Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

Friday, June 12, 2009
GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL
him. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ Cold comfort. But after all is said and done, the others are
right.” Though Bernstein thrived on the collaborative theatrical process at that time in his life (West
Side Story appeared three years later), he never returned to the film studio. On the Waterfront was his
only movie score.
On the Waterfront, the story of Terry, a longshoreman (played by Brando) who defies the racketeers
who had previously controlled him, enjoyed enormous success when it was released, earning
seven Academy Awards, including those for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress
(Eva Marie Saint) and Best Director (Elia Kazan). Bernstein, however, was not content to have his
music (which he insisted “had been planned as a composition with a beginning, middle and end”)
remain in the background, and in 1955 he extracted from it a Symphonic Suite for large orchestra
based on the half-dozen thematic ideas from which he wove the tightly integrated movie score. A
broad horn melody (used in the film for the main title) opens the Suite, and recurs several times as
a connective device. The following sections of the Suite, played without pause, are a powerful Presto
barbaro led by the percussion (heard in the film to anticipate or heighten the scenes of violence);
a warmly lyrical melody introduced by the solo flute (associated with the girl whose love is largely
responsible for converting Terry to the forces of good); and a ferocious Allegro non troppo (which
accompanies the fight scene between Terry and the racketeer, Johnny Friendly). The opening horn
theme returns in a transfigured setting to close both the Suite and the movie, where it underlines
Terry’s heroic walk to victory. The last measures, however, are marked by discordant cries from the
full orchestra that recall the bitterness and suffering which characterize the story and preclude the
conventional happy ending.
The Song of the Forests, Op. 81 (1949)
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Shostakovich’s Song of the Forests is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English
horn, three clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, nine trumpets, nine trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion, two harps and strings. The performance time is 37 minutes. This
is the first performance of the work by the Grant Park Orchestra.
Much of the cultural and political history of Soviet Russia can be read
from the events and creations of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life. His music
of the 1920s — the impudent First Symphony, the satiric opera The Nose, the jingoistic Second
and Third Symphonies — reflects the youthful exuberance and artistic avant-gardism of the first
decade of the Soviet regime. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin emerged victorious from the
scramble for political power, and he solidified his dictatorship with the purges of the 1930s. Art and
music did not escape Stalin’s repressions, and the vigorous, experimental styles of the preceding
decade were attacked as “bourgeois decadence” and “formalistic.” Outright condemnation came
upon Shostakovich in early 1936, when his lurid modernist opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which
had been performed successfully dozens of times in Leningrad and Moscow following its premiere
in 1934, incited Stalin’s vitriol. Stalin stormed out of a performance in Moscow, and within days
an article in the Communist Party’s official newspaper, Pravda, perhaps written by Stalin himself,
denigrated the opera as “Chaos Instead of Music.” Shostakovich, reeling from the blow, withdrew
Lady Macbeth and his Fourth Symphony, already in rehearsal, and produced the Fifth Symphony in
1937 as “an artist’s response to just criticism.”
Welcomed back into the fold of repentant artists, Shostakovich became the leading Soviet
composer during World War II. His Seventh Symphony, which recorded the misery and hopedfor
triumph of the Russians in Leningrad under the ghastly Nazi siege, was a symbol of Russian
courage and heroism to those at home and abroad, and it gained a Stalin Prize for the composer in
1942. The brooding Eighth Symphony (1943) and the sardonic Ninth (1945) met with less official
approval, however, largely because they eschewed blatant patriotism at the time of the defeat of
Germany. Again, in 1948, Shostakovich’s music was denounced, this time as “neo-classic” and “an
escape from reality.” (The Soviet bureaucracy never gave clear definitions for any of these censorious
terms.) Rather than a specifically artistic reason behind this condemnation, which also included
Program Notes A23