At the moment, collective hopes at the Grant Park Music Festival are soaring higher than the jets of water in Buckingham Fountain south of the Petrillo Music Shell. The festival is moving in new directions artistically, architecturally and acoustically, and these changes promise to make Chicago even more of a key player among major American cities that produce international-level classical music the year round.
This opening weekend of the 2000 season brings the official debut of Austrian conductor Carlos Kalmar as principal conductor of the Grant Park Orchestra, a post to which he was named last September. Assuming the newly created position of principal guest conductor later this week will be James Paul, director of the Oregon Festival of American Music. Their affiliation gives the free series of symphonic concerts a more distinct identity.
“Carlos and James bring exactly the infusion of energy and creativity we were looking for at Grant Park,” says James Palermo, the festival’s artistic and general director. “They’re ingenious, creative and represent two different musical traditions. Neither gentleman is constricted by preconceived notions about what should be done at a summer music festival.”
Palermo is relying on the advent of his dynamic podium duo to fuel anticipation of the orchestra’s planned June 2002 move to its new home at the city’s $230 million Lakefront Millennium Park, now being built in Grant Park’s northwest corner. Already everybody is talking about Frank Gehry’s $15 million music pavilion, the focal point of the park, scheduled to open in autumn 2001.
Less widely discussed, but crucial to the way music will be made and heard at the “new” Grant Park, is a new “acoustic enhancement system” designed by the Chicago-based Talaske Group in conjunction with Gehry. The first permanent installation of its kind in the U.S., the system will use state-of-the-art electronics and traditional acoustical design techniques to create the sense of hearing music in an enclosed concert hall. Listeners will feel they are surrounded by “virtual walls and ceilings” in a simulated concert hall experience, according to Jonathan Laney, Talaske’s senior audio consultant. A prototype of the new system was successfully tried in 1998 at the Petrillo Music Shell, which will continue to house festival concerts this summer and next.
Kalmar and Paul will share all but two of the festival’s 10 weeks–the former will conduct five weeks of concerts, the latter three. Both men will be playing a fair number of scores local audiences have never heard or have not heard for many years. They will place special emphasis on American 20th Century works, including pieces by Leonard Bernstein, Andre Previn, Walter Piston, John Corigliano, Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson and Leo Sowerby.
This summer’s mix of standard repertory and offbeat fare is typical of the programming listeners may expect in future seasons, Paul says. “Both Carlos and I can take some chances on pieces from the fringes of the repertory that need to be heard more often than they are,” says Paul, who will lead the Chicago premiere of French conductor-composer Paul Paray’s Symphony No. 1 as part of his first set of concerts, an all-French program, Wednesday and Friday.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, of Austrian parents who fled Hitler’s Anschluss, the 42-year-old Kalmar comes to Chicago with a solid background in symphonic and operatic music, not to mention an avid interest in American works.
Kalmar had his sights set on becoming a violinist but was bitten by the conducting bug early in his studies at the College for Music in Vienna. Winning first prize in the Hans Swarowsky Conducting Competition eventually led to his securing chief conductor posts in Hamburg and Stuttgart. Currently serving as general music director of the Opera House and Philharmonic Orchestra in Dessau, Germany, he will add another post later this year when he becomes principal conductor of the Niederoesterreichisches Tonkuenstler Orchestra in Vienna.
Having made his way up the ladder the old-fashioned European way, he says he is not hungry for international stardom. “Although it’s marvelous to conduct the big orchestras, when I lead ensembles [of lesser rank] and I have this feeling that we really are making music together, then I am happy,” Kalmar said recently by phone from his home in Vienna, where he lives with his German wife, Britta, and their two daughters. “It’s my orchestra, my family–a true relationship. That’s important for me.”
He says that one of the prime attractions of coming to Chicago is conducting a front-rank orchestra that can prepare challenging, often unusual scores along with the standard repertory in minimal rehearsal time–and perform them well.
“I have been talking a lot about this festival with people I know here in Europe,” Kalmar says. “When I tell them what the programs are, and that audiences can hear them free of charge, they say they don’t believe it! Grant Park is the ideal place for a festival based on music of the last century and works of American composers. I think, and very much hope, that the results this year will be as good as we are expecting.”
“The orchestra is made up of very skilled professionals with whom I adore working; the same applies to the Grant Park Chorus,” adds Paul. “With these musicians there are no musical or emotional contretemps; they are like the CSO or the London Symphony in that they are incredibly fast [learners].”
Palermo says he has gotten only positive feedback from orchestra members regarding Kalmar. “Carlos understands how orchestras function and how to work with them as a team to achieve high-quality results,” he says.
There is, however, one wild card at Grant Park that nobody can control, and that is the weather. Grant Park audiences are famously weatherproof, willing to tolerate monsoon rains and extremes of heat and cold to hear great music in the not-so-great outdoors.
Making music under such conditions entails artistic compromise, both conductors concede. And many an orchestral performance at Grant Park has suffered the infernal intrusions of traffic, train and aeronautical noise. Not until the first concerts are presented at Millennium Park in 2002 will we know how successfully the new facility can shield listeners and musicians from such distractions, or whether Mayor Richard M. Daley’s proposal to add a rainproof cover to Gehry’s trellis-canopy will be adopted.
Rain shield or no, park planners say they are confident the new audio system will mask a considerable amount of peripheral noise. And Kalmar predicts the compromises forced on musicians will be “smaller and smaller” as the Grant Park Orchestra settles into its new home–and the city gets used to the idea of supporting a major classical music festival even closer to where it works and plays.
COMING THIS SUMMER
Here is a selective guide to the more noteworthy concerts–all free–that the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus will present at the Petrillo Music Shell, Columbus Drive at Jackson Boulevard; 312-742-GPMF:
Sunday, 7:30 p.m.: Kalmar concludes with an unusual double bill of two 20th Century Hungarian choral masterpieces, Bartok’s “Cantata Profana” and Kodaly’s “Psalmus Hungaricus.”
Saturday and June 25, 7:30 p.m.: Two rarely heard American works, Alan Hovhaness’ Psalm and Fugue, and Piston’s Symphony No. 4, are paired with Rachmaninov’s ever-popular Third Piano Concerto.
July 5 and 6, 7:30 p.m.: While Taste of Chicago takes over the lakefront, the Grant Park Chorus takes temporary refuge at Holy Family Church, 1019 S. May, for a performance of Rachmaninov’s sublime “Vespers (Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom).”
July 8 and 9, 7:30 p.m.: This time it’s the orchestra that’s on the move–to Symphony Center–where Kalmar will direct an all-American program of Gould, Barber, Sowerby and Bernstein.
July 14 and 15, 7:30 p.m.: Paul has a genuine feel for English music, and this program should be a treat for Anglophiles, anchored by the seldom-heard Violin Concerto by Benjamin Britten (Elmar Oliveira, soloist) and a rare Chicago performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” (1898), with the Grant Park Chorus.
Aug. 12 and 13, 7:30 p.m.: Kalmar conducts an unexpected, tragically ironic pairing of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw.”
