2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C39

GrantParkMusicFestivalSeventy-seventh Season

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

Christopher Bell, Chorus Director

Prokofiev Symphony No. 7Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORCHESTRAHannu Lintu, Guest Conductor

PROKOFIEV Symphony No. 7, Op. 131 Moderato Allegretto Andante espressivo Vivace SHCHEDRIN Old Russian Circus Music, Concerto for Orchestra No. 3

Th is concert is sponsored by:

2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C41

hANNu LINTu is currently Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra. He will be Chief Guest Conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2012-2013 and becomes that ensemble’s Chief Conductor with 2013-2014 season. Mr. Lintu is also Principal Guest Conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orches-tra in Dublin. He previously held Artistic Director positions with the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra (2002-2005) and Turku Philharmonic Orchestra (1998-2001). He is a regular guest conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony and Avanti! Chamber orchestras, and has an ongoing relationship with Finnish National Opera, for whom he has conducted

Wagner’s Parsifal, Bizet’s Carmen, King Lear by Aulis Sallinen, Before We Are All Drowned by Kalevi Aho and a new opera by Mikko Heiniö, The Hour of the Serpent. Mr. Lintu has also worked with Estonian National Opera, conducting their recording of Tauno Pylkkanen’s Mare and Her Son, as well as with the Savonlinna Opera Festival and Grant Park Music Festival, where he led a concert performance of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. Hannu Lintu’s recent engagements include appearances with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Or-chestre National de Belgique, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and the Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Sydney, Tokyo Metropolitan orchestras. Hannu Lintu has made several recordings for Ondine, Hyperion and Naxos, as well as two recordings for Dana-cord with the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra: The Sound of Shakespeare and the Shostakovich Piano Concertos with Oleg Marshev. His latest release, with Corey Cerovsek and the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne on the Claves label, features works for violin and orchestra by Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps. His other recent recordings include works by Jouni Kaipainen with the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra and Schumann, Dietrich, Gernsheim and Volkmann with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Hannu Lintu studied cello, piano and conducting with Jorma Panula at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy. He participated in master classes with Myung-Whun Chung at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and took first prize at the Nordic Conducting Competition in Bergen in 1994.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

honoring Christopher Bell’s 10th Anniversary

Save the date to attend a celebration

as Chorus Director of the Grant Park Music Festival

Friday, July 22nd, 2011Post-Concert Reception and Buffet

University Club of ChicagoMarta Farion and Julian Oettinger, Event Co-Chairs

Proceeds from this event help support the Grant Park Music Festival’s mission to provide free and accessible classical music for all

For details call 312.742.4763, or email debra.magad@cityofchicago.org

2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C43

movement. The second movement is a waltz in the Russian tradition of such pieces by Tchaikovsky, Glinka and Glazunov. There follows an Andante, effusively melodious and one of the most unabash-edly sentimental pieces that Prokofiev ever created. The finale is fast, excited and joyous, but pauses to recall the first movement’s second and third themes in its closing pages.

OLD RuSSIAN CIRCuS MuSIC, CONCeRTO FOR ORCheSTRA NO. 3 (1989)Rodion Shchedrin (born in 1932)Old Russian Circus Music is scored for two piccolos, two flutes, two oboes, Eng-lish horn, four clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, celesta and strings. Perfor-mance time is 25 minutes. This is the work’s first performance by the Grant Park Orchestra.

Rodion Shchedrin, one of the handful of Russian composers of the generation after Shostakovich whose music has made an impact in the West, was born in Moscow on December 16, 1932. His father, a well-known musical theorist and writer on music, encouraged Rodion’s musical interests with piano lessons, but the boy’s formal training was interrupted by the German invasion in 1941. Shchedrin resumed his musical education in 1948 at the Choir School in Moscow, where he began to compose, and he entered the Moscow Conservatory three years later to study piano with Yacob Flier and composition with Yuri Shaporin. By the time he graduated in 1955, Shchedrin had established a distinctive idiom with a string quartet, a piano quintet and the Piano Concerto No. 1, which incor-porate the styles of both folk music from various Russian regions (which he studied on the field trips required by the Conservatory curriculum) and the simple urban street song known as the chastushka. The First Piano Concerto attracted sufficient attention that he was named to represent the U.S.S.R. at the Fifth World Festival of Democratic Youth in Prague in 1954. The following year he composed The Humpbacked Horse, which became widely popular in its original form as a ballet, as well as in two orchestral suites and a film version. Shchedrin subsequently wrote about current trends in his country’s music in official publications, received many awards (most notably the Lenin Prize in 1984), was made a People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R. in 1981, and visited the United States on cultural exchange programs in 1964, 1968 and 1986. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1965 to 1969. He has since worked as a free-lance composer, and now divides his time between Moscow and Munich. From 1973 to 1990, Shchedrin was Chairman of the Composers’ Union of the Russian Federation; in 1990, he became Honorary Chairman of the organization. His many distinctions include: USSR State Prize (1972); State Prize of Russia (1992); Dmitri Shostakovich Prize (Russia, 1993); Crystal Award (Swit-zerland, 1995); membership in the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (1976), Academy of Fine Arts of the German Democratic Republic (1983) and International Music Council (1985); Honorary Profes-sorships at the conservatories of Moscow (1997), St. Petersburg (2005) and Beijing (2008); Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (2002); Russian Federation State Order (2002); Russian State Order 2nd Class (2007); and a 2011 Grammy nomination for his opera The Enchanted Wanderer as “Best Classical Contemporary Composition.”

