Angélica Negrón (1981-)

Color Shape Transmission

Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings

Performance time: 10 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Puerto Rican-born composer Angelica Negrón is known for writing for unusual instruments, such as accordions, toys, robotic instruments, and electronics. This sonic adventurousness gives her a fresh approach to scoring for orchestra. In 2022, the Seattle Symphony commissioned Negrón to compose Color Shape Transmission as part of their Sibelius Companions series, where a new work was intended to respond to one of the Finnish composer’s seven complete symphonies. Negrón’s piece appeared alongside Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2, one of his most beloved works.

Color Shape Transmission employs a small selection of sounds, which Negrón transforms through echo and delay effects. In addition to synthesized MIDI samples, she adds two relatively unusual instruments to the orchestra: a vibraphone with its resonators covered in aluminum foil and a melodica, a handheld reed instrument with a piano keyboard. Regarding the brief, Negrón said she finds kindship with Sibelius in their shared use of “entrancing, hypnotic textures” and their ability to make space for joy while retaining emotional weight. Negrón also drew inspiration from ceramic artist Linda Nguyen Lopez for this work. When she saw Lopez’s pieces, she said, “I just saw a lot of personality and almost empathy. I felt like they were trying to communicate with each other.” In Color Shape Transmission, she imagines the sculptures “trying to communicate through colors and textures and shapes” in a huge, resonant space.

Arturo Márquez (1950-)

Fandango

Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings, and solo violin

Performance time: 30 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Mexican composer Arturo Márquez had wanted to compose a piece based on the Mexican fandango for decades. Fate called when violinist Anne Akiko Meyers approached him in 2018 about writing her a violin concerto based on Mexican music. “I had known this music since I was a child, listening to it in the cinema, on the radio and listening to my father, a mariachi violinist, (Arturo Márquez Sr.) interpret huastecos and mariachi music,” Márquez writes. The Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered Fandango in 2021 under Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who said of the piece, “He’s created a wonderful journey through the history of the violin as a Latin folk instrument…After each note, you feel like you’re touching the beauty of the folk music that Arturo Márquez has written.”

Fandango is a traditional three-movement concerto for violin and orchestra. The first movement, “Folia Tropical,” recalls the baroque minor-mode chord progression called “La Folia,” which originated on the Iberian Peninsula. Márquez calls the introduction a “call to the remote history of the fandango.” The fandango, a fundamental part of flamenco, first appeared in eighteenth-century Spain and soon made its way to the Americas, where it was imbued with a new personality based on the people who adopted it. As such, Márquez incorporates multiple stylistic influences within the movement. The first theme is based on the Caribbean clave rhythmic pattern, while the second theme recalls an expressive bolero. The second movement, “Plegaria (Prayer),” is a free treatment of a chaconne, another baroque dance with Spanish roots. This meditative movement “pays tribute to the huapango mariachi together with the Spanish Fandango, both in its rhythmic and emotional parts,” Márquez explains. Finally, “Fandanguito” elaborates on the Huasteco Fandanguito. It also employs a fast Venezuelan dance called a pajarillo, which involves extensive introductory improvisation. This improvisatory spirit characterizes the finale, underpinned by the rhythmic vitality of the instruments native to the Huasteca region.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) 

Symphony No.6 in B minor, op.74, TH 30 (1893) 

Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings

Performance time: 46 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 21, 1935; Ebba Sundstrom, conductor

As early as 1889, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was thinking about his legacy. That year, he wrote to his friend Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, “I want terribly to write a somewhat grandiose symphony, which would crown my artistic career.” It would take him until 1893 to realize this dream, however. He began sketching a symphony in E-flat major in 1892 with this intent, but he ultimately destroyed it after a wave of self-doubt. In February of 1893, Tchaikovsky had the idea for what would become his final masterpiece: Symphony No. 6, “Pathétique.” He worked furiously on the symphony, sketching it in only 24 days and orchestrating it later that summer.

The nickname “Pathétique,” or “Pateticheskaya” in Russian, was ascribed to the symphony after the premiere, likely by Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest. Although this symphony is often referred to by the French term in the West, “Patetichskaya” has a slightly different connotation, meaning full of passionate emotion instead of necessarily sorrowful. Tchaikovsky had been of two minds when it came to attaching a program, or story, to his symphonic music. He had provided a detailed synopsis for his Fourth Symphony, but this time he decided that, while there was a program behind the symphony, it would “remain an enigma to everyone—let them guess.” And guess we have. 

Tchaikovsky’s emotionally turbulent Sixth Symphony cries out for dramatic interpretation. This inclination, spurred by Tchaikovsky’s suggestion, is only further intensified by the speculation surrounding Tchaikovsky’s death just nine days after the symphony’s premiere. While the official cause of death—and most widely accepted by modern scholars—is that Tchaikovsky died of cholera due to drinking unboiled water during an outbreak in St. Petersburg, the rumor has persisted that he poisoned himself under threat that his affair with a young nobleman would be made public if he didn’t. Although we may never know for certain Tchaikovsky’s cause of death, Tchaikovsky’s complicated personal life as a gay man in Tsarist Russia and his sudden death have nonetheless influenced our interpretation of this symphony as especially tragic, like a suicide note or requiem. In reality, Symphony No. 6 follows a pattern in Tchaikovsky’s late works of alternating between joyful, fantastical compositions, such as Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, and darker pieces occupied by themes of fate, such as The Queen of Spades. Plus, Tchaikovsky had finalized the symphony’s musical material seven months before his death.

The first movement opens with a dark bassoon solo, which foreshadows the agitated first subject introduced by the strings. The lyrical second theme bears a striking resemblance to Don José’s “Flower Song” from one of Tchaikovsky’s favorite operas, Carmen. After a woodwind interlude, the reprise of this theme fades to an impossibly quiet “pppppp” marking, which erupts into a ferocious fugue. The whole symphony can be characterized by these sudden and extreme shifts in dynamics, intensifying the nervous energy that pervades the work. 

The inner two movements provide some emotional respite. The Allegro con grazia is cast as a flowing yet slightly off-kilter dance in 5/4 time, whereas the Allegro molto vivace is an aggressive march. Joyful on the outside, the third movement rings hollow in the context of the wider symphony, as if Tchaikovsky is parodying the bombastic finales for which he was known. Flouting symphonic convention, Tchaikovsky then concludes not with fireworks but with a long drawn-out Adagio in B minor. After the opening theme, marked “lamentoso,” comes a steady crescendo to a thundering climax. However, the lamentoso melody returns, sinking ever further in the low strings before gradually fading to nothing. As tempting as it is to read personal tragedy into this ending, Tchaikovsky was optimistic about the future while composing this symphony, writing to his nephew, “You can’t imagine how blissful I feel in the conviction that my time is not yet passed, and to work is still possible. Of course, I might be mistaken, but I don’t think so.”