2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C7

GrantParkMusicFestivalSeventy-seventh Season

Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor

Christopher Bell, Chorus Director

Penderecki Conducts PendereckiFriday, July 15, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, July 16, 2011 at 7:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORCHESTRAKrzysztof Penderecki, Guest ConductorJulie Albers, CelloKira Kraftzoff, Cello Amit Peled, Cello

PENDERECKI Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Three Cellos and Orchestra Andante sostenuto Allegro con brio Allegretto giocoso Meno mosso. Notturno. Adagio Allegro con brio Adagio Played without pause

Julie Albers, Kira Kraftzoff and Amit Peled

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, “Eroica” Allegro con brio Marcia funebre: Adagio assai Scherzo: Allegro vivace Finale: Allegro molto

Th is concert is sponsored by the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland

Travel for Mr. and Mrs. Penderecki generously provided by LOT Polish Airlines

Th is program is partially supported by Comcast

C8 2011 Program Notes, Book 3 2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C9

KRZYSZTOF PeNDeReCKI (pen-de-RET-skee), born in 1933 in Debica, seventy miles east of Cracow, is the most significant Polish composer of his generation, and one of the most inspired and influential musicians to emerge from Eastern Europe after World War II. His music first drew atten-tion at the 1959 competition sponsored by the Youth Circle of the Associa-tion of Polish Composers when three of his works — entered anonymously — each won first prize in its class. He gained international fame only a year later with his Threnody To the Victims of Hiroshima, winner of UNESCO’s “Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs.” His stunning St. Luke Passion of 1966 enjoyed enormous success in Europe and America, and led to a steady stream of commissions and performances. During the mid-1960s, Penderecki began incorporating more traditional techniques into his works without fully abandoning the powerfully dramatic avant-garde style that energized his early music. Utrenia (a choral setting of texts treating Christ’s Entombment and Resur-rection), the oratorio Dies Irae (dedicated to the memory of those murdered at Auschwitz), the opera Paradise Lost, the Violin Concerto and other important scores showed an increasing reliance on orthodox Romanticism in their lyricism and introspection filtered through his modern creative sensibility. Even though his compositions are filled with fascinating aural events, Penderecki insists that these soundscapes are not ends in themselves, but the necessary means to communicate his vision. “I am not interested in sound for its own sake and never have been,” wrote Penderecki. “Anyone can make a sound: a composer )must fashion it into an aesthetically satisfying experience.”

Penderecki showed some interest in music during his early years by taking lessons on piano and violin and writing a few pieces in traditional style, but he enrolled at the University of Cracow when he was seventeen with the intention of studying humanities. Cracow’s musical life excited his creative inclina-tions, however, and he began studying composition privately with Franciszek Skolyszewski; a year later he transferred to the Cracow Academy of Music as a composition student of Artur Malewski and Stanislas Wiechowicz. Upon graduating from the Academy in 1958, Penderecki was appointed to the school’s faculty and soon began establishing an international reputation for his compositions. In 1966, he went to Münster for the premiere of his St. Luke Passion, and his presence and music made such a strong impres-sion in West Germany that he was asked to join the faculty of the Volkwäng Hochschule für Musik in Essen. He returned to Cracow in 1972 to become director of the Academy of Music; while guiding the school during the next fifteen years, he also held an extended residency at Yale University (1973-1978).

Penderecki has also been active as a conductor since 1972, appearing with leading orchestras world-wide, recording many of his own works, and serving as Artistic Director of the Cracow Philharmonic (1987-1990), Music Director of the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico (1992-2002), and Artistic Advisor for the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg (1988-1992) and the Beijing Music Festival (1998); he has been Artistic Advisor and a frequent conductor of Warsaw’s Sinfonia Varsovia since 1997. Among Penderecki’s many distinctions are the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville, Order of the White Eagle (Poland’s highest honor), Three Star Order of Latvia, Prince of Asturias Award, Sibelius Gold Medal, Fellowship in the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, honorary doctorates from several European and American universities and honorary memberships in many learned academies.

