rossini's Stabat Mater - The Grant Park Music Festival

Friday, July 20 and Saturday, July 21, 2012
the emerging Romantic style into this epic work, as evidenced by its subject matter,
symphonic scope and attention to dramatic and poetic content. The French public
followed intently the progress of the new piece through frequent press reports — it
was Rossini’s first opera written exclusively for Paris. From the summer of 1828, when
word of the project first surfaced, through the following spring, when several delays
were reportedly caused by prima donna incapacity (actually, Rossini was withholding
the work’s premiere to press negotiations with the government over a lucrative
contract for future — never realized — operas) until the premiere in August 1829,
William Tell kept Parisian society abuzz. Once the opera finally reached the stage, it
was hailed by critics and musicians, but disappointed the public, who felt that its sixhour
length was more entertainment than a single evening should decently hold. (The
score was greatly truncated when it was staged in later years.) Whether the new style
of the opera was one which Rossini did not wish to pursue, or whether he was drained
by two decades of constant work, or whether he just wanted to enjoy in leisure the
fortune he had amassed, William Tell was his last opera. During the remaining 39 years
of his life, he did not compose another note for the stage.
The Overture to William Tell is essentially a miniature tone poem in several
evocative sections. Peaceful dawn in the Swiss mountains is depicted by the quiet
song of the cello quintet that opens the Overture. The following furious music signifies
a violent thunderstorm. The subsequent English horn theme portrays the calm after
the tempest and the pastoral beauty of the Swiss countryside. The final section is one
of the most famous strains in symphonic music. Rossini originally wrote this theme
seven years earlier in Vienna as a quickstep march for military band, and borrowed it
for William Tell to accompany the triumphant return of the Swiss patriot troops in Act
III and to provide a blazing conclusion to this splendid Overture.
Hymn to Matter (1978)
Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988)
Leighton’s Hymn to Matter is scored for piano, timpani, percussion
and strings. The performance time is thirteen minutes. This is the
first performance of the work by the Grant Park Orchestra.
Kenneth Leighton, one of Britain’s most distinguished
mid-20th-century composers and music teachers, was born in
Wakefield, Yorkshire on October 2, 1929. He studied piano and was a chorister at
Wakefield Cathedral as a boy, and entered Queen’s College, Oxford in 1947 as a
student of classics and music; his principal composition teacher was Bernard Rose.
Upon his graduation, in 1951, he won a Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled
him to study in Rome with Goffredo Petrassi. After returning to England the following
year, Leighton taught at the Royal Naval School of Music and the University of Leeds
before joining the faculty of the University of Edinburgh in 1955. From 1968 to 1970,
he was University Lecturer in Music and Fellow of Worcester College at Oxford; he
earned his doctorate from the university in 1970. In October 1970, he was appointed
Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, a post he held until his death,
in 1988. Leighton’s distinctions included the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize (1950,
1951), Busoni Prize (1956), Trieste Prize (1965), Bernhard Sprengel Prize (1965) and
Cobbett Medal for distinguished services to chamber music (1968), as well as an
honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews (1977).
British musicologist and choir director Richard Cooke wrote that Leighton’s
compositions — an opera (Columba), two symphonies, concertos for piano, organ
and flute, a number of smaller orchestral scores, many sacred and secular vocal
works, chamber music, organ and piano pieces — are characterized by “a compelling
2012 Program Notes, Book 3 A35