2016 Program Notes, Book 5 | 27

Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor

Christopher Bell, Chorus Director

Rachel Barton Pine Plays BruchWednesday, July 13, 2016 at 6:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORCHESTRAMichał Nesterowicz, Guest ConductorRachel Barton Pine, Violin

LUTOSŁAWSKI Mala Suite (“Little Suite”)

Fujarka (“Fife”) Hurra Polka Piosenka (“Song”) Taniec (“Dance”)

BRUCH Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26

Prelude: Allegro moderato — Adagio Finale: Allegro energico

Rachel BaRton Pine

SCHUMANN Symphony No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 120

Ziemlich langsam — Lebhaft Romanze: Ziemlich langsam Scherzo: Lebhaft — Langsam — Lebhaft

This concert is supported by the Walter E. Heller Foundation, given in memory of Alyce DeCosta.

Tonight’s concert is being broadcast live on 98.7 WFMT and streamed live at wfmt.com.

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MICHAŁ NESTEROWICZ, born in Wrocław, Poland, is Artistic Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife and assumes the post of Principal Guest Conductor of the Sinfonieorchester Basel at the beginning of the 2016-2017 season. He previous-ly served as Artistic Director of the Polish Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra in Gdan sk and Principal Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Chile. Mr. Nesterowicz frequently con-ducts the leading orchestras of Spain and his native Poland, and has appeared as guest conductor with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Tonhalle Orchestra (Zurich), Royal Liverpool Philhar-

monic Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, Orchestra della Svizzera Italia, Symphony Orchestra of New Russia, Brus-sels Philharmonic, Münchner Philharmoniker, BBC Symphony Orchestra, WDR Sin-fonieorchester, NDR Sinfonieorchester (Hamburg), Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice, Jerusalem Camerata Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico, Orquesta Sin-fônica de Estado de São Paulo, Spokane Symphony Orchestra and National Tai-wan Symphony Orchestra. Michał Nesterowicz studied at the Academy of Music in Wrocław and graduated with honors in conducting. Two years later he was among the winners at the Sixth Grzegorz Fitelberg International Conducting Competition in Katowice and in 2008 received First Prize at the Ninth Conducting Competition of Cadaques in Spain.

American violinist RACHEL BARTON PINE has appeared inter-nationally in recital and as soloist with many of the world’s great-est orchestras, including the Chicago, Atlanta, St. Louis, Dallas, Baltimore, Montreal, Vienna, New Zealand and Iceland sympho-nies, and the Philadelphia Orchestra; her festival appearances include Ravinia, Marlboro and Salzburg. Ms. Pine has been fea-tured on St. Paul Sunday, Performance Today, From the Top, CBS Sunday Morning, and NBC’s Today. Among her critically acclaimed albums for the Cedille, Warner Classics, Hänssler Classics, Naxos and Dorian labels are Brahms and Joachim

Violin Concertos with Carlos Kalmar and the Chicago Symphony, Scottish Fanta-sies with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Beethoven and Clement Violin Concertos with José Serebrier and the Royal Philharmonic, and Vivaldi: The Complete Viola D’Amore Concertos with Ars Antigua. She made her debut on Avie Records with Mozart: Complete Violin Concertos with conductor Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, featuring her own cadenzas. She holds top prizes from the J.S. Bach (gold medal), Queen Elisabeth, Paganini, Kreisler, Szigeti and Montreal international competitions, and has twice been honored as a Chica-goan of the Year. Her charitable activities include serving as a trustee of the Music Institute of Chicago and president of the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation. A Chicago native, Rachel Barton Pine began violin studies at age three and made her professional debut four years later with the Chicago String Ensemble. Her earliest appearances with the Chicago Symphony (at ages ten and fifteen) were broadcast on television. Her principal teachers were Roland and Almita Vamos and she has also studied with Ruben Gonzalez, Werner Scholz, Elmira Darvarova and several early music specialists. Ms. Pine performs on the Joseph Guarnerius del Gesu (Cremona 1742), known as the “ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat,” on lifetime loan from her patron. She resides in Chicago with her husband and daughter.

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MALA SUITE (“LITTLE SUITE”) (1950)Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994)Lutosławski’s Little Suite is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus pic-colo, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. The performance time is 11 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the Grant Park Orchestra.

Witold Lutosławski was among the giants of late-20th-century music. Born into a highly cultured family in Warsaw, Poland on January 25, 1913, Lutosławski took up piano and violin as a teen-

ager before entering the Warsaw Conservatory to study keyboard and composition. His first important work, the Symphonic Variations (1938), dates from the year after his graduation. He supported himself during the difficult years of World War II, when he was in constant fear of deportation, as a pianist in the Warsaw cafés. At that time, he also worked on his First Symphony, which was condemned following its 1947 pre-miere for not conforming to the government-prescribed style of “socialist realism.” Many of his works of the following decade avoided “formalism” by deriving their melodic and harmonic inspiration from folk songs and dances, a period that culmi-nated in the splendid Concerto for Orchestra of 1950-1954. After the Funeral Music for String Orchestra of 1957, Lutosławski’s music was written in a more decidedly modern idiom, akin in some respects to twelve-tone serialism but still individual in its formal strength, colorful sonority, lucid texture and emotional power. His last works, notably the Third (1983) and Fourth (1992) Symphonies and the Piano Concerto (1987), turned to an idiom that is less dissonant, dense, complicated and unpredict-able, and more lucid and obviously melodic than the compositions of the preceding two decades. In summarizing the style of Lutosławski’s music, Bohdan Pociej wrote, “For him sound is primary, but this does not mean that he tends in the direction of impressionism; rather the superior position given to sound quality is combined with an unusually acute sense of proportion and of the expressive capacities of shape. The sources of his music may be traced to the deepest and most vital European traditions, and he has renewed and developed currents of musical thought basic to those traditions: the idea of form in sound as a manifestation of beauty and the idea of dramatic form generated by conflict.”

The composer gave the following account of the genesis of his folk-inspired works of the early 1950s, including the delightful Little Suite for Orchestra of 1950: “In 1945, the Polish music publishing company PWM [Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzy-czne] — which had just been established — asked me to compose a series of easy pieces based on Polish folk song and dance themes. I readily accepted this proposi-tion and began for the first time to introduce elements of folk music into my work.... The series of ‘functional’ pieces which I wrote based on folk themes gave me the possibility of developing a style which, though narrow and limited, was nevertheless characteristic enough.”

The Little Suite was composed for a program of light music broadcast by Polish Radio; Lutosławski revised the work’s original chamber orchestra scoring the follow-ing year for full orchestra. The thematic material for its four movements — Fujarka (“Fife”), Hurra Polka, Piosenka (“Song”) and Taniec (“Dance”) — comes from the vil-lage of Machów, near Rzeszów, east of Cracow; Lutosławski discovered the melodies at a festival of Polish folk music. The original tunes are presented in the Little Suite without parody or pretension, and developed with subtle rhythmic modifications, playful dialogue among the instruments and luminous orchestral settings.

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VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 1 IN G MINOR, OP. 26 (1865-1866)Max Bruch (1838-1920)Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 is scored for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. The performance time is 24 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Concerto on September 4, 1938, with Walter H. Steindel conducting. Albert Spalding was the soloist.

Max Bruch, widely known and respected in his day as a com-poser, conductor and teacher, received his earliest music instruction from his mother, a noted singer and pianist. He began composing at eleven, and by fourteen had produced a symphony and a string quartet, the latter garnering a prize that allowed him to study with Reinecke and Hiller in Cologne. Bruch held various posts as a cho-ral and orchestral conductor in Cologne, Coblenz, Sondershausen, Berlin, Liverpool and Breslau, and in 1883 he visited America to conduct concerts of his own composi-tions. From 1890 to 1910, he taught composition at the Berlin Academy and received numerous awards for his work, including an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. Though Bruch is known mainly for three famous compositions for string soloist and orchestra (the G minor Concerto and Scottish Fantasy for violin, and Kol Nidrei for cello), he also composed two other violin concertos, three symphonies, a concerto for two pianos, various chamber pieces, songs, three operas and much choral music.

The G minor Violin Concerto is a work of lyrical beauty and emotional sincerity. The first movement, which Bruch called a “Prelude,” is in the nature of an extended introduction leading without pause into the slow movement. The Concerto opens with a dialogue between soloist and orchestra followed by a wide-ranging subject played by the violinist over a pizzicato line in the basses. A contrasting theme reach-es into the highest register of the violin. A stormy section for orchestra alone recalls the opening dialogue, which softens to usher in the lovely Adagio. This slow move-ment contains three important themes, all languorous and sweet, which are shared by soloist and orchestra. The music builds to a passionate climax before subsiding to a tranquil close. The finale begins with eighteen modulatory bars containing hints of the upcoming theme before the soloist proclaims the vibrant melody itself. A broad melody, played first by the orchestra alone before being taken over by the soloist, serves as the second theme. A brief development, based on the dance-like first theme, leads to the recapitulation. The coda recalls again the first theme to bring the work to a rousing close.

SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN D MINOR, OP. 120 (1841; REVISED 1851)Robert Schumann (1810-1856)Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 is scored for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. The performance time is 28 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on July 21, 1940, with Rudolph Ganz conducting.

“I often feel tempted to crush my piano — it is too narrow for my thoughts,” wrote Schumann in 1839 to Heinrich Dorn, his former composition

2016 Program Notes, Book 5 | 31

teacher. “I really have very little practice in orchestral music now; still, I hope to mas-ter it.” To that time (Schumann turned thirty the following summer), he had produced only songs and small-scale works for solo piano, with the exception of an abandoned symphony of 1832. Within a year of his words to Professor Dorn, Schumann received strong encouragement from three sources to act on his ambition to launch into the grander genres of music. First, the redoubtable Franz Liszt had taken up Schumann’s piano works, especially the brilliant Carnaval, and he convinced his young colleague that he was capable of bigger things. As the second impetus toward undertaking an orchestral work, Schumann had discovered the wondrous Symphony No. 9 in C major of Franz Schubert among the papers of the late composer’s brother in 1839. Schumann was ecstatic over his find, and he talked Mendelssohn into conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in a performance of the work.

Schumann’s third source of encouragement was his beloved wife, Clara. Their long-hoped-for marriage finally took place in September 1840, and Clara, one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century, was soon coaxing her new husband to begin a symphony. Her urging had an immediate effect. The year 1841 was one of almost unmatched creativity for Schumann, during which he wrote not one but two sym-phonies, the first movement of what became the Piano Concerto, a hybrid orchestral work called Overture, Scherzo and Finale (Op. 52) and sketches for a C minor sym-phony that was never completed. He began the D minor Symphony in May, as soon as he finished the one in B-flat major (No. 1, “Spring”), and was able to present the manuscript as a gift to Clara for her birthday on September 13, 1841, also the day on which their first child was baptized. Schumann felt unsure of the orchestration of the new Symphony because of his limited background in writing for instruments, however, and, after hearing a trial performance of the work in December, he decided not to publish it. The score went into his desk drawer, where it lay untouched for a decade. In 1851, after he had written two more symphonies (hence, this D minor Symphony became known as “Number 4,” though it was the second he composed), Schumann undertook a revision of the score, excising some passages and changing the orchestration by reinforcing many of the lines. This final version of the score was premiered on March 3, 1853, when the composer conducted it in Düsseldorf.

The introduction is somber and slow-moving, with a “motto” (a half-dozen scale notes turning around a central pitch) presented immediately in the second violins. The tempo quickens and the Allegro begins with a bounding theme for violins and high woodwinds that encompasses the “motto.” The movement continues, passion-ate and eloquent, with the bounding main theme almost constantly in evidence. Hardly before the recapitulation has begun, it is abruptly truncated to make way for the wistful Romanze, based on a haunting tune sung by the oboe. Following a lovely, limpid section marked by shimmering triplet figures in the solo violin, the oboe melody returns briefly but stops on an inconclusive harmony which resolves only as the tempestuous Scherzo begins; the gentle trio recalls the Romanze. With no break, the hushed expectancy that began the Symphony returns, and here serves to usher in the Finale. The bounding main theme of the opening movement reap-pears, as do other musical ideas previously encountered. There is an invigorating rhythmic energy about this closing movement that carries the music forward and gives a sense of arrival, as though the Finale were the goal of all that had preceded it. (It is, of course.) As if the exuberant mood that begins this movement were insuf-ficient to cap the structure, the tempo in the closing pages is increased twice to provide a thrilling final climax to this grand Symphony.

©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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