PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, April 28, 2016, at 8:00 Friday, April 29, 2016, at 8:00 Saturday, April 30, 2016, at 8:00 Bernard Haitink Conductor Till Fellner Piano Mozart Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major, K. 482 Allegro Andante Rondo: Allegro TILL FELLNER INTERMISSION Strauss An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 Thursday s concert is generously sponsored by Daniel R. Murray. Saturday s concert is generously sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Dietrich M. Gross.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher Wolfgang Mozart Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria. Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria. Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major, K. 482 Mozart wrote three piano concertos while he worked on The Marriage of Figaro during the winter of 1785 86. This was the most productive period in his life, and the only reasonable way to explain the enormous and varied output of these six months is to assume that the intense work on the complicated musical and dramatic structures of the opera set his mind racing with more ideas than a single four-act opera could contain. Neither the challenge of the purely mechanical task of writing it all down, nor the infinitely greater one of conceiving so much glorious music, appears to have inconvenienced Mozart in the least. Throughout the winter, he kept to his regular routine of teaching and performing, while also maintaining a full social calendar. The only activity that seems to have suffered was his correspondence, and so we have only a sketchy account of his daily life at the time. Mozart s piano concertos were his main performing vehicles as well as his primary source of income. From 1782, the year after he moved to Vienna, until 1786, Mozart wrote fifteen piano concertos an incredible outpouring of important music that corresponds, not coincidentally, to his heyday as a performer. When Leopold Mozart visited Wolfgang in Vienna early in 1785, he saw that his son s life was a whirlwind of public appearances, complicated immeasurably by the convention of hauling one s own instrument along to each performance. Since my arrival, he wrote to Nannerl, your brother s fortepiano has been taken at least a dozen times from the house to the theater or to some other house. There are passages for the piano in the E-flat major concerto he wrote that hectic Figaro winter that are not fully written out, because Mozart was then, more than ever, short of time. (Besides, he composed the concerto expressly for his own use.) Those fragmentary measures speak not of carelessness, but merely impatience; they also remind us that Mozart regularly improvised and ornamented certain phrases as he played. The three concertos of the Figaro winter are Mozart s first to include clarinets, his favorite wind instrument, and they dominate the E-flat work as they do no other piano concerto. (It is the first concerto to have been conceived with clarinets in mind; the next in the series, K. 488, was actually begun earlier, but with oboes instead; Mozart switched to clarinets when he COMPOSED Entered in Mozart s catalog on December 16, 1785 FIRST PERFORMANCE December 23, 1785; Vienna, Austria, with the composer as soloist FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES March 14 & 15, 1924, Orchestra Hall. Wanda Landowska as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting July 9, 1955, Ravinia Festival. Rudolf Serkin as soloist, Eduard van Beinum conducting MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES July 24, 2005, Ravinia Festival. Emanuel Ax as soloist, James Conlon conducting June 8 & 13, 2006, Orchestra Hall. Daniel Barenboim conducting from the keyboard INSTRUMENTATION solo piano, flute, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings CADENZAS First movement: Paul Badura-Skoda Third movement: Johann Nepomuk Hummel APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 33 minutes 2
A pen-and-ink and watercolor drawing of central Vienna s Kohlmarkt in 1786 by Carl Schütz completed the score in 1786.) In fact, the E-flat concerto is saturated with the sound of woodwinds; even the bassoon often catches the ear with ripe melodic interjections. T he first movement benefits from the exceptional richness and variety of Mozart s scoring, for its primary material is little more than boilerplate ceremonial music, decked out with fanfares and trumpet-and-drums heroics. Yet at every turn, Mozart invests anonymous gestures with personality and interest. Listen, for example, to the opening six measures, with its horn duet answered by bassoons; Mozart then repeats the passage, giving the duet to clarinets, and the response not to another of the winds, but to the violins. The entire movement is enlivened by that kind of careful, imaginative detail. As always in Mozart s concertos, the interplay between instruments, and between piano and orchestra, suggests the intimacy of chamber music; here the effect is heightened in particular by the number of wind solos. The first Viennese audience applauded the C minor Andante so insistently that Mozart played it again. It is one of his finest slow movements, launched by a simple, yet indescribably poignant theme. Mozart writes three increasingly elaborate variations on the opening theme, the first two for the piano with only the most discreet accompaniment. Around the second variation, Mozart wraps two episodes, one for winds alone, the other a duet for flute and bassoon. The final variation is expansive and dramatic, surprising in its details listen for the glint of C major in a C minor world and endlessly complicated in its emotional progress. The finale begins as genial hunting music, only to have the hunt frozen in place by the interjection of a courtly minuet, with its wistful echoes of the Andante and still more glorious writing for the winds. This mixture of ballroom and sunny outdoors, of high spirits and quiet introspection, is typically Mozartean, and it gives the finale an unexpected depth. 3
Richard Strauss Born June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany. Died September 8, 1949, Garmisch, Germany. An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 The idea to write an Alpine symphony began in Strauss s boyhood, with a mountain hike on which the party got lost going up and drenched to the skin coming down. When young Richard got home, he ran to the piano and improvised a fantasy based on the adventure, a lot of nonsense and gigantic Wagnerian tone painting, as he told his friend Ludwig Thuille. Even after his childhood pastime had developed into a serious, gigantic talent and he had produced the dazzling series of orchestral tone poems that made him the most celebrated composer of his day, he could not forget a day spent on a mountain. In 1900, after Ein Heldenleben had been successfully launched, Strauss wrote to his parents that he was considering one more tone poem, which would begin with a sunrise in Switzerland. (He had recently written what is perhaps the grandest, most impressive sunrise in all music, in Also sprach Zarathustra.) He even jotted down a few themes. In 1902, Strauss outlined a plan for a symphony in four parts: I. Night; sunrise/ascent; forest (hunt)/ waterfall (Alpine sprite)/flowery meadows (shepherds)/glacier/thunderstorm/ descent and rest. II. Rustic pleasures, dance, folk festival/ procession. III. Dreams and specters (after Goya). IV. Liberation through work; artistic creation. Fugue. Nothing came of that until May 1911, the month Gustav Mahler died. Although he and Strauss had never been close, nor even of the same mind artistically Mahler once said that he and Strauss were tunneling from opposite sides of the same mountain and might eventually meet in the middle Strauss wrote in his diary, The death of this aspiring, idealistic, and energetic artist is a heavy loss. This was the moment childhood memory, abandoned sketches, and a deeper vision of man s place on the earth became An Alpine Symphony. This new piece grew to represent the ritual of purification through one s own strength, emancipation COMPOSED 1911 February 1915 FIRST PERFORMANCE October 28, 1915; Berlin, Germany FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES December 1 & 2, 1916, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting August 2, 1986, Ravinia Festival. Edo de Waart conducting MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES February 22, 23, 24 & 25, 2007, Orchestra Hall. Semyon Bychkov conducting INSTRUMENTATION four flutes and two piccolos, three oboes, english horn and heckelphone, two clarinets in B, one clarinet in C, E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, four bassoons and contrabassoon, eight horns, four wagner tubas, four trumpets, four trombones and two tubas, two harps, wind machine, thunder machine, glockenspiel, cymbals, bass drum, side drum, triangle, cowbells, tam-tam, celesta, organ, timpani, and strings; plus an off-stage brass group consisting of an additional twelve horns, two trumpets, and two trombones APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 51 minutes CSO RECORDING 1992. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Erato 4
A GUIDE TO AN ALPINE SYMPHONY The twenty-one individual sections of Strauss s tone poem are played without pause 1. Night 2. Sunrise 3. The Ascent 4. Entering the Forest, Wandering by the Brook 5. By the Waterfall 6. Apparition 7. Flowery Meadows 8. In the Mountain Pasture 9. On the Wrong Path through Thickets and Undergrowth 10. On the Glacier 11. Precarious Moments 12. On the Summit 13. Vision 14. Rising Mists 15. The Sun Gradually Dims 16. Elegy 17. Calm before the Storm 18. Thunderstorm, Descent 19. Sunset 20. Epilogue (Dying Away of Sound) 21. Night Storm among the Alps, ca. 1856, by German-born American artist Albert Bierstadt through work, and the adoration of eternal, glorious nature. Strauss continued to sketch for some time. For inspiration, he had only to look up from the polished desk he had positioned in front of the windows of his workroom in Garmisch the house recently built with the royalties from Salome at the magnificent Alps beyond. In November 1914, Strauss began to orchestrate the piece, completing work on February 8, 1915. The premiere, on October 28, received little notice (it was the second year of World War I), but Strauss was pleased with his newest composition and his final tone poem and he urged Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the celebrated librettist of his blockbuster operas Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, to catch a later performance: It really is a good piece, he wrote, with obvious satisfaction. Even years later, when critical opinion began to devalue the work for its over-the-top Hollywood effects, Strauss held firm: in 1947, when he was invited to London for a festival of his music, he said that of all his orchestral works he would most like to conduct the Alpine Symphony. (He was forced to settle for the Symphonia domestica, which calls for a smaller orchestra.) Although An Alpine Symphony is a continuous stretch of music, Strauss has marked off twenty-one sections in the score a traveler s itinerary of the day s journey. With so much vivid and illustrative music in a single span, the work is more tone poem than symphony, though there are still hints of Strauss s original subdivision into four movements. In fact, Strauss felt that with this score he had at last found the right balance of absolute and program music. (Not everyone bought his argument. The prickly theorist and critic Theodor Adorno abhorred the crass externality of the relationship between program and form. Hindemith thought it would be better to hang oneself than ever to write music like that. ) Strauss s orchestra is lavish including 5
cowbells and a wind machine and he uses it with unfailing imagination and remarkable finesse, even for the man responsible for some of the most stunning sounds in recent music. (At the dress rehearsal he remarked, At last I ve learned how to orchestrate. ) A n Alpine Symphony, moving from sunrise to sunset, begins and ends in the quiet darkness of night. Strauss being Strauss, music s greatest master of the blockbuster moment, all twenty-one stops on his musical travelogue are highlights, although admittedly some are more spectacular than others. There are many celebrated examples of pictorial writing, including a fine A major sunrise to rival the one in Also sprach Zarathustra, the sound of hunting horns vaulting through the valleys below (played by an off-stage band of twelve horns, two trumpets, and two trombones), a cascading waterfall, and an even wetter storm later on a wild and noisy outburst, complete with the sounds of thunder and wind, that makes the rainstorm of Strauss s childhood memory remarkably vivid and unforgettable. (You can only imagine how this must have sounded when it was played in an arrangement for two pianos at one of Schoenberg s groundbreaking concerts sponsored by his Society for the Private Performance of Music.) The centerpiece of the score is the arrival at the summit, announced by the stammering of the solo oboe, apparently stunned by the high-altitude view and lack of oxygen, and climaxing with an ecstatic outpouring, scored for the full orchestra, that combines several themes encountered on the way up. The glory of An Alpine Symphony is not in the details, however, but in the scope of the whole, and in the emotional depth Strauss finds, particularly on the summit and in the spacious and reflective closing pages. There we see the mountain s challenge and the setting sun as metaphors; An Alpine Symphony suddenly encompasses the whole of life. Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987. 6 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra