Riccardo Muti Conductor Robert Chen Violin Mozart Divertimento in D Major, K. 136 Allegro Andante Presto

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1 Program One Hundred Twenty-Third 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, October 3, 2013, at 8:00 Saturday, October 5, 2013, at 8:00 Tuesday, October 8, 2013, at 7:30 Friday, October 11, 2013, at 1:30 Riccardo Muti Conductor Robert Chen Violin Mozart Divertimento in D Major, K. 136 Allegro Andante Presto Hindemith Violin Concerto At a moderate tempo Slow Lively Robert Chen Intermission Prokofiev Suite from Romeo and Juliet Montagues and Capulets Juliet the Young Girl Madrigal Minuet Masks Romeo and Juliet Death of Tybalt Friar Laurence Romeo and Juliet before Parting Romeo at Juliet s Tomb These concerts are generously sponsored by Cindy Sargent. Sponsorship of the music director and related programs is provided 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 Wolfgang mozart Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria. Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria. divertimento in d major, k. 136 ComPosed 1772 first PerformanCe date unknown 2 Comments by Phillip huscher Mozart s first compositions, an Andante and an Allegro for keyboard, were written down by Leopold, one of history s proudest stage fathers, when Wolfgang was just five years old. Even earlier, the boy had tried to write what he called a concerto in his own system of notation, which as a family friend recalled, consisted mainly of a smudge of notes, most of which were written over inkblots that he had rubbed out. After 1761, music began to flow, with increasing frequency, from his little hands. Inevitably, however, despite Wolfgang s astonishing talent Everyone whom I have heard says that his genius is incomprehensible, Leopold wrote when his son was only six many of the earliest works in his official catalog are little more than child s play. Eventually, however, signs of Wolfgang s true promise and unique, once-in-a-generation gift began to emerge. Of the first three hundred numbers in Köchel s famous catalog, most of them identifying compositions written before Mozart turned twenty-one, a handful of works stand out. K. 183, a remarkable symphony in G minor his twenty-fifth, according to the standard numbering is the earliest of his symphonies to have found a place in the standard repertoire. K. 271, a piano concerto known as the Jeunnehomme, is the first of Mozart s landmark pieces in that form that is still regularly played today. There are other notable works from first Cso PerformanCes July 1, 1965, Ravinia Festival. Seiji Ozawa conducting March 22, 23 & 24, 1979, Orchestra hall. János Ferencsik conducting most recent Cso PerformanCes February 14, 15, 16 & 19, 2008, Orchestra hall [no conductor] these years Exsultate, jubilate for soprano and orchestra; the Haffner Serenade, the Turkish Violin Concerto all of which have appeared on Chicago Symphony programs over the years. W ith the exception of Mozart s First Symphony (K. 16), the D major divertimento on this week s program is the earliest piece by Mozart the Chicago Symphony has performed. It is one of three works for strings written early in The sixteen-year-old Mozart may well have thought of them as string quartets with one player per part but, over the years, they have just as often been played by string orchestra, as they are this week. (The divertimento title apparently isn t Mozart s own.) The three works are also sometimes called Salzburg symphonies, but that too is misleading. In any case, they are the first important works in which Mozart wrote for the classic combination of two violin parts with viola over a bass line. The Divertimento in D major, the first in the set, has three movements: an energetic Allegro with an unusually florid first violin part; a tender, graceful Andante; and an urgently paced finale with a showy, contrapuntal midsection. It s possible that this is one of the quartets Leopold offered to the publishing house of Breitkopf and Härtel in February of 1772, without success. The prestigious Viennese company s lack of interest in an untested teenage composer is hardly surprising. In fact, during Mozart s lifetime, only some 130 of the 626 works in Köchel s catalog were printed and sold. InstrUmentatIon strings approximate PerformanCe time 15 minutes

3 Paul Hindemith Born November 16, 1895, Hanau, Germany. Died December 28, 1963, Frankfurt, Germany. violin Concerto Paul Hindemith boasted, with complete justification, that he could play every instrument in the orchestra at least passably. But the violin was Hindemith s first instrument. As a child, he was given the violin to play, while his younger sister Toni took up the piano and his brother Rudolf the cello. (The Hindemith children eventually played together as the Frankfurt Children s Trio in villages and at social events.) Paul showed unusual promise, and, at the age of eleven, he began serious study, first with the Swiss violinist Anna Hegner, and then with her teacher, Adolf Rebner, who was one of the best known and most highly regarded musicians in Frankfurt. Paul was soon admitted to the Hoch Conservatory, where Rebner taught. At the age of nineteen, he joined the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra (where he met the conductor Willem Mengelberg, who would later commission this violin concerto) and the following year, he became the second violinist in Rebner s string quartet. Eventually, he was drawn to the idea of composing (his first composition teacher at the Hoch