Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)
The Building of the House, op. 79 (1967)
Scored for: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two French horns, two trumpets, tuba, timpani, percussion, strings, and chorus
Performance time: 5 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Benjamin Britten composed the choral overture The Building of the House in 1967 for the inauguration of the Snape Maltings concert hall. The hall is one of the main sites of the annual Aldeburgh Festival, which Britten and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, founded in 1948 alongside the music education organization Britten Pears Arts. Although the overture can be performed without chorus, with the chorus part played by organ and trombones, the choral version sets a version of Psalm 127 adapted by Imogen Holst, the daughter of composer Gustav Holst and a fine composer in her own right. Amid a flurry of orchestral activity, suggesting busy workers constructing the concert hall, the chorus sings the words of Psalm 127 to the stately Lutheran chorale tune “Vater unser im Himmelreich” (“Our Father in Heaven”).

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)
The Singing Rooms (2006)
Scored for: two flutes, two oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings, chorus, and solo violin
Performance time: 38 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Despite a relatively late start to formal musical training at 18 years old, Jennifer Higdon has gone on to become one of the most-performed American composers working today, winning three Grammy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for her Violin Concerto. Three years prior, Higdon had written another violin concerto, The Singing Rooms. Scored for solo violin, orchestra, and chorus, The Singing Rooms is a kind of concerto–oratorio hybrid. Tonight’s soloist, violinist Jennifer Koh, premiered the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach in 2008.

Higdon struggled to find the right set of poems that would not only speak to her but also invite musical setting and fit together thematically. “I discovered that sometimes the answer is in your own backyard,” Higdon writes in her program note. She approached a fellow faculty member at the Curtis Institute of Music, Jeanne Minahan, the head of the conservatory’s liberal arts department and a poet. Upon reading Minahan’s work, Higdon knew she had found what she was looking for: a series of poems that would allow for different emotional settings “as if they were lessons in life arranged like different rooms within a house.” It is not just the chorus who sings in The Singing Rooms. “This is a house where the violin sings, the choir sings, and the orchestra sings,” Higdon explains. “Every room is its own sound world. Not an ordinary house, this is the house that we all inhabit: that of life.”

The first movement, “Three Windows: Two Versions of the Day,” captures the changing nature of light depending on the time of day, from the cool light of morning to the blazing sun of the late afternoon. After the solo violin’s pensive rhapsodizing, the chorus offers a somber homophonic incantation accompanied by tolling bells. In “Things Aren’t Always,” the orchestra is more active and texturally varied, constantly moving and shifting. Gentle rocking and lush harmonies evoke the poet’s dream on the boat in “The Interpretation of Dreams.” The fourth movement, “Confession,” begins anxiously as the poet builds up the courage to divulge her dreams to another, the mood softening when she reveals she dreamt she slept inside a flower. At just over three minutes long, “History Lesson” was meant to capture how quickly we tend to forget the lessons of history. The ominous percussion and menacing repetitions of the word “How” that open the movement portend the danger of such forgetfulness.

The most expansive movement of the concerto, “A Word with God” opens with an intimate conversation between the English horn and solo violin, the conversation becoming more urgent and complex as more instruments and voices are added. The poem opens with an Irish proverb: “Your feet will bring you to where your heart is.” Higdon repeats this proverb at the end of the movement to bring the listener back to the room where the concerto began. Coming full circle, the second setting of “Three Windows: Two Versions of the Day” presents what Higdon calls “a view at the close of a day in life . . . a return to the original room, but with wisdom gained and all seen in a new light.”

Lera Auerbach (b. 1973)
Ikarus (Icarus) (2006)
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, two harps, piano, celesta, theremin, and strings
Performance time: 12 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

A true Renaissance woman, Lera Auerbach has achieved acclaim as a conductor, pianist, composer, poet, and visual artist. Growing up in Chelyabinsk, a city on the border of Siberia, Auerbach immersed herself in the world of ancient Greece—specifically, Greek mythology. “The world outside made much more sense through the perspective of the ancient Greek myths, where it was quite common for a power-protective god to devour all his children,” she writes. The figure of Icarus captured her imagination in particular. In the story, Icarus dons wings of beeswax crafted by his father, Daedalus. Like a typical teenager, Icarus does not heed his father’s warnings. Instead, he soars higher and higher, exhilarated by the feeling of freedom, until, having flown too close to the sun, his wings melt, causing him to plummet into the ocean. “What makes this myth so touching is Icarus’s impatience of the heart, his wish to reach the unreachable, the intensity of the ecstatic brevity of his flight and inevitability of his fall,” Auerbach explains.

