Program Notes PDF - The Grant Park Music Festival

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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, D8 2011 Program Notes, Book 4 2011 Program Notes, Book 4 D9
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 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 2011 Program Notes, Book 4 D11
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