Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor Christopher Bell, Chorus Director

Transcription

1 Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor Christopher Bell, Chorus Director Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony at 6:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker Pavilion GRANT PARK ORCHESTRA Carlos Kalmar, Conductor Roberto Díaz, Viola WALTON Viola Concerto Andante comodo Vivo, e molto preciso Allegro moderato Roberto Díaz TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36 Andante sostenuto Moderato con anima Andantino in modo di canzona Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato (Allegro) Finale: Allegro con fuoco 2015 Program Notes, Book 2 35

2 ROBERTO DÍAZ, a violist of international reputation, is President and CEO of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and former Principal Viola of the Philadelphia Orchestra. During his tenure at Curtis, Díaz has founded the highly successful Curtis On Tour program, performing chamber music side-by-side with Curtis students and other faculty and alumni of the school, overseen the construction of a significant new building that doubled the size of the school s campus, introduced classical guitar and string quartet programs, launched the public performance series Curtis Summerfest, and developed lasting collaborations with other music and arts institutions in Philadelphia and throughout the world. As a soloist, Díaz collaborates with leading conductors of our time on stages across North and South America, Europe and Asia. In addition to performing with major string quartets and pianists in chamber music series and festivals worldwide, he has toured Europe, Asia and the Americas as a member of the Díaz Trio with violinist Andrés Cárdenes and cellist Andrés Díaz; the Trio has recorded for the Artek and Dorian labels. He has also recorded music of Vieuxtemps, Leshnoff, Brahms and others on the Naxos label, Jacob Druckman s Viola Concerto with Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Philadelphia Orchestra on New World Records, and concertos by Walton and Peter Lieberson on Bridge Records. Mr. Díaz received a bachelor s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music and a diploma from Curtis, where his teacher was his predecessor at the Philadelphia Orchestra, Joseph de Pasquale. He received an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin College and was awarded an honorary membership by the national board of the American Viola Society. In the fall of 2013, Roberto Díaz became a member of the prestigious American Philosophical Society founded by Benjamin Franklin. He plays the ex-primrose Amati viola. 36 gpmf.org VIOLA CONCERTO ( ) Sir William Walton ( ) Walton s Viola Concerto is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, English horn and bass clarinet, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, harp and strings. The performance time is 27 minutes. This is the first performance of this work by the Grant Park Orchestra. After William Walton left Oxford in 1920 without a degree (excellent in music, shaky in academics), he lived in London for the next decade with the Sitwells: Osbert (poet and novelist) and Sacheverell (poet and art critic), both of whom he had met at university, and their sister, Edith (poet and critic). Not only was Walton immensely stimulated by such brilliant intellectual company, but the Sitwells generosity allowed him to escape the financial difficulties suffered by most young composers. In 1922, he wrote Façade, an iconoclastic entertainment for the Sitwells drawing room comprising musical backgrounds for some of Edith s most piquant poems. Walton s reputation as a sly enfant terrible was not diminished by his immersion in jazz during , when he said he was writing and scoring fox-trots for the Savoy Orpheus Band and working at a monumentally planned concerto for two pianofortes, jazz band and orchestra. (1924 was also the year of Gershwin s Rhapsody in Blue.) All of this music has disappeared (Walton, a slow and meticulous worker, may have destroyed it himself), but the drive and freedom of its jazz rhythms were a potent influence on his first important orchestral score, the Portsmouth Point Overture of In 1928, Walton undertook a piece for orchestra, broader in scope and more serious in expression than Portsmouth Point, whose genesis he recalled in a 1962 interview: It was [conductor Sir Thomas] Beecham who suggested my writing a viola concerto for Lionel

