Riccardo Muti Conductor Vivaldi Concerto in A Major for Strings and Continuo, R. 158 Allegro molto Andante molto Allegro

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1 Program One Hundred Twenty-Second Season Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, April 18, 2013, at 8:00 Friday, April 19, 2013, at 1:30 Tuesday, April 23, 2013, at 7:30 Riccardo Muti Conductor Vivaldi Concerto in A Major for Strings and Continuo, R. 158 Allegro molto Andante molto Allegro Mozart Symphony No. 38 in D Major, K. 504 (Prague) Adagio Allegro Andante Presto Intermission Beethoven Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60 Adagio Allegro vivace Adagio Allegro vivace Allegro ma non troppo The Chicago Symphony Orchestra gratefully acknowledges the Walter E. Heller Foundation for its concert sponsorship support of these s. The appearance of the music director is made possible in part by a generous gift from the Zell Family Foundation. CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

2 Comments by Phillip Huscher Antonio Vivaldi Born March 4, 1678, Venice, Italy. Died July 28, 1741, Vienna, Austria. Concerto in A Major for Strings and Continuo, R. 158 The most original, popular, and influential Italian composer of his time, Vivaldi was very quickly forgotten. Within a hundred years of his death, he had achieved the ultimate fate of most composers complete oblivion. After he was finally rediscovered in the early twentieth century, and eventually became one of the most performed of all composers again, he often was written off as excessively prolific and facile. Stravinsky famously dismissed his entire career as the same concerto four hundred times, an assessment that was not just unkind, but also unfair. We now know that he wrote more than five not four hundred concertos, in addition to operas (he once claimed ninety-four, no doubt with characteristic exaggeration; some twenty survive), cantatas, and trio sonatas. Vivaldi began his career as a violin virtuoso (he studied with his father, who played at the great Saint Mark s Basilica in Venice), but he also prepared for the priesthood and took Holy Orders at the age of twenty-five. (He soon became known as the Red Priest, after the color of his hair.) That same year, he accepted a job as music director, violin teacher, and composer at La Pietà, a Venetian orphanage for girls a post he would keep for more than thirtyfive years, nearly the remainder of his life. At the height of his career, Vivaldi was as highly regarded as any living composer, including J.S. Bach, who admired Vivaldi s music, copied out several of his scores for, and arranged others for different instruments. (Perhaps the most ingenious of Bach s transcriptions is his reworking of a solo concerto in B minor into a concerto for four harpsichords in A minor.) Vivaldi s apparent specialty was the concerto, which he composed Composed before 1729 First date unknown First CSO December 26, 1952, Orchestra Hall. Dorothy Lane, harpsichord; Rafael Kubelík conducting Most recent CSO March 22, 1975, Orchestra Hall. Riccardo Muti conducting Approximate time 8 minutes 2

3 in abundance and with unusual ease, even by his own standards. (Vivaldi claimed he could compose a concerto faster than a scribe could copy it.) It was the publication in Amsterdam in 1711 of a collection of twelve concertos called L estro armonico that first spread Vivaldi s name throughout Europe; it became the best-selling music title of the early eighteenth century. (Bach copied and arranged six of these concertos for organ or harpsichord.) Vivaldi is said to have established the conventional three-movement baroque concerto form; he didn t invent it, but by constant use from one work to the next, and with endless variety in its handling, he certainly set in place the pattern others would follow for decades to come. He is also the first composer to make regular use of ritornello form the use of a repeating refrain, in different but related keys, for all the instruments, alternating with freer, modulating passages that are dominated by the soloist. The A major concerto that opens this week s program is one of Vivaldi s nearly sixty ripieno concertos that is, concertos designed not for one or more soloists, but simply for an orchestra of strings without soloists. These pieces, normally with three movements (in the standard fast-slow-fast sequence, like the solo concertos), are actually very close stylistically to the sinfonias that open baroque operas. This A major concerto has the expected three movements, although the central Adagio is more substantive than many a genuine separate movement rather than a short interlude. The entire work is such a quintessential example not only of Vivaldi s surpassing skill and natural gift for melody, but of the ripieno style in general, that it is often simply known by the nickname Concerto ripieno. 3