Conservatory was Arnold Mendelssohn, a great-nephew of Felix), but Hindemith continued to perform as a violinist, playing both the Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos two of the most challenging works in the violin repertoire in public. While he was in the army during World War I, he formed a string quartet (he would always remember that the ensemble was playing Debussy s quartet at the moment news of the composer s death came over the radio). Later, he began to favor playing the viola, and it ultimately became his instrument of choice. But even after he had given up playing the violin in public, he agreed, on short notice, to take over the violin solo in the German premiere of Stravinsky s The Soldier s Tale in N ot surprisingly, many of Hindemith s first compositions feature the violin prominently, including a very early sonata for violin and piano, dating from , that has been lost. Hindemith continued to write violin sonatas throughout his early career, including one composed in 1917, while he was serving in the German army, and another from 1924 that includes variations on a Mozart song for its finale. The fourth in his landmark series of Kammermusik, ensemble pieces for various combinations of instruments, also composed in 1924, is scored for violin and a small orchestra it is something of a study for the big-scale concerto performed this week. But Hindemith did not set out to write a full-fledged violin concerto the ultimate vehicle for the solo violin until T he 1930s were a difficult and ultimately decisive time for Hindemith. Once the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Hindemith was branded as a degenerate composer, largely because Hitler ComPosed 1939 first PerformanCe March 4, 1940, Amsterdam most recent Cso PerformanCes november 15, 16 & 17, 1984, Orchestra hall. Mark Peskanov as soloist, Leonard Slatkin conducting approximate PerformanCe time 24 minutes first Cso PerformanCes October 28 & 29, 1948, Orchestra hall. Ruth Posselt as soloist, Pierre Monteux conducting InstrUmentatIon solo violin, two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, strings 3

4 had walked out of a performance of Hindemith s opera Neues vom Tage (News of the day), infuriated by the sight of a soprano singing from her bathtub. It is obvious that [it] shocked the Führer greatly, Hindemith wrote to his publisher late in I shall write him a letter... in which I shall ask him to convince himself to the contrary. But, in the meantime, Joseph Goebbels spoke out publicly about the horror of modern composers allowing naked women to appear on the stage in obscene scenes in a bathtub, making a mockery of the female sex. Hindemith wasn t mentioned by name, but the message was clear. He made a powerful statement on the value of art and the role of the artist in society in his 1935 opera Mathis der Maler, about the sixteenth-century German painter Mathias Grünewald, who was himself torn between his commitment to art and a life of political activism. That work, too, was attacked and eventually banned. After Hindemith figured prominently in the exhibition of Entartete Musik (Degenerate music) in 1938, he had little choice but to leave his native Germany for good. H indemith composed his Violin Concerto while he was temporarily living in Switzerland in 1939, in self-imposed exile. He had already tackled the central issues of writing a work for solo violin and orchestra with his chamber concerto, the Kammermusik no. 4. And, in 1930, he had even counseled Igor Stravinsky, who initially balked at the idea of writing a violin concerto but I am not a violinist! and turned to Hindemith for advice. Hindemith managed to convince Stravinsky that his lack of experience playing the violin would in fact allow him to avoid a routine technique and would give rise to ideas which would not be suggested by the familiar movement of the fingers. Reassured, Stravinsky proceeded. (His Violin Concerto, successfully premiered in Berlin in 1931, will be performed by Leila Josefewicz and the Chicago Symphony, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, later this month.) Then, nearly a decade later, Hindemith himself tackled the form and managed to create something original and fresh and utterly devoid of the routine despite an intimate, first-hand knowledge of the instrument matched by virtually no other composer. Hindemith writes three movements in the traditional sequence, with slower music in the middle. The two outer movements are equally weighted in terms of size, substance, and significance (a concerto finale is often both slighter and lighter). The solo violin carries both movements, in music that dazzles with the complexity of its technical challenges at one point and then soars in magnificent flights of lyricism at others. The solo writing is expressive and highly personal, as if the essence of Hindemith s own troubled life at the time was concentrated into a single violin line. The slow middle movement is the heart of the concerto. It is like a great dramatic monologue aside from a very dramatic outburst near the end, the orchestral writing here is particularly spare, the texture reminiscent of chamber music and the violin seems to speak for Hindemith himself, an exile and a seeker at the pivotal time in his life. A postscript about Hindemith and Chicago. Hindemith came to the United States for the first time in 1937, and he returned in both 1938 and The letters he wrote home to his wife Gertrude reveal a man struggling to find his place and a job in a new world. On his first U.S. tour, he appeared as viola soloist in his Der Schwanendreher with members of the Chicago Symphony at the Chicago Arts Club. The next year, Hindemith made his American conducting debut with the CSO, leading his Kammermusik no. 1 and the Symphonic Dances. In 1939, he returned to Chicago to attend a concert of his music given by University of Chicago students, but he didn t appear with the Orchestra. During his visit, however, he met with CSO music director Frederick Stock, who asked him to write a piece for the Orchestra s fiftieth anniversary, then two seasons away. The specifics still need to be discussed, Hindemith wrote to Gertrude in March. Hindemith began a piece for the Chicago Symphony s anniversary a kind of free fantasy, as he called it, on an old Virginian ballad about poor Lazarus and the rich man but then abandoned it midway when he realized he had been so busy working on other scores that he couldn t finish it in time. Hindemith s score for Poor Lazarus was later published in its incomplete state. 4

5 sergei Prokofiev Born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka, Ukraine. Died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia. suite from Romeo and Juliet During Sergei Prokofiev s last trip to Chicago, in January 1937, he led the Chicago Symphony in selections from his new, still-unstaged ballet, Romeo and Juliet. This was the composer s fifth visit to Chicago, and he clearly felt at home: shortly after he arrived in town, he sat down with a Tribune reporter and talked freely while eating apple pie at a downtown luncheonette. He was staying in the same hotel room where he had lived for several months during his Chicago visit in 1921, when he presided over preparations for the world premiere of his opera The Love for Three Oranges. He told the Tribune that his Romeo and Juliet featured the kind of new melodic line that he thought would prove to be the salvation of modern music one, he said, that would have immediate appeal, yet sound like nothing written before. Of all the moderns, the Herald Examiner critic wrote after hearing Romeo and Juliet later in the week, this tall and boyish Russian has the most definite gift of melody, the most authentic contrapuntal technic [sic], and displays the subtlest and most imaginative use of dissonance. Chicago was the first American city to hear music from Romeo and Juliet (following recent performances in Moscow and Paris), and, not for the only time in Prokofiev s career, orchestral excerpts were premiered before the ballet itself had been staged. The idea for a ballet version of the Shakespeare play came from the director Sergei Radlov, who was a friend of Prokofiev and had mounted the first Russian production of The Love for Three Oranges. He and Prokofiev worked together to flesh out a scenario early in 1935, and the composer began to write the music that summer. But the Kirov Ballet, which had commissioned the work, unexpectedly backed out, and the Bolshoi Theater took over the project. There were further problems with the score itself, including Prokofiev s initial insistence on a happy ending Living people can dance, he later wrote in defense of the decision, but the dead cannot dance lying down. The end was ultimately changed to match Shakespeare s, but then the Bolshoi staff pronounced Prokofiev s music unsuitable to dance and dropped out as well. The premiere of Romeo and Juliet eventually was given in Brno, Czechoslovakia, without Prokofiev s participation (he didn t attend the opening in December 1938) and the ballet wasn t staged in Russia until January In the meantime, Prokofiev made two orchestral suites of seven excerpts each, and it was the first of these that he conducted in Chicago. (At this week s concerts, Riccardo Muti conducts selections from both of these suites.) Although no other play by Shakespeare has inspired as many musical treatments as Romeo ComPosed 1935, complete ballet 1936, two suites for orchestra first PerformanCe December 30, 1938, brno, Czechoslovakia (complete ballet) first Cso PerformanCes January 21 & 22, 1937, Orchestra hall. The composer conducting (u.s. premiere of Suite no. 1) most recent Cso PerformanCes May 5, 6 & 7, 2011, Orchestra hall. Riccardo Muti conducting (Suite) August 5, 2011, Ravinia Festival. James Conlon conducting (Suite) September 6, 2011; Grosser Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, Austria. Riccardo Muti conducting (Suite) Cso recordings Sir Georg Solti. London (Suite) InstrUmentatIon two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets and piccolo trumpet, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, piano, celesta, strings approximate PerformanCe time 48 minutes 5

6 and Juliet, including more than twenty operas (Gounod s, which the teenage Prokofiev saw in Saint Petersburg, is the most enduring), Prokofiev s is the first large-scale ballet. It s one of his most important works, merging the primitive style of his radical earlier music, a newfound classicism, and the sumptuous lyricism of which he was so proud. T his week s excerpts begin with Montagues and Capulets menacing music to depict the warring families, introduced by the prince s powerful order to preserve peace. The opening chords, which seem to grow in intensity to the breaking point, set a tone of sorrow and inevitable tragedy. The big ominous marching theme, later discovered by the television advertising industry, was originally the Dance of the Knights from the act 2 ballroom scene. The centerpiece of the movement, with its lovely flute solo, is Juliet s dance with Paris the moment Romeo catches his first glimpse of the A publicity shot of Prokofiev posing with a pipe in a Chicago hotel room, 1918 girl who will quickly steal his heart. In the more fully sketched portrait of the young girl that follows, we are reminded that she is an innocent thirteen-year-old, capricious and playful, and (in the midsection flute duet) eager for romance. Prokofiev and Chicago In the summer of 1917, Chicago businessman Cyrus McCormick, Jr., the farm machine magnate, met the twenty-six-year-old composer Sergei Prokofiev while on a business trip to Russia. Prokofiev was unknown to McCormick, but the composer recognized the distinguished American s name at once, because the estate his father had managed owned several impressive International Harvester machines. McCormick expressed an interest in the composer s new music, and he eventually agreed to pay for the printing of his unpublished Scythian Suite. He also encouraged Prokofiev to come to the United States, and asked him to send some of his scores to Chicago Symphony music director Frederick Stock. McCormick wrote to Stock at once, saying that Prokofiev would be glad to come to Chicago and bring some of his symphonies if his expenses were paid. But not knowing myself the value of his music, I did not feel justified in taking the risk of bringing him here. After Stock received Prokofiev s scores, he replied to McCormick: There is no question in my mind as to the talent of young Serge. Although Stock at first doubted that it was feasible to bring the Russian composer to the U.S. right away, Prokofiev (or Prokofieff, as the U.S. press spelled his name at the time) made his debut with the Chicago Symphony the following season, playing his First Piano Concerto under Eric DeLamarter s baton, and conducting the Orchestra himself in his Scythian Suite in Orchestra Hall in December 1918, both U.S. premieres. The appearance here of the young Russian, Serge Prokofieff, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert was the most startling and, in a sense, important musical event that has happened in this town for a long time, wrote Henriette Weber in the Herald and Examiner. Personally he is middle-sized and blond, somewhat gangling about the arms and shoulders, and entirely business-like in demeanor, reported the Journal. His business is his music, while he is on the stage, and he would seem to resent even the time that it takes to bow. The music itself caused quite a stir. Russian Genius Displays Weird Harmonies was the headline in the American. The music was of such savagery, so brutally barbaric, Henriette Weber wrote, that it seemed almost grotesque to see civilized men, in modern dress with modern instruments performing it. By the same token it was big, sincere, true. The public loved it. Every man and woman there reacted to it, Weber continued, and Prokofieff was given a thundering ovation that at least in a slight degree expressed the tumultuous emotions he inspired. Prokofiev returned to Chicago four more times. In 1921, he oversaw the world premieres of his Piano Concerto no. 3, which he played in Orchestra Hall on December 16, and his opera, The Love for Three Oranges, which was staged by the Chicago Opera at the Auditorium Theatre on the thirtieth. (The Chicago Symphony also played Prokofiev s Classical Symphony for the first time that month.) His last visit, in 1937, introduced Romeo and Juliet. P.H. 6

7 The Madrigal a mixture of serenade and lilting party music sets the scene in the Capulets ballroom; the Minuet is stately entrance music for their guests. With the furtive, shifty Masks, Romeo appears at the Capulets (with his fellow Montagues, Mercutio and Benvolio) in full masquerade. The music perfectly captures both the nervousness and boldness of their entry into hostile territory. Next comes the balcony scene passionate and tender, richly lyrical, and one of the most rapturous moments in all ballet. This is spacious, magically scored night music, underlined by the melancholy cut of Prokofiev s grand, floating melodies. The Death of Tybalt, by contrast, is tightly packed with incident and action, almost cinematic in the way it compresses events into a short time. In comments written in his score, Prokofiev characterized both the high-bravado duel between Tybalt and Mercutio ( they look at each other like two fighting bulls; blood is boiling ) and the subsequent encounter between Romeo and Tybalt, who fight wildly, to the death. Fifteen powerful, hammering chords tell of Tybalt s fate. Prokofiev concludes with Tybalt s funeral procession over a pounding ostinato. Friar Laurence, waiting to marry the lovers in his cell, is depicted by a solo bassoon with strings. A haunting flute solo over shimmering strings It was the lark, the herald of the morn, in Shakespeare (act 3, scene 5) introduces Romeo and Juliet s final moments together. This scene recapitulates the many facets of their romance, and it is filled not only with recollected passion but also, in its oddly halting final pages, with the inevitability of their parting. Romeo at Juliet s Tomb is a lament a tragic march of power and intensity, and, when it s overpowered by the lovers theme, great poignancy. This is the music that was played at Prokofiev s funeral (oddly paralleling the fate of Fauré and Melisande s death scene) on a tape recorder because all of Moscow s musicians had been tapped for the funeral of Stalin, who had died at the same hour on the same day as the composer. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chicago Symphony Orchestra 7