Grant Park Music Festival celebrates the new and the classic

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Conductor Marin Alsop | Photo: COURTESY OF GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

With its adventurous and eclectic programming, formidable talent lineup, largely free and easy access — and, if the weather cooperates, some of the most beautiful evenings-under-the-stars to be had in Chicago — the annual Grant Park Music Festival is the very definition of summertime bliss in this city. Just ask the more than 300,000 people who find their way to Frank Gehry’s dramatically sculpted Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park each summer, where they can opt for an assured seat (one of the privileges of a pre-paid membership), or just grab a free spot on the lawn.

GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL When: June 15 – Aug. 20 Where: Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, 205 E. Randolph Tickets: Free (with memberships for assured seating available Info: www.GPMF.org

This year’s Festival, running June 15 – Aug. 20, promises an unusually appealing series of concerts, with the Grant Park Orchestra playing a slew of masterworks including Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 1”; Mahler’s “Symphony No. 6”; Schumann’s “Symphony No. 4”; Bruckner’s “Symphony No. 4”;  Mendelssohn’s “Italian Symphony”; Mozart’s “Mass in C Minor,” and Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust.” Special events include a Movie Night featuring a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s beguiling “City Lights” (July 6), with live orchestral accompaniment; a two-night Cole Porter Celebration (July 8 and 9) marking the 125th anniversary of the composer-lyricist’s birth; and a concert version of Carlisle Floyd’s opera, “Of Mice and Men” (July 27), based on John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl era novella.

And there is much more, for Carlos Kalmar, the Festival’s music director, has a special gift for mixing and matching the classics with audacious new works, and for tapping the talents of formidable guest conductors.

For example, this summer, Marin Alsop — who, since 2007, has served as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (the first woman to hold such a position with a major American orchestra) — will lead two innovative, wide-ranging programs during her week-long residency in Chicago.

Carlos Kalmar conducts the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra. (Photo: Patrick Pyszka)

Carlos Kalmar conducts the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra. (Photo: Patrick Pyszka)

On July 20, Marin (who, in 2005, also became the first conductor ever to receive a MacArthur Fellowship), will lead the Grant Park Festival Orchestra in a program that includes Argentinean-Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov’s “Azul,” described as “a 21st century Baroque adagio,” along with a multimedia work, “Life: A Journey Through Time,” which pairs the music of Philip Glass with projected images by the famed National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting.

For programs on July 22 and 23, Alsop will explore the themes of immigration and assimilation. The intriguing mix of works will include  Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 “Symphony No. 9” (the “New World Symphony”), paired with two works (“Harlem Symphony” and “Victory Stride”) by James P. Johnson, the early 20th century African-American composer who pioneered stride style jazz piano, helped moved ragtime into jazz, and composed that Roaring Twenties anthem, the “Charleston,” as well as Duke Ellington’s “Slave Song/Come Sunday” and “Imagine My Frustration,” featuring jazz violinist Regina Carter.

About her choices of repertoire Alsop said: “I love Golijov’s world view — the way he looks at things in such a pure, childlike way, but always with a sense of beauty. ‘Azul,’  the Spanish word for blue, is about the universe, and the world we inhabit. He plays on all sorts of genres, mixing the Baroque and the spiritual, and including a hyper-accordion [which uses digital signal processing to enhance the sound with a multitude of effects]. There’s a folk element to it, and something primal, too.”

“Life” is a multimedia piece for full orchestra in seven sections, adapted from works originally composed by Philip Glass for smaller ensembles or solo instruments, and arranged by Michael Riesman. The projected images by Frans Lanting are from his six-year journey of photographic discovery that captured new scientific insights about the evolution of life on Earth, with everything from giant tortoises and delicate jellies to erupting volcanoes and coral reefs.

And as Alsop asked: “What could be better than to watch all that outside on a summer night?”

Dvorak, who often drew on folk themes from Moravia and his native Bohemia, spent three years in the U.S — from 1892 to 1895 — and became interested in  the African-American spirituals he heard here. And while director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York he met an African-American student, Harry T. Burleigh, who sang traditional spirituals to him. He would go on to say: “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them.”

“I think we should be discussing much more about race and classical music,” said Alsop, who credits her mentor, Leonard Bernstein, with opening her eyes to “how important it is to think socially if you are to be counted in the arts.”

“Like all black American composers of his time, Johnson was directed into the popular rather than the classical music world,” said Alsop. “I spent six years trying to find his classical scores, and finally found them in the attic of his surviving adopted daughters’ home in California.”

A new work by composer Michael Gondolfi will be part of this summer’s Grant Park Music Festival. (Photo: Courtesy of Grant Park Music Festival)

A new work by composer Michael Gondolfi will be part of this summer’s Grant Park Music Festival. (Photo: Courtesy of Grant Park Music Festival)

Championing the new also is crucial for the Grant Park festival. So on Aug. 5 and 6. along with Mozart’s “Great Mass in C Minor” (featuring the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, and guest soloists) Kalmar will lead the world premiere of Michael Gandolfi’s latest installment in an ever-expanding work inspired by the Garden of Cosmic Speculation — a 30 acre sculpture garden in Scotland created by landscape architect and theorist Charles Jencks (who happens to be good friends with Frank Gehry). Inspired by the science and mathematics of modern cosmology, its sculptures and landscaping reflects such themes as Black Holes and Fractals, combining natural features with artificial symmetry and curves.

“I first discovered the garden in 2003 when I saw a beautiful coffee table book about it,” said Gandolfi, who chairs the composition department at the New England Conservatory of Music. “I wrote four movements for a joint commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Festival, and then, in 2007, I expanded it for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which subsequently recorded it. In the interim I got to know Charles Jencks and visit his garden, and I’ve added more sections to the piece for Grant Park. One is inspired by the Octagonia, a library of stone with an ancient look that has eight major topics (from arts and architecture, to economics and politics, language and mind, and philosophy and power), and I used uncommon eight-note scales to create a sort of tone poem suggesting the mystery of it all. Another movement was inspired by the Comet Bridge — a steely, very modern footbridge new to the garden.”

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