Program Notes: March 2, 2025
Luis Serrano Alarcón - Angelita
The composer has written that he composed this pasodoble (Spanish march) "in memory of my grandmother Ángeles, on the centenary of her birth (1912-2012). With all my love."
Yasuhide Ito - Arietta
Premiered on 3rd December 2024 by Senzoku Gakuen College of Music Green-Tie Wind Ensemble, conducted by Luis Serrano Alarcon, Arietta for Wind Ensemble was designed as a five-minute intermezzo in a slow tempo to be performed between Alarc6n's dramatic and passionate works. Arietta is of moderate difficulty, written with educational purposes in mind by fostering expressive playing in wind ensembles.
The composition emphasizes awareness of harmony and non-harmonic notes, phrasing which incorporates anacruses, natural agogics derived from these elements, beautiful soft playing, delicate dynamic shifts, percussion that enhances tonal colour, musical structure, and attentive listening to other voices.
In contrast to increasingly technique-focused pieces that dominate today's wind ensemble repertoire, Arietta invites listeners to enjoy a gentler, more introspective kind of music. As the introductory motif unfolds, one may catch glimpses of familiar melodies. I hope it conveys both my affection for and a homage to wind music.
The instrumentation follows the formation recommended by the All Japan Band Association for wind band competition test pieces, allowing for performances by both smaller ensembles and full-sized wind bands.
Luis Serrano Alarcón - Third Symphony “Jalupe” for Wind Orchestra
I. From a place too far away
II. Crazy nights collage
III. “The only immortality you and I may share”
It is impossible to represent, in just 25 minutes of music, all the feelings, love and admiration I felt for my brother Fernando. But, after his death in February 2022 and several months of painful mourning, I felt the need to do something in his honor and in his memory. Thus the idea of writing my third symphony was born. This is not intended to be a funeral work, rather, it wants to be the opposite: a song to life and to the greatness of the human being represented in the figure of my brother.
The work is written in three movements. The place too far away to which the first of them alludes is, evidently, childhood. A childhood so far away that it is lost in memory and that I have been able to recover from old photos in which I appear with my brother: It is our shared childhood, in which that powerful bond of brotherhood was forged that accompanied us throughout our lives.
The crazy nights of the second movement are those of our youth: Nights of festivals, of parties, of an overflowing joy that seemed to have no end. The remembrances crowd into my memory in torrents like a disordered collage. The soundscape that accompanies these images mixes, without apparent control, rhythms that go from swing to flamenco, in a varied amalgam that represents the multiple faces of happiness.
The quote that gives title to the third movement is the last sentence of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. This movement, a tribute to man in all his plenitude, is basically a theme with four variations of very different character. After the fourth, the organ's appearance gives way to the sung exposition of the theme, an allegorical construction that gives voice to those who have left.
A final presentation of the theme in a powerful tutti constitutes, together with the previously sung part, the absolute climax of the composition. The work closes with a grand coda on the F pedal of exactly 47 bars. The last of a long list of symbolic details hidden throughout the composition.