Henry Dorn (b. 1988)
Transitions (2019)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings
Performance time: 10 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Countless composers have used their music to honor loved ones who have passed. Take Johannes Brahms’s German Requiem, for example, inspired by the death of his mother. Like Brahms, Henry Dorn channeled his grief over losing his mother to lung cancer in Transitions. Unusually, however, Dorn directly confronts the cruelty of the disease that claimed his mother. “I try to capture not the beauty we often try to find in the passing of a loved one, but the tumultuous, ravenous nature of this illness,” he writes in his program note. Dorn spent a month in the hospital with his mother as she lay dying in 2017. “It was there that I started to the write notes and ideas I felt about the experience, her journey, her unspoken strength, and her quiet inner beauty,” he said. Dorn revisited these sketches after taking some time to process his thoughts, completing the work in 2019. Transitions was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä on May 6, 2022.

Dorn charts the progression of the disease through Transitions, beginning with a menacing fugal subject that quickly spreads throughout the orchestra. He captures the soundscape of the hospital, from the rising sound of the ventilator to the clanking of computer keyboards and rolling of hospital equipment. A quote of the “Dies Irae” chant hints at impending death. Amid this turmoil comes a moment of reprieve in the stillness of the night after everyone is gone. “I tried to imagine my mother’s thoughts and envisioned this state of serenity led by a melody I could see her humming. This was her unspoken strength, still present in the face of death,” he writes. After this moment of calm, the chaos of cancer returns with renewed vigor. In a nod to the instrument his mother played in school, the horns raise their bells for a steadfast melody, projecting her inner strength in the face of suffering.

Max Bruch (1838–1920)
Scottish Fantasy for Violin & Orchestra, op. 46 (1880)
Scored for: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings, and solo violin
Performance time: 30 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 19, 1978; David Zinman, conductor and Isidor Lateiner, violin

According to Max Bruch, the violin “can sing a melody better than a piano, and melody is the soul of music.” Given his affinity for the instrument, it is no surprise that Bruch’s works for solo violin and orchestra have endured where most of his other compositions have not. Overshadowed during and after his life by his more original contemporary, Johannes Brahms, Bruch is largely remembered for two pieces: his Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Scottish Fantasy.

Although Bruch had never been to Scotland when he wrote the Scottish Fantasy in 1879, he was drawn to images of the country’s rugged landscapes and its rich folk music tradition. For authentic Scottish folk melodies, Bruch turned to The Scots Musical Museum, a collection of 600 folk songs compiled by James Johnson between 1787 and 1803 with the help of none other than Robert Burns.

The first movement opens with a somber trombone chorale, setting the stage for the solo violin’s brooding lament, evoking the image of an ancient castle arising from the mist. The clouds eventually disperse with a warm rendition of the folk song “Auld Robb Morris,” accompanied by the harp. The scherzo’s main theme is based on a vigorous dance tune called “The Dusty Miller.” Here, the soloist imitates a Scottish fiddler, while the low strings provide the drone of the bagpipes. After a false ending, the violas recall “Auld Robb Morris,” drawing the violin soloist back into their reverie. Proceeding without pause, the third movement is a set of variations on the lovelorn song “I’m a’doon for lack O’Johnnie.”

The finale, marked Allegro guerriero, is a warlike dance based on “Hey Tuttie Tatie.” Robert Burns used this tune for his patriotic poem “Scots, wha hae,” which imagines Robert the Bruce’s speech to his outnumbered army before the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. According to traditional lore, his army played “Hey Tuttie Tatie” on the battlefield, which is why Burns chose the song. The triumphant battle cry contrasts with a more lyrical second theme, culminating in a wistful reflection on “Auld Robb Morris” before the exuberant finish.

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Symphony No. 6 in F major, op. 68, Pastoral (1808)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two French horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, and strings
Performance time: 39 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 19, 1937; Walter H. Steindel, conductor

Like many composers, Ludwig van Beethoven loved a good country walk to get the creative juices flowing. In the summers he would take up residence in the small towns on the outskirts of Vienna, using solitary walks to work through his compositions in his head. The peace he felt in nature was the inspiration for his “Pastoral” Symphony No. 6. Although written at the same time as his intensely driven Fifth Symphony (and premiered in the same concert in 1808), the more laid-back Pastoral Symphony provides a rare glimpse of Beethoven’s lighter side. Unlike Beethoven’s “heroic” symphonies, which go from struggle to triumph, the Pastoral Symphony comes full circle, returning to the state of normalcy in which it began.

The Pastoral Symphony is also unique among Beethoven’s oeuvre in that he gives a descriptive title for each movement. Although Beethoven cautioned that the symphony was “more an expression of feeling than of painting,” the titles suggest a program relating to his cherished summer holidays in the countryside, with musical illustrations of birdsong, peasant dances, babbling brooks, yodeling shepherds, and a thunderstorm. In his pastoral evocations, Beethoven was building on at least 300 years of musical tradition, with Haydn’s pastoral oratorios The Creation and The Seasons serving as recent models. Where Beethoven’s symphony excels is that, rather than just being effects, the explicit programmatic elements all serve a structural purpose within the scope of symphonic form. Beethoven achieved a delicate balance in writing something with programmatic intent without compromising musical integrity or veering into kitsch.

The first movement, “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country,” opens with a blithe melody in the first violins over a soft drone in the cello and viola. Across the movement, Beethoven creates a feeling of serenity and stability by avoiding dissonances, favoring root-position chords, and staying in one key for long periods. Even with his sparing use of melodic and harmonic material, he maintains textural interest through his masterful orchestration.

“Scene by the Brook” is even more spacious than the preceding movement. Water gently flows in streams of eighth notes, ending with a classical cadenza of bird song. In the score, Beethoven even notates which bird each instrument is meant to evoke: nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet). Next, Beethoven injects some humor into the symphony in the scherzo (“Merry Gathering of Countryfolk”), using rhythmic displacement to imitate a village tavern band struggling to keep it together.

A fierce summer storm interrupts the party in the next movement. Storm scenes were a cliché of pastoral music, but Beethoven scores it with such precision and economy that it has more impact than most. The storm builds from distant thunder, depicted by pianissimo tremolos in the low strings. Raindrops begin to fall in staccato eighth notes in the violins. Reserving the timpani, trombones, and piccolo for this movement, Beethoven deploys the orchestra’s full forces in a thunderous crescendo. The storm eventually passes, and an ascending flute scale leads seamlessly into the radiant final movement, “Shepherd’s Song—Happy, Thankful Feelings After the Storm.”

—Katherine Buzard