Sleepers and Dreamers Friday, July 6, 2012 at … · Sleepers and Dreamers Friday, July 6, ... You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat. 4. The Call Come,

2012 Program Notes, Book 2 A47

Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, Principal ConductorChristopher Bell, Chorus Director

Sleepers and DreamersFriday, July 6, 2012 at 6:30PMSaturday, July 7, 2012 at 7:30PM

Jay Pritzker PavilionGrant Park orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, ConductorChristopher Bell, Chorus DirectorLevi Hernandez, Baritone

BRAHMS Tragic Overture, op. 81

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Five Mystical Songs for Baritone, Chorus and orchestra

Easter I Got Me Flowers Love Bade Me Welcome The Call Antiphon

levi Hernandez

INTERMISSIoN

STRAUSS Death and Transfiguration, op. 24

CURRIER Sleepers and Dreamers for Chorus and orchestra

Sleepers Dreamers

WoRLD PREMIERE

This work was commissioned by the Grant Park Music Festivalin celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Grant Park Choruswith the generous support of Joyce Saxon and Richard Tribble.

Special thanks to Ginger and Jim Meyer, and Dr. Ken Shanoff and Mr. Steve Young

A48 2012 Program Notes, Book 2

TraGIc oVErTurE, OP. 81 (1880)Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)The Tragic overture is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. The performance time is approximately 13 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this work on August 13, 1938, Walter Steindel conducting.

Many of Brahms’ works were produced in pairs: the Piano Sonatas, op. 1 and op. 2; Piano Quartets, op. 25 and op. 26; String Quartets, op. 51; Clarinet Sonatas, op. 120; even the first two Symphonies, the sets of Liebeslieder Waltzes and the Serenades. These twin pieces seem to have been the result of a surfeit of material — as Brahms was working out his ideas for a composition in a particular genre, he produced enough material to spin off a second work of similar type. Though the two orchestral overtures of 1880, Academic Festival and Tragic, were also written in tandem, they have about them more the quality of complementary balance than of continuity. Academic Festival is bright in mood and lighthearted in its musical treatment of some favorite German student drinking songs. The Tragic Overture, on the other hand, is somber and darkly heroic. of them, Brahms wrote to his biographer, Max Kalbeck, “one overture laughs, the other weeps.”

The Tragic Overture is comparable in form and expression to the first movement of a symphony. Its sonata structure commences with a stern summons of two chords immediately preceding the austere arching main theme in D minor. A contrasting theme is presented by violins, but the stormy disposition of the opening is not kept long at bay. The compact development restores the tempestuous mood. The recapitulation is a considerably altered version of the exposition’s musical events, which here receive further exploration of their expressive potentials. The sense of heroic struggle that dominates the Tragic Overture remains undiminished to the end.

LEVi HErnAnDEz, baritone, a native of El Paso and a graduate of Westminster Choir College and the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, made his Grant Park Music Festival debut in the title role of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi in 2004. He is also an alumnus of the Lyric opera of Chicago Center for American Artists, and made his Lyric opera mainstage debut during 2004-2005 as Marullo in Rigoletto, Sciarrone in Tosca, the Innkeeper in Manon Lescaut and the Bartender in the world premiere of William Bolcom’s A Wedding; he returned to

Lyric opera the following season to make his principal role debut as Dandini in La Cenerentola and was seen in 2007-2008 as Schaunard in La Bohème. Mr. Hernandez’s additional credits include Puccini’s Il Trittico and La Fanciulla del West with both San Francisco opera and the Metropolitan opera, Madama Butterfly with Houston Grand opera, Don Giovanni with opera Theater of St. Louis, Tosca and La Rondine with Los Angeles opera, Carmen, Rigoletto and Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Boston Lyric opera, Rigoletto, Carmen and L’italiana in Algeri with opera Company of Philadelphia, and Pique Dame with the Komosche oper of Berlin. He returns to the Metropolitan opera roster for the 2012-2013 season. His concert appearances include the Phoenix Symphony, Pennsylvania Ballet, Kalamazoo Symphony and Cheyenne Symphony. Levi Hernandez was a 2002 Metropolitan opera National Council Awards finalist, a Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation grant winner and a 2002 operalia competition finalist.

