Program Notes PDF - Chicago Symphony Orchestra

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, May 12, 2016, at 8:00
Saturday, May 14, 2016, at 8:00
Charles Dutoit Conductor
Javier Perianes Piano
Daniela Mack Mezzo-soprano
Ravel
Alborada del gracioso
Falla
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
In the Generalife
Distant Dance—
In the Gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba
JAVIER PERIANES
INTERMISSION
Dukas
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Falla
The Three-Cornered Hat
Introduction
Part One
Afternoon
Dance of the Miller’s Wife (Fandango)
The Grapes
Part Two
The Neighbors’ Dance (Seguidilla)
The Miller’s Dance (Farruca)
The Corregidor’s Dance
Final Dance (Jota)
DANIELA MACK
The appearances of Daniela Mack and Javier Perianes are endowed in part by the John Ward Seabury
Distinguished Soloist Fund.
Saturday’s concert is sponsored by S&C Electric Company.
This work is part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective, which is generously sponsored by the
Sargent Family Foundation.
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
Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.
Alborada del gracioso
Maurice Ravel was born
in the French Pyrenees,
only a few miles from the
Spanish border, a geographical boundary he
often crossed in his music.
Even though his family
moved to Paris while he
was still a baby, Ravel
came by his fascination
with Spain naturally, for his mother was Basque
and grew up in Madrid. (His Swiss father
inspired in his son a love for things precise and
mechanical that carried over into his impeccable
music, provoking Stravinsky to dismiss him as
a “Swiss watchmaker.”)
In 1905, Ravel composed a set of five piano
pieces he called Miroirs (Mirrors), which included
some of the earliest of the Spanish music he
wrote from the comfort of his Paris apartment.
Alborada del gracioso, one of the three pieces
which he later transcribed for full orchestra,
immediately became one of his most popular
works. The original piano version, with its impossibly fast repeated notes (it remains a challenge
to all but the most skilled pianists), is so rich and
evocative that orchestrating it must have seemed
COMPOSED
1905, for piano; orchestrated in 1918
FIRST PERFORMANCE
May 17, 1919; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 6 & 7, 1925, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting
July 15, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Willem
van Hoogstraten conducting
2
redundant at first. But, perhaps more than any
musician of his time, Ravel had an extraordinary
ear for sonority and color. The newly redecorated
Alborada is one of his greatest sonic achievements.
A lborada means morning music, just
as serenade means night music. It’s
related to the French aubade and the
troubadour’s alba (literally “white of dawn”), by
which means lovers are warned of the approaching dawn in time to dampen their passions and
part company. (This requires the participation
of a loyal watchman or friend—like Brangäne in
Tristan and Isolde, whose warnings are famously
ignored.) In the more common Spanish tradition, it’s simply any music performed at daybreak, often to celebrate a festival or to honor a
person—or both, such as a bride on her wedding
day. To his Alborada, however, Ravel adds del
gracioso, or “of the buffoon,” clouding the picture
with the introduction of the standard grotesque
lover, akin to Don Quixote of ancient Castilian
comedy. And so we have a highly spirited, almost
outrageous dance that begins with the strumming of a guitar (here given to the pizzicato
strings and the harp) and concluding with a
grand and glorious racket. MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 26, 1990, Ravinia Festival.
Gianluigi Gelmetti conducting
February 27, 28 & March 1,
2014, Orchestra Hall. Marcelo
Lehninger conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes
and english horn, two clarinets, two
bassoons and contrabassoon, four
horns, two trumpets, three trombones
and tuba, timpani, crotales, triangle,
tambourine, castanets, side drum,
cymbals, bass drum, xylophone, two
harps, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
7 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA
1968. Jean Martinon conducting. RCA
1991. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Erato
Manuel de Falla
Born November 23, 1876, Cádiz, Spain.
Died November 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina.
