Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor Christopher Bell, Chorus Director Opening Night Wednesday, June 12, 2013 at 6:30PM Jay Pritzker Pavilion Grant Park orchestra Carlos Kalmar, Conductor Stefan Jackiw, Violin NORMAN MOZART Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, K. 219, Turkish Allegro aperto Adagio Tempo di Menuetto Allegro Tempo di Menuetto Stefan Jackiw INTERMISSION 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 2013 Program Notes, Book 1 A5
carlos kalmar s biography can be found on page 8. Wednesday, June 12, 2013 American violinist STEFAN JACKIW is fast earning a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Of Korean/German heritage, Jackiw began studying the violin at the age of four; his teachers have included Zinaida Gilels, Michèle Auclair and Donald Weilerstein. In 2002 he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. At age fourteen, Jackiw made a sensational debut with the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall performing the Mendelssohn Concerto and took the London music world by storm (The Strad). In 2002 Jackiw made his debut with the Baltimore Symphony and has become a regular guest with that orchestra and toured with them to Japan. Elsewhere in North America, he has performed with the orchestras of New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Toronto and Chicago. He also appeared with the YouTube Symphony in Sydney at the invitation of Michael Tilson-Thomas. In recital, Stefan Jackiw has performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Louvre, Aspen, Ravinia, Kennedy Center, Mostly Mozart, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall s Zankel Hall. He gave the world premiere of a new work for violin and piano by American composer David Fulmer in Carnegie Hall in November 2012. Recent highlights include concerts with RTVE Madrid, BBC Scottish Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Tapiola Sinfonietta, Residentie Orkest, Singapore Symphony, Malaysian Philharmonic, Adelaide, West Australian and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, Netherlands Philharmonic and a Far East tour with the Royal Philharmonic. A6 2013 Program Notes, Book 1
Drip Blip Sparkle Spin Glint Glide Glow Float Flop Chop Pop Shatter Splash (2005) Andrew Norman (born in 1979) Drip... is scored for three flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano and strings. The performance time is five minutes. This is the first performance of Drip... by the Grant Park Orchestra. In announcing Andrew Norman as one of the four emerging composers receiving commissions through Project 440, a musical celebration of its fortieth anniversary season, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra described him as a lifelong enthusiast for all things architectural who writes music that is often inspired by forms and ideas he encounters in the visual world. His music draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and usually features some combination of bright colors, propulsive energy, a healthy dose of lyricism, and the fragmentation of musical ideas into little pieces. Norman was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1979 and raised in central California. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he studied composition with Donald Crockett and Stephen Hartke and piano with Stewart Gordon, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, where he was a student of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis. Norman s orchestral and chamber works have been commissioned and premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival; he is currently serving a three-year residency with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Norman s rapidly accumulating distinctions include fellowships from the American Academies in both Rome and Berlin, Nissim Prize and five Morton Gould Young Composer Awards from American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a BMI Student Composer Award. His string trio The Companion Guide to Rome was named a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Drip was commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra in 2005 for their Young People s Concerts. Norman writes, The process of writing it was a bit like making a tossed salad. I chopped up sounds from the orchestra one sound for each of the thirteen verbs in the title and then I tossed them all together and called it a piece. Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219, Turkish (1775) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Mozart s A major Violin Concerto is scored for two oboes, two horns and strings. The performance time is 31 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this work on July 25, 1956, with Izler Solomon conducting; Eudice Shapiro was the soloist. Mozart s five authentic Violin Concertos were all products of a single year 1775. At nineteen he was already a veteran of five years experience as concertmaster of the archiepiscopal court in Salzburg, for which his duties included not only playing, but also composing, acting as co-conductor with the keyboard player (modern orchestral conducting was not to originate for at least two more decades), and soloing in concertos. It was for this last function that Mozart wrote these concertos. He 2013 Program Notes, Book 1 A7
was, of course, a quick study at everything that he did, and each of these works builds on the knowledge gained from its predecessors. It was with the last three (K. 216, 218, 219) that something more than simple experience emerged, however, because it was with these compositions that Mozart indisputably entered the era of his musical maturity. These are his earliest pieces now regularly heard in the concert hall, and the last one, No. 5 in A major, is the greatest of the set. The opening movement is in sonata-concerto form, but has some curious structural experiments more associated with the music of Haydn than with that of Mozart. After the initial presentation of the thematic material by the orchestra, the soloist is introduced with the surprising device of a brief, stately Adagio. When the Allegro tempo resumes, the soloist plays not the main theme already announced by the ensemble, but a new lyrical melody for which the original main theme becomes the accompaniment. More new material fills the remainder of the exposition. The development section is invested with passages of dark harmonic color which cast expressive shadows across the generally sunny landscape of the movement, and lend it emotional weight. The recapitulation calls for restrained, elegant virtuosity from the soloist. The second movement is a graceful song in sonatina form (sonata-allegro without development). The final movement is an extended rondo in the style and rhythm of a minuet. Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877-1878) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Tchaikovsky s Fourth Symphony is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Performance time is 44 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on September 8, 1935, with Frederick Stock conducting. The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most 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 music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck, who became the financial backer who allowed him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory. 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 Miliukov, a student in one of his large lecture classes at the Conservatory who had worked herself into a passion over her 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 twenty years since his mother died and help dispel rumors of his homosexuality. He believed he might achieve both these goals with Antonina. 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, A8 2013 Program Notes, Book 1
finishing the first three movements before Antonina began her advances; 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 eighteen days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations postdated the composition of the Symphony by a few months. What Tchaikovsky found in his relationship with this woman (who died in a mental ward in 1917, still legally married to him) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable workings of Fate in human destiny. Tchaikovsky wrote, The introduction [blaring brasses heard immediately in a motto theme that recurs throughout the Symphony] is the kernel of the whole Symphony. This is Fate, which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain [the melancholy, syncopated shadow-waltz of the main theme, heard in the strings]. 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.] But no these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. [A brass fanfare begins the development.] The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has already been and gone! It is sad, yet sweet, to lose one s self in the past. In the third movement are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one is slightly intoxicated. Military music is heard in the distance. As to the finale, if you find no pleasure in yourself, go to the people. The picture of a folk holiday. [The finale employs the folk song A Birch Stood in the Meadow.] Rejoice in the happiness of others and you can still live. 2013 Dr. Richard E. Rodda Spend Your Time Building Your Business, Not Searching For Office Space I ll save you time and money on your next offi ce lease Tenant Representation, from consultation through lease negotiations Commercial Real Estate Consultants Serving Chicago Since 1981 222 S. Morgan St., Suite 3A Darryl Brehm Chicago, IL 60607 (312) 229-6671 dbrehm@anovitz.com 2013 Program Notes, Book 1 A9