3 Tertis [perhaps the greatest solo violist of the early 20th century]. When it was finished [in 1929] I sent it to Tertis, who turned it down sharply by return of post, which depressed me a good deal as virtuoso violists were scarce. However, Edward Clark, who at that time was in charge of the music section of the BBC, suggested we should go to Hindemith. So I duly conducted Hindemith in it at the first performance at a Proms concert in Tertis came and was won over, and he played the work whenever he had the chance. Hindemith, of course, was the German composer Paul Hindemith, who was not only one of the 20th-century s master creative musicians but also a virtuoso performer on viola. The Concerto won an immediate success for Walton, and it was the first of his works to excite international recognition of his talent; it was chosen for performance at the International Festival of Contemporary Music at Liège in 1930, and has been regularly performed ever since. The work was revised in 1962, when Walton reduced its orchestration from triple to double woodwinds but added a harp. The Viola Concerto demonstrated a remarkable maturity of technique and expression from the 26-year-old Walton. It solves with expert craftsmanship the difficult problem of balancing orchestra and viola, whose sonority and middle-register tessitura make it so easily absorbed into the instrumental texture, by relying primarily on strands of accompanimental counterpoint rather than on homophonic block scoring. As would the later concertos for violin (1939) and cello (1956), the Viola Concerto surrounds a fast, scherzo-like central movement with music of greater introspection. The opening movement of each concerto is slow in tempo and lyrical in nature, while the finale recalls thematic material from the earlier movements to round out the composition s overall formal structure. In the style and construction of the Viola Concerto, Walton found a most satisfying meeting of tradition and modernity, one which carries forward the language and formal principles of 19th-century Romanticism while expanding them in a distinctly personal manner: Walton s style is not sentimental; but neither is it anti-romantic, wrote Sir Donald Tovey in his admiring analysis of the piece. The opening movement begins with rocking figures in the orchestral strings and clarinet as a preface to the viola s broadly lyrical main theme, whose opening interval (a minor third) is a motto from which much of the later melodic material is derived. A contrasting idea, first given by the viola above a pizzicato string accompaniment, becomes more rhythmically animated and leads into the development section, initiated with a fierce and strongly rhythmic transformation of the main theme. Motivic elements from both of the earlier themes are worked out and augmented with new material before the music softens to usher in the return of the main theme by the oboe and flute as a brief epilogue. The whole movement, wrote Sir Donald Tovey, must convince every listener [that it is] a masterpiece of form in its freedom and precision, besides showing pathos of a high order. The residue of Walton s experience with jazz is abundantly evident in the rhythmic animation of the second movement, a scherzo built from the ingenious elaborations and interweavings of three themes: a bounding, syncopated motive first given by the viola (with tiny flashing echoes in clarinet and bassoon); a quick, staccato figure in the brass; and a bold strain begun by the soloist in multiple stops. The finale is launched by an insouciant melody in the bassoon, which is soon taken up for contrapuntal discussion by the viola and some of the orchestral entourage. A transition based on a close-interval triplet figure in the viola leads to the second theme, a sad, sighing melody in almost-too-sweet double stops. The balance of the movement is given over to superbly inventive elaborations of the thematic material, and is capped by a closing section in which the themes of the finale are masterfully combined with those of the first movement. Tovey offered the following summary of Walton s Viola Concerto: The listener will become convinced that the total import of the work is that 2015 Program Notes, Book 2 37