Shchedrin wrote, “Old Russian Circus Music (Concerto for Orchestra No. 3) was composed in 1989 as a commission for the centenary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; it was first performed by the CSO in Chicago on October 25, 1990 under the direction of Lorin Maazel. The work is dedi-cated to Lorin Maazel and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

“The circus played an important role in Russian life during the nineteenth century. All Russian literature and art of that time is flecked with poetic, dramatic and sentimental conflicts, with the comings and goings of itinerant circuses in small Russian towns. With them came the donning of disguises, maidens with broken hearts, amorous strong men, roguish clowns, jealous husbands, tears, laughter, gun shots, applause, fireworks and so on. By allusion, I too have tried to touch upon this long-since-bygone, now almost completely forgotten, aspect of Russian provincial life with my musi-cal paintbrush.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

SYMPhONY NO. 7, OP. 131 (1952)Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 7 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings. The performance time is 31 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this symphony on June 22, 1955, with Nicolai Malko conducting.

Prokofiev’s feverish activity during the years after the Second World War belie the alarming state of his health. He suffered the first of a series of heart attacks in 1941, and a fall early in 1945 resulted in a severe concussion with several painful and continuing complications. Despite his nearly debilitated condition, in 1946 and 1947 alone he was able to compose the Sixth Symphony, arrange three extensive suites of the music from Cinderella, revise the Fourth Symphony, write a cantata for the 30th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and a separate orchestral piece on the same subject, produce a sonata for unaccompanied violins, and devise suites of symphonic excerpts from several of his stage works. He was only able to complete these projects because he persevered with the punctual and concentrated work habits of his earlier years, though at a less intense level. His friend, the composer Dmitri Kabalevsky, wrote, “His whole existence, all his energies, his entire mode of life were directed to the one aim, of saving for his work all the strength he had left. At times it seemed as if he knew his malady would defeat him in the end and he was deliberately hurrying to get all his ideas down on paper before it was too late.” During his frequent hospital stays, for example, he was forbidden to work at all. One friend reported, however, that Prokofiev stationed him at his hospital door during a visit so that he could warn the composer of any approaching nurses. While the coast was clear, Prokofiev scribbled a few notes on the pad he kept hidden beneath his pillow.

Late in 1951, Prokofiev projected a whole series of works — sonatas for piano and for cello, a sixth piano concerto, extensive revisions of earlier scores — that he intended to complete in the near future. Among these plans, he told the press, was one for a “simple symphony,” intended for young listeners, perhaps to be broadcast by the Children’s Division of the national radio. He set to work on the symphony immediately; the short score was finished by March 20, 1952, and the orchestration was done by July 5th. (It was to be the only one of these late projected works that he completed.) The new Symphony, however, his seventh in the genre, had grown beyond his original conception to a full concert hall specimen, though it retained a pronounced simplicity of form, texture and thematic substance. The piece stirred considerable interest even before it was publicly premiered on October 11, 1952 in Moscow: the pianist Anatoly Vedernikov made a four-hand arrangement of the score, which was enthusiastically received at a private concert given for the Composer’s Union; Kabalevsky extolled the Symphony in the press; Shostakovich called it “joyful, lyrical and delightful.” When the piece was finally heard, the critics and public joined in the praise, making the premiere a virtual farewell to the ailing composer. It was the last time he attended a public performance of his own music; he died of a stroke five months later. The Symphony was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize in 1957.

The Seventh Symphony, along with such other works as Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, Alexander Nevsky and the Second Violin Concerto that Prokofiev wrote after returning to Russia from the West in 1933, is richly lyrical and immediately ingratiating, the style deemed appropriate by the government to inspire the Soviet masses. “It is the duty of the composer, like the poet, the sculptor or the painter, to serve his fellow men, to beautify human life and show the way to a radiant future,” he wrote in his 1946 Autobiography. This Symphony, his last important completed score, not only made those words manifest, but also showed that Prokofiev was able to create music of surpassing quality under the tightest ideological strictures.

Rather than being dramatic or heroic, the Symphony’s opening movement is quiet, lyri-cal and somewhat nostalgic in expression, a formal technique Prokofiev may have borrowed from Shostakovich. The movement contains three themes: a sad, simple melody initiated by the violins; a sweeping phrase of balletic mien; and a slight, sardonic motive in metronomic rhythm. The compact development section treats each of the three themes before they are fully recapitulated to round out the

GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Wednesday, July 27, 2011

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“Old Russian Circus Music is written in the traditions of virtuoso concert music. Sometimes today, contemporary composers ignore this type of music in essence, preferring to write slow, gloomy, doleful music as if it were the confession of a suicide before he takes his life…. My Circus Music is directed straight at the listener, the audience, at the skill of the instrumental player, the soloists within the orchestra, at the joy that can be derived from well-coordinated and virtuoso ensemble playing. In this work I deliberately strove for color, musical painting and humor, and also for those things that are effective, superficial and entertaining. In a word, I flew in the face of what is now considered to be good taste, i.e., depicting oneself as an ascetic, ruminating philosopher, or a monk who has taken the [Orthodox Church] vows of schema.

“In the work I use — admittedly very briefly, almost only as a hint — the famous old song Dark Eyes, which Gypsy musicians introduced into Russian folklore. Russian chroniclers have verified that no circus performance of those distant years was complete without this song. [The theme is quoted in a quiet, dream-like episode near the end by the violas, who may also sing along quietly as they play the melody tremolo.]

“I hope that in my musical narrative, my dear listener, your ear will be able to make out the ap-proach of the circus caravan, the fanfares of the criers, and the solo variations of, let’s say, the tightrope-walker and the juggler, and then the slight parody of a quasi-balletic Grand adagio, followed by a coda with a parade for the entire company of players. At the end, there are some more fanfares and the circus procession leaves town. Circus Music was written in 1989, during the perestroika years, a time of hope and faith in the emancipation and reconstruction of Russian society. Was I, too, perhaps fired me with energy and optimism by a feeling of hope that there would be changes for the better?”

©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL