2014 Program Notes, Book 8 39

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

Symphonie EspagnoleWednesday, July 30, 2014 at 6:30 p.m.

Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORCHESTRACarlos Kalmar, ConductorChristian Tetzlaff, Violin

CHAUSSON Symphony in B-flat Major

Lent — Allegro vivo Très lent Animé

INTERMISSION

LALO Symphonie espagnole

Allegro non troppo Scherzando: Allegro molto Intermezzo: Allegretto non troppo Andante Rondo: Allegro

ChriStian tetzlaff

C. HALFFTER Tiento del primer tono y batalla imperial

Tonight’s concert will be broadcast live on 98.7WFMT

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CARLOS KALMAR’s biography can be found on page 16.Violinist CHRISTIAN TETzLAFF was Musical America’s 2005 “Instrumentalist of the Year” and a 2010-2011 Carnegie Hall Perspectives Artist, for which he curated a personal concert series featuring collaborations with other musicians and ensembles and led a Professional Training Workshop for young violinists and pianists. Born in Hamburg in 1966, Mr. Tetzlaff began playing violin at age six and made his debut performing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at fourteen. He came to the United States to study with Walter Levine at the University of

Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and spent two summers at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. Mr. Tetzlaff appears regularly with the orchestras of Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Toronto, among many others in North America, as well as with major European ensembles including the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He is a dedicated chamber musician and frequently collaborates with such distinguished artists as Leif Ove Andsnes, Lars Vogt and Alexander Lonquich and his own Tetzlaff Quartet, which he formed in 1994 with violinist Elisabeth Kufferath, violist Hanna Weinmeister and his sister, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff. From the outset of his career, Christian Tetzlaff has performed and recorded a broad spectrum of repertory, ranging from Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas and partitas to world premieres of contemporary works.

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2014 Program Notes, Book 8 41

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

SYMPHONY IN B-FLAT MAjOR, OP. 20 (1889-1890)Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)Chausson’s Symphony in B-flat is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two harps and strings. The performance time is 30 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this work

on August 23, 1937, with Ebba Sundstrom conducting.Ernest Chausson, the only child of a wealthy Parisian building contractor, was

tutored privately at home as a boy. He consequently had little contact with other children, a circumstance that seems to have been the root of his lifelong reflective disposition. Though he was sent for advanced general studies to law school, from which he graduated in 1877, he never lost his refined taste for art, literature and music, and in 1879 he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire as a student of César Franck. After his graduation in 1883, Chausson’s elegant Parisian home became the site for many gatherings of France’s intellectual and artistic elite, including Manet, Renoir, Degas, Rodin, Mallarmé, Franck, Chabrier, Dukas, Satie and many others. The Chausson house was always open to aspiring musicians, including the young Debussy and the Spaniard Isaac Albéniz, with whom he was generous with his encouragement. Chausson was, by all reports, a gentle, considerate, kind and somewhat shy man, who enjoyed health, wealth and a happy home life. Despite the halcyon circumstances of his personal life, however, he was given to writing melancholy music, perhaps spurred by his occasional fits of depression. Since quiet surroundings helped to soothe his spirit, he took to spending the hot summer months away from Paris at various country retreats. It was on one of those sylvan sojourns that he met his untimely death at the age of 44 as the result of a bicycle accident.

Chausson's only Symphony, composed in 1888-1890 and premiered under the composer’s direction at a concert of the Société Nationale in Paris on April 18, 1891, begins with a spacious introduction of rather portentous character whose opening motive returns in the finale to unify the work’s overall structure. The main body of the sonata-form first movement is launched by an animated triple-meter melody sounded by horn and bassoon; the subsidiary subject is a broadly flowing theme initiated by clarinet, violas and cellos. The development makes much use of the staccato transition phrase, which is balanced by more expansive episodes based on the main theme and the motive from the introduction. Ribbons of rising scales lead to the recapitulation. The second movement, instructed to be played “with great intensity of expression,” is brooding and introspective, the most tragic utterance in Chausson’s oeuvre. The solemn harmonic progression that opens the movement resolves itself into a violin melody of plaintive character. The middle regions of the movement are occupied by a dolorous theme given in the plangent tones of the English horn. The music builds in emotional potency and reaches a climax in the full orchestra for the formal restatement of the principal theme, after which the tension subsides. A brief, heroic gesture closes the movement. The opening of the finale is stormy and aggressive, with tempestuous figures in the strings serving as the foundation for the proclamation of the dynamic main theme by woodwinds and trumpet. This mood and theme are sustained through several transformations until they are superseded by the chorale passage that serves as the second subject. The skillful development section incorporates not only the two themes of the finale, but also recalls much of material from the first movement. The recapitulation of the finale’s themes is abbreviated. This handsome product of French Late Romanticism ends with a majestic coda based on the broad motive that opened the Symphony.