Friday, July 6 and Saturday, July 7, 2012



FIVE MYSTIcaL SoNGS (1906-1911)ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs is scored for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp and strings. The performance time is approximately 20 minutes. This is the work’s first performance by the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus.

“Music,” said George Herbert, according to Izaak Walton’s 1670 biography of the Welsh clergyman and poet, “did relieve my drooping spirits, compose my distracted thoughts, and raise my weary soul so far above earth, that it gave me an earnest of the joys of heaven, before I possessed them.” George Herbert was born in 1593 in Montgomery in central Wales, three miles from the English border, into a wealthy and artistic noble family — his mother was a friend and patron of John Donne, who delivered the eulogy at her funeral in 1627. Herbert’s father died when George was three and the family moved to London, where he received an excellent general education at Westminster School. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1609 with the intention of becoming a priest, excelling there in languages and music, and in 1620 he was appointed University orator, which required writing and delivering speeches for institutional occasions and before king and court, and visiting with dignitaries and ambassadors. After a brief stint in parliament in the mid-1620s representing Montgomery, Herbert returned to his religious studies at Cambridge; he took holy orders in the Church of England in 1630. He spent the rest of his short life at the parish of St. Andrew’s in Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he was beloved for his unfailing care for his parishioners and for rebuilding the 14th-century church with his own funds. Music was integral to his spirituality: he composed hymns around several of the many devotional poems he wrote throughout his life; he walked several miles into Salisbury twice a week to hear Evensong at the cathedral; he regularly joined parishioners and church musicians on his lute or viol. “My time spent in prayer and music elevated my soul,” he said, “and was my heaven upon earth.” Herbert suffered from poor health throughout his life and he succumbed to tuberculosis on March 1, 1633, just three years after he had been ordained. His body was buried under the chancel floor at St. Andrew’s. A stained glass window in his memory was dedicated in Westminster Abbey in 1875.

By 1911, the time of not only the Five Mystical Songs based on Herbert’s verses but also A Sea Symphony and the luminous Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, Vaughan Williams had formed a unique creative voice from the pastoral lyricism and gentle modality of British folksong and hymnody, the opulent harmony of Ravel (with whom he had studied in Paris in 1908), and the orchestral grandeur and surety of design of Elgar, all qualities heard in Easter, which evokes both the joy (Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen) and the solemn dignity (What key is best to celebrate this most high day?) of Christianity’s seminal event. The simplicity of the stanzaic structure and the purity of the musical language of I Got Me Flowers reflect the conviction of the unison sentiment with which it closes: There is but one, and that one ever. Love Bade Me Welcome is Herbert’s compassionate vision of the soul’s redemption, for which Vaughan Williams provided a benediction with a wordless choral recollection of the ancient chant melody O Sacrum Convivium, from the second Vespers service of Corpus Christi: O sacred feast, in which Christ is received: the memory of his Passion is renewed, alleluia. Michael Kennedy, in his study of the composer, wrote that the melody Vaughan Williams matched to Herbert’s summation of his own religious life, The Call (Such a Life, as killeth death), is “one of those simple tunes which came naturally to him and are entirely personal, yet sound as if they had always existed.” The closing Antiphon is a hymn of exultation (Let all the world in every corner sing) that creates what Kennedy described as “a mood of bell-ringing, cymbal-crashing celebration.”

A50 2012 Program Notes, Book 2


1. EasterRise, heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praiseWithout delays,Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewiseWith him may’st rise;That, as his death calcined thee to dust,His life may make thee gold, and much more, Just. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy partWith all thy art. The cross taught all wood to resound his nameWho bore the same. His stretched sinews taught all strings, what keyIs best to celebrate this most high day. Consort both heart and lute, and twist a songPleasant and long;or since all music is but three parts vied,And multiplied;o let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,And make up our defects with his sweet art.

2. I Got Me FlowersI got me flowers to strew thy way;I got me boughs off many a tree:But thou wast up by break of day,And brought’st thy sweets along with thee. The Sun arising in the East,Though he give light, and the East perfume;



If they should offer to contestWith thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,Though many suns to shine endeavour? We count three hundred, but we miss:There is but one, and that one ever.

3. Love Bade Me Welcome

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slackFrom my first entrance in,Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,If I lack’d anything.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shameGo where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:So I did sit and eat.

4. The Call

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:Such a Way, as gives us breath:Such a Truth, as ends all strife:Such a Life, as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:Such a Light, as shows a feast:Such a Feast, as mends in length:Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:Such a Joy, as none can move:Such a Love, as none can part:Such a Heart, as joys in love.

5. Antiphon

Let all the world in every corner sing,My God and King!

The heav’ns are not too high,His praise may thither fly:The earth is not too low,His praises there may grow.


The church with Psalms must shout,No door can keep them out:But above all, the heartMust bear the longest part.




dEaTh aNd TraNSFIGuraTIoN, OP. 24 (1889)richard Strauss (1864-1949)Death and Transfiguration is scored for three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings. Performance time is 23 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this work on August 25, 1936, Richard Czerwonky conducted.

It was at his first conducting post as assistant to the renowned Hans von Bülow at Meiningen that Strauss began composing his tone poems. Death and Transfiguration (1889) was the third of these, following Macbeth (1887) and Don Juan (1888). The literary inspiration for Death and Transfiguration originated with Strauss himself, as he noted in a letter to his friend Friedrich von Hausegger: “The idea came to me to write a tone poem describing the last hours of a man who had striven for the highest ideals, presumably an artist. The sick man lies in his bed breathing heavily and irregularly in his sleep. Friendly dreams bring a smile to his face; his sleep grows lighter; he awakens. Fearful pains once more begin to torture him, fever shakes his body. When the attack is over and the pain recedes, he recalls his past life; his childhood passes before his eyes; his youth with its strivings and passions; and then, when the pain returns, there appears to him the goal of his life’s journey — the idea, the ideal which he attempted to embody in his art, but which he was unable to perfect because such perfection could be achieved by no man. The fatal hour arrives. The soul leaves his body, to discover in the eternal cosmos the magnificent realization of the ideal which could not be fulfilled here below.” Strauss’ composition follows his literary program with almost clinical precision. It is divided into four sections. The first summons a vision of the sickroom and the irregular heartbeat and distressed sighs of the man/artist. The second section is a vivid portrayal of his suffering. The ensuing section, beginning tenderly and representing the artist’s remembrance of his life, is broken off when the anguished music of the second part returns. This ultimate, painful struggle ends in death, signified by a stroke of the gong. The final section, hymnal in mood, depicts the artist’s vision of ultimate beauty as he is transfigured into part of “the eternal cosmos.”

SLEEpErS aNd drEaMErS (2012)Sebastian Currier (born in 1959)Sleepers and Dreamers is scored for piccolo, two flutes, three oboes, clarinet, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, percussion, piano, keyboard sampler and strings. The performance time is 22 minutes. This is the work’s world premiere.

Sebastian Currier was born in 1959 into a musical family in Huntington, Pennsylvania and raised in Providence, Rhode Island — his father, Robert, was a professional violinist and violist and a string teacher; his mother, Marilyn Kind Currier, was a composer and professor of music at Providence College; his younger brother, Nathan, is a Juilliard-trained composer deeply involved with climate science in both his music and his life. Sebastian Currier holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, where his teachers included Milton Babbitt; he also studied at Tanglewood with George Perle. Currier has served on the faculties of Juilliard and Columbia University, and held residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. In 2007, he won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award of the University of Louisville; his other distinctions include the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, Berlin Prize, Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the


Arts, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Currier wrote that Sleepers and Dreamers, commissioned by the Grant Park Music Festival in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Grant Park Chorus in 2012, “explores the mysterious nature of sleep. We spend nearly a third of our lives sleeping. over a lifetime, it is a vast expanse of time for which, aside from the occasional dream remembered, we have little conscious awareness. Sleepers and Dreamers imagines this remote world within us. In the first part, Sleepers, we experience sleep from the outside. Sleep is observed, considered, analyzed: ‘The sleepers’ eyes dart. Their limbs and faces twitch. Their eyes beat beneath their lids.’ It is the world of science, rational thought, daylight. In Dreamers, night falls and we enter the strange, remote world of sleep. The chorus sings without words, conjuring the oblivion of deep sleep. This is interrupted by short fragmentary dreams, each from a different dreamer — Phillip dreams that a locomotive is coming towards him and he can’t escape; Leah dreams she is swimming in air; Susan confronts a bat the size of a boy. All are locked in sleep, remote from even themselves, yet what they dream reflects the desires, fears, anxieties, pleasures of all of us. Sleepers and Dreamers takes us on a voyage from the normal world into the distant, inaccessible world of our sleeping selves. The text of Sleepers is by [acclaimed Boston novelist and poet, winner of a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize] Sarah Manguso. The second section, Dreamers, uses first hand dream accounts from various individuals from different walks of life.”

Sleepers

Light strikes the cells of the organs of sight that deliver it mindward

and the sleepers wake into the long day that swells into evening.

The small pine cone of the third eye, inhibited by light,

emits its dark milk that drowses and cools as a black river.

It spills everywhere and the sleepers lie down and close their eyes.

Brain cells trade energies that are light. They are heat. And the waves move slow.

The muscles still and the bodies finish their movements

and the eyes move slower. Be quiet — the sleepers can still be awakened.

Their eyes flutter and stop. Their breathing thins. Their blood runs slow.

Their bodies cool. The sleepers don’t know where they are anymore.

Their breath takes a rhythm. Their blood creeps and their muscles soften.

In deep sleep now they are hard to awaken. The waves slow further,

as much as they can before the drop into the deepest water.

The sleepers’ eyes dart. Their limbs and faces twitch. Their eyes beat beneath the lids.

Their breathing grows fast, shallow, wild. Their hearts quicken amid the whirl of dreams

in which they float. Their paralyzed bodies hold them still in the black river.

No one knows why their brains alight for learning and memory.

Light strikes the cells of the organs of sight that deliver it mindward

and the sleepers wake and rise from the river that dries in the light

and remembers their bodies, which hold the dark waves they forget incompletely.



II. DREAMERSFirst-hand dream accounts

Dreamer 1: JeanineI’m in my boyfriend’s luxurious apartment. Many beautiful women are there. one turns to me and

says “you don’t belong here.”

Dreamer 2: LeahI am swimming, not in water, but in air, floating a few feet above the ground. I feel so free as I

glide along the street past houses and shops.

Dreamer 3: PhilipI am standing on a railroad track in an endless field of yellow wheat. A black locomotive is coming

towards me. I move to escape, but my feet always land on more track.

Dreamer 4: SusanI see a bat. He’s the size of a boy. He says he’ll pull my hair out. He pulls his hair out and eats it!

Dreamer 5: SebastianI am having an ecstasy. It keeps going and going and going. It will not stop! My pleasure turns

quickly to panic and then to terror.

Dreamer 6: RobertI stare down at a shriveled, motionless body lying on a bed with a blue sheet. I know it is me, in

the future, dying.

Dreamer 7: Marilynon the beach, just at the water’s edge, I see my cousin Serene, struggling with a huge alligator.

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Sleepers and Dreamers Friday, July 6, 2012 at … · Sleepers and Dreamers Friday, July 6, ... You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat. 4. The Call Come,