Program Note:

Bandanna is a grand operatic retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, updated and set on the Texas-Mexican border during summer 1968. Its music draws equally from influences as varied as mariachi music, the high romanticism of early Korngold, the music theater of Gershwin, and the modernist operas of Britten to conjure the lurid feel of a border town bursting with outsized sensual and religious passion.  The Overture is built several of the opera’s themes. It begins with a brass fanfare that, in the opera, is associated with the recurring cry, “Santa Maria, salve!” Immediately, piety gives way to highly syncopated music that underscores a fistfight, alternating with a poignant tune associated with the entreaty, “Dona nobis requiem.” A secondary, lyrical theme whose lyric in the opera is, “Donde esta mi querida?” or, “Where has my beloved gone?” is woven around the requiem theme. This entire section is then repeated with different orchestration and is succeeded by the opera’s grandest, most sweeping operatic theme: sung to the words, “We strike out across the river, with our lives between our teeth,” at the beginning of the opera, and again, at the end of the opera, to different words, about Desdemona, “She struck out across the river, marigolds upon her breast.” The Overture concludes as the opera does, with a coda combining the opening brass fanfare and all of the other themes culminating in a massive supplication, “Dona nobis pacem!”

The opera Bandanna, commissioned by the College Band Directors National Association and premiered in 1998, was originally scored for band. The composer created this new symphonic version for JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic in summer 2021.