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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.

C1 Rhapsody in Blue

Rhapsody in Blue

Program


Gabriela Lena Frank Three Latin American Dances (20 mins)


George Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue (16 mins)


Manuel de Falla Suites from The Three-Cornered Hat (24 mins)


Featuring

  • Andrew Litton
    Andrew Litton

    Andrew Litton

    Conductor and Piano

  • Grant Park Orchestra
    Grant Park Orchestra

    Grant Park Orchestra

    Orchestra

Program Notes

Gabriela Lena Frank – Three Latin American Dances

Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972)
Three Latin American Dances (2003)
Scored for:
three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings
Performance time: 20 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Named one of the “35 Most Significant Women Composers in History” by the Washington Post in 2017, Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) currently serves as composer-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was born in Berkley, California, to a mother of Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent. Throughout her career, her multicultural heritage has been central to her compositional identity, her voice an amalgam of her lived experiences as a multiethnic Latina and the paradoxes inherent in that reality. She writes that her early days were “filled with Oriental stir-fry cuisine, Andean nursery songs, and frequent visits from our New York-bred Jewish cousins.” Her musical upbringing was just as diverse, her piano repertoire spanning not only the traditional works of Bach and Mozart but also Scott Joplin’s rags and her own early compositions, which carried overtones of Peruvian folk music.

Frank’s Three Latin American Dances (2004) are an encapsulation of this diverse background. The first movement, “Introduction: Jungle Jaunt,” begins with an intentional nod to Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which similarly employ an eclectic mix of musical traditions. After this tribute, she turns to the harmonies and rhythms of various pan-Amazonian dance forms. Next, “Highland Harawi,” evokes the harawi, a traditional Andean genre of music and lyric poetry Frank describes as “a melancholy adagio traditionally sung by a single bamboo quena flute so as to accompany a single dancer.” The somber music that bookends this movement depicts the vastness of the Andean mountains, while the fast middle section is meant to simulate the great spinning top belonging to Illapa, the Peruvian-Inca weather deity of thunder, lightning, and rain. Finally, “The Mestizo Waltz” honors the mixed-race (“mestizo”) music of the South American Pacific coast. “In particular,” Frank writes, “it evokes the ‘romancero’ tradition of popular songs and dances that mix influences from indigenous Indian cultures, African slave cultures, and western brass bands.”

George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue

George Gershwin (1898-1937) (Orchestration by Ferde Grofé, 1926)
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Scored for:
two flutes, two oboes, three clarinets including bass clarinet, two bassoons, three French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, banjo, strings, and solo piano
Performance time: 16 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: June 23, 1940; Oscar W. Anderson, conductor and Jane Anderson, piano

The story of how Rhapsody in Blue came to be is almost as legendary as the work itself. George Gershwin (1898–1937) and his brother Ira were reading the paper one day in early January 1924 when they came across a startling announcement: the famous dance bandleader Paul Whiteman was holding a concert on February 12, featuring a new jazz concerto by George Gershwin. This was news to the composer. Gershwin either had forgotten about the commission, or there was a miscommunication. Regardless, he had to write something—and fast. Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue in just a few weeks while also in rehearsals for his new musical comedy, Sweet Little Devil, which was opening in Boston at the same time. He sought the help of Whiteman’s go-to arranger, Ferde Grofé, who orchestrated Gershwin’s piano reduction for Whiteman’s idiosyncratic “jazz” band and later scored it for symphony orchestra.

The bustling soundscape of urban America was Gershwin’s main source of inspiration. “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety-bang that is often so stimulating to a composer,” Gershwin explained. “And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end . . . I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” Though other classical composers before Gershwin had integrated jazz rhythms and harmonies into their music, Rhapsody in Blue is often considered the landmark piece that brought “jazz” into the concert hall. 

Jazz is not the only nonclassical stylistic influence in Rhapsody in Blue. While Rhapsody in Blue has received criticism for white-washing jazz, it is erroneous to treat Rhapsody in Blue as authentic source material, as it is not really jazz. Instead, the work presents an amalgam of the sounds Gershwin grew up hearing as a second-generation Russian Jewish immigrant in New York. For instance, he nods to his roots as a teenage song plugger on Tin Pan Alley. There are also strains of Yiddish theater music, the hurdy-gurdies of the Lower East Side, and Latin American dance rhythms, representing the city’s rich cultural tapestry.

Manuel de Falla – Suite from The Three-Cornered Hat

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
Suite from El sombrero de tres picos (Three-Cornered Hat) (1916)
Scored for:
three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings
Performance time: 24 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 9, 1948; Alfredo Antonini, conductor

The 1919 London premiere of Manuel de Falla’s (1876­–1946) ballet El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) is one of those moments in music history that makes you wish time travel were possible. Not only does the ballet score feature some of Falla’s most delightful music, but the production was mounted by impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the famed Ballets Russes (the same company that premiered Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring), with Léonide Massine as the choreographer/principal dancer and none other than Pablo Picasso as the set and costume designer. The ballet was a hit in London, cementing Falla’s international reputation as one of the most consequential Spanish composers of the early 20th century.

Before the outbreak of World War I, Falla had spent seven years in Paris, where he encountered the artistic luminaries who would later help bring El sombrero de tres picos to fruition. Along with Diaghilev, he met prominent composers such as Stravinsky, Ravel, and Debussy. The latter was especially influential on Falla’s compositional style, which blends traditional Spanish musical elements with French Impressionism. Back in Spain, Falla set to work on numerous stage works, including incidental music for a pantomime called El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller), based on a novella by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. After visiting Madrid with Stravinsky in 1916, Diaghilev convinced Falla to expand the pantomime into a ballet for full orchestra.

El sombrero de tres picos tells the story of a miller and a buffoonish magistrate, whose attempts to seduce the miller’s wife are repeatedly thwarted. By the end of the ballet, the magistrate, identified by his traditional three-cornered hat, is thoroughly humiliated, even being arrested by his own constables in a case of mistaken identity. Two orchestral suites are typically extracted from the score for concert performance, with one suite for each of the ballet’s two acts. The first suite opens with a brief fanfare as the curtain rises on a warm, sunny afternoon. The magistrate passes by the mill, his pompous strut represented by the bassoon. To goad the boorish official, the miller’s wife seduces him by dancing a fandango and offering him grapes. When she runs away, the magistrate tries to catch her but is ambushed by the miller, who leaps from the bushes, brandishing a stick. In the second suite, the miller’s neighbors celebrate the Feast of St. John by dancing seguidillas. The miller then dances a solo flamenco farruca—a showcase Falla had composed for Massine. Before choreographing the ballet, Massine had toured Spain for a year to immerse himself in authentic Spanish character dances, even studying under renowned flamenco dancer Félix Fernández García. Finally, the ballet’s themes combine in the celebratory jota, as the villagers toss the debased magistrate in the air on a blanket.

—Katherine Buzard

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

Event Sponsors

This concert is generously supported by American Accents Series Sponsor AbelsonTaylor Group and the Mazza Foundation.

Artistic Leadership

  • Giancarlo Guerrero
    Welcome Letter from Giancarlo

    Giancarlo Guerrero

    Conductor

  • Christopher Bell
    Christopher_Bell

    Christopher Bell

    Chorus Director

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