GrantParkMusicFestival
Seventy-fifth Season
Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus
Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor
Christopher Bell, Chorus Director
Thirteenth Program: Dances and Fairytales
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Jay Pritzker Pavilion
Grant Park orchestra
Gilbert Varga, Conductor
OFFENBACH
Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld
FRANCK
Le Chasseur Maudit, Symphonic Poem
RAVEL
Suite from Mother Goose
Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty
Hop o’ My Thumb
Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas
Conversations of Beauty and the Beast
The Fairy Garden
ROUSSEL
Bacchus et Ariane, Suite No. 2, Op. 43
Program Notes C
Wednesday, July 15 and Saturday, July 18, 2009 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL
Renowned for his exemplary baton technique, GiLBERT VARGA has
held positions with and guest conducted many of the major orchestras
throughout the world. In the earlier part of his conducting career,
Varga concentrated on work with chamber orchestras, particularly
the Tibor Varga Chamber Orchestra, before rapidly developing a
reputation as a symphonic conductor. he was Chief Conductor of the
hofer Symphoniker between 1980 and 1985, and from 1985 to 1990
Chief Conductor of the Philharmonia hungarica in Marl. In 1991
until 1995 Varga took up the position of Permanent Guest Conductor
of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, and from 1997 to 2000 was Principal Guest of the
Malmö Symphony. In 1997 Varga was appointed Music Director of the Basque National
Symphony Orchestra, leading them through ten seasons, during which time he conducted
them on tours across Europe and South America. Varga has conducted many of Europe’s
major orchestras; in recent and forthcoming seasons these include the Oslo Philharmonic,
Orchestre de Paris, Berlin Radio Symphony, Gürzenich, Frankfurt Museumgesellschaft, MDR
Leipzig, hungarian National Philharmonic, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Basel Symphony and the
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. In North America he conducts the Minnesota Orchestra
every season, and elsewhere in the U.S. has conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the
Dallas, Detroit, St. Louis, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Indianapolis Symphonies. his appearance
with the Grant Park Orchestra marks his debut here and he looks forward to debuts with the
Seattle and Utah Symphonies in the coming season. Varga’s discography includes recordings
with ASV, Discover Records, Tring, Koch International and Claves Recordings.
o u r fa m i ly w e l c o m e s yo u r fa m i ly
chicago’s firsT family of resTauranTs since 1927
all aT 71 wesT monroe sTreeT | 312.332.7005 | iTalianVillage-chicago.com
BEST OF CITYSEARCH | 2008 BEST ITALIAN RESTAURANT | AUDIENCE VOTED
Program Notes C9
GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Wednesday, July 15 and Saturday, July 18, 2009
Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld (1858)
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
The Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus
piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and
strings. The performance time is ten minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed
this work on August 25, 1935, George Dasch conducting.
In 1855, Jacques Offenbach opened a little theater in the Champs-Elysées for the presentation of one-act musical farces using a small orchestra
and a handful of singers. He managed to keep the venture afloat, but by 1858 he had amassed
enough debts to put the future of the operation in doubt. To raise the money needed to pay his
bills, he created a riotous musical satire based on the exploits of the ancient gods, notably those
told in the legend of Orpheus and Euridice — Orpheus in the Underworld. The work, the first in
which his famous Can-Can melody appears, did not have much success until the review of critic
Jules Janin appeared. When Janin described Orpheus as “a profanation of holy and glorious antiquity
in a spirit of irreverence that bordered on blasphemy,” the Parisians rushed to see for themselves
what outrages Offenbach had committed. The highly profitable run ended after 227 consecutive
performances only when the cast pleaded exhaustion.
Since Offenbach’s instrumental resources at the Champs Elysées theater were so limited, the
original overtures for his productions there were little more than short preludes. For later productions with full orchestra, new overtures were devised by other hands utilizing Offenbach’s melodies.
(This practice continues on Broadway, where the overture is usually the work of the arranger/orchestrator rather than that of the show’s composer.) The present Orpheus in the Underworld Overture
was written by Carl Binder for the Viennese premiere.