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
In 1921, when he was the
most celebrated Spanish
composer alive, Falla
settled in Granada, in a
cottage surrounded by
roses, honeysuckle, and
jasmine, with an arbor
and a small fountain. At
the top of a nearby hill sat
the great Alhambra—the
fortress of the Moorish kings that Falla had
famously drawn in music in his Nights in the
Gardens of Spain. At the time he began the score,
more than a decade earlier, Falla was living in
Paris and had never even been to Granada; he
knew about the Alhambra only from an inexpensive book he bought at a bookstall on the rue de
Richelieu. (He was so captivated that he stayed
up all night reading it.)
Nights in the Gardens of Spain began as a set of
nocturnes for solo piano. Falla started sketching
in 1909, the year his colleague Isaac Albéniz
died, depriving Spain of one of its best-known
composers. (When Enrique Granados died in
1916, less than a month before the premiere of
Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Falla was thrust
into his new role as the country’s preeminent
composer.) Ricardo Viñes, the great Catalan
pianist who introduced many of Debussy’s and
COMPOSED
1909–15
FIRST PERFORMANCE
April 9, 1916; Madrid, Spain
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
December 11 & 12, 1925, Orchestra
Hall. Rudolph Reuter as soloist,
Frederick Stock conducting
July 14, 1949, Ravinia Festival.
William Kapell as soloist, Fritz
Reiner conducting
Ravel’s works, suggested that Falla turn the
nocturnes into a piece for piano with orchestra.
Falla took his recommendation to heart, but this
change in direction further delayed completion
of the score. As Falla became better known in
Paris, particularly after the success of his opera
La vida breve in 1913, the long-awaited work
became legendary in the city’s music circles.
When Falla fled to Spain as war broke out in
August 1914 (he was in such a hurry to catch a
train that he lost his toupee en route) the nocturnes, now called Nights in the Gardens of Spain,
were still unfinished. Shortly after returning to
his homeland, Falla visited the Alhambra for the
first time, in the company of his friend Maria
Martínez Sierra, who noticed his “satisfaction at
having guessed, with the help of some book, the
charm which he had never seen before.”
After settling briefly in Madrid, Falla lived for
several months in the beach town of Sitges, near
Barcelona, where he put the finishing touches
on Nights in the Gardens of Spain. He worked on
an old, out-of-tune piano in El Cau Ferrat, the
home of the popular painter Santiago Rusiñol,
fine-tuning his sense of orchestral color in a
house filled with his host’s evocative canvases of
Spanish gardens. (It was once believed, erroneously, that these paintings were the inspiration
for the score.)
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
August 2, 1996, Ravinia Festival. Alicia
de Larrocha as soloist, Christoph
Eschenbach conducting
May 31, June 1, 2 & 5, 2012, Orchestra
Hall. Stewart Goodyear as soloist,
Ludovic Morlot conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
solo piano, three flutes and piccolo,
two oboes and english horn, two
clarinets, two bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets, three trombones and
tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle,
celesta, harp, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
23 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1997. Daniel Barenboim as soloist,
Plácido Domingo conducting. Teldec
1997. Daniel Barenboim as soloist,
Plácido Domingo conducting. Arthaus
Musik (video)
3
rushing torrents.” And they’re
all gathered here in Falla’s
wondrously evocative and
fragrant music.
The second movement, set
in an unidentified distant
garden, is an exotic dance. The
piano, with its arabesques,
trills, arpeggios, and stomping
octaves, suggests a guitar, then
a dancer, and later a singer.
Without pause, Falla transports
us to festivities in the Sierra de
Córdoba. Music historians like
to attribute this brilliant finale
to the zambra gitano—a night
festival characterized by lively
gypsy dancing and singing
Granada’s Alhambra, with the Sierra Nevada in the background
traditionally held for the feast
of Corpus Christi. But Falla,
no fan of explicit program music, didn’t care to
ights in the Gardens of Spain is neither a
be pinned down. As he wrote:
concerto, although it’s scored for a solo
piano with orchestra, nor a tone poem,
If these “symphonic impressions” have
even though it vividly portrays the spirit of a
achieved their object, the mere enumeration
place. Falla referred to it simply as “symphonic
of their titles should be a significant guide to
impressions.” The piano role, prominent but
the hearer. Although in this work—as in all
rarely dominant, is characterized by elaborate,
which have a legitimate claim to be considbrilliant, and eloquent writing. (Falla’s piano
ered as music—the composer has followed a
teacher studied with a pupil of Chopin.) The
definite design regarding tonal, rhythmical,
score is dedicated to Viñes, who didn’t play the
and thematic material . . . the end for which
first performance, but, like the composer himself,
it was written is no other than to evoke
often performed the work in public in later years.
places, sensations, and sentiments.
