Program Book - Equity Arc Pathways Orchestra Finale
Sunday, April 6, 2025, at 2:00
EQUITY ARC PATHWAYS ORCHESTRA FINALE
Equity Arc Pathways Orchestra
Kyle Dickson Conductor
Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Musicians from the Civic Orchestra of Chicago
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR
TCHAIKOVSKY
There will be no intermission.
Ballade in A Minor, Op. 33
Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36
Andante sostenuto
Andantino in modo di canzona
Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato
Finale: Allegro con fuoco
The Chicago Youth in Music Festival is generously sponsored by Megan and Steve Shebik and by Michael and Linda Simon.
Equity Arc is thankful for the inspired support of its institutional sponsors including the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, Country Music Association Foundation, Driehaus Foundation, Music Man Foundation, and Pistocelli Services.
Kyle Dickson Conductor
American conductor Kyle Dickson has built a reputation as an inspiring and compelling presence on the podium. Recipient of the 2021 Grant Park Music Festival Advocate for Arts Award and the Concert Artists Guild’s Richard S. Weinart Award, Dickson was recently appointed assistant conductor of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and conductor of the Memphis Youth Symphony. From 2021 to 2023, Dickson was a Salonen Fellow with the San Francisco Symphony under the guidance of Esa-Pekka Salonen and assistant conductor of the MacArthur Award–winning Chicago Sinfonietta under Mei-Ann Chen.
As guest conductor, Dickson has appeared with the San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Wichita Symphony, and the Louisville Orchestra. A passionate educator regarded for his commitment to youth as well as diversity in the arts, Dickson was awarded the Weissberg Prize and the 2024 Spirit of Detroit Award for his series, MUSIC REPRESENTS. He was assistant conductor for Carnegie Hall’s 2022 National Youth Orchestra (NYO2) and has worked closely with the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, Colburn Academy Virtuosi, Chicago Youth Symphony, and the Claremont Young Musicians Orchestra, among other ensembles across the country. Kyle Dickson attended the Colburn School and Northwestern University.
Negaunee Music Institute
The Negaunee Music Institute is the education and community engagement wing of the Chicago Symphony with a mission to connect people to the extraordinary musical resources of the Orchestra. Programming educates audiences, trains young musicians, and serves diverse communities, across the city and around the world.
Current Negaunee Music Institute programs include an extensive series of CSO School and Family Concerts and open rehearsals, more than seventy-five in-depth school partnerships, online learning resources, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, intensive training and performance opportunities for youth, social impact initiatives, and music education activities during CSO domestic and international tours. The Negaunee Music Institute’s annual reach exceeds 200,000 through programming in-person and online.
Civic Orchestra of Chicago
Founded during the 1919–20 season by Frederick Stock, the Civic Orchestra prepares young professionals for careers in orchestral music. Civic members receive rigorous training led by Principal Conductor Ken-David Masur, other luminary guest conductors and a faculty of coaches from the CSO. The Orchestra also performs free and low-cost concerts in Orchestra Hall and in communities across Greater Chicago and anchors the annual CrainMaling Foundation CSO Young Artists Competition and Chicago Youth in Music Festival.
Equity Arc
Equity Arc is a continually growing and evolving alliance of the country’s leading classical music training and professional performing organizations that collectively contribute to the education, training, performance, and sustainability of classical music. It is supported by the strength of our extended network of members and advocates to build a comprehensive arc of support and mentorship for instrumentalists to navigate the journey from student to professional and to empower musicians to sustain and thrive in their careers.
In 2022, Equity Arc developed the National Collective for Musical Pathways, an initiative that provides a nucleus for Pathways Programs across the United States. These programs offer rigorous, holistic training for irrefutably talented musicians from historically underrepresented backgrounds to prepare them to compete at the highest level in their collegiate training. The Equity Arc Pathways Orchestra is an annual opportunity for select fellows in the National Pathways Collective to convene in a central location for a multi-day musical intensive, working alongside professional orchestral musicians to form the Equity Arc Pathways Orchestra.
The 2025 Equity Arc Pathways Orchestra was selected through a competitive national audition and its Fellows will take part in a transformative musical intensive in Chicago. In addition to mentorship opportunities from musicians in the CSO and Civic, Fellows connect with their peers from across the country and serve as ambassadors for their local Pathways programs. This year marks the fourth
iteration of the Pathways Orchestra in its return to Chicago.
The Equity Arc Pathways Orchestra provides professional development opportunities for its Fellows, including mock auditions, panel discussions, and administrative internships. A college and summer study fair will also be held at Symphony Center, welcoming youth from across Chicago. The Pathways Orchestra is one of Equity Arc’s core ensembles and its performance is the culmination of Equity Arc’s Annual Convening, which takes place April 4–6, 2025, hosted at the Hilton Chicago. This national gathering engages our dynamic network to create lasting local and national impact, ensuring musicians from all backgrounds are empowered to thrive in classical music.
Equity Arc is thankful for the inspired support of our institutional sponsors whose belief in our work makes this gathering possible.
Paul M. Angell Family Foundation
Country Music Association Foundation Driehaus Foundation Music Man Foundation Pistocelli Services
Program notes can be found online at cso.org/program.
The Ballade performed at today’s concert was composed in 1898, the year after Samuel Coleridge-Taylor completed his studies at the Royal College of Music in London and just before he began Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast Coleridge-Taylor himself conducted the premiere. The Ballade is a supremely confident work, marked by strong thematic material and an energetic spirit—it reveals not a shred of immaturity or inexperience, and it is full of promise for a long and rich composing life. But that was not to be.
In 1912, Coleridge-Taylor composed a violin concerto for Maud Powell, the Illinois native who had made her debut under Theodore Thomas, founder and music director from 1891–1905, in 1885
and played with him and the Chicago Orchestra at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. It turned out to be his last major score. He died three months after the premiere, at the age of thirty-seven—scarcely older than Mozart was at the time of his premature death. It is impossible to know how Coleridge-Taylor’s flourishing career might have continued. He was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery in London. Four measures from Hiawatha are inscribed on his tombstone, along with a tribute from his close friend, the poet Alfred Noyes:
Too young to die: his great simplicity, his happy courage in an alien world, his gentleness, made all that knew him love him.
A footnote on the passing down of names and traditions. Just as Samuel was named after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his own name was the source for Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, the composer, conductor, and pianist who was born in New York City in 1932 and eventually moved to Chicago, where he was artistic director of the performance program at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College until his death in 2004.
Tchaikovsky was at work on his Fourth Symphony when he received a letter from Antonina Milyukova claiming to be a former student of his and declaring that she was madly in love with him. Tchaikovsky had just read Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, hoping to find an opera subject, and he saw fateful parallels between Antonina and Pushkin’s heroine, Tatiana. It is hard to say which letter provoked the stronger response from Tchaikovsky— the despairing letter Tatiana writes to the coldhearted Onegin, or the one he himself received from Antonina, threatening suicide. The first inspired one of the great scenes in opera; the latter precipitated a painful and disastrous marriage.
Tchaikovsky’s marriage lasted less than three months. On October 13, Tchaikovsky’s brother Anatoly took him to Switzerland, then on to Paris and Italy. Tchaikovsky asked that the unfinished manuscript of the Fourth Symphony be sent from Moscow, and he completed the scoring in January 1878. He finished Eugene Onegin the following month. That March he sketched the violin concerto in just eleven days. When he returned to Russia in late April, his problems with Antonina were still unresolved—she first accepted and then rejected the divorce papers, and later extracted her final revenge by moving into the apartment above his— but the worst year of his life was over.
T he temptation to read a program into Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is as old as the work itself. Since his patron Nadezhda von Meck allowed Tchaikovsky to dedicate the symphony to her (without mentioning her name) and was contributing generously to support his career, she demanded to know what the work was about. Tchaikovsky’s response, often quoted, is a detailed account, filled with emotional thoughts and empty phrases—words written after the fact to satisfy an indispensable patron. When Tchaikovsky mentions fate, however, his words ring true; this was a subject that had haunted him since 1876, when he saw Carmen and was struck by the “death of the two
above: Pyotr Tchaikovsky, portrait, 1880, Vezenberg & Company, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
principals who, through fate, fatum, ultimately reach the peak of their suffering and their inescapable end.”
Indeed, the icy blast from the horns that opens this symphony returns repeatedly in the first movement (and once in the finale), each time wiping out everything in its path. It’s like the celebrated fate motive from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—the one the composer himself compared to fate knocking at the door—except that it’s more of a disruption than a compositional device. Later, Tchaikovsky wrote to the composer Sergei Taneyev, a former student, “Of course, my symphony is programmatic, but this program is such that it cannot be formulated in words.”
Taneyev was perhaps the first to question the preponderance of what he called ballet music in the symphony. In fact, the lilting main theme of the opening movement (marked “in movimento di valse”) and the whole of the two inner movements—the slow pas de deux with its mournful oboe solo, and the brilliant and playful pizzicato scherzo—remind us that the best of Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores are symphonic in scope and tone. Tchaikovsky was angered by the
comment and asked Taneyev if he considered ballet music “every cheerful tune that has a dance rhythm? If that’s the case,” he concluded, “you must also be unable to reconcile yourself to the majority of Beethoven’s symphonies in which you encounter such things at every turn.” The finale is more complex, emotionally and musically, swinging from the dark emotions of the first movement to a more festive mood. “If you cannot discover reasons for happiness in yourself,” Tchaikovsky wrote to Mme von Meck, “look at others. Get out among the people. Look what a good time they have simply surrendering themselves to joy.” There is one final intrusion of the fateful horns from the symphony’s opening, but this time the music quickly recovers, rousing itself to a defiantly triumphant and heroic Beethovenian ending, in intention if not in substance.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Adapted from comments written for Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concerts.
