Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus Carlos Kalmar, Principal

Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus
Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor
Christopher Bell, Chorus Director
Brahms Requiem
Friday, July 17, 2015 at 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 18, 2015 at 7:30 p.m.
Jay Pritzker Pavilion
GRANT PARK ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS
Thierry Fischer, Guest Conductor
Caitlin Lynch, Soprano
Stephen Hegedus, Baritone
SCHOENBERG
Transfigured Night, Op. 4
Intermission
BRAHMS
A German Requiem, Op. 45
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras
Herr, lehre doch mich
Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen
Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit
Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt
Selig sind die Toten
This concert is sponsored by Marion and Chuck Kierscht.
Organ provided by Triune Music/S.B. Smith & Associates.
2015 Program Notes, Book 5 | 33
Friday & Saturday, July 17 & 18, 2015
THIERRY FISCHER recently renewed his contract as Music
Director of the Utah Symphony to a ten-year term. He has
attracted leading young musicians to join the Symphony and
top soloists to come to Utah, refreshed the programming, consistently drawn full houses, and galvanized community support.
He instituted a major commissioning program in Utah in spring
2012 with a Cello Concerto for Jean-Guihen Queyras composed
by Michael Jarrell. Mr. Fischer was Principal Conductor of the
BBC National Orchestra of Wales from 2006-2012 and returned
with that ensemble to the BBC Proms in 2014. A busy guest
conducting career has taken him to orchestras as diverse as the Czech Philharmonic,
Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony and Orchestra of the Age of
Enlightenment. In October 2014 he made his debut with the Boston Symphony
Orchestra. Mr. Fischer has made numerous recordings; his CD of Frank Martin’s
opera Der Sturm with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus
on Hyperion was awarded the International Classical Music Award in 2012. Other
recent Hyperion releases include music by Honegger, d’Indy and Florent Schmitt
with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales as well as recordings of the Stravinsky
ballets for Signum, Stravinsky and Frank Martin concertos with Baiba Skride for Orfeo,
and Beethoven piano concertos with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Louis
Schwizgebel for Aparte. Thierry Fischer started out as Principal Flutist in Hamburg
and at the Zurich Opera. His conducting career began in his thirties when he replaced
an ailing colleague, subsequently directing concerts with the Chamber Orchestra of
Europe, where he was Principal Flute under Claudio Abbado. He spent his apprentice
years in Holland and became Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Ulster
Orchestra 2001-2006. He was Chief Conductor of the Nagoya Philharmonic 20082011 and is now that orchestra’s Honorary Guest Conductor.
CAITLIN LYNCH, Soprano, made her Metropolitan Opera
debut in 2013 performing Biancofiore in Zandonai’s Francesca
da Rimini and returned last season as Cynthia for the world
premiere production of Nico Muhly’s Two Boys. This season she
returned to the Met for Le Nozze di Figaro. She has won special
acclaim for such important Mozart roles as both Donna Anna
and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Konstanze in Die Entführung
aus dem Serail, Erste Dame in Die Zauberflöte and Fiordiligi
in Così fan tutte. Her future engagements include the world
premiere of Ben Moore’s Enemies, a Love Story at Palm Beach
Opera in the role of Yadwiga, Marguerite in Faust at Michigan Opera Theatre, Konstanze
in Die Entführung aus dem Serail with Des Moines Metro Opera, and a return to the
Milwaukee Symphony as the soprano soloist in Carmina Burana. Ms. Lynch also returns
to Seattle Opera in 2016. Her recent premieres include Jake Heggie’s song cycles
Another Sunrise and Farewell, Auschwitz!, commissioned by Music of Remembrance
in Seattle. She has appeared with Glimmerglass Opera, Lyric Opera Baltimore, Opera
Lyra Ottawa, Pittsburgh Opera, Green Mountain Opera Festival, Michigan Opera
Theatre, Madison Opera, Opera Carolina, Arizona Opera, Dallas Opera, Opera
Cleveland, Cincinnati Opera, Nashville Opera, Spoleto Festival USA, Kentucky
Symphony, Lexington Philharmonic, Ann Arbor Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Cincinnati
Symphony, Columbus Symphony and Aspen Music Festival. She has been a prize
winner in the 2008 Houston Grand Opera Competition, Irma M. Cooper Opera
Columbus Competition, Opera Index, Jensen Foundation Voice Competition, and Palm
Beach Opera Competition. Caitlin Lynch is a graduate of the Seattle Opera Young Artist
Program and Glimmerglass Opera’s Young Artist Program.
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Friday & Saturday, July 17 & 18, 2015
Bass-baritone STEPHEN HEGEDUS was a prize winner at
the Lyndon Woodside Oratorio Solo Competition, hosted
by the Oratorio Society of New York, and a finalist at Placido
Domingo’s Operalia. He has appeared on stage with Teatro
Municipal de Santiago (Chile), Vancouver Opera, l’Opéra de
Montréal, Edmonton Opera, Hamilton Opera, Against the
Grain Theatre, Opera Atelier (both in Toronto and at Versailles),
Canadian Opera Company and Pacific Opera Victoria.
Mr. Hegedus’ operatic repertoire includes the title role and
Masetto in Le Nozze di Figaro, Colline (La Bohème),
Guglielmo (Così fan tutte), Albert (Werther), Nick Shadow (The Rake’s Progress),
Collatinus (The Rape of Lucretia), Talbot (Maria Stuarda) and Sprecher (Die
Zauberflöte). He has appeared in concert performances of Verdi’s Requiem with
l’Orchestre Symphonique de Trois-Rivières, Bach’s Weihnachts-Oratorium with the
Victoria Symphony, Handel’s Messiah with the Edmonton Symphony, Finzi’s In Terra
Pax with I Musici de Montréal and Bach’s Magnificat and Bruckner’s Te Deum with
l’Orchestra Symphonique de Québec, as well as with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,
Edmonton Symphony, Winnipeg Symphony, Grant Park Music Festival, Seattle
Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Houston Symphony, San Antonio
Symphony, Le Festival de Lanaudière, Lamèque International Festival, Aldeburgh
Festival, l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grant Montréal, Chorus Niagara and Amadeus
Choir; he made his Carnegie Hall debut singing Bach’s Mass in B minor with the
Oratorio Society of New York and returned for Handel’s Messiah.
2015 Program Notes, Book 5 | 35
Friday & Saturday, July 17 & 18, 2015
VERKLÄRTE NACHT (“TRANSFIGURED NIGHT”)
FOR STRING ORCHESTRA, OP. 4 (1899, 1917)
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night is scored for strings alone. The
performance time is 30 minutes. This is the first performance of
this work by the Grant Park Orchestra.
During the summer of 1899, Schoenberg was on holiday in
the mountain village of Payerbach, south of Vienna, and it was
there that he began a work for string sextet based on a poem by Richard Dehmel:
Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”), which had appeared three years earlier in a
collection called Weib und die Welt (“Woman and the World”). Dehmel was one of
the most distinguished German poets of the day, whose verses bridged the sensuous
Impressionism of the preceding generation and the intense spirituality of encroaching Expressionism. The following translated excerpt from Dehmel’s poem appears in
Schoenberg’s published score:
“Two people walk through the bare, cold woods. A woman’s voice speaks: ‘I bear a
child, but not by you. I walk in sin alongside you.... Now life has taken its revenge: Now
I have met you, you.’ She gazes upward; the moon runs along. Her somber glance
drowns in the light. A man’s voice speaks: ‘The child that you conceived be to your
soul no burden. Oh look, how clear the universe glitters! A peculiar warmth sparkles
from you in me, from me in you. It will transfigure the strange child you will bear for
me, from me; you brought the glory into me.’ He holds her around her strong hips.
Their breath kisses in the air. Two people walk through the high, light night.”
Schoenberg glossed this richly emotional poem with music influenced by Wagner’s lush Tristan chromaticism, Brahms’ intellectual rigor and the intense expression of
Romanticism to create a vast one-movement piece for strings that is virtually a
programmatic tone poem.
EIN DEUTSCHES REQUIEM
(“A GERMAN REQUIEM”), OP. 45 (1857-1868)
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Brahms’ A German Requiem is scored for pairs of woodwinds
plus piccolo and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, two harps, organ and strings.
The performance time is 68 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra
and Chorus first performed the German Requiem on
August 14, 1976, with Pavle Dešpalj conducting. Janice Huston and William Diana
were the soloists.
Robert Schumann was the most influential person who ever came into the life of
Johannes Brahms. It was Schumann who hailed Brahms in print as the “savior of German music” when the young composer had only just begun his life’s work. It was
to Schumann that Brahms looked when he was searching to establish not only the
technique of his compositions, but also the philosophical basis on which they were
founded. And it was the Schumann family, first Robert and later his wife, Clara, who
provided encouragement, constructive criticism and affection to Brahms throughout
his life. It is no surprise, then, that Brahms was deeply moved by the premature death
of his mentor in 1856, the first profound grief to fall upon his life.
