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Table of Contents
S U M M E R 2 0 1 8
PROGRAM NOTES
which was about aliens visiting Earth.
He remembered an alien friend he
made up when he was a child, and
he decided to create a whole story
based on memories of his childhood.
That became the movie
E.T.
:
The Extra-
Terrestrial
, in which a group of chil-
dren discover an alien stranded on
Earth and help him contact his family
to return home. Most of the stars of
the movie are kids like you! In one of
its most famous scenes, the kids are
being chased on their bicycles, and
Spielberg liked the music Williams
wrote to go with the scene so much
that he re-edited the movie to bet-
ter match the music. That’s how well
Spielberg and Williams understood
the stories they were trying to tell
together; one of their ideas could
make the other’s ideas even better.
7:30 p.m. Saturday, August 4
Pavilion
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Vasily Petrenko,
conductor
Simon Trpčeski,
piano
Richard Strauss:
Don Juan
Edvard Grieg:
Piano Concerto
Ludwig van Beethoven:
Symphony No. 5
The guest artists on tonight’s con-
cert, conductor Vasily Petrenko and
pianist Simon Trpčeski, have made a
lot of CDs together. Most of the time,
they’ve featured piano concertos
by Russian composers, like Serge
Rachmaninoff, Dmitri Shostakovich,
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Sergei
Prokofiev. It makes sense—both
of them are Russian, and the style
of those concertos is very exciting,
giving the pianist plenty of oppor-
tunities to show how many different
kinds of sounds and moods they
can create with the instrument. The
concerto they’ll be playing tonight is
by Edvard Grieg, a Norwegian, but its
opening is even more powerful than
many of those Russian concertos—
you won’t have any doubt that the
performance has started!
You also can’t help but notice
when Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
starts. The four notes at its begin-
ning are the most famous in all of
classical music. (The cartoon
The
Simpsons
even once made a joke that
a whole audience left a concert after
hearing those four notes because
that’s what they wanted to hear. But
trust us, you’ll want to listen to the
whole thing!) A common story is
that those four notes represent Fate,
the idea that something is going to
happen whether you want it to or
not. Because Beethoven was slowly
going deaf when he wrote the Fifth
Symphony, it might have been about
him to releasing his feelings about it,
like writing in a diary. It’s no wonder
that when people talk about the
music, there’s something about how
it makes them feel.