CONCeRTO GROSSO NO. 1 FOR ThRee CeLLOS AND ORCheSTRA (2000-2001)Krzysztof Penderecki (born in 1933)Penderecki’s Concerto Grosso for Three Cellos is scored for piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, E-flat clarinet, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, per-cussion, harp, celesta and strings. The performance time is 35 minutes. This is the work’s first performance by the Grant Park Orchestra.

The “Concerto Grosso” (“Great Concerto”) was a species of Baroque music in which a small band of soloists contended/cooperated (both are inherent in the concept of the “concerto” with a larger ensemble. Corelli, Vivaldi, Geminiani and a host of other late-17th- and early-18th-century Italian composers spe-

GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Friday, July 15 and Saturday, July 16, 2011 Friday, July 15 and Saturday, July 16, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

JuLIe ALBeRS was born into a musical family in Longmont, Colorado and began violin studies at the age of two with her mother, switching to cello at four. She moved to Cleveland during her junior year of high school to pursue studies through the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland In-stitute of Music, where she studied with Richard Aaron. Miss Albers was awarded the Grand Prize at the XIII International Competition for Young Musicians in Douai, France, and as a result toured France as soloist with Orchestre Symphonique de Douai. Julie Albers made her major orchestra debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1998, and since has performed in recital and with orchestras in the United States, Europe, Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand. She won Second Prize in Munich’s Internationalen Musikwettbewerbes der ARD, and was also awarded the Wilhelm-Weichsler-Musikpreis der Stadt Osnabruch. In November 2003, she was named the first Gold Medal Laureate of South Korea’s Gyeongnam International Music Competition, winning the $25,000 Grand Prize. In addition to solo and recital performances, Miss Albers regularly participates in chamber music around the world, including a recent two-year resi-dency with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two. She is also currently active with the Albers String Trio and the cello quartet CELLO. Miss Albers is on the faculty of Kean University in New Jersey. Her debut album, which includes works by Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Schumann, Massenet and Piatigorsky, was released on the Artek label in 2005. Julie Albers performs on a N.F. Vuillaume cello made in 1872 and now lives in New York City.

KIRA KRAFTZOFF, born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), began his musical studies at age six at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and made his public debut at fourteen playing Khachaturian’s Cello Concerto with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. In 1988, he was the youngest finalist ever in the All-USSR Cello Competition, winning a special award for “most bril-liant prospect.” He thereafter continued his studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and graduated with honors in 1994; the year before he had participated in Mstislav Rostropovich’s first master class in Russia follow-ing that famed virtuoso’s long exile. Mr. Kraftzoff subsequently studied in Stuttgart with Peter Buck, cellist of the Melos Quartet. His other honors

include prizes in the 1990 Murcia Competition (Spain), 1992 Unisa String Competition (South Africa), 1994 Trapani Chamber Music Competition (Italy), 1995 Konzertgesellschaft Wettbewerb (Munich) and 1997 Vienna International Competition. He has performed in festivals and promi-nent concert halls in Europe and Asia, and appeared on radio and television broadcasts in Germany, Russia and Korea. Kira Kraftzoff served as the Principal Cellist of the St. Petersburg Soloists from 1991 to 1994 and Germany’s Wurttembergisches Kammerorchester from 1998 to 2005.

Israeli cellist AMIT PeLeD has performed as soloist with many orchestras and in such major concert venues as Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall (New York), Salle Gaveau (Paris), Wigmore Hall (London), Konzerthaus (Berlin) and Mann Auditorium (Tel Aviv). Following enthusiastically re-ceived debuts with the Columbus Symphony and Baltimore Symphony, Mr. Peled’s 2010-2011 season included  recital debuts at the Kennedy Center and New York’s Symphony Space, and a first appearance in Lin-coln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with the Riverside Symphony playing Hin-demith’s Cello Concerto. Mr. Peled is a frequent guest artist at leading summer music festivals in America, Germany, Sweden, England, Spain and Israel. He has been featured on television and radio stations throughout the world, includ-ing NPR’s Performance Today, WGBH Boston, WQXR New York, WFMT Chicago, Deutschland Radio Berlin, Radio France, Swedish National Radio and Television, and Israeli National Radio and Television. As a recording artist, Mr. Peled has released two critically acclaimed CDs: The Jew-ish Soul and Cellobration, both on the Centaur Label. Amit Peled is on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C11