The orchestral writing is lush but never excessive;
it’s Falla’s most “impressionistic” (and arguably
The themes employed are based (as is much
his most “French”) score, and as an evocation of
of the composer’s earlier work) on the rhythms,
atmosphere and setting, it ranks with Debussy’s
modes, cadences, and ornamental figures which
and Ravel’s greatest symphonic works.
Falla depicts three gardens. The first is the cel- distinguish the popular music of Andalusia,
though they are rarely used in their original
ebrated Generalife, the jasmine-scented gardens
forms; and the orchestra frequently employs, and
surrounding the summer palace of the king’s
employs in a conventional manner, certain effects
harem at the Alhambra. (The word “Generalife”
peculiar to the popular instruments used in those
comes from the Moorish “Jennat al Arif ”—the
parts of Spain. The music has no pretensions to
builder’s garden.) “Nowhere,” wrote Alexander
being descriptive; it is merely expressive. But
Dumas, “were so many orange trees, so many
something more than the sounds of festivals and
roses, so many jasmines gathered in so small
dances has inspired these “evocations in sound,”
a place . . . . Nowhere will you see so many
for melancholy and mystery also have their part. springs, so many leaping waterfalls, so many
N 4
Paul Dukas
Born October 1, 1865, Paris, France.
Died May 17, 1935, Paris, France.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Performed as part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective
“This interesting novelty is
by a composer little known
to the musical world and
whose name now appears
for the first time on the
programs of these concerts,” were the words that
introduced this music
when Theodore Thomas
conducted the U.S.
premiere of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Chicago on
January 13, 1899. The orchestral scherzo quickly
became an audience favorite—the Chicago
Symphony played it nearly every season in the first
decades of the twentieth century—and with the
1940 release of Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which
Mickey Mouse gives technicolor life to each
gesture in Dukas’s score and the poem by Goethe
on which it is based, Dukas’s novelty became one
of the best known of all symphonic works.
Although he lived a long life in good health,
Dukas left only seven major compositions, each a
single example in a different genre—an overture
(Polyeucte, his first published work), a symphony,
a piano sonata, a set of piano variations, one
opera (Ariane et Barbe-Bleu), the ballet score
for La péri, and the tone poem The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice. Those works span just two decades of
Dukas’s nearly seventy years. La péri is the last of
COMPOSED
1897
FIRST PERFORMANCE
May 18, 1897; Paris, France. The
composer conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 13 & 14, 1899, Auditorium
Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting (U.S. premiere)
July 10, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Hans
Lange conducting
them; although he lived nearly another quarter
century, Dukas composed very little during
those years and destroyed virtually everything he
wrote. (Among Dukas’s projected and discarded
works are three operas, including a Tempest
drawn from Shakespeare.)
Dukas was a fiercely self-critical and fastidious craftsman, an exemplary orchestrator, and
an adventuresome musical thinker. Despite
the brevity of his career and the paucity of his
compositions, he managed to wield a certain
influence. Although the theatrics of a work like
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are overly familiar today,
both Stravinsky and Debussy were quite taken
with the piece at the time of its premiere in 1897,
and admired his later music as well. Debussy
wrote an effusive review of Dukas’s piano sonata
when it appeared in 1901, and later said it was
worthy of standing alongside Beethoven’s—it
was the only one that was “representative of
our time.” Stravinsky dropped an almost literal
quotation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in his 1908
orchestral piece, Fireworks. (Stravinsky’s Scherzo
fantastique, written the previous year, is also
indebted to Dukas.)
