Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus
Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor
Christopher Bell, Chorus Director
Opening Night
Wednesday, June 12, 2013 at 6:30PM
Jay Pritzker Pavilion
Grant Park orchestra
Carlos Kalmar, Conductor
Stefan Jackiw, Violin
NORMAN
MOZART
Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow
Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, K. 219, “Turkish”
Allegro aperto
Adagio
Tempo di Menuetto — Allegro —
Tempo di Menuetto
Stefan Jackiw
INTERMISSION
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36
Andante sostenuto — Moderato con anima
Andantino in modo di canzona
Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato (Allegro)
Finale: Allegro con fuoco
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carlos kalmar’s biography can be found on page 8.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
American violinist STEFAN JACKIW is fast earning a reputation
on both sides of the Atlantic. Of Korean/German heritage, Jackiw
began studying the violin at the age of four; his teachers have
included Zinaida Gilels, Michèle Auclair and Donald Weilerstein.
In 2002 he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career
Grant. At age fourteen, Jackiw made a sensational debut with
the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall performing
the Mendelssohn Concerto and “took the London music world
by storm” (The Strad). In 2002 Jackiw made his debut with the
Baltimore Symphony and has become a regular guest with that orchestra and toured
with them to Japan. Elsewhere in North America, he has performed with the orchestras
of New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati, Toronto and Chicago. He also appeared with the YouTube Symphony
in Sydney at the invitation of Michael Tilson-Thomas. In recital, Stefan Jackiw has
performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Louvre, Aspen, Ravinia, Kennedy
Center, Mostly Mozart, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.
He gave the world premiere of a new work for violin and piano by American composer
David Fulmer in Carnegie Hall in November 2012. Recent highlights include concerts
with RTVE Madrid, BBC Scottish Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Tapiola Sinfonietta,
Residentie Orkest, Singapore Symphony, Malaysian Philharmonic, Adelaide, West
Australian and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, Netherlands Philharmonic and a Far
East tour with the Royal Philharmonic.
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Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow
Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash (2005)
Andrew Norman (born in 1979)
Drip ... is scored for three flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, two
bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion, piano and strings. The performance time is
five minutes. This is the first performance of Drip ... by the Grant
Park Orchestra.
In announcing Andrew Norman as one of the four emerging composers receiving
commissions through “Project 440,” a musical celebration of its fortieth anniversary
season, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra described him as “a lifelong enthusiast for
all things architectural who writes music that is often inspired by forms and ideas he
encounters in the visual world. His music draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and usually
features some combination of bright colors, propulsive energy, a healthy dose of lyricism,
and the fragmentation of musical ideas into little pieces.”
Norman was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1979 and raised in central California.
He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California Thornton
School of Music, where he studied composition with Donald Crockett and Stephen Hartke
and piano with Stewart Gordon, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, where
he was a student of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis. Norman’s orchestral
and chamber works have been commissioned and premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra,
Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival; he is currently
serving a three-year residency with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Norman’s rapidly
accumulating distinctions include fellowships from the American Academies in both Rome
and Berlin, Nissim Prize and five Morton Gould Young Composer Awards from American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Charles Ives Scholarship from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, and a BMI Student Composer Award. His string trio The
Companion Guide to Rome was named a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Drip was commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra in 2005 for their Young People’s
Concerts. Norman writes, “The process of writing it was a bit like making a tossed salad. I
chopped up sounds from the orchestra — one sound for each of the thirteen verbs in the
title — and then I tossed them all together and called it a piece.”
Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219,
“Turkish” (1775)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Mozart’s A major Violin Concerto is scored for two oboes, two
horns and strings. The performance time is 31 minutes. The
Grant Park Orchestra first performed this work on July 25, 1956,
with Izler Solomon conducting; Eudice Shapiro was the soloist.
