Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972)
Three Latin American Dances (2003)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings
Performance time: 20 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Named one of the “35 Most Significant Women Composers in History” by the Washington Post in 2017, Gabriela Lena Frank currently serves as composer-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was born in Berkley, California, to a mother of Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent. Throughout her career, her multicultural heritage has been central to her compositional identity, her voice an amalgam of her lived experiences as a multiethnic Latina and the paradoxes inherent in that reality. She writes that her early days were “filled with Oriental stir-fry cuisine, Andean nursery songs, and frequent visits from our New York-bred Jewish cousins.” Her musical upbringing was just as diverse, her piano repertoire spanning not only the traditional works of Bach and Mozart but also Scott Joplin’s rags and her own early compositions, which carried overtones of Peruvian folk music.

Frank’s Three Latin American Dances (2004) are an encapsulation of this diverse background. The first movement, “Introduction: Jungle Jaunt,” begins with an intentional nod to Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which similarly employ an eclectic mix of musical traditions. After this tribute, she turns to the harmonies and rhythms of various pan-Amazonian dance forms. Next, “Highland Harawi,” evokes the harawi, a traditional Andean genre of music and lyric poetry Frank describes as “a melancholy adagio traditionally sung by a single bamboo quena flute so as to accompany a single dancer.” The somber music that bookends this movement depicts the vastness of the Andean mountains, while the fast middle section is meant to simulate the great spinning top belonging to Illapa, the Peruvian-Inca weather deity of thunder, lightning, and rain. Finally, “The Mestizo Waltz” honors the mixed-race (“mestizo”) music of the South American Pacific coast. “In particular,” Frank writes, “it evokes the ‘romancero’ tradition of popular songs and dances that mix influences from indigenous Indian cultures, African slave cultures, and western brass bands.”

George Gershwin (1898–1937)
Rhapsody in Blue (1924; Orchestration by Ferde Grofé, 1926)
Scored for: two flutes, two oboes, three clarinets including bass clarinet, two bassoons, three French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, banjo, strings, and solo piano
Performance time: 16 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: June 23, 1940; Oscar W. Anderson, conductor and Jane Anderson, piano

The story of how Rhapsody in Blue came to be is almost as legendary as the work itself. George Gershwin and his brother Ira were reading the paper one day in early January 1924 when they came across a startling announcement: the famous dance bandleader Paul Whiteman was holding a concert on February 12, featuring a new jazz concerto by George Gershwin. This was news to the composer. Gershwin either had forgotten about the commission, or there was a miscommunication. Regardless, he had to write something—and fast. Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue in just a few weeks while also in rehearsals for his new musical comedy, Sweet Little Devil, which was opening in Boston at the same time. He sought the help of Whiteman’s go-to arranger, Ferde Grofé, who orchestrated Gershwin’s piano reduction for Whiteman’s idiosyncratic “jazz” band and later scored it for symphony orchestra.

The bustling soundscape of urban America was Gershwin’s main source of inspiration. “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety-bang that is often so stimulating to a composer,” Gershwin explained. “And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end . . . I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” Though other classical composers before Gershwin had integrated jazz rhythms and harmonies into their music, Rhapsody in Blue is often considered the landmark piece that brought “jazz” into the concert hall. 

Jazz is not the only nonclassical stylistic influence in Rhapsody in Blue. While Rhapsody in Blue has received criticism for white-washing jazz, it is erroneous to treat Rhapsody in Blue as authentic source material, as it is not really jazz. Instead, the work presents an amalgam of the sounds Gershwin grew up hearing as a second-generation Russian Jewish immigrant in New York. For instance, he nods to his roots as a teenage song plugger on Tin Pan Alley. There are also strains of Yiddish theater music, the hurdy-gurdies of the Lower East Side, and Latin American dance rhythms, representing the city’s rich cultural tapestry.

Manuel de Falla (1876–1946)
Suite from El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) (1916)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings
Performance time: 24 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 9, 1948; Alfredo Antonini, conductor

The 1919 London premiere of Manuel de Falla’s ballet El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) is one of those moments in music history that makes you wish time travel were possible. Not only does the ballet score feature some of Falla’s most delightful music, but the production was mounted by impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the famed Ballets Russes (the same company that premiered Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring), with Léonide Massine as the choreographer/principal dancer and none other than Pablo Picasso as the set and costume designer. The ballet was a hit in London, cementing Falla’s international reputation as one of the most consequential Spanish composers of the early 20th century.

Before the outbreak of World War I, Falla had spent seven years in Paris, where he encountered the artistic luminaries who would later help bring El sombrero de tres picos to fruition. Along with Diaghilev, he met prominent composers such as Stravinsky, Ravel, and Debussy. The latter was especially influential on Falla’s compositional style, which blends traditional Spanish musical elements with French Impressionism. Back in Spain, Falla set to work on numerous stage works, including incidental music for a pantomime called El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller), based on a novella by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. After visiting Madrid with Stravinsky in 1916, Diaghilev convinced Falla to expand the pantomime into a ballet for full orchestra.

El sombrero de tres picos tells the story of a miller and a buffoonish magistrate, whose attempts to seduce the miller’s wife are repeatedly thwarted. By the end of the ballet, the magistrate, identified by his traditional three-cornered hat, is thoroughly humiliated, even being arrested by his own constables in a case of mistaken identity. Two orchestral suites are typically extracted from the score for concert performance, with one suite for each of the ballet’s two acts. The first suite opens with a brief fanfare as the curtain rises on a warm, sunny afternoon. The magistrate passes by the mill, his pompous strut represented by the bassoon. To goad the boorish official, the miller’s wife seduces him by dancing a fandango and offering him grapes. When she runs away, the magistrate tries to catch her but is ambushed by the miller, who leaps from the bushes, brandishing a stick. In the second suite, the miller’s neighbors celebrate the Feast of St. John by dancing seguidillas. The miller then dances a solo flamenco farruca—a showcase Falla had composed for Massine. Before choreographing the ballet, Massine had toured Spain for a year to immerse himself in authentic Spanish character dances, even studying under renowned flamenco dancer Félix Fernández García. Finally, the ballet’s themes combine in the celebratory jota, as the villagers toss the debased magistrate in the air on a blanket.

—Katherine Buzard