grantparkmusicfestival · grantparkmusicfestival seventy-fifth season grant park orchestra and...

Program Notes A��

GrantParkMusicFestivalSeventy-fifth Season

Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, Principal ConductorChristopher Bell, Chorus Director

Fifth Program: Burnham’s Plan and Rachmaninoff ’s ThirdFriday, June 19, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORChESTRA AND ChORUSCarlos Kalmar, ConductorChristopher Bell, Chorus DirectorJon Kimura Parker, PianoJonita Lattimore, SopranoBryan Griffin, Tenor

RAChMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30

Allegro ma non tanto Intermezzo: Adagio Finale: Alla breve

Jon KiMura parKer

INTERMISSION

TORKE Plans for Soprano Solo, Tenor Solo, Chorus and Orchestra

Make Big Plans Noble Diagram Long After We Are Gone Our Sons and Grandsons Your Watchword

Jonita LattiMore Bryan griffin

WORLD PREMIERE Commissioned by the Grant Park Music Festival in honor of the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham’s Plan for Chicago

This concert is generously sponsored by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A�� Program Notes

GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Friday, June 19 and Saturday, June 20, 2009

CARlOS kAlMAR’s biography can be found on page A2.

ChRiSTOPheR Bell’s biography can be found on page A3.

Internationally acclaimed concert pianist JOn kiMURA PARkeR’s extraordinary career has taken him from Carnegie hall to the Sydney Opera house. A true Canadian ambassador of music, Mr. Parker has given two command performances for Queen Elizabeth II, special performances for the United States Supreme Court, and has performed for the Prime Ministers of Canada and Japan. He is an Officer of The Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian honor. In recent seasons, Jon Kimura Parker has performed as guest soloist with the New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Philadelphia

Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the NhK Tokyo Orchestra, and with major orchestras in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Recent summer orchestral festival appearances have included the hollywood Bowl, Minnesota Sommerfest, Mainly Mozart, Sun Valley and Vail, as well as chamber music festivals in Amelia Island, La Jolla, Santa Fe, and Orcas Island. he is also a regular guest artist at the Chamber Music Society of Detroit. “Jackie” Parker received all of his early education in Canada, training with his uncle, Edward Parker, and his mother, Keiko Parker. he studied with Lee Kum-Sing, Marek Jablonski, and Adele Marcus. he won the Gold Medal at the 1984 Leeds International Piano Competition. A committed educator, Jon Kimura Parker is Professor of Piano at The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in houston. he has recorded for Telarc with Yoel Levi, André Previn and Peter Schickele. he lives in houston with his wife, violinist Aloysia Friedmann, and their daughter Sophie.


Friday, June 19 and Saturday, June 20, 2009 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

JOniTA lATTiMORe, a lyric soprano of immense vocal range and expressive musicality, has garnered plaudits for her vivid portrayals of roles ranging from Micaëla to Jackie O as well as oratorio performances with major orchestras across the United States and abroad. John von Rhein from the Chicago Tribune calls Lattimore’s soprano a “richly upholstered voice with secure line and coloratura.” She “is surely destined for great things.” Lattimore made her Lyric Opera of Chicago debut in Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and was also seen on Lyric’s stage as Micaëla in Bizet’s Carmen. She recently performed with Tulsa Opera, Blue Lake Fine Arts Festival and houston Grand Opera. She made her Paris debut at the Bastille Opera as Serena in Porgy and Bess. her 2008-09 season engagements include the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Eugene, Virginia and Colorado symphonies and the Grant Park Music Festival. After a busy summer performing with the Xalapa and the Grant Park Music Festival during the 2007-08 season Lattimore appeared with the Moab Music Festival, the Oakland East Bay Symphony and Louisiana Philharmonic. Lattimore’s 2006-07 performances included houston Symphony, Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, Chicago Sinfonietta, Calgary Philharmonic, helena Symphony and a recital at the New York Festival. Other recent oratorio and symphonic highlights include the N. O. Tonkünstler Orchestra of Vienna, Northern Israel Symphony, the Winter Park Bach Festival, Elgin Symphony,Albany Symphony and the Grant Park Music Festival.

Tenor BRyAn GRiFFin recently graduated as a member of the Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. he made his Lyric Opera debut as Edmondo in Olivier Tambosi’s new production of Manon Lescaut with Bruno Bartoletti conducting, opposite Karita Mattila and Vladimir Galouzine. Bryan Griffin’s other roles at the Lyric Opera of Chicago have been Tamino in Die Zauberflöte (he filled in for an indisposed colleague on a few hours’ notice, scoring a great success), Fenton in Falstaff, and Tybalt in Roméo et Juliette. In the 2008-09 season, Mr. Griffin added two major French roles to his repertoire: the title

role in Faust with Opera Grand Rapids and Gerald in Lakmé with Florida Grand Opera. In addition, Mr. Griffin performed with Sacred Music in a Sacred Space, New York City, Helena Symphony and the Grant Park Music Festival. Mr. Griffin recently made his European debut on opening night of the 2007 Glyndebourne Festival, portraying Malcolm in Richard Jones’s new production of Macbeth, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Recent engagements include Fenton in Falstaff at Lyric Opera of Chicago with Sir Andrew Davis, Les Noces with New York City Ballet, and Rachmaninoff ’s The Bells with the Grant Park Music Festival. After receiving his undergraduate degree from The Juilliard School, Mr. Griffin pursued pre-medical studies at the University of Connecticut while working as a computer programmer. he returned to music in the summer of 2004 as an apprentice at the Santa Fe Opera.



Piano ConCerto no. 3 in d minor, oP. 30 (1909)sergei rachmaninoff (1873-1943)Rachmaninoff ’s Third Piano Concerto is scored for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. The performance time is �� minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Concerto on July 6, 1949, Nicolai Malko conducting; the soloist was Sigi Weissenberg.

The worlds of technology and art sometimes brush against each other in curious ways. In 1909, it seems, Sergei Rachmaninoff wanted one of

those new mechanical wonders — an automobile. And thereby hangs the tale of his first visit to America.

The impresario henry Wolfson of New York arranged a thirty-concert tour for the 1909-1910 season for Rachmaninoff so that he could play and conduct his own works in a number of Ameri-can cities. Rachmaninoff was at first hesitant about leaving his family and home for such an ex-tended overseas trip, but the generous financial remuneration was too tempting to resist. With a few tour details still left unsettled, Wolfson died suddenly in the spring of 1909, and the composer was much relieved that the journey would probably be cancelled. Wolfson’s agency had a contract with Rachmaninoff, however, and during the summer finished the arrangements for his appearances so that the composer-pianist-conductor was obliged to leave for New York as scheduled. Trying to look on the bright side of this daunting prospect, Rachmaninoff wrote to his long-time friend Nikita Morozov, “I don’t want to go. But then perhaps, after America I’ll be able to buy myself that automobile.... It may not be so bad after all!” It was for the American tour that Rachmaninoff composed his Third Piano Concerto.

Rachmaninoff ’s hectic schedule during the early months of 1909 prevented him from begin-ning the new piece until June, when he arrived at his country retreat at Ivanovka, a village north of the Black Sea, but then he worked feverishly on the score all summer, adding the finishing touches when he returned to Moscow in September. he did not have time, however, to get the demand-ing solo part into his fingers before he left for the United States, so he took along a silent practice keyboard and labored over it in his stateroom throughout the crossing. The unorthodox method worked, and he was ready for the premiere on November 28, 1909 with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, but he vowed never to use the contraption again.

