Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Edo
Transcription
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Edo
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 Thursday, March 26, 2015, at 8:00 Saturday, March 28, 2015, at 8:00 Edo de Waart Conductor Orion Weiss Piano Ippolito Nocturne for Orchestra First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 Allegro maestoso Andante Allegretto ORION WEISS INTERMISSION Brahms Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 Allegro con brio Andante Poco allegretto Allegro The appearance of Orion Weiss is endowed in part by the Nuveen Investments Emerging Artist Fund. 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 Michael Ippolito Born January 28, 1985, Tampa, Florida. Nocturne for Orchestra Michael Ippolito is both a composer and a performer whose still-young career has ignored the old-fashioned boundaries: he has collaborated with classical, folk, and jazz musicians— in everything from experimental improvisation to traditional klezmer music. He studied at the Juilliard School (with John Corigliano, the CSO’s first-ever composer-in-residence, from 1987 to 1990) and at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and was a composer fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. Ippolito is now assistant professor of composition at Texas State University. Not surprisingly, given the variety of his musical experiences, the range of sights and sounds that generate Ippolito’s own music is wide: an Ansel Adams photograph, a field recording of a Croatian folk song, poems by Carl Sandburg and Siegfried Sassoon, three Japanese haiku about mushrooms. Recent works include a string quartet inspired by Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines; a large ensemble piece, West of the Sun, which takes its name from a novel by Haruki Murakami; Lights Out!, for violin and piano, inspired by old-time radio shows; and A Feast of Fools, a piece for large ensemble based on the medieval celebration of “drunkenness and bawdy humor, of social inversion, ceremonial parody, and licensed foolishness.” His Nocturne, originally a chamber work for flute, violin, and piano, and later rescored for orchestra, takes its initial cue from the work by the Spanish surrealist painter and sculptor Joan Miró, who died in 1983, two years before Ippolito was born. MICHAEL IPPOLITO COMMENTS ON NOCTURNE FOR ORCHESTRA My Nocturne was originally inspired by Joan Miró’s 1940 painting of the same name. I was first drawn to the pure visual appeal of Miró’s fantastical figures and swirling lines, but I was also intrigued by the idea of a “nocturne” with so much energy and whimsy. As I thought about the tension between the title and the image, the other approaches to the nocturne came to my mind—from the Whistler paintings and the dreamy world of Chopin and Field that inspired him, to the colorful and diverse Debussy pieces, to the creaking and sliding “night music” of Bartók. In the end, my piece is about the different connotations of the title as much as it is about an imagined nocturnal scene. Nocturne is in three large sections. The opening evokes a hazy world, with allusions to familiar nocturnal imagery floating in and out of focus. The middle section is a wild scherzo inspired by Miró’s bizarre nocturne. At the end, the music from the opening section returns, with a brief nod to Chopin before the music evaporates to nothing. COMPOSED 2010, for flute, violin, and piano 2011, for orchestra FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performances. horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, strings FIRST PERFORMANCE February 27, 2012, New York City INSTRUMENTATION two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 10 minutes 2 Wolfgang Mozart Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria. Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria. Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 Mozart wrote twelve piano concertos in less than three years. We can follow his extraordinary progress almost day by day, because in 1784 he began to catalog his works, entering each of his compositions in a small, hand-bound volume as soon as he finished it. (He even took the book with him on trips, since he never knew when he might complete one of several works in progress.) He listed six piano concertos that year alone, an astonishing creative achievement and something of a logistical feat as well, since during those same twelve months he worked on several other substantial scores; maintained a heavy teaching schedule; gave many concerts; entertained a number of house guests; suffered from a kidney infection; recorded the birth of his second son; and moved his entire family, not once, but twice, to new lodgings. This was the busiest, most productive period of Mozart’s life, and he consistently worked at the peak of his powers, both as a composer and as a performer. He apparently thrived on a high-energy existence and a packed calendar—on March 3, when he wrote to his father that he had twenty-two concerts in thirty-eight days, he couldn’t fail to see the bright side of such a COMPOSED 1786, completed on December 4 FIRST PERFORMANCE date unknown, possibly in December 1786 FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES December 13, 1955, Orchestra Hall. Rudolf Serkin as soloist, Fritz Reiner conducting July 13, 1956, Ravinia Festival. Leon Fleisher as soloist, Igor Markevitch conducting grueling schedule: “I don’t think that this way I can possibly get out of practice.” The three years beginning in 1784 marked Mozart’s heyday as a performer, and these twelve concertos were his main performing vehicles. T he C major concerto we now know as K. 503 wraps up this exceptional period—it is the twelfth and final work in Mozart’s outpouring of concertos, and the last one he would write for more than a year. It comes at the