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June 11 - August 16, 2025

Welcome

The Grant Park Music Festival is a ten-week classical music concert series held annually in Chicago, Illinois’ Millennium Park.

It features the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, along with guest performers and conductors, and is one of the only free outdoor classical-music concert series in the US.

C9_Nicole_Paiement

Debussy La Mer

Program


Bedřich Smetana The Moldau (12 mins)


Mark Adamo Last Year (25 mins)

Autumn: Dismissing Eunice
Winter: Le Triangle Noir
Spring: Zephaniah 1:14-15
Summer: For Julia, born 2045

Claude Debussy La mer (23 mins)

From Dawn to Noon on the Sea
Play of the Waves
Dialogue of Wind and Sea

Featuring

  • Grant Park Orchestra
    Grant Park Orchestra

    Grant Park Orchestra

    Orchestra

  • Nicole Paiement
    Nicole_Paiement

    Nicole Paiement

    Guest Conductor

  • Inbal Segev
    Inbal_Segev

    Inbal Segev

    Cello

Program Notes

Bedrich Smetana – The Moldau

Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884)
Vltava (The Moldau)
, from Má vlast (1874)
Scored for:
three flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Performance time: 12 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance:
July 2, 1935; Eric DeLamarter, conductor

Alongside Antonín Dvořák, Bedřich Smetana is recognized as a seminal figure in the development of a Czech national musical style. Although he grew up speaking German and spent five years in Sweden, Smetana became committed to the ideas of Czech nationalism. In the 1860s, he began composing specifically “Czech” music, focusing on Bohemian themes and incorporating folk styles as an essential element of his musical language.

Smetana’s cycle of six symphonic poems, Má vlast (My Fatherland), is a prime example. Each tone poem depicts an element of the history, landscape, and traditions of Bohemia in what he called “musical pictures of Czech glories and defeats.” He began composing the work in 1874, shortly after resigning from his post as principal conductor of the Prague Provisional Theatre. Increasing deafness and tinnitus that was the result of syphilis had made conducting impossible. Nevertheless, he continued to compose, completing the suite that would become one of his most enduring works over the next five years. Ultimately, he lost his eyesight as well, and hallucinations and self-destructive behavior led to his institutionalization in a Prague asylum, where he died in 1884.

The second tone poem, Vltava (The Moldau), is the most famous of the cycle. It traces the journey of the Moldau River from its source in the Bohemian Forest to where it joins the Elbe. On its way, the river flows through fields and forests, past hunters and a peasant wedding, by river nymphs dancing in the moonlight, and down the rapids of St. John before majestically opening into a broad stream as it enters the city of Prague. Smetana musically paints the rolling waters of the river with a Wagnerian leitmotif before layering a broad folk tune on top. The melody may stem from a 16th-century Italian song called “La Mantovana,” which has spread throughout Europe in different guises (even forming the basis of the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” via Romania). While the melody’s origins may not be Bohemian, Smetana’s posthumous reputation as the father of Czech music, combined with the work’s popularity, has made Vltava an unofficial anthem of the Czech Republic.

Mark Adamo – Last Year

Mark Adamo (b. 1962)
Last Year
(2019)
Scored for:
timpani, percussion, harp, strings, and solo cello
Performance time: 25 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

While Mark Adamo is best known for his work as an opera composer and librettist—with his debut opera, Little Women (1998), standing as one of the most performed American operas today—he has recently turned his hand to symphonic, choral, and chamber works. Mark Adamo began composing Last Year in 2018 in response to Hurricane Harvey. He had been listening to a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at the time and pondered what Vivaldi would write if he were alive today, confronted with the reality of climate change. In writing this piece, Adamo said he attempts to “give voice to the fears and hopes we experience during this moment of crisis.”