4 Wolfgang Mozart Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria. Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria. Symphony No. 38 in D Major, K. 504 (Prague) There are more sketches for the Prague Symphony than any other by Mozart starts and stops and doodling for all the movements, even an opening for the finale which eventually was discarded. This was Mozart s first symphony in three years; his struggle, however, wasn t with the form, which he had mastered long before, but with the desire to say something important and new. This great D major symphony was written for Prague, where Mozart was something of a folk hero. Music from his newest opera, The Marriage of Figaro, was whistled on the streets and played at dances and balls even the alehouse harpist had to add Cherubino s Non più andrai to his repertoire. The symphony was written in the eighteen months between the premieres of Figaro and Don Giovanni, and it finds Mozart working on an operatic scale in purely orchestral music and reaching for a more deeply expressive language. The opening of the Prague Symphony is highly dramatic music, full of power and that peculiarly alarming Mozartean undercurrent of tragedy. This Adagio is arguably the most profound and fully realized symphonic introduction before Beethoven s Seventh Symphony, and it certainly marks an advance over the slow beginning of Mozart s own Linz Symphony, written three years earlier. Even Prague audiences, who doted on Mozart s every move and were surely willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, must have wondered what Mozart was up to in these first thirty-six measures of music. Our advantage is a familiarity with Don Giovanni, which Composed 1786, entered in catalog on December 6 First January 19, 1787, Prague. The composer conducting First CSO November 30, 1894, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting Most recent CSO May 25, 2004, Orchestra Hall. Daniel Barenboim conducting Instrumentation two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings Approximate time 23 minutes CSO recordings Frederick Stock conducting. Columbia Rafael Kubelík conducting. Mercury Sir Georg Solti conducting. London A 1960 television with Sir Thomas Beecham conducting was released by Kultur. 4

5 Mozart would soon introduce in Prague, and which obviously was on his mind. Don Giovanni s fingerprints are all over this music listen to the tread of surging basses, the heart-stopping drum rolls, the suspenseful wind chords, even the rising chromatic scales. An introduction of this breadth and significance demands a substantial, big-boned allegro, and Mozart doesn t disappoint. Mozart is working here on the largest scale (this is one of his most spacious sonata-allegro movements) and with an astonishing abundance of thematic material. In the first sixteen bars alone there are at least four perfectly good ideas, and although Mozart continues to use and develop these, he spins out new material at every turn. Melodic ingenuity is at the highest level throughout; the bassoon accompaniment to the second theme, for example, quietly alludes to the first. Mozart s concept of sonata form is flexible and creative. The exposition ends unexpectedly with material first heard early in the movement, the development section tosses out a couple of false leads regarding the return to home base, and the recapitulation is cavalier about restating events in their original sequence. There are moments in the development section when every instrument contributes to a contrapuntal web as dazzling as that in the celebrated finale of the Jupiter Symphony. The whole is a great intellectual achievement, presented with the good-natured grace of one who is very comfortable with his exceptional talent. The most remarkable thing about the Andante in G, without trumpets and drums is the way one lovely idea succeeds another in the most logical progression. There s enough material here to last a lesser composer a lifetime; Mozart presses forward, as if he believes he will never run out of ideas. After the power and energy of the first movement, the Andante seems uncharacteristically placid, but Mozart draws the listener in until the simplest of gestures even the gentle rise and fall of the interval of a second carries extraordinary emotional weight. The Prague Symphony is known in Germany as the symphony without a minuet, and, in fact, it s the only one of Mozart s last six symphonies that follows the serenity of the slow movement directly with the bustle of the finale. The Prague audience surely recognized the composer of their beloved Figaro in this last movement the opening is the same music as that of the breathless duet in which Susanna tries to stop Cherubino from jumping out the window. The form here is a hybrid between sonata-allegro and rondo that s neither, though it s thoroughly delightful and inventive music. There s a wonderful moment in the development section when the violins seem to have fallen behind the beat and scurry after the cellos and basses, causing a frightful series of dissonances. Finally, Cherubino makes his jump and lands squarely on both feet, to the D major cheers of the full orchestra. 5

6 Ludwig van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany. Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria. Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60 Generations of music lovers have described and sometimes dismissed Beethoven s evennumbered symphonies as lyrical and relaxed compared to their spunky, coltish, odd-numbered neighbors. The Fourth, in B-flat major, has suffered from that fate perhaps more than any. Not long after Beethoven s death, Robert Schumann called it a slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants, and, at the end of the nineteenth century, George Grove the Grove of the celebrated Dictionary of Music and Musicians commented that this symphony is a complete contrast to both its predecessor and successor, and is as gay and spontaneous as they are serious and lofty. Grove thought that this accounted for the fact that it had not yet had justice done it by the public. And, as Grove might have predicted, in our own time the Chicago Symphony has played the Third and Fifth symphonies with much greater regularity. Schumann was perhaps the first musician to warn us not to overlook the Fourth s own special qualities: Do not illustrate his genius with the Ninth Symphony alone, no matter how great its audacity and scope, never uttered in any tongue. You can do as much with his First Symphony, or with the Greek-like slender one in B-flat major! Beethoven began his B-flat major symphony in the summer of 1806, when he retired to the country estate of Prince Carl von Lichnowsky one of the most devoted of the composer s early Composed 1806 First s private: March 1807, Vienna public: April 13, 1808, Vienna First CSO March 17, 1893, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting Most recent CSO June 11, 2010, Orchestra Hall. Bernard Haitink conducting Instrumentation flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings Approximate time 32 minutes CSO recordings Sir Georg Solti conducting. London Sir Georg Solti conducting. London. A 1958 conducted by Fritz Reiner is included on From the Archives, vol. 3. 6

7 admirers. This score, as well as the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto, all completed late in 1806, interrupted work on his Fifth Symphony. These three works, often characterized as unexpectedly spacious and relaxed, do suggest that Beethoven was catching his breath before returning to the heroic, titanic struggles of the Fifth Symphony. But they do not mark a shift in his direction (in fact, ideas for the Violin Concerto and the Fifth Symphony exist side by side in his sketchbooks). We only need to listen to the opening pages of the Fourth Symphony to understand that it was written in the midst of Beethoven s work on the Fifth, and that it is, in fact, more its companion than its antithesis. Beethoven begins with a slow introduction of deep darkness and suspense, not in B-flat major, as the key signature promises, but B-flat minor. (And, like the opening of the Fifth Symphony, it starts with a series of descending thirds.) Beethoven is unusually stingy with notes and hesitant to get moving the spareness of this passage provoked Weber s scorn and the symphony seems at first to be stuck in slow motion, which makes the sudden arrival of lively music in the proper key all the more startling. The Allegro vivace is full of activity and unexpected dynamic contrasts it is playful and witty, but also dramatic. As Beethoven approaches the recapitulation, he suddenly drops down to a pianissimo and coaxes the music back to life over the ominous roll of the timpani. This movement may be less serious and lofty, to use Grove s words, than the corresponding one in the Fifth, and it is certainly lighter in tone, but it is far from lightweight. In terms of economy and tightly coiled energy, it is every bit the equal of its more familiar counterpart. The second movement is a graceful and Prince Carl von Lichnowsky expansive song the cantabile (singing) marking is especially apt made particularly memorable by a restless, insistent accompaniment that refuses to remain quietly in the background. Schumann, one of the symphony s first great admirers, found the effect unexpectedly humorous a veritable Falstaff, in particular when occurring in the bass or the timpani. For the first time in his career, Beethoven enlarges the floor plan of the third movement in order to bring back the trio a second time. (Ever economical, he then cuts short the ensuing third statement of the scherzo with an unmistakable rejoinder from the horns.) The finale is a brilliant exercise in movement and contrast worthy of Haydn in earthy humor and high spirits. It is neither spectacular nor heroic, and does not call attention to itself like some of the more famous Beethoven finales, but brings this symphony to a perfect conclusion. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chicago Symphony Orchestra 7