.

This versatile soloist has had appearances with the San Francisco, Chicago, Utah, Phoenix, Syracuse, Vancouver, Detroit, and National Symphony Orchestras, with a repertoire ranging from Broadway to Stravinsky. She has appeared in concert with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, composer Stephen Schwartz, organist David Higgs, and The Empire Brass Quintet, and has also toured with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Ms. Vroman's first solo CD is entitled, Broadway Classic. She can be heard with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra on a new Debussy recording, Arabesque, and is featured on Christmas Center Stage, a benefit recording for pediatric AIDS in the Bay Area. A George London Competition Grant winner, and the 1999 Minerva award recipient from the Potsdam State University Alumni Association, New York, she has sung for Queen Elizabeth, former President Clinton, and former Vice President Gore.

Douglas Webster

Douglas Webster began his association with the music of Leonard Bernstein in 1988, singing the role of the Celebrant in Mass for the composer's 70th birthday gala at the Tanglewood Festival. Now considered the foremost interpreter of Bernstein's Mass he has produced, directed or starred in productions across the country as well as the premiers in Spain, Lithuania and at the Vatican. Mr. Webster has also performed the music of Bernstein with the Oregon Symphony, Opera Illinois (West Side Story), the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and was featured as the opening singer for the Wall to Wall Bernstein marathon concert at New York's Symphony Space. While appearing in Les Misérables (Broadway, National Tour), Mr. Webster was awarded the Concert Artists Guild prize and the Joy In Singing Award for classical vocalists. Over the past two seasons, he has been presented in over 100 solo appearances across the U.S. with acclaimed Hollywood pianist Lincoln Mayorga. The duo recently recorded Schumann's Dichterliebe for Yamaha and Song Recital - Alive in America for Town Hall Records. His other recordings include Telarc Records A Disney Spectacular with Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops, and the Koch Records release of Aaron Copland's opera, The Tender Land.

Mr. Webster is artistic director of the American Singer Seminar, a program which brings accomplished performers together with younger singers who wish to pursue a career in musical theater. In addition to the two-week summer program in Breckenridge, Colorado, week-long workshops will be presented in New York and Boca Raton this Spring.

Richard Rodgers

Richard Rodgers career as a composer spanned over 50 years. He was only 14 when he wrote his first song, and went on to master, first with Lorenz Hart, then with Oscar Hammerstein, over 40 unforgettable musicals for the stage, including Poor Little Ritz Girl, By Jupiter, Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music.

Rodgers collaborated with Lorenz Hart to produce 28 stage musicals, one night club revue, eight film musicals, and one non-musical play. He teamed up with Hammerstein in 1942, and the two went on to create nine stage musicals, one film musical, and one television musical.

Rodgers was born in New York, where he attended Public School 10 and DeWitt Clinton High School. By the time he entered Columbia University in the fall of 1919, he had already created a Broadway musical with Hart called, A Lonely Romeo.

In 1921, Rodgers left Columbia to attend the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School of Music), where he studied for three years. Despite the modest success of Poor Little Ritz Girl, Rodgers and Hart found it difficult to interest Broadway producers in their songs, but their luck changed in 1925 when the Theatre Guild signed them to furnish the score for a revue called The Garrick Gaieties. From this moment on they became one of the most prolific songwriting teams in the theatre.

From 1931 to 1935, Rodgers and Hart worked in Hollywood writing songs for such films as the classic Love Me Tonight (1932), starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933), starring Al Jolson, and Mississippi (1935), starring Bing Crosby and W.C. Fields. In 1935, the two returned to New York, where their success continued until the death of Hart in November 1943.

The collaboration with Hammerstein came about in 1942. Their innovative and adventuresome style delighted audiences in London and in New York. Their first work, Oklahoma!, achieved a record-breaking run of 2,212 performances and won a special Pulitzer Prize for drama. Perhaps the most successful Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was 1959's The Sound of Music, winning a Tony for best musical and a Grammy for best theater album. The film version, starring Julie Andrews, won an Academy Award.

The Syracuse Symphony Orchestra

Founded with a $50,000 grant from the Gifford Foundation, conductor Karl Kritz was named the Orchestra's first music director. The artistic core of the Orchestra strengthened quickly with key musicians assuming guaranteed annual positions, and by the end of the third season, permanent chamber groups had formed within the orchestra ensemble, an idea which was later copied by most other orchestras around the country.

Kritz was succeeded in 1971 by Frederik Prausnitz and, in 1975, Christopher Keene. Shortly thereafter, the Orchestra moved into its new home, the Crouse-Hinds Concert Theater at the John H. Mulroy Civic Center. Kazuyoshi Akiyama became music director in 1985, a post he held for eight years before becoming conductor emeritus. Fabio Mechetti served as music director from 1993 to 1999. Daniel Hege became the SSO's sixth music director with the 1999-2000 season.

Now the 45th largest orchestra in the United States, the SSO performs a vast array of programs, including classics, pops, family, chamber orchestra, educational youth programs, and free summer parks concerts. In addition, the SSO presents The Nutcracker with a visiting ballet company each December and also plays for Syracuse Opera performances. This is the Orchestra's forty-first Anniversary season.

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