Rachmaninoff was, as he had expected, depressed during his inaugural American tour, though the impressions he made on his audiences were so strong that he was invited to become permanent conductor of both the Boston and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras, offers he firmly refused so that he could return to his beloved homeland. Eight years later, however, as fate would have it, he was forced to leave Russia when his estate and family fortune were swallowed by the Revolution, and he settled in the United States for good in 1917 — his annual cross-country tours were a hal-lowed American institution for the next two decades. The Concerto No. 3, the work with which he introduced himself to American audiences, remained an integral and constantly requested part of his repertory throughout his career.

The Concerto consists of three large movements. The first is a modified sonata-allegro form which begins with a theme that is recalled in the later movements. This opening melody, announced in stark octaves over a sparse accompaniment, bears a strong resemblance to the plaintive chants of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Joseph Yasser, organist, musicologist and friend of Rach-maninoff, asked him if there was any deliberate relationship between the two. Rachmaninoff de-nied that the theme was based on liturgical or folk music, but he maintained that he had not com-posed it consciously; it had, he said, “created itself.” In 1969, Yasser discovered a chant used in Kiev that closely parallels Rachmaninoff ’s melody. he speculated that the composer may have heard it as a boy, and, when pressed with the need for thematic material for the Third Concerto, the ancient strain rose up from the recesses of his memory. Whatever its source, the haunting melody sets perfectly the Concerto’s mood of somber intensity. The espressivo second theme is presented by the pianist, whose part has, by this point, abundantly demonstrated the staggering technical challenge that this piece offers to the soloist, a characteristic Rachmaninoff had disguised by the simplicity



of the opening. The development section is concerned mostly with transformations of fragments from the first theme. A massive cadenza, separated into two parts by the recall of the main theme by the woodwinds, leads to the recapitulation. The earlier material is greatly abbreviated in this closing section, with just a single presentation of the opening melody and a brief, staccato version of the subsidiary theme.

The second movement, subtitled Intermezzo, which Dr. Otto Kinkleday described in his notes for the New York premiere as “tender and melancholy, yet not tearful,” is a set of free variations with an inserted episode. The descending, drooping principal theme derives from a melodic type used to express sadness since at least the time of Josquin des Pres in the late 15th century. The mo-tive is played first by the orchestra alone, then in several transformations by the soloist. A sprightly, scherzo-like passage in quick triple meter intervenes before the last variation; it is in this episode that the chant melody from the first movement is recollected by the clarinet and bassoon. The slow tempo returns for the final variation of the Intermezzo theme, but the music is broken off by a flour-ish from the soloist and a brief blast from the brass to lead directly into the finale.

“One of the most dashing and exciting pieces of music ever composed for piano and orches-tra” is how Patrick Piggot described the finale. It is music that employs virtually every sonorous possibility of the modern grand piano, making it a dazzling showpiece for the master performer. The movement is structured in three large sections. The first part has an abundance of themes which Rachmaninoff skillfully derived from those of the opening movement, creating a subtle but strong formal link across the entire Concerto. The relationship is further strengthened in the finale’s second section, where both themes from the opening movement are recalled in slow tempo. The pace again quickens, and the music from the first part of the finale returns with some modi-fications. A brief solo cadenza leads to the coda, a dazzling final stanza with fistfuls of chords propelling the headlong rush to the dramatic closing gestures.

Plans for soPrano solo, tenor solo, Chorus and orChestra (World Premiere)michael torke (born in 1961)Torke’s Plans is scored for three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. The performance time is forty minutes. This is the work’s world premiere.

