Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bosques Shostakovich
Bosques Shostakovich
Seventy-fifth Season
Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus
Carlos Kalmar, Principal Conductor
Christopher Bell, Chorus Director
Hailed by Opera Now for his “believably heroic figure with a gleaming
ring at the top of his vocal register,” John Horton Murray has
recently added several new roles to his repertoire at the Nationaltheater
Mannheim where his performances included the title roles in Lohengrin,
Parsifal, and Otello, Jason in Medée, Alvaro in La forza del destino, Kaiser in
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Max in Der Freischütz, Siegmund in Die Walküre,
Sergei in Lady Macbeth von Mtsensk, and Canio in Pagliacci. Highlights of
his engagements in America include The Metropolitan Opera, Seattle
Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Santa Fe
Opera, New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Opera Company of Philadelphia.
Among his many international engagements are performances at the Deutsche Oper Berlin,
the Frankfurt Opera, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, the Scottish Opera, Opera North
Ireland, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Teatro alla Scala. On the concert stage, John Horton
Murray recently performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Vancouver Symphony
Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Kansas City, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,
the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Colorado Symphony and
the San Francisco Symphony. A frequent guest at festivals around the world, the tenor has
been featured at the Spoleto Festival, Antiken Fesitval, Bard Music Festival, the Baden-Baden
Festival and the Bellingham Festival. Mr. Murray has recorded on numerous labels including
Naxos, London, Decca and Sony.
“I want to write music that is visceral, that is moving, and that is im-
peccably put together. I don’t want classical music to be a passive experi-
ence. I want it to have as much impact as the best rock concerts.” Aaron Jay Kernis, who distilled
the essence of his art in these words, is very much a composer for the turn of the millennium
— eclectic, brazen, exuberant, aggressive, plugged-in. “I want everything to be included in music,”
he says, “soaring melody, consonance, tension, dissonance, drive, relaxation, color, strong harmony
and form — and for every possible emotion to be elicited actively by the passionate use of these
elements.” Passion, laced with chutzpah, marked his earliest recognition by the music world: when
Jacob Druckman, his teacher at Yale and then Composer-in-Residence with the New York Phil-
harmonic, scheduled an open reading of Kernis’ Dream of the Morning Sky at the Philharmonic’s
Horizons Festival of new music in June 1983, Kernis vigorously defended his handling of the
orchestra after the conductor, Zubin Mehta, criticized it from the podium. Audience and critics
were won over, and Kernis was news.
Aaron Jay Kernis was born in Philadelphia on January 15, 1960, and started teaching himself
piano and violin at age twelve; he began composing soon thereafter. He took his professional
training at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (with John Adams), the Manhattan School
of Music (Elias Tanenbaum and Charles Wuorinen), Yale (Morton Subotnik, Bernard Rands and,
principally, Jacob Druckman) and the American Academy in Rome; he was appointed to the faculty
of the Yale School of Music in 2003. Since his coming-out with Dream of the Morning Sky at the New
York Philharmonic concert in 1983, Kernis has created an impressive catalog: significant scores for
orchestra (three symphonies, New Era Dance, Invisible Mosaic III, Musica Celestis, a double concerto
for guitar and violin, a concerto for English horn titled Colored Field); numerous compositions for
varied chamber ensembles; pieces for piano, organ and accordion; and many works for solo voices
and for chorus. He was Composer-in-Residence with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra from 1993
to 1996; he began a similar post with the Minnesota Orchestra in September 1998. In 1998, Ker-
nis won the Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2, “Musica Instrumentalis”; his most recent
recognition is the University of Louisville’s prestigious Grawemeyer Award for 2002 for the cello
concerto Colored Field. Among his other distinctions are the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music
Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize, a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts, a Bearns Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Tippett
Award, an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and awards from
BMI and ASCAP, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony,
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Aspen
Music Festival, the Koussevitzky, Naumburg and Fromm foundations, American Public Radio and
others. He fulfilled commissions for works for two significant occasions in the year 2000: one for
the centennial celebrations of the Philadelphia Orchestra; the other, from Michael Eisner and the
Disney Corporation, observing the arrival of the new millennium. In February 2000, his “perma-
nently installed ambient music” for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s Museum
of Natural History, titled Cosmic Cycle, was first heard. In 1995, Kernis signed an exclusive recording
contract with Decca/London, which has released several highly acclaimed albums of his music. His
recent works include Color Wheel, commissioned for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s opening concert
at the new Kimmel Center on December 15, 2001. Kernis’ current commissions include works for
his residency with the Minnesota Orchestra, a toy piano concerto for Margaret Leng Tan, and a
new opera for Santa Fe Opera.