Schumann encouraged Brahms to write in the grand forms of the great Classical
composers, and Brahms began a symphony the year after Schumann’s death. Though
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Friday & Saturday, July 17 & 18, 2015
he eventually abandoned that score, Brahms used the music of the opening movement in his first orchestral work, the D minor Piano Concerto. The slow movement of
the Symphony was resurrected as a choral work in 1861 and provided with the text
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras (“For all flesh is as grass”); it served as the germ from
which A German Requiem grew. It is possible that Brahms may have been influenced
in this transformation by an idea credited to Schumann, one that he did not live to
realize — the writing of a work of the Requiem type based on a German text rather
than on the traditional Latin liturgy of the ancient Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead.
With a view towards erecting a musical monument to Schumann, Brahms assembled
a text appropriate to such a composition from the Lutheran Bible in 1861, but that
memorial then lay dormant for several years.
It was the death of another loved one that moved Brahms to resume activity on his
Requiem. Brahms, a confirmed bachelor, was extraordinarily fond of his mother. When
she passed away in February 1865, it marked the beginning of a period of sadness
and mourning for him. Another product of this experience was that it spurred him to
resume work on the unfinished Requiem, which, with the death of his mother, could
become a memorial both to her and to Schumann. He completed the six sections of
his original conception by August 1866, and added another portion 18 months later
for soprano soloist specifically occasioned by the death of his mother: Ihr habt nun
Traurigkeit (“Ye now have sorrow”). A line of its scripture, “I will see you again,” tells of
the touching personal message that this music carried for the composer.
Though Brahms was raised in the beliefs of German Protestantism, he was not a
religious man. He did not bother with the church, and confessed in the last year of his life
to his biographer Max Kalbeck that he had never believed in life after death. His knowledge of the Bible, however, was thorough, and he continued to enjoy the comfort that
reading it provided him throughout his life. When he chose the texts for his Requiem, he
took the greatest care to eschew dogmatism, avoiding passages mentioning the name
of Christ. Rather than a specifically sectarian document, he saw the work as a universal
response by a sensitive soul to the inevitability and sorrow of death, and he even noted
that he would be happy if the word “Mankind” could replace the word “German” in the
title. This is a work meant for people rather than for God.
The overriding mood of A German Requiem is one of comforting resignation rather
than of visions of supra-human worlds. Only in the sixth movement is any of the terror of the Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) of the Latin Requiem present, and that is quickly
supplanted by the quiet benediction of the finale. Most of the movements exhibit a
tripartite organization in which the text and music of the opening section reappear to
round out the form. Brahms’ A German Requiem, a work of grand scope and surpassing excellence, is rich in a substance that never wavers from its purpose of sharing a
universal experience through the incandescent beauties that only music can provide.
I. Chorus
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen,
denn sie sollen getröstet werden.
Die mit Tränen säen,
werden mit Freuden ernten.
Sie gehen hin und weinen,
und tragen edlen Samen,
und kommen mit Freuden
und bringen ihre Garben.
Blessed are they that mourn;
for they shall be comforted.
(Matthew 5:4)
They that sow in tears
shall reap in joy.
They that go forth and weep,
bearing precious seed,
shall come again with rejoicing,
bringing their sheaves with them.
(Psalm 126:5-6)
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Friday & Saturday, July 17 & 18, 2015
II. Chorus
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen
wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret
und die Blume abgefallen.
For all flesh is as grass,
and all the glory of man
as the flowers of the grass.
The grass is withered,
and the flower fallen away.
So seid nun geduldig, lieben Brüder,
bis auf die Zukunft des Herrn.
Siehe, ein Ackermann wartet auf
die köstliche Frucht der Erde
und ist geduldig darüber,
bis er empfahe
den Morgenregen und Abendregen.
So seid geduldig.
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras ...
Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit.
(I Peter 1:24)
Be patient, therefore, brethren,
unto the coming of the Lord.
Behold, the husbandman waiteth for
the precious fruit of the earth,
and hath long patience for it,
until he receive
the early and the latter rain.
So be patient.
(James 5:7)
For all flesh is as grass ...
But the word of the Lord endureth forever.
(I Peter 1:25)
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
Die Erlöseten des Herrn werden wiederkommen,
und gen Zion kommen mit Jauchzen;
and come to Zion with songs
Freude, ewige Freude wird über and everlasting joy upon their heads:
ihrem Haupte sein;
Freude und Wonne werden sie ergreifen, they shall obtain joy and gladness,
und Schmerz und Seufzen wird weg müssen.and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
(Isaiah 35:10)
III. Baritone Solo and Chorus
Herr, lehre doch mich, dass ein Ende
Lord, make me to know mine end,
mit mir haben muss, und mein Leben
and the measure of my days, what it is;
ein Ziel hat, und ich davon muss.
and I must journey toward it.