T he essence of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
is the same in Goethe’s ballad Der
Zauberlehrling, in Dukas’s scherzo, and
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
November 23, 24 & 25, 2012, Orchestra
Hall. Ludwig Wicki conducting
July 12, 2015, Ravinia Festival. Ted
Sperling conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets and bass clarinet, three
bassoons and contrabassoon, four
horns, two trumpets and two cornets,
three trombones, timpani, percussion,
harp, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
10 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1968. Jean Martinon conducting. CSO
(From the Archives, vol. 12: A Tribute to
Jean Martinon)
5
in Disney’s animation. A magician’s
apprentice has observed his master’s
ability to bring a broomstick to life
in order to do the sorcerer’s bidding.
Left on his own, the apprentice orders
the broomstick to fetch water, only to
realize that he has no power to stop
it. As the magician’s house begins to
overflow with water, the apprentice
tries to avoid disaster by chopping the
broom in half, which merely produces
two brooms and even more water.
Only with the return of the sorcerer
himself, and a masterful wave of his
hand, is the disaster stopped and calm
restored. As the Chicago Orchestra’s
program annotator Hubbard William
Harris wrote in 1899,
Dukas’s composition is, as its name
signifies, in a single movement and
is constructed from thematic material so easily grasped as to require
neither quotation nor extended
explanation. . . . The instrumentation is exceedingly rich and
effective and in point of difficulty
of execution the work stands side
by side with the brilliant compositions of Strauss, d’Indy, and other
modern writers. The program for January 13 and 14, 1899—including the
U.S. premiere of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, conducted by
Theodore Thomas—had to be revised at the last minute. Bruno
Steindel, the Orchestra’s principal cello, originally was scheduled
to be soloist in Raff’s Cello Concerto; however, he canceled due to
illness and Chabrier’s “interesting novelty,” the composer’s Suite
pastorale, replaced the concerto.
6
Manuel de Falla
The Three-Cornered Hat
One of music’s great
international collaborative
efforts, The Three-Cornered
Hat began life in 1916 as
a modest pantomime
called El corregidor y la
molinera (The magistrate
and the miller’s wife).
(The 1875 novel by Pedro
Antonio de Alarcón, on
which it’s based, also is the source for Hugo
Wolf ’s 1896 opera Der Corregidor.) Sergei
Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes were visiting
Madrid during the initial run of El corregidor,
and the impresario asked Falla to transform it
into a ballet, expanded and rescored for large
orchestra. (Diaghilev had been urging Falla to
write something for his troupe for years—at one
point, they talked seriously about producing
Nights in the Gardens of Spain as a ballet.) In no
time, Diaghilev put together an extraordinary
cast of characters for Falla’s ballet, with Léonide
Massine as choreographer and Pablo Picasso
as designer.
To help devise the choreography, Massine took
flamenco lessons from Felix Fernandez Garcia, a
phenomenal dancer whom Diaghilev found in a
working-class café in the back streets of Madrid
and persuaded to join the company as the star of
the new ballet. (Massine also admitted to finding
COMPOSED
1918–19, as a revision of the pantomime El corregidor y la molinera of
1916–17
FIRST PERFORMANCE
July 22, 1919, in London’s Alhambra
Theater by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 23 & 24, 1923, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting (Suite
no. 2)
July 10, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest
Ansermet conducting (Suite no. 2)
June 7 & 8, 1973, Orchestra Hall. Teresa
Orantes as soloist, Rafael Frühbeck de
Burgos conducting
many beautiful poses in bullfighting.) Picasso
designed sets and costumes that were characteristically witty and brilliant, and devised a front
drop curtain depicting a bullfight in ochre, pale
pink, white, blue, and gray that was so magnificent that Falla wrote some new music at the
last minute just to show it off. (Picasso finished
painting the curtain during final rehearsals.)