Instead of a cycle of four concertos for solo violin, Adamo scores his work as a concerto in four movements for solo cello, adding harp, piano, and percussion to the sonority of the string orchestra. Like Vivaldi’s cycle, each movement bears the title of a different season but also a subtitle. The first movement, “Autumn: Dismissing Eunice,” invokes Eunice Newton Foote, an American climatologist who, in 1856, was the first to scientifically prove what we now refer to as the greenhouse effect. The movement begins with a fanfare that alternates uneasily between major and minor. Adamo weaves in a theme from Vivaldi’s Autumn in what he calls a “polymetric scherzo of nervous and glittering character” interrupted by tolling chords in the percussion choir.

“Winter: Le triangle noir” refers to an ice storm in January 1998 that left an area south of Montreal without power for several weeks. The media nicknamed the area “The Triangle of Darkness.” Here, Adamo captures the eerie stillness of a landscape encased in ice with a hushed theme, as strains of Vivaldi murmur underneath. Again, the percussion choir interrupts, but this time with a clear statement of the Gregorian “Dies Irae” chant. This acts as a warning knell for the third movement, “Spring: Zephaniah 1:14–15,” which proceeds without pause. The bible verse alluded to in the title warns of the coming of the day of judgment—a day of wrath and destruction. The theme from Vivaldi’s Spring alternates in fast and slow iterations. Eventually, the orchestra erupts into a thundercloud of sound before evaporating to reveal the soloist serenely sustaining a note underneath.

“Summer: For Julia, born 2045” again continues without a break. In this movement, Adamo envisions a barren landscape emptied of everything but low bass notes and the cries of seagulls. Even amid this bleakness, the cello is determined to be hopeful. “But—even as the orchestra takes up and develops, harmonically, that determined theme—the solo cello cannot help, for a moment, but lose itself in recrimination,” Adamo writes. “Memories of chaos, and that opening premonition, return to haunt the final moments: but the cello maintains the last word.”

Claude Debussy – La mer

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
La mer
(1903)
Scored for:
three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, four bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, five trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, and strings
Performance time: 23 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance:
July 28, 1965; Irwin Hoffman, conductor

“My old friend the sea; it is always endless and beautiful,” Claude Debussy mused. “It is really the thing in nature which best puts you in your place.” Debussy had a lifelong affinity for the sea. As a child, he spent his summers at the shore in Cannes, and at one point, he had a mind to become a sailor. Throughout his life he had accumulated enough memories of the ocean that he did not need to be on the waterfront to compose La mer. Like the English painter J. M. W. Turner, Debussy worked from memory. To Debussy, memories were more useful for composing than reality, “whose beauty weighs down thought too heavily.”

Turner’s seascapes served as a direct inspiration for Debussy after he saw an exhibition of the English artist’s paintings while on a trip to London in 1903, the year he began writing La mer. Turner anticipated the French Impressionist movement in his study of light, color, and atmosphere. His dynamic seascapes capture fleeting moments of the ever-changing sea as it reflects the sun and catches the wind. Debussy sought to channel this aesthetic in music in La mer. However, where music surpasses painting, Debussy said, was in its ability to “bring together all manner of variations in color and light as they continually change in time.”

Although there is plenty of precedent for musical depictions of water, Debussy was original in his impressionistic approach to La mer, a work he described as “three symphonic sketches.” In contrast with Smetana’s Vltava, which charts the Moldau’s exact course with distinct scenes along the way, Debussy’s evocation of water is more nebulous, though no less effective. Like the sea, musical ideas and colors constantly shift as if viewed through a kaleidoscope. Short melodic snippets are favored over long-drawn-out thematic development, and harmonies do not necessarily resolve but are used as color. Debussy’s groundbreaking orchestration also plays a role in achieving his desired effect. He blurs the traditional divisions of labor between the strings, winds, and brass and puts them in unique combinations to achieve specific colors. Any doubling is done with the utmost intention, as Debussy considered timbre a musical element of equal stature to harmony and melody.

While La mer is more suggestive than narrative, it is easy to imagine the scenes Debussy sketches in each movement. In “De l’aube à midi sur la mer” (“From dawn to midday on the sea”), the seascape gradually emerges from the mist at dawn. The sun peeks over the horizon in a melody in the cor anglais and muted trumpet, and the sea begins to swell. Later, a horn chorale sounds as the sun reaches its apex at noon. “Jeux de vague” (“Play of waves”) is even more spontaneous, capturing the waves shimmering in the sun in its rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic irregularities. The sea gathers strength in “Dialogue du vent et de la mer” (“Dialogue between the wind and the sea”). A turbulent storm brews, with surging waves and battering winds, while the eye of the storm brings an uneasy moment of calm. The “symphonic” aspect of the work reveals itself at the end in the recollection of the horn chorale of the first movement, this time in full brass.

—Katherine Buzard

Event Sponsors

The appearance of Nicole Paiement is generously underwritten by Lori Julian for The Julian Family Foundation.

Artistic Leadership

  • Giancarlo Guerrero
    Welcome Letter from Giancarlo

    Giancarlo Guerrero

    Conductor

  • Christopher Bell
    Christopher_Bell

    Christopher Bell

    Chorus Director

Support The Festival

Grant Park Orchestra

* denotes leave-of-absence † one-year position

Violin I

Jeremy Black, concertmaster

Trista Wong, acting assistant concertmaster

Zulfiya Bashirova

Jennifer Cappelli

Laura Park Chen†

Injoo Choi

Dima Dimitrova

Erica Hudson

Hyewon Kim*

Matthew Lehmann

Jayna Park

Rika Seko

Karen Sinclair

Bonnie Terry

Krzysztof Zimowski

Violin II

Liba Shacht, principal

Laura Miller, assistant principal*

Ying Chai

Ran Cheng

Karl Davies

Likai He

Ann Lehmann

Cristina Muresan*

Kjersti Nostbakken

Irene Radetzky

Jeanine Wynton

Thomas Yang

Bing Jing Yu†

Viola

Terri Van Valkinburgh, principal

Yoshihiko Nakano, assistant principal

Elizabeth Breslin*

Beatrice Chen

Amy Hess

Christopher McKay†

Edwardo Rios†

Rebecca Swan

Chloé Thominet

Cello

Walter Haman, principal

Peter Szczepanek, assistant principal

Calum Cook

Larry Glazier

Steven Houser

Eric Kutz

Eran Meir

Double Bass

Colin Corner, principal

Peter Hatch, assistant principal

Andrew Anderson

Christian Luevano

Samuel Rocklin

Chunyang Wang

Chris White

Flute

Jennifer Lawson, acting principal

Jennifer Clippert†

Alyce Johnson, acting assistant principal

Piccolo

Alyce Johnson

Oboe

Mitchell Kuhn, principal

Alex Liedtke

Anne Bach, assistant principal

English Horn

Anne Bach

Clarinet

Dario Brignoli, principal

Trevor O’Riordan

Bassoon

Eric Hall, principal

Nicole Haywood Vera Tenorio, assistant principal

Contrabassoon

Juan De Gomar†

French Horn

Patrick Walle, acting principal†

Stephanie Blaha, assistant principal*

Neil Kimel

Brett Hodge

Paul Clifton

Trumpet

David Gordon, principal

Mike Brozick, acting assistant principal

William Denton*

Rebecca Oliverio†

Trombone

Daniel Cloutier, principal*

Jeremy Moeller, acting principal

Lee Rogers, acting assistant principal†

Bass Trombone

Alexander Mullins

Tuba

Andrew Smith, principal

