CONCERT

Carnegie Hall
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Stravinsky - Scherzo fantastique
Jennifer Higdon - Low Brass Concerto (NY Premiere)
Chausson - Poème de l' amour et de la mer
Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes

"There’s passion and power in Chausson’s and Britten’s sea music. Chausson set Symbolist poetry in his Poème de l’amour et de la mer, a two-song collection with orchestral interlude that is rich with metaphor and infused with steamy Wagnerian harmonies. There’s nothing metaphorical about Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes; the sun’s glimmering light on the water, the sound of church bells, waking birds, and a savage storm are portrayed with gripping realism."

IGOR STRAVINSKY Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3

The Scherzo fantastique is the first music by Stravinsky that impresario Sergei Diaghilev heard, and, on the basis of this work as well as the orchestral Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), Diaghilev offered the Russian composer a job, and together they made history. Although Stravinsky’s utterly original voice is not always consistently recognizable here, the Scherzo fantastique is like an early painting in a retrospective exhibition that paves the way for the great, revolutionary canvases of later years.


JENNIFER HIGDON Low Brass Concerto

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition that same year, Jennifer Higdon’s hold on audiences began much earlier. Her first opera, Cold Mountain (based on Charles Frazier’s bestselling novel), sold out its entire run of six performances at the Santa Fe Opera. Higdon has written extensively for orchestra over the years, and her newest concerto casts its spotlight on the “low brass” that is a subset of sorts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s long-acclaimed brass section.


ERNEST CHAUSSON Poème de l’amour et de la mer

Chausson’s career as a composer lasted barely 15 years, and work on the Poème de l’amour et de la mer occupied him for 10 of those. He set two of his friend Maurice Bouchor’s poems about lost love as large pieces for voice and orchestra, separating them by a short, pensive orchestral interlude. The work is unique in form—it’s neither a loose collection of songs nor a narrative song cycle—but with his exquisite, expressive music, Chausson turns Bouchor’s unremarkable poems into a great, probing monologue.


BENJAMIN BRITTEN Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op. 33a

Britten set Peter Grimes, his first major opera, in a small fishing village that could easily be the seaside town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, which he helped to make famous. The orchestral interludes that divide the scenes of Peter Grimes are distinct from the rest of the opera (they are to be played with the curtain down), yet they’re indispensable to its meaning and impact. After the triumphant premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, Britten realized that the interludes could stand alone as evocative sea pictures, and he selected four to be played as a suite.