Le Chasseur maudit (“The Accursed Huntsman”) (1882)
César Franck (1822-1890)
Le Chasseur Maudit is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, four
bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. The performance time is fourteen minutes. This is the first performance
of the work by the Grant Park Orchestra.
An entire coven of 19th-century composers had a preternatural interest in the supernatural — Berlioz conjured up a hellish brigade in his
epochal Symphonie Fantastique; Paganini was said to have possessed fiddling powers not of this earth
(the Church did not allow his coffin to be buried in consecrated ground for over two years after his
death — in the neighborhoods where the suspect box was kept, the inhabitants claimed that they
heard ghostly violin sounds emanating from therein in the still of the night); Liszt made his piano
dance with death and the devil; the single most famous strain Chopin wrote is a funeral march.
Even the pacific César Franck, master organist of Ste. Clothilde in Paris, mentor of countless
fanatically devoted students, paragon of professional and personal virtue, made a musical visit to
the nether regions.
In 1882, soon after completing the oratorio Les Béatitudes and a “Biblical Scene” for soloists,
chorus and orchestra based on the story of Rebecca, Franck turned for the subject of his next work
to a cautionary tale rendered in the form of a ballad poem by the German writer Gottfried August
Bürger (1747-1794), one of the principal advocates of the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang (“Storm
and Stress”) literary movement. Bürger’s poem Der Wilde Jäger was reworked in English by Sir Walter
Scott in 1796 as The Wild Huntsman, and served to inspire César Franck to the composition of a
symphonic poem. Donald N. Ferguson offered the following précis of the saga: “The tale is one
of the countless versions of the story of the huntsman who would not refrain from his favorite
sport even on the Lord’s day. Hackenberg, a Count in the Drömling, was so passionately fond of
hunting that he even forced his peasants to join in his sport. One Sunday, when the chase was at its
most exciting pitch, two strange horsemen joined the party. The undaunted Hackenberg welcomed
C10 Program Notes
Wednesday, July 15 and Saturday, July 18, 2009 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL
the newcomers, riding with them and chasing the stag across moor and field right into the chapel
of a holy hermit. At this mischance, the Count blasphemed God, and suddenly there was a ghastly
silence. He tried to blow his horn. It gave forth no sound. Even the hounds ceased baying. At last
there came a voice from a cloud: ‘The measure of thy cup is full; be chased forever through the
wood!’ and from the bowels of the earth arose misbegotten hounds of hell.”
Franck altered the title of Bürger’s tale slightly for his symphonic poem — Le Chasseur maudit
(“The Accursed Huntsman”) — but followed the progress of the story closely in his music. The composer provided a preface explaining each of the work’s four sections. “It was Sunday morning; from
afar sounded the joyous ringing of bells and the glad songs of the people.” Horn calls tumble one after another
as introduction to a hymnal cello melody representing dawn. Church bells peal, but cannot subdue
the huntsman’s calls. “The chase dashes through cornfields, brakes and meadows. Stop, Count, I pray! Hear
the pious songs! No! And the horsemen rush onward like the whirlwind.” The hunt is away with galloping
rhythms which grow more frantic and untamed as the chase is joined. “Suddenly the Count is alone; his
horse will go no farther; he blows his horn, but his horn no longer sounds.... A lugubrious, implacable voice curses
him. ‘Sacrilege!’ it says. ‘Thou shalt be forever hunted through Hell.’ Tremulous string figures and uncertain
harmonies in the winds served as background to the stentorian pronouncements of the trombones.
“The flames dart from everywhere. The Count, maddened by terror, flees, faster and faster, pursued by a pack of
devils.” The impious Count’s eternal, infernal damnation is depicted in one of the most violent and
cataclysmic episodes in French orchestral music.
Suite from Mother Goose (1908)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, English
horn and contrabassoon, two horns, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings. The
performance time is sixteen minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed the
Suite on July 28, 1965, Irwin Hoffman conducting.
“I would settle down on his lap, and tirelessly he would begin, ‘Once
upon a time ...’ It was Beauty and the Beast and The Ugly Empress of the Pagodas,
and, above all, the adventures of a little mouse he invented for me.” So Mimi Godebski reminisced
in later years about the visits of Maurice Ravel to her family’s home during her childhood. Ravel, a
contented bachelor, enjoyed those visits to the Godebski’s, and took special delight in playing with
the young children — cutting out paper dolls, telling stories, romping around on all fours. Young
Mimi and her brother Jean were in the first stages of piano tutelage in 1908, and Ravel decided to
encourage their studies by composing some little pieces for them portraying Sleeping Beauty, Hop o’
My Thumb, Empress of the Pagodas and Beauty and the Beast. To these he added an evocation of The
Fairy Garden as a postlude. In 1911, he made an orchestral transcription of the original five pieces,
added to them a prelude, an opening scene and connecting interludes, and produced a ballet with a
scenario based on Sleeping Beauty for the Théâtre des Arts in Paris.
The Mother Goose Suite comprises the five orchestrated movements of Ravel’s original piano
version. The tiny Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty, only twenty measures long, depicts the Good Fairy,
who watches over the Princess during her somnolence. Hop o’ My Thumb treats the old legend taken
from Perrault’s anthology of 1697. “A boy believed,” Ravel noted of the tale, “that he could easily
find his path by means of the bread crumbs which he had scattered wherever he passed; but he
was very much surprised when he could not find a single crumb: the birds had come and eaten
everything up.” Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas portrays a young girl cursed with ugliness by a
wicked fairy. The tale, however, has a happy ending in which the Empress’ beauty is restored. In the
Conversations of Beauty and the Beast, the high woodwinds sing the delicate words of the Beauty, while
the Beast is portrayed by the lumbering contrabassoon. At first the two converse, politely taking
turns in the dialogue, but after their betrothal both melodies are entwined, and finally the Beast’s
theme is transfigured into a floating wisp in the most ethereal reaches of the solo violin’s range.
The rapt, introspective splendor of the closing Fairy Garden is Ravel’s masterful summation of the
beauty, mystery and wonder that pervade Mother Goose.
Program Notes C11
n
Wednesday, July 15 and Saturday, July 18, 2009 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL
Bacchus et Ariane Suite No. 2, Op. 43 (1930)
Albert Roussel (1869-1937)
Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane Suite No. 2 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes,
English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoon, contrabassoon, four horns, four
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta and strings.
The performance time is twenty minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed
this Suite on July 30, 1958, Milton Katims conducting.
Albert Roussel, a leading figure in French music during the years between the two world wars, was orphaned at an early age and raised first by his grandfather, the
mayor of his native town of Tourcoing, at the Belgian border thirty miles from the North Sea,
and later by a maternal aunt. Though he showed musical promise as a boy, Roussel decided upon a
naval career, and he was admitted to the École Navale as a cadet in 1887. The duty and travels of
military life did nothing to diminish his interest in music, however, and in 1894 he resigned his naval
commission to devote himself to the study of composition. After several years of private tuition
and some tentative creative undertakings, he enrolled in 1898 in Vincent d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum,
recently formed as a rival to the venerable Paris Conservatoire, to begin an imposing ten-year curriculum, which he saw to completion. Roussel was appointed to teach the counterpoint class at the
Schola beginning in 1902, and he remained in that post for the next dozen years; Eric Satie and
Edgar Varèse were among his pupils. By the time he finally completed his studies at the Schola, in
1908, Roussel had already written several large works, including his First Symphony.
In 1909, Roussel went on an extended tour of India and Southeast Asia. His music was deeply
affected by that exotic experience, and two of the works that first brought him wide attention (the
orchestral suite Evocations and the opéra-ballet Padmâvatî) were based on Hindu legends and employed Indian musical motifs. With the outbreak of World War I, Roussel sought re-admission to
the armed forces, and, after a period as an ambulance driver, he was taken into the artillery corps.
Following the war, he lived on the coast in Brittany and later in Normandy, where, despite persistent
health problems, he produced a succession of major scores. His eminent position in French cultural
life was recognized by a week-long festival of his music in Paris in 1929 to celebrate his sixtieth
birthday. He visited the United States the following year for the premiere of his Third Symphony,
commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Roussel’s life-long
interest in music education was reflected in the composition that he left unfinished at his death, in
1937: a large theatrical piece involving workers’ choral groups.
Roussel’s earliest compositions reflect the academic style and cyclical forms advocated by the
Schola Cantorum and its director, Vincent d’Indy. His later works, from the years immediately
before World War I, such as the ballet The Spider’s Feast, show the influence of the Impressionists,
especially Ravel, in matters of scoring, harmony and melodic construction. The Hindu-inspired
pieces and those that followed the pre-war compositions are marked by visceral energy, a more
dissonant harmonic palette and an angular rhythmic structure. By 1926, Roussel had created a
unique idiom that shared several techniques with the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and others, but
which was distinctly his own. French musicologist Harry Halbreich summarized the most important characteristics of Roussel’s mature style: “Long and winding melodic curves, harsh but refined
and often polytonal harmony, a rhythmic drive of enormous energy, and finally a richly colored
and brilliant orchestral writing, with those purple and golden brasses that are quite unmatched by
any other composer.”
Roussel’s colorful score for the ballet Bacchus et Ariane is among the most important works of his
last decade. For his subject matter, he turned to the ancient Greek legend of Ariadne, Theseus and
Bacchus that had inspired composers from Monteverdi to Strauss. In the tale, Theseus is returning
from Crete with Ariadne, whom he has rescued from the Minotaur. After landing on the deserted
island of Naxos, Theseus and his warriors are driven off by the god Bacchus in disguise, leaving
Ariadne behind in a trance-like sleep. She dreams she is dancing with Bacchus. Roussel’s biographer
Basil Deane recounted the rest of the story: “At the beginning of Act II [and of the Second Suite],
Ariadne awakens and, finding herself alone, climbs to the summit of the rocks. Looking seaward,
Program Notes C13
GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Wednesday, July 15 and Saturday, July 18, 2009
she discerns the receding sail of Theseus’ galley. Terrified, she attempts to throw herself into the
sea, but falls instead into the embrace of Bacchus. Together they resume the dream dance. Their
lips unite in a kiss which releases a Dionysiac enchantment, whereupon the island comes to life,
and vine-wreathed fauns and maenads spring from among the rocks, crowding the scene. Two of
them offer a golden goblet filled with grape juice to Ariadne. She drinks and, intoxicated, dances
with mounting frenzy, first alone, then with Bacchus. The entire troop of followers joins in a Bacchanalia, while the god conducts Ariadne to the highest pinnacle and crowns her with a diadem of
stars ravished from the heavenly constellations.”
The Second Suite (Act II) is divided into eight continuous scenes. The first scene depicts Ariadne’s slumber, with somnolent rhythms and a sedate melody of small intervals. In scene 2, she
wakens, looks around in amazement to find she has been abandoned, runs about fitfully, and climbs
a rock looking for Theseus, all to the accompaniment of tense music in changing meters. Bacchus
reappears, and she slips from the rock into his arms and (scene 3) they briefly resume the dream
dance from the first act to a long-limbed melody of wide intervals played by the strings. Then
(scene 4) the god dances alone to his own slightly inebriated, scherzando musical strain in jaunty 6/8
meter. After a brief pause, the sensuous music of Scene 5 accompanies The Kiss of the God, by which
Ariadne becomes immortal. The rustling, atmospheric music of the Dionysiac Enchantment is interrupted by savage rhythms as the Bacchantes march past. Ariadne expresses her new-found happiness over her love of Bacchus in a solo dance (scene 6) to an expressive, lyrical movement, begun
by the solo violin, that gradually grows to include the entire orchestra. As Bacchus and Ariadne
dance together to vigorous music of elemental power (scene 7), the whole company is drawn into
the revels. The vibrant closing Bacchanale is filled with furious rhythmic energy and blazing orchestral sonorities, one of the most intoxicating paeans to the God of Wine ever written.
©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
The ultimate room with a view.
Photo By: James Steinkamp, Steinkamp Photography
11 N. Michigan Ave. t Chicago, IL 60602 t 312-521-PARK t www.parkgrillchicago.com
PG_GrantParkAd_4.875x3.625_BW.indd 1
C14 Program Notes
4/24/09 11:40:46 AM