Composers since the age of the Renaissance have incorporated popu-lar songs and styles into works of elevated purpose: students of music history will recall the profu-sion of Masses erected upon the 15th-century French ditty L’Homme armé (“The Armed Man”); Bach wove two popular melodies of the day (Long Have I Been Away from Thee and Cabbage and Turnips) into the contrapuntal complexities of the Goldberg Variations; Chopin’s peerless piano creations are rooted in the dance patterns and melodic gestures of his native Poland; jazz and the blues have served as a wellspring for American composers ever since Copland returned from France in 1924. For all of their creative hybridization, however, these earlier attempts at stylistic interpenetration recognized distinct boundaries among the various types of music — the Rhapsody in Blue is clearly intended for the concert hall and not the jazz club. however, as this new millennium begins the conventional distinctions among musical idioms have blurred. The world is now so suffused with music — rock, pop, rap, punk, folk, metal, jazz, new age, soul, and even the venerable forms of symphony, opera and ballet — that the old melting pot has become a veritable cauldron of trans-stylistic musical immersion. Many of today’s young composers and performers are not only inevita-bly exposed to this invigorating universe of musics, but can move comfortably and creatively from one to another, drawing from them a cross-fertilized inspiration that defies traditional categoriza-tion. Michael Torke is among the lead guides along this musical pathway into the new century.

Michael Torke (TOR-kee) was born in Milwaukee on September 22, 1961. his parents enjoyed music, but they were not trained in the field, so they entrusted Michael to a local piano teacher when he early showed musical talent. he soon started making up his own pieces, and by age nine he was



taking formal composition lessons. his skills as a pianist and composer blossomed while he was in high school, and he chose to take his professional training at the Eastman School in Rochester, where he studied with Joseph Schwantner and Christopher Rouse. Though he had surprisingly little familiarity with popular idioms before entering Eastman in 1980, Torke absorbed all manners of music from the students and faculty at the school, coming to realize that he could make pop, rock and jazz coexist with the “classical” idioms in his music. His distinctive style was already well formed in Vanada, which he composed for a student ensemble at Eastman in 1984, his last year at the school. he spent a year at the Yale School of Music as a student of Jacob Druckman before moving to New York City, where his practice of submitting scores to every available competition had already made his name known to a number of contemporary music buffs. (he has won the American Prix de Rome and grants and prizes from the Koussevitzky Foundation, ASCAP, BMI and the American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters.) A commission from the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1985 resulted in Ecstatic Orange, his first orchestral score and one of his many works influenced by his drawing relations between color and sound. That same year his music was taken on by the prestigious publishing firm of Boosey & Hawkes, who introduced him to Peter Martins, director of the New York City Ballet. Martins was immediately struck by the freshness and vitality of Torke’s work, and he choreographed Ecstatic Orange in 1987; the company has since commissioned and premiered Purple (1987), Black & White (1988), Slate (1989), Mass (1990) and Ash (1991).

In 1990, Torke received a first-refusal contract for all of his compositions from Decca/London Records, the first such agreement that that company had offered since its association with Benja-min Britten; in 2003, he launched his own label, Ecstatic Records. Torke now has more requests for commissions than he can accept, and he is one of only a handful of American composers supporting themselves entirely through the income from their compositions. he writes mainly for orchestra, sometimes with an added soloist or concertante group, and the list of ensembles that have performed his music includes the orchestras of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York, Danish Radio Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta and Ensemble InterContemporain. In 1997, Torke was appointed the first Associate Composer of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in which capacity he has advised on programming and educational activities and composed Rapture, a concerto for Scottish percussionist Colin Currie, and the tone poem An American Abroad. In 1999, Torke premiered two large-scale, high-profile pieces: Strawberry Fields, a one-act opera jointly commissioned by Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera and WNET’s “Great Performances” television program (PBS), made its debut at Glim-merglass in Cooperstown, New York; and Four Seasons, a 62-minute symphonic oratorio for vocal soloists, two choruses and large orchestra commissioned by the Disney Company in celebration of the new millennium, was introduced by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic. his most recently premiered work, a new ballet inspired by Eugène-Marin Labiche’s classic 1851 farce The Italian Straw Hat, was introduced by the National Ballet of Canada in May 2005. Torke’s current projects include a joint commission from the Metropolitan Opera, Châtelet Theater in Paris and English National Opera about Formula-1 racing legend Ayrton Senna, to be premiered in 2011; Plans (2009) for Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, written in observance of the centenary of Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago; a percussion concerto for Colin Currie for the 2010 TROMP In-ternational Music Festival in The Netherlands; and a concerto for violin and harp for the principals of the San Diego Symphony.