end of 1786, a very busy year that began with two operas—The Impresario and The Marriage of Figaro—and included two other piano concertos and the last of the horn concertos, as well as the E-flat piano quartet and several other remarkable pieces of chamber music. Mozart worked simultaneously on the C major concerto and the Prague Symphony, completing the former on December 4 and the symphony two days later. (With a few days left on the calendar, he turned out one of his most original compositions, the concert aria with obbligato piano, Ch’io mi scordi di te.) For many years, the C major piano concerto was seldom played, particularly compared to its immediate predecessor in C minor, which immediately attracted attention with its unusually dark and dramatic colors. K. 503 is quite unlike any other concerto in the series. It’s certainly the grandest and most symphonic of all. The key MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES February 23 & 25, 2006, Orchestra Hall. Alfred Brendel as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting July 23, 2006, Ravinia Festival. Andreas Haefliger as soloist, James Conlon conducting INSTRUMENTATION solo piano, one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings CADENZA Orion Weiss APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 32 minutes CSO RECORDING 1958. André Tchaikowsky as soloist, Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA 3 itself—C major (the one Haydn later picked for the depiction of light in The Creation)—regularly inspired some of Mozart’s most brilliant and majestic music, such as the earlier piano concerto in the same key (K. 467), or the Jupiter Symphony yet to come. K. 503 is, in fact, Mozart’s longest concerto, the first movement alone running to a more than generous 432 measures. I n The Classical Style, Charles In 1784, Mozart began to catalog his music (Index of all my works) Rosen writes of the “almost same pitch.) When, at the beginning of the neutral character of the material” development section, the piano seems to begin on in the first movement, and for once, Mozart’s the wrong notes (again in the knocking rhythm), subjects seem deliberately conventional. The first the effect is so striking that Beethoven decided sixteen measures, for example, offer little more than grand cadential flourishes—a commonplace to borrow it for his own Fourth Piano Concerto, written twenty years later, at the same point in series of chords that would seem more fitting the movement and in the identical rhythm. at the very end, to bring down the curtain. The Andante is another sonata-form moveBut in the seventeenth measure, Mozart adds ment, on a much more intimate scale, with piano a tiny gesture in the oboes and bassoons, first phrases so lavishly decorated that one can only in C major, then in C minor, introducing an wonder how Mozart would have further embelambiguity of mood that will color the entire lished them in performance, as was common movement with a continual flickering of light practice at the time. and shadow. And, in the very next measure, he The rondo finale begins cheerfully enough, but launches a plain rhythmic figure that will take again the clouds roll in, and music that seemed over the whole movement, much as Beethoven’s buoyant at first soon appears less certain. A famous knocking theme dominates his Fifth particularly dark and passionate episode appears Symphony. (The rhythm is the same—three midway through. The ending is upbeat, inventive, short hammer strokes followed by a longer and brilliant. note—although Mozart places all four on the 4 Johannes Brahms Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany. Died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria. Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 The Chicago Symphony played Brahms’s Third Symphony its very first season. By that time, Johannes Brahms, still very much alive, had stopped writing symphonic music. Little more than a year before, he had announced his decision to quit work on his fifth symphony. It was a time of tying up loose ends, finishing business, and clearing the desk. (Brahms was a tidy man; he left virtually no evidence of his unfinished fifth symphony.) It’s hard to imagine a time when Brahms’s Third Symphony was contemporary music. To many listeners today, it’s emphatically classic (in the sense of a work of enduring excellence, cozily familiar and harmless), but several hundred people walked out of the first Boston Symphony performance in 1884. (It had been introduced to America a month before at one of Frank van der Stucken’s Novelty Concerts in New York.) But Brahms’s Third was once a novelty, tough for orchestras and difficult for audiences. Even when Brahms’s music was new, it was hardly radical. Brahms was concerned with writing music worthy of standing next to that by Beethoven; it was this fear that kept him from placing the double bar at the end of his first symphony for twenty years. Hugo Wolf, the COMPOSED 1882–83 FIRST PERFORMANCE December 2, 1883; Vienna, Austria FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES April 22 & 23, 1892, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting July 11, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Hans Lange conducting adventuresome song composer, said, “Brahms writes symphonies regardless of what has happened in the meantime.