Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

GrantParkMusicFestival
Seventy-seventh Season
Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus
Carlos Kalmar, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor
Christopher Bell, Chorus Director
Jennifer Koh Returns
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 6:30 p.m.
Jay Pritzker Pavilion
Grant Park orchestra
Carlos Kalmar, Conductor
Jennifer Koh, Violin
BRITTEN Violin Concerto, Op. 15
Moderato con moto
Vivace
Passacaglia: Andante lento
Played without pause
Jennifer Koh
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68
Un poco sostenuto — Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Un poco allegretto e grazioso
Adagio — Allegro non troppo, ma con brio
The Grant Park Music Festival gratefully acknowledges
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for its generous grant
in support of general operations and this evening’s concert.
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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,
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2011 Program Notes, Book 4 D9

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GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL
mostly descending phrases. The orchestra takes over the main theme to provide a transition to
the second subject, which is constructed from extensive elaborations of the rhythms and intervals
inherent in the motto. A climax is built from this material in the development section before the
recapitulation begins with roles reversed from the exposition: the upper strings play the main theme
while the soloist hammers out aggressive permutations of the motto. The second subject is omitted
in the recapitulation, but the violin reclaims the main theme in the coda, intoning it musingly
above a sparse accompaniment of timpani, harp and plucked strings. The second movement is
a driving, virtuosic, slightly sinister scherzo for which the more relaxed central section provides
formal and expressive contrast. A brilliant cadenza that recalls the timpani motto and the main
theme from the first movement serves as a bridge to the finale. The somber closing movement is
a passacaglia, a formal technique using a series of variations on a short, recurring melody that was
highly favored by Baroque composers but which fell into disuse with the changed requirements of
the music of the Classical era. Britten fitted this passacaglia with nine variations on a stern scalar
melody, and gave the music a serious emotional cast that seems to have reflected his sorrow over
the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, which reached its bloody climax when he was completing
the Concerto. “It is at times like these,” he said, “that work is so important — so that people can
think of other things than blowing each other up! ... I try not to listen to the radio more than I can
help.” Though Benjamin Britten was only 27 when he composed his Violin Concerto, the work
shows that he had already become a master of reflecting the human condition in music of technical
mastery and emotional depth.
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1855-1876)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus contrabassoon,
four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. The performance
time is 45 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony
on August 15, 1937, with Hans Lange conducting.
Brahms, while not as breathtakingly precocious as Mozart, Mendelssohn
or Schubert, got a reasonably early start on his musical career: he had produced
several piano works (including two large sonatas) and a goodly number of songs by the age of
nineteen. In 1853, when Brahms was only twenty, Robert Schumann wrote an article for the widely
distributed Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, his first contribution to that journal in a decade, hailing
Brahms as the savior of German music, the rightful heir to the mantle of Beethoven. Brahms was
extremely proud of Schumann’s advocacy and he displayed the journal with great joy to his friends
and family when he returned to his humble Hamburg neighborhood after visiting Schumann in
Düsseldorf, but there was the other side of Schumann’s assessment as well, that which placed an
immense burden on Brahms’ shoulders.
Brahms was acutely aware of the deeply rooted traditions of German music extending back not
just to Beethoven, but even beyond him to Bach and Schütz and Lassus. His knowledge of Bach was
so thorough, for example, that he was asked to join the editorial board of the first complete edition
of the works of that Baroque master. He knew that, having been heralded by Schumann, his compositions,
especially a symphony, would have to measure up to the standards set by his forebears.
At first he doubted that he was even able to write a symphony, feeling that Beethoven had nearly
expended all the potential of that form, leaving nothing for future generations. “You have no idea,”
Brahms lamented, “how it feels to hear behind you the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.”
Encouraged by Schumann to undertake a symphony (“If one only makes the beginning, then
the end comes of itself,” he cajoled), Brahms made some attempts in 1854, but was unsatisfied
with the symphonic potential of the sketches, and he diverted them into the First Piano Concerto
and the German Requiem. He began again a year later, perhaps influenced by a performance of
Schumann’s Manfred, and set down a first movement, but this music he kept to himself, and even
his closest friends knew of no more than the existence of the manuscript. Seven years passed before
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he sent this movement to Clara, Schumann’s widow, to seek her opinion. With only a few reservations,
she was pleased with this C minor sketch, and encouraged Brahms to hurry on and finish the
rest so that it could be performed. Brahms, however, was not to be rushed. Eager inquiries from
conductors in 1863, 1864 and 1866 went unanswered. It was not until 1870 that he hinted about
any progress at all beyond the first movement.
The success of the superb Haydn Variations for orchestra of 1873 seemed to convince Brahms
that he could complete his initial symphony, and in the summer of 1874 he began two years of labor
— revising, correcting, perfecting — before he signed and dated the score of the First Symphony in
September 1876. He was at work right up to the premiere, making alterations after each rehearsal.
The C minor Symphony met with a good but not overwhelming reception. It was considered by
some to be stern and ascetic, lacking in melody (!). One critic suggested posting signs in concert
halls warning: “Exit in case of Brahms.” But Brahms’ vision was greater than that of his audiences,
and some time was needed by listeners to absorb the manifold beauties of this work. It is a serious
and important essay (“Composing a symphony is no laughing matter,” according to Brahms), one
that revitalized the symphonic sonata form of Beethoven and combined it with the full contrapuntal
resources of Bach, a worthy successor to the traditions Brahms revered. In the years since its
premiere, it has become the most performed of Brahms’ symphonies and one of the most cherished
pieces in the orchestral literature.
The success and popularity of the First Symphony are richly deserved. It is a work of supreme
technical accomplishment and profound emotion, of elaborate counterpoint and beautiful melody.
Even to those who know its progress intimately, it reveals new marvels upon each hearing. The first
movement begins with a slow introduction in 6/8 meter energized by the heart-beats of the timpani
supporting the full orchestra. The violins announce the upward-bounding main theme in the faster
tempo that launches a magnificent, seamless sonata form. The second movement starts with a
placid, melancholy song led by the violins. After a mildly syncopated middle section, the bittersweet
melody returns in a splendid scoring for oboe, horn and solo violin. The brief third movement, with
its prevailing woodwind colors, is reminiscent of the pastoral serenity of Brahms’ earlier Serenades.
The finale begins with an extended slow introduction based on several pregnant thematic ideas.
The first, high in the violins, is a minor-mode transformation of what will become the main theme
of the finale, but here broken off by an agitated pizzicato passage. A tense section of rushing scales
is halted by a timpani roll leading to the call of the solo horn, a melody originally for Alphorn
that Brahms collected while on vacation in Switzerland. The introduction concludes with a noble
chorale intoned by trombones and bassoons, the former having been held in reserve throughout
the entire Symphony just for this moment. The finale proper begins with a new tempo and one of
the most famous themes in the repertory, a stirring hymn-like melody that resembles the finale of
Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony. (When a friend pointed out this affinity to Brahms he shot back,
“Any fool can see that!”) The movement progresses in sonata form, but without a development section.
The work closes with a majestic coda in the brilliant key of C major featuring the trombone
chorale of the introduction in its full splendor.
Of Brahms’ symphonies, and this one in particular, Lawrence Gilman wrote, “The essential
fact to remember and to celebrate about Brahms is that he possessed not only the mechanisms of
the grand style, but that he was able to exert it as a vehicle for ideas of authentic greatness, and he
achieved this miracle with a continence, a sense of balance and proportion, an instinct for the larger
contours as well as the finer adjustments of musical design, that were almost unerring.”
©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
2011 Program Notes, Book 4 D13