cialized in the genre, who bequeathed it to Bach, Handel, Telemann and their northern contemporaries. Rechristened “Sinfonia Concertante” during the Classical era to denote its blending of the instrumental principles of the old concerto with the formal necessities of the newly emerged symphony, multiple-soloist works found proponents in Mozart, Haydn, Pleyel and a number of others; Beethoven created a “Triple Concerto” that wrapped showy parts for violin and cello around a piano part of more modest technical requirements to complement the limited keyboard technique of his noble pupil Archduke Rudolf. The concerto has since been largely a solo affair, though the intriguing challenges presented by multiple soloists have been taken up by a few enterprising composers — Mendelssohn’s early concertos for two pianos and for violin and piano, Schumann’s Konzertstück for Four Horns, Brahms’ Double Concerto — and was the medium that Penderecki chose for fulfilling a commission in 2000 from the NHK Symphony, Japan’s national public radio orchestra. The premiere of the Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Three Cellos and Orchestra (Penderecki wrote the Concerto Grosso No. 2 for Five Clarinets four years later) was given in Tokyo on June 22, 2001 by a veritable United Nations of artists — Swiss conductor and dedicated Penderecki champion Charles Dutoit and cellists from Russia (Boris Pergamenschikow), Norway (Truls Mørk) and South Korea (Han-Na Chang). The work has been heard frequently since; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed it in March 2011 under the direction of Charles Dutoit with CSO cellists Katinka Kleijn, Kenneth Olsen and John Sharp as soloists.

The expressive states of the Concerto Grosso No. 1 — largely ruminative but with moments of lyri-cism and heightened tension — are perfectly suited to the tone and character of the solo instruments. The first of the work’s six continuous movements (Andante sostenuto) begins with quiet, mysterious gestures from the low strings. The cellos enter with individual soliloquies punctuated by orchestral in-terjections before joining the ensemble in an animated passage that soon subsides to allow a return to the thoughtful mood of the opening. The music turns aggressive with the second movement (Allegro con brio), whose martial rhythms, angular themes and anxious interchanges evoke a certain menace. The threat seems to pass and a keening trio for the soloists and a brief oboe solo lead to the Allegretto giocoso, which, like the previous movement, is also unable to bring its premonitory opening music to a climax before the intensity is dispersed. The orchestra attempts again to revive the music’s ardor and is again rebuffed by the cellos’ introspective admonitions, which bridge to the Notturno, a movement of tragic character that builds inexorably to the climax that the earlier militaristic music was denied. The cellos then sing a threnody. The intensity again mounts to lead to the Allegro con brio, which recounts some of the earlier themes in varied forms before moving on to an extended three-way cadenza for the soloists. The eloquent closing Adagio offers not so much a resolution as a quiet acceptance of the work’s contending forces.

SYMPhONY NO. 3 IN e-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 55, “eROICA” (1803-1804)Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony is scored for pairs of woodwinds, three horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. The performance time is 47 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed the Third Symphony on August 2, 1935, with Eric De Lamarter conducting.

The year 1804 — the time when Beethoven finished his Third Symphony — was crucial in the modern political history of Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte had begun his meteoric rise to power only a decade earlier, after playing a significant part in the recapture in 1793 of Toulon, a Mediterranean port that had been surrendered to the British by French royalists. Britain, along with Austria, Prussia, Holland and Spain, was a member of the First Coalition, an alliance that had been formed by those monarchial nations in the wake of the execution of Louis XVI to thwart the French National Convention’s ambition to spread revolution (and royal overthrow) throughout Europe. In 1796, Carnot entrusted the campaign against northern Italy, then dominated by Austria, to the young General Bonaparte, who won a stunning series of victories with an army that he had transformed from a demoralized, starving band into a military juggernaut. He returned to France in 1799 as First Consul of

Friday, July 15 and Saturday, July 16, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C13

the newly established Consulate, and put in place measures to halt inflation, instituted a new legal code, and repaired relations with the Church. It was to this man, this great leader and potential saviour of the masses from centuries of tyrannical political, social and economic oppression, that Beethoven intended to pay tribute in his majestic E-flat Symphony, begun in 1803. The name “Bonaparte” appears above that of the composer on the original title page.

Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor of France in 1804, and he was crowned, with the new Em-press Josephine, at Notre Dame Cathedral on December 2nd, an event forever frozen in time by David’s magnificent canvas in the Louvre. Beethoven, enraged and feeling betrayed by this usurpation of power, roared at his student Ferdinand Ries, who brought him the news, “Then is he, too, only an ordinary human being?” The ragged hole in the title page of the score now in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna bears mute testimony to the violent manner in which Beethoven erased Na-poleon from this Symphony. He later inscribed it, undoubtedly with much sorrow, “To celebrate the memory of a great man.”

The “Eroica” (“Heroic”) is a work that changed the course of music history. There was much senti-ment at the turn of the 19th century that the expressive and technical possibilities of the symphonic genre had been exhausted by Haydn, Mozart, C.P.E. Bach and their contemporaries. It was Beethoven, and specifically this majestic Symphony, that threw wide the gates on the unprecedented artistic vistas that were to be explored for the rest of the century. In a single giant leap, he invested the genre with the breadth and richness of emotional and architectonic expression that established the grand sweep that the word “symphonic” now connotes. For the first time, with this music, the master composer was recognized as an individual responding to a higher calling. No longer could the creative musician be considered a mere artisan in tones, producing pieces within the confines of the court or the church for specific occasions, much as a talented chef would dispense a hearty roast or a succulent torte for a formal dinner. After Beethoven, the composer was regarded as a visionary — a special being lifted above mun-dane experience — who could guide benighted listeners to loftier planes of existence through his valued gifts. The modern conception of an artist — what he is, his place in society, what he can do for those who experience his work — stems from Beethoven. Romanticism began with the “Eroica.”

The first movement opens with a brief summons of two mighty chords. At least four thematic ideas are presented in the exposition, and one of the wonders of the Symphony is the way in which Beethoven made these melodies succeed each other in a seemingly inevitable manner, as though this music could have been composed in no other way. The development section is a massive essay progressing through many moods which are all united by an almost titanic sense of struggle. It is in this central portion of the movement and in the lengthy coda that Beethoven broke through the boundaries of the 18th-century symphony to create a work not only longer in duration but also more profound in meaning. The begin-ning of the second movement — Marcia funebre (“Funeral March”) — with its plaintive, simple themes intoned over a mock drum-roll in the basses, is the touchstone for the expression of tragedy in instrumen-tal music. The mournful C minor of the opening gives way to the brighter C major of the oboe’s melody in a stroke of genius that George Bernard Shaw, during his early days as a music critic in London, admit-ted “ruins me,” as only the expression of deepest emotion can. A development-like section, full of re-markable contrapuntal complexities, is followed by a return of the simple opening threnody, which itself eventually expires amid sobs and silences at the close of this eloquent movement. The third movement is a scherzo, the lusty successor to the graceful minuet. The central section is a rousing trio for horns, one of the earliest examples (Haydn’s “Horn Call” Symphony is an exception) of the use of more than two horns in an orchestral work. The finale is a large set of variations on two themes, one of which (the first one heard) forms the bass line to the other. The second theme, introduced by the oboe, is a melody that appears in three other of Beethoven’s works: the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, Contradanse No. 7 and Variations and Fugue, Op. 35 for piano. The variations accumulate energy as they go, and, just as it seems the movement is whirling toward its final climax, the music comes to a full stop before launching into an extended Andante section which explores first the tender and then the majestic possibilities of the themes. A brilliant Presto led by the horns concludes this epochal work.

©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Friday, July 15 and Saturday, July 16, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL