Reena Esmail
Black Iris (2017)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings
Performance time: 11 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance.

“I always get asked why there aren’t more women composers,” composer Reena Esmail said. “This piece is one response—of many hundreds of responses—to that question.” Originally titled #metoo, Esmail’s 2018 composition Black Iris is a response to her own experience of sexual abuse and the experiences too many other women in the music industry face. “So many of us decide to become composers when we are young women because we fall deeply in love with individual pieces of music . . . And then at some point, for some of us, as we engage with that music, something devastating happens to us—often by the very person who has introduced us to that music.”

To ensure the piece had a life after the #metoo movement, Esmail decided to retitle the piece Black Iris after a work by Georgia O’Keeffe. Cast in a palette of purples and grays, the oil painting features light petals on top and dark petals underneath, which Esmail said resonated with the experience on which this piece is based.

Black Iris draws on Esmail’s background as an American-born child of Indian parents. She weaves in a traditional Hindustani form called a “bandish,” a short melody that is intended to be improvised over. It is set in a raag that, to Western ears, constantly shifts between major and minor tonalities, reflecting the darkness and light of the painting. Esmail calls this bandish the “protagonist” of the piece, “a woman who is trying to navigate through a world filled with pitfalls, dead ends, dark turns—each time finding the way back to her own, individual, powerful voice.”

After a declamatory start, a nervous undulating figure in the marimba and strings sets the tone of unease. Eventually, the bandish attempts to break through the cloud of whirring melodic and rhythmic fragments. The perpetual motion is brought to a halt with a violent flourish. Over a held violin note, the women of the orchestra begin to sing, intoning an open fifth. They enter one by one in the order in which they joined the orchestra, crescendoing with each added voice. Meanwhile, a poignant lyrical duet between the cello and English horn can be heard.

—Katherine Buzard

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Concerto No. 3 in C major for Piano & Orchestra, op. 26 (1917)
Scored for: two flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, solo piano, and strings
Performance time: 27 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: Jun 30, 1954; Nicolai Malko, conductor; Leonard Pennario, piano

At a concert in Petrograd in 1917, Sergei Prokofiev met American businessman Cyrus McCormick, president of the International Harvester Company, a farm machinery manufacturer headquartered in Chicago. McCormick encouraged the 26-year-old composer to come to the United States and promised he would help get his scores to Frederick Stock, the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Stock was thoroughly impressed and invited Prokofiev to make his debut with the CSO the following season.

In March 1918, Prokofiev had left Russia in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Armed with little money but a suitcase of scores, he traveled to the United States by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway, stopping to play concerts in Tokyo before sailing across the Pacific to San Francisco. After his successful debut in December 1918, he returned to Chicago four more times. In December 1921, he premiered his Piano Concerto No. 3 as the piano soloist with the CSO and conducted the premiere of his opera The Love of Three Oranges at the Auditorium Theater, all within a two-week period.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 had been simmering for a decade, with initial sketches dating to 1911. He returned to the piece sporadically over the intervening years, completing it in the summer of 1921 while in Brittany, France. Despite its protracted and fragmented compositional process, the work is remarkably cohesive, encapsulating Prokofiev’s distinctive musical voice in its blend of mechanical rhythms, lyrical themes, and idiosyncratic harmonies. It soon became Prokofiev’s calling card as a pianist and was his first piece he recorded. Today, it is by far the most performed of his five piano concertos.

The concerto opens with a melancholy clarinet melody, which is continued by the violins. The tempo quickly ratchets up with a variation on the clarinet theme, ushering in the piano soloist’s first entrance with a fanfare-like motif. After a declamatory back-and-forth with the orchestra, the piano introduces a mockingly sarcastic second theme, soon taken up by the oboe and accompanied by castanets and pizzicato strings. A sweeping full-orchestra statement of the opening theme ushers in one of many dreamlike sequences in this concerto. The piano spreads its fairy dust in quiet cascading runs before the recapitulation returns to the mechanical percussiveness of the piano’s first appearance.

The second movement is cast as a set of five variations on a theme. The theme is a courtly dance, with leaping grace notes and tip-toeing strings adding a comedic touch. The ensuing variations then alternate between hazy and dreamlike or dazzling and fiery. The finale continues to explore these extremes, with brittle, machinelike pianism alternating with an expansive lyrical melody reminiscent of Rachmaninoff. The relentless motoric rhythm eventually returns in the fiery coda, a swirl of glissandos launching the pianist full-tilt into a brilliant C-major conclusion.

—Katherine Buzard

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Symphony No. 3 (1944)
Scored for: four flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, four clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, piano, and strings
Performance time: 43 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: Aug 25, 1992; Catherine Comet, conductor

When Aaron Copland was a young man, American composers were expected to go to Europe for “finishing.” So, in 1921, having learned all he could from his first composition teacher, Rubin Goldmark, the 21-year-old Copland packed up and headed to Paris. After finding his teacher at the Paris Conservatoire too similar to Goldmark, Copland decided to give a young female composition teacher a try. Copland was among the first crop of American composers to study with Nadia Boulanger at the newly established American School at Fontainebleau. Boulanger, then only in her mid-30s, would go on to teach many of the greatest American composers and musicians of the 20th century, including Phillip Glass, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson, and Quincy Jones.

In addition to honing Copland’s compositional technique and giving him much-needed confidence, she also made an auspicious introduction. Conductor Serge Koussevitzky had contracted Boulanger to appear as organ soloist during his first season leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924–25. She asked Copland to compose an organ symphony for the occasion. Impressed with the result, Koussevitzky soon became one of Copland’s biggest champions, personally commissioning several works, including Symphony No. 3 in 1944.

Copland worked on what would be his largest-scale orchestral work between 1944 and 1946, completing it three weeks before its premiere with the BSO and Koussevitzky on October 18. Koussevitzky hailed it as “the greatest American symphony—it goes from the heart to the heart.” Although Copland dedicated Symphony No. 3 to the conductor’s late wife, Natalie Koussevitzky, its ultimate tone is affirmative, reflecting the country’s optimism following the end of World War II.

The first movement conjures a vast American landscape with its expansive opening theme characteristic of Copland in its broad leaps, open orchestral texture, and sense of spontaneity. After this slow, brooding fanfare comes a similar hymn-like melody in the violas and oboes. Repetitive ascending leaps reminiscent of Appalachian Spring, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, briefly cut through the texture before the horns and trombones introduce the bold third theme. After a modal brass prelude, the second movement comes in the form of a scherzo and trio. The jaunty scherzo again calls to mind Copland’s highly successful “Americana” ballets, while a more pastoral dance comprises the contrasting trio section. The third movement is more free-form, with sections “emerging from one another in continuous flow,” Copland explained. The spare introduction and lack of brass, save for one trumpet, create a more contemplative mood.

The finale proceeds without pause as the flutes and clarinets quietly introduce the unmistakable theme from Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. In 1942, conductor Eugene Goossens had commissioned a series of patriotic fanfares for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to inspire national unity during the war. Copland’s fanfare was inspired by a speech by then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who proclaimed the dawning of the “Century of the Common Man,” a counterargument to Life magazine publisher Henry Luce’s call for an “American century” in which America would dominate the post-war world. Fanfare for the Common Man became Copland’s best-known work. Here, Copland combines the Fanfare—whose melodic contours have influenced the symphony all along—with a syncopated countermelody and the first movement’s opening theme, before concluding in a resounding, life-affirming D major.

—Katherine Buzard