Timpani

Daniel Karas, principal

Percussion

Josh Jones, principal

Joel Cohen, assistant principal

Doug Waddell

Harp

Kayo Ishimaru-Fleisher, principal*

Keyboards

Christopher Guzman

Orchestra Librarian

Eliza Bangert, principal

String Fellows

Javier F. Torres-Delgado, violin

Maria Gabriela Mendez Martinez, violin

Joshua Thaver, viola

Manuel Papale, cello

Grant Park Chorus

* denotes leave-of-absence † 2025 Vocal Fellow

Soprano

Laura Lynch Anderson

Kristina Bachrach

Madalynn Baez

Megan E. Bell

Alyssa Bennett

Tamara Bodnar

Kylie Buckham

Anna Joy Buegel

Laura Bumgardner

Katherine Buzard

Bethany Clearfield

Nathalie Colas

Carolyne DalMonte

Megan Fletcher

Kaitlin Foley

Saira Frank

Julia Frodyma

Katherine Gray-Noon

Kimberly Gunderson

Alexandra Ioan

Alexandra Kassouf

Darlene Kelsey

Olivia Knutsen

Marybeth Kurnat

Katelyn Lee

Kyuyim Lee+

Rosalind Lee

Veronica Mak

Hannah Dixon McConnell

Marie McManama

Kathleen Monson

Susan Nelson

Evangeline Ng

Máire O'Brien

Alexandra Olsavsky

Laura Perkett

Angela Presutti Korbitz

Alexia Rivera

Veronica Samiec

Emily Sinclair

Molly Snodgrass

Tiana Sorenson

Christine Steyer

Sarah van der Ploeg*

Lydia Walsh-Rock

Sherry Watkins

Vocal Fellows

Kyuyim Lee

Isabel Yang

Opal Clyburn-Miller

Matthew Dexter

Alto

Emily Amesquita

Melissa Arning

Christina Bernardoni

Angela Born

Bethany Brewer

Julie DeBoer

Leah Dexter

Katrina Dubbs

Stacy Eckert

Margaret Fox

Catarine Hancock

Ruth Ginelle Heald

Sophia Heinz

Miya Higashiyama

Carla Janzen

Amy Allyssa Johnson

Kathryn Kinjo Duncan

Amanda Koopman

Anna Laurenzo

Jeannette Lee

Thereza Lituma

Chelsea Lyons

Victoria Marshall

Jessica McCarthy

Quinn Middleman

Ella Peters

Sarah Ponder

Emily Price

Stephanie Schoenhofer

Suzanne A. Shields

Marissa Simmons

Cassidy Smith

Aidan Spencer

Alannah Spencer

Margaret Stoltz

Carolyn Sundlof Boudreau

Gabrielle Timofeeva López

Elizabeth Vaughan

Corinne Wallace-Crane

A.J. Wester

Debra Wilder

Isabel Yang+

Tenor

Charles Anderson

Enrico Giuseppe Bellomo

Justin Berkowitz

Madison Bolt

Hoss Brock

Steven Caldicott Wilson

Opal Clyburn-Miller+

John J. Concepción

Micah Dingler

Jared V. Esguerra

Alec Fore

Ace Gangoso

Klaus Georg

Tejas Gururaja

Paul Hunter

Garrett Johannsen

William Johnson

James Judd

Tim Lambert

Tyler Lee

Stephen D. Noon

Marcos Ochoa

Brett Potts

Nicholas Pulikowski

Peder Reiff

Samuel Rosner

Matthew W. Schlesinger

Joe Shadday

Aaron Short

Brian Skoog

Michael St. Peter

Ryan Townsend Strand

Alan Taylor*

Sean J. Watland

Nate Widelitz

Bass

Walter Aldrich

Evan Bravos

Matthew Brennan

Michael Cavalieri

Ryan J. Cox

Ed Frazier Davis

Lifan Deng

Matthew Dexter+

Chris DiMarco

Christopher Filipowicz

Dimitri German

Dominic German

David Govertsen

Spencer Greene

Brian Hupp

Jan Jarvis

Jess Koehn

Eric Miranda

Ian Morris

Ian Murrell

John E. Orduña

Wilbur Pauley

Douglas Peters

Jackson Pierzina

Martin Lowen Poock

Ian Prichard

Dan Richardson

Stephen Richardson

Benjamin D. Rivera

Scott Uddenberg

Schyler Vargas

Vince Wallace

Aaron Wardell

Ronald Watkins

Jonathon Weller

Peter Wesoloski

Jonathan Wilson

Staff and Board