Michael Torke has kindly provided the following comments for Plans, commissioned by the Grant Park Music Festival in honor of the 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham’s Plan for Chicago:

“Modernism has had such a stranglehold on the fields of arts and architecture that it has taken generations for both to loosen its intolerant grip and bring back into perspective alternate achieve-ments both before and after. By the mid-20th century, Daniel Burnham, the architect, was almost forgotten, even sneered at, and if an American composer wrote a symphonic piece with a key signa-ture in the 1970s, he was all but laughed off the stage. By the first decade of our new century much has changed: modernism seems almost quaint, and, led by the post-modernist movement, older forms and ideas have been restored. That a popular book — Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City — could bring about almost a fanaticism over Burnham’s accomplishments, and that a present-day

The Burnham Plan Centennial Committee salutes the Grant Park Music Festival and composer Michael Torke for making Bold Plans and Big Dreams in the spirit of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett's Plan of Chicago.

OPENING EVENTS SPONSOR

THE BURNHAM PLAN CENTENNIAL ALSO THANKS THE FOLLOWING SPONSORS OF THE BURNHAM PAVILIONS

The Burnham Leadership Group, British Airways, ArcelorMittal, The Marmon Group and Marmon/Keystone Corporation and

the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Leadership funding for the Burnham Plan Centennial is provided by the Chicago Community Trust, our region’s community foundation.

The Trust is joined as a founding sponsor by The Elizabeth Morse and Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trusts.



orchestral composer frequently broadcast over classical radio stations would have listeners phoning in their support — would have seemed absurd just thirty years ago!

“That’s why, when I was commissioned by the Grant Park Music Festival to write an oratorio using some famous spoken words of Daniel Burnham to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Plan for Chicago, not only was I inspired, but I composed and delivered the piece some eight months before the contractual deadline!

“In the cynical times in which we live, what with the economic downturn, it might seem odd to proclaim: Make big plans! What our sons and grandsons will do will stagger us! But there once was a time when thinking big in conjunction with order and beauty was thought to be the recipe for making lasting and meaningful things. In other words, art can either reflect the squalor, pain and suffering of human existence, or it can appeal to the ‘better angels of our nature,’ and in that transcendence raise the spirits of man. I believe firmly in the second choice.

“I divided up Burnham’s famous quote into five phrases, and each phrase became a movement. I then let the words guide the music. The first movement, Make Big Plans, is panoramic and thrust-ing, while the second movement, Noble Diagram, has grid-like, eighth-note patterns with sustained, floating vocal lines. Long After We Are Gone features the soprano and tenor soloists building can-ons [i.e., lines in exact imitation] around an extended melody, gracefully suggesting an ‘ever-growing insistency,’ which contrasts with the aggressive fourth movement, Our Sons and Grandsons, with its extroverted orchestral passages and vocal shouts reinforcing the excitement of future generations’ achievements. Finally, Your Watchword organizes four lines of classical counterpoint, showing that beauty can come out of disciplined order.

“I have no fear of repeating Burnham’s words. The text becomes a thematic line to develop, as I would develop a musical theme. Just as I don’t need countless musical themes to develop a large-scale musical structure (sometimes just one theme per movement will suffice), I don’t need lots of words to fill up a forty-minute oratorio.

“Below are the movement titles and the corresponding text:“1. Make Big Plans — Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably

themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work …“2. Noble Diagram — … remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never

die …“3. Long After We Are Gone — … [but] long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting

itself with ever-growing insistency.“4. Our Sons and Grandsons — Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things

that would stagger us.“5. Your Watchword — Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.”

©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

TRIUNE MUSICA Division of S.B. Smith & Associates, Inc.

785 Industrial Dr.Elmhurst, IL 60126-1107

Phone: (630) 279-3535www.triunemusic.com

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