In 2011, Auerbach extracted the last two movements from her Symphony No. 1, “Chimera,” (2006) to create the symphonic poem Icarus. While a chimera is a Greek mythological creature, the myth of Icarus was not in her mind when she initially composed the work. However, she was reminded of the myth after hearing the extracted movements in their new context. “All my music is abstract, but by giving evocative titles I invite the listener to feel free to imagine, to access his own memories, associations,” she writes in her program note for Icarus. Further, the title beckons the listener to reflect on the innate human desire to transcend the limits imposed on us.

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
Suite from The Firebird (Zhar’-ptitsa; L'oiseau de feu) (1909, Reorchestrated by the composer in 1919)
Scored for: two flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings
Performance time: 23 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: August 2, 1935; Eric DeLamarter, conductor

Art critic and impresario Sergei Diaghilev was passionate about exporting Russian art and music abroad, particularly in the cultural hub of Paris. In 1906, Diaghilev organized an exhibition of Russian art. The exhibition’s success spurred him to mount a series of concerts of Russian music the following year and a production of Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov in 1908. By building up the Parisian public’s appetite for Russian culture, Diaghilev had laid the groundwork to form the Ballets Russes in 1909. The company’s first season was received favorably, though the press complained about the lack of musical novelty. So, for the 1910 season Diaghilev decided to commission a new ballet based on Russian fairy tales. The only question was—who would compose the score?

The previous season, Diaghilev had commissioned Igor Stravinsky—then only 27 and virtually unknown—to reorchestrate two Chopin piano pieces for a production of Les Sylphides. Diaghilev was sufficiently pleased with the young composer’s work, eventually offering him the commission for the new ballet. His gamble paid off. The success of The Firebird not only continued to stoke the Parisian craze for all things Russian, but it also catapulted Stravinsky’s career overnight and led to the commissions for Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).

Theatrical designer Alexandre Benois and choreographer Mikhail Fokine combined multiple archetypal characters and stories from Russian folklore for the scenario of The Firebird. In the ballet, Prince Ivan captures the Firebird in the enchanted garden of the evil sorcerer Kashchei. Prince Ivan lets the Firebird go but keeps a feather as a talisman. In the garden he also encounters 13 princesses dancing a slow khorovod, a traditional circle dance. Kashchei has imprisoned them and will turn anyone attempting to rescue them to stone. Determined to save the princesses and wed the youngest, Prince Ivan summons the Firebird with the feather. She casts a spell over Kashchei and his minions, causing them to dance themselves to exhaustion and then lulling them to sleep. The Firebird then instructs Prince Ivan to destroy a giant egg in which Kashchei has hidden his soul. Upon breaking the egg, Kashchei dies, releasing the kingdom from his tyranny.

“Music more poetic, music more expressive of every moment and shading, music more beautiful-sounding and phantasmagoric could not be imagined,” Benois said of Stravinsky’s score. Stravinsky remained fond of The Firebird and created three concert versions. The suite compiled in 1919 is the most popular and will be performed tonight. From his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky not only learned masterful orchestration techniques but also adopted his idea of using chromaticism to depict mystical themes and simple folk songs to represent the mortal world. A spooky winding figure in the low strings sets the scene in Kashchei’s evil domain. Glassy string glissandos and tremolos mirror the bird’s shimmering plumage, while busy woodwinds show her struggle to escape. Representing the human world, “The Princesses’ Khorovod” quotes a Russian folk song Rimsky-Korsakov used in his Sinfonietta on Russian Themes. The frenetic rhythms of “Infernal Dance of King Kashchei” whip the sorcerer and his court into a frenzy before a languid bassoon melody casts a sleepy pall over “Lullaby.” In the finale, a solo horn announces a new dawn, the majestic theme building as goodness and light return.

—Katherine Buzard