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it touches on an important truth: Brahms was the first composer to develop successfully Beethoven’s rigorous brand of symphonic thinking. Hans Richter, a musician of considerable perception, called this F major symphony Brahms’s Eroica. There’s certainly something Beethovenesque about the way the music is developed from the most compact material, although the parallel with the monumental, expansive Eroica is puzzling, aside from the opening tempo (Allegro con brio) and the fact that they are both third symphonies. Brahms’s Third Symphony is his shortest and his most tightly knit. Its substance came to him in a relatively sudden spurt: it was mostly written in less than four months—a flash of inspiration compared to the twenty years he spent on his First Symphony. Brahms was enjoying a trip to the Rhine at the time, and he quickly rented a place in Wiesbaden, where he could work in peace, and canceled his plans to summer in Bad Ischl. The whole F major symphony was written nonstop. T he benefit of such compressed work is a thematic coherence and organic unity rare even in Brahms. Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms on February 11, 1884, after having spent hours playing through the work MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES March 13, 14, 15 & 18, 2003, Orchestra Hall. David Robertson conducting July 15, 2011, Ravinia Festival. Christoph von Dohnányi conducting INSTRUMENTATION two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 36 minutes CSO RECORDINGS 1940. Frederick Stock conducting. Columbia 1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA 1976. James Levine conducting. RCA 1978. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London 1993. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Erato 5 in its two-piano version: “All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart.” Clara had been following Brahms’s career ever since the day he showed up at the door some thirty years earlier, asking to meet her famous husband Robert. By 1884, Robert Schumann—Brahms’s first staunch advocate— was long dead, and Brahms’s on-again-off-again infatuation with Clara was off for good. But she was still a dear friend, a musician of great insight, and a keen judge of his work. Surely, in trying to get her hands around the three massive chords with which Brahms begins, Clara noted in the top voice the rising F, A-flat, F motive that had become Brahms’s monogram for “frei aber froh” (free but joyful), an optimistic response to the motto of his friend Joseph Joachim, “frei aber einsam” (free but lonely). It’s one of the few times in Brahms’s music that the notes mean something beyond themselves. That particular motive can be pointed out again and again throughout the symphony—it’s the bass line for the violin melody that follows in measures three and four, for example. Clara also can’t have missed the continual shifting back and forth from A-natural to A-flat, starting with the first three chords and again in the very first phrase of Brahms’s cascading violin melody. Since the half step from A-natural down to A-flat darkens F major into F minor, the preeminence of F major isn’t so certain in this music, even though we already know from the title that it will win in the end. In four measures (and as many seconds), Brahms has laid his cards on the table. In the course of this movement and those that follow, we could trace, with growing amazement, the progress of that rising three-note motive, or the falling thirds of the violin theme, or the quicksilver shifts of major to minor that give this music its peculiar character. This is what Clara meant when she commented that “all the movements seem to be of one piece,” for, although Brahms’s connections are intricate and subtle, we sense their presence, and that they are unshakable. For all its apparent beauty, Brahms’s Third Symphony hasn’t always been the most easily grasped of his works. Brahms doesn’t shake us by the shoulders as Beethoven so often did, even though the quality of his material and the logic of its development is up to the Beethovenian 6 standards he set for himself. All four movements end quietly—try to name one other symphony of which that can be said—and some of its most powerful moments are so restrained the tension is nearly unbearable. Both the second and third movements hold back as much as they reveal. For long stretches, Brahms writes music that never rises above piano; when it does, the effect is always telling. The Andante abounds in beautiful writing for the clarinet, long one of Brahms’s favorite instruments. (The year the Chicago Symphony first played this symphony, Brahms met the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, who inspired the composer’s last great instrumental works, the Clarinet Trio and the Clarinet Quintet.) The third movement opens with a wonderful, arching theme for cello—another of the low, rich sounds Brahms favored—later taken up by the solo horn in a passage so fragile and transparent it overrules all the textbook comments about the excessive weight of Brahms’s writing. There is weight and power in the finale, although it begins furtively in the shadows and evaporates into thin air some ten minutes later. The body of the movement is dramatic, forceful, and brilliantly designed. As Donald Tovey writes in his famous essay on this symphony, “It needs either a close analysis or none at all.” Two things do merit mention. The somber music in the trombones and bassoons very near the beginning is a theme from the middle of the third movement (precisely the sort of thematic reference we don’t associate with Brahms). And the choice of F minor for the key of this movement was determined as early as the fourth bar of the symphony, when the cloud of the minor mode crossed over the bold F major opening. Throughout the finale, the clouds return repeatedly (and often unexpectedly) and Brahms makes something of a cliffhanger out of the struggle between major and minor. The ending is a surprise, not because it settles comfortably into F major, but because, in a way that’s virtually unknown to the symphony before the twentieth century, it allows the music to unwind, all its energy spent, content with the memory of the symphony’s opening. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. © 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra