PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Wednesday, January 7, 2015, at 6:30 (Afterwork Masterworks, performed without intermission) Vasily Petrenko Conductor Paul Lewis Piano Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor) Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support as a media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterworks series. Thursday, January 8, 2015, at 8:00 Friday, January 9, 2015, at 8:00 Saturday, January 10, 2015, at 8:00 Vasily Petrenko Conductor Paul Lewis Piano Elgar In the South (Alassio), Op. 50 Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor) Allegro Adagio un poco mosso Rondo: Allegro PAUL LEWIS INTERMISSION Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 Non allegro Andante con moto (Tempo di valse) Lento assai Allegro vivace This evening s performance is generously sponsored by Margot and Josef Lakonishok. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher Edward Elgar Born June 2, 1857, Broadheath, near Worcester, England. Died February 23, 1934, Worcester, England. In the South (Alassio), Op. 50 When Henry James toured Italy in the 1870s, he encountered hordes of grave English people who looked respectable and bored. Three decades later, when Edward Elgar went to the Italian Riviera, craving sunshine and relaxation, he discovered the roads full of English nursery maids and old English women and children. He quickly abandoned his first stop, in touristclogged Bordighera, just across the French border, finding it lovely but too cockney for me, and moved on to Alassio, farther along the coast in the direction of Genoa. This place is jolly, he wrote, real Italian & no nursemaids calling out Now Master Johnny! Although Alassio did not provide the cloudless skies Elgar sought, he discovered the true Italy that has long intoxicated travelers. What matter the Mediterranean being rough & grey? Who cares for gales?... We have such meals! Such wine! Gosh! We are at last living a life. Elgar had gone to Italy in December 1903 not to escape the damp and cold of an English winter, but to regain his strength and inspiration after the exhausting work of finishing The Apostles and to begin his first symphony. He failed on all three counts. Several days into their stay in Alassio, his wife Alice wrote in her diary, Still cold & grey & windy E. and A. much depressed at these conditions & wondering if they will not pack up & go home. E. feeling no inspiration for writing. Edward himself wrote to his dear friend Alfred Jaeger (immortalized in the magnificent and moving Nimrod music in the Enigma Variations): This visit has been, is, artistically a complete failure & I can do nothing. The symphony will not be written in this sunny (?) land. But the essence of Italian life affected Elgar, despite the cold and the gales and swarms of mosquitoes as annoying as the tourist crowds. In Alassio, he began a concert overture, in place of the promised symphony, that is perhaps his sunniest and most energized work. It depicts the Italian holiday that largely eluded him, and it is music that Elgar never would have written at home in England, for even a dispiriting stay in Italy offered glimpses of life s greatest pleasures. In his manuscript, he wrote this passage from Tennyson s The Daisy: What hours were thine and mine In lands of palm and southern pine In lands of palm, of orange-blossom Of olive, aloe, and maise and vine COMPOSED 1903 February 21, 1904 FIRST PERFORMANCE March 16, 1904; London. The composer conducting FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES November 4 & 5, 1904, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting (U.S. premiere) MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES January 20 & 21, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Leonard Slatkin conducting INSTRUMENTATION three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, glockenspiel, two harps, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 17 minutes 2
And from Byron s Childe Harold:... a land Which was the mightiest in its old command And is the loveliest... Wherein were cast...... the men of Rome! Thou art the garden of the world. Although Elgar called In the South a concert overture, it s really a tone poem his largest orchestral movement at the time of weighty dimensions and electric colors. Elgar may have sidestepped that term to avoid comparison with the new tone poems by Richard Strauss (at the time of the premiere he asked that the program notes not mention Strauss s name), for much about Elgar s overture recalls the style, substance, and sheer orchestral splendor of Strauss. These two composers were kindred spirits in many ways, and their artistic outlooks were never more closely aligned than in the early years of the twentieth century. When Strauss heard a performance of Elgar s The Dream of Gerontius in 1902, he proposed a toast to the first English progressivist, Meister Edward Elgar, and remained Elgar s friend for life. In the South begins with a rapid unfurling of a large orchestral chord, very like the opening of Strauss s Don Juan (which Elgar admired), followed by the kind of dancing horns Strauss had already made famous. T he precise idea for In the South came to Elgar during an afternoon stroll near Alassio. I was by the side of an old Roman way. A peasant stood by an old ruin, and in a flash it all came to me the conflict of armies in that very spot long ago, where now I stood the contrast of the ruin and the shepherd. In a letter to Percy Pitt, who wrote the program note for the premiere, Elgar marked his initial theme Joy of Life (wine & macaroni), but, in fact, it s an idea he had sketched several years before, depicting Dan, a friend s bulldog, triumphant (after a fight). (Dan is officially memorialized in the eleventh of the Enigma Variations, when he falls into the river Wye, paddles upstream, and reaches the shore with a victorious bark.) The rest of In the South, however, leaves England far behind, beginning with the reflective shepherd s music that soon follows, with, as the composer told Pitt, romance creeping into the picture. Elgar lingers in this relaxed and genial mood for some time until the music moves into a forceful and determined passage marked grandioso. There he writes two more lines from Tennyson into his manuscript: What Roman strength Turbia show d In ruin, by the mountain road Here, and in the uncharacteristically dissonant pages that follow, Elgar recalls the strife and wars, the drums and tramplings of a later time. This gives way to a delicate canto populare first sung by the solo viola an unidentified popular song that Elgar eventually confessed he had written himself. He later turned this lovely music into a real song, taking words from a poem by Shelley, An Ariette for Music (he begins at the line, As the moon s soft splendour ). With this little song titled In Moonlight Elgar returns to the shores of the Mediterranean, for it was there, on the curving coast not far from Alassio, that Shelley spent the last months of his short life. When Henry James made his pilgrimage to Shelley s house, he wrote, I can fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm evening and feeling very far from England. Elgar s own final pages say the same thing, in music of warmly melodic and life-loving exuberance. 3
Ludwig van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany. Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria. Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor) It s hard for today s audiences to appreciate the audacities of Beethoven s final piano concerto, the one we call the Emperor. For those who are familiar not only with this great work, but with any of the later concertos that took their cues from Beethoven s example, the grand piano flourishes with which the score begins have little shock value. Nor does the size and complexity of the first movement trouble those who not only have traveled its many paths before, but also have come to accept the vast landscapes of Mahler. But to those who packed the Leipzig Gewandhaus in November 1811, this was new music, full of revelations and surprises. To begin with, Beethoven wasn t at the keyboard this was the only one of his five piano concertos that he didn t personally introduce to the public. Although it wasn t common knowledge at the time, by 1811 his deafness was so advanced (he began to notice symptoms as early as 1796) that he may have turned this work over to other hands rather than admit the difficulties of playing for an audience. (In 1815, he abandoned work on sketches for a sixth concerto, in D, certain that his performing days were over.) Beethoven begins with a single majestic E-flat major chord from the full orchestra one of those sounds so commanding and individual that today, without hearing another note, we know what is sure to follow. The 1811 audience, of course, didn t know what to expect, and they surely wouldn t have predicted the sudden, cadenza-like eruption from the soloist that Beethoven gives them. Hearing from the soloist so early in a concerto is bold and unconventional, but it s not without precedent. Mozart tried it once, early in his career, and Beethoven himself had begun his previous concerto the fourth, in G major with the piano alone. But here Beethoven isn t striving for novelty; he s preparing us for what lies ahead a musical argument of unprecedented breadth and scale between two protagonists of equal stature. Only after Beethoven commands our attention with three emphatic chords, each followed by long-winded outbursts from the piano, does he settle down to his first theme, a heroic tune in E-flat major. The piano falls silent and the orchestral exposition sweeps forward with great energy. This is an enormous movement, lasting some twenty minutes, and it s longer than the following two movements combined. But for all the time and space it occupies, it s not hard to follow. Beethoven alone among composers of his generation knew how to expand the classical COMPOSED 1809 FIRST PERFORMANCE November 28, 1811; Leipzig, Germany FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES February 10, 1900 (twice, in the afternoon and again that evening), Auditorium Theatre. Ignace Paderewski as soloist, Theodore Thomas conducting July 1, 1939, Ravinia Festival. Josef Hofmann as soloist, Sir Adrian Boult conducting 4 MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES May 24, 25 & 26, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Emanuel Ax as soloist, David Robertson conducting July 12, 2013, Ravinia Festival. Emanuel Ax as soloist, Christoph von Dohnányi conducting INSTRUMENTATION two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 38 minutes CSO RECORDINGS 1940. Josef Hofmann as soloist, Hans Lange conducting. CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years) 1942. Artur Schnabel as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting. RCA 1961. Van Cliburn as soloist, Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA 1966. Emil Gilels as soloist, Jean Martinon conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 17: Beethoven) 1971. Vladimir Ashkenazy as soloist, Georg Solti conducting. London 1983. Alfred Brendel as soloist, James Levine conducting. Philips
structures he inherited without upsetting their delicate proportions or abandoning their inner logic. The slow movement is in B major a remote key, but one which is familiar from the earliest digressions of the opening Allegro. The strings begin with a noble theme, to which the piano responds with an eloquent cantilena. Midway through, the piano has a chain of trills that rises more than an octave by half Carl Czerny steps, while the orchestra plays broken chords, as if stunned by this daring high-wire act. Finally, there is the celebrated moment when the strings drop from B to B-flat and the piano begins to putter with the makings of a dazzling new theme, which it suddenly unleashes without pause to open the rondo finale. This robust and seemingly tireless music dashes headlong through a generous sampling of keys until it collapses just before the end, leaving only the piano and the timpani to reach the final bars. B eethoven s brilliance wasn t lost on the Leipzig audience, who took it all in and applauded enthusiastically. The critic for the prestigious Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported that this was undoubtedly one of the most original, imaginative, effective but also most difficult of all existing concertos words that still hold true today. Beethoven withheld the important Vienna premiere until February 1812, perhaps still vainly hoping that he might be able to take his place at the keyboard. It was his student, the young Carl Czerny, however, who played that night. The response this time was poor, perhaps because this grand and noble work was tacked on to a charity event which consisted largely of Viennese society ladies in living tableaux of famous paintings. 5
Sergei Rachmaninov Born April 1, 1873, Semyonovo, Russia. Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, California. Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 After finishing his Third Symphony in 1936, Rachmaninov quit composing, discouraged by the lukewarm reception several of his recent scores had met. (Only the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini had been well received; both the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Variations on a Theme by Corelli were public failures, and the Third Symphony was only a modest success). Rachmaninov was tired of trying to juggle his careers as a composer, conductor, and pianist and in recent years it seemed that he was only guaranteed success in his role as pianist (he was, after all, one of the greatest of all time). Perhaps he also had grown weary of having his music dismissed as old-fashioned and irrelevant invariably pitted against the radical work of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, the two giants of the day. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Rachmaninov and his wife Natalya left Europe for the last time and settled in Orchard Point, an estate he had rented on Long Island, near his friends Vladimir and Wanda Horowitz; his former secretary, Evgeny Somov; and choreographer Michel Fokine, who recently had made a popular ballet of the Paganini Variations. Throughout the summer of 1940, Rachmaninov was busy preparing for his upcoming concert tour he regularly practiced every day from early morning until eleven at night and, for the first time in years, he found that he couldn t resist the urge to compose. On August 21, he wrote to Eugene Ormandy, who had conducted some of Rachmaninov s greatest successes with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Last week I finished a new symphonic piece, which I naturally want to give first to you and your orchestra. It is called Fantastic Dances. I shall now begin the orchestration. Even with his impending tour, Rachmaninov managed to complete the scoring that October. By then, the dances had become symphonic rather than fantastic, and he also had given up his original idea to identify the three movements as midday, twilight, and midnight. ( It should have been called just Dances, he told a newspaper reporter, but I was afraid people would think I had written dance music for jazz orchestra. ) Before Ormandy even had a chance to see the score, Rachmaninov played through parts of it at the piano for Fokine, hoping that he would want to collaborate on another ballet this was a set of dances, after all and repeat the international success of their Paganini project. Fokine was enthusiastic it seemed to me appropriate and beautiful, he wrote to Rachmaninov, after hearing the music but his death, in August 1942, robbed the composer of both a friend and another hit ballet. The Philadelphia premiere was well received, but a subsequent performance in New York was COMPOSED 1940 FIRST PERFORMANCE January 3, 1941; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES December 11 & 12, 1941, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting July 19, 1949, Ravinia Festival. Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting 6 MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES May 24, 25 & 26, 2012, Orchestra Hall. David Robertson conducting August 2, 2012, Ravinia Festival. Gianandrea Noseda conducting INSTRUMENTATION two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, xylophone, snare drum, chimes, harp, piano, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 36 minutes
panned. Rachmaninov was hurt that Ormandy didn t appear interested in recording the new work, even though he had made best-selling records of practically all his previous orchestral pieces. The Symphonic Dances turned out to be his last score, and Rachmaninov died believing that it would never find the kind of popularity his earlier music had so easily won. (Although Rachmaninov had spent The composer with his wife Natalya, 1922 long periods of time in the United States since 1918, the Symphonic Dances is the only score he composed in this country earlier, he regularly wrote, on breaks from concert tours, in his villa near Lucerne.) But in recent years, the score has become a favorite of orchestras and audiences alike Rachmaninov s star is once again on the rise. T he first dance has an extended solo for saxophone, an instrument for which Rachmaninov had never written before. (He consulted with his friend, the Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett, who was amazed that, when the composer played the score for him, he sang, whistled, stamped, rolled his chords, and otherwise conducted himself not as one would expect of so great and impeccable a piano virtuoso. ) He also got advice on string bowings from no less an artist than Fritz Kreisler. (At the first rehearsal, when Ormandy remarked on their difficulty, Rachmaninov said, Fritz did those for me, knowing he need say no more.) In the coda of the first dance, Rachmaninov privately quotes the opening theme of his First Symphony, which was the greatest failure of his career (after its disastrous premiere in 1897, Rachmaninov wrote nothing for three years). Rachmaninov knew that only he would catch the reference, because he had long since destroyed the score, hoping to erase painful memories along with the music itself. But shortly after his death a copy of a two-piano arrangement, and then a set of orchestra parts, turned up in Leningrad, bringing Rachmaninov s secret quotation to light. The second movement is a melancholy waltz (in 6/8 time) that only turns more anxious and wistful as it progresses. The finale quotes the chant of the Russian Orthodox liturgy as well as the Gregorian melody of the Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead. It also recycles part of his All-Night Vigil, an a cappella choral work dating from 1915, but this is no secret quotation, for Rachmaninov writes the original text, Alliluya, in the score at that point. Perhaps guessing that this would be his final work It must have been my last spark, he said at the time Rachmaninov wrote at the end of his manuscript, I thank thee, Lord. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra 7