Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

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Friday, June 12, 2009 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Too Hot Toccata (1996) Aaron Jay Kernis (born in 1960) Kernis’s Too Hot Toccata is scored for timpani, piccolo, flute, two oboes, eb clarinet, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano and strings. The performance time is six minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed the Toccata on June 29, 2007, Carlos Kalmar conducting. “I want to write music that is visceral, that is moving, and that is impeccably put together. I don’t want classical music to be a passive experience. I want it to have as much impact as the best rock concerts.” Aaron Jay Kernis, who distilled the essence of his art in these words, is very much a composer for the turn of the millennium — eclectic, brazen, exuberant, aggressive, plugged-in. “I want everything to be included in music,” he says, “soaring melody, consonance, tension, dissonance, drive, relaxation, color, strong harmony and form — and for every possible emotion to be elicited actively by the passionate use of these elements.” Passion, laced with chutzpah, marked his earliest recognition by the music world: when Jacob Druckman, his teacher at Yale and then Composer-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic, scheduled an open reading of Kernis’ Dream of the Morning Sky at the Philharmonic’s Horizons Festival of new music in June 1983, Kernis vigorously defended his handling of the orchestra after the conductor, Zubin Mehta, criticized it from the podium. Audience and critics were won over, and Kernis was news. Aaron Jay Kernis was born in Philadelphia on January 15, 1960, and started teaching himself piano and violin at age twelve; he began composing soon thereafter. He took his professional training at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (with John Adams), the Manhattan School of Music (Elias Tanenbaum and Charles Wuorinen), Yale (Morton Subotnik, Bernard Rands and, principally, Jacob Druckman) and the American Academy in Rome; he was appointed to the faculty of the Yale School of Music in 2003. Since his coming-out with Dream of the Morning Sky at the New York Philharmonic concert in 1983, Kernis has created an impressive catalog: significant scores for orchestra (three symphonies, New Era Dance, Invisible Mosaic III, Musica Celestis, a double concerto for guitar and violin, a concerto for English horn titled Colored Field); numerous compositions for varied chamber ensembles; pieces for piano, organ and accordion; and many works for solo voices and for chorus. He was Composer-in-Residence with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra from 1993 to 1996; he began a similar post with the Minnesota Orchestra in September 1998. In 1998, Kernis won the Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2, “Musica Instrumentalis”; his most recent recognition is the University of Louisville’s prestigious Grawemeyer Award for 2002 for the cello concerto Colored Field. Among his other distinctions are the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Bearns Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Tippett Award, an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and awards from BMI and ASCAP, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, the Koussevitzky, Naumburg and Fromm foundations, American Public Radio and others. He fulfilled commissions for works for two significant occasions in the year 2000: one for the centennial celebrations of the Philadelphia Orchestra; the other, from Michael Eisner and the Disney Corporation, observing the arrival of the new millennium. In February 2000, his “permanently installed ambient music” for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s Museum of Natural History, titled Cosmic Cycle, was first heard. In 1995, Kernis signed an exclusive recording contract with Decca/London, which has released several highly acclaimed albums of his music. His recent works include Color Wheel, commissioned for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s opening concert at the new Kimmel Center on December 15, 2001. Kernis’ current commissions include works for his residency with the Minnesota Orchestra, a toy piano concerto for Margaret Leng Tan, and a new opera for Santa Fe Opera. Too Hot Toccata, written in 1996 to mark the end of Kernis’ residency with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, is a brilliant reworking of the finale of his Double Concerto for Violin, Guitar and Program Notes A21
GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Friday, June 12, 2009 Orchestra, jointly commissioned by that ensemble, the Aspen Music Festival and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Sharon Isbin. The toccata is an old keyboard form meant to show off the skill of the performer — the Italian word “toccare” means “to touch” the keys in a virtuosic fashion — and Kernis said that his Too Hot Toccata “features just about all of the principal players and treats all of the various orchestral sections as soloists. There is also a horribly difficult honky-tonk piano solo, as well as a fiendish clarinet solo and a big part for the piccolo trumpet, in addition to a lot of virtuoso percussion writing. The music is a little hyperactive — very high-energy and quite out-of-control, but with a slower middle section for balance.” A22 Program Notes Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront (1954) Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) Bernstein’s Suite from On the Waterfront is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings. The performance time is 23 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed the Suite on July 1, 1967, Samuel Krachmalnick conducting. By early 1954, when Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel first approached him about writing the score for a new film, Leonard Bernstein had firmly established himself on the American musical scene as both conductor and composer. He had served as Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Music Director of the New York City Symphony and Musical Advisor to the Israel Philharmonic. As a composer, he had won the New York Music Critics Circle Award for his “Jeremiah” Symphony, and had completed his Second Symphony (“The Age of Anxiety”) and the ballets Fancy Free and Facsimile, as well as the scores for two Broadway shows (On the Town and Wonderful Town). During the middle 1950s, he was on the faculties of Brandeis University and the Tanglewood Music Festival, and was much in demand as a guest conductor in Europe and America, having created a sensation in December 1953 as the first American to conduct at La Scala. Initially, Bernstein turned down Spiegel’s offer to supply the music for On the Waterfront, the film based on Budd Schulberg’s gritty novel about the docks protection rackets, but after seeing a screening of the work print in February 1954, he agreed to undertake the project. He took a leave of absence from his post at Brandeis, and moved to Hollywood. (It was not his first trip to the West Coast. In 1945 the star-struck Bernstein had taken a screen test to play the lead in a Hal Wallis movie about Tchaikovsky that was never made.) In an essay titled “Upper Dubbing, Calif.” that appeared in his book The Joy of Music (the thirdfloor room at Columbia Studios where sounds and images were mixed was known as “Upper Dubbing”), Bernstein wrote, “When I was first shown a rough cut of the picture I thought it a masterpiece of direction; and Marlon Brando seemed to me to give the greatest performance I had ever seen him give, which is saying a good deal. I was swept away by my enthusiasm into accepting the commission to write the score, although I had thereto resisted all such offers on the grounds that it is a musically unsatisfactory experience for a composer to write a score whose chief merit ought to be its unobtrusiveness.... But all such thoughts were drowned in the surge of excitement I felt upon first seeing this film. I heard music as I watched: that was enough.... Day after day I sat at a movieola, running the print back and forth, measuring in feet the sequences I had chosen for music, converting feet into seconds by mathematical formula, making homemade cue sheets; and every time I wept at the same speeches, chuckled at the same gestures. This continued right through the composing, orchestrating and recording of the music.... I was fortunate to be admitted to the dubbing sessions; I am told that usually the composer’s work is finished on the recording stage. By this time, I had become so involved in each detail of the score that it seemed to me perhaps the most important part of the picture. I had to keep reminding myself that it is really the least important part, that a spoken line covered by music is a line lost, and by that much a loss to the picture, while a bar of music completely obliterated by speech is only a bar of music lost and not necessarily a loss to the picture.... And so the composer sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting, be it with a heavy heart, the inevitable loss of a good part of his score. Everyone tries to comfort
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Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

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