Thomas Wilkins
William Grant Still (1895-1978) is profiled at AfriClassical.com,
which features a comprehensive Works List by Dr. Dominique-René de
Lerma, http://www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com.
CHICAGO (July 24, 2015) — The 81st annual Grant Park Music Festival continues July 29 with guest conductor Thomas Wilkins – music director of the Omaha Symphony and principal guest conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra – leading the Grant Park Orchestra. The program includes Jerry Goldsmith’s eight-minute Fireworks, Dvorák’s beautiful, large-scale “Symphony No. 6,” and “The Sunday Symphony” by William Grant Still, “the Dean of all Afro-American Composers.” Performance is Wednesday, July 29, 6:30pm in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park.
One
hour before the concert, CSO’s Sounds and Stories contributor Laura Sauer hosts a free
Club 615 pre-concert lecture with Mr. Wilkins on Wednesday, July 29, 5:30pm in Millennium Park’s Family Fun Tent located just west of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.
Wednesday
night’s concert will also be broadcast live on 98.7WFMT, Chicago’s
classical and fine arts radio station, and also online at
wfmt.com/streaming.
Open lunchtime rehearsals of for this concert take place
Tuesday and Wednesday, July 28 and 29, 11 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Audiences are welcome to sit in the Pavilion Seating Bowl during
rehearsals, and Festival docents will be on site to talk about the
concert during rehearsal breaks.
For more information about the Grant Park Music Festival including membership, one-night passes and group seating, visit gpmf.org or call
312-742-7647. For additional information, visit the Grant Park Music Festival Facebook page or follow the Festival on Twitter @gpmf. A complete Grant Park Music Festival schedule
is accessible at www.gpmf.org.
DVOŘÁK SYMPHONY NO. 6
Wednesday, July 29, 6:30 PM in Millennium Park
Performers: Grant Park Orchestra; Thomas Wilkins, guest conductor
Thomas Wilkins conducts the Sunday Symphony by
the prolific William Grant Still, the "Dean of all African-American composers." The evening concludes with
Dvořák's beautiful large-scale work, his Sixth Symphony, which recalls the Czech folksongs of his native Bohemia.
Goldsmith
Fireworks: A Celebration of Los Angeles
Still Symphony No. 3,
Sunday Symphony
Dvořák Symphony No. 6
This
concert is supported in part by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation. The Walter E. Heller Foundation is a proud supporter of
American Accents, Grant Park Music Festival’s ongoing
initiative showcasing works by American composers, including Jerry
Goldsmith and William Grant Still.
Thomas Wilkins
is Music Director of the Omaha Symphony and Principal Conductor of the
Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. He
also holds the Germeshausen Family and Youth Concert Conductor Chair
with the Boston Symphony. Mr. Wilkins’ past positions have included
Resident Conductor of the Detroit Symphony and Florida Orchestra and
Associate Conductor of the Richmond (VA) Symphony.
He has also served on the faculties of North Park University in
Chicago, University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and Virginia
Commonwealth University in Richmond. He has led major orchestras
throughout the United States, including those of Cleveland, Atlanta,
Rochester, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dallas, Houston, Buffalo, Baltimore,
New Mexico, Utah and Washington, D.C., and continues to make frequent
appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony, San
Diego Symphony and New Jersey Symphony. Last
season Mr. Wilkins returned to the National Symphony Orchestra for a
two-week festival of American music and dance, as well as a
collaboration with world renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma at Wolf Trap, the
NSO’s summer home. He has participated on several boards of
directors, including the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, Charles
Drew Health Center (Omaha), Center Against Spouse Abuse in Tampa Bay,
and Museum of Fine Arts and Academy Preparatory Center, both in St.
Petersburg. Currently he serves as chairman of the
board for the Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund and as national
ambassador for the non-profit World Pediatric Project headquartered in
Richmond, which provides children throughout Central America and the
Caribbean with critical surgical and diagnostic
care. A native of Norfolk, Virginia, Thomas Wilkins is a graduate of
the Shenandoah Conservatory and New England Conservatory.
The Boston Globe named him among the “Best People and Ideas of
2011” and in 2014 he received the prestigious “Outstanding Artist Award”
at the Nebraska Governor’s Arts Awards.
SYMPHONY NO. 3, “THE SUNDAY SYMPHONY” (1958)
William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Still’s
Symphony No. 3 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English
horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
harp, celesta and strings. The performance time is 25 minutes. The
Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on July 7, 1994, with
Kay George Roberts conducting.
William
Grant Still, whom Nicolas Slonimsky in his authoritative
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians called “The Dean of
Afro-American Composers,” was born in Woodville, Mississippi on May 11,
1895. His father, the town bandmaster and a music teacher at Alabama
A&M, died when the boy was an infant, and the
family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his mother, a graduate of
Atlanta University, taught high school. In Little Rock, she married an
opera buff and he introduced young William to the great voices of the
day on records and encouraged his interest in
playing the violin. At the age of 16, Still matriculated as a medical
student at Wilberforce University in Ohio, but he soon switched to
music. He taught himself to play the reed instruments and left school to
perform in dance bands in the Columbus area and
work for a brief period as an arranger for the great blues writer W.C.
Handy. He returned to Wilberforce, graduated in 1915, married later that
year, and then resumed playing in dance and theater orchestras.
In
1917, Still entered Oberlin College, but he interrupted his studies the
following year to serve in the Navy during World War I, first as a mess
attendant and later as a violinist in officers’
clubs. He went back to Oberlin after his service duty and stayed there
until 1921, when he moved to New York to join the orchestra of the Noble
Sissle–Eubie Blake revue
Shuffle Along as an oboist. While on tour in Boston with the
show, Still studied with George Chadwick, then President of the New
England Conservatory, who was so impressed with his talent that he
provided his lessons free of charge. Back in New York,
Still studied with Edgard Varèse and ran the Black Swan Recording
Company for a period in the mid-1920s. He tried composing in Varèse’s
modernistic idiom, but soon abandoned that dissonant style in favor of a
more traditional manner.
Still’s
work was recognized as early as 1928, when he received the Harmon Award
for the most significant contribution to black culture in America. His
Afro-American Symphony of 1930 was premiered by Howard Hanson and
the Rochester Philharmonic (the first such work by a black composer
played by a leading American orchestra) and heard thereafter in
performances in Europe and South America. Unable to
make a living from his concert compositions, however, Still worked as
an arranger and orchestrator of music for radio, for Broadway shows, and
for Paul Whiteman, Artie Shaw and other popular bandleaders. A 1934
Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to cut back
on his commercial activities and write his first opera, Blue Steel,
which incorporated jazz and spirituals. He continued to compose
large-scale orchestral, instrumental and vocal works in his distinctive
idiom during the following years, and after moving
to Los Angeles in 1934, he supplemented that activity by arranging
music for films (including Frank Capra’s 1937
Lost Horizon) and later for television (Perry Mason, Gunsmoke). Still continued to hold an important place in American music until his death in Los Angeles in 1978.
Still
received many awards for his work: seven honorary degrees; commissions
from CBS, New York World’s Fair, League of Composers, Cleveland
Orchestra and other important cultural organizations;
the Phi Beta Sigma Award; a citation from ASCAP noting his
“extraordinary contributions” to music and his “greatness, both as an
artist and as a human being”; and the Freedom Foundation Award. Not only
was his music performed by most of the major American
orchestras, but he was also the first Black musician to conduct one of
those ensembles (Los Angeles Philharmonic, at Hollywood Bowl in 1936)
and a major symphony in a southern state (New Orleans Philharmonic in
1955). In 1945, Leopold Stokowski called William
Grant Still “one of our great American composers. He has made a real
contribution to music.”
Still’s
“Sunday Symphony,” composed in 1958 as the last of his five works in
the form, was numbered No. 3 to replace his original Third Symphony of
1945, which was discarded and later revised as
the Symphony No. 5. The work was not performed until 1984, six years
after the composer’s death, when the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by Carlton R. Woods, gave its premiere. Still’s use of
programmatic titles for the movements of his “Sunday
Symphony” evokes the worship activities of a typical Sabbath — The Awakening;
Prayer; Relaxation; and Day’s End and a New Beginning.
The composer’s daughter, Judith Still Headlee, observed that because
her father believed the communicative power of music to be a gift from
God, this Symphony represents “not just one
day, but a lifelong way of thinking. Every day in his career was one of
prayer and self-improvement, and, for him, every day and every piece of
music constituted a new beginning and a fuller opportunity to serve the
creator.”
The Awakening
begins with a stern unison proclamation which is followed by a playful
main theme, given in bright orchestral
sonorities with much dialogue between strings and winds. A contrasting
folk-like melody, built from a gapped scale, occupies the center
section. The main theme returns to round out the movement’s form.
Prayer is based on a haunting lament for the English horn. A
broad, hymnal theme is introduced by the strings and becomes more
agitated as the music unfolds. An altered recapitulation of the lament
theme, led by English horn doubled by piccolo, closes
the movement. Relaxation is a lighthearted dance featuring the high piping woodwinds. The finale,
Day’s End and a New Beginning, is more ominous and heavy in
character than its title might imply. The main part of the movement is
based on a spiritual-inspired string theme, and grows with a steady
tread to a full but foreboding ending.
Grant Park Music Festival
Acclaimed by critics and beloved by audiences, the
Grant Park Music Festival is the nation’s only free, summer-long
outdoor classical music series of its kind. The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in
Millennium Park, located between Michigan and Columbus Avenues at
Washington Street, is the official home of the Grant
Park Music Festival.
The
Grant Park Music Festival is led by Artistic Director and Principal
Conductor Carlos Kalmar, along with Grant Park Chorus Director
Christopher Bell, Grant Park Orchestral Association President
and CEO Paul Winberg, and Board Chair Chuck Kierscht.
The
Grant Park Music Festival gratefully acknowledges the generous support
from its 2015 sponsors: BMO Harris Bank, Season Sponsor; Fairmont
Chicago Millennium Park, Official Hotel; Macy’s, Official
Picnic Sponsor; and ComEd, Concert Sponsor. The Grant Park Music
Festival is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment
for the Arts, and partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts
Council Agency.
The Grant Park Music Festival participates in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s
Night Out in the Parks series. Night Out in the Parks is an initiative featuring more than 1,000 cultural activities in Chicago Park District locations citywide, in support of the City of Chicago’s Cultural Plan.
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