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Symphonie eSpagnole FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA, OP. 21 (1873)Édouard Lalo (1823-1892)Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. The performance time is 33 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Concerto on August 10, 1937, with Ebba Sundstrom

conducting and Evelyn Levin Davis as soloist.Édouard Lalo’s early musical training was at the conservatory in Lille, where he

was born in 1823; he later transferred to the Paris Conservatoire to study composition and violin. He started composing in the 1840s, but, discouraged by the lack of performances and publications of his music, he abandoned his creative work for almost a decade to play viola in the Armingaud-Jacquard Quartet. His muse was rekindled in 1865 upon his marriage to Bernier de Maligny, a gifted contralto who performed many of his songs in recital and who also inspired his first opera, Fiesque. The Divertissement for orchestra (1872), based on ballet music from Fiesque, was his first important success as a composer. Encouraged by the formation of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 and the support of such conductors as Pasdeloup, Lamoureux and Colonne, Lalo produced a succession of instrumental works that brought him to the forefront of French music, including the Violin Concerto (1874) and Symphonie espagnole (1875), both premiered by the celebrated Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate. His eminent position in French music was confirmed when he was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1888.

The Symphonie espagnole, despite its name, is a true concerto in which the soloist is called upon to display significant feats of violinistic prowess. The five movements individually follow symphonic structures, which led Lalo to write about the title, “It conveyed my thought — a violin soaring above the rigid form of an old symphony.” The first movement is cast in sonata form, with a main theme employing bold upward leaps and a legato second theme in a contrasting major tonality. The nimble, dance-like Scherzando, in three-part form (A–B–A), calls for both lyricism and flexibility from the soloist. The next movement is characterized by the extensive use of the Spanish rhythmic device of alternating groups of two and three notes. In the fourth movement, a three-part structure (A–B–A), a somber introduction leads to the melancholy main theme for the soloist. The finale, begun by the sound of distant peeling bells, is a bubbling rondo in the style of the saltarello.

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TienTo del primer Tono y baTalla imperial (“The Touch of The firST noTe and The royal baTTle”) (1986)Cristóbal Halffter (born in 1930)Halffter’s Tiento del primer tono y batalla imperial is scored for piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, four clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, four trombones, percussion and strings. The performance time is

10 minutes. This is the first performance of the work by the Grant Park Orchestra.Cristóbal Halffter, nephew of brother composers Rodolfo and Ernesto Halffter,

is one of Spain’s most prominent musicians. Cristóbal was born in Madrid in 1930 and went to Germany with his family in 1936 to escape the Spanish Civil War. They returned to Madrid in 1939 and Halffter entered the Royal Conservatory to study with composer, violinist and conductor Conrado del Campo. After graduating, Halffter studied privately in Paris with Alexandre Tansman and André Jolivet, and conducted the Manuel de Falla Orchestra. He has since composed steadily, guest conducted widely in Europe and America, and served as president of the Spanish section of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Among Halffter’s honors are membership in the European Academy of Science, Arts and Humanities, Berlin Academy of the Arts and Swedish Royal Academy, Gold Medal of the Fine Arts awarded by King Juan Carlos of Spain, and the National Music Prize of Spain.

Halffter wrote of Tiento del primer tono y batalla imperial, “In April 1986 Paul Sacher [director of the Basel Chamber Orchestra and an important advocate and commissioner of many 20th-century composers] celebrated his eightieth birthday. Tiento del primer tono y batalla imperial was commissioned by the City of Basel as a ‘musical gift’ to honor one of its most illustrious sons. It is also a personal homage to a dear friend whose trust and incentive were behind much of my creative work.

“For a work for such special circumstances, I wanted to use both cheerful and serious ele ments from my tradition that, I believe, should be inherent in every act of celebration of this kind. I decided to seek out material from the history of Spanish organ music that unites such intentions. Antonio de Cabezón and Juan Bautista José Cabanilles, both of whom are close to my own concept of composition, provided the foundation for my work.

“El tiento del primer tono by Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566) provided me with the sound material to combine dignity and tradition. In the middle of the original contrapuntal structure, I introduced the motto S-A-C-H-E-R (the pitches E-flat, A, C, B, E and D, in German notation) to honor my friend. La batalla imperial by Juan Bautista José Cabanilles (1644-1712), which unites seamlessly with El tiento, gives the work its festive character. Here I based the music on a famous organ piece that I adapted according to my formal and tonal needs to use as a frame. I added the characteristic Basel drums that during Carnival season transform that otherwise serious city into a festive place for several days.

“A variety of compositional methods that I used in other pieces, and that conform to the music of our day, are combined with the material from the Spanish tradition. I had no interest in an ‘archaeological reconstruction’ of early musical works; my piece is an attempt to unite, in a way both serious and festive, my cultural tradition with today’s world. At the same time, it is a gift to a person with whom I am bound by a long friendship, whose initiatives made much of twen tieth-century music possible — music that will someday dovetail with the tradition of our culture.”

©2014 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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