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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 2014 Program Notes, Book 8 45 Week_8_071114_FINAL.indd 45 7/11/14 11:04 AM Friday, August 1 and Saturday, August 2, 2014 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 46 2014 Program Notes, Book 8 Week_8_071114_FINAL.indd 46 7/11/14 11:04 AM Friday, August 1 and Saturday, August 2, 2014 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. 2014 Program Notes, Book 8 47 Week_8_071114_FINAL.indd 47 7/11/14 11:04 AM Friday, August 1 and Saturday, August 2, 2014 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 LOVE FREE CONCERTS? Help keep the Festival free for all by making a donation using your mobile phone! Text GPMF to 74700 to pledge your donation now. Sumotext Promotional Alerts (max8msg/mo). T/C’s & Privacy Policy at www.74700.mobi. Reply STOP to opt out or HELP for help. Msg & Data rates may apply. 48 2014 Program Notes, Book 8 Week_8_071114_FINAL.indd 48 7/11/14 11:04 AM