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Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus
Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor
Christopher Bell, Chorus Director
Brahms Symphony No. 4
Friday, August 1, 2014 at 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, August 2, 2014 at 7:30 p.m.
Harris Theater for Music and Dance
GRANT PARK ORCHESTRA
Carlos Kalmar, Conductor
Markus Groh, Piano
WIDMANN
BARTÓK
Con Brio
Piano Concerto No. 3
Allegretto
Adagio religioso —
Allegro vivace
marKUS GrOh
INTERMISSION
BRAHMS
Symphony No. 4 in E Minor
Allegro non troppo
Andante moderato
Allegro giocoso
Allegro energico e passionato
Piano provided by
Steinway Piano Galleries of Chicago
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Carlos Kalmar’s biography can be found on page 16.
Pianist Markus Groh gained immediate world attention
after winning the Queen Elisabeth International Competition
in 1995, the first German to do so. Since then he has built
an international reputation that confirms his place among
today’s finest pianists. His European highlights this past season
included performances with the Finnish Radio Orchestra, a tour
with the Flanders Symphony, and a live television broadcast
of Hindemith’s Piano Concerto conducted by Hannu Lintu
in Finland. In the United States, Mr. Groh played a recital at
Kennedy Center and concertos with the Harrisburg Symphony and Florida Orchestra;
he makes his debut with the St. Louis Symphony in November 2014. He has previously
appeared as soloist with orchestras around North America and the world, been heard
in recital at leading venues in Europe and America, and toured regularly with the Tokyo
String Quartet. He is founder and artistic director of the Bebersee Festival near Berlin
and a frequent guest at international festivals and on radio and television in Europe,
North America, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Japan. A prize-winning documentary
featuring Mr. Groh playing a replica of Steinway’s first piano (built in 1836) on a recital
tour traveling by horse and carriage was broadcast across Germany in 2011. Markus
Groh, born in southern Germany in 1970, was recently named Professor of Piano at
the University of the Arts in Berlin.
Con Brio (2008)
Jörg Widmann (born in 1973)
Widmann’s Con Brio is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus
piccolo, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. The
performance time is 12 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra has
never performed this work.
German composer and clarinetist Jörg Widmann was born
in Munich in 1973 and studied clarinet with Gerd Starke at
the Hochschule für Musik in Munich and with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School
in New York. After winning the Carl Maria von Weber Competition, Competition of
German Music Colleges and Bavarian State Prize for Young Artists, Widmann was
appointed professor of clarinet at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg in
2001; he continues to be recognized as one of his generation’s finest clarinetists. His
parallel interest in composition began when he started lessons with Kay Westermann in
Munich at age eleven, and continued with his studies with Hans Werner Henze, Wilfried
Hiller and Wolfgang Rihm; in 2009, he was also named to the Freiburg Hochschule’s
composition faculty. Among his many distinctions as a composer are the Stoeger Prize of
the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Arnold Schoenberg Medal, and Honorary
Award of the Munich Opera Festival, and election to membership in the Institute for
Advanced Study in Berlin, Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts, and German Academy of
the Dramatic Arts.
For a cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies with the Bavarian Radio
Symphony Orchestra in 2008-2009, the ensemble’s Chief Conductor, Mariss Jansons,
commissioned six internationally recognized composers to write “reflections” that
would “last approximately ten minutes and refer to a particular symphony by Ludwig
van Beethoven in terms of its form, its concept or the material used. Each of these
short orchestral pieces was intended as an introductory gesture, or as a modern
afterthought on the performance of the relevant symphonies in the concert hall.”
Widmann, who took the inspiration for his Con Brio (“With Energy,” a favorite
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tempo marking of Beethoven) from the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, wrote,
“My reference to Beethoven in Con Brio begins with the scoring, because in the
Symphonies No. 7 and No. 8 the orchestration is special. There are not four horns
or three trombones, as in the Ninth Symphony, but just two horns, two trumpets
and timpani, with which he makes that incredible ‘noise.’ In my view, the reduced
scoring is the very reason he unleashes such musical fury in the first place.” Though
Widmann did not quote directly from the symphonies, their sonorities, figurations,
rhythms and buoyancy echo throughout Con Brio, a testament to the powerful
influence that Beethoven continues to exert almost two centuries after his death.
Piano Concerto No. 3 (1945)
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is scored for piccolo, flute, oboe,
English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and
strings. The performance time is 23 minutes. The Grant Park
Orchestra first performed this Concerto on June 26, 1963, with
Irwin Hoffman conducting and Gary Graffman as soloist.