Shortly before the premiere, Garcia became ill
and Massine had to take over his role. And on
the afternoon of the first performance, Falla was
summoned by telegram back to Madrid to his
mother’s deathbed, and Ernest Ansermet stepped
in to conduct. But The Three-Cornered Hat was a
triumph, and Massine later said that of his more
than one hundred ballets, it was the one of which
he was most proud. (He continued to dance the
role of the miller into the 1950s.) Misia Sert gave
a post-premiere party at which Rubinstein played
the piano and Picasso drew a laurel crown on the
composer’s bald head with his hostess’s eyebrow
pencil. (Incidentally, The Three-Cornered Hat
was the last ballet danced by Diaghilev’s company, on August 4, 1929, a fortnight before the
impresario’s death.)
T he Three-Cornered Hat begins with the
brief introduction Falla added to show
off Picasso’s curtain—a minute or so of
pounding drums and sizzling castanets (used
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
September 21 & 23, 2003, Orchestra
Hall. Susanne Mentzer as soloist,
William Eddins conducting
June 20, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Edwin
Outwater conducting (Suite no. 2)
July 17, 2015, Ravinia Festival. Michelle
DeYoung as soloist, Carlos Miguel
Prieto conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
female vocal soloist, three flutes
and piccolo, two oboes and english
horn, two clarinets, two bassoons,
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones and tuba, timpani, snare
drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle,
castanets, tam-tam, xylophone, harp,
celesta, piano, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
38 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1997. Jennifer Larmore as soloist,
Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec
2001. Elisabéte Matos as soloist, Daniel
Barenboim conducting. EuroArts
(video)
7
so sparingly elsewhere in the score), as trumpet
fanfares and shouts of “olé” set off a young
woman’s warning:
Casadita, casadita, Little wife, little wife,
cierra con tranca fasten your door with
la puerta; a bar;
que aunque el diablo even if the devil is
esté dormido asleep now,
!a lo mejor se when you least expect
despierta! it he’ll wake up!
Afternoon. The miller tries to teach his pet
blackbird to imitate the striking of a clock. (The
bird resists until the miller’s wife bribes him with
grapes.) The miller draws water for the garden
(the wheel squeaks noisily, in the piccolos and
violins). A dandy passes by and flirts with the
miller’s beautiful wife. The corregidor, wearing
the huge three-cornered hat that is his badge of
office, now enters.
Dance of the Miller’s Wife. Pretending not to
notice the corregidor, the miller’s wife dances a
fandango. He tries to get her attention by bowing
to the ground (a low-lying bassoon solo). She
curtsies, to seductive string chords.
The Grapes. The miller’s wife teases the
corregidor with a bunch of grapes held just out of
reach. Humiliated, he storms off while the miller
and his wife continue the fandango.
The Neighbors’ Dance. That evening, Saint
John’s Eve, the neighbors celebrate by dancing
a seguidilla (Falla refashions a gypsy song
from Granada).
The Miller’s Dance. The miller begins to
dance. In his memoirs, Massine recalls:
I began by stamping my feet repeatedly
and twirling my hands over my head. As
the music quickened I did a series of high
jumps, ending with a turn in mid-air and a
8
savage stamp of the foot as I landed. . . . The
mental image of an enraged bull going into
the attack unleashed some inner force which
generated power within me. . . . For one
moment it seemed as if some other person
within me was performing the dance.
A knock at the door—parodying the opening
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—announces
soldiers who have come to arrest the miller, on
the corregidor’s orders. Once again, a female
voice sounds a warning:
Por la noche canta el The cuckoo sings in
cuco the night
advirtiendo a los
warning husbands
casados
que corran bien los
to fasten their latches
cerrojos as well,
!que el diable esta
for the devil is
desvelado! vigilant!
The cuckoo clock strikes nine (answered by the
learned blackbird).
The Corregidor’s Dance. The corregidor,
thinking himself a true Don Juan, approaches
and dances a courtly number. In the dark, he falls
into the mill stream. The miller returns to find the
corregidor’s clothes hung up to dry, misconstrues
the evidence, puts on his rival’s outfit, and sets off
to try his luck with the corregidor’s wife.
Final Dance. The finale, propelled by mistaken
identities and general confusion, eventually ends
happily, with the miller and his wife reunited. The
villagers toss the corregidor into the air, and everyone joins in the jota, a wild dance from Aragon. Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.
© 2016 Chicago Symphony Orchestra