Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Wednesday, August 3, 2011 Wednesday, August 3, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL
Violinist Jennifer Koh has earned a wide reputation for bringing her
probing intellectual acuity to contemporary and traditional repertoire in
equal measure. Ms. Koh is committed to exploring connections between
the pieces she plays. Accordingly, her programs often present rare and revealing
juxtapositions, offering works by composers as divergent as Mozart
and Ligeti, Schubert and Saariaho. Ms. Koh’s most recent recording
for the Cedille label, Rhapsodic Musings, released in 2010, features solo
violin works by 21st-century composers; the disc also includes a visual
component — a dynamic interpretation of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen
Verlernt for solo violin by filmmaker Tal Rosner, presented by the 2010
Tribeca Film Festival in the “Shorts: Experimental Collisions” category. Ms. Koh records regularly
for the Chicago-based Cedille label, and, in addition to Rhapsodic Musings, she recently released the
Grammy-nominated recording String Poetic. Her other Cedille recordings include an acclaimed CD
devoted to the Schumann violin sonatas plus music by such varied composers as Bach, Schubert,
Szymanowski, Martinu, Schoenberg and jazz great Ornette Coleman, and Portraits, a disc featuring
violin concertos by Szymanowski and Martinu recorded with the Grant Park Orchestra conducted
by Carlos Kalmar. A prolific recitalist, she appears frequently at major music venues and festivals,
including Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Marlboro, Wolf Trap,
Spoleto and Festival International de Lanaudiere in Canada. Born in Chicago of Korean parents,
Jennifer Koh currently resides in New York City. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and an
alumna of the Curtis Institute, where she worked with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir. Ms. Koh is
grateful to her private sponsor for the generous loan of the 1727 Ex Grumiaux Ex General DuPont
Stradivari she uses in performance. Violinist Jennifer Koh returns to the Grant Park Music Festival
for the first time since 2005. Her two most recent performances with the Grant Park Music Festival
resulted in the release of a CD, Jennifer Koh Portraits, featuring Martinu’s Violin Concerto No. 2,
Bartok’s Two Portraits and Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No 1.
Violin Concerto, Op. 15 (1938-1939)
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Britten’s Violin Concerto is scored for piccolo, two flutes, oboe, English horn,
two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion, harp and strings. The performance time is 32 minutes.
This is the first performance of this Concerto by the Grant Park Orchestra.
Benjamin Britten was 26 in 1939, and much unsettled about his life.
Though he had already produced fourteen works important enough to be
given opus numbers and a large additional amount of songs, chamber music, choral works and film
and theater scores, he felt his career was stymied both by an innate conservatism among the British
music public and by the increasingly assured threat of war in Europe. Additionally troubling was his
proclaimed pacificism in a nation girding itself for battle. In January 1939, his friends poet W.H.
Auden and novelist Christopher Isherwood left for America in search of creative stimulation and
freedom from what Auden called the English artist’s feeling of being “essentially lonely, twisted in
dying roots.” With the promise of a performance of his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge by the
New York Philharmonic in August and the prospect (never realized) of writing a score for a Hollywood
film about King Arthur, Britten decided to follow Auden, and in May he left England with
his life-long companion, the tenor Peter Pears, intent on becoming a citizen of the United States.
Since Britten and Pears planned on taking up a permanent working status, they skirted immigration
regulations by entering the United States through Canada, where they became “legal
British immigrants” and spent several pleasant weeks in Toronto establishing contact with the representatives
in that city of the composer’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. (In December 1939, Britten
composed the lighthearted Canadian Carnival for orchestra as a souvenir of his visit.) They arrived
in New York in late June, and were invited “for a weekend” by William and Elizabeth Mayer to
their home in Amityville, Long Island — except for short trips away and a brief, rowdy period with
a houseful of artists headed by Auden in Brooklyn, it was to be their principal residence until they
returned to England almost three years later. Despite frequent bouts of depression and ill health,
Britten composed freely in America, producing such important scores as the Violin Concerto, Les
Illuminations, Michelangelo Sonnets, Sinfonia da Requiem, Ceremony of Carols and the operetta Paul
Bunyan. (The Hollywood film project never materialized.)
In August 1938, several months before he left for America, Britten appeared as soloist in the
premiere of his Piano Concerto at a Promenade Concert in London. The venture went well enough
that he began a concerto for violin three months later, and carried the sketches with him when
he sailed for Canada in May 1939. He worked on the Violin Concerto in Toronto over the next
several weeks and at his home on Long Island during the summer, and finished it while vacationing
in the Quebec town of St. Jovite in September. He submitted the score for consideration to Jascha
Heifetz, who was then preparing for the December premiere in Cleveland of the Violin Concerto
that William Walton had just written for him, but the famed violinist rejected Britten’s Concerto as
unplayable (though without specifying whether his judgment arose from technical, contractual or
political considerations). Britten then contacted the Spanish virtuoso Antonio Brosa, an old friend
and fellow student of the English composer Frank Bridge with whom he had given the premiere of
his Suite for Violin and Piano (Op. 6) on a BBC broadcast in March 1936. Brosa, like Britten, had
settled in the United States with war looming in Europe, and he agreed to give the Concerto’s premiere
on March 28, 1940 with the New York Philharmonic and its music director, John Barbirolli,
another English musician then working in America. The reviews of the premiere were mixed —
“pretty violent: either pro or con,” Britten remembered — but among those who heard a distinctive
voice in this music was the American composer Elliott Carter, who wrote that “nobody could fail to
be impressed by the remarkable gifts of the composer, the size and ambition of his talent.”
The Concerto’s broad, darkly noble first movement begins with a succinct, open-interval motive
in the timpani that recurs throughout as a motto. Above the bassoon’s muttering repetitions of
the motto, the solo violin presents the main theme, a melody made from a series of short, smooth,
D8 2011 Program Notes, Book 4
2011 Program Notes, Book 4 D9