Bartók, never a robust man, suffered from serious ailments from the time he
settled in the United States in 1940. Some of his problems were never diagnosed,
but he was often anemic, and during his last year his health failed steadily and
rapidly. The ultimate cause of his death was leukemia, and that illness took its
sorry toll during those last months. In the early summer of 1945, Bartók became
enflamed with the notion of writing a solo concerto in an accessible style, a concerto
that his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, could use as a vehicle for her own concert
performances. He viewed the work as almost a legacy that he could leave to his
family in place of the money he never was able to earn. He labored feverishly on the
Concerto throughout the summer, and by September 22nd, only four days before
his death, he had finished the entire score except for the last seventeen measures.
His thoughts for the close of the piece were encoded in a shorthand that he devised,
from which his friend and disciple Tibor Serly scored the remaining bars.
The Concerto's opening movement, in sonata form, begins with a rustling
of strings that introduces the first theme, a tune played in octaves by the soloist
that displays the melodic leadings and jagged rhythms of Magyar folk song. An
extended group of secondary ideas, all with smoother rhythms, stands in place
of a true development section. The piano presents the recapitulation of the first
theme, thickened harmonically, amid the resumed rustling of the strings. Some
of the subsidiary ideas are repeated before the movement ends with a tiny tag, a
summary statement by flute and piano that condenses the essential melodic and
rhythmic germs of the preceding music. The first portion of the second movement
(Adagio religioso) recalls the technique and serenity of a Renaissance motet in its
close imitative entries and chordal texture. Piano and strings alternate phrases in
this music, the most beatific that Bartók ever wrote. The atmospheric central section
of the movement is almost themeless, consisting rather of whisperings in the strings
and twitterings in the winds that Tibor Serly said were based on bird calls Bartók had
noted down during a retreat at Asheville, North Carolina in 1944. The chorale returns
in the woodwinds, accompanied by a restrained commentary from the soloist. The
finale, with its lusty, irregular metric groupings, exudes the air of a festive peasant
dance. The movement is a rondo whose fugal first episode is announced by taps on
the solo timpani. Following an abbreviated repeat of the main theme, the timpani
heralds another episode, this one more extended but also fugal in texture. The coda
utilizes the rondo theme to bring the Concerto to a brilliant, whirling conclusion.
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Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98
(1884-1885)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 is scored for piccolo, flute, two
oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four
horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion
and strings. The performance time is 39 minutes. The Grant
Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on August 4,
1937, with Richard Czerwonky conducting.
In the popular image of Brahms, he appears as a patriarch: full grey beard,
rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes. He grew the beard in his late forties as, some say, a
compensation for his late physical maturity — he was in his twenties before his voice
changed and he needed to shave — and it seemed to be an external admission
that Brahms had allowed himself to become an old man. The ideas did not seem to
flow so freely as he approached the age of fifty, and he even put his publisher on
notice to expect nothing more. Thankfully, the ideas did come, as they would for
more than another decade, and he soon completed the superb Third Symphony.
The philosophical introspection continued, however, and was reflected in many
of his works. The Second Piano Concerto of 1881 is almost autumnal in its mellow
ripeness; this Fourth Symphony is music of deep thoughtfulness that leads “into
realms where joy and sorrow are hushed, and humanity bows before that which is
eternal,” wrote the eminent German musical scholar August Kretzschmar.
The Symphony’s first movement begins almost in mid-thought, as though the
mood of sad melancholy pervading the opening theme had existed forever and
Brahms had simply borrowed a portion of it to present musically. The movement
is founded upon the tiny two-note motive (short–long) heard immediately at the
beginning. To introduce the necessary contrasts into this sonata form other themes
are presented, including a broadly lyrical one for horns and cellos and a fragmented
fanfare. The movement grows with a wondrous, dark majesty to its closing pages. “A
funeral procession moving across moonlit heights” is how the young Richard Strauss
described the second movement. Though the tonality is nominally E major, the
movement opens with a stark melody, pregnant with grief, in the ancient Phrygian
mode. The mood brightens, but the introspective sorrow of the beginning is never
far away. The dance-like quality of the third movement heightens the pathos of the
surrounding movements, especially the granitic splendor of the finale. The closing
movement is a passacaglia — a series of variations on a short, recurring melody.
There are some thirty continuous variations here, though it is less important to
follow them individually than to feel the massive strength given to the movement by
this technique. The opening chorale-like statement, in which trombones are heard
for the first time in the Symphony, recurs twice as a further supporting pillar in the
unification of the movement.
©2014 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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