Siehe, meine Tage sind eine Behold thou hast made my days as an
Handbreit vor dir,
handbreadth;
und mein Leben ist wie nichts vor dir.
and mine age is as nothing before thee:
Ach, wie gar nichts sind alle Menschen,
verily, every man at his best state
die doch so sicher leben.
is altogether vanity.
Sie gehen daher wie ein Schemen,
Surely every man walketh in a vain shew;
und machen ihnen viel vergebliche Unruhe; surely they are disquieted in vain:
sie sammeln und wissen nicht,
he heapeth up riches,
wer es kriegen wird.
and knoweth not who shall gather them.
Nun Herr, wes soll ich mich trösten?
And now, Lord, what is my hope?
Ich hoffe auf dich.
My hope is in thee.
(Psalm 39:4-7)
Der Gerechten Seelen sind in Gottes Hand The souls of the righteous are in God’s hand,
und keine Qual rühret sie an.
and there shall no torment touch them.
(Wisdom of Solomon 3:1)
IV. Chorus
Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen,
Herr Zebaoth!
Meine Seele verlanget und sehnet sich
nach den Vorhöfen des Herrn;
mein Leib und Seele freuen sich
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How amiable are thy tabernacles,
O Lord of hosts!
My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth
for the courts of the Lord:
my heart and flesh rejoice
Friday & Saturday, July 17 & 18, 2015
in dem lebendigen Gott.
in the living God.
Wohl denen, die in deinem Hause wohnen, Blessed are they that dwell in thy house:
die loben dich immerdar!
they will still be praising thee.
(Psalm 84:1-2, 4)
V. Soprano Solo and Chorus
Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit;
aber ich will euch wieder sehen
und euer Herz soll sich freuen,
und eure Freude soll niemand von euch nehmen.
Ye now have sorrow;
but I will see you again,
and your heart shall rejoice,
and your joy no man shall take from you.
Ich will euch trösten,
wie einen seine Mutter tröstet.
I will comfort you
as one comforted by his mother.
Sehet mich an: ich habe
eine kleine Zeit Mühe und Arbeit gehabt
und habe grossen Trost funden.
(John 16:22)
(Isaiah 66:13)
Behold with your eyes,
how that I labored but a little,
and found for myself much rest.
(Ecclesiasticus 51:35)
VI. Baritone Solo and Chorus
Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt,
sondern die zukünftige suchen wir.
For here we have no continuing city,
but we seek one to come.
(Hebrews 13:14)
Siehe, ich sage euch ein Geheimnis.
Behold, I shew you a mystery;
Wir werden nicht alle entschlafen,
we shall not all sleep,
wir werden aber alle verwandelt werden;
but we shall all be changed,
und dasselbige plötzlich in a moment, in the twinkling
in einem Augenblick
of an eye,
zu der Zeit der letzten Posaune.
at the last trumpet:
Denn es wird die Posaune schallen
for the trumpet shall sound,
und die Toten werden auferstehen and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
unverweslich,
und wir werden verwandelt werden.
and we shall be changed.
Dann wird erfüllet werden
Then shall be brought to pass
das Wort, das geschrieben steht:
the saying that is written,
Der Tod ist verschlungen in den Sieg.
Death is swallowed up in victory.
Tod, wo ist dein Stachel?
O death, where is thy sting?
Hölle, wo ist dein Sieg?
O grave, where is thy victory?
(I Corinthians 15:51-2, 54-5)
Herr, du bist würdig
Thou art worthy, O Lord,
zu nehmen Preis und Ehre und Kraft,
to receive glory and honor and power:
denn du hast alle Dinge erschaffen,
for thou hast created all things,
und durch deinen Willen
and for thy pleasure
haben sie das Wesen und sind geschaffen. they are and were created.
(Revelation 4:11)
VII. Chorus
Selig sind die Toten,
die in dem Herren sterben, von nun an.
Ja, der Geist spricht,
dass sie ruhen von ihrer Arbeit;
denn ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach.
Blessed are the dead
which die in the Lord from henceforth:
Yea, saith the Spirit,
that they may rest from their labors;
and their works do follow them.
(Revelation 14:13)
2015 Program Notes, Book 5 | 39