Too Hot Toccata, written in 1996 to mark the end of Kernis’ residency with the St. Paul Chamber
Orchestra, is a brilliant reworking of the finale of his Double Concerto for Violin, Guitar and
Much of the cultural and political history of Soviet Russia can be read
from the events and creations of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life. His music
of the 1920s — the impudent First Symphony, the satiric opera The Nose, the jingoistic Second
and Third Symphonies — reflects the youthful exuberance and artistic avant-gardism of the first
decade of the Soviet regime. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin emerged victorious from the
scramble for political power, and he solidified his dictatorship with the purges of the 1930s. Art and
music did not escape Stalin’s repressions, and the vigorous, experimental styles of the preceding
decade were attacked as “bourgeois decadence” and “formalistic.” Outright condemnation came
upon Shostakovich in early 1936, when his lurid modernist opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which
had been performed successfully dozens of times in Leningrad and Moscow following its premiere
in 1934, incited Stalin’s vitriol. Stalin stormed out of a performance in Moscow, and within days
an article in the Communist Party’s official newspaper, Pravda, perhaps written by Stalin himself,
denigrated the opera as “Chaos Instead of Music.” Shostakovich, reeling from the blow, withdrew
Lady Macbeth and his Fourth Symphony, already in rehearsal, and produced the Fifth Symphony in
1937 as “an artist’s response to just criticism.”
Welcomed back into the fold of repentant artists, Shostakovich became the leading Soviet
composer during World War II. His Seventh Symphony, which recorded the misery and hoped-
for triumph of the Russians in Leningrad under the ghastly Nazi siege, was a symbol of Russian
courage and heroism to those at home and abroad, and it gained a Stalin Prize for the composer in
1942. The brooding Eighth Symphony (1943) and the sardonic Ninth (1945) met with less official
approval, however, largely because they eschewed blatant patriotism at the time of the defeat of
Germany. Again, in 1948, Shostakovich’s music was denounced, this time as “neo-classic” and “an
escape from reality.” (The Soviet bureaucracy never gave clear definitions for any of these censori-
ous terms.) Rather than a specifically artistic reason behind this condemnation, which also included
Odyenem Rodinu v Lesa (“We Will Clothe Our Homeland with Forests”)
Zvuchit priziv na vsyu stranu, The call rings out through all the land,
raznosit vyeter golosa the voices are carried by the winds:
obyavim zasukhye voinu, we will declare war on drought,
odyenem rodinu we will clothe our homeland
v lesa! with forests.
Kovaren byl iyulski znoi, The intense heat of July was ominous,
polyam grozili nyebesa. the heavens threatened the fields.
Shtob novi mir So that a new world
dyshal vesnoi, might breathe in spring,
odyenem rodinu we will clothe our homeland
v lesa! with forests.
Svetla, kak pervaya lyubov, Pure and radiant, like first love,
beryozok yunaya krasa. is the youthful beauty of the birches.
Poseyem rozh We will sow rye
pod syen dubov, in the shade of the oaks.
odyenem rodinu We will clothe our homeland
v lesa! with forests!
My zashchitim svoi polya, We will protect our fields,
yavlyaya miru chudesa. and show the world great wonders.
Shtob krugli god So that the earth should bloom
A ... Ah ...
Solovi poyut schastliviye, The silence is filled with the joyous
oglashaya tishinu, song of the nightingales,
nad polyami nad nivami above the cornfields
slavyat yunost i vesnu. they celebrate youth and the spring.
V stepi lesok zelyony vyros, On the steppe has sprung up
lyubov moya, lyubov moya! a little green wood, my love, my love!
A ranshe nam nye prikhodilos But here in the past,
zdyes slishat we could not hear
penye solovya. the song of the nightingale.
Nashi lyudi bespokoiniye Our tireless people
prevratili zemlyu v sad, have turned the earth into a garden:
v tri ryada deryevya stroiniye, in rows of three, our slender trees
vzyavshis za ruki, stoyat. join hands and stand straight.
I nad shirokimi polyami — And above the broad fields —
maya mechta, tvoya mechta — my dream and yours —
listva zelyonaya nad nami, the green leaves above us,
strany sovyetskoi krasota. the beauty of our Soviet land.
Slava (“Glory”)