Mozart’s five authentic Violin Concertos were all products of
a single year — 1775. At nineteen he was already a veteran of five years experience
as concertmaster of the archiepiscopal court in Salzburg, for which his duties included
not only playing, but also composing, acting as co-conductor with the keyboard player
(modern orchestral conducting was not to originate for at least two more decades), and
soloing in concertos. It was for this last function that Mozart wrote these concertos. He
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Wednesday, June 12, 2013
was, of course, a quick study at everything that he did, and each of these works builds
on the knowledge gained from its predecessors. It was with the last three (K. 216, 218,
219) that something more than simple experience emerged, however, because it was
with these compositions that Mozart indisputably entered the era of his musical maturity.
These are his earliest pieces now regularly heard in the concert hall, and the last one,
No. 5 in A major, is the greatest of the set.
The opening movement is in sonata-concerto form, but has some curious structural
experiments more associated with the music of Haydn than with that of Mozart. After the
initial presentation of the thematic material by the orchestra, the soloist is introduced
with the surprising device of a brief, stately Adagio. When the Allegro tempo resumes,
the soloist plays not the main theme already announced by the ensemble, but a new
lyrical melody for which the original main theme becomes the accompaniment. More
new material fills the remainder of the exposition. The development section is invested
with passages of dark harmonic color which cast expressive shadows across the generally
sunny landscape of the movement, and lend it emotional weight. The recapitulation calls
for restrained, elegant virtuosity from the soloist. The second movement is a graceful
song in sonatina form (sonata-allegro without development). The final movement is an
extended rondo in the style and rhythm of a minuet.
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877-1878)
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is scored for pairs of woodwinds
plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion and strings. Performance time is 44 minutes.
The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on
September 8, 1935, with Frederick Stock conducting.
The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most turbulent
time of Tchaikovsky’s life — 1877, when he met two women who forced him to evaluate
himself as he never had before. The first was the music-loving widow of a wealthy
Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck, who became the financial backer who
allowed him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory. Though
they never met, her place in Tchaikovsky’s life was enormous and beneficial.
The second woman to enter Tchaikovsky’s life in 1877 was Antonina Miliukov, a
student in one of his large lecture classes at the Conservatory who had worked herself
into a passion over her professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no special attention, and he had
quite forgotten her when he received an ardent love letter professing her flaming and
unquenchable desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky (age 37), who should have burned the
thing, answered the letter of the 28-year-old Antonina in a polite, cool fashion, but did
not include an outright rejection of her advances. He had been considering marriage
for almost a year in the hope that it would give him both the stable home life that
he had not enjoyed in the twenty years since his mother died and help dispel rumors
of his homosexuality. He believed he might achieve both these goals with Antonina.
What a welter of emotions must have gripped his heart when, just a few weeks later, he
proposed marriage to her! Inevitably, the marriage crumbled within days of the wedding
amid Tchaikovsky’s searing self-deprecation.
It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the Fourth Symphony,
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Wednesday, June 12, 2013
finishing the first three movements before Antonina began her advances; the finale was
completed by the time he proposed. Because of this chronology, the program of the
Symphony was not a direct result of his marital disaster. All that — the July wedding,
the mere eighteen days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations — postdated
the composition of the Symphony by a few months. What Tchaikovsky found in his
relationship with this woman (who died in a mental ward in 1917, still legally married to
him) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable workings of Fate in human destiny.
Tchaikovsky wrote, “The introduction [blaring brasses heard immediately in a motto
theme that recurs throughout the Symphony] is the kernel of the whole Symphony.
This is Fate, which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing to do but
to submit and vainly complain [the melancholy, syncopated shadow-waltz of the main
theme, heard in the strings]. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and lull one’s
self in dreams? [The second theme is begun by the clarinet.] But no — these are but
dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. [A brass fanfare begins the development.]
The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has
already been and gone! It is sad, yet sweet, to lose one’s self in the past. In the third
movement are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination
when one is slightly intoxicated. Military music is heard in the distance. As to the finale,
if you find no pleasure in yourself, go to the people. The picture of a folk holiday. [The
finale employs the folk song A Birch Stood in the Meadow.] Rejoice in the happiness of
others — and you can still live.”
©2013 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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2013 Program Notes, Book 1 A9