4 of high tragedy... There are so few concertos for viola that it would be poor compliment to say that this was the finest. Any concerto for viola must be a tour de force; but this seems to me to be one of the most important modern concertos for any instrument. 38 gpmf.org SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN F MINOR, OP. 36 ( ) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ) Tchaikovsky s Symphony No. 4 is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. The performance time is 44 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on September 8, 1935, Frederick Stock conducting. The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most crucial and turbulent time of Tchaikovsky s life 1877, when he met two women who forced him to evaluate himself as he never had before. The first was the sensitive, music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck. Mme. von Meck had been enthralled by Tchaikovsky s music, and she first contacted him at the end of 1876 to commission a work. She paid him extravagantly, and soon an almost constant stream of notes and letters passed between them: hers contained money and effusive praise; his, thanks and an increasingly greater revelation of his thoughts and feelings. She became not only the financial backer who allowed him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory to devote himself to composition, but also the sympathetic soundingboard for reports on the whole range of his activities emotional, musical, personal. Though they never met, her place in Tchaikovsky s life was enormous and beneficial. The second woman to enter Tchaikovsky s life in 1877 was Antonina Miliukova, an unnoticed student in one of his large lecture classes at the Conservatory who had worked herself into a passion over her young professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no special attention, and he had quite forgotten her when he received an ardent love letter professing her flaming and unquenchable desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky (age 37), who should have burned the thing, answered the letter of the 28-year-old Antonina in a polite, cool fashion, but did not include an outright rejection of her advances. He had been considering marriage for almost a year in the hope that it would give him both the stable home life that he had not enjoyed in the 20 years since his mother died, as well as to help dispel the all-too-true rumors of his homosexuality. He believed he might achieve both these goals with Antonina. He could not see the situation clearly enough to realize that what he hoped for was impossible a pure, platonic marriage without its physical and emotional realities. Further letters from Antonina implored Tchaikovsky to meet her, and threatened suicide out of desperation if he refused. What a welter of emotions must have gripped his heart when, just a few weeks later, he proposed marriage to her! Inevitably, the marriage crumbled within days of the wedding amid Tchaikovsky s searing self-deprecation. It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the Fourth Symphony, finishing the first three movements before Antonina began her siege. The finale was completed by the time he proposed. Because of this chronology, the program of the Symphony was not a direct result of his marital disaster. All that the July wedding, the mere 18 days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations postdated the actual composition of the Symphony by a few months, though the orchestration took place during the painful time from September to January when the composer was seeking respite in a half dozen European cities from St. Petersburg to San Remo. What Tchaikovsky found in his relationship with this woman (who by 1877 already showed

5 signs of approaching the door of the mental ward in which, still legally married to him, she died in 1917) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable workings of Fate in human destiny. He later wrote to Mme. von Meck, We cannot escape our Fate, and there was something fatalistic about my meeting with this girl. The relationships with the two women of 1877, Mme. von Meck and Antonina, occupy important places in the composition of this Symphony: one made it possible, the other made it inevitable, but the vision and its fulfillment were Tchaikovsky s alone. After the premiere, Tchaikovsky wrote to Mme. von Meck, with great trepidation, explaining the emotional content of the Fourth Symphony: The introduction [blaring brasses heard immediately in a motto theme that recurs several times throughout the Symphony] is the kernel, the chief thought of the whole Symphony. This is Fate, the fatal power that hinders one in the pursuit of happiness from gaining the goal, which jealously provides that peace and comfort do not prevail, that the sky is not free from clouds a might that swings, like the sword of Damocles, constantly over the head, that poisons continuously the soul. This might is overpowering and invincible. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain [the melancholy, syncopated shadow-waltz of the main theme, heard in the strings]. The feeling of desperation and loneliness grows stronger and stronger. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and lull one s self in dreams? [The second theme is begun by the clarinet, with trailing sighs from the rest of the woodwinds.] Deeper and deeper the soul is sunk in dreams. All that was dark and joyless is forgotten... No these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. [The blaring brass fanfare over a wave of timpani begins the development section.] Thus we see that life is only an everlasting alternation of somber reality and fugitive dreams of happiness. Something like this is the program of the first movement. The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has already been and gone! And yet it is a pleasure to think of the early years. One mourns the past and has neither the courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life. One would fain rest awhile, recalling happy hours when young blood pulsed warm through our veins and life brought satisfaction. We remember irreparable loss. But these things are far away. It is sad, yet sweet, to lose one s self in the past. There is no determined feeling, no exact expression in the third movement. Here are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly intoxicated. Suddenly there rushes into the imagination the picture of a drunken peasant and a gutter song. Military music is heard passing in the distance. There are disconnected pictures which come and go in the brain of the sleeper. They have nothing to do with reality; they are unintelligible, bizarre. As to the finale, if you find no pleasure in yourself, look about you. Go to the people. See how they can enjoy life and give themselves up entirely to festivity. The picture of a folk holiday. [The finale employs the folk song A Birch Stood in the Meadow, presented simply by the woodwinds after the noisy flourish of the opening.] Hardly have we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. The other children of men are not concerned with us. How merry and glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequential, so simple. And do you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still is happiness, simple, naive happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of others and you can still live Dr. Richard E. Rodda